Talent On Demand - book review

I recently finished reading 'Talent On Demand' by Peter Cappelli. I found it a very enlightening publication. Without reading anything back or going over my notes, this is the pure, unfiltered and honest brain dump of what I got out of it:

• Back to the essence: a for profit organization has one goal and one goal only when it comes to people (or human resources, or human capital, or talent, or workforce, or however you want to call it). And it is not surprisingly a very economic argument. That is to match the available talent (supply) with the needed talent (demand). Pure and simple. X marks the spot. Supply meets demand. Companies have a target of creating profit in a chosen set of activities. Therefore they need some money (capital), some stuff (buildings, machines, intranets), and competent people. The exercise is to match the need for competent people in the necessary competency domains with the availability of them. Having too many competent people that are not used weighs heavily on your costs and is not sustainable. Having too few will degrade your service level, make you turn down and loose customers and miss profit you could have made. Either way is not a good solution. Just going back to the essence of things was an eye opener.
• Employing people is just one: you can also hire people as contractors or temps, or rely on business partners to bring in the necessary talent at the time of need. There is a balance to obtain of making your talent in house, and buying it on the market. It's an 'and' story, not an 'or'.
  
• The times they are a-changing: there are a lot of mechanisms the 'people department' of corporations have done the supply-meets-demand exercise for talent. They all made sense in their time and context. A few decades ago, in the 50ies, 60ies, the corporate world was a stable one where you could reliably plan five or ten years into the future. There was no labour market for hiring away people from your competition. It was the time of corporate development centers, up-or-out career ladders, assessment centres, lifetime employment etc. But times have changed, and there is a problem with the old techniques to match supply and demand of talent.
  
• The core problem is risk: The core of the matter is that things are not predictable anymore. Not on the supply side, not on the demand side. That means any planning has a high risk attached to it. On top of that, things change fast. In my 12 year career I already had 2 surges and 2 downturns. A company may invest a lot of money in developing its next generation of leaders, only to find that they are hired away by the competition when they are 'ripe'. The problem is not so much that people leave, before they also left but only for retirement reasons. The issue is that it happens now at unpredictable times.
• New approaches - or not so new: The author recommends some solutions to solve the talent matching problem in our day and age. Basically the people department would do well to see how other parts of the enterprize have solved similar problems. Useful techniques exist in the fields of portfolio management, operations research, financial risk, etc to help us out here.
  

Linking it to my thinking on 'competent people', I'm more than ever convinced that for profit corporations need competent people for one goal only: supply meets demand. The name of that game is talent management. The name of the game is different for the other two actors around the competence table (you and society).

Thanks Mike for lending me the book!