We have covered two components below. The first component is around high potential talent, and the second is around changes within Cybersecurity roles.

This week, we worked on various aspects that would further expand Strategic Workforce Planning and Recruitment boundaries.  One of the leaders requested us to look into High potential candidate acquisition and High Potential talent retention.  This is an essential aspect of talent planning.  Take, for example, Disney.    After the Lion King was released in 1994, eventually grossing 952 million dollars worldwide, the studio began its slow decline.  The bulk of the talent that worked in Lion King was still there.  It took Disney some serious effort to bring back a High potential executive Kevin Mayer.  Kevin Mayer diagnosed that new talent-hiring between 1994 and 2006 was shockingly low (innovators and high-potential leaders).  Kevin Mayer went for a spree of acquisitions – Pixar, Marvel, Lucas, and so on.  In many scenarios, Kevin Mayer valued talent more than the assets that were brought in.  Disney emerged from its creative slump.

Focusing on High Potential Talent is very hard but a very must activity for HR leaders.  It is important to note that even if you end up getting one key engineer or one key leader, the company takes a different growth trajectory.  In 2009, both companies Tesla and Fisker Karma, were on an even setting, and many companies were betting in favor of Fisker becoming the market leader for Electric vehicles.  Tesla ran into severe issues in vehicle design in 2009.  In 2009, Elon Musk identified one of the world’s top Vehicle Engineers Peter Rawlinson from Lotus Cars.  This move paid off big time and put Tesla on the right course.  Fisker Karma failed in vehicle design.

Predicting a hire from a high potential standpoint is a holy grail.  All Recruiters aspire to hire the best of the best and expect everyone to be of high potential.  Assessing whether a resource has significant potential from outside is hard.  You are making a prediction based on the data gathered through resumes and interviews.  Niels Bohr, the Nobel laureate in Physics and father of the atomic model, is quoted as saying, “Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future!” This quote serves as a warning for all of us when Predicting a key outcome. At best, we can look at a framework with these five components to minimize our error in prediction

Skills Match and Mastery:  There is a saying that one can only break the rules when they have mastered it.  This saying is well suited for High Performance and High Potential Candidates.  Mastery and ability in the core set of skills targeted is an absolute must

Ecosystem Contributor:  High Potential Candidates are always net contributors.  This means they have a Github commit, blogs in Linkedin, Presentations at events, Whitepapers, Patents in technical scenarios.  Having a point of view is a critical trait of a high potential candidate

Autotelic Workers: In the book Flow, Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi explains the concept called Autotelic workers.  These are workers who get into what is called a Flow mode, where when things get challenging, they block out everything else and work towards resolving the challenge.  This is a critical attribute of a high potential resource.  Sridhar Ramaswamy, who was an SVP at Google and now the founder of Neeva. co, states the following. “The best way for you to judge what you should do is to think about the thing that you want to do engrosses you so much that you will gladly stay up all night to do.”  As a recruiter, your questions and assessments should seek to understand this

Examples of Risk-Taking:  At some point in time, high potential candidates have experience of taking the risk (Internally within an Enterprise as an Intrapreneur or joining a startup).  The outcome of that risk does not matter, but the training that goes with it is critical

The Scale Factor or the lack of it:  A person who is mastering and excelling in Job1 may not be the right High Potential Performer for Job2.  There is a difference between High Performance and High Potential.  An awesome scriptwriter bringing all kinds of data sets into a database and analyzing trends may not scale into, say, an Analytics Manager.  Certain things are unique about High Potential attributes, and this needs to be understood in detail

Security Compliance Engineer and Data Protection Engineer job roles are emerging and changing fast in Enterprises.  We have given the critical workloads and emerging skills around the same.  Hope you find this useful