Zachary Misko: A rare blend of competence and courtesy in the HR industry

By Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

I do not attend too many tradeshows and conferences per year... Among the ones I like is the HRO Today Forum that takes place annually in May. They also hold annual in events in APAC (Spring) and Europe (November).  The person who lured me into checking it out was Zachary Misko, Vice President and Global Executive Director at SharedXpertise. Zachary's soft-spoken and kind manners are extremely effective. No overselling. No claim that, as a vendor, I "should" be there. No injunction of any sort. He didn't need to: the simple fact that Zachary had joined that organization made it interesting to me.

Sharing expertise...

That's what Zachary Misko is deeply and sincerely about. This was the mission of the original media group founded in 2006 by Elliot Clark. Zachary is not stepping in just after a few years of experience: he was a practitioner for twelve years in various organizations and a provider of services for another thirteen years at KellyOCG, where his latest position was to their Global Vice President for Workforce Strategy.  He also served on the Board of Advisors and various committees for HRO Today Association for 8 years, prior to joining.  He is also the author, with Todd Wheatland, of The New Rules of Recruiting, an excellent short book published in 2013, on which I reported in this blog. In short, Zachary has a right to claim "responsibility for the thought leadership, best practice sharing or management of the association."

The Association

HRO Today offers a wide spectrum of services destined to a very large number of HR decision makers through its magazines, research studies, newsletters, events, and its famous HRO Today’s Baker’s Dozen Rankings. In my latest conversation with Zachary, we focused more on the great progress accomplished over the last year or so with the Association.

"It's all about the art of fostering conversation," Zachary says. "For this, we needed to strengthen our brand recognition, welcome advisors and practitioners from across the globe. We have built a powerful product and we have great content. We have "Thought Leadership Counsels" (that we call TLC's) and that's the opportunity to engage in best practice sharing and learning with our members on an on-going basis. We use that platform monthly for North America and Europe, the second week of each month, and address four different topics: talent acquisition, talent management, employee relations and services and outsourcing. My focus is to continue to improve that product and attract more professionals to engage. Today in the association has 3,000 members and 80% are practitioners. The Association has helped me to steer new content for both the magazine and well as for our events." The APAC region also meets twice monthly to discuss similar topics.

Events

Zachary is definitely in his own element there too. His exquisite interface, his ability to listen and his understated moxie are a delight for all the attendees. You can see that he loves every minute and every aspect of his job. He enjoys the feeling of being kind of backstage while operating as an “MC” and major enactor in the inner sanctums of the HR show.

The event I know best is their North America event, held the past two years in Philadelphia – and it's really good. Of course as in most HR events, we hear about "success stories" whose content displays all the buzzword of the day, but you have much more and much better: Elliot Clark's deep attachment to Philly and the unshakled humor of a consummate professional, awards for people who make meaning in their communities, such as, this year, Candace Osunsade, the V.P. of Human Resources of  National Aquarium, Kawel LauBach, the CHRO of the Mohegan Tribal Gaming Authority, or authentic narrations from hands-on practitioners who are not necessarily on the big talk circuit such as Kathleen Edge, the EVP of Human Resources of Southwire Company. This conference also offers the absolute best as far as relevant information is concerned thanks to the Wharton School Track, with amazing contributions by my friend Peter Cappelli whose fact-based perspectives should inspire any serious HR who loves her job, or such unbeatable session on Games and Gamification in HR delivered by Ethan Mollick . The 2016 North America HRO Today Forum will take to the windy city on May 2-4, 2016 in Chicago. This years European HRO Today Forum takes place November 10-12, 2015 in Amsterdam and ... there is still time to nominate HR professionals, providers and team excellence for the HRO Today EU Awards Gala.

The HRO Today Association continues to gain momentum, with solid membership growth, combined with learning opportunities, best practice sharing and networking.  The Association is excited to begin offering recertification credits in fourth quarter this year.  With a good group of HR Executives on the Board of Advisors and Zachary at the helm, they have a leadership team for success.

Zachary is only at the beginning of a long journey in our complex space, where people want to hear about change, yet can't only absorb it in homeopathic doses, where leadership is everybody's dream, yet micromanagement is everybody's obsession, and where pulse conversations should never give you a heart attack. But Zachary has what it takes to handle our metastable world, grey matter and emotional intelligence.

