Is the career website dead?

Jason Averbook gushes about the innovation & its impact on HR Tech..Gautam Ghosh talks about its impact on India & how candidates can benefit from it. 
Yes, we are talking about the new innovation from Linkedin whereby prospective candidates can apply directly to companies & send them their public profile for open positions on their company pages.


Well, this post is not about Linkedin's innovation, but more specifically how this innovation will radically change traditional career websites. 
In a traditional setting

1. Candidates logon to career websites, register, fill up their profile information, search & apply for specific positions. 
2. Companies would check the applicant database, screen, interview & onboard candidates.

Then Linkedin came along & changed the traditional way of sourcing candidates. 
Companies realized that here was a much more powerful & better candidate database than what they were having with them. The rest is history...
Now there is a danger of the career website itself being shelved. 
Imagine that there is an API which can expose open positions from the HRIS on the company page in Linkedin, the the candidate applies for that position. 
After the candidate is screened, interviewed & hired, there is another API which can pull the profile information of the hired candidate into the applicant pages & then onto the HRIS as an employee. 
Sounds like fun...Who needs a career website..?? 
Thoughts..

HR Apps & consumer orientation

Steve Boese in his latest blog talks about a consumer oriented approach to HR Technology, where we can have the latest apps for HR downloaded, configured & ready to use.
The same thought occurred to me when we I was getting a demo of SuccessFactors (SFSF) & their entire suite of applications. I was really impressed with the deep functionality, UI, configurability & their 2-3 month implementation time frames, not to mention that a customer is always on the latest release.
Traditional ERP shops like PS, SAP etc take a lot of time & cost to upgrade, their UI sucks big time & functionality is, well, nothing to speak of. Try configuring their workflows & then you really start hating them big time.
Of course, we are still far off from Steve's vision of preloaded HR apps, but we are getting there..

Are you ready for Social technology?

Nowadays there is a growing trend within organizations to talk, understand and then adopt some form of Web 2.0, Social collaboration technologies. Typically these may consist of internal blogs, wikis, collaboration tools, profiles etc. Although this is a good & positive trend, but sometime one wonders if organizations are really ready to internally deploy & reap the fruits of the Social tech tools.

Some factors that readily come to mind

Is the organization truly open? - Many Indian firms are extremely risk averse as well as criticism sensitive. Once you deploy social technologies, you are essentially giving employees the freedom to display/voice their opinions. Can you swallow negative opinions as well? One Indian firm discovered this last year when employees gave vent to the flaws in the new performance management system through their company blogs. The company responded by bringing down the servers. Only if you are sure of taking in both the bouquets & brickbats should you consider deploying this technology

Rewarding the collaborators - Organizations need to answer the question - what is the need for employee to contribute to the social networks? The power of social networks is that they are open, have their social hierarchies & their own rules. Employees will contribute to get themselves noticed, get "followed" & "liked". So there is no real incentive for rewarding collaborators, apart from ensuring there is no bureaucracy or artificial rules. Can the organization ensure this?

Hierarchy hurdles - are managers willing to propagate the benefits & use these tools. Hierarchy is usually a great motivator or demotivator for usage of social tools. If employee sees that his manager is actively using these tools, he knows & understands that it will be a good idea to use it. If the opposite happens, then tool usage will typically lag & fall into dis-use.

Linkage to pay/performance - once employees start using these social tools for collaboration, knowledge management, profile updation, etc, this will become the default location to turn to for understanding the skills, competencies etc of the employee. Can organizations/managers start using the information from social tools to help in the pay or performance decisions.
How this will be done is something that HR needs to come to an agreement, but eventually this will be a great driver to influence the employees to be users of internal social tools.

What are the other hurdles you foresee for adoption of these tools?

Junk the Pay for Performance systems

Fistful of Talent has a new blogpost on Pay for performance & guess what.. Andy Porter,  VP of HR/OD with Merrimack Pharmaceuticals says what most of us secretly believe but never have the guts to say it aloud....they are going to "junk" their performance management system & their pay for performance model.

Here are some of the reasons he gives
1. By rating short term employee performance through semiannual reviews, we're preventing employees from focusing on the big picture, taking long-term risks and being innovative
2. A rating based system actually encourages a manager to give less frequent performance feedback to employees preventing real-time learning
3. Having a reward system based on the faulty premise that financial incentives improve performance, we are undermining powerful intrinsic employee motivation towards achieving our mission
4. There's no evidence that convinces me that a performance rating system actually improves performance

The last point is very pertinent to note, in fact I happened to read the very same point by Jeffrey Pfeffer in his testimony to Congress about Evidence-Based Practices. Prof. Pfeffer notes some interesting points which point to what Andy has said above.

1. Mere prevalence or persistence of some management practice is not evidence that it works
2. The idea that individual pay for performance will enhance organizational operations rests on a set of assumptions. Once those assumptions are spelled out and confronted with the evidence, it is clear that many -- maybe all -- do not hold in most organizations
3. The evidence for the effectiveness of individual pay for performance is mixed, at best -- not because pay systems don't motivate behavior, but more frequently, because such systems effectively motivate the wrong behavior

I think intrinsically, we all know that money can at best be only a hygiene factor, for driving higher performance we all need that higher, lofty goal which will motivate us. A classic example is of our armed forces, who may not be paid that well, but nevertheless they do a great job.

I am also not getting into the issue of forced rankings, a major contributor to pay for performance decisions, which deeply flawed, still continue to be used for lack of a real alternative.

