LG & Associates Search / Talent Strategy

Lizz Pellet and Emerge International - Pretty Darn Impressive!

If you're in the Recruitosphere and have had the opportunity to meet Lizz Pellet, CEO of Emerge International, it doesn't take long to figure out just how passionate she is about providing organizations tangible solutions that drive both quantitative and qualitative results in the way of cultural health and employment branding.

Lizz was a few hours removed from her Recruiting 2007 Conference & Expo Workshop on "Attract, Retain, Repel: Understanding How Employment Branding and Organizational Culture Can Increase the ROI of Employee Recruitment and Retention Programs", so it was a great opportunity to meet up with her and learn more about her vision of talent management's future in a globalizing economy. As Lizz explained the amount of detail, market intelligence, and actionable recommendations contained within her reasonably priced assessment tools, I couldn't help but be more and more impressed.

The solutions delivered by Lizz Pellet and Emerge International may be "just in time" as more and more research is being dedicated to the innovation of talent management and the formation of a decision science that helps HR Leaders and Talent Acquisition Professionals make better decisions that drive strategic objectives. As an example of the growing trend to move away from traditional lagging indicators (such as Cost-per-Hire) and more toward leading indicators (such as forecasted QOH) and predictive analytics, Hewitt Associates earlier this year popularized its research which analyzed the HR data of more than 1,000 large companies and 20 million employees. Most notably, Hewitt found a direct link between the attraction and retention of pivotal employees and increasing shareholder value.

As our industry continues to move toward becoming more of a strategic partner with upper management, Lizz's and Emerge International's tools may be 'just what the doctor ordered' in terms of diagnosing and enhancing the corporate culture and employment brand to follow in the footsteps of high-performing organizations such as Southwest Airlines, Disney, Harley Davidson, Deloitte & Touche, Microsoft, and Google -- companies that understand and embrace the link between talent and shareholder value.

What Does it Mean to "Be Spherical" and "See the Whole"?

Perhaps the single most interesting read I've picked up in the last several years, I highly recommend checking the following book out: "Being Spherical: Reshaping Our Lives and Our World for the 21st Century", by Phil Lawson and Robert Lindstrom. Friends, family, clients, and candidates know how much I enjoy reading, and much of my job involves keeping a constant finger on the pulse of what's happening in the business world . . . so it's quite the statement to say that I believe Phil Lawson's book rivals "The Tipping Point" (by Malcon Gladwell) in its ability to shake the trees of status quo thinking.

By the end of the book, I felt strongly educated and enlightened in terms of how we think and view problems today. The walk through our progression as a civilization alone made it difficult for me to put the book down for even a moment. The authors help us understand why many of our problems (both social, economic, political, business, etc.) exist and creates a new conceptual framework for how we look at these issues. Not only have I began implementing "Seeing the Whole" in my professional life, but this concept has also impacted my personal life in very positive ways as well.

Here is a synopsis of the premise in Phil's words himself:

"Free yourself

Long ago, some of the first identified scientists to grace this planet determined that the world functioned like a giant machine. As our world progressed, experts in various fields observed our lives, jobs and communities as if they were machines. They studied our parts, and improved our parts, as if success depended on it. They built efficiency systems that compartmentalized our resources. They measured our accomplishments by evaluating our seperate parts.

Today, those beliefs are obsolete and dangerous to keep

In reality, our world is organic, complex and interconnected. To function completely, we must understand the integrated nature of our lives, jobs, communities and the world. We must see whole to be whole. We must think whole to progressively navigate our way."

Within the coming weeks, we will keep you updated on some work that we're doing with Phil in the way of talent management. Yes, you heard right - Phil's philosophy and coinciding SMT (Spherical Modeling Tool) have impressed me to such a point that I think the value of "Seeing the Whole" from an organizational perspective may be one of the greatest visual assessment breakthroughs in recent memory. Stay tuned!

Ever Wonder What Really Goes On At The Big-Box Publicly Traded Staffing Firms?

What's behind the black box? How are they structured? What goes on behind closed doors? What's a typical day at the PTBBSA (Publicly-Traded Big-Box Staffing Firm) like? Instead of just coming out and giving away all the "juice", I'm going to expose "A Day in the Life of Jill, an Agency-er".