TalentCircles is the most comprehensive candidate engagement platform on the market. Take a product tour or request a live demo today. 

Eye-opening new book by Peter Cappelli: Will College Pay Off?

By Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

Students in the United States pay about four times more than their peers in the rest of world. So it’s no wonder there are endless conversations about whether earning a college degree is worth the expense.  Dozens of entrepreneurs will tell you to forget about college — although they were lucky to be born into highly educated environments and often trained in the best universities, and dozens of dropouts who made it through backbreaking work do insist that their kids experience college.

Peter Cappelli's book, Will College Pay Off?: A Guide to the Most Important Financial Decision You'll Ever Make, takes the heat out of the debate and ultimately answers this question "it depends." This non-dogmatic stand is actually courageous when everybody wants certitudes and validations. Peter's mission is to tender pointers and landmarks in maze of research data, assumptions, biases and even misinformation: "What prompted me to write this book was the unqualified statements about the big payoff to a college degree," Peter says. “While there are lots of guides to tell us whether a particular school suits the temperament of our child, there is almost nothing that helps us decide whether a college experience will lead to financial ruin. That is what I try to offer here: a guide to the factors that determine whether a particular program will pay off."  

This book is complex. Here are some of the critical topics debated in the book.

Is there some shortfall of science, technology, engineering, and math or STEM graduates?

There may be more jobs in STEM, but are all students good or interested in them? On top of this, "the argument that the history major would be better off learning practical material that is useful in a first job is highly debatable, especially if we are concerned about the experience of that individual after his or her first job." Think of it this way: would Peter Thiel have been more successful had he not graduated with a B.A. in Philosophy from Stanford and not met his inspiring professor, René Girard?

Do college students major in the fields where jobs are?

The job market makes prior work experience rather than education a key factor and, as a result, a number of colleges shape the degrees they offer after industries' needs. Yet how reasonable is it to lock students into narrow practical degrees, especially when market needs change? How effective have economists and employers been at anticipating demand? What happens if too many people graduate in petroleum engineering just because it's hot at a given time? "Employers who say that right now they want students with degrees in [a given] field aren’t promising to hire students who go into those fields when they graduate." The reality is simple: It is " basic supply and demand. Education pays off when it is in demand and doesn’t when it isn’t in demand. It pays off when it is scarce and doesn’t when it is common."

How important is a College student's first job?

It is for students who have to pay off a debt. However, does a first job define a career? What happens if people are laid off? How easy will it be for them to find a new position? While it's true that, today "hiring for skills is what is changing the relationship between college and the workplace," students with a vocational degrees that is no more in demand don't have a leg up in the job market. Instead, they may be at a disadvantage.  "Getting a good job right out of college is very important, but if those jobs don’t last, the degree may not have bought you much."

Do jobs today require more education than in the past?

Nothing is less certain. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the majority of jobs created between 2012 and 2022 will require a high school degree or less, not a bachelor’s degree. As a result, already today "about one-third of U.S. workers are overeducated for their jobs or, put another way, underemployed, and they earn about half what their peers are paid for jobs that require the degree they have." So by expecting too much, employers may create a costly volatility risk in their own workforce as a recent Deloitte report stated: "regardless of gender or geography, only 28 percent of Millennials feel that their current organizations are making ‘full use’ of the skills they currently have to offer." Do the math... 72 percent of them are ready to see if the grass is greener elsewhere! That's even more pathetic when "both the human capital and the screening advocates have difficulty in explaining why college educations seem to matter so much after the first job," and when the overall correlation between grades and job performance is virtually nonexistent.

Is it easier to find a job as a college grad? How big is the college wage premium?

Outside of a few specific fields, college degrees don't guarantee a good career any longer. College grads have difficulties in finding jobs of any kind, not just good jobs. For example, in China, the unemployment rate of recent college graduates is very high. As a rule however, the US employment market has "by far the best outcomes for college graduates as compared to their high graduate peers come in finding a job. The unemployment rate for the average college graduate with a bachelor’s degree has been about half the rate for the average worker with only a high school diploma in recent decades." College students have also had a wage premium at least since the 1981 recession — the third section of the book shows that in the sixties the gap very small. So the reason to go to college may not be because college attendance intrinsically pays off, but because of what is in store if you do not go.

