If there's no one in your company who knows Internet Marketing, you want to start hiring Internet Marketing experts. The question is how do you decide on the best candidate when you don't know enough to judge competence in that area. You hire the person who seems the best to you. You make a mistake and realize your mistake in six months. You give it a 'I-don't-know-how-but-fix-it' speech and give it another three months, then a last warning and another three. Then what? You have the same risk hanging on your head. How do you get around this chicken and egg?
Take another equivalent problem. Say you have IM competence and you, for some reason, start losing it. At some point, the people who are left start getting frustrated because no one in your company now understands what they do. Some start enjoying the vacation and start doing what they fancy, or even nothing. There's no one to guide and drive them. At some point, the IM folks don't have a gang and they lose interest and motivation. More people leave. Is that something that also rings a bell?
So here's the question, is there a nucleus needed for talent / capability? Is there a critical mass needed to make that talent-pool self-sustaining? And the other question, if you don't have a nucleus, what do you do?
Some companies try an agency model, some try and get experts on board to help out in hiring. Some just push good people in the company to acquire that missing competence through trainings. And are there ways to increase your capability mass? If you were to connect your IM people to IM folks in other countries within your company, or if you connect them to a similar community in another, non-competing company, does that delay the exodus?
Dear Ratul
ReplyDeleteThis is a question that is going to be asked more and more !! I think the response is the following
a.- Make or Buy- is this a core skill- would you rather outsource it or make it inhouse- and by outsource I do not mean give it to an Infy to do - but individual experts or ready made teams available on the 'human cloud", for example a website like "innocentive "- even the likes of P&G and DuPont use them for R&D
2. Talent Communities within and outside the organisation already exist- the question than is do you encourage them or get afraid of your team members being taken away through them
3. Development is going to be individual lead-Companies instead of spending millions on development programmes internally- will give it as a compensation head- so that the person spends it on stuff he/she really requires. The reason being that technical/ expert based jobs require training akin to a performance athlete which internal systems cannot give
btw- Great post- I would be curious how Ebay does it !!
best regards
Omar