ASPEN

Integration / Separation

New Talent Leaders

Technology Improvement

Initiative or Monitor Initiatives

Benchmarks & Comparison

Metrics & Reporting

Insource or Outsource

Communicating New Ideas

Specialized Intelligence

Counsel & Advice

Integration / Separation

Companies go through major change when another group is purchased, merged, bought out, or severed. This typically marks serious change for HR, but also for the talent design of the organization. We have counseled organizations going through integration/separation combine tools, recycle ideas, merge workflows, throw out bad habits, and discard unneeded resources without major disruption to the operations in talent acquisition and workforce planning. These shifts can cut across multiple regions and industries, and our Advisory is geographically and intellectually positioned for those conditions. The environments are typically volatile, and the need for project management, smart thinking, business intelligence & metrics, and previous experience with success is significant.

New Talent Leaders

There are companies that spend some time talking with talent leaders about what they do, and then there is us. When we engage leaders, we really are not talking about their desired career like recruiting agencies would. Our team interviews leaders in talent acquisition, diversity, workforce planning, and retention across multiple regions and industries to understand what they are doing in those companies and where their business is moving strategically. This provides us a good real-time pulse on who are the leaders and who are the followers. This business intelligence is invaluable as companies look for new leadership for talent teams.

Our typical process is to

provide counsel to senior leadership to help design the actual job,
present metrics and business intelligence in order to create strong yet realistic goals for leaders,
provide access to profile types that can translate well to the environment, and
orient a leader into an organization by arming them with tools, processes, and systems that are best in class.

This process gives that leader a huge head start, and does what was intended - impact the function by inserting new talent.

Technology Improvement

Most talent leaders will integrate or upgrade a new technology a handful of times during their career. Many will only serve on teams that execute that work, and may one design or lead one such upgrade. Expertise in anything typically requires repetition, and few team repeat these processes frequently. Technology improvements and usage are constantly on the project list at Aspen, and when organizations are thinking about a change and how technology could impact them, they should give us a call. We have executed such work across multiple regions, industries, and environments - which help us better understand to your environment quickly and with high relevance. We don’t advocate one technology over another (we don’t have referral agreements in place) and we are not advocates of using technology for technology sake. Like most project managers, we believe technology is simply one of many resources. We help our customers analyze the resources they need to accomplish the activities desired, and then figure out how technology is part of that plan.

We can counsel your teams on selection, coaching, and usage with the technology - any technology - but we are not experts in installation. The vendor is the expert in installation. We are experts in getting improvement to happen and behavioral change to stick once installed. We have had to do so with assessment tools, CRMs, ATS, HRIS, social media, resume tools, metrics, mobility and more.

Initiative or Monitor Initiatives

Hire more top talent. Outsource staffing. Remove outsourcing. Change university relations. Get more veterans. Increase executive diversity. Start an internal executive search team. Design a back to work program. And so on.

Organizations always have some initiative they needs to be accomplished. It could be a program or a project but the needle is going to move on something. This is a great time to call in Aspen. We can tell you what others have done, how they have been successful, how they have tripped and where land mines have been triggered. Not to mention that we design the project plans for dozens of such initiatives, and help internal teams successfully implement. By engaging us, you avoid making missteps, get work done faster and cheaper, and have metric and data driven business intelligence backing up your decisions.

Benchmarks & Comparison

One of the most common questions we get is "what is the best practice?" - which is then followed by "who exactly is doing that?". If you are having questions like that posed to your talent organization by leadership, we suggest you 1) stop guessing and 2) increase your exposure. We admire how many groups have been fashioned meet regularly and discuss their practices, but the question is how relevant are those practices, and how much detail is really in those discussions. Summits and conferences offer excellent advice, but they may not be as specific as you need. These summits have to satisfy multiple needs, and they may not be able to satisfy all of yours.

