How 'Believe Chicago' Connected AT&T With Its Neighbors

BY emilyludolph | March 04, 2019

In the city of Chicago, the twin plagues of gun violence and unemployment determine the experience of many who live and work in neighborhoods far from the sparkling high rises of downtown. In this other part of the shining city, gun violence is so high that the Wall Street Journal reported last year that Navy medics are prepared for tours of duty by training at the trauma unit at Cook County’s Stroger Hospital. The number of homicides has dropped over the last three years, down from 771 in 2016 to 561 last year. But that positive trend—shaped by nonprofit groups, religious congregations, local activists and government programs—can use all the help it can get. Now it’s getting it from a new source: AT&T.

Eileen Mitchell, president of AT&T Illinois

The world’s largest telecom company (2018 revenues: $170.8 billion) launched a new program last October called Believe Chicago to focus on injecting opportunity into 19 Chicago neighborhoods with the highest rates of unemployment and violence. It’s not a random selection—many of AT&T’s local employees live or work in those very neighborhoods. “When we did the research and saw how many employees and retirees we had living in these neighborhoods, how many stores we had, we determined that we had an obligation to step forward,” says Eileen Mitchell, president of AT&T Illinois, one of the state’s largest private-sector employers.

AT&T has a history of volunteerism and community service within its workforce, but at a time when the relationship between big companies and big cities can be contentious, AT&T wanted to build a sustainable, employee-driven program in partnership with Chicago's neighborhoods.

So AT&T's managers fanned out. Across the city, headquarters staff met with employees in stores, call centers, and equipment garages. “The magic started to happen when we went out and talked to our employees,” recalls Mitchell. “They were very close to the issue and there was an extreme amount of enthusiasm for the idea that we needed to get involved. The conversations that we had informed and inspired the work that we did and the program that we built.”

One of the program's initiatives is Learn Chicago, which provides skills training for young people, including in retail stores

From there, AT&T went even deeper into the communities, convening organizers and activists, and asking them to gather residents who could share their perspective of what was happening around them and where there were gaps in services and support. One of the biggest gaps? Economic opportunity.

Well, Mitchell reasoned, one of the most powerful opportunities a large company can leverage is hiring. This led to one of the pillars of the Believe Chicago program: skills training and connection to job openings. Last month, AT&T hired their 500th employee from the 19 neighborhoods who came up through the Believe Chicago program.

The programs milestones will be celebrated on March 15 with the debut of a documentary entitled, Beacons of Hope: Stories of Strength from Chicago, launching on the AT&T Audience Network. With early support from company executives including John Donovan, CEO of AT&T Communications, the Believe initiative has grown in just a year into a national program with offshoots in New York City, Dallas, Atlanta and Detroit. More than a dozen additional cities are planning to launch their own Believe efforts later this year. The Believe program joins a variety of job-skills programs that AT&T supports, including Girls Who Code and All Star Code.

Eileen Mitchell’s passion for Believe Chicago is built from her three-pronged background: 12 years as an AT&T executive, a stint as Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel’s chief of staff, where she became familiar with the challenges facing neighborhoods, and a year volunteering for the archdiocese of Chicago to develop an office of violence prevention.

“All institutions have different assets that they can bring to bear,” Mitchell says on the role that corporations should fill in local communities. “The violence issue in Chicago is not one person’s to solve. Government can’t do it alone. Private enterprise can’t do it alone. And the faith community can’t do it alone. The real power comes when government, the private sector and the faith community can all come together with one goal in mind: to lift these neighborhoods, to invest in them, and to create opportunity that doesn’t exist.”

That corporations are just one integral piece of the health of local communities in which their employees and customers live and work points to a key tenet of the program: sustainability. The program may still be young, but by focusing on community partnerships, job growth, and training, Believe Chicago has its eyes on a commitment to the Windy City that will extend many years into the future.

