Human Resources: Still At A Crossroads?

The retail, restaurant, and hospitality industries have always been closer to the realization that talent drives both top and bottom line numbers. Not only does talent drive strategy-- the assortment, the menu, the property feature set, the pricing-- talent drives the execution of selling and servicing customers. Fred covers the basics nicely here. Still, some critical fine points get missed. Turnover can positively contribute to top and bottom line numbers when those leaving underperform and those replacing them do much better. There are ways to track that and engineer optimal return on talent. Savvy CHROs should know the cost of traditional vs. subjective, traditional hiring methods-- and the metrics for tracking how well each hiring manager's decisions impact the business.

Savvy CHROs move from describing talent stocks and flows into projecting the business impact for those enhancements in talent management that will move the needle the most for ongoing operations, and mitigate foreseeable problems with proposed new strategies and tactics proposed by operational business leaders.

Laszlo Bock, the Head of People Operations at Google, addressing the annual conference of talent scientists (Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology) told of a four-year struggle that Google went through to convince the operations leaders (engineers) that evidence-based talent management made dollars and sense. Initially, the engineers rejected the analytics, claiming their intuition was right. Only by having the engineers work the numbers together with the analytics team did they get to the point where the engineers require the people analytics now. Laszlo pointed out how he cringed every time the head of analytics presents to the executive committee or board. It seems that this person has a sticker on his laptop lid that reads, "We have the numbers and graphs to prove it, so shut the F#&* up." Not so politically correct but with undeniable impact.