Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Can HR Recruit Creatives?

HR departments in China are too often helpless when it comes to their capabilities to recruit Creatives. This failure results from the following issues:
1. Traditional HR departments take a passive approach and believe that Creative Directors prefer to screen creative staff themselves.
2. HR professionals do not invest the time to learn about and understand the market, advertising campaigns, and the people behind the scenes to really grasp how and what the artists' true contributions were and thereby make a proper skill assessment.
3. HR does not have an "eye for creativity" and is therefore unable to assess who has superior creative and design skills.
4. HR people are not trained in the Creative world and can not even differentiate between ATL, BTL, and digital works. If these are not clearly labeled, then they end up spamming Creative Directors' mailboxes with many inadequate candidates.

To change this defunct status quo, HR should:
1. Instigate the belief that HR’s assistance in the recruitment of creative staff is needed and necessary for Agencies to achieve their business objectives. Why else would Creative Directors brief HR on their staffing needs? HR must realize that Creatives have expectations and HR needs to deliver on them.
2. Achieve Partner status with the business, demonstrate an ongoing interest in the Creative process, learn more about specific campaigns (also the ones of from competitors), hold formal and informal meetings with all kinds of artists, talk with candidates about the different strategies and execution of successful campaigns, and recreate organigrams for project teams in target companies.
3. Develop into a learning unit. The department must comprehend inside and out Creatives' requirements, know what constitutes quality creative and design skills, and fully understand services offered by the Agency.
4. Have the drive to excel at this challenge thereby making everything aforesaid possible.

This being said, organizational support is also crucial to HR success in the recruitment of Creatives. An essential step to take is to invest more resources in the position of Recruiter by instituting greater financial incentives and designing an appealing career path to keep the "good ones" onboard. After all, they are the key to this entire process and Recruiters will need to be the ones to change their behaviors and learn more about Creative's and the "Arts".

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

General Manager – HR

Last year, I wrote about the semantics in development of HR as a profession. 2009 emerged as the year of a new HR designation; namely, General Manager – HR (GM of HR Department, GM Admin & HR Department).

This new title sounds promising at the onset but after closer review of several GM - HR Job Descriptions, one can quickly realize that the responsibilities of the GM - HR are basically the same ones as that of any other HR Head focused on administration, statutory compliance, and the entire gamut of HR activities without explicitly calling for business, strategic, and team leadership.

Added analysis into the Job Requirements by any HR Business Partner advocate will further cool down their excitement toward this new title. After all, the new designation continues to demand excessive HR experience; particularly one of HR Generalist and only introduces one modern and advantageous requirement; an MBA.

In my view, introducing any new HR title is pointless and confusing unless the "core" of the position is new. The GM – HR role would be of greater substance if the primary responsibilities were:
• To run multiple HR departments as value creating centers for the different companies under one holding company,
• To optimize HR services, and
• To lead the alignment of HR strategy with the business strategy across the different companies.

Accordingly, the ideal candidate would then be required to have more of an entrepreneurial and business track record with either an operational background or extensive knowledge and an understanding of the business model of each company and the value drivers of each business.