Emily Ludolph is a senior editor at 99U and an alum of TED Conferences and Vassar College. She has published in the New York Times, the Atlantic, Narratively, Artsy, 99U, Quartz, and Design Observer


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Who Are the Next CHROs? A High-Stakes Recruiting Task Gets Serious Attention

Not long ago, if you’d asked someone what the most conservative part of an organization was, chances are the answer would be the HR department. Well, maybe tied with the general counsel’s office, but the image of the top HR officer as a high-ranking paper-pusher or disciplinarian carried on for decades.No longer. In the information age, when companies are increasingly investing in human capital over physical capital, the chief HR officer plays a pivotal role in a company’s fate. Today’s CHRO is a business leader, operating what Deloitte named “boundaryless HR,” in which “the traditional people discipline itself starts to merge with other related disciplines like decision science, behavioral economics, and academic disciplines such as psychology, sociology, and anthropology.”The question now becomes: Where can companies find a person like that for such a high-stakes role? Turns out, CEOs are far more proficient in CHRO selection today than they were a decade ago, says John Bremen, a managing director at consultancy WTW, where his job is to imagine the future of the C-suite. “People issues today are so much more pronounced and so much more prominent than previously.”From Day One spoke with CHROs in the Fortune 1000 and the consultants who recruit them to find out what it takes to be a CHRO at the world’s biggest companies. What do CEOs look for in an HR chief? And who’s next in line for the job? No one single formula emerges, but several key attributes emerge, including previous experience as a CHRO, demonstrated HR savvy plus a law degree, or a proven track record of adaptability across multiple industries.All Eyes on the CHROCHROs are experiencing unprecedented attention, thanks to their inestimable value confirmed by the pandemic, economic swings, social unrest, return to work, and now the global skills shortage. Dan Kaplan has spent 15 years recruiting CHROs at consulting firms like Heidrick & Struggles and Korn Ferry, where he’s currently a senior partner. He told From Day One that private-equity firms, in particular, have homed in on the position as they restructure companies, assessing not just CEOs and CFOs rigorously, but now the CHRO as well. Some PE firms replace the CHRO first, he said, “with a view that that person becomes the catalyst to assess and replace the rest of the leadership team.”Given the scope of the role, executives are appointing fewer first-timers than they have in the past, according to the CHRO Turnover Index by Russell Reynolds Associates. The number of rookie CHROs has been decreasing globally since mid 2022. Among S&P 500 firms, first-time appointments are down 19 percentage points since that year. This is even more true for FTSE 500 companies–the UK’s answer to the S&P 500–where for nearly a year in 2022-23) every incoming CHROs was a veteran of the role.Maral Kazanjian, the CHRO at the credit-rating agency Moody’s (company photo). Featured photo at top: Kate Gebo, CHRO of United Airlines, spoke at From Day One’s Chicago conference this springThere’s also an appetite for highly varied professional experience. The lion’s share of CHROs today are cross-industry hires. Analysts at Heidrick & Struggles examined the 2024 Fortune 1000 companies and found that more than 77% of external CHRO hires were from other industries. With a few exceptions, the CHRO is an “industry agnostic” role, said Kaplan, and HR chiefs tend to glide easily between industries. Among the most coveted qualities in a HR chief is agility, and cross-industry work naturally develops that skill. Now companies recruit CHROs with much of the same criteria they use when recruiting business leaders: experience with mergers and acquisitions and the grunt work of combining workforces, knowledge of a P&L, plus familiarity with thorny issues like labor-union negotiations. “At a company juncture—say, a new CEO comes in and they’re tasked with some turnaround—they often need a different type of CHRO for that phase of the company,” said Jennifer Wilson, co-head of the global HR officers practice at Heidrick & Struggles. “With the amount of M&A and cost-cutting, and then getting back to growth, they want to find somebody who’s been through that cycle.” Why Your Next CHRO May Also Be a JDIf you’re looking for a CHRO with cross-industry experience, plenty of exposure to the C-suite, plus experience with assembling multiple companies and quelling labor disputes, a labor-and-employment lawyer often satisfies the brief. With