Nordic HR: Finding and Managing Talent

Economic recovery has yet to return to some areas of Europe, yet the Nordic countries are seeing an upsurge in recruitment as they find business conditions improving – particularly in Sweden.

Monster's European employment index for December 2010 shows Sweden, along with Germany, has been among those seeing the strongest long-term recoveries in vacancies, with the recruitment experts noting online demand for positions was "trending at notably higher levels compared to last year."

This was a view echoed by the Manpower employment outlook survey for the first quarter of 2010, which placed hiring activity in Sweden among the highest in the entire Europe, Middle East and Africa region.

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Volvo, for example, recently announced it is to create 200 more jobs at its Gothenburg plant in Sweden in preparation for higher demand for its vehicles in the coming years.

Yet despite the large pool of workers available due to continuing high levels of unemployment, finding the top talent remains an issue.

Talent Management

Last year, Manpower highlighted how the general trend was for HR professionals to adopt a too short-term approach to recruiting and management within their organisations, sometimes to the detriment of the business.

Jeff Joerres, Manpower chairman and chief executive officer, explained: "In the current economic environment, employers are thinking short-term about talent needs, but if businesses don't change this mindset, external forces in the rapidly-changing world of work will leave them talent-poor.

According to Joerres, businesses should increasingly be focusing on a five to ten year talent plan, identifying which skills they will require in both the long and short-term.

"This means building from within by placing high-potential employees and top performers in business-critical areas, as well as hiring in from outside," he added.

Using HR Software

The increasing use of such applications is expected to see the market for HR software experience a compound annual growth rate of 14.5 percent between 2009 and 2013, according to research by Bharatbook.

A number of factors were said to be behind this growth, such as the need for companies to effectively manage their workforce, track individual performance and automate some functions, however there were also said to be a number of barriers.

Distributed denial of service or denial of service attacks were said to be among the issues affecting HR software, and in particular web based operations, which could have some questioning their safety for HR operations which deal with high levels of personal data.

Looking at the possibility for using Saas, research conducted by Gartner found last year generally such services were used for dealing with expenses, customer services and financial management. Although the vast majority of respondents said they were planning to up their investment in this area.