The HR Recruitment Marketplace

HR functions continue to be tested on their commercial astuteness and added value contribution to the businesses they support. High performing organisations have high performing HR teams who successfully balance commercial imperatives with employee centricity:

• Talent management and organisational capability/effectiveness
• Employer branding and employee engagement
• Human capital measurement
• Authentic leadership
• Centres of excellence
• Reward and the psychological contract
• OD & change management

Talent is now recognised as one of the top three issues for CEO’s in businesses across the UK and Europe; how to find it, how to develop it and how to keep it. To attract and retain talent requires a business to have a range of programmes and philosophies in place:

• a talent strategy that acknowledges that talent is a shared resource irrespective of local/national/divisional demarcations;
• a great employer brand with its foundations in the commercial brand but also in its reputation for treating people well (as evidenced on many a website blog) and, increasingly, in a track record of corporate social responsibility;
• a culture of learning with clearly defined leadership behaviours;
• performance management systems that accurately identify talent;
• succession planning processes that are actively championed by business leaders

The greatest demand continues to be for HR Business Partners who provide internal consultancy to individual business units and the pragmatic, commercial link between them and specialist technical expertise (be it internal or external) as well as the essential operational delivery of solutions.

OD and change specialists touch on every aspect of the organisation - structure, capability, process, employee development, motivation, behaviours, attitudes to change and the psychological/emotional contract.

Reward and HRIS remain essential technical functions, on the one hand providing the data that informs good decision making and allows excellent transactional performance, on the other providing consultancy that can drive true employee engagement.

Policy, ER and IR have become increasingly complex due to legislation and the increased voice and power of the individual. Technical experts need to be attuned to the organisational culture and climate tailoring solutions to meet a range of needs - a knowledge alone is not enough. Managing internal and external relations and working collaboratively is at the heart of success.

Titles vary from organisation to organisation, as does allocation of responsibility, but the common theme for HR teams and individuals to excel is in enabling their organisation and its most valued resource - people - to excel and in turn ensure that their performance and behaviours impact positively on the bottom line.