Talent Edge Weekly - Issue #212

Filling competitive roles without surpassing pay guidelines, using GenAI to support scenario planning, Verizon's succession planning, neurodiverse talent, and the fractional CHRO.

Author

Brian Heger
December 03, 2023

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Guide to Dynamic Scenario Planning

Having a comprehensive scenario planning strategy helps safeguard your organization against uncertain circumstances and allows you to plan for a successful future. This guide will provide you with step-by-step guidance on how to build a scenario planning strategy and best practices for anticipating changes in the future.

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THIS WEEK'S CONTENT

Here’s a glance at this week’s content. A deep dive is in the section that follows.

Also, check out the 2023 job cuts tracker & Chief HR Officer hire of the week.

Let’s dive in.

THIS WEEK'S EDGE 

Figure 2

In a competitive job market, offering higher salaries is a common strategy to attract top talent, particularly for critical positions. However, this practice may result in disparities in pay equity between new recruits and existing employees and could swiftly exhaust compensation budgets. This challenge intensifies when hiring managers aim to exceed the organization’s pay guidelines, often due to urgent role vacancies and pressure to fill them quickly. This article explores approaches for hiring managers to fill competitive roles without surpassing pay guidelines. It emphasizes utilizing a wider spectrum of benefits beyond just increased salaries, such as emphasizing work-life balance, career progression, and flexibility. According to Figure 2, more than half of surveyed job candidates prioritize non-monetary aspects of the employee value proposition (EVP) over a 10% pay increase, presenting an opportunity for managers to use these EVP attributes as part of a compelling job offer. Another tactic discussed is how recruiting leaders in one organization proactively work with total rewards leaders and HR business partners to identify “hot jobs.” This list of jobs is vetted with business leaders for accuracy, and then they proactively prioritize the retention and attraction of those critical roles. As organizations continue to identify and plan for their critical positions, I am sharing my editable critical role identification template, offering an example of how organizations might identify such roles.

The recent 28-page report by BCG and WFPMA, focusing on 32 HR and people management practices, highlights strategic workforce planning (SWP) as the second most 'urgent' practice— representing a significant gap between the practice’s importance and organizations' capability to implement it effectively. One contributing factor to this gap is the increasing necessity for organizations to integrate scenario planning (SP) into their workforce planning. SP helps organizations envision, describe, and plan for potential alternative futures, yet its complexity has risen due to multiple influential factors and heightened uncertainty in business scenarios. In this new HBR article, the authors propose leveraging GenAI to support three stages of SP: 1) Scenario Creation—rapidly process vast sets of internal business data, global news sources, political developments, industry reports, think tank studies, etc., to assist strategists in comprehensively framing the overall planning exercise. 2) Narrative Exploration—crafting detailed narratives to describe scenarios, including their key challenges, concerns, and limitations. 3) Strategy Generation— utilizing GenAI to propose tailored strategies and actions addressing specific scenario challenges. As noted in the article, “while human judgment remains essential in contingency planning, generative AI allows organizations to generate and consider far more scenarios and strategic factors than people, on their own, could.” As such, it can serve as an effective tool for scenario-based workforce planning.

(Left) Christina Schelling, Verizon's SVP and Chief Talent and Diversity Officer.

On November 13 and 14, 2023, the WEC— a council of human resource executives assembled by CNBC—hosted its WEC Summit event in New York. One session featured a 20-minute discussion involving Christina Schelling, Verizon's SVP and Chief Talent and Diversity Officer, focusing on Verizon's strategic use of data science and talent intelligence over the past 12 months to revamp succession planning and executive development for its top 300 VP+ level executives. A few points from the discussion: 1) Movement in top roles. In the past year, 7 out of 9 of the direct reports to the CEO have changed positions due to retirements, rotations, promotions, and external hires for critical capabilities. 2) Reevaluation of succession plans. Movement within executive roles indicated that it was time to replenish the succession pool and determine whether the internal candidates on succession slates were viable candidates (e.g., would we really put this person in the role if the position became open?). 3) Expanding the succession pool: a) consider external candidates from other industries to bring in new capabilities (e.g., telecom isn’t known for great customer service, so consider talent in other industries and organizations known for high customer service levels, such as The Ritz-Carlton); b) Drop unnecessary qualifications in selection criteria (e.g., 90% of Verizon jobs now do not require an academic degree). Other ideas are discussed on how Verizon partnered with an external provider to use data-based talent intelligence to achieve these and other goals.

