Once upon a time, in the age-old, gritty world of business mergers and acquisitions, the focus was on acquiring companies in order to get its patents, property, products, processes, power or prestige. Think of AT&T acquiring Bell South in 2006 for $83 Billion and Exxon acquiring Mobile in 1998 for $80.3 Billion. The advertising industry used serial mergers to achieve a global presence, attain substantial influence over media, and offer a full range of marketing services to international clientele. In some cases, corporate acquisitions have been used to keep patents out of the hands of those who might be tempted to assert them against a mega corporation. But, while companies still want to acquire innovative institutions and inventive ideas, corporate acquisition efforts have taken an odd and interesting turn in the 21st century. Instead of buying the competition’s better widgets or customer base, today’s mega corporations are acquiring companies just to get its employees.
Big business has begun acquiring companies – sometimes lackluster startups — just to get the staff who work there. The world of corporate acquisitions has expanded into the realm of recruiting and HR. It is perhaps the ultimate confirmation that a company’s greatest assets are its people. But this approach is now becoming a common – if not a common sense — approach for tech giants fighting to hire the most brilliant leaders, engineers and programmers in the world. The real question is whether this approach to talent acquisition is effective and can it work for other industries too? Does it make sense to spend money – sometimes big money — buying a company in the hopes that the talent will stay long-term? And does that mean, in essence, that companies are selling “human talent”? Continue reading →

When looking to hire employees, managers often confuse talents, skills, knowledge and strengths. A talent is an innate ability, while a skill is an ability that is learned and nurtured over time. A person might be a naturally-gifted writer even while never having taken any kind of writing class. That is a talent. That same person might also take a course in online advertising and attain the Google Adwords Certification. That is a skill. If that person attends a college and takes a host of classes in business, sales and marketing, that person attains knowledge – and perhaps a degree – in business administration. If that person then gets a job in which she is using her writing talents, online marketing skills, and sales and marketing knowledge, over time this will become her strength. A strength is the ability to consistently produce a positive outcome through superior performance of specific tasks. When a company recruits and hires staff, it looks for people who have particular talents, skills and knowledge.
However, there are certain qualities that are very important for employees to have which are not innate talents, nurtured skills or learned knowledge. These are often traits that are simply a part of who the person is. Over time, some of these traits can be honed, but they are generally not “learnable”. Last week, we considered five of these innate qualities: being on time every day; having a strong work ethic; putting forth maximum effort; having affirmative body language; and having a passion for work. While these might seem like things that can be learned, the truth is that people don’t generally change their work ethic, effort, passion, or body language. They can try to improve those things for a short time, but they usually revert back to their normal level of energy, their true degree of passion, their ingrained body language and their usual work ethic in time. The same is true of their attendance and punctuality. A person might do better for a while, but eventually a person who has a problem with punctuality or attendance will revert back to those bad habits. That is why screening for these qualities in new hires is so important.
Here are five more invaluable qualities that an employee should have and employer should want that requires absolutely zero talent. Continue reading →