Attracting IT Talent: The Human Factor - ' Planning the Workforce of '

Experts and analysts agree that attracting and retaining young talent is the most vexing challenge facing employers today. No one knows that better than Hyatt Hotels Corp., which has a young workforce and a very strong culture of promoting its own people—80 percent of all promotions on the management side of the Chicago-based hotelier come from within. It's part of their basic business strategy to retain talented young people.

About three years ago, the company installed a talent management system from Dublin, Calif.-based Taleo Corp., and it has made the process significantly more manageable, says Randy Goldberg, executive director of recruiting at Hyatt, which operates more than 200 hotels and resorts around the world. "All of our current employees have a profile of themselves in the system. And we communicate quarterly to our entire management and staff, asking them to update their profiles: Who you are, your address, current job, where located, where you would like to be, when you would like to move, what position you're interested in."

So when a new position opens in, say, Las Vegas, HR executives can look at who's interested in moving there, and start calling them. "It used to be that we had no way of telling who wanted what job. I used to get calls from people saying, 'Gee, I wish I'd known about that position in Las Vegas, because I've always wanted to go there." I don't get those calls any more.

In addition to the significant boost in morale the system has brought to Hyatt, Goldberg notes that his newest, youngest employees, those just coming out of college, particularly like the system. "It reinforces what we told them on campus—that Hyatt promotes from within, and that there's lots of opportunity at Hyatt."

The company has instituted other technologies that Goldberg feels appeal especially to younger workers, including an internal discussion board that only young managers are allowed to use. "It's amazing how much they know about what happens in the company—that plans to open a new hotel in Las Vegas, for instance, are five months ahead of schedule. The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. It's like myspace.com without the photos," he says.

In Goldberg's view, such systems are critical to retaining good young employees. "Younger workers coming in are thrilled by how open this company is. Yet some senior managers still don't understand just how important social networking and the free flow of communication is to younger workers."

Expect to see more such platforms coming to corporations of all sizes as they look for new ways to attract, assess and keep talented young people. Companies will need to provide younger workers with an open, flexible, socially and intellectually stimulating work environment in which they can thrive. And that will require better collaboration software, e-learning systems, and a variety of social networking software—for use by both employees and managers looking to keep track of employees' whereabouts, activities and skills—even gaming and virtual worlds.

Says Goldberg: "Younger workers today expect this kind of openness. Companies that try to manage and control that kind of information are going to have a much harder time with the generation that's now coming out of school."

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