Are People Truly Your Greatest Asset?

“People are our Greatest Asset” is a motto that is as heavily overused in the corporate world in China as around the world. After all, the "people's agenda” is still not the number one priority on many CEO’s list of strategic priorities. Metrics can be used to help the HR department shift the CEO's priorities to PEOPLE. For example, “Amount of time the CEO spends face-to-face with employees from different management levels”, “Hours per week the CEO spends with the HR Head”, “Number of people initiatives that are owned by the CEO”, and “Employees’ engagement score”.

Additionally, to test and demonstrate that substance exists behind this slogan, organizations should consider adopting the following steps:
• Implementing metrics and targets for the organization's people agenda (Workforce Scorecard).
• Making it really hard for excellent talent to leave (Career Planning and Benefits Planning that surpasses the competition).
• Outlining clearly which behaviors are desirable and which are unacceptable (Employee Handbook).
• Creating policies and practices that reflect workforce trends and show genuine care (Periodic HR and People audits and revisions of policies and practices).
• Promoting common sense and a positive “Yes, I can” approach among policy Administrators so that they do not just follow policies blindly but also think about and understand when policies simply do not apply. In this respect, policy Administrators must be empowered to grant an exception on the spot if the situation requires.
• Showing people a "human touch" and respect at all times.

Lastly, companies preaching “People are our Greatest Asset” should also reevaluate their approach to temporary staff such as Freelancers and Interns.

How to Avoid Sloppy Online Recruitment Advertising

Since the boom of the Internet, online advertising has become an integral component of all recruitment efforts. It is not only an extremely cost effective form of advertising, but less demanding than print advertising particularly in regards to ad size, the amount of words used, and quality of the entire copy.

As a result, some companies slack off here and delegate the drafting and posting of online recruitment advertising to junior HR staff without further supervision. Over time however, this approach leads to various design formats with inconsistent copy and numerous grammatical and spelling mistakes. More troubling is the fact that these ads seldom portray the job in an attractive and engaging manner and regularly continue to live on and on somewhere in digital space long after the position has been closed; very careless indeed.

So, to reverse this negative cycle and harness positive public relations, prepare a thorough online recruitment advertising policy. Begin by answering the following questions:
• Who is authorizing the advertising of positions?
• Who approves the final draft of the online recruitment advertisement?
• Who determines placement of online recruitment advertisements (which Internet sites are used will likely depend on the nature of the position and an expected ease or difficulty of securing an adequate field of Candidates).
• Who is responsible for assuring the quality of the company’s agreed to branding, style, and standard design format?
• What are the specific guidelines for the content of the online recruitment advertisement (e.g. to be consistent with the position description/person specification with non discriminatory criteria as sex and age, whether to indicate the salary range of the position, etc.)?
• Does the online recruitment advertising need to be in English or in Chinese or bilingual?
• How do we track the effectiveness of the online recruitment advertising by recruitment portal (e.g. effectiveness of the response rates to the advertisement [Applicant Tracking], the percentage of appointments made after the first round of advertising, or the number of applications processed within standard timeframes)?

Five Human Capital/HR Truths to Reinforce in 2009

1. You cannot rely on the HR function to take care of your people. Every Manager in the company must understand the value of people. Executives and managers must do their part to address strategic people challenges. It is not all up to the HR Department; it is a shared responsibility.
2. HR cannot effectively drive change without a non-HR sponsor. Executive buy-in and in particular the CEO's ongoing and firm commitment are essential to change management. There tend to be just a few change agents in the organization as a whole and this is way many programs and changes fail miserably. See point 1 as well.
3. The entire HR function must learn to help leaders improve their talent decisions, not just implement them. HR practitioners must develop analytical insight to support executive “decision making”. HR is sitting on tons of data but few of which is properly monitored and adjusted to be ready and served up as management information.
4. Simply rebranding HR as “strategic” is not enough. Executives must either hire people capable of assessing people challenges and devising executable solutions or help HR staff develop the required skills and capabilities. If you do not know it, then find it elsewhere and bring it on board or invest in acquiring the skills first. HR strategy is much easier said than done.
5. Bonuses are not tokens to buy future performance. Executives must realize that a "bonus" is a sum of money given to an employee in addition to their regular pay because of excellent work, length of service, accumulated favors, etc. It is not a form of bribery to convince an employee to stay and perform well in the coming year. Concentrate on and fix the true reasons as to why an employee is seriously interested in leaving in the first place.

