The War for Talent is ON

With the current world economies on its way to recovery, the hiring activities have since change from its lukewarm campaign to an all out war for manpower due to the increase of customer demands and business deals that have been halted due to the flailing economy are revived from its abyss again. Suddenly, all those candidates there were there during the credit crunch are not there anymore, to make matters worse, they joined your competitors.

For most HR professionals, the market have begun pick up to face demands from their business users/ Hiring managers; for Business Development for the sales force and project related staff are in the pipelines, there is your programmers, project managers, business development and engineers etc… to core of the engine for their organization.

Before most HR professionals go on a shopping spree or aggressive an advice they need to heed before embarking on the path to war.

We live in an economy in which all work is becoming knowledge in which intellectual capital is important for company success.
The value in the capital markets, there is an assumption that “the company with the best talent wins.” This war for talent imagery overlooks the fact that it is often the case that effective teams often outperform even more talented collections of individuals, that individual talent and motivation is partly under the control of what companies do, and that what matters to organizational success is the set of management practices that create the culture.

But it is not just that the war for talent is the metaphor for organizational success. Fighting the war for talent itself can cause problems.

Companies that adopt a talent war mind set often wind up venerating outsiders and downplaying the talent already inside the company, set up competitive, zero sum dynamics that makes internal learning and knowledge transfer difficult, activate the self-fulfilling prophecy in the wrong direction, and create an attitude of arrogance instead of an attitude of wisdom. For all of these reasons, even fighting the war for talent may be hazardous to an organization’s health and detrimental to doing the things that will make it successful.
There was certainly no lack of talent at some companies but it collapsed. The economic problems of the world today are caused largely by investment banks; whom were known to hire to best people who were paid the highest salaries. It turned out the high salaries didn't buy integrity...it didn't even buy competence and a basic sense of responsibility. It was this collection of "talents" with a lot hubris that brought so much economic pain the world…
Look around you - do you see any other group of talents that are just as arrogant...believing they are the only talents in our society
Not anymore after the credit crunch. The talents nowadays realize that the best companies are the ones stable and flexible during the crunch. Companies that have been busy at cutting off whoever they can offload during the trying times got to work on their image. The market knows.. oh yes..the market knows..

Most HR professionals should be mindful that they better be careful because talents too will bring you pain.
We all want the best talents for our organization to do what we do better but we have to be careful not to foster a culture of arrogance that can breed hubris. There is one thing I observe in people - passion, honesty and hard work can overcome the lack of talent. If we as a society believe that results can be bought with money, just pay money to solve our problems with human resource- we are guaranteed to end up like one of the banks that brought the credit crunch.

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What happens in a war for talent?

There is:

• An invariable emphasis on individual performance (rewarding the individual stars), thereby diminishing teamwork, creating destructive internal competition, and retarding learning and the spread of best practices inside the company;

• A tendency to glorify the talents of those outside the company and downplay the skills and abilities of insiders, leading to a loss of motivation on the part of those inside the firm and to their turnover(thereby ensuring that the recruiting challenge will be even greater asthe company tries to replace those that has inadvertently sent packing elsewhere);

• The creation of a self-fulfilling prophecy where those labeled as less able become less able because they are asked to do less, given fewer resources, training, and mentoring, and become discouraged, in the process ensuring that the organization has way too many people who are in the process of dropping out of the competitive fray;

• A de-emphasis on fixing the systemic, cultural, and business process issues that are invariably much more important for enhancing performance, as the company seeks success solely through getting the right people in the door;

• And finally, the development of an elitist, arrogant attitude—once you have successfully competed in the war for talent, you have the best people—an attitude that makes building a wise organization almost impossible; in wise organizations, people know that they know and they know what they don’t know. Companies that think they are winning the war for talent think they are so full of smart people that they know everything!"

1. Take time to identify what you're really talking about. In a world of platitudes, high potentials, excellence, star performers (fill in your favorite), it's easy to overstate what you need. I'm not talking about lowering standards; I'm talking about raising the reality factor.

2. Do your recruiting systems make it easy for candidates or discourage them?
Online applications are the norm. Yet I can tell you from first-hand experience that many of the websites are clunky, user-unfriendly, and periodically inoperative. I've watched job candidates go through numerous screens, fill in data, and 30 minutes later watch it disappear when they clicked "submit." But it wasn't submitted. It disappeared.

3. Get people in front of people. Fine, you want online applications that are screened by keywords? Then stop telling the world that you are looking for "that unique individual who will add to our diverse workforce." Unless of course you are looking for binary people. Look, we all know that relationships matter. If it takes a month for a candidate to see, or even talk to, a real manager or recruiter, they're gone. If you at least call me right away and ask me interesting questions and tell me about your organization, I'm still interested even though I may get a call from some other firm.

