Horizon Point Consulting

Category: Talent Management and Development

We provide full service talent management and talent development consulting services. Read our blogs in this category for stories and best practices from real clients and real research.

The Candidate Experience Influences The Brand

Branding is an important marketing topic. Some organizations invest heavily in a brand strategy that reaches many audiences, including the job seeker. A great brand attracts job candidates to an organization. As a marketer and HR professional, I have a unique perspective on this topic. The marketer side understands the importance of brand equity and the HR side values the role it plays in talent acquisition. Some organizations fail to make this connection. Other organizations offer poor candidate experiences, which cast a negative image. As a result, it harms the brand while turning away potential talent.

Over the years, I have heard candidates’ horror stories of bad encounters, which diminish the job seekers value of an organization. A few of these experiences were so negative that it impacted the candidate’s use of the products and services. Most job seekers desire an organization that aligns with their values and where a connection can be made to the culture. The candidate experience is an extension of the brand strategy. It expands beyond the talent acquisition strategy. Recruiters are often the first human contact a job seeker has with the brand. Having a marketing orientation is vital to recruiting, since they are brand representatives.

A negative candidate experience has a lasting impact. Talent acquisition influences brand equity. Designing a marketing-focused talent strategy can create positive candidate experiences. Collaboration between marketing and talent acquisition is beneficial in driving the strategy. Every encounter is exposure to the brand, so make it exceptional.

About the author: Steve Graham serves as Vice President for Marketing, HR Business Partner, and college instructor. He holds graduate degrees in management and higher education. As a life-long learner, he has additional graduate and professional education in executive & professional coaching, health care administration, and strategic human resource management.

He is a certified HR professional with The Society for Human Resource Management, certified coach with the International Coach Federation, and a Global Career Development Facilitator. His professional memberships include: The Society for Human Resource Management, the American Society for Healthcare Human Resources Administration, Association for Talent Development, and International Coach Federation. LinkedIn.com/in/hstevegraham

April 4, 2017
Chocolate Anyone? Symbols to Remind You to Be Grateful and Spread Gratefulness

“I’ll be right back,” the lady said to her colleague. “I’ve got to finish giving my chocolate bars away.”

The colleague nods. I’m sitting next to him at a conference breakfast, and I look at him with must have been a look like, “What? Chocolate bars? At breakfast?”

He smiles, and says, “You’ll have to ask her about them.” I could tell he was indirectly saying, it’s her story to tell, not mine. Yes, ask her about the chocolate I will.

I see her hand a chocolate bar to a server and give him a hug.

She finally comes and sits back down and smiles. I, of course say, “So you have to tell me about the chocolate bars.”

I’ve never seen anyone light up so much as she tells me about how her habit with chocolate bars comes from her very first client that manufactures them. Nancy, I learn is her name, and she explained to me that she had come out of a bad job situation in HR management. She said she had been battling breast cancer and her employer was absolutely awful in helping her through this, so she quit.

She interviewed for a position at the chocolate manufacturer, to which the hiring manager told her she was overqualified for the role and that she needed to start her own business in HR compensation consulting.

“I’ll hire your company then to work with us on some compensation issues we are having,” he told her. And he gave her a chocolate bar as she left.

The chocolate giving lady then went on to say that this was the beginning of a new life for her. She did start that business, and five years later, everywhere she goes she gives out chocolate bars to people to show gratitude and to challenge people to reach for their dreams.

She told me, “I didn’t even realize this was my dream until he challenged me to do this.” Grinning again she said, “Now it is only right for me to pass this along.”

So today, I challenge you to take a lesson from Nancy and figure out what your own chocolate bar is. Then, figure out a way to not to only share it with others, but more importantly, share it to constantly remind yourself of what and who you have to be thankful for and to pass that on.

Like this post, you may also like:

Love Lives Here a new book out by Maria Goff. Maria and her husband, Bob, who wrote Love Does, give out real keys to their own home as their chocolate bars. This is a way to show that love resides in their home and is therefore something to be shared.

