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Creating New Models for Talent Management
Despite the historical standoff between IT and HR, the horizon is not all dark clouds. At one nonprofit corporation that provides services to government, the CEO recently declared IT talent a core competency within the firm, and the organization has focused significant resources on optimizing IT potential. At another company, the CIO collected leading-edge ideas from other organizations and now works hand in hand with HR to define multiple IT career paths (i.e., technical, managerial and analytical).
Thankfully, the notion of building competency models and alternate IT career paths is taking hold within both large and midsized high-performing companies. As one consumer products company CIO is pleased to report, "We have materially influenced the company's definition of career development frameworks through the competency models we have built," he says. "We did not get this proactively from HR."
Indeed, it may be better for IT to grab the reins and bring HR along for the ride. IT human resources embodies the characteristics of the future "workscape": rapid change, global and remote project management, intense "skilling," and fast-paced, cross-functional deployments. IT is the perfect laboratory for a new mode of managing HR processes that will ultimately be rolled out to the entire enterprise.
Rescuing HR From the IT Backwaters
IT executives universally agree that the lack of process automation in the HR department is appalling. As the divisional CEO at a construction company observes, "The HR department doesn't like to be told how to do things. But many HR processes are labor-intensive and lend themselves to automation. If only HR would let IT sit at the HR strategic planning table."
And the CIO at a mid-Atlantic insurance company laments: "We use the same old tools: people and paper, [though] we have moved some forms online." The health care industry is infamous for being behind the technology curve. The CIO at one provider corroborates: "Web tools are in use to enhance the company-wide awareness of job openings and their requirements and to enable employee referrals," he says. "Most other functions are still amazingly free of any technology and, in many cases, equally free of standard processes." The head of shared services at a global manufacturer says his company "hasn't used any great technologies to transform the IT hiring process. We tend to post positions internally for five days, then externally on our own Web site. If there's no action, we'll go to job boards, look at networking environments and then, finally, retain search firms for executive positions."
This executive adds that more candidates now use the Web to investigate a company before they apply and to research comparable salaries before they negotiate a salary. "In some ways, they're outstripping our ability to respond because they have a lot of information at their fingertips," he notes.
Yet while the world of work has changed, the processes whereby HR manages employees have not. "We need a means to measure our IT staffing requirements. Our crude spreadsheets that try to predict staffing levels based on users/servers/phones/etc. are just not sufficient," says the direct report of a CIO at a specialized government contractor. "We need an automated, reproducible way of identifying the people that we need -- some sort of applicant screening that produces reliable results," he adds.
Such tools are available. The CIO at a media company explains that "firings and resignations are handled very swiftly with a mixture of manual and scripted processes. As for hiring, we use Ceridian's tools (Web site, résumé tracking, etc.), and we're satisfied, if not delirious, with them. Monster.com and other such services have not proven much help to us."
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