Promoting From Within

Promoting From Within

In the aftermath of hurricanes Katrina and Rita, an already beleaguered oil industry is finding itself in yet another bind, according to BusinessWeek. In its Oct. 10 issue, the magazine reports that after years of layoffs during slow times, the industry is scrambling to find engineering talent to fill vacant positions. With a coming scarcity of petroleum-engineering graduates – just 1,500 are enrolled this year, down 85 percent since 1982, the article notes – some oil companies are resorting to novel means of recruitment.

Schlumberger, an oil-field services provider based in New York, uses a proprietary online system called PeopleMatch, the company told BusinessWeek. The system, accessed through Schlumberger's intranet site, helps human resources managers fill positions with talent already under the company's roof. Managers can use PeopleMatch to select possible candidates within the company based on desired characteristics. Information on employees' past job performance, salary and resumes are available through the system; managers can also access employees' self-written bios, which include photos, career goals, family information, past assignments and professional affiliations.

Cultivating talent from within rather than scrambling to fill open slots from without is a sound goal for small companies as well. The Washington, D.C.-based SCORE Association, a nonprofit organization that gives advice to small businesses, provides tips for promoting from within. SCORE suggests bringing outsourced work back into the company if it could create an advancement opportunity for an existing employee. In the organization's "5 Tips on Promoting From Within," Tip No. 5 suggests, "If an employee needs outside training for a higher-level job, pay for it. That will be cheaper than recruiting a new employee."

Superior talent management strategies are also behind top-performing hospitals, Linda Wilson wrote in the July 25 issue of Modern Healthcare. The magazine reported on findings from the "2005 Hospital CEO Leadership Survey," published by Evanston, Ill.-based health-care business-intelligence provider Solucient and St. Louis-based health-care staffing firm Cejka Search. The survey, completed by more than 100 hospital CEOs, was designed to identify the hospitals' leadership team composition, organizational performance and future strategies for success.

According to the survey, boards of "top" hospitals select a CEO from inside the organization about 50 percent of the time, while boards of "typical" hospitals promote insiders just 37 percent of the time. For non-CEO senior executives, top hospitals are also more likely to promote from within than typical hospitals are (36 percent of the time versus 21 percent of the time).

"Top" hospitals were defined as institutions that made Solucient's list of top 100 hospitals for three to five years, while "typical" hospitals were defined as those that consistently ranked in the middle quintile of hospitals on the list during the past five years.

The entire report of survey results can be found at www.cejkasearch.com/ceosurvey.