Count Your Problems and Be Thankful

Leaders Start With Gratitude

March 21, 2017
The Conundrum of Incentive Pay
I know of two people who have left their job in the last year because they felt like they were slighted when it came to how their company handled incentive pay. Both of them- one working for a global behemoth of a company and one working for a family start-up- were promised things when it came to incentive compensation and then the rules were changed on them in the middle of the game, thus slighting them in pay they felt they were entitled to.

And I can think of one company owner who is a friend that has tried and tried to come up with an incentive plan for her business development people that works, only to come out with frustrating results in that the intent didn’t drive the desired outcome. In some cases, it drove the exact opposite.

Incentive compensation is tough. It’s why many companies avoid it all together. But I can’t give up on the fact that tying at least part of pay to outcomes and results that contribute to a company’s bottom-line, and the hard workers pocket all at once, aren’t a good thing.

Here are some things that stand in order to do incentive pay well:
1. Align any incentive plan with your company values that drive everyday behaviors. This should dictate that an incentive to perform is not an incentive to cheat. Be like Southwest Airlines, not Wells Fargo.
2. Combine incentives programs with overall social recognition that includes monetary and non-monetary rewards for a job well done. As a Globoforce blog post states:
In 2012, Aberdeen surveyed more than 300 sales organizations to understand how best-in-class organizations motivate their sales staff. Recognition for a ‘job well done’ scored higher than any other non-cash incentives, including competitions, learning & development, and team-based financial compensation. Further, Aberdeen found that best-in-class companies are more likely to indicate that internal recognition for positive performance results is a vital motivator for sales success.

And this-

“Just remember that your sales people are human, too, and crave recognition and appreciation beyond the basic comp plan.”
1. DWYSYWD- Do what you say you will do. This means if you say you are going to pay x amount out for doing or achieving y, then do it. If you screwed up and didn’t figure out beforehand how this affects your bottom-line, its your fault not your employees’. Of course, this should be tempered with stating that incentive compensation structures are not indefinite in nature, because markets and situations change. However, when you communicate a plan to your employees you should let them know when this structure “expires” so to speak or is subject to review and changes (most likely on an annual basis) to be clear on expectations of payouts.
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Corporate Recruitment Incentive Programs from Fistful of Talent

Meaningless Core Values – A Dangerous Liability
February 28, 2017
HR Santa Clauses focus on the Employee Experience

Whether you like it or not, the Christmas season really starts the second Halloween is over. I walked into Target a few minutes after it opened on November 1^st(like at 8:01 a.m. because we were out of dog food and the dog was hungry) and it had been transformed into a Christmas shopping wonderland. Where has Thanksgiving gone?

With Christmas marketing screaming at all of us to buy a lot of stuff most of which we don’t need, I’m beginning to think about how to make Christmas meaningful for my almost six and two and a half year old without turning them into materialistic hoarders.

In thinking about this, I’m drawn to a concept that I’ve been hearing a lot about in HR circles and that is the importance of the employee experience. Many people in human resources and talent management are seeking to shift the conversation about employee engagement to one that is centered on employee experience.

At work, this means focusing on meaningful, positive and memorable experiences for employees. Whether it is the company picnicor how the employee logs on to his or her 401K portal to view their assets, it should be an experience. It can be seen from the experience generated when someone requests time off to how that person’s immediate supervisor interacts with them. As these examples illustrate, the focus on experience encompasses the mundane HR relevant tasks (and let’s face it, sometimes those “experiences” are the most frustrating, which can decrease satisfaction in a hurry) to the key leadership decisions and behaviors that drive an organization to be considered a best place to work.

Whereas I’m somewhat thinking the whole focus experience instead of engagement is really just a different word to describe the same thing, I’m beginning to see through the value in a focusing on experience in order to make Christmas meaningful for my children. Maybe experience is what drives the engagement. And focusing on those interactions or experiences is the means, which leads to the end- aka- engagement.