This article addresses an under-discussed facet of diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB) — neurodiversity. Neurodivergent individuals, whose brain functions differ from the neurotypical, encompass conditions such as dyslexia, ADHD, dyscalculia, and autism spectrum disorders, to name a few. The article explores the intersection of the labor market shortage and the high unemployment rates among neurodivergent individuals—highlighting how an estimated 30% to 40% of neurodivergent adults are currently unemployed. The authors note that: “Harnessing the potential of neurodivergent individuals could help employers build a more future-ready workforce. Creativity, lateral (or nonlinear) thinking, reverse engineering to solve problems, complex visual-spatial skills, systems thinking, intuitive insights, hyperfocus, and multisensory pattern recognition — distinct areas in which neurodivergent candidates might excel — all stand to become increasingly important as artificial intelligence embeds itself into our daily lives. The authors suggest that community colleges could be pivotal in bridging this gap, as a significant number of neurodivergent individuals start their higher education journey there. Collaboration between community colleges, employers, and local economic development organizations is proposed to create neurodiversity-friendly pathways to employment. As a bonus, this Deloitte Insights article shares ideas for building a neuro-inclusive workplace. This additional Gartner article provides six ideas to increase development inclusion for neurodivergent employees.

This article highlights the value of fractional CHROs (Chief HR Officers) or Chief People Officers in driving organizational success, especially for start-ups and firms seeking efficient and strategic HR leadership. While there are various definitions of a fractional CHRO, one common description is someone with broad and deep HR knowledge and experience to support organizations that need help with the HR function on a part-time, project-by-project, or in an interim consulting capacity. Among the various reasons why a fractional CHRO might be beneficial to organizations are: they can come in to set up the right foundation for start-ups, develop the internal HR team to work at a higher level, and develop and optimize the right HR operating model. Regarding HR operating models, I am resharing my PDF, which includes five curated resources for Chief HR Officers to consider as they make decisions about their HR operating model. The PDF includes a description of each resource and links to the source document. It helps to answer questions such as: How are organizations structuring their HR operating models? What factors influence the choice of the HR operating model? How can one ensure an HR model is fit for purpose? How can HR operate as an integrated function? What are effective ways to communicate an HR operating model? In addition, here is my one-page PDF that includes 18 questions that might help CHROs think through different aspects of talent management for their organizations.

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MOST POPULAR FROM LAST WEEK

Shares Booz Allen's experience in launching an internal talent marketplace, including key lessons learned during the first year of the project. You can also check out my post on LinkedIn about this resource.

2023 JOB CUTS AND LAYOFF TRACKER

Partial view of the tracker

Here is my tracker, which includes announcements from a segment of organizations that have conducted job cuts and layoffs since the start of 2023.

A few firms that announced job cuts this past week include:

  • Broadcom Inc. (NASDAQ: AVG). The chipmaker announced that it will lay off over 1,200 tech workers in Silicon Valley following the $69B VMware acquisition. The initial separations are slated to take place on Jan. 26.

  • Textron (NYSE: TXT). The Providence, R.I.-based industrial manufacturing company says it will reduce its workforce by about 725 positions (or 2%) in the face of weaker demand in its Industrial segment.

  • VF Corp. (NYSE: VFC). The global apparel and footwear company has laid off 500 salaried employees across the company. The job cuts come weeks after an activist investor demanded the conglomerate slash $300 million in expenses.

Click here to access all listed announcements from 2023.

CHIEF HR OFFICER HIRE OF THE WEEK

Shoals Technologies Group (PORTLAND, TENNESSEE) [NASDAQ: SHLS]—a leading provider of Electrical Balance of Systems (EBOS) solar, energy storage, and eMobility solutions— has named James Hart as Chief People Officer. James joins Shoals from Cardlytics (NASDAQ: CDLX), where he served as Vice President, People, leading the people and culture function for the organization.

James Hart

  • If you want access to +3000 (and growing) detailed announcements of CHROs hired, promoted, and resigning, join CHROs on the Go—a digital platform that offers a 3-month and annual subscription. It’s a one-stop shop for CHRO announcements.

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FROM X (FORMERLY TWITTER)

TALENT EDGE WEEKLY REWIND

Talent acquisition (TA) professionals continue to source talent from untapped talent pools to uncover “hidden” top talent. One overlooked talent pool is former employees—often called boomerang employees—who have the skills their former organization values and a desire to return to their previous employer. With many TA practitioners relying increasingly on data to inform their strategies and tactics, this paper provides data-based insights for rehiring former employees.

THE BEST OF NOVEMBER

Did you miss the “Best of November” issue of Talent Edge Weekly? If so, check out issue #211, which includes 16 of the most popular resources from November. 

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​brianheger.com provides free access to +1,000 curated articles, research reports, podcasts, and more that help practitioners drive better business results through strategic human resources and talent management.

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​Talent Edge Weekly is a free weekly newsletter that brings together the best talent and strategic human resources insights from various sources. It is published every Sunday at 6 PM EST.

Talent Edge Weekly is written by Brian Heger, an internal human resources practitioner with a Fortune 150 organization. Brian holds responsibilities for Strategic Talent and Workforce Planning. You can connect with Brian on Linkedin, Twitter, and brianheger.com