Strategic Human Capital Insights

We are thrilled to announce the launch of Joanne Flynn's co-authored career development book, Brand YOU, Brand NEW, a Step-by-Step Guide to Take Your Career to the Next Level.📚
 

Joanne Toth Flynn and Elyse Flynn Meyer, a mother-daughter team, co-authored, Brand YOU, Brand NEW  from a multigenerational perspective. Through their collaborative approach, they provide a range of universal perspectives to help you optimize your personal Brand YOU. This book takes you through the critical steps needed to proactively manage your brand and your personal development. The goal is to put you in the ultimate career control seat.

This is the fourth blog in our ‘soft skills hiring practices’ series. If you missed any of the other blogs in our series, you can view them here.

Employees with Growth Potential and the Looming Talent Crisis

This blog focuses on interviewing questions that can help you tangibly determine the growth potential of a candidate.  Why are these questions so incredibly important? Our organizations, according to Workforce 2020, are in a talent crisis. With the rate of change increasing, employee skills are deteriorating or become obsolete every 2 – 2.5 years. In IT, this ‘skills obsolescence’ is actually accelerating given:

• all the change stressors IT is experiencing in general
• the increased demands being placed on IT’s human resources

When employees were surveyed, 60% responded that they fear becoming obsolete and irrelevant given the demands of the future workplace.

This is the third blog in our ‘soft skills hiring practices’ series.  If you missed the first two blogs, you can view them here.

I recently attended a conference focused on the future of the workforce.  The keynote speaker focused on the different work revolutions that have redefined the very nature of the workforce.  The speaker reviewed the issues of the industrial revolution and followed through to the technology and internet revolution. 

Today, the speaker talked about how we are now entering the next workforce revolution – the collaboration revolution.  The nature of organizations is changing and companies are embracing strategic partnerships and alliances, working virtually across geographies with new organizational structures that will perform and behave in vastly different ways.

The word collaboration has its root in Latin meaning to co labor – work together.  Collaboration is defined as:

Hiring managers often say, ”I can teach people skills, but hiring people to work in our culture is more important. I can’t teach that!” These words are so true. So how important is this topic to hiring within IT? It’s critical! Get this right, and employee retention, productivity, and engagement will follow. Get this wrong, and the management nightmare begins. And with that nightmare goes productivity issues, disengagement, and the spread of discontent among your staff and the client users who must interact with your people. Culture clash affects and infects your entire organization.

Did you know that 69% of hiring managers say Adaptability is the most important soft skill they screen for? To stay competitive today, your company needs to be able to adapt to a changing economy and business needs. This means you also need to hire employees who can adapt as well.

So what does this mean for IT hiring? Adaptability is one of the most difficult challenges in the IT hiring process. Why? Because when you consider how positions in IT are evolving today, the role of IT employees increasingly requires the Adaptability soft skill. Adaptability is now required for multiple facets of the evolving IT position benchmark:

It's All About the Information!

The question is often asked, "So how can I determine my client's DiSC® profile? We all know we would like to have clients fill out the profile, but since that's often not going to happen, here are some things to consider. The behaviors are right in front of you.

In sales, the salesperson's job is to observe and process every clue the client gives. If you can master the most prominent and easily observed behaviors, it doesn't matter if you are selling face-to-face or over the phone. It's all about the information. 

It’s never too early to start managing people, your most important asset.  Increase the ROI of your people investment.  Focus on improving financial results by unlocking human capital potential. 

We recently held a Lunch & Learn in partnership with the Arizona Technology Council on September 25, 2014.

Start-up and high-growth companies, by their very nature, are fast-paced and change continually.  Every person in every role will make a critical, strategic difference.  There is no room for error and no place to hide. During the Lunch & Learn with the Arizona Technology Council, attendees learned how to take a disciplined approach to strategic human capital planning focusing on business agility and unlocking the strength of your people.

The DiSC Profile is a very powerful tool used in organizations globally. It assesses people for their underlying personality styles. In addition, the social styles model presents a methodology for understanding the feedback from the DiSC Profile. The key elements that make up personality and motivators can be used to manage effective interpersonal relationships, manage people and understand how to plan for and manage change through people in any organization. 

Here are three ways to help successfully

align your people with the change process:

1. The DiSC Profile, People, and Managing the Change Spectrum: Background

What is the DiSC Profile, and regarding change, what do the results tell us? The DiSC Profile helps us understand personality styles, our own and others. In addition, the DiSC Profile provides the key to understanding the all-important motivators underlying each personality style. This helps us understand people on a much more profound and complex level.