Talent management rarely hits the headlines here in the UK, but the issue received a considerable airing in the British press this morning.

Luis Felipe Scolari’s appointment as Chelsea manager dominated the back pages, whilst Alan Sugar’s decision to say “you’re hired” to Lee McQueen – the dairyman’s son who lied on his CV and is now preparing to milk Amstrad for all their worth – grabbed the headlines in the nation’s tabloids.

After an exhaustive process – for both candidates and viewers in the case of The Apprentice – both club and company believe they’ve got the right man for the right price. And al though the rarefied atmosphere of the English Premier League and reality TV, are far removed from the rather more down-to-earth world of procurement, the recruitment principles involved in both appointments are remarkably similar to those that go on in boardrooms across the world on the daily basis.

Everyone wants the best person for the job, where experience, charisma and an ability to lead are crucial – and whether you’re earning £100,000 or £4m a year is, in reality, irrelevant.

In football, like procurement, there is a desperate dearth of managerial talent, sending the price for the best candidate sky-high. And, as in procurement, where talent gravitates to the companies with the best reputation (and the deepest wallets) then so the same thing occurs in the beautiful game.

Ironically, after seeing off his competitors McQueen declared: “I delivered. I’m Manchester United.”

If Chelsea’s new man fails to live up to expectations then he could be hearing the words that have made The Apprentice famous, before having had time to find his way from the local tube station to Stamford Bridge (for those who haven’t seen the show those words are “You’re Fired”, delivered with an evil glare and a characteristic point of the Sugar finger, although in Scolari’s case they’ll be uttered by one of the richest men in the world – Roman Abramovich).

Those procurement operations that don’t deliver can expect the same treatment.

No subject is more likely to elicit a lively response from those managing procurement operations than one concerning the ongoing need to source and, crucially, maintain talent at a time when the need for it is more chronic than ever.

With that in mind, a recent article from Wharton Management caught my eye. In it, professor Peter Cappelli, argues that company’s need to take a new approach when it comes to talent management, claiming that failing to manage your company’s talent needs “is the equivalent of failing to manage your supply chain.”

Cappelli, is the author of a soon-to-be-published book entitled Talent on Demand: Managing Talent in an Age of Uncertainty, and says that it’s high time the principles of supply chain management – most pertinently those of ensuring stock and managing risk – were applied to talent. And he has a point.

"Managing supply chains is about managing uncertainty and variability,” he says. “This same uncertainty exists inside companies with regard to talent development. Companies rarely know what they will be building five years out and what skills they will need to make that happen; they also don't know if the people they have in their pipelines are going to be around."

In such an unpredictable business area, his views are bound to strike a chord with those operating in country’s such as India and China – the front line of procurement’s war for talent.

No-one involved in procurement needs telling that the battleground for talent has got a whole lot more ugly in 2007, and, with this in mind, a recent article in Fortune magazine should be required reading for anyone with a passing interest in the subject.

The piece, which was penned by Geoff Colvin, the magazine’s editor-at-large, argues that countries are beginning to realise that their future success depends not on their resources, but on that most priceless of commodities – human capital.

“Companies have been battling for years to attract and keep the best people. Now countries are engaging in the same fight,” Colvin says. “It wasn't much of a scrap until recently. Only the United States, Western Europe, and Japan - for a while - were even contenders. They didn't beat up on one another too badly vying for the best talent because there was enough to go around.”

Not any more there isn’t. And in a week where Europe has once again outlined plans to attract more skilled workers, a plan Colvin slams as “pretty pathetic”, the battle for what he terms “human-capital supremacy”, promises to rage on.

According to Colvin, education is the key battleground, and cites comments made by Cisco CEO, John Chambers, that “anyone with a college degree should be welcome in our country, with appropriate security change,” as evidence that, in an increasingly global marketplace, nations have to adapt to the demands placed upon them.

“This international fight for talent will get much more serious,” Colvin warns. “With luck, it will lead to something new: a free market in brainpower.

Wise words indeed.

With geographical boundaries becoming increasingly blurred in modern-day business, a new study claims that when it comes to productivity American workers are leading the way.