Ongoing research initiatives reveal much more than normal, and our multi-region, multi-industry collection of data and metrics create a unique business intelligence environment for our clients to leverage. If you need comparison, benchmarking, and data, you should consider Aspen’s intelligence systems as a place you may want to start (or finish).

Metrics & Reporting

We have a comprehensive and ever expanding metrics suite for talent acquisition. Its designed as a baseline and starting point for a business, as we believe each business has to learn to measure itself effectively. Our collection of data from companies help our clients understand what others are doing in a specific, yet unidentified and confidential way. As our data grows, so does its ability to peer into retention, talent management, and diversity initiatives. We then combine your metrics with others for cross comparison and ongoing tracking into an innovative business intelligence dashboard.

As you consider improvement, and likely need to get metrics, reporting, and analysis under control, Aspen can be a very valuable partner.

Insource or Outsource

Resource considerations are a major theme at Aspen. We are constantly evaluating if activities, tasks, or initiatives should be done by the people working as employees, or should be outsourced to non-employees. The landscape for what employees is changing daily, and how to use them, and we certainly can help with this struggle that many organizations face.

There is really no sense in insourcing anything if you won’t try to get better at it or develop competence in it. In the same light, if you know you don’t want to be responsible for building competence, then maybe you should outsource. Either way, Aspen has performed analysis, integration, vendor introduction, comparisons, RASIC, and more to counsel, advise, and change how talent leaders resource the projects and work at hand - and we can help you do the same regardless of your location, industry, or environment.

We find that a project with recruit process outsourcing (RPO) or pipelining of passive talent are excellent gateways into realigning your internal HR or talent group towards your intended competencies. We certainly don’t do the execution work that is typically required (you will need to be introduced to viable options). We do figure out what is right for you right now and in the near future based primarily on costs, goals, quality, and your willingness to develop certain competencies.

Communicating New Ideas

New ideas. New people. New methods. New to the organization. New to the role. New to your team. New to the project. New whatever.

We just kept on taking on change management, efficiency, and continuous improvement projects and all of a sudden we 5 years of doing that is in the books. Along the way we developed some pretty cool communication tools for our clients. We then took the time to reverse engineer those into starting points that can be used to help facilitate and retain changes across the talent spectrum in almost any environment.

As you think about doing the next new thing - think about how well you communicated the last new thing. We may be able to help you do better.

Specialized Intelligence

We are not a search firm. We are not a research/sourcing firm. No reference checks, employment branding, job board distribution, career site design or boolean expertise here. We can’t really show you how Twitter will change the way you source, or build you a killer Facebook page, and we don’t build HRIS systems that track candidates, applicants, succession plans, or workforces.

So if we don’t talk about those things (and lots of people do), and all we research is talent initiatives, workforce design, effective change management strategies, cost cutting, quality improvement, and continuous improvement - its fair to say that we have some pretty interesting intelligence on those things. And if we don’t have what you need, we will likely go and get it, provided its not part of stuff we do not do - because we know that other people will probably want it.

Counsel & Advice

A friendly ear is sometimes not as good as an educated and honest one. Some clients just need to talk it out, and validate what they are doing. Call it coaching, listening, counsel or advice, but they need someone who likely has seen either more, seen different, or both. We are fortunate to be in that position many times. Our team has a variety of backgrounds, and we constantly evaluate other organizations and their practices, so we can lend an honest and educated ear to most talent initiatives and problems.

At Aspen, not problem is too small. We appreciate our customers who recognize that we are there to help anytime with what we can - regardless of engagement size.

See what’s #trending with Aspen Advisors today!

Click the widgets below to explore Aspen’s newest endeavors, including upcoming speaking events, job openings and fundraising opportunities!

Coming Soon

Aspen is currently performing research across a number of initiatives, the first being revealed at OnRec 2011. More.

Coming Soon

Aspen is running in the CCFA "Guts and Glory" 5k in Ocean City, NJ this August!

Check out who and what we track, and keep yourself informed.

Visit our blog and see what
our Advisors are writing about.

Tell us how we can help you today.