Category Archives: Talent

Overqualified Candidates are Truly Rare …

… and rarer still are instances when you should pass on these candidates. A recent post over on the HBR blogs that asked if you “should hire an overqualified candidate” made some great points about the assumptions made by Hiring Managers when presented with “overqualified candidates”, and hinted at a few others.

Most Hiring Managers misunderstand what overqualified is
A candidate is only over-qualified if they exceed the skill requirements of the job. This means that the following candidates are not overqualified:

  • candidates with an advanced degree that exceeds stated educational requirements
    because the education might not be that relevant anyway
  • candidates with considerably more years of professional experienced than expected
    because if most of a candidate’s experience is in a different role (because they just changed career paths a few years ago), the experience with respect to specific skill requirements could still be minimal
  • candidates with a lot of experience in similar roles in the function
    because candidates with 20 years in tactical order placement and processing would not have a lot of experience in strategic negotiation, a major requirement for sourcing professionals today

Today’s job definition will not be tomorrow’s job definition.
Business is evolving as rapidly as the technology that drives it evolves, and this means that the requirements for a role are no longer static. If the job responsibilities are evolving rapidly, you will need a candidate with more education, skills, and experience than the job requires today to keep up.

There’s nothing stopping you from paying a candidate what he or she is worth.
Maybe you planned to pay 60K, but if you get a candidate who is so perfect for the role that he or she will be twice as productive, and you can get that candidate for 90K, you’re getting someone who can do the work of two people for only 75% of what it would cost you to hire two lesser skilled candidates.

Just because a candidate is overqualified doesn’t mean that he or she will be bored or move on quickly.
This particular misconception drives me nuts. Some jobs are always challenging. Like sales. You never know what the customer is going to want. Or development. Technology is always changing and you never know what new technology is going to pop up that you will have to integrate with or what new bug will appear in the next release that you will have to track down.

Not every candidate wants your job.
Not everyone wants to be the boss … and, in fact, a candidate who has been the boss and decides that she would rather spend her days getting work done instead of fighting fires, going to a never ending stream of management meetings, and micro-managing lesser qualified employees who can’t keep on track without constant guidance is less likely to try and take you job than an overly ambitious over-achieving up-and-comer. If you create the right position for the individual with the most impressive non-boss title you can give them, pay them well, and free them to do what they want to do, they will likely be more than happy to leave you to you own personal boss-hell while they build systems that work, successfully source strategic categories, and design and implement new processes for efficient operations.

Bottom line, there are very few overqualified candidates and fewer still who would not make a good hire if you pay them well and give them the opportunity to shine (because most people would rather complete a task and have a sense of accomplishment than “be the boss”). So if you get a very qualified candidate, the first thing you should do is get her in for an interview before the competition does — because she is the type of candidate you want.

More Proof We’re Overworked … and in Deep Talent Trouble

As per this recent article in Industry Week on “building a lean, mean profitable machine”, productivity in manufacturing has jumped by a record 94% during the past two decades while headcount has significantly shrunk. That’s a productivity increase that’s 60% higher than any other U.S. business sector. Since technological innovations have occurred across the board, one cannot attribute all of this productivity increase to new technologies. A good portion of it is due to blood, sweat, and tears — and people working harder and longer than ever before. And while it looks good on the books, it’s not sustainable over the long term.

There’s a reason that 9 out of 10 employees are looking for a new job. They feel like they’ve been worked to death and that there couldn’t be a job that is possibly worse than their current job. Considering that production is becoming more and more specialized and reliant on precision machinery and technology, this is not a good thing as the industry as a whole is facing a dire shortage of skilled production workers, scientists and engineers. Add this to the predicted shortage of up to 100,000 logistics workers by mid-decade, and you see a deep talent shortage looming across the supply chain.

How does your organization plan to manage it … before it’s too late?

The Universal Key to Supply Chain Success

These days, there’s a lot of requirements for supply chain success. Even a supply chain that is carefully architected, supported by the best technology, and managed using the most modern (collaborative) process is not guaranteed to succeed. But whether the supply chain is in the public sector or the private sector, there is one fundamental requirement of success that does not change: talent.

