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Holiday greetings from David Leigh
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First of all, I wish you the very best this holiday season and wanted to thank you for your continued support of SHL. As you may know, SHL and PreVisor merged in January to become the global leader in People Intelligence solutions. The merger has vastly expanded our product offerings and we are thrilled to have made available to our customers over 1,000 different assessment titles for use throughout the employee life cycle.
2011 was truly a year of coming together. Beyond the expanded solution offerings, clients now have access to everything from rich thought leadership documents like the Global Assessments Trends Report, to our first LINK client conferences this year under the SHL brand in both the United States and in the United Kingdom - with LINK events scheduled in South Africa and Australia next year.
And the innovation did not slow down in 2011, with a bevy of new assessment simulations released as well as the soft launch of SHL’s Talent Analytics capability at HR Tech this past October, which promises to provide the answers to the critical workforce questions that organizations require.
We are so very grateful for your continued support and we look forward to providing you with the quality and service levels you expect from SHL in 2012 and beyond.
I wish you the very best for the holiday season and a happy and successful 2012.
David Leigh
Chief Executive Officer, SHL
Guest column: how HR enables growth
While every organization is at a different point on the talent management maturity curve, I appreciate the constant pressure to achieve objectives and to correlate efforts with measurable output. After years of cutting costs, businesses are focused on revenue growth and productivity...
While every organization is at a different point on the talent management maturity curve, I appreciate the constant pressure to achieve objectives and to correlate efforts with measurable output.
After years of cutting costs, businesses are focused on revenue growth and productivity. Yet HR is often not correlated to strategic growth so HR must enable business leaders to accomplish their goals by equipping them to better manage their organization’s talent. Aberdeen’s data shows it is about connecting the dots between employee engagement and business growth, and enabling HR professionals to rise to the opportunity.
I believe there are four key things HR must do to enable growth.
The first is take aim at and measure what matters to the business. It is essential we look at talent management not as an HR initiative but as a business imperative. You must harness the ability to connect HR efforts to the priorities of the business and move away from the old-fashioned, tactical nature of HR. You must prove the business case and correlate effort with results – don’t rely on "gut feeling."
Next, have a formal strategy around employee engagement. It undoubtedly drives satisfied customers, which in turn has a direct impact on business growth. To be clear, engagement is not about being a happy employee – there is more to it than that. Formal on-boarding, mentoring and coaching for professional development, and retention programs all drive engagement.
Thirdly, equip the business to become better talent managers. This is particularly true in the sales environment where our research shows that a Fortune 20 company’s sales reps who had undergone a formal and structured on-boarding program consistently out-performed those sales reps who had not. With over 1,000 sales reps, this translated into over US$1 billion in additional sales – a very persuasive argument.
Finally, equip the business to make talent decisions that best support the strategic direction. Our data shows best-in-class companies continually align business and talent strategies while identifying gaps between workforce supply and business demand. Treating the candidate pipeline as you would a sales funnel strengthens the ability to identify and to cultivate talent relationships with top prospects.
By sharing what Aberdeen’s research shows as best-practices, I hope for those of you on the early stages of that talent management maturity curve that you can better equip your organizations to succeed. And for those of you further along the curve, perhaps I have challenged the status quo.
The Aberdeen Group has just published The Value of the Difference™, a new brief that summarizes key research from their Quarterly Business Review.
People Intelligence: a business imperative for high-performing organizations
The September 2011 research report from Bersin & Associates covers "People Intelligence" and what this means to the business world. The research demonstrates the compelling nature of assessments and their relation to corporate performance.
The Bersin & Associates Report concludes, "We see great value for those companies that use assessments throughout the employee lifecycle, and even greater value for those organizations who which use this data at the macro level to understand their overall workforce effectiveness, as well as their competitive positioning in the market."
