China Gorman

For more than 25 years, China Gorman has held strategic business leadership roles in the human capital management sector. Currently CEO of the CMG Group, a consultancy supporting solutions providers in the human capital management sector, she is a sought-after speaker and thought leader in the broad HR marketplace. Well known for her tenure as Chief Operating Officer and interim CEO of SHRM (the Society for Human Resource Management), she also held the posts of President of DBM North America, and President of Lee Hecht Harrison, the global consulting division of Adecco, which became the performance leader in its industry under her leadership. You can read her blog at ChinaGorman.com, and contact her at china@chinagorman.com.

Articles by China Gorman

Recruiting and Staffing

Getting Onboarding Right: Another Reminder That It’s Not Rocket Science

Onboarding

As HR and other leaders grapple with high turnover rates among the Gen Y/Millennial cohort (see last week’s post here), all kinds of issues get raised.

Is the turnover due to “special” characteristics inherent in Gen Y? Is the turnover due to lack of education and training opportunities? Naivete on the part of Millennials – the world of work doesn’t match their expectations? Could a lack of thoughtful onboarding play a part?

The Aberdeen Group published Onboarding 2013: A New Look at New Hires last month and author Madeline Laurano provides data that might help organizations become more effective in retaining the youngest of their workforce. Read more…

HR News & Trends

Millennials on the Job: They Want to Commit, But Will We Let Them?

123RF Stock Photo

Accenture recently published its 2013 College Graduate Employment Survey findings.

There’s lots of great data — especially if you plan to hire recent college grads. In fact, some of the data is surprising.

One of the important takeaways is that employers have unrealistic expectations for the skills of the hires they make out of college. They think these young people should be able to hit the ground running and are surprised and disappointed when they don’t.

And to compound the problem, these employers are not investing in training initiatives to get the newly hired up to speed in the short term or effective in the long term. Read more…

Recruiting and Staffing

Recruiting and Social Networking: SHRM Research Shows a Few Surprises

From istockphoto.com

The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) debuted some new survey data at their recent Talent Management Conference and Exposition in Las Vegas.

Published on April 11, Social Networking Websites and Recruiting/Selection is interesting. And some of the data may not be what you think.

Employers use social networking sites during the recruitment process as tools to recruit candidates who might not normally apply. Expanding their reach to passive candidates, candidates with specific skill sets and candidates in specific geographies, recruiters seem to be very strategic in their use of social networking tactics and sites. Read more…

HR News & Trends, Recruiting and Staffing

Unemployment Is a Problem, But Youth Unemployment Is a Crisis

Teen worker

You probably know a good kid like this.

Graduating from high school in June. From an OK high school. Not the best student. Probably not able to get in to college – even if they could afford it and were motivated to try.

They had a part-time job a couple of years ago, but got laid off. Haven’t really looked for a job since then. No real skills that employers can use. No idea how to look for a job. Starting to think about the future. No idea where to start.

Guess what? Their prospects are not good. And they need help. Read more…

HR News & Trends, Training & Development

Think We Have Skills Shortages Now? Just Wait Until We Get to 2020

123RF Stock Photo

Skills shortages in 2020 will rise to an entirely new level.

And I’m not talking about STEM skills, although they’re critical. Or the ability to speak multiple languages, which needs to be more common in the U.S. Or even the readiness of college graduates to take a place in the economy, which a majority of employers report is lacking.

I’m talking about the skills that the globally-connected, superstructured, computationally focused, smart-machine powered organizations of the future staffed by longer living and working, new media-using employees will require.

We’re all thinking about that right? We’re re-writing job descriptions and re-wording job postings to incorporate the emerging skills we know we’ll need. Aren’t we? Read more…

HR Insights

Another Reminder Why HR’s Priorities Need to Focus on Business Value

shl-logo

SHL has just published their fascinating yearly report on global assessment trends.

Acquired last year by CEB, SHL is an assessment company, so reporting on assessment trends is right up their alley. The survey data is interesting and the conclusions are worth noting by anyone in HR.

But their questions and conclusions go way beyond the use of assessment instruments for employment selection and employee development strategies and practices. Read more…

HR News & Trends, Talent Management

Talent and Human Capital: Why It Determines Today’s Business Success

talent_rising_cover1

Is talentism the new capitalism?

Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum, thinks so and said as much as he opened this year’s event in Davos.

Mercer chose this quote to open the executive summary of its new report, Talent Rising: High-impact Accelerators to Global Growth. It includes some great survey data from more than 1,250 HR and talent management executives in 65 countries around the world. It also includes important and useful data about how organizations are or are not expanding their definition of capital to include talent. Read more…

Recruiting and Staffing

If You’re Recruiting, Source of Hire Is Taking on Even More Importance

hiring

Along with Quality of Hire, Source of Hire is starting to take center stage in the talent acquisition world.

The annual report tracking and analyzing Source of Hire from CareerXroads is out this week. Sources of Hire 2013: Perception is Reality contains truly interesting data – understandable and actionable. And the authors ask some really important questions about B2D (Big Bad Data) and how to measure the pre-application talent supply chain.

Early in the white paper, Gerry Crispin and Mark Mehler, the principals at CareerXroads, show the following chart of source of hire data from 1997 – collected by the Society for Human Resource Management and EMA (now part of SHRM). Read more…

Talent Management

A Workplace Truth: Managers Are the Key Players in Engaging Workers

Photo by istockphoto

BlessingWhite’s Employee Engagement Research Update has recently been released. It’s an update to their massive research published in 2011.

Measuring engagement is tricky – from gaining consensus on terms and definitions, to crafting survey questions that generate useful answers, to identifying key findings, to agreeing on recommendations – it’s all very tricky.

Global consulting firm BlessingWhite does a good job managing the trickiness. But truthfully, there’s not a lot of difference in engagement scores globally since their 2011 findings. Read more…

Recruiting and Staffing

Candidate Experience: Can You Keep Them Out of the “Black Hole?”

Illustration by Dreamstime.

A couple of months ago I shared some data from an Aberdeen Group report about benchmarking quality of hire best practices.

It’s a great benchmark list of outcomes. But how about the inputs?

More specifically, in terms of quality of hire, how about benchmarking the quality of the candidate experience? Call me crazy, but it seems to me that a higher quality candidate experience translates into a higher quality of hire. Read more…