greater exposure to risk (as a sample: reputational, environmental, technological, privacy, and supply chain) it’s reassuring to know there’s an attorney occupying the seat. “There’s the employee-engagement lens, and there’s the productivity lens, there’s the regulatory lens, and there’s the profitability lens,” said WTW’s Bremen. HR is no longer a static department, now it has to make things happen.Law practice also develops the confrontational confidence CHROs need. “You need to have had the experience of walking into a senior leader’s office, closing the door, giving them feedback, and challenging them on an issue where you think there’s a pretty good chance of getting fired today,” Korn Ferry’s Kaplan said. At times, it’s as diplomatic as managing the CEO’s personality and presenting even the most uncharismatic leaders to the workforce as people who can be trusted, which sounds a lot like what might happen in a courtroom.Before Claudia Toussaint became the chief people officer at the global water-technology company Xylem, she was the company’s general counsel. CHROs can’t afford to be intimidated by hierarchy, she said. They have to be prepared to tell the CEO that they’re out of line, and why it matters. The professional training of an attorney comes in handy too. Lawyers gather evidence, make conclusions, and present a case. “That skillset, I think, is far more valuable today in the HR function than five years ago or ten years ago,” Toussaint said. “I think that’s why people are increasingly saying, ‘These people that have a law degree and have been trained to think systemically, to take data, analyze data, reach conclusions from it, and then drive impact from those conclusions—that’s actually not a bad background for leading HR function.’”HR and the general counsel’s office have a natural relationship. Maral Kazanjian, the CHRO at the credit-rating agency Moody’s, felt she was effectively moonlighting as an HR professional while working as the firm’s attorney, applying the law to all kinds of employment matters. “I was really lucky because Moody’s is a very successful company and also has a really fast-growing information-services business within the traditional ratings agency. Because they were growing so fast, a lot of employment issues arose,” she told From Day One. “We were in different jurisdictions. We had different questions we wanted to answer about ‘How do we do hiring right? How do we handle performance management? How do we maintain a focus on being inclusive? How do we do promotions right?’ There are legal questions, then there are operational and human capital questions.” Kazanjian’s first time leading the people function was at WeWork during the dog days of the pandemic. In February 2022, she returned to Moody’s, where she occupies the chief people officer job today.Jennifer Manchester, the CHRO at Fiserv, is a relatively new arrival to the C-suite, and like Kazanjian, has jumped industries. Manchester first crossed paths with HR at her former employer, the Dow Chemical Co., where she worked in the general counsel’s office on mergers, acquisitions, and other corporate transactions. “I always loved the employment piece and the people side of things the best. That’s where I figured it out: That was really ultimately what I wanted to do.”Manchester moved over to Fiserv in 2015, working closely with HR as a labor attorney, and ascended to the CHRO seat last spring, “I’ve always gravitated toward people issues, trying to solve problems. It’s such a dynamic role.” But about this she was clear: You can’t just pluck any attorney out of the legal department and promote them to the chief position. “You have to have some substantive core expertise in HR or employment. HR is a real science, and I don’t think anyone can just do it.”Deep, Successful Experience in HR Counts TooA background in HR is hardly irrelevant. Among the 10 highest-ranked companies on the Fortune 500, most of their CHROs have spent decades as HR practitioners. Melissa Hagerman, CHRO at insurance firm Genworth, came up through the HR department, and, like many of her peers in the Fortune 500, has worked across industries, including consumer and automotive retail and healthcare. She joined the HR field when it was still known as the personnel department. Being an effective CHRO takes compassion and diplomatic agility, she said. And it can’t be done without a natural curiosity for businesses. “As a CHRO, you have to really genuinely care about what the business is doing and where we’re heading, and you have to care about the people that are on the path to get us there. That is something that I really try to embrace and live by every day.”Hagerman is also a keen scout, continually monitoring what’s going on both inside and outside the organization, “understanding