Does the current gap mean that the investment in college education pays off?

If the premium is up and stays up, maybe... But it seems that raw financial analysis shows that the return from attending many colleges is negative. Pinning down what determines that payoff is a complex task with no definitive response if the value is only defined in financial terms. Also, results vary depending of the colleges. who, themselves struggle to provide prospective students with real data or base their marketing pitch on limited statistics. So who will end up defining this value? Maybe employers. "One company that takes sorting out the value of different colleges seriously is India-based Tata," notes Peter Cappelli. "It has turned this analytic approach into an art form by assessing all its new college hires on the basis of the school where they graduated, considering their job performance, how long they stay with Tata, and also how much the company had to pay to hire them. As a result, the company targets its recruiting at schools that provide the biggest bang for the buck. Some of the elite U.S. business schools didn’t make the cut, even though their graduates were great employees, because those graduates didn’t stay very long and were quite expensive to hire."

What's the takeaway?

No matter what, getting a good job out of college is a challenge because of the changes in our society and employment landscape, which Peter Cappelli also addressed in a fascinating previous book from 2012, Why Good People Can't Get Jobs: The Skills Gap and What Companies Can Do About It. The problem starts with the fact that most employers have dropped training programs and "what they want from college graduates now is the same thing they want from applicants who have been out of school for years."

—     Does it mean that our education system is a problem? No— except for the costs, actual data do not support such blame: "We’ve been in roughly the same place for some time. Our students are not doing worse, and there is no evidence from the comparative data that U.S. schools are failing." Could the US government do better helping public colleges? Definitely yes.

—     Does it mean that colleges should only focus on practical education? No — vocational education can be a terrible dead end. Parents and students have a complex due diligence to perform in a tough supply and demand market and should try to delay choosing a major until the last minute.

This book is by no means an indictment of college education: it simply implores parents and students carefully to analyze their rationale before getting into heavy debt and to take with a pinch of salt the sometimes deceptive claims of some of the for-profit colleges.

The book only focuses on an alleged equation between college education and a better job. It doesn't question the value of receiving a college education and its long-term human and existential meaning. If anything, the underlying message is that it's not efficient for colleges to try to replicate the workplace on their own campus... and that they should instead focus on what they do best. The ultimate message of Peter Cappelli is clear: "Maybe the appropriate alternative is to let college do what it is good at, which is educating rather than training, focusing on knowledge and life skills rather than job skills, and to find connections into the job market through other paths."

The book invites employers and colleges to think more carefully about their strategy:

—     Employers: Has their strategy of hiring for skills just after college actually paid off? So far, it hasn't. The cost of failed hires and bad hires hasn’t dropped. Employers' processes have been the same for almost three decades. So maybe it's time for them to look into these processes, and the burden may not be on colleges in this area.

—     Colleges: Colleges are hard-pressed to provide cogs in the corporate machinery with uncertain guarantee of return for students. With employers not showing better results in their human capital build-up, why should colleges cave in? Why don't colleges try to educate the market and affirm the power of education? Maybe colleges should do a better job at promoting students and alumni, which means radically revising antiquated campus recruiting products and procedures, beefing up their career services offices in order to offer a modern access to their gigantic talent pools to employers (instead of letting their students spends up to 20 to 30 hours a week looking for employers...).

Marylene Delbourg-Delphis is the CEO, co-founder of TalentCircles, the most comprehensive candidate engagement platform on the market. Take a product tour or request a live demo today. 

What about the discrimination against young people?

By Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

The DirectEmployers Association conference (DEAM14) last week was just amazing, attracting the right attention on new regulations to improve the employment of veterans as well as people with disabilities — this is summarized by the OFCCP news release last August. Yet, there is something just as bad happening right now, The Plummeting Labor Market Fortunes of Teens and Young Adults, as described by a report from the Brookings/ Brookings/Metropolitan Policy Program.

The takeaway is this: "Employment prospects for teens and young adults in the nation’s 100 largest metropolitan areas plummeted between 2000 and 2011."

Key findings

The report segments its findings into two major age categories: teens aged 16-19 and Young adults aged 20-24

• For teens aged 16-19: Employment rates declined drastically, from 44 percent in 2000 to 24 percent in 2011.
• For young adults aged 20-24: The employment rate among young adults fell from 72 percent in 2000 to 60 percent in 2011.

