Top tips for HR Flexibility is key to winning the talent war By David Ingham Bruce Tulgan says companies should pay for performance and nothing else. Bruce Tulgan is an internationally acclaimed consultant on new management practices for the New Economy. His company, RainmakerThinking , is a research and consulting firm launched to explore the working lives of those born after 1963. The transformation of the relationship between employers and employees has much more to do with an increasingly efficient, fluid labor market. Free agents are not born of never-ending good news, nor are they shameless job hoppers.
Free agents are the reluctant offspring of the end of job security.
Even at the height of the economic boom, there was no job security. Downsizing reached record highs as unemployment reached record lows. In fact, the global economic boom was built largely on the end of job security and increasingly lean, flexible companies. What's going on is that companies are leaner than they've ever been, more flexible than they've ever been, more ruthless than they've ever been, and individuals, for their part, are more aggressive in their careers. There's a much more efficient labor market and most employers have not retooled their expectations, systems and competencies for employing people, and as a result their expectations, systems and competencies are out of synch with the more fluid labor market, and that's why most companies are experiencing a staffing crisis.