what’s happening politically and socially in the markets so that I can weigh in, whether that’s with our executive team or with our board of directors, or being able to think about how those may impact eventually our workforce.”HR has far more credibility and influence than in the past, Hagerman said, reflecting on her decades in the department. “The world now understands that people resources are really fundamental to the bottom line. Succession planning, development of associates—the focus on those things is far greater now than they ever were. Of course, cybersecurity, protection of data–all of those things–are more in the limelight now than ever.”Yet Your Next CHRO May Not Be Working In HR Right NowA career in HR can win you the seat at the top now, but that may not be true for the next generation of CHROs. Today, businesses seldom want an HR executive who has spent all their time in the department, said Wilson at Heidrick & Struggles. “In the companies we work with, it’s often said that if you can find somebody with a business background who’s either been in management consulting or held either a P&L role or a functional role outside of HR, that’s more interesting to us.”The next crisis is always around the corner, Korn Ferry’s Kaplan told From Day One, and HR has to be there to meet it. He rattled off a list of recent trials, from financial and economic wobbles, political unrest, racial injustice, reproductive rights, return to office, artificial intelligence, and gun crime. “If you are not prepared to put on your dance shoes and figure it out, you can’t do this job. More than academic credentials, intellect, or experience, you have to be able to tap dance.” As a result, people aren’t exactly grappling for the seat, he said. It’s a big job and it’s tough to recruit for. Some people get too close to the sun and opt out; others don’t realize what they’re signing up for before it’s too late.Everyone is looking for agility in the role. Bremen at WTW speculated that consumer-oriented industries–like retail, fast-moving consumer goods, cosmetics, or fashion–may be developing tomorrow’s most coveted CHROs. Tech firms develop great HR talent too because they have to marry operational complexity with consumer demands. Regardless of industry, he believes the most successful future CHROs are schooling themselves in the application of new technologies, particularly artificial intelligence, and have analytical capabilities far superior to their predecessors.In case you were thinking of plucking your next CHRO from the Wharton School, however, Kaplan cast doubt on the wisdom of choosing an MBA for the job simply because they’re a whiz at business. “If someone says to me, ‘I’m not an HR person, I’m a business person,’ that is a sign that I’m wasting time. I’ve never heard a CFO say, ‘I’m not a finance person, I’m a business person.’”Disciplines like finance can be taught in school, Kaplan argued, but HR is learned through apprenticeship. Management consultants who spoke to From Day One predicted that the future chiefs who are coming up through the HR department are leading complex functions at the moment, as heads of talent or directors of compensation and benefits.As today’s CHROs consider their potential successors, what are they looking for? At Moody’s, Kazanjian wants someone who is open-minded, bold, and analytical. She imagines that person might be in law, or they might be in management consulting. Toussaint wants someone who deeply understands the company culture at Xylem as well as how the business makes money, someone who’s good at data analysis, and someone who is a “truth teller,” uncowed by hierarchy. Manchester hopes her Fiserv successor has financial acumen and an always-learning attitude. At Genworth, Hagerman wants a values-driven, business-minded leader with deep knowledge of HR and a knack for diplomacy. Someone who is willing to uphold integrity, “above all else.”“Once upon a time, it was possible to be the most senior HR leader in a company and not have a grounding in the business fundamentals,” Bremen said. “That skillset is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition.” Yet business acumen alone isn’t enough without a deep understanding of the CHRO discipline, though he’s seen it happen. “They struggle. Just as you would struggle if you put someone in a chief marketing officer role who did not have a background in marketing. Sometimes leaders take those HR skills for granted.”Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is a freelance journalist and From Day One contributing editor who writes about work, the job market, and women’s experiences in the workplace. Her work has appeared in the Economist, the BBC, The Washington Post, Quartz, Business Insider, Fast Company, and Digiday’s Worklife.

Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza | September 24, 2024

Election Stress in the Workplace: How Leaders Can Respond Without Taking Sides

Business leaders don’t need outside research to tell them that anxiety around the coming Presidential election is high–and that the stress can impact employee well-being and productivity, but here are some sobering stats:•73% of U.S. adults say they are anxious about the election, according to the results of the 2024 American Psychiatric Association’s annual mental health poll.•55% of Americans surveyed by Pew Research always or often feel angry about politics.•8 of 10 in the Pew survey used a negative word or phrase to describe how they feel about  politics, with “divisive” being the most used.•Nearly two thirds of workers (65%) surveyed this summer by the Society of Human Resource Management (SHRM) said they have experienced or witnessed incivility in their workplace within the past month. And more than a third of workers (34%) said they believe the November election will trigger additional incivility in the workplace.In fact, psychologists and researchers are now studying a distinct form of anxiety called “political anxiety” and the unique way it harms both physical and mental health. The stress has been building since the 2016 election.The good news: executives, HR teams, and managers can—and should—prepare (now) for the November election. With just a few weeks until workers head to the polls, From Day One reached out to HR experts to learn about their strategies to diffuse stress and political polarization in the office, and, if necessary, address conflicts that may arise. Among the takeaways:Encourage Employees to VoteOne simple and non-controversial step companies can take is to promote voting. While there’s no federal mandate that employers give workers the day off to vote, some states do, and many companies provide flexibility on election day. Encouraging workers to vote is a good way to acknowledge what’s on their minds without taking a political position.If you’re curious about what other organizations are doing or need to back up a recommendation to leadership, check out Time to Vote, a non-partisan business group launched in 2018 that believes “workers shouldn’t have to choose between earning a paycheck and voting.” With more than 2,000 member companies including VISA, P&G, and Target, the organization is attempting to bridge the legislative gap and increase voter turnout. Patagonia, one of the companies that founded Time to Vote, has been giving its employees Election Day off since 2016. This year, the outdoor apparel company will close stores, offices, and warehouses on Oct. 29, national Vote Early Day, to allow workers to vote and volunteer in support of the election.Acknowledge Political Differences, But Don’t Take Sides“Some leaders want to take a stance, but I would caution them not to impose their political views. Your job is to stay neutral,” says Deb Josephs, an HR consultant and executive coach. You can take a stand, without taking a side, she adds, “as long as you support the individual as opposed to an issue.” When Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022, for example, one of her HR colleagues said their company put out a statement to let employees know that they could come to HR if they needed support for reproductive health. Large employers like JPMorgan Chase and Meta and others announced they would cover travel costs for employees who are seeking legal abortions out of state.   Keep the Focus on Empathy and Employee Support “Organizations need to say it’s a polarizing time, and that could be impacting how you show up at work,” offers Tracy Avin, Founder of TroopHR, a human resources peer group with more than 1,300 members and 15,000 LinkedIn followers. Avin says the topic of how to address the election has come up often in the TroopHR message boards, so much so that she decided to host a fireside chat called “Leading with Empathy in Polarizing Times” with an outside expert this September. One piece of advice from the virtual session: Develop an "Allyship Series" or similar educational program to foster understanding and empathy for different experiences and perspectives within your organization.She advises HR leaders to do what she does for her members: create a supportive