What is required for organizations, is to really assess their incentive systems & see if they are motivating the right behaviors. Also needed are interventions in creating & sustaining a proper organization culture & providing the right leadership capabilities to manage the workforce.

Web 2.0 & Competitive Advantage to firms

A new research by Mckinsey points out a significant correlation between adoption of Web 2.0 technologies & the firm's market share. This is wonderful news, esp for CxO's who want evidence that implementing Web 2.0 technologies would enhance the firm's competitive advantage.
Infact this research, while still in its infancy, is as seminal as the one conducted earlier by Becker, Huselid on how implementing best HR practices can help the competitive advantage of a firm.

From McKinsey ..."Market share gains.. were significantly correlated with fully networked and externally networked organizations"...
"...companies that used Web 2.0 to collaborate across organizational silos and to share information more broadly also reported improved market shares"

Naomi at Mercer

We always follow Naomi as one of the original thought leaders in the HR technology space.
In her recent post, Naomi writes that she will be joining Mercer and "acting as a strategic advisor to the Human Capital Operations and Technology Solutions practice at Mercer. A major focus of my work with Mercer will be their Human Capital Connect solution powered by Peopleclick Authoria technology, advising on business and marketing strategy through software architecture and functional roadmaps."
She will also be focussing on best HR practices, Strategic HRM and HR Service delivery models.

Interesting times and we will be following more of Naomi as she embarks on a new journey at 70..!.. Here's wishing her all the best

On the factor of HR Consultants

Another important factor which we have observed is the reluctance of Indian organizations to engage HR consultants during the implementations. By usage of the term Consultants, we mean real consulting experience of HR processes, Best Practices, Change Management - & not IT consultants who just do the system implementation.
An interesting study conducted by Accenture pointed out that " Indian firms were unaware of many modern management practices or did not have the know how to implement them".
Also the study showed that companies that availed these consulting practices showed a dramatic improvement in efficiency and profits.
While this study was primarily in the textile manufacturing sector, there is sufficient understanding that a broad based nature of these problems could exist in other industries as well.
In a similar vien, we have seen most of the organizations struggle with their HR technology implementations. Even after implementation, most organizations only use it as a tactical and operational tool failing to fully leverage strategic benefits of the technology.

Why is it that organizations do not want to employ consultants? I premise a few

• Consultants are generally too expensive
• Openness to consulting kind of a model - we know it the best attitude
• Consultants generally recommend too much without actually having a grounding in the problems, what I would call Recommend and Run.

While some of these criticisms are true for the consulting industry, one cannot really use the same brush to tar all consultants. Consultants can bring in their professional grounding in different industries, different verticals and advise clients. Also it is a myth that many consultants are expensive. Organizations can discuss & debate various pricing models with consultants to derive the maximum value from their advice.
It may make sense for organizations to involve consultants in a limited way in niche areas during the course of their HR implementations. The reasons for involving HR consultants could be the following:

• Lack of awareness of HR technology & its application to their HR issues - Organizations are generally good at formulating HR policies but do not know how to implement the same using HR technology.  
• Even before the launch of RFP for the technology to be implemented, there is a lot of due diligence to be done, organizations are generally unaware of how to go about doing the same  
• Organizations are not aware of how to formulate requirements for implementing a technology solution for their HR challenges 
• Lack of clarity on Best Practices: Even though implementation partners claim to bring best practices in the implementation, more often these are a rehash of their last implementation without any thought to the critical parameters such as industry sector, nature and size of the organization, geographical span etc. This generally results in implementation of processes which do not have a fit with organization’s requirements. This has to be done at the time of requirement definition itself in the pre-implementation stage. 
• During vendor evaluation, due to information asymmetry as vendors typically try to sell the “hot stuff” available and do not take completely into account the organization’ need, organizations may not be in a position to make right choices , hence wrong vendor and technology selection may happen.  
• Lack of preparation by the HR team: Once an implementation partner is chosen, the organizations go along with what the partner brings to the table, more often losing focus on critical areas such Job Profiling, Competency Mapping, Talent Management linkages, integration points and data extraction, cleansing and reconciliation approaches. This generally results in half baked work done by the implementation partner who is not well versed with these specific organizational processes.  
• Lack of monitoring and health checks: Most of the implementations do have a monitoring mechanism in the form of steering committees but these committees generally operate at a very high level mostly handling coordination and conflict resolution. There is no hands-on independent health check of the implementation at critical milestones leading to cascading of critical issues towards the end of implementation lifecycle. This generally results in chaos during the User Acceptance and Go Live stages of the project. Going live is a tumultuous experience for most of the organizations due to lack of advanced assessment of all aspects of production readiness.  
• Lack of understanding on the right reporting: The reports delivered with the HR standard products are very generic in nature and do not cater to specific reporting requirements for specific roles in the organization. Selection of right KPIs relevant for the industry is generally given a miss by the implementation partner. Clearly spelling out the reporting requirement is critical for right management reporting and right level of decision making support at levels of management. This is also one most of the most important measures of the success of technology implementation 
• Change management is another area where organizations usually are under-prepared. Moreover, incumbent vendor may not have necessary skill sets to advise clients for the same. In most cases, organizations start on this critical process too late in their project life-cycle considering it as an end of lifecycle activity. As a result, after implementation, organizations may not realize the necessary benefits of the new technology due to lack of user adoption.
• Value Assessment: During post implementation stabilization phase, organizations fail to measure the return on their investment and effectiveness of technology implementation. This result in organizations losing interest in the implementation as a source of competitive advantage and use it only as a tactical tool for administering the workforce.