According to a new report by the United Nations, workers from the US stay longer in the office than their European counterparts, and are only surpassed by the Norwegians when it comes to getting more done in an hour.

The figures, which are derived from dividing the country’s gross domestic product by the number of people employed, found that the average US worker produces $63,885 of wealth per year, leaving them streets ahead of their nearest rivals Ireland ($55,986), and Luxembourg ($55,641).

Belgium ($55,235) and France ($54,609) came in fourth and fifth respectively.

The report claims that those busy workers in the US also beat every EU member state when it came to generating the most output per working hour, although their $35.63 an hour was bettered by Norway ’s $37.99.

The figures represent a severe fall from grace by workers in France , who between 1994 and 2003, topped the efforts of those across the pond by over a dollar more on average.

Unsurprisingly, the UN study found that workers in Asia worked the largest number of annual hours. In seven countries – South Korea, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Hong Kong, China, Malaysia and Thailand – workers yearly hours topped 2,200.

However, whilst productivity in many of the region’s economies was still lagging behind, the advent of offshoring has led to China and East Asian countries catching up quickly with their Western counterparts, with the figures suggesting that productivity in the region had doubled in the past decade and is accelerating at a greater rate than anywhere else in the world.

That said, with workers in East Asia still only one-fifth as productive as those in industrialised countries, it’s little wonder that the US is still one of the first ports of call for some of the world’s most successful companies.

If a shortage of supply chain talent is an ongoing concern for businesses across Europe, it seems the problem is nowhere near as accute as in far-east, and in particular, China.

A recent HR summit of China’s Supply Chain Council, claimed the growth of their booming supply chain sector was in danger of stalling due to increasing talent shortages. This follows a study published by McKinsey that showed the demand for professionals in this area is far outstripping supply – at present McKinsey claim the logistics industry is facing a demand for 75,000 new employees a year in an industry that annually graduates just 5,000.

According to the Supply Chain Council companies are currently experiencing a shortage of, amongst others, logistics engineers, quality process engineers and commodity managers, all of which makes the ongoing management of ever-increasing global supply chains problematical in the extreme.

A lack of leadership, a skill which is still not readily encouraged or taught in the country, is also causing executives a headache – a point graphically illustrated by another recent survey involving nearly 60,000 business leaders in the country which claimed initiative and communication were the two most sought after, yet most hard to come by, elements of leadership.

So what can China do to address the current crisis? Well, in many ways the country has become a victim of its own success. The country’s economy has grown at such a rate it’s little surprise talent demand is outstripping talent supply. With growth set to continue there appears to be a limit to what companies can do to overcome the problem.

Bringing in foreign talent may bring expertise in certain areas, but the Chinese market is complex and takes time (something companies can ill-afford) to understand - recruit more local personnel and it will take further investment to train them up to the required standard.

All-in-all it’s a difficult situation, and how long it takes to find a solution is likely to dictate whether the future growth of the supply chain sector will rise or fall.

The Economist Intelligence Unit has identified Global Sourcing as one of the key drivers for growth in emerging markets, but highlights competition for talent as a real problem area.

The Economist Intelligence Unit's fifth annual CEO Briefing survey’s results a lack of available local talent will be the single greatest barrier to growth for firms that operate within emerging markets over the next three years.

Labour is also the primary barrier to growth in developed markets, according to the 1,006 executives surveyed worldwide (including 115 from the United States), but here the problem is high cost. As competition for talent heightens in all markets, firms will put more effort into their own training and development programmes, while also emphasising performance-based compensation more than ever.

The survey highlights the importance of emerging markets to companies as primary revenue and sourcing opportunities. A clear majority of respondents intends to invest more time and money in emerging markets over the next three years than in developed markets. For the second year running, rising demand in the developing world is seen as the most critical force at play in the global marketplace (34%), followed by global sourcing (32%).

"Although the differences between the developed and developing worlds are eroding, the report makes it clear that they are still very distinct business landscapes," says Andrew Palmer, editor of the report.

