The New Lean, Wired, Changing World of Human Resources

“After finding no qualified candidates for the position of principal, the school board is extremely pleased to announce the appointment of [David S.] to the post.” –Actual announcement sent to parents

Last week, I had the pleasure of spending two days with a group of nine HR managers at a GonzoBanker Roundtable discussing their successes, challenges and issues. Now, I’m guessing most bank execs don’t spend a lot of time in HR and spend even less time thinking about their world. Well, here’s a news flash: whatever old school ideas might have prevailed about this group, it’s time to re-think them. This bunch was young, smart, aggressive, tech-savvy and forward thinking (I think I was there to represent the opposite and balance things out).

Here’s a summary of what I took away:

• There is a new 800-pound gorilla of recruiting, and it’s LinkedIn. LinkedIn began as a fairly passive experience where people connected with other people in the industry and occasionally kept in touch with them. Not so with HR. The three biggest communities on LinkedIn center on job searches and recruitment. An astounding 97% of recruiters recently surveyed said LinkedIn is the most common in-house recruiting platform. Everybody at our meeting said they use it almost daily. The search capabilities on even the free version are good, and on the paid version they are very sophisticated. It is an impressive evolution of a cloud-based tool.

Another growing player is Glassdoor. Didn’t Glassdoor start out as a place where people could talk about their companies? It now has a robust hiring, job posting and company branding solution that is getting traction in HR groups.

• Because of tools like LinkedIn, candidate recruitment is increasingly happening in advance of job openings. It used to be that movement started when a job opening occurred. Now, HR recruiters are able to proactively take these platforms/communities, combine them with historical turnover stats in certain areas, and look for candidates before the company might need them. One service level agreement (SLA) that is being positively impacted is hire time, or the length of time between a job opening and it being filled.

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“Recently, I was asked if I was going to fire an employee who made a mistake that cost the company $600,000. ‘No,’ I replied, ‘I just spent $600,000 training him. Why would I want somebody to hire his experience?’”  -Thomas John Watson, Sr., first CEO at IBM

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• Job interviews and testing via digital channels is becoming commonplace. We’re way past the experience where the video was one to two seconds ahead of the audio and you got dizzy watching. Increasingly, HR groups are supporting a widely dispersed employee base with an oftentimes national recruitment footprint. Necessity being the mother of invention, they have deployed solutions that allow deep digital interviews (recorded for subsequent review by line managers), testing for certain positions, and a success rate that may not quite match face-to-face but is pretty close.
• People analytics is the new frontier. Broadly defined, it is the use of big data and analytical tools to predict how employees will perform in certain jobs and, from the other side, for which jobs they may be best suited. Several start-up companies are offering solutions that perform these services – check out Evolv, Knack and Klout to see examples of this. ere, a very pragmatic approach is being taken by HR directors. There is a lot of promise in technology that can help predict where and how employees will succeed, but there is a need to balance this against the myriad potential compliance and other legal issues that are always looming. Stay tuned on this one.
• Human Resource Information System (HRIS) systems go to the cloud! Big, traditional providers such as ADP, Ceridian, Ultimate and Peoplesoft are adding and integrating modules such as workforce management, progression management recruiting and analytics to the more basic products like payroll and benefits administration. Newer players such as Workday, designed for the cloud, are making serious inroads and creating industry buzz. The biggest technology frustration expressed by HR leaders? Lack of system integration and no single sign-on. Boy, does this all sound like our core systems environment or what?
• If I were a professional recruiter, I’d be feeling the same way travel agents must have felt 10 years ago. These HR directors, with the new tools they have at hand and their new skills at using them, are increasingly turning away from the recruiter path. The only real exceptions are a)“C” level recruitment with national reach and issues of confidentiality and (just maybe) politics; and b) really specialized looks. If I were a recruiter, I’d either get very specialized to meet these new and lesser needs, or I’d get ready to put my resume on LinkedIn.

The takeaways? The same trends and changes we see in delivery to customers – new channels, new experiences and new skills needed to support it – are also happening to HR groups and their internal customers. The same system needs and issues we hear from lending and retail are also being heard from HR. And it’s all happening fast.

Traditionally, HR has been at the bottom of the system upgrade/investment priority list we create every year in Information Technology. Maybe they get prioritized ahead of facilities, but that’s about it. Bank executives need to provide HR teams access to these newer tools and channels. They also need to be looking at their HR groups and asking what they are doing to build new knowledge and skills in this new world of recruiting and HRIS.

Oh, and keep your eye on these new HR professionals. They will be game changers.
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Let’s Get Gritty!

At Cornerstone Advisors, we’re all about knowledge sharing. We get giddy when our clients talk amongst themselves in their quests to become – or remain – best practice institutions. So we created GonzoBanker Roundtables for executives at banks and credit unions to get together and dig deep on today’s hottest issues.

We host roundtables for CEOs, CIOs and CFOs and Lending, HR, Marketing, Payments and Risk Management executives.

Contact Emily Waite to learn about next year’s line-up.

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