How do you know if your HR Head lacks strategic potential or leadership?

• S/he focuses on and strives to keep administrative transactions and other non-strategic activities in-house by limiting the HR budget to HR personnel salaries as much as possible.
• S/he does not understand, drive, nor support (financially or otherwise) any employer branding initiatives and perceives recruitment marketing as a waste of time.
• S/he is unable to recognize that competition for critical talent is heating up and does not understand the supply and demand of critical workforce segments.
• S/he is unable to monitor availability of critical talent for the organization and does not work to influence it (e.g. University engagement).
• S/he does not strive to gain insights into employee factors as turnover or age within the organization’s critical workforce segments.
• S/he believes the company’s recruiter is a junior role and does not have an issue with the recruiter being in charge of overtaking administrative duties connected with e.g. visa for expatriates, new staff announcements, etc.
• S/he does not know the answer to the question: Why would great people want to work at their Company?
• S/he does not recognize the link between the company’s standing in the talent market and its position in the product/service market.

HR People in China

In China, the HR profession has relatively low barriers to entry. Even today, many HR Departments are filled with HR people without any formal HR qualifications.

Traditionally, vacancies in the HR Department were taken up by graduates of English schools or Finance professionals whose talents were incommensurate with their new responsibilities and duties.

Another wave of HR professionals comes from consulting companies. Just like advertising agencies develop talent for their in-house Marketing Department, recruitment agencies and HR consulting companies produce a talent pool of in-house recruiters and HR executives. These candidates may find themselves overwhelmed with the amount of daily Admin work that requires their attention.

The final batch of HR professionals comes from an Operations background. This group usually starts their career in Marketing, Sales, or Product Development. They in fact have very limited HR know-how.

To climb the corporate ladder, HR people from all three groups must prove that they have a solid understanding of the company's business, can contribute to and collaborate effectively with senior management, and convert data into management information. In a nutshell, the best HR people are entrepreneurial, highly dedicated, solutions-oriented, and hungry to work with people to drive change, development and training, and individual/team/company performance.

Offer Acceptance Rate and Show Up Rate

An Offer Acceptance Rate shows the percentage of job offers that have been accepted from the hiring process. It is calculated by knowing the Job Offers Accepted by the Job Offers Extended.

In China, this metric can be complimented by a Show Up Rate which would be the Onboards Completed by Jobs Offers Accepted as it is not uncommon for Candidates not to show up for their first day of work even though they accepted the offer.

Both ratios may be good indicators for measuring the strength of your employer brand, productivity and skillfulness of your recruiters/hiring managers in assessing the needs and wants of the Candidate, and quality and effectiveness of internal communications.

A low rate should force the organization to reevaluate:
• The ways it markets its employee value proposition,
• The salaries benchmarking data,
• Candidates' journey with particular focus on pre-employment activities, and
• The communication approach with Candidates.

An organization should also take proactive steps before, during, and after an offer acceptance to ensure a high conversion rate. A few sample initiatives include:
• Be clear about your employee value proposition and communicate it persuasively.
• Send the Candidate a small company gift, marketing collaterals, and/or a card from the Division Head or even better, the CEO.
• Let the Division Head/CEO call the Candidate.
• Invite the Candidate to join any team activities that are scheduled before his/her Onboard Day.
• Connect with the Candidate via Facebook or Twitter in order to update him/her on the organization's status and any new happenings or successes.

Focus on Strengths

In both Marketing and HR, the dilemma arises as to where one should allocate resources. Two choices exist; either focus on strengths or concentrate on compensating weaknesses.

For Marketing, these two approaches are discussed, for example, by Dru*:

“If a P&G product had a 12 percent market share in Normandy and only 6 percent in Alsace, P&G would spend twice as much in Normandy as in Alsace. P&G invests where it is strong. Colgate would have done the opposite, believing that the 6 percent in Alsace, lower than the national average, was clear evidence of underexploited potential requiring investment.”

For HR, alternative examples include:
• Guide and encourage high performers to deliver even greater results or help low performers reach average results.
• Motivate employees by focusing on their strengths or helping them identify and overcome some of their weaknesses.
• Reward, grow, and retain “A” players or concentrate on salvaging “C” players.

Without a doubt, performance-driven organizations will choose to focus on high-performers and allocate resources accordingly.


* Dru, Jean-Marie (2007). How Disruption Brought Order: The Story of Winning Strategy in the World of Advertising. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. P. 177.