HROTodayGlobal

CEO's Corner If you know you are going to be in a war, do you prepare by getting to the edge of the battlefield and running around in circles trying to think about what to do? I am pretty sure Sun Tzu recommends against that as a first choice. Talent management needs to be a lot more like strategic planning, and it needs to be ready for the coming demographic changes. Most companies also need to get much better at workforce planning. Most HR departments are really pretty bad at it, though partly due to the line organisation being weak forecasters. However, HR should take the lead and show its value by making the line staff become proficient and also providing better and even more sophisticated tools. MSP providers with vendor management software, many RPO providers, and HRO providers all offer platforms and expertise around this forecasting issue from multiple engagements, and this is a hidden benefit of external support. Eliminating 100 unnecessary hires from budget more than offsets the markup on 500 others. Lastly, I mentioned the "global demand" issue. Yes many companies are hiring, but are they growing or replacing resources with just more bodies? I am more concerned that we have a global supply issue. Certainly, there is skyrocketing hiring in Asia, but rapid turnover (more than 100 percent a year in some Indian companies) eviscerates productivity due to constant knowledge transfer issues. In addition, there may be issues with the labour pool for graduate hiring. More universities have been founded in India and China in the last decade than in the previous five. This may be controversial, but I have heard many complaints that the quality of the graduates is far below the respected schools such as Pune, Gujurat or Madras. I have heard some of these new "universities" scoffed at as "diploma mills" and being little better than "vo-tech" schools. A plethora of poorly trained engineers is problematic. Here in the Old World we are not much better. We are contending educationally with our own "new lost" generation. One 18-year-old recently told me that she was going to go college to take a few years to find herself. My harsh response was to remind her that there was a GPS on the iPhone that mommy and daddy gave her when she turned 14 so she knew exactly where she was in space. In the career-oriented generation that preceded this one, few parents would fund the education of a child who gave an answer like that; my parents would have called me a dunderhead and given me the Sunday paper help-wanted section. Student graduates in most engineering and technical disciplines are down. The U.S. labour pool is shrinking. In China, the one child policy has left the country about to hit the 50-year-old tipping point, so by 2015 as many workers will be over 50 as under. In a decade, tumbleweeds may be blowing through all the new office parks they are building today. The same thing will happen in Singapore in 2020 to 2025. This will all come to pass, unless these countries become immigrant economies (something the U.S. should think more openly about returning to). Meanwhile, in India in 2006 54 per cent of the 1.1 billion people were under the age of 25. Watch India and China, who have long been wary rivals, eventually become labour trading partners. Signs of this are already emerging. The key question for the employer will be what is the quality available. If it is as weak as I fear, you will need several people to do what one engineer should be able to do and the shortage will only grow. Are you ready? Do you have a strategic plan and the workforce plan to compete and win? Is your plan to go to market with the same aggressiveness that your company plans for sales and the procurement of manufacturing materials and other resources? We are in a global labour economy, and it is changing rapidly, and not all signs are encouraging. So stow your tray, put you seat back in an upright position, and get ready. Depending on the quality of your preparation, you will know soon enough whether you are taking off or landing. Elliot H. Clark, CEO FALL 2011 | www.hroglobal.com [5]

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