Talent Management - September 2008 - (Page 47)

are motivated not only by monetary rewards; they’re extremely motivated by the types of projects they get to work on. We’re mindful of those high-potential employees who, if they leave are going to leave for the next best technology or technical career, not necessarily for a higher salary. How has SAS developed its culture and facilitated employee attitudes around engagement? I’m sure many in the technical area are experiencing this, but it’s ﬁnding the very speciﬁc talent we’re looking for that has technical depth and speciﬁc domain experience like banking, manufacturing or the various industries that we tackle. Also, with low turnover and employees who have been here over 20-plus years, we’re dealing with an aging workforce and increasing numbers of retirement-eligible employees. Our products are quite deep and complicated, and there are lots of people who have a lot of knowledge. If we lost them, that would be a real detriment to the company. We track those employees who are eligible for retirement or who there’s a threat of losing and try to make sure we’re doing things to keep that knowledge within the organization. TM: these people go to obtain certiﬁcations or to attend a users’ conference in their specialization. And we’ll tap into those conferences and build a pipeline and relationships with those people. Consulting is one area where we will hire fresh, out-of-school college grads and put them through a pretty extensive boot-camp program to get them exposure to key areas of training so we can place them once they’ve gone through that training. Student programs range from strong technical universities where we hire people and put them into a summer internship program to partnering with high schools in local areas. We also have fellowships and scholarship programs, and we leverage some of the more basic strategies like referral bonuses. For us, the best word of mouth is through our employees, so we certainly leverage that. Also, we have a strong employment brand. Many people know about SAS as an employer before they even know what we actually do, and we’ve started leveraging that globally. For a long time we had a real strong employment brand in the U.S. We started to see that take off by being recognized as a best place to work in many of our international sites. We’ve done some pretty incredible things in some of the international ofﬁces where SAS is being used in some universities. Our HR and technical training staff has gone over and done SAS training classes to give the students more exposure, so when they graduate, they think of SAS. September 2008 Mann: TM: Mann: Does SAS have any processes or programs in place to attract and retain top talent? Yes, we have several things. We attend industry conferences where TM: How does SAS performance? measure workforce talent management magazine www.talentmgt.com 47 http://www.talentmgt.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Talent Management - September 2008

Talent Management - September 2008 Editor's Letter Contents Human Performance: Stop Wasting Money on Training Leading Edge: No Whining, No Excuses Learning Connections: Do You Get It? The Untapped Resource Reinventing HR Doing Compensation Right: The Winning Spread Managing Performance in the Knowledge and Innovation Worker Age Stop-The-Clock Time Management Preparing for the Future in the Public Sector SAS: Connecting People, Process and Products Talent Transformation at Textron The Price of Finding the Right Gen Y Candidate Advertiser's Index Editorial Resources Full Potential: Do What You Love, Love What You Do

Talent Management - September 2008

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