environment where all viewpoints are welcome. “It’s an opportunity for managers to know how to respond. It’s not about opinions,” she said. “You can say something like, ‘It seems like you’ve been upset lately,’ so that person can express that they are stressed out. Then you can tell them to take a day off or provide mental health resources as needed.”Additional outlets for employees might include a moderated Slack channel or an employee resource group (ERG). “What’s most important is that employees know where they can go for support,” says Leonora Wiener, an executive leadership coach and former chief operating officer of Consumer Reports. Communicate Early and OftenAt Consumer Reports, Wiener helped lead teams through the 2016 and 2020 elections, the racial-justice reckoning after George Floyd’s murder, as well as the pandemic. She stresses the importance of listening to employee concerns and actually asking your staff what kind of support they are looking for. “Oftentimes organizations aren’t that good at finding out what their ‘internal customers’ need,” she said, adding to make sure any feedback groups are diverse and include representatives from all generations and backgrounds. In terms of communications, her philosophy is lather, rinse, repeat. “People need to hear the same message many times, and it needs to be said through different channels. Not everyone reads Slack or emails, and not every manager delivers the message in the same way.” Start that election communications drumbeat today, she says.Don’t Go It Alone Josephs echoes that sentiment, recalling how much “over communication” was required during the pandemic and other recent events. She also points out the added pressure and increased responsibility borne by HR and people leaders as social and political issues continue to divide the country and tensions spill over into the workplace. Her tips: find support, leverage your professional networks, and share information with your peers. They are likely also engaged in scenario planning and reviewing their employee handbooks to ensure current policies are being followed.   Revisit and Reinforce Your Corporate Values Speaking of employee handbooks, now is the time—not the day before the election—to take a good look at your organization’s values and what employee behaviors are and are not tolerated. “You want to support employees,” said Wiener, “but you also need to be prepared for [how you will respond to] conflict.” Once you review your employee handbook, it’s important to figure out how the company will act if one of those values is violated. “Leadership needs to decide if they have zero tolerance or if they will put an employee on probation, and they need to be consistent.” Get Input From the Legal Department But Don’t OvercorrectShould you involve legal? Yes, says Wiener. “It’s important to be prepared and understand what you can and cannot do.” Scenario planning, she says, is critical. Ask yourself: How will either election outcome affect my products and services (supply chain, tariffs)? What are the risks and mitigants (for any immigrant workers)? How will employees be impacted (job productivity, mental health)? How might you handle immigration issues, or a harassment claim? But don’t go down a legal rabbit hole. Alison Taylor, a clinical professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business and author of Higher Ground: How Business Can Do the Right Thing in a Turbulent World, weighs in with a word of caution:“The main thing I’m seeing out there is that corporations are overreacting to advice from their legal teams, and dialing back on DEI and ESG because they fear legal retaliation under a Trump presidency,” said Taylor. “But they seem to have forgotten how angry the public and employees were over issues like climate change and racism under the last Trump presidency.” She continued: “A laser focus on legal risk is not a good idea. There needs to be broad scenario planning, certainly caution over sustainability commitments, but also care and restraint about overreacting to rhetoric from either side.”Jenny Sucov is a journalist and editor who focuses on health and well-being. She has worked for companies and publishers including Hinge Health, EverydayHealth.com, Canyon Ranch, Real Simple, and Prevention.(Feature photo by Adamkaz/iStock by Getty Images)

