If a company’s survival hinges on the ability of its people to execute against a well-conceived strategy, then its fate depends to a huge extent on its ability to attract, retain, and motivate the best people for the job.
“Talent is at the core of success,” Oracle CEO Mark Hurd told an audience of human resources executives on November 18 at a conference in London, England. Hurd rejected the notion that companies need to hire “the best” people generally—but said one of his primary responsibilities as CEO is to ensure the company hires “the best people for what I have to do.”
“I have to be able to articulate generally the skills we need, and that needs to trickle throughout the organization,” he said.
Neither brilliant strategies nor perfectly thought-out operating models can work successfully in a talent vacuum. “I want the best people, I don’t want to lose them, and I want them completely engaged,” Hurd said.
However, companies face significant hurdles in their talent search. The first is demographic: 43% of the U.S. workforce is eligible for retirement in the next 10 years, while in the United Kingdom, 3.5 million people will retire in the next five years, Hurd said. For Oracle, with 130,000 employees around the world, even a 10% employee attrition rate would require the company to recruit, evaluate, hire, onboard, and integrate thousands of people every year.
A second hurdle is at the other end of the demographic spectrum: The new generation of people being recruited out of college demand more transparent career paths and faster rewards than preceding generations, and they expect their employers to provide them with more modern workplace and collaboration tools than are available at most companies today.
This up-and-coming generation wants better, faster service not only from the companies they patronize but also from those for which they work. “They expect a level of capability that most people can’t deliver today,” said Hurd.
Companies have to instill at all levels of management a commitment to articulating the skills they need to execute their strategies and to leading people properly by providing the right incentives, career paths, and mentoring. Companies with legacy HR systems built long before the ubiquity of the internet, mobile devices, and social networks are particularly hamstrung in this environment.
Those older systems cannot provide the kind of social-based recruiting, mobile onboarding, downloadable training, and performance appraisal capabilities that modern, cloud-based HR systems can provide companies today.
To compete for talent, companies need to show employees “an opportunity for career development,” and they need to see “HR as a real-time application, on a par with financials,” said Hurd. Companies must be able to get real-time insights into their talent pool, just as they can with other assets, such as inventory or cash.
In contrast to legacy systems that run on company premises, software as a service, or SaaS, allows companies to standardize their HR IT on a platform that embeds best practices across different geographies and that gets updated with hundreds of new features every year, he said.
It’s not merely a matter of technology—a commitment to using these tools to modernize HR management is also paramount. But “if you do that right, you get an opportunity to really differentiate yourself in the market,” said Hurd.
