Dr John Sullivan Talent Management Thought Leadership
I’ve compiled a list of my most-read articles from 2024. First, to reveal the hot topics my audience found most relevant to them. And second, to provide quick access to must-read articles readers might have missed during their initial publication.
I would also note that I now find that staying current in talent management can no longer just be something you do when you have spare time. With the continuous introduction of new AI tools, new technologies, and data-driven practices, everyone must acknowledge that staying constantly up-to-date is now essential.
To be effective and maintain your job security, you need to know “what works” and “what doesn’t work” because changes happen overnight. Below, you will find my most-read and highly recommended articles from this year, along with highlights of the content and reasons why each is a “must-read article.” Each summary also includes a hyperlink to the original published article.
Dr. Sullivan’s Top 5 Most-Read Talent Management Articles
From the 52 articles that I published in 2024. Here are the top five most popular ones (as ranked by LinkedIn impressions). I have also included the top articles my editor and I selected independently as our most impactful.
Article #1) Eight Ugly Numbers… That Highlights HR’s Failures – Rather than automatically assuming everything is okay in HR. This top-ranked article reveals how the recent availability of performance data in HR has made it possible to identify areas where HR is clearly failing. This is an important emerging development because HR has a long history of denying or shifting the blame for talent failures. Where in direct contrast, the now emerging more businesslike approach that much of HR is finally adopting. Instead, it emphasizes seeking out failures and learning from each one through the use of failure analysis. One of the most glaring of these HR failure areas is the addition of new “liberal courses/seminars” that cover “soft topics” like coaching, mindfulness, massage, resilience, relaxation, time management, and financial health. Unfortunately, new data reveals that 90% of these liberal offerings have literally had no measurable positive impact. Another HR failure area includes the fact that surveys reveal that outsiders do not regard HR as either strategic or trustworthy. The article also provides data covering the painfully high failure rates of our hiring, diversity, and L&D processes. You can click on the following underlined link to learn more about these HR failure areas and their costs.
Article #2) Stop Painful New-Hire Turnover – By Identifying Candidates That Will Likely Quit (A checklist for screening out flight risks) – It’s shocking to most that 38% of new hires quit early on average. Yet few talent leaders even attempt to proactively minimize hiring candidates who are likely to quit within their first six months. So, it’s important to realize upfront that most employee turnover is predictable and thus preventable. You should also be aware that many rate this new-hire turnover as the most painful type of turnover. Because when new employees leave early, organizations do have enough time to recoup the huge upfront time and sunk costs you invested in them. Those sunk costs include recruiting, onboarding, and training costs. As well as wasted salary dollars and the time spent coaching the new hire. Fortunately, there are multiple “stay factors” that managers can use to predict whether a particular candidate is likely to stay beyond their first six months. You can click on this underlined link to learn how to identify which candidates are likely to become an early turnover statistic.
#3) Bad HR Can Cost You Billions, Just Ask Boeing (Why HR needs to embrace risk management) – This think piece was put together as a result of the employee error (i.e., failing to secure a cabin door) that ended up costing Boeing billions of dollars and their VP of HR their job. This article urges HR not to assume that what happened to Boeing, Norfolk Southern Railroad, and others “can’t happen here.” And to instead join every other strategic business function that long ago embraced strategic risk management. As part of this new effort, HR needs first to accept the accountability for minimizing risks in areas that we manage or influence, like retention, bad hiring, skill development, safety, harassment, and weak leadership development. Next, we need to calculate the risk profile (the probability of occurring and the costs when it occurs) for each high-cost employee and HR error category. Then, HR must develop a plan for reducing each of the high-cost or high-volume potential errors. Initially, many leaders will feel that HR can’t do much to minimize catastrophic workforce errors. But this article argues that they can––provided that they assume the role of “captain of the ship.” This means that HR must take responsibility for increasing the overall productivity of the workforce as well as identifying and reducing all employee errors that can have catastrophic costs and consequences. You can click on this link to learn more about how proactive HR actions can minimize employee-caused corporate catastrophes.