I was reminded of this when reading a recent post over on the HBR blogs about “the intelligence challenge” where the authors, who were all Marine Corps Intelligence Officers in Iraq who now advise clients through the Mayflower Strategy Group, noted that the way ahead, for those who want success in the public sector and the military, is to emulate the lessons learned from the recent slim-downs in the private sector where the winning organizations were those that spent money on obtaining best-in-class collaboration tools and top talent to deploy them.

The reality is that there is no one (network) architecture, technology, or process that will guarantee success in today’s global supply chain that is wrought with risk from end to end. That means an organization’s best chance of success is having top talent in place who can quickly react to unpredictable occurrences and prevent minor hiccups from becoming major disruptions. A good supply chain runs on good people, so make sure you have some. And be sure to give them the best tools and training available, as they can never be over prepared.

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Want a More Productive Supply Chain Worker? Take a Page from Tina Turner!

The difference between a productive supply chain worker and an unproductive one is staggering in today’s knowledge economy. As per this recent article in the McKinsey Quarterly on “boosting the productivity of knowledge workers”, raising the productivity of these workers, who constitute a large and growing share of the workforce in developed economies, represents a major opportunity for companies, as well as for countries with low birthrates that hope to maintain GDP growth. However, those companies that fail to keep up with their competitors will soon be swept aside in the battle for supremacy in the knowledge economy.

But knowledge work involves more diverse and amorphous tasks than do production or clerical positions and is thus hard to automate or streamline. Plus, the real returns are often the result of creativity and ingenuity that spark a new innovation — how do you boost that with a system or process? Typically, you don’t. So how do you increase the productivity of your knowledge workers? Simple, you increase the amount of time they have to spend on creativity, ingenuity, and innovation. And you do that by identifying their time-drains and taking them away.

According to McKinsey Research, knowledge workers spend half their time on interactions. Half their time! If they’re not getting what they need from these interactions, that’s up to half of their time wasted. So what can you do? You identify the productivity barriers — which can be physical, technical, social, cultural, contextual, and/or temporal — and you remove them.

If distance is a problem, you get people together when needed. If the technology isn’t sufficient for the types of global collaboration required by your team, you upgrade it. If the organizational modus operandi isn’t appropriate to the locale, you change it. If your people are having trouble understanding their counterparts across the globe, you give them some cultural training. If marketing can’t understand engineering and vice versa, you upgrade their technical skills. And if there truly isn’t enough time, you admit that fact and adjust the project scope and timelines to be more reasonable.

In other words, Tina Turner was right. If you want to succeed, you have to break through the barrier.

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E-I-E-I … E

Dalip Raheja of The Mpower Group recently ran a piece here on Sourcing Innovation on how Old MacDonald Was Right — It Is About E-I-E-I-O when it comes to successful supply chains. And when it comes to performance, he’s right — it’s all about Adoption, Execution, Implementation, Optimization, and Utilization.

But when it comes to attracting, retaining, and growing talent, you have to really focus on creating the optimal work environment. According to a recent piece in Industry week, when “hiring and retaining talent”, it’s all about the three E’s: Experience, Exposure, and Education because employees need

  • challenging assignments that allow them to develop new skills,
  • opportunities to expand their network inside and outside of the organization to continue learning, and
  • classes and mentoring to improve and gain new skills.

And the author is right. If your employees aren’t engaged, exposed, and enlightened, they won’t be energized by your organization. That means your stars will leave, and once high performers see their peers leaving, they won’t be very interested in joining.

However, it’s not the perfect recipe for an attractive environment as it misses two other key features of attractive work environments: Innovation and Inovlvement. Superstars want to innovate and build new products and solutions that make your customers’ lives better and they want to be involved in all aspects of the process from contemplation through design, development, and delivery. And they want to be informed when something happens good or bad (and asked for feedback). The don’t like a closed-door need-to-know environment and won’t stand for it. The want their E – I – E – I – E.

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