Case study: dropping turnover and branding the hiring process
As seen in Talent Management Magazine
Swarovski, one of the world's leading producers of cut crystal, genuine gemstones, and created stones, wanted to decrease their attrition rate within first year employees and improve time-to-hire and overall quality of hire. Working with SHL the company is seeing their employees stay on board longer while generating millions in additional sales. "Not only do we significantly reduce the time and financial costs typically attached to employee turnover, but our customized SHL talent assessment system also translated into millions of dollars in additional sales," says Head of Talent Management, Jeremy Juutilainen.
Read more about Swarovski’s dramatic results
New client LINK events planned
Following the success of SHL’s recent client conferences in London and Orlando, the program is to be extended to Australia and South Africa in the spring.
The LINK client conferences bring together senior HR professionals under one roof to learn, network and share experiences on how best to use SHL People Intelligence to drive business performance.
LINK US 2011SHL Americas hosted its seventh client conference in early November at the Ritz-Carlton in Orlando. With over 10 countries represented, it was the highest attendance LINK conference to date. The two-day event featured keynotes by Josh Bersin and Ryan Estis, with breakout sessions led by speakers from 25 different companies including Coca Cola, Hertz, Prudential, The Children's Place and Time Warner Cable.
Conference breakout sessions spanned a host of topics affecting organizations today including: how to successfully integrate and align talent strategies across a global organization; effectively measuring People Intelligence to transform your bottom line; utilizing the latest assessment science to create talent management strategies for the next generation of business leaders; and more. Participants hailing from North America, Latin America, Europe, and Asia - in aggregate employing a workforce of over 5 million employees - learned about products in development and innovative talent management techniques in practice. Topics covered how "immersive" technologies (like virtual simulations) can be leveraged for traditional talent measurement practices, and how Talent Analytics benchmarking can transform talent decision-making, and strengthen competitive advantage.
A sampling of feedback from this year’s attendees can be found below:
"I’ve been going to events like this one for over 25 years, and this is the best, most effective HR event I have attended." - VP HR from Major Financial Services Company
"Great opportunity to network with other HR professionals. Engaging breakout sessions. Wonderful time!" - HR Director from National Credit Union
"I learned so much and met so many people. From a content and networking perspective it was fabulous." - Talent Acquisition Director at Global Consulting Firm
SHL’s inaugural client conference attracted over 100 senior HR professionals to join discussions and share experiences on achieving world class talent strategy through people intelligence.
LINK UK provided a platform to bring together leading international HR professionals to give insight, share experiences and synthesize ideas on talent management and measurement best practice.
Over 170 delegates and 7 journalists attended the event at Inmarsat Conference Centre, London on Tuesday 18th October 2011, to hear from and interact with industry experts.
David Leigh, CEO at SHL, kicked off the day’s proceedings: "‘People Intelligence’ is critical to success; organizations need to understand the potential of their people in order to make better talent recruitment and development decisions – driving measurable business results and sustaining competitive advantage."
‘Does your organization have the right talent on board to drive strategic change?’ Eugene Burke posed one of the most poignant questions of the day to the LINK audience, who were among the first in UK to preview SHL Talent Analytics™, the new benchmarking solution.
"Good to understand benchmarking and where we are as a company" – Bentley Motors
"Refreshing, professional, engaging" – Motorola
"A very well organized networking experience and a validation of the work we have started in our company" – Diversey
"Brought back excitement into my daily work in Talent" – Shell
PRODUCT UPDATESNew SHL solutions and assessmentsSHL has added the following solutions and assessments during the past three months: New solutions: Teller/Bank Cashier Solution (US English, Australasian English, UK English), Retail Solution (German, French, Swedish, Dutch). New skills assessments: JavaScript 1.8, .NET Framework 4.0, C# 4.0, Java – EJB 3.0, Java 6 Fundamentals, Computer Fundamentals (Windows 7), Computer Literacy (Windows 7). Other: Verify Numeric and Verbal Reasoning (Arabic), Multiple Assessment Portfolio exercise - Consumer brands, iPQ Career Planner iPhone / iPad / iPod touch app and report (now free of charge). |
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