TRAINING TALENT
To ;nd seasoned talent, NiSource partners with
third-party recruiters who turn to extensive contacts
in the industry and social media networks. Sites like
LinkedIn are especially useful for identifying talent
not actively seeking new jobs, which can be a massive expansion of an organization’s pipeline. While
only 12 percent of the workforce is actively seeking
new jobs, according to the site’s global report Talent
Trends 2014, 85 percent consider themselves “
passive candidates.” ;ese people are willing to consider
a new position if approached, even though they’re
not searching job boards for their next steps.
Another way to expand the recruitment pipeline
is to alter expectations. Even top-shelf practitioner
talent needs molding, so don’t overlook appealing
candidates with a lot to learn about a speci;c industry. To pinpoint candidates with the best attitude,
drive and transferable skill set, some organizations
turn to behavioral-based interviews. To predict future
behavior, Mr. Roy asks potential hires how they have
responded to speci;c project situations—“tell me how
you dealt with a signi;cant scope change on a project
you managed,” for example. “When a candidate starts
talking through how they handle projects and manage risk and cost and schedule, you see they speak the
Picture
of Health
“When I first walked through the door here
two years ago, I realized we needed more
than just timeline trackers. The people we
hire typically have managed projects for
many years, so they have skills dealing
with timelines and budgets, but they didn’t
have technical knowledge of Healthgrades’
projects. Healthgrades helps those in the
United States find physicians, and we allow
hospitals to figure out who they should
market toward.
I interviewed everyone on my staff and
realized the training program here was pretty much nonexistent. There
was some very basic training around the ins and outs of being a project
manager, like the templates for minutes and agendas.
I created a training site with a shared online document that has links to
training videos, testing and process documents—like the communications
process and having difficult conversations with clients. We needed to have
documentation that people could refer back to, because with face-to-face
training, after a couple of days people forget things. And some things we
train people on they need to be able to do only a few times a year.
When we have new employees coming on board, I give them editing
access to that training site because as a newbie you see things different-
ly. We encourage employees to come up with new ways of doing things.
For leadership skills, we instill in our employees an understanding of the
importance of building relationships with their team members and their
clients. Having strong relationships helps move your project forward, so
everybody wins. I work with my staff to make sure they take advantage of
opportunities to build relationships—for example, to be in a social setting
with colleagues, meet them face-to-face and talk about their projects.
We now have much quicker onboarding of staff because we have a
training program in place that allows project managers to more rapidly
take on client-based projects. The technical training the project manag-
ers receive helps other team members spend more time, heads down,
doing work, rather than sitting in technical meetings.
One year after we rolled out this training program, we saw a 20 percent reduction in the amount of time it takes to complete our projects.
It’s been huge.”
Ryan Endres, PMP,
is the director of
project management at Healthgrades, Madison,
Wisconsin, USA.
Financial Performance
Strategic talent leaders say their companies’
financial performance is:
Source: Rally the Talent to Win: Transforming Strategy into Reality, an
Economist Intelligence Unit research program sponsored by PMI, 2014
52%
above
average
well above
average
24%
