Few businesses can afford to offer the kind of broadbased employee training and “warm and fuzzy” leadership development programs that rose to popularity in the ‘90s. Yet the need to develop job specific skills and nurture top talent has never been greater.

Executives and HR managers are torn between wanting to create an environment that promotes learning and offers opportunities for all employees versus delivering development programs with clear bottom-line results. So what should an organization do to balance these two goals? The answer: strategic human capital management.

Strategic management of human capital (or HCM) is a new term to describe a new way of thinking about organizational development. It is a targeted approach that focuses on achieving clearly defined business objectives and increased value to the organization. As a concept, it represents a dramatic shift in how organizations think about development. Simply, the goal of HCM is to develop individual people to fill specific jobs at the specific times when they’re needed.

In both the public and private sectors, leaders recognize the direct correlation between recruiting, hiring, and developing the right the people for the right jobs and their ability to achieve organizational goals. The HCM process directs talent management in a way that increases the odds of a perfect match between the job, the employee and the organization, and allows precious development resources to be applied precisely where they’re needed most.

Creating a 3-D Profile

The HCM process for talent management is based on creating customized 3-D profiles that consider all three elements required for success – the job, the individual and the organization culture. The enabling technology behind HCM is a web-based system that combines the best of traditional competency models in a diagnostic process. Proven evaluation aptitude and personal style indicator tools such as the DISC and PIAV interactive insights are integrated with new behavioral and cultural assessment tools.

The first profile developed in the HCM process is of the job in question. By allowing the job to “talk” about the knowledge, hard skills, people skills, behavior and culture needed for superior performance, managers can develop interview questions specifically tailored to identify the best possible candidate. As individuals are assessed against the job profile, it becomes automatically clear which one is most likely to be the best fit in terms of capability, behavior, motivation and attributes.

1. Capability. This includes the hard skills needed such as oral and written communication skills, mathematics, advanced technical knowledge, and typing skills. In most situations, these job needs are the clearest. Unfortunately, because they are the clearest, too much attention has been focused on this one factor in traditional organization development models.
   
   
2. Behavior. What sort of work environment does the job offer, which in turn suggests what personal characteristics are needed? For instance, does the job require more extroverted, people-oriented behaviors as in many sales positions, or maybe more introverted, detailed, and task-oriented behaviors as in a quality technician role. Recent developments including personal style indicators and EQ assessments have made it possible to gauge behavior, but only in the context of the individual, not the job.
   
   
3. Motivation. This aspect of the profile identifies the internal rewards that a job offers. While the primary rewards for investment banking might be economic, a scientific position may offer more theoretical rewards. Until now, there has not been a method to quantitatively assess the connection, or disconnect, between an employee’s or a candidate’s values and the corporate culture.
   
   
4. Attributes. A job’s attributes describe what personal skills or capacities it requires. For example, a particular sales manager position might require personal skills such as customer focus and the ability to influence others. The job profile allows organizations to apply an objective assessment to personal skills, which offers a true breakthrough from traditional hiring and development methods.

In development, there are some things you can improve through learning and other things you can’t. No amount of training will change an individual’s nature or personal attributes. The HCM process for considering talent management provides insight into whether an individual is suited for a job or if development will be effective before making an investment in the person or the job.

For this reason, the HCM process is an effective tool for benchmarking, development and hiring as well as succession planning. When used in combination with a coaching model, it can be a very powerful way for organizations to identify talent and apply limited development resources when and where they are needed most.

EDIZEN Insights #13
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