Welcome to the Davies-Black Business Blast

In today’s marketplace, it is becoming increasingly important for HR to move from being the end of the business process chain to its rightful position as the strategic leader in aligning talent with organizational goals. To help your company gain competitive advantage, this issue is dedicated to strategic human resource goals and tactics for reinventing its HR function. We hope that it encourages you, a co-worker, a colleague, or other leaders in your organization to take a commanding leadership role as well as offer insight and innovation to help ensure that any changes made today are right for the challenges that may be faced tomorrow.

—The Davies-Black Publishing Team

Transformation in Action

Information flows, collaborative organizational structures, and the reliance on knowledge sharing have made it essential to address the various needs and styles of the generations in talent management and organizational dynamics. As stated in Human Resource Transformation, “Leaders must develop a proactive approach to managing their multigenerational workforce, much the same as they must develop targeted marketing strategies to reach their customer base.”

One organization that has assessed and transformed its method of recruiting, communications, and branding to fulfill changing strategic objectives in the face of major generational demographic changes is the United States Marine Corps Recruiting Command (MCRC). Read about their transformation. >>

Q&A with Joseph Daniel McCool

Joseph Daniel McCool is an internationally recognized writer, speaker, and consultant on executive search best practices and corporate senior management succession. He is author of the groundbreaking new book Deciding Who Leads: How Executive Recruiters Drive, Direct, and Disrupt the Global Search for Leadership Talent..

What influence do executive recruiters have on corporate performance and career advancement?
Executive recruiters control access to the world's most demanding and highest paid jobs in senior corporate management today. Their confidential, behind-the-scenes work for hiring companies around the world actually influences a variety of hot topics in the business media these days, including executive compensation, management diversity (or the lack thereof), high-profile CEO searches for some of the world's largest corporations, and the very definition of leadership itself.

Why do you believe executive recruiters are a leading indicator of the health of companies and economies as a whole?
Executive search activity is a leading indicator of the health of companies and economies overall because exceptional leaders tend to gravitate to outstanding companies with compelling growth stories and, conversely, they tend to run from companies that are heading for trouble—usually right straight into the arms of executive recruiters who want to place them in other hiring organizations. For these reasons, executive recruiters typically are ahead of the economic curve and are uniquely positioned to take advantage of market intelligence for their own gain.

Can executive recruiters really influence the number of women and minority leaders in positions of corporate leadership?
I believe that if executive recruiting firms became more diverse, their consultants could bring a different perspective to executive-level interviewing and the sourcing of management candidates for top leadership positions across Corporate America and beyond. I believe the lack of diversity in the executive ranks stems, in part, from the fact that most search firms are anything but diverse.

What can companies do to increase the effectiveness of their recruiting and retention policies?
There's actually a lot that companies can do to increase the overall effectiveness of their approaches to executive-level recruiting, talent management, and retention. For starters, they have to understand that, even if they're inclined to “go outside” for executive talent and work through an executive search consultant, they must still make a commitment to be actively engaged in the process. Too many hiring organizations leave the external search process entirely in the hands of the search firm, and that's part of the reason many of them are left dissatisfied with the results.

What can executives do to get themselves noticed by executive recruiters?
One especially well-known recruiter, the very individual who has recruited the CEOs of companies such as Alcoa, Nike, Disney, Home Depot, and others, put it this way: "Be exceptional and we'll find you."

Award-Winning Catalog

Davies-Black Publishing was named a winner at BookBuilders West’s 37th Annual Book Show for the new category product catalog. Copies of Davies-Black’s winning spring and fall 2007 catalog were showcased at the gala banquet, where they were viewed by hundreds of book designers, publishers, and printers. View the current catalog. >>

ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Awards

Rethinking Work: Are You Ready to Take Charge? by Cliff Hakim is a finalist in ForeWord magazine’s 10th Annual Book of the Year Awards, career category. Winners will be announced at BookExpo America on May 29, 2008, in Los Angeles.
Learn about the book. >>

Partnership HR

Today’s positive forces driving the global competitiveness of U.S. business demonstrate that the American work ethic is alive and well—and much of the credit goes to Human Resources for giving it a new lease on life.

Author Irving Buchen challenges organization leaders and HR professionals alike to continue building alliances across the organization as advocates for the growth of the workforce, and to nurture and support this new performance ethic. Some of the key facets for achieving this are recruitment, retention, evaluation,
and training.

With retention, orientation of new hires can be crucial. Here is a quick list of orientation blunders and tactics that start new hires down the road to their exit interview. Be aware and alert to avoid them! Don't...

• Intimidate new hires (make them go through every line of every page in the oversized employee manual)
• Control them (making sure everyone knows their place on the organization chart—something taken very seriously in the organization)
• Dazzle them (being overzealous cheerleaders)
• Amuse them (do fun things that give them the feeling of having a great time)
• Impress them (tell them it's a company of winners but then none of the stars are available for the orientation)

Irving Buchen's Partnership HR can help you build an effective culture that empowers the workforce to achieve global competitiveness. Learn more about Partnership HR. >>

Davies-Black Author Events

• April 17, Teleconference
  Leadership Coach Academy's Thought Leader Tele-Forum
  Scott Eblin, author of The Next Level, Featured Speaker
• April 30, St. Louis, MO
  2008 Crime Laboratory Development Symposium at the Olin Business School at Washington Unviersity
  Nancy S. Ahlrichs, author of Igniting Gen B and Gen V, Speaker
• May 3, Minneapolis, MN
  Career Management Alliance 2008 Annual Professional Conference
  Joseph Daniel McCool, author of Deciding Who Leads, Keynote Speaker
• May 15, Las Vegas, NV
  Kennedy Information's Recruiting 2008 Conference and Expo
  Joseph Daniel McCool, author of Deciding Who Leads, Speaker
• May 20 & 21, Dallas, TX
  Strategic Account Manager's Annual Conference
  Terry Bacon, author of What People Want, Speaker

View a complete listing of upcoming author events >>

Conferences

• BookExpo America – May 29-June 1
• ASTD International Conference & Exposition – June 1-4
• SHRM Annual Conference & Exposition – June 22-25
• Academy of Management Annual Meeting – August 8-13
• Frankfurt Book Fair – October 15-19

Let us know if you're going to be at any of these conferences — we'd love to meet you there.
E-mail us at db_newsletter@cpp.com.

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