An Interview with Jon Ingham.

 With the very first of our Monster Buzz events coming up later this month, we took the opportunity to speak to one of our guest panellists about the event and his views on Talent Management vs Talent Acquisition.

Do you think a debating panel is a good idea?

Jon enjoys a good debate, but knows that they have to be made up of the right panellists who are prepared to join in, share knowledge, be open and occasionally Jon likes people to be provocative. He also understands the need for strong facilitation and David and Keith are looking forward to the challenge!

What we at Monster Buzz are looking forward to is not just engaging the panellists in the debate but our audience as well. It’s not just about the ‘experts’, we’d love it for everyone at the event to have a chance to participate.

With a topic as wide as Talent Acquisition and Talent Management, we asked Jon what for him matters the most.

Unsurprisingly, he opted for both. He strongly believes that developing talent and more widely developing human potential is valuable to an organisation and strategic in ensuring that performance management is both maintained and improved on.

For Jon, analytics are becoming an ever important part of the HR role and understanding what impacts on performance, is a key measurement. This indirectly can, of course, impact on your Talent Acquisition strategy – benchmarking, competency testing, all become part of your hiring armoury.

We then asked Jon; can hiring make a quicker contribution to organisational performance then internal development?

Jon was adamant that investment in your existing employees, will always deliver a quicker and better return. He believes this because within existing teams, you’ll always find a strong network and community of people who understand the culture of your organisation. A new hire may bring fresh skills to the table, but they also have to learn this culture in order to perform their best.

In certain situations, Jon believes you could notice a quicker contribution to performance with new hires, but only if a big team were brought in to replace around a third or so of the organisation. If it’s just one or two new hires, the new performance measures they could bring to your company would get lost in existing procedures and infrastructure.

Is there an issue where recruiters are looking for the absolute perfect candidate for a new role instead of developing the internal talent?

Jon agrees that line managers are under great pressure to deliver and therefore seem to err towards wanting to find ‘the perfect candidate’. A number of issues seem to drive this:

• Pressure to deliver within the organisation equals don’t risk an internal candidate who doesn’t have the perfect skills set
• For some organisations it is a ‘hire and fire issue’
• The ‘I own the candidate’ mentality of some managers.
• HR / recruiters tend to focus on performance rather than culture, and seem to prefer an external CV to an internal candidates existing details.

Recent research from Roffey highlights that 20% of managers in the private sector and 30% in the public sector, see no opportunity for internal development. It is hardly surprising, as Jon observes, we are seeing unparalleled levels of worker disengagement.

Do recruitment consultancies, in-house recruiters and RPOs really care about Talent Management?

Jon had strong views on this, he feels that recruiters of all persuasions tend to focus on the tactical issue of putting bums on seats… controversial; we’ll discuss this more at our event!

They focus on issues such as cost to hire and time to hire but few recruiters or organisations are doing a good job of measuring the quality of hire. In Jon’s view, this is an area where recruiters generally can take greater ownership of, and add value to, the organisation.

Key issue; does HR care either?

Jon equally believes that organisations need to focus much more on the acquisition of talent, but definitely not at the expense of developing talent. Building your employer brand and your employer value proposition, and then understanding how you align these with HR learning and development strategies, is often overlooked.

Finally, we asked Jon to ‘vote’ either way for what is more strategic to the organisation – Talent Acquisition or Talent Management.

Jon believes that talent acquisition needs more investment, but not at the expense of talent development. He likened recruitment to purchasing raw products. You bring in raw materials, you mould them into a product or potentially a service, and then you sell it. And he sees recruitment in the same way you find a great raw material, you then train, develop and mould them that raw material into the talent that the organisation needs.

Finally, he believes – which we agree with – that a fundamental part of the EVP is a strong training and development culture. Research consistently shows that organisations that invest in this tend to be ‘employers of choice’.

Jon Ingham describes himself as a writer, speaker and consultant helping companies develop human, organisational and social capital for competitive advantage. Check out his blog, Social Advantage or follow him on Twitter @joningham.