You'll come away with the real-deal of what goes on at what most top-performers in the recruiting industry call "candidate factories". Have fun reading! Here's the breakdown of sections for your entertainment and enlightenment:

1. Meet Jill - "A Day in the Life of an Agency-er"
2. 8:00 - 8:30: Refining the "Plan"
3. 8:30 - 9:00 Training and "Get Motivated" Time
4. 9:00 - 11:00: Calling the People in "The Plan"
5. 11:00 - 12:00: Interviewing Candidates
6. 12:00 - 1:00: Lunch Time
7. 1:00 - 2:00 "Get New Business" Time
8. 2:00 - 4:00 Back to Calling People in "The Plan"
9. 4:00 - 4:30 Time to Call the Client with Bad News about the Fake Candidate
10. 4:30 - 5:00 Debriefing the Day
11. 5:00 - 6:00 Time to Make Tomorrow's Plan
12. 6:00 - 6:15 Jill Has a Realization
13. 6:15 - 6:20 Jill Won't Be Coming Back . . . And It Feels Pretty Good.
14. UPDATE: Wow, I've Had Some Serious Response To This Squidoo!!!

Welcome To Our New Look!

We've decided that we'd like to interact and engage with our customers at a deeper level. At a minimum, we want to ensure you have fresh content to keep you reading and coming back! That's the reason we've 'ditched' our old static-site format and went with the blog look & feel. This is an evolving work of art (yeah, yeah, we know we need more color!) and we encourage you to feel free to post comments or questions. Feel free to RSS us and we promise to keep you up-to-date on the coolest, weirdest, innovative, and just plan most interesting content in the way of Talent Acquisition!

RecruitSmart Services Contract & Expand To Your Needs

In a perfect world, a company would be able to forecast all hiring needs and execute talent management in seamless fashion. The problem is that the "perfect world" never existed - even Henry Ford had his own recruitment challenges despite creating the plug-and-play assembly line factory system during the Industrialization Era. Factors such as rising and falling market capitalization, currency risk, new products, and competitive actions, etc. often force business leaders to rethink and restrategize talent management. As a result, hiring needs are often fluid and most recruiting leaders are in agreement that it would be nice to have "a shoulder to lean on during those busy times" when increasing recruitment headcount is not a viable solution and/or contingency fees must be kept in check.

Operational Impact:

- Agency and direct-hire fees are estimated to rise significantly.
- There are so many reqs open that we believe QOH (Quality-of-Hire) is being sacrificed in lieu of volume.
- Our internal recruitment staff is having difficulty managing the increasing demands and stress levels are slightly higher at the current moment.
- We believe the candidate experience of our interviewing and hiring process may be slipping due to the increased req workload.

Our Solution:

At LG & Associates, we know that competitive advantage is maintained and harnessed through our ability to recruit, engage, develop, and retain our biggest asset: human talent.

Through our Recruit-Smart service, we provide scalable recruiting resources that can expand and contract in response to candidate flow. Whether you need a short-term contract recruiting / strategic sourcing consultant to assist with the spike in demand, or you are looking for a viable alternative to steep contingency fees, we can work with you to create a solution custom-tailored to your organization and specific challenges.

Client Results:

30% reduction in annual contingency fees for $2.6 Billion USD natural-gas distributor headquartered in Southeastern U.S.

Our SSF (Strategic-Sourcing Framework) May Just Be The Answer!

Just say the term 'Strategic Sourcing' and you're bound to strike fear in the heart of the Internal Recruiter that already has enough on their plate. However, study after study suggests that a company's ability to create and sustain competitive advantage is directly correlated to the organization's level of talent. So how does an organization balance its need to increase Quality-of-Hire (QOH) with its Time-to-Fill (TTF), Cost-to-Hire (CTH), and other key metrics that often seem to push and pull against one another?

Operational Impact:

- Agency and direct-hire fees have been rising and we’d like to better manage them.
- We know there are better candidates out there, but we often have a hard time finding and attracting them.
- High-priority candidates that are proven top performers and mesh with our culture well fall out of our hiring process inexplicably or randomly.
- We’ve lost several hires to competitors vying aggressively for the same talent.
- Upper management is feeling the talent crunch and it’s often a key topic of discussion with HR and Internal Recruitment.
- We know that QOH (Quality of Hire) can improve at our organization.

Our Solution:

At LG & Associates, we know that competitive advantage is maintained and harnessed through our ability to recruit, engage, develop, and retain our biggest asset: human talent.

Our Strategic-Sourcing Framework (SSF) allows us to assist you in not only determining which talent resources are most pivotal to your organization, but also the “where” and the “how” of finding them and attracting them to your employment value proposition. After we identify and develop plans to attract and capture the passive talent that has been eluding your recruiting efforts, we fully align your organization to execute the plans in a powerful, unified fashion.

