A few days ago I looked at a suggestion by Professor Richard Beatty that most HR staff are not equipped to carry out value-add workforce planning and transformation. Professor Beatty takes it even further and suggests that HR uses wrong-headed thinking about other human resources issues.

He’s obviously not out to win any popularity contests.

He cites a Gallup survey on the performance of about 4,500 customer service employees at an unnamed major financial firm. The survey results showed that the employees who scored in the top quartile had a positive affect on 61% of the people they talked to. The next two quartiles registered 40% and 27% positive responses, respectively.

The lowest quartile of staff scored a net 2% negative impact.

What the good professor goes on to say is that in this situation HR professionals would normally go in and use psychometric profiling or interviews to try to figure out what the top performers were doing right. Then they would train the low performers how to be high performers.

This is wrong-headed thinking, he says, because selection is a more powerful predictor of performance than training.

Furthermore, training may not be the problem - some employees may know what to do, but choose not to do it. Finally he says that HR wants to treat everybody equally well, to reduce turnover, but he suggests that you might want to disinvest in certain employees.

Radical stuff.

Silly Notions

Professor Beatty doesn’t think much of the idea of the “employer of choice” either.

He thinks that if you are the employer of choice everybody and anybody is going to apply for jobs in your company. But many of these potential employees are excited by the chance to be in a well paid job where they can be secure, and hide out; not by the chance to make a contribution to a growing company.

He is also not a fan of appointing HR staff to senior HR positions. His suggestion is to appoint someone from outside the HR department to manage strategic talent. He cites the example of Precision Castparts Corp., a $7 billion machine-parts manufacturer that bypassed HR in several situations, and gained competitive advantage.

The logic of such appointments is that HR is not good at “Speaking Board”. The “language of numbers” is simply not their strength. Many people entered HR, he says, in order to help people, and this is nice or even admirable.

But it does not build winning organizations