Jenny Sucov | September 23, 2024

Is Talent Acquisition Equipped to Go Up Against the Global Labor Shortage?

For all the concern about AI taking over jobs, an equally pressing question has arisen: Who’ll fill the jobs that still call for human workers? A growing, global talent shortage presents a major threat to businesses across all sectors, countries, and continents. Energy companies don’t have enough green-skilled workers, professional services firms can’t find accountants, and manufacturers are struggling to fill roles on the shop floor.Despite the desperate need for workers, talent acquisition teams report being asked to cut costs and do more with less. Human resources may have moved into the C-suite as a strategic contributor, but not everyone in the department has a seat at the decision-making table. According to new research from the Josh Bersin Co., just 32% of talent acquisition leads feel that they’re strategic contributors to the business. Corporate plans change too quickly, they say, if there is a plan at all, and executives treat workforce planning as an afterthought. Right now, Labor Department statistics show overall job growth slowing more than expected, but employers need to take a long-term view. The problem, HR analyst Josh Bersin told From Day One, is that “workforce planning isn’t a very strategic process. It’s a once-a-year budget exercise. And when there’s a bad quarter, the company looks at the workforce and says, ‘Freeze the headcount over here, freeze the headcount over there.’”For some business leaders, hiring and firing are reflexes, not strategies. The cycle is so predictable that a 2023 story in the Harvard Business Review advised employees to assess their job security by checking their company’s quarterly filings. A bad quarter foreshadows layoffs.Companies can no longer afford to run their recruitment departments like e-commerce warehouses, Bersin argues. And unless leaders start taking it seriously, businesses won’t be able to outrun the talent shortage.Updating Antiquated Talent Acquisition ModelsThere are two types of TA departments, said Bersin: Operational and strategic. The former works like a fulfillment center. A requisition is opened, recruiters source candidates, conduct interviews, present options to managers, and complete the hire. “They’re operationally measured and operationally configured. They look at cost-of-hire, they look at channels and sources, they outsource a lot of stuff, and they design around scale,” Bersin said. The strategic TA team works differently. When someone wants to open a req, they ask questions: Who do you want to hire? What skills should they have? How will they contribute to the business? Is there someone internal who can fill the role? Could the responsibilities of this role be automated?HR analyst Josh Bersin (Photo courtesy of Josh Bersin Co.)If a talent acquisition team isn’t strategic, it’s not necessarily their fault, according to Gina Larson, an HR consultant with more than a decade of experience in HR and talent development. “It’s the direction of the business, the remit that they’re given, and the control that they have” that determines how strategic they can be, she said. “Most companies aren’t set up to invest time and energy into developing more diverse and non-traditional hires that would bring the company into the future.”When Bersin’s company surveyed business leaders about their views of TA, 55% of the respondents said they see the function as an integral part of the organization, but it appears they haven’t learned to treat it that way, and they continue to set the wrong expectations. Old habits die hard, it seems.If executives think recruiters are order-takers, then that’s what they’ll be, Larson said. “We all report to someone. Short-term results typically get the rewards. If you’re struggling for a while and you say, ‘Just trust me, we have long-term results coming,’ it’s hard. Everyone has a stakeholder, and I think there is the pressure of short-term results.”Operational teams are a vestige of an outdated philosophy that equates headcount with revenue, one that prioritizes cost-to-hire and time-to-hire above all else, Bersin said. Companies that run operational TA teams are typically ones that put the business–and its workers–at the mercy of market swings. “The financial pressures on companies these days are so quarterly-based,” Bersin said. “I think CEOs and CFOs have to deal with this very short-term mentality in their investor base. A lot of companies over-hire and then lay people off, and then over-hire and lay people off. What I call ‘enduring companies’ don’t think that way. They ignore those signals and think about long-term, sustainable growth.” When Bersin’s company asked TA leaders to identify the biggest barriers to becoming a strategic business partner, 36% said that shifting business priorities is obstacle No. 1.Talent Acquisition and the Future of BusinessIt seems that no industry is safe from the skills shortage. In the energy sector, imperatives to develop next-generation technologies mean companies need workers with green-energy skills, but seven in every eight workers globally have no green skills to speak of, according to research from LinkedIn. In 2023 the World Economic Forum declared the talent shortage “the next energy crisis.”Companies ranging from auto parts retailers to biotech companies blame financial-reporting problems on the lack of accountants, a shortage so severe that industry-regulating bodies are considering cutting certification requirements for the role. Meanwhile, consulting firm Korn Ferry estimates that the media and telecoms industry is on track to “hit a wall” with a shortage of 4.3 million workers by 2030, and manufacturing is forecasted to have 2.1 million empty jobs by then.Korn Ferry projects that, globally, the shortage of skilled workers will result in more than 85 million empty jobs by the end of the decade. Fifty-seven percent of respondents to the Bersin Co. survey said that it’s the skills shortage that will present the biggest challenge to the TA field in the next 12 months. Some companies are thinking strategically, however. Talent intelligence, as it’s situated in HR, is an increasingly influential discipline, Bersin said. That’s typically led by a data-wielding analyst who advises HR on where to look for the best candidates, what cities they live in, and which schools they graduate from, even the companies they work for. Some companies, like Aon, have invested in apprenticeship programs that train unskilled workers into highly skilled ones. PwC is trying to influence college curriculums to create more accountants. Talent acquisition just can’t afford to work on the sidelines, said Kumud Sharma, chief people officer at financial advisory firm Betterment. Her recruiters work cross-functionally, getting to know all parts of the business. Otherwise, how will they show candidates what the company can offer them?Sharma remembers when talent acquisition was its own entity outside of HR–working like a restaurant window. A hiring manager filled out a form requesting one engineer, and recruiting served up one engineer. But that doesn’t work anymore–because we know better, she said. “We’re not thinking of people as widgets anymore. We’re not thinking of people as products. We’re thinking of people as people now.” It’s this change in thinking that has changed the HR profession altogether.“For 30 years or so, we have been saying that people are the assets of the organization. Who’s bringing those assets in? Those assets are coming through talent acquisition,” said Sharma. “How can that not be a strategic function?”Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is a freelance journalist and From Day One contributing editor who writes about work, the job market, and women’s experiences in the workplace. Her work has appeared in the Economist, the BBC, The Washington Post, Quartz, and Fast Company.(Featured photo by Izusek/iStock by Getty Images)

Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza | August 19, 2024