Client Results:

A key multinational client with 46,000 employees and 1,000 offices worldwide has reported a substantial increase in QOH over the last 6 months (21 basis point improvement on a scale of 1 – 100). Agency fees have been reduced 25% percent over the last 6 months (compared to 6 month averages ranging from Q1 2004 to present, Q3 2007).

VideoSmart Recruiting: Video Interviewing Has Come Of Age

Video interviewing has gained as much press as any other topic in the recruiting world over the last several years. Risk aversion is often the key discussion, ranging from OFCCP compliance to avoidance of 'disparate impact' due to affecting groups of citizens that may not have access to webcams. The discussions have ranged from intelligent to the absolutely absurd, while at the same time, we see the following trends:

Organizations continue to decentralize in an effort to capitalize on globalization and increasing levels of consumption within develooping economies. At the same time, Internet Video adoption continues to grow at massive levels due to YouTube and the oncoming wave of IPTV. The point is that most organizations understand cost drivers and how time-to-fill negatively impacts the bottom line, so the need and demand is here today for a video interviewing solution that offers the necessary blend of ROI and OFCCP compliance.

Operational Impact:

- Expenses due to candidates traveling to our locations for interviews has been increasing greatly due to rising transportation costs.
- Lodging and meals expenses are also driving up Cost-to-Hire, and we’d like to mitigate those.
- Our time-to-fill has been increasing and we’d like to better get it under control.

Our Solution:

At LG & Associates, we know that competitive advantage is maintained and harnessed through our ability to recruit, engage, develop, and retain our biggest asset: human talent. Our Video-Smart Solution and back-end architecture allow you to easily log in and view a number of competing candidates with ease.

We will work together with you to craft the behavioral interview questions and create the video interview in 10 minutes or less. At this point, we take over all the shipping of the webcam to the candidate and assist the candidate in getting set up and rolling. Once this is complete, simply log in, click on a candidate, and watch them answer a standard battery of questions that help you gauge who you’d like to approve to the next round.

Client Results:

While newly implemented, a key client based on the U.S. West Coast, reports that Time-to-Fill among global sales positions has been reduced by over 40%. Cost-to-Fill is currently reported to be cut in half over the last 3 months. In addition, Hiring Manager Satisfaction has risen to record levels within the organization. We are awaiting Quality-of-Hire data, but all evidence points to an increase there as well.

Spherically Modeling Your Cultural Health: "Cool in concept, even Cooler in action!"

The bottom line is that you're right - most outside consulting firms conduct what is normally termed an 'Environmental Scan', meaning they audit and observe your operations and/or culture from an outside-in anthropological/sociological perspective. We imagine you've been to a zoo before - this is the best analogy for what an 'Environmental Scan' represents. We visit and observe the animals, take pictures and mental notes of what they're doing, but we can't really appreciate their lives and environment because we don't live with them on a daily basis. In addition, there may be different issues at play within certain groups of animals (or confines) than others. The same is likely true for your organization - each business unit, department, and even team can often take on a personality of its own.

So the question remains: Does an outside-in 'Environmental Scan' really indicate what your true cultural health represents at the organization? Does this type of research enable us to look more deeply into our own workforce in an effort to improve? If you're looking for actionable insights, the answer is likely no. In addition to a lack of documented effectiveness, these scans can be quite pricy as well.

But what if we could gather information directly from our own workforce, meaning through our very own eyes? The results will astound you.

Operational Impact:

- Within a certain business unit, job function, or team, turnover seems to unusually high.
- Talent engagement seems to be higher in certain areas than others at our organization.
- Our HiPo (High-Potential) Talent turnover levels have been rising lately.
- Upper mgmt would like to begin stronger dialogues with all levels of our organization, not just middle mgmt.

Our Solution:

At LG & Associates, we know that competitive advantage is maintained and harnessed through our ability to recruit, engage, develop, and retain our biggest asset: human talent.

Through a partnership with Phil Lawson, Author of “Being Spherical: Reshaping Our Lives and Our World for the 21st Century” and creator of the SMT (Spherical Modeling Tool), we come to the table with one of the most innovative and enlightening assessment tools to be introduced in recent memory.

Outside of the pure enjoyment and experiential factor of diagnosing and learning the internal pyschology of your own organization from a number of different perspectives, the impact of a Spherical Analysis can change the way you look at your internal workforce and organization forever.