

Ashley Lutz, “Applicants for jobs at the new DC Walmart face worse odds than people trying to get into Harvard,” Business Insider, November 19, 2013,. It was harder to get entry-level work there than to be accepted by Harvard: 2.6 percent of Walmart applicants made it through, as opposed to 6.1 percent for the Ivy League university. When Walmart launched a new Washington, DC, store in 2013, for example, it received 23,000 applications for 600 positions. In economies gripped by financial crises, unemployment hit levels not seen since the early 1980s, so there was no shortage of applicants for many openings. It refers to the increasingly fierce competition to attract and retain employees at a time when too few workers are available to replace the baby boomers now departing the workforce in advanced economies.įast forward to the wake of the Great Recession, and the war for talent turned into the war for jobs. Beth Axelrod, Helen Handfield-Jones, and Ed Michaels, The War for Talent, Boston: Harvard Business School Publishing, 2001. The term “war for talent” was coined by McKinsey’s Steven Hankin in 1997 and popularized by the book of that name in 2001. Would you like to learn more about People Analytics? Jim Collins, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap.And Others Don‘t, New York: Harper Business, 2001,. Management guru Jim Collins concurred: “… the single biggest constraint on the success of my organization is the ability to get and to hang on to enough of the right people.” 5 5. TalentTrust, “How Steve Jobs got the A+ players and kept them,” blog entry by Kathleen Quinn Votaw, October 31, 2011,. A small team of A+ players can run circles around a giant team of B and C players.” 4 4. The late Steve Jobs of Apple summed up talent’s importance with this advice: “Go after the cream of the cream. Judiesch, and Frank L Schmidt, “Individual differences in output variability as a function of job complexity,” Journal of Applied Psychology, February 1990, Volume 75, Number 1, pp. For high-complexity jobs, the differential is so big it can’t be quantified. One person in the top 1 percent is worth 12 in the bottom 1 percent. For unskilled and semiskilled jobs, the top 1 percent are three times more productive for jobs of middling complexity (say, technicians and supervisors), 12 times more.

You get even more remarkable results comparing the productivity of the top and bottom 1 percent.

If a competitor used 20 percent more great talent in similar efforts, it would beat you to market even if it started a year or two later. If you took 20 percent of the average talent working on the project and replaced it with great talent, how soon would you achieve the desired impact? If these people were 400 percent more productive, it would take less than two years if they were 800 percent more productive, it would take less than one. Please email us at: your business strategy involves cross-functional initiatives that would take three years to complete. If you would like information about this content we will be happy to work with you.

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