An article entitled “Managing Your Career as a Business” in today’s New York Times business section discusses my career experiences and what I’m seeing in the job market:

Joy Chen followed her own entrepreneurial career path. Ms. Chen, with a master’s degree in business administration from the Anderson School of Management at the University of California, Los Angeles, had been a deputy mayor of Los Angeles and then went to work for Heidrick & Struggles, the management search firm. She left to start her own recruiting firm, Chen Partners in 2007, just as the economy started to slow. Business was initially scarce, she said. “Many employers were even then hunkering down.”

Then this year, Ms. Chen said, things changed. “Many companies noticed that after all the layoffs and uncertainty, skilled people were available at lower salary demands than in former years. And now business is very active.” The lesson of the economy’s ups and downs, she said, is that workers cannot let hard times or lower pay discourage them. “It’s a change in the market, not a depreciation of who you are as a person.”

The article points out that you need to develop a more entrepreneurial mindset about managing your own career.  The recession has laid to rest the notion that your company will take care of that for you. I’m always meeting people who make the mistake of being highly strategic on behalf of their companies, but not at all strategic for themselves.  Certainly, when a company gives you a set of responsibilities you should identify with your job and try to excel in it. But just as the recession is forcing companies to innovate, people should innovate on their own behalf.

One way to be entrepreneurial, of course, is to go out and create your own company. My very first boss, Yue-Sai Kan (靳羽西), is China’s most famous woman, having built a media and retail conglomerate there over the past 30 years. When I started Chen Partners, I recalled her advice: “Never just work for other people. They could fire you!”

Candidates sometimes ask me what it’s like to own a small business. I never discourage them from exploring it, though if everyone ran off and started a business, I myself would be out of business. Being an entrepreneur is an exhilarating experience, and headhunting is a special joy. It’s exciting to help great people grow their companies.

This recession has turned many of our previously-held assumptions upside down. One lesson we may take away is that now, we’re all working for ourselves. That’s true whether we’re doing so within a larger company or in one that we’ve created ourselves.

• What jobs are companies upgrading?
• What jobs should I consider upgrading?”

These are the two most common questions people have been asking me following my last blog post “Behind the Layoff Numbers, Companies are Upgrading Their Talent.”

The answer in both cases: jobs that require “pivotal talent.” “Pivotal” is not synonymous with “important.” Pivotal talents are those game-changing employees whose performance can make or break the bottom line.

Two of the best thinkers on this subject are John Boudreau and Pete Ramstad, whose book, Beyond HR: The New Science of Human Capital, has helped shape my thinking on how to connect business strategy to human capital strategy.

In a workshop I once attended, John and Pete offered a fictitious case study involving FedEx and pivotal talent. The board of FedEx pronounces Asia as their #1 growth market and key to the company’s future. Many companies make such pronouncements, and then fail to put in the people they need to succeed there. FedEx next analyzes their Asia growth processes, identifying the most important bottlenecks to that growth. (You may recall from business school that a “bottleneck” is a key constraint which, if removed, causes the entire process to work better.) A major bottleneck is the periodic assigning of landing rights at key airports in the region. By securing those landing rights, FedEx could grow in Asia; without those landing rights, growth of the entire enterprise would be compromised.

FedEx realizes that the people who secure those landing rights are pivotal to the future growth not only at those airports, but of the enterprise as a whole. Those community liaisons are pivotal talents.

How much compensation should FedEx pay to recruit and lock up the few individuals in each market with the knowledge, skills and connections to secure those landing rights? Further, what if they could poach those individuals from DHL or UPS and not only secure their competitive advantage for years to come, but also neutralize their competition?

This chart demonstrates the talent pool of pilots versus community liaisons:

Pilots are unquestionably important to the business of FedEx. Assuming the pilots have a basic level of competence, though, improving pilot quality yields little additional value. But at key airports where landing rights are at stake, the difference in value to FedEx between the worst and best community liaisons is huge.

Who are the FedEx community liaisons at your company?

Before reflexively deploying traditional strategies like across-the-board layoffs and pay cuts, evaluate your approach to “pivotal talent,” those game-changing employees whose performance can make or break the bottom line. As market conditions evolve and business objectives quickly change, you’ll need the right blend of critical skills to succeed. Focusing on your pivotal talent can provide you a major competitive advantage over the next 18-24 months.

Consider:

• What processes does your company need to win in your marketplace? Which are potentially pivotal? What are the key bottlenecks?