The Must-Read Articles for Talent Professionals This Week

If your company is looking to make progress on employee engagement, you may want to get out your trowel, sharpen your clippers, and put on a sensible pair of boots because the garden may be where you should be looking for inspiration.

According to a recent article from Forbes, employee engagement scores really haven’t changed much in nearly 20 years, despite good intentions, increased investments, and a renewed focus spurred on by the pandemic. The problem, leadership strategist and author Dan Pontefract told Forbes, is that companies have been trying to evaluate the wrong thing and may have unrealistic expectations of what employee engagement even means.

“Dan’s premise,” writes Forbes, “is that humans grow the way a garden grows, with periods of blooming, budding, stuntedness, or renewal, and that the way leaders support employees and bring out their best is analogous to how a thoughtful gardener cares for — and benefits from — the garden.”

To learn more about when employees may need a little fertilizer or just to be left alone for the winter, be sure to dig into Forbes’s piece at the top of our list below of must-read articles for talent professionals. And further down our list, you can find out what’s next for chief diversity officers; why time to alignment may be your missing recruiting metric; and why a happily employed programmer took the time to fill out a whopping 250 job applications.

Here are the must-read articles from this week:

1. Now Focus on Human Needs Because Employee Engagement Has Failed (Forbes)

2. What’s Next for Chief Diversity Officers? (Fast Company)

3. Why Isn’t ‘Candidate Waiting Time’ a Key Metric Used in the Recruitment Industry? (Darren Bush on LinkedIn)

4. Why You Should Pay Attention to Gen Z’s Desire to Learn and Build Relationships (Lisa Friscia on LinkedIn)

5. The Most Important Recruiting Metric You’ve Never Heard Of: Time to Alignment (LinkedIn Talent Blog)

6. What Is a New-Hire Announcement? (Dr. John Sullivan on LinkedIn)

7. An Unpopular Opinion (Recruitment Isn’t Broken)

8. Some Say Recruiting Fees Are Too High, But If You Ask Me They Are ‘Basically Free’ (Mike Williams on LinkedIn)

9. Job Hunting Sucks. This Programmer Filled Out 250 Applications to Find Out Why (Wired)

10. The Five-Day Office Week Is Dead (The New York Times)

Here is the must-listen podcast:

Predicting the Future of Recruiting with Matt Alder (The Modern Recruiter)