HR Managers – From Human Capital Management to Talent Capitalists

A new science allows HR managers to invest in talent with complete precision.

HR has long been the poor relation of the business world. Marketing, Finance, Engineering – even Distribution ranks higher than poor old HR. But that’s about to change.

It’s easy to see why HR has been the runt of the litter. And it’s all about precision. The Sales Team  can show its value by putting numbers on the board. Finance pay our salaries – accurate to the last penny. Manufacturing make things you can actually see. Marketing spend a lot of money and nobody knows where any of it goes but dammit they act like they’re important. Those goofy smiles and whizzy jargon confound everyone.

But HR, underfunded and overlooked, have the hardest job of the lot. They are responsible for attracting and hiring the very best talent available in the market. This is the most important job in the company, bar none. The future health of the business depends entirely on them filtering the résumés, sifting the chaff from the wheat, interviewing the top few per cent and making offers to the right people. Here and there they get to use an occasional psychometric, but otherwise it’s an entirely intuitive process.

And that’s the problem.

The tools we give HR to work with – the résumé, the interview, the psychometric – are no more advanced than the age of steam. And the results show it: 80% of us hate our jobs, according to Deloitte; only 13% of employees worldwide are engaged, says Gallup. The sad fact is that the entire hiring process is broken. We’re not filling our vacancies with people who are right for the job.

But it’s not HR’s fault. If you give someone a piece of rusty iron and a hammer you can’t be surprised if they don’t produce a range of surgical steel instruments out of it.

Now comes the solution I promised you.

An entirely new branch of science has opened up in the last decade. This science has been brought to the market and commercialized as Method Teaming®. Method Teaming gives HR recruiters and hiring managers, for the first time, the precise tools to be able to identify and recruit candidates who are exactly suited to the role. Business teams can now be formed that are 100% mission-perfect for the task in hand. They can be maintained this way too, for ever.

In companies that use Method Teaming, engagement and retention rates are rising with all the predictability of the sun coming up in the morning. Productivity is soaring.

Now look at where this puts the formerly undervalued HR recruiter. It gives him or her the same status as a venture capitalist (VC). VCs don’t make decisions using intuition. They make decisions using balance sheets. They use the facts in the balance sheet to inform their decisions about whether or not to put money into a company. HR recruiters now have the same capability using Method Teaming. They have become investors of talent. Method Teaming provides them with a deadly accurate map of each candidate’s Intellect. This is the equivalent of a VC’s balance sheet. The recruiter can use the candidate’s Method Teaming Intellect map, combined with a similar map of the team into which they are recruiting, to inform them whether to invest that talent into that team.

Bad hires become a thing of the past. Bad transfers within the organisation become the stuff of memories. Science has come to recruitment.

HR now has the precise tools to allow them to get it right every time. They are no longer in human capital management, they are in human capital investment. It’s time to show a bit more respect for HR. They are the new talent capitalists.