4. If you're recruiting on campus or at a job fair, actually take and use the resumes given to you. Then follow up.
One of my lessons is that a situation when your star player leaves is quite often a good thing after all. You're forced to reorganize the team because chances aren't good that you'll find another person which exactly suits the gap. Quite often you end up with healthier organization, of course the prerequisite is to have changes implemented wisely.

Another lesson, which is general but applies in talent recruitment too, is that you should always use the common sense. There are positions where I need talented and rather complete person, although I prefer to employ people who are yet to be formed as employees. It all depends on the situation, the role in the team, the timeline, the person, the product etc.


Last but not least I leave you with this thoughts to ponder –

There are two dangerous things that I've observed amongst the War for Talent ideas. First is the idea that talent is some kind of undifferentiated value. Talent will only work for your company if you recruit the talent that will fit your culture.

Superstars are over-rated, but systems are under-rated. There's plenty of research pointing to the fact that even the most talented folks can't do great work in a lousy system.

Teams don't get talked about much in War for Talent, but business is a team sport. War for Talent recommends forced ranking procedures and reward systems that are toxic to good teams.

Silver lining among the gloom

FOR fresh graduates, 2008 was supposed to be a year full of promise.
But in the gloomy 2009, unemployment rates in Singapore are expecting a dip to an all-time low at 5% in a further 6 months down the road.

Like falling dominoes, banks and companies worldwide found themselves reeling from the effects of the mortgage crisis, which turned into a credit crunch and then a recession that skirted the edges of depression. Forced to cut costs to survive, firms started freezing new hires, laying off workers and slashing wages.

Now, young people are finding themselves stuck with pay cuts and lower bonuses - that is, if they are lucky enough to be employed at all.
Fresh grads are expected to bite the bullet and move into contract or internships, many will expect despite sending out dozens of applications and going for more than a few interviews. http://www.singaporeinternship.com/

In the past, a dearth of jobs prompted people to take a break and head back to school. But this time, paying for graduate school is becoming a less viable option as the world anticipates the worst recession in modern times next year

Things on the economic front are not likely to improve for much of 2009.Still, as with every dark cloud, there is a silver lining.

The cost of living is expected to be lower next year, with inflation tipped at less than 1 per cent - from an alarming 6 per cent this year.
Food prices are easing and oil prices are plunging, making it cheaper to pump petrol, take public transport, buy air tickets and use electricity, among other things.
With shoppers staying at home and saving their money, retailers are also likely to start giving bigger discounts to draw customers back.

And as many sanguine commentators have noted, there is also a philosophical bright side to the downturn.
A recession, coming after years of excess, can be a time for reflection and re- evaluation.
A survey of 100 companies, about half of them were still hiring. Another 40 per cent of the respondents had frozen their recruitment plans and the rest were reducing their workforce either through retrenchment or natural attrition. Jobs are being offered by accounting firms as well as service, IT and healthcare companies.
There are still job opportunities out there for new graduates, but they will probably have to moderate their salary expectations. In most cases, starting salaries are expected to remain the same.
Fresh grads are advised to take up job offers even if the salaries offered are slightly lower than what they are expecting. However, companies in the hospitality industries are supportive and have been hiring older workers (Silver workforce)

Resume Writing

1. Plan your resume to target the industry in general and the interviewer in particular. Doing this quickly brings the focus to:

a. Your Qualifications Summary: Be practical with this part; avoid making goal statements because they may be out of line with a particular company’s positional standpoint. Also, don’t get your personal goals and qualifications mixed up; this section is about your qualifications, it should stay away from any statement about your personal goals. This may seem obvious, but it is a mistake that is often made.
b. The Goal Statement: This is the section for your statement on the goals you want to achieve. Here again, avoid mistakes like ‘… to serve the organization as long as possible and grow to greater heights’. The reality is, your employment’s longevity is riddled with many practicalities and ever-changing market dynamics.
c. Your Salary Expectations: Your resume is not the place to have this discussion. Unless, of course, you want to torpedo your chances of either getting the job or getting a higher salary. Leave this section for oral negotiation.

2. Never write vague descriptions like ‘10 years experience in store management’. Instead, explain what and how you did in stores. A chemical store and an engineering materials store differ hugely in functionality. A description that applies to the former will not to the latter. Just like you were selling something (and you are!), it is better to be specific. Apply this principle to your specific career.

3. Your experiences are not true testimonies of your abilities until you make them link together. How do you do this? By highlighting verifiable and practical justifications. What you talk about in the interview must match the highlighted strengths on your resume. If they do not, you’ll just raise red flags.

4. Letting typos, grammar errors creep in suggests an unorganized character and uneducated behavior. It might not be fair, but that’s the way it is. Since your resume is in fact, your advocate, you must get the most mileage out of it by having it edited or proofread by others, if you can’t do it yourself for some reason. Do it twice or three times if necessary, but get the job done to perfection.