As well as battling with a shortage of skilled local workers, business leaders entering emerging markets feel that they have a poorer understanding of customers and are more worried by the risk of economic and financial volatility. For developed markets, by contrast, executives from all over the world point not just to high labour costs but also saturated markets as the critical challenges they face. Strategies differ too: firms will primarily focus on pushing new products at existing customers in developed markets, while offering existing products to new customers in emerging markets.

Commenting on the report, Andrew Cahn, Chief Executive of UK Trade & Investment said: "This report gives a crucial insight into the way executives around the world view the challenges and opportunities facing global business. Emerging markets are clearly top of the agenda, but they're not risk-free environments, and the business culture is frequently very different. It is more important than ever those corporate leaders have access to high quality, impartial advice on which to base their management decisions."

A full copy of the Economist Intelligence Unit's fifth annual CEO Briefing survey can be downloaded here.

I just returned from an 8-day visit to India organized around the theme The Future of Work. We traveled with a group of  executives from North America of which many were from the areas of talent sourcing and HR. The visit was organized by the Human Capital Institute in Toronto and DNL Global in Dallas. It was fascinating even for one who grew up in India. The delegation visited the EDS BPO center, Microsoft’s largest development center outside Redmond, various schools and attended the National HR Conference on the Future of Work.

What does this have to do with Procurement, you ask? The operative word is ‘sourcing’ as in sourcing of talent. This word seems to have entered the HR vocabulary as a broad substitute for ‘recruiting’. I like the usage. It implies having to actively search for a source of a company’s primary asset – its people – rather than simply greeting them at the front door when they apply. Sources are increasingly diverse – internal markets, passive candidates, alumni, overseas workers, headhunters, contractors, free agents, staffing firms, part timers, shift workers. It seems logical to think of recruiting as, at least, partly a sourcing activity.

Notes from the trip:

• The central equation of employment has changed, perhaps forever. In the old equation, employees offered their loyalty in exchange for security. Now they offer their talent in exchange for meaningful opportunities. This is a Daniel Pink (“A Whole New Mind”) observation and oft quoted at the conference in New Delhi. I believe that sourcing this talent will go far beyond traditional notions of recruiting. It will extend to the redesign of jobs to maximize their appeal to the knowledge workers everyone is trying to attract.
• Anything that can be done at the end of a wire will probably be outsourced sooner or later. This includes voice and data dependent processes. We visited the bustling EDS/Mphasis BPO center in Mumbai. The range of outsourced processes handled here has grown far beyond simple call center support. Work increasingly doesn’t have a specific location.
• What’s good for the goose... Many firms that previously spent huge amounts on third party outsourcers are setting up their own captive offshore shops in India and other low cost locations. This is putting a huge premium on attracting and retaining the right types of workers. Turnover in some places runs 60-70% a year and some multinationals are resorting to mutual non-poaching agreements to stem the tide.
• Progressive companies are creating positions such as ‘Chief Talent Officer’ to acknowledge the changing nature of HR. One such executive from a major multinational pharmaceutical firm was traveling with us.
• Microsoft’s largest development center outside Redmond is in Hyderabad, India. We toured the beautiful campus with its pristine buildings, a standout in the Hyderabad landscape. No formal office hours, people in the gym mid-morning, energetic people everywhere - a lot like what you’d expect at a startup. This type of energy was typical at the places we visited; a palpable sense of excitement at the possibilities that the country is just discovering.

Dynamic, enthusiastic, tenacious are the sorts of words that would have been at the top of your list for either describing your company or the type of person you wanted to recruit. Well, no longer! It isn’t just the words that might depict the fact you are aiming at a younger audience but the same applies if your approach is perceived to exclude the more recent entrants into the working world. In other words mature, considered or a certain number of years experience will not be tolerated as criteria for recruiting an individual.

As a recruitment consultancy we are extremely aware of the new Age Discrimination Act but as hiring Manager how aware are you? Even since the Act became Law we have been asked the age of an individual on several occasions, which is now something we are not at liberty to divulge for obvious reasons. You might argue that you need to know someone’s age to see if they will fit the culture of your organisation or your department but this can no longer be a consideration.

I’m sure the majority of large organisations have been aware of the Act for some time and have adapted their recruitment, retirement and dismissal policies and proceedings accordingly, but for those who haven’t then change now to avoid severe consequences.