So, this year, as my husband and I prep to make Christmas magical without turning our kids into entitled brats, we plan to have a gift for each of them under the tree that then ties to a more important experience for them. And a personalized experience at that. For example, my son loves Legos, so his gift and experience is shaping up to look like a new Lego set with a “gift certificate” to Lego world in Atlanta for us to experience as a family. My guess is he will remember the trip to Lego world far longer than he will remember the set of blocks given to him under the tree. Just like his time at Lego camp, which uses Legos to focus kids in STEM- Science, Technology, Engineering and Math- learning at school once a week will shape him more than the actual physical toy and will help him to more fully enjoy and engage in school and learning.

And maybe focusing on experiences will help us all put some thanksgiving back in the holiday season by avoiding the time spent shopping for stuff. And just maybe, some thanksgiving can be restored in your organization by a higher level of employee engagement through focusing on the employee experience.

What one HR process do you need to view from the lens of the experience it creates for employees? Does the way you do it now lead to a more or less engaged staff?

Like this post? You may also like: The HR Metric You’re Not Measuring (But Should Be)

November 15, 2016
The name of the game is FREEDOM: How innovative companies motivate, get, and retain the best…
“The competition to hire the best will increase in the years ahead. Companies that give extra flexibility (freedom) to their employees will have the edge in this area.” Bill Gates
I can’t neglect (since I missed the window over the 4th) to make sure to make a point about freedom during our nation’s birthday month. And as by coincidence or actually, by what really makes a whole lot of sense, you can’t talk about what drives innovation without talking about freedom. America is a country that was built around the concept of freedom.

Despite a presidential campaign grounded on “Making America Great Again,” it is the most innovative country in the world as measured by producing goods and services that people value (as measured by GDP). It is also still a country where many desire to immigrate, and though I’m not citing fact now, I will venture to say that many of them desire to come here precisely because they will have freedom, including the freedom to innovate.

And, since I can’t resist the urge to make a slight political commentary here, a country grounded in freedom is what gives Mr. Trump the freedom to say that America needs to be great again and gives citizens the right to show their support of this by their vote. This is precisely what makes America great. Not the idea of building a wall.

And freedom is what grounds innovative organizations.

Why? Because giving people freedom leads to this cycle:
1. Trust. Freedom is the way you behaviorally demonstrate to people that you trust them. When people are trusted, they feel free to:
2. Experiment. A/B or split testing is something the most innovative companies do all the time. Because everything can’t be known, trying it more than one way and seeing what works better- what the customer prefers- leads to better results.
3. Fail (more often than not). If I saw anything across the literature that was vital to innovation it was room to fail because it leads people to:
4. Learn. As the Innovator’s Dilemma emphasizes over and over again – “The strategies and plans that managers formulate for confronting disruptive technological change, therefore, should be plans for learning and discovery rather than plans for execution.” Learning can also come from getting it right instead of failing, but often the biggest breakthroughs come through some kind of failure in the beginning.
5. Grow. Growth occurs at the individual level and then collectively at the organizational level in terms of profits.
Much of the literature uses the word “autonomy” or “flexibility” for “freedom” and this autonomy, as you see in Drive couples with finding mastery and purpose in the workplace to create motivation.

So how do we create this freedom in the workplace that allows for this cycle to take place, leading to innovation?

Here are some ideas to create freedom from some of the best innovation hubs:
- 3M allows its employees to spend 15% of their time to work on their own projects Guess where post-it notes came from? Yes, from the 15%. Other innovators do likewise. Google has used a 20% standard.
- Nike experimented with a T-shirt factory in Mexico giving workers in a specific plant more freedom by letting them help set production targets, form their own teams, decide how work should be accomplished and allowed them to stop production if they thought they saw problems. Production at this plant was found to be twice as high as at another similar plant that was tightly controlled.
- Flex-time and work from home and telecommuting arrangements are becoming widespread and cater to people’s desire for freedom in how and when work gets done. Most studies show these arrangements increase productivity.
- Some companies are going as far as to eliminate setting limits on vacation or paid time off.
- Decision making is being pushed down to the individual or employee level. Managers don’t make the decisions, the ones closest to the work have the freedom to do so.
How do you allow for freedom in the workplace? What results have you seen?

What scares you about giving people freedom in the workplace? Why?
July 26, 2016