Balancing Talent and Technology
David Zax at Fast Company recently wrote a piece exploring how firms can use social recruiting and referrals to source for top talent. Zax interviewed Ivan Kirigin, chief executive officer at YesGraph, who has developed software to tap into the social networks of employees and gamify referrals. Kirigin explains, “The web application is fairly simple. A recruiter sends out an invite to people on his or her staff, asking for referrals. Those employees then can connect simply through Facebook and LinkedIn, and YesGraph automatically culls the most apt connections (people who’ve listed engineering as their professions for an engineering job, for instance). YesGraph pulls up these people one by one, and your employee can very quickly say “Yes”--this person’s a good one--or pass.” How does YesGraph fit in the market when a quick search of the HR social recruiting returns more than 50,000,000 hits? With so much technology to sort through and new software firms being funded daily, HR leaders have the difficult task of examining and evaluating which solutions would be the best fit for the firm. But technology only plays one part in the balancing act of success, what role should talent play?
In the blog Hire for Attitude, Train for Skill for Harvard Business Review, Bill Taylor reviews the results of firms who are focusing on the attitude of the potential candidates instead of their experience with a skill set. By examining the personality and possible culture fit of candidates, firms like Southwest Airlines or ING Direct can determine the lifelong attitudes of talent who can help them remain special and set apart from their competition. Taylor shares, “In other words, the company evaluates talent based on the proposition that who you are as a person counts for as much as what you know at any point in time — and subjects prospective employees to a barrage of character tests before they join the organization. Over the years, Southwest has elevated to something of a science the practice of identifying its star performers, understanding what makes them tick, and devising interviews, group exercises, and other techniques to probe for those same attributes in new employees.”
The reality is HR leaders need be able to balance the benefits of technology with their talent to maximize the benefits to the firm. For HR to operate at its most effective level it has to be aligned with the strategic goals of the business, an integral cog in the larger machine. With tightening budgets and shallow talent pools the ability to attract, assess, develop, and engage the best talent remains a challenge. Join HCI on April 24, 2014 at 1pm ET for the webcast Balance Talent and Technology to Align HR to the Business as thought leader Steve Boese explores this balance, and questions if there is an optimal mix and how to find it. How does the firm integrate its human capital analytics and organizational effectiveness to maximize results? Which strategies will return the best value on the dollar? Join this webcast to learn the answers to these questions and more.