Succession planning discussions aren’t limited to HR industry magazines and websites anymore – just Google search “Yankees succession plan” and you’ll get a host of hits from a wide range of sources. Clearly this is more than just buzz – it’s top of mind in the business community, as I believe it should be. A sound succession plan keeps organizations on the path to success.

So why do we hesitate to create that crucial blueprint? Confusion? Dread? Lack of resources and tools? Too many of us get bogged down in the concept of managing the process instead of focusing on the plan itself.

This is a subject that I’ve been tackling head on lately. So, I thought I’d put all of our recent succession planning resources here. I hope you enjoy! read more »

More workers quit their jobs than were laid off in March. Wow. I was a little surprised when I first heard this statistic. Then I thought about it and realized what this means for talent management and workforce planning – it’s no time to be on auto-pilot. We’d better be working on strategies to keep the talent we already have as companies begin to hire again giving employees more choices in employers.

Let’s admit it – there’s been a buyer’s market for talent the past two years (when there’s been any hiring at all) resulting in a class of “underemployed” – laid-off overqualified types who were willing to trade in a title or a bit of salary in exchange for benefits. Even tenured employees who have been denied promotions or raises during hiring freezes and layoffs can be counted as underemployed. I recently read more »

Written by President and COO of Aquire, Tom McKeown

Athletics can be great training for youths, as they mature into adulthood by providing vital lessons in discipline and hard work.  But, there are different types of sports that require different types of coaching and involvement.  There are individual sports such as track and wrestling, where the participant need only be concerned with maximum achievement in his or her own event and that result is grouped into a total score.  On the other hand there are team sports such as football and basketball where participants play different roles in order to achieve one common result.  The same can be said for departments within companies, consider sales and marketing. read more »

With the biggest sporting event of the year and the upcoming HR Happy Hour, “The World Cup and the Workplace,” as my muse, I found that the World Cup and Talent Management surprisingly have a great deal in common. read more »