Key Take-Aways:
· “In a marketplace where talent is scarce, boards are taking note of the opportunities for getting the talent agenda right—along with the risks of being left behind.”
· One way to gauge the current and future trajectory of an organization’s talent platform is to evaluate HR’s project/program portfolio: How well does each directly align with the strategy of the business? The portfolio of investments will yield the organization’s future currency.
· “The CHRO role must be reinvented. There are no longer “best practices” in human resources. Instead, the CHRO must be an executive who, like top CEOs, can envision and shape the talent strategy and architecture to align with transformational business objectives.”
· “CHROs need a plan for attracting the right talent, not some generic concept of top talent” to fuel growth and competitive advantage.
· Going forward, the effective future CHRO’s investment priorities will need to include fact-based, predictive insights.
· CHROs should generate and syndicate clear problem statements specific to their industry and company situation, then deploy analytics to tease out the root causes and their dynamics.
· The use of analytics to design, defend, and activate a growth-oriented agenda will be a key source of newfound credibility and a hallmark of great HR leaders.
· Some leading HR teams are using predictive models to identify precisely where interventions should be targeted, down to the level of a particular person at a particular time, thereby getting greater impact from their limited resources. Consider how valuable this can be for a company trying to protect the gains it has made in diversity and inclusion, for example. Being able to direct highly focused interventions toward small cohorts or individuals who are at particular risk at specific times in their careers can make all the difference to retention.
· More CHROs should join forces with chief marketing officers, seeking increasing crossover between marketing and recruitment.
· Any company that wants the creativity and commitment of what Hagel and Brown call “passionate workers” needs to learn more about the means through which companies can enhance engagement.
· And with many large companies pushing to have 50 percent of their new hires come from referrals,25 it’s today’s workers who will help define tomorrow’s workforce.
· Inevitably, the misalignment of expectations between the CEO and the CHRO will be rectified by those HR leaders who are able to develop and deploy strategic, relationship, operational, and technical HR capabilities at scale.