The problem affects all young people and the report provides multiple graphs on the effect of education, previous employment and sometimes, geographic differences. If you are a teen, it's better to live in Utah than in Silicon Valley. This is also true if you are an educated young adult even if the contrast is not so big.

Traditional divides — or call them discriminatory factors — are still very much in place. Regardless of the criteria and the models, non-Hispanic whites have a better chance of getting a job. One of the models for young adults shows how age, race/ethnicity, marital status, and education are in play for males and females. While being older was associated with increased employment chances for both genders, race/ethnicity play differently for males and females:

• Being African/American was associated with reduced employment among men, but not women;
• Being Asian was associated with reduced employment among both men and women;
• Being Hispanic was associated with increased employment among men but not women;
• And... marital status has an impact! It is positively associated with employment for men and negatively associated for women. Read: employers are wary about employing young women who could become pregnant.

The report lists important measures and initiatives designed to reduce youth joblessness and labor force underutilization, incorporate work-based learning into education, adjust to regional labor market needs, and encourage employers to facilitate the transition of young people into the labor market.

This survey should be a wake-up call to just anybody who has children or simply cares about young people as well as diversity in the workplace. The solutions are compelling and most of the organizations named in the report are doing an amazing job attracting the attention of a fundamental problem: where can a country go when so much of its youth is unemployed or underemployed?

Open questions

The underlying assumption of the report is that youth unemployment and underemployment are primarily caused by a discrepancy between available skills and the needs of the labor market. This may be true to some extent, but not entirely.

Is it really all about our current education system? Do we have data showing that people who were 20 in 1970, in 1980, in 1990 or in 2000 were better prepared and was more employable? These are questions for researchers such as Peter Cappelli. I suggest that you read Why Good People Can't Get Jobs: The Skills Gap and What Companies Can Do About It , which I discussed in an earlier post or Why Employers Aren't Filling Their Open Jobs, recently published by the Harvard Business Review: "Jobs have not changed over the last couple of years in any way that changed skill requirements substantially. The “failing schools” notion, even if it was true, couldn’t explain the continued unemployment of the majority of job seekers, who graduated years ago and had jobs just before the recession," Cappelli notes.

Do recruiting budget cuts make it more difficult to spot the right skills? It's unclear. I agree with Peter Cappelli that unemployment/underemployment may "come from the ways in which contemporary practices have made hiring more difficult," and that a higher scrutiny on profit-and-loss and "cost-cutting took out recruiters." Yet, the latter should also be further investigated. The Talent Management market continues to grow at an impressive rate. So if more money is spent, is it spent efficiently? What if the systems and methodologies that have controlled the recruiting industry for the last 25 years were showing their inability to identify modern days talent?

My personal take on the discrimination against young people

We all look for the "right" skills. Yet, what exactly are these right skills? People who have existing skills or people with a potential to do a good job? If the right skills are out there, are we even able to capture them?

Trying to evaluate and manage 20 year-old candidates using 20 year-old or even a 10-year transactional systems may be a huge problem. Look at it this way: it's like prospecting the world with a 28.8k Modem in 1994 or a 56k Modem in 2000. So traditional approaches may work for 22 year-old candidates with a boilerplate education for boilerplate job requisitions and boilerplate skills that are themselves defined via the prism of these transactional systems filtering out candidates... Yet, can such hiring practices capture new behaviors derived from a decade-old social world and be fair to the new generation? Probably not. The entire process might discriminate against young people, a trend that's likely to worsen if it's true, as Cathy N. Davidson, a professor at Duke University, claims, that "65 percent of children entering grade school this year [2012] will end up working in careers that haven’t even been invented yet."

Today youth unemployment may cost $25 billion annually in net losses to federal and state governments according to the Young Invincibles. This does not include the image and opportunity costs for corporations who ignore these young people... Companies reluctant to take a chance on people young people and eventually spend money training them could reconsider their position after examining the costs of all their recent bad hires (often people whom they believed had the right skills and "good resumes). The problem affects seven in ten businesses and costs U.S. businesses an estimated $300 billion in 2009. Remember, even Tony Hsieh, the CEO of a notoriously great company, said in 2010 that his own bad hires had cost Zappos "well over $100 million." Doesn't this mean that the way to evaluate skills is a real problem? So why not change?