5. If you are a fresh grad, a new set of rules apply to you. As you can’t possibly be show extensive work experience, you need to highlight your educational achievements and extracurricular activities, in place of the experience and accomplishment sections. You can use this to your advantage by reflecting on your leadership skills- for example, if you were a football team captain, organizational skills and accomplishments- or if you were an editor of your school magazine, your meticulous attention to detail.

The way you write your resume can either make or break your job candidacy. Also, if your resume will be posted on the Internet on some of the popular job boards, this means that it will be visible by nearly everyone. Not writing your resume properly, then, has the potential to sink your job prospects entirely. Don’t let this happen to you.

By following the resume writing tips above, you will position yourself as a strong candidate and make your resume stand out from the crowd.

Ten Do’s and Don’ts for Your Resume

The Do’s

1. Place your strongest material in the two-inch visual space that begins about 2 5/8 inches from the top of your resume. Make sure you include your most impressive, impactful achievements and qualifications in this "primetime" space. It’s where the reader’s eyes will focus first.
2. Use a professional profile or qualifications section in your resume’s primetime space to give the employer a quick but concrete capsule of your achievements and skills. Write it when the rest of your resume is complete and you’ve already decided what your strongest qualifications are.
3. Give the most weight to your most recent (past ten to fifteen years) professional position. The section of the resume for your most recent position should contain more bulleted accomplishments than your previous positions. For each position, rank the accomplishments in order of decreasing relevance to the employer you are targeting.
4. Quantify your impact on the organizations you have worked for. If you reduced expenses, say by how much or by what percentage. If you supervised a project, say how many were on your team. Always ask yourself how you helped the organization, and insert the numbers that demonstrate that impact.
5. Pay as much attention to your resume’s design as you do to its content. Use bullets or other appropriate symbols, insert rules (horizontal lines) to separate major sections, and use a 10-to-12-point conservative typeface for the body text of the resume. Aim for 1-inch side margins and slightly smaller top and bottom margins.
6. Include publications, patents, presentations, honors, relevant volunteer experiences, and professional licenses or certifications in your resume, particularly if they are relevant to the position you seek. These "extras" can sometimes be the factor that wins you the interview.
7. Edit and proofread mercilessly. Edit your resume to reduce fluff and make every word count. Set your resume aside for a few days and then come back to it again with "fresh eyes." Misspelled words and grammatical mistakes are the proverbial kiss of death in a resume. Eliminate them.
8. Place your education after your experience if you’ve been in the workforce for more than five years. If the degree you earned is the most relevant or impressive detail of your education section, highlight it. If the school you attended is the selling point, emphasize it.
9. Use a two-page resume if appropriate. Two-page resumes are fine (and in some cases, preferable) if you’ve been in the workforce for about ten years or more or have particularly impressive work experience.
10. Mail your resume in a 9-by-12-inch labeled envelope rather than folded up in a standard No. 10 envelope. The impact and professional image this produces is worth the extra postage.

The Don’ts

1. Don’t make things up or inflate your accomplishments, level of responsibility, or skills.
2. Don’t confuse your resume with your autobiography. While there are many pieces of information that your resume must have, its primary purpose is to focus on the aspects of your life and career that address the employer’s needs.
3. Don’t automatically include a separate "objective" line at the beginning of the resume. If you believe that stating your career objective will improve your chances, then mention the job title you seek in the "Professional Profile" or "Qualifications" section at the beginning of the resume (see "Do" number 2). More often than not, separate objective lines are too general and take up valuable space at the top of the resume that could be better used to focus on the skills prospective employers need. Use your cover letter to explain your career objectives.
4. Don’t use pronouns ("I") or articles ("a," "the"). They detract from the force of your accomplishments, slow down the reader, and take up precious space.
5. Don’t provide personal data. Marital status, date of birth, height/weight, and similar non-work-related information can be used to illegally discriminate against applicants, and they rarely add anything of value to your qualifications.
6. Don’t repeat the same action words throughout the resume. Instead of using the verb developed or led over and over, pull out your thesaurus and mix in terms like accelerated, delivered, directed, established, initiated, or reengineered.
7. Don’t leave out dates. Even if you choose the functional resume format to minimize frequent job changes or lack of experience, include your dates of employment somewhere on your resume (usually at the end).
8. Don’t use more detail than you need to convey your accomplishments. Dense, paragraph-sized bullet points make for tough reading. A good rule of thumb is to limit each bullet to one to two lines of text with three to five accomplishments for each position.
9. Don’t use adjectives like dynamic or self-starting. Let the details of your resume and cover letter convince the employer that you have these qualities.
10. Don’t make your resume a list of your job duties — make it a list of your accomplishments! Weave your job responsibilities into your descriptions of your accomplishments.