From Booz Allen’s strategy+business (and via recruiting.com) comes this article on “Rethinking the value of talent.” It’s a great article, but it’s a little boring, so I’m going to illustrate the point by telling a story that expounds on one in the article.

The tale of Barry and Leverne: Colliding Canapés
By Max Goldman

Barry and Leverne work together at Creative Canapés Internationale. There, they each craft delectable, treats that are a lot like hors d’oeuvres. They would call them hors d’oeuvres, but they found that because “canapés” sounds less familiar and more European, people pay more.

Anyway, the company, located in Mechanicsville, Virginia and run by one Colin Craftsbury (a gentle, witty sort of British fellow who moved to the US to be closer to his college sweetheart though sadly that didn’t work out as she was married by the time he got himself across the Atlantic), is doing fantastically well.  Their small, innovative crispy food is fit is for royalty and often delivered to people who consider themselves as such. They are widely regarded as the best premium-European-small-party-food company for miles around.

(more…)

The 2006 talent management survey, conducted by IHRIM and Knowledge Infusion, found that 77% of the HR professionals think that talent management will only increase in importance over the next three years.

Some of the factors, according to Jason Averbrook of Knowledge Infusion, are “the looming talent shortage, the increased focus on redeploying internal employees rather than recruiting and the realization that organizations must link training, knowledge and performance.”

The most interesting piece, I thought, was this quote from Averbrook: “Many organizations roll out a performance management system or workforce analytics system and simply just put it out there. They don’t do a good job of making sure that people know why these systems are implemented, show people the value of the systems, etc. So if organizations don’t market these systems to their employees, the employees will just think of them as another online tool and won’t actually use them to their full advantage.”

Employees can themselves get real benefits from performance management initiatives. And there’s far more to it than just making reviews easier. ( I refer you to a previous post on the topic.) But making those benefits clear to employees and explaining why usage of the system will help THEM is an important part of a successful deployment and not to be overlooked.

How many HR related blogs would you guess there are? 21? 77?132? I figured 100 at the most. Apparently I need to get out more  – Michael Specht has a sortable, dynamic list of almost 350 HR blogs. A great resource if you’re new to the blogosphere – or if you’re just a little too wrapped up in your own world – like me.