July 2014 News Round Up

Here are the top 5 news pieces we didn’t want you to miss from July 2014!

We welcome submissions for future HR news roundup articles in the comments section.

1. What I learned from reading 8,000 recruiting messages

The process of hiring is difficult in every field of work, particularly when it comes to catching the candidate’s attention. The author of this article, Aline Lerner, teamed up with a hiring company in an effort to understand what makes engineers respond to some recruiting messages and not others.

Around 8,000 recruiting messages were analyzed in attempts to determine which factors were predictive of an engineer engaging with a company by accepting an initial interview request. In the process, they discovered, among other things, that:

• Given the large volume of opportunities available, few candidates find it worthwhile to pursue positions below their specified salary bar
• Message personalization is very important, but not all personalization is created equal
• Left to their own devices, engineers and founders sound just as “spammy” as recruiters in their attempts to woo new talent

2. Splitting HR? No, It’s About Infusing It With an Operational Mindset

This article rejects the proposal that it is time to “split” HR. This was in response to a recent article from the July-August 2014 Harvard Business Review, in which the author proposed two totally different units in the workplace.

The first unit would handle “administration” which would be primarily compensation and benefits. It would consist of HR professionals and report directly to the CFO.

The second unit would handle “leadership and organization”, report to the CEO, and be staffed by rotating high potential operational leaders.

This article explains that this approach has been tried before and failed. The author agrees that HR needs to change but this can be done without splitting or disrupting the entire profession.

3. The Hot HR Technology Trends Of 2014

The Information Services Group (ISG), a leading technology insights, market intelligence and advisory services company, recently conducted the “Industry Trends in Human Resources Technology and Service Delivery Survey.”

In this article the author reviews and summarizes this long overdue survey of HR tech trends that will affect the workplace in 2014.

The survey points to three benefits companies expect to realize from investments in HR tech (quoting from the report):

Improved user and candidate experience
Access to ongoing innovation and best practices to support the business
Speed of implementation to increase the value of technology to the organization.

4. Implications of open innovation trends for HR

Open innovation (OI) is a relatively new concept amongst HR professionals, but one that is here to stay.

According to OI expert Stefan Lindegaard, author of The Open Innovation Revolution: “We have a definite paradigm shift going on, from closed to open innovation. There’s going to be a big need for corporate innovation training programmes and upgrades in the coming years. It will be interesting to see how organisations tackle this – and the role of HR.”

What is HR’s role in this new concept?

According to this article, HR’s role involves enhancing communication, networking and stakeholder management skills, which will become ever more critical in a connected world. This article consults with several different OI experts who agree that they would like to see HR practitioners become more proficient in this area.

5. HR Roundtable: How to Make Change Sustainable

This time at the HR Roundtable, the forum broke out into smaller groups to discuss the topics more in depth. Once split into more concentrated groups, the teams gave great in-depth insights into the following three questions:

What obstacles exist in organizations that deter/destroy change?
What keeps employees from embracing change?
How can change be sustainable in organizations?