Moving beyond Appraisals

Performance Appraisal and Management have been close to the heart of many HR professionals because this is what is suppose to align business and individual goals. Sadly, as many of us may not like to really accept it, its a process which has become more like a compulsory year end event.

Come year end and the routine task of “finishing" appraisals start in most of the organization. No matter how much HR would want it to be a disciplined exercise the fact remains that neither the assessor nor the assesses see value in the process. For an assessor its assigning a value to his / her perception of the individual's performance throughout the year and for assessees its a mechanism to achieve a rating which can lead to compensation changes. Some assesses also feel that ratings and the payouts are predetermined.

Strange but true, varied models, mechanisms have failed to change this.
Another Appraisal exercise undertaken by the organization is Potential Appraisal. Again this is an exercise which really does not result into something meaningful until the career pathing is done properly and rigourously followed.

This made me think is there something beyond Performance and Potential Appraisal organizations should look at ? may be yes, its time to introduce Human Performance Forecasting and Human Performance Reliability as the next concepts and practices. More thoughts on these areas to follow in my next blogs

Innovative Networking

Gautam blogged on a interesting subject here what he talks about is how recruiters are using status update to innovatively advertise vacancies.
He also points out to the fact that they are bypassing the LinkedIn Job facility which is a paid service.
I guess this is where the real challenge of networking lies. Networking has no boundaries and therefore it can present / manifest itself in various ways and the service providers would have to keep ways and means to provide services which are both free and paid to the target segments. How for example, identifying recruiters as a separate category, when the person enrolls ?
It's easier said than done, because this is what we see in a network sphere, when the power of web 2.0 spreads to organizations a similar situation would also take place there, and the question is are we ready to face it ???