Chances are that hiring young people and training them may be a better economic bet than only looking at "vetted" people, provided of course, that you use a recruiting methodology and infrastructure that enable you to connect and engage with them!

Why Good People Can't Get Jobs: The Skills Gap and What Companies Can Do About It

By Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

A refreshing short book by Peter Cappelli, Director of Wharton's Center for Human Resources! This is a must read for any HR Professional, of course, but even more for anyone who is in a management position and has the power, or simply the will, to put an end the current "crippling employer-employee standoff." The purpose of Peter Cappelli's book is to get "America's job engine revved up again."

We are all familiar with the litany of complaints: Companies can't find skilled workers, schools are not providing the right kind of training, the government doesn't let in enough highly skilled immigrants, prospective employees don't want jobs at the wages that are offered, etc. If perception and scattered research might give some weight to such complaints, Cappelli demonstrates that they don't add up when looked at holistically, and that they come across as urban myths.

Are we a nation of un-qualified people? In a market with a lot of job applicants, companies tend to look for purple squirrels or unicorns. Are job seekers unqualified for not fitting a paranormal job description? Does it allow us to jump to the conclusion that "there is a skills gap" when the hardest-to-fill jobs appear to be those that often require the least skills? In reality, lots of job seekers are overqualified: "When applicants far outnumber job openings, the overqualified bump out those only adequately qualified... And the proportion of overqualified has more than doubled over the past generation." Cappelli sees very little evidence of an actual supply problem and asks a valid question: Isn't it a paradox that the US would rank seven among 39 countries (survey performed by Manpower in 2011) in terms of employers' complaints about an inability to fill jobs, while in China, the new global rising power, these complaints are half as frequent? Does China have a larger pull of "qualified" people?  No — simply millions learn on the job and do so very quickly, just as generations of Americans have. In the end, the analysis shows that skills aren't the issue, but market-determined wages are...

Are your kids less intelligent that you were at their age? Nobody wants to believe this, but businesses are quick to assume that today's workforce is more flawed than 20 years ago. There is no evidence to support this "good old days bias" either. Cappelli indicates that US student performance has actually improved over the past decades. In addition, studies by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation (OCDE) do not show any absolute decline in US scores. Emerging countries are simply catching up — and they do not belittle their workforce nearly as much as we do. Another great point: the history of Russia "reminds us that an economy's success is not related to education in any simple fashion."

So what's wrong? Job seekers and employers talk at cross purposes. Is it reasonable to expect job seekers to have done the work before because companies don't want to train people? While it's certainly valid to fear that a newly trained employee might go to the competition, it's equally logical to wonder why a newly trained employee would leave... Maybe this was not the right hire in the first place... Maybe the very culture or a non-existent culture of the company is the problem. Is it reasonable to assume that filling a job vacancy is akin to replacing a part in a washing machine — what Peter Cappelli calls the "Home Depot Syndrome" — and assume that people are mere cogs in the industrial machine? This may not be the safest angle to increase a company's productivity or creativity, or to even motivate people to join a company.

Cappelli mentions two major problems: The first one is the automated software used to filter job seekers — it allegedly complies with the mandate of equal treatment of all candidates, yet ends up generating pervasive unfairness: people can't find jobs even though there are millions of open positions. How long will the legal requirements be an excuse for using antiquated software? The second one is the loss of power of the HR function: "Not coincidentally, the United States has the weakest human resources in the industrialized world." The ultimate call is certainly to re-empower human resources, and re-empower recruiters —give them a strategic role. Brain drain is the death of companies, and so is brain blindness: "Millions of unfilled jobs are costing the economy billions of dollars in lost business," reminds Cappelli.

This little book is a powerful eye-opener. As I was reading through it, it seemed to me that what is initially presented as a sort of standoff between job seekers and employers may not be that willingly created by employers, and may raise a broader question about the ability for established companies to realize that economic survival in a global economy is more about building and nurturing talent and less about "filling" positions. The vast majority of the people who look for the perfect match today would not be hired in their own company. They benefited from a system when trust in people and intra-entrepreneurship mattered, which is the deep history of this country: the US started the modern industrial revolution thanks to millions of "unqualified" people — and Cornelius Vanderbilt left school when he was 11.