#4) Hiring Candidates “You’d Like To Have A Beer With” (And other dinosaur candidate screening practices to stop using) – Unfortunately, many support the intuitive notion that you should hire individuals that “you would enjoy having a beer with.” However, the data shows that using these criteria will damage your hiring results. In fact, the data shows that, by far, the most damaging element of the overall hiring process is the candidate assessment last screening component (i.e., interviews, testing, reference checking, and qualifications). So, this article provides data that reveals that many common candidate screening and assessment practices are no longer effective. This article identifies the problematic assessment and screening practices that should be re-examined. They include candidate fit, body language assessment, requiring any college degree, and using brainteaser interview questions. I would also add to “the need to be revisited list” assessing emotional intelligence, using unstructured interviews, and assuming that past experience predicts future performance. You can click on this underlined link to learn more about the most damaging dinosaur candidate screening practices that you should immediately re-examine.
#5) You’ve Been Warned – Interviews Rarely Select The Best Candidate (New data reveals that flipping a coin is more accurate) – Even though this article was ranked at number five. It turns out that adding a handful of additional elements to your interviews will by itself likely have the highest and the most immediate impact on the accuracy of your candidate selection. This article highlights powerful recent research that clearly shows that most traditional interviews are secretly horrible at identifying the best candidate! Where horrible is defined as the fact that interviews fail to select the best candidate over 90% of the time. And that a coin flip may be more accurate. This article recommends simple additions to your interview process. Include shifting from behavioral interview questions to “How will you act today” questions. Begin using the “How will you solve this problem” interview scenarios. It also suggests allocating more time to increase candidates’ excitement and selling the candidate. The article also suggests that you begin using performance metrics to identify your interview and hiring failures. You can click on this underlined link to learn more about how adding a few elements to your interviews can dramatically improve the accuracy of your top candidate selection.
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Dr. Sullivan’s Choice For The Most Impactful Article During 2024
Among the dozens of my articles that specifically covered recruiting tools published during 2024, I have selected the one that covers hiring innovators, which I have found to be the most powerful way to increase your business impact.
Hiring Innovators – The Highest Impact Action In Talent Management (Highlighting the benefits of hiring innovators) – Yes, most don’t realize it. But, hiring has the highest business impact of any HR action. Innovators produce the highest business impact of any category of new hire (They can produce from 5 to 300 times greater economic value than the average employee). This article highlights the many benefits an organization will receive when it develops the capability of hiring multiple innovators. The article also includes a direct link to my companion article, which specifically covers how to hire innovators. You can read the current article covering the many positive benefits of hiring innovators by clicking on this link.
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My Editor’s Choice For The Most Impactful Talent Management Article In 2024
Among the many 2024 articles covering HR practices that urgently need updating. My wickedly smart editor, Michael Cox, selected this article, “HR, Cleanup on Aisle 3,” as his choice for the year’s most impactful article.
HR, Clean-up On Aisle 3 – Under The Radar HR Processes That May Require A Clean-up (It’s time to revisit these high-impact but less glamorous HR processes) – After years of turmoil where HR leaders really had no choice but to focus on strategic HR issues like COVID, remote work, DEI, AI, and recruiting/retention. Now may be the appropriate time for HR to revisit some of its less glamorous and often ignored HR areas. This article suggests first revisiting areas where there is no current process, like increasing workforce productivity, increasing employee motivation, and identifying bad managers. It next recommends revisiting areas that already have an existing HR process, including internal movement, DEI, performance appraisal, and performance management. You can read the entire article covering these HR processes under the radar by clicking here.
Final Thoughts
Looking forward to next year. You might want to know that in 2025, I will be authoring articles highlighting some major emerging strategic issues that few currently realize will significantly impact the future of talent management. Those focus areas will include the emerging red-hot area of how to recruit quantum computing team members. Also, how all recruiting and talent materials currently presented exclusively in a written narrative format must be read with your eyes will eventually need to “add a verbal playback feature.” As an acknowledgment that fewer employees and candidates will be willing to (or even be able to) read any narrative piece. So you will have to give them an additional option, where all they need to do is listen.
Finally, I will continue writing about what I consider to be the most powerful growing trend. This is how all talent management processes will be forced to become more data-driven and business-like. That means that smart talent leaders will have to become more open to borrowing and adapting existing processes from other more respected data-driven business functions like supply chain, finance, risk management, customer service, and marketing.
Note to the reader
The remainder of my 52 articles from 2024 and my over 1,300 additional articles covering strategic talent management and aggressive recruiting can be found at www.drjohnsullivan.com. In addition, if you are not among the thousands of current readers, you can subscribe to Dr. Sullivan’s weekly Aggressive Talent Newsletter here.
