This recession has switched most organisations’ thinking to the key requirement for survival: performance. When growth returns, it will be the high performing organisations that will be the most agile and adaptable to the new market conditions. Organisations will need the most agile and adaptable employees to fit the new conditions. What they don’t need is *Corporate Prisoners.

Within any organisation, there will be some employees that will represent a drain on the organisation. These are the Corporate Prisoners. A Corporate Prisoner is someone who works within an organisation but is not fully engaged. Their personal aspirations and needs are no longer aligned with those of the employer. Rather than move on to a new role or new organisation, the Corporate Prisoner stays – sometimes out of choice but sometimes for reasons beyond their control. It is important to recognise that some Prisoners are exactly where they want to be – they have found a niche where they can do the minimum to survive. They often operate below their full potential and resist extending beyond the boundaries of the job description. So how do you ensure that you do not recruit and therefore accummulate Corporate Prisoner’s of the future?

Resourcing Teams play a key role in reducing the Prisoner population by ensuring that organisations hire the right people for the future – not just for today. Many recruitment functions are judged primarily on short term targets such as cost per hire and time to hire which encourages a short term approach to talent acquisition. What needs to be included as a measurement of success for future resourcing strategies are Key Performance Indicators showing on a candidate’s contribution to the performance of the organisation and as well as their career progression and how this has benefitted the business.

With pressing deadlines, there is always the temptation to provide an ‘oven –ready’ candidate. Failure to assess the long term needs of the candidate and the organisation may create a Prisoner of tomorrow.

The pace of change is unlikely to get slower.  In order to get the right balance of organisational needs, Organisational Development and the business need to work together to ensure that the skills and behaviours required for future organisational success are identified.  Once recognised these skills can be used to create selection materials for future employees.  

A new set of long term recruitment success criteria needs to be agreed that covers future interest and involvement in the business, performance and career progression. The ability to change the profile of the workforce to suit business demands may also be needed which will require the use of Interim managers to cover short term resource areas – this resource could be seen as ‘Visiting Stars’.

Changes to resourcing strategies now, will affect the survival of organisations in the future. So an organisation’s ability to adapt its resourcing strategy to fit the needs of its changing business will be vital to its success.

*Taken from A Chiumento Green Paper 2009: Releasing Performance – the new agenda for HR