At the end of October eeVoices hosted a HR conference that shared talent life cycle strategies with those in HR.
Greg Basham, the company’s CEO, began with an overview of defining moments that either lead to loyalty and commitment from staff or them exiting the company. These influences include first day impressions; the speed to productive work; the role fit; and workplace tools such as training, mentoring and performance management. He said, “These defining moments begin with pre-employment practices that define your organisation’s character and can be influenced by other HR tools such as surveys of new hires, engagement and exit interviews.”
Florence Ng, Senior HR Director with Philips Electronics Hong Kong provided a strategic look at the realities of globalisation of business functions in supply chain management, production, shared services, projects and marketing and the need for a pipeline of mobile talents. She advised, “The broad focus company-wide talent reviews must include key talents and key roles that maximise revenues and customer relationships.” She added, “A key challenge is figuring out new ways to work for all generations to be motivated and engaged.”
Dr Erik Schmidt, Managing Director, APAC, StepStone Solutions made the case for new social media to factor into recruitment strategies and tactics to help organisations source more media-savvy talent.
Doris Ng, Human Resource Business Partner (Asia Pacific) for Bayer Material Science Ltd. explored the relationship between ‘talent development’ and ‘product lifecycle’. She noted that with new products, during the R&D and pre-launch stage, the talent pool grows and new hires are building networks and learning the organisation and country cultures. Ng pointed out that later, as needs shift, HR should assist talent in enhancing the three Es: experience, exposure, education. At maturity when the need for successors in critical positions arises and if product growth is planned, new talent from outside the organisation might also be needed. Ng noted that there was no one size-fits-all solution that worked in talent development.
Bianca Wong, Managing Director, HR Services for the North Pacific for Fedex presented three themes for those in HR concerned about controlling the cost of hiring, the loss of training investment and the impact of turnover on morale. Firstly, on the topic of job and expectation matching she advised HR to ensure they wrote realistic job previews to help identify best-fit candidates in terms of culture and values. Secondly, in relation to on-boarding, she advised providing a pre-boarding welcome kit and company orientation.
Finally, in regards to staff roles and responsibilities, she spoke on training, managing expectations, providing incentives, and HR management systems. In all these areas, Wong noted that HR and line managers play crucial roles in establishing a framework for pre-boarding and on-boarding that is essential to ‘set the tone’ for new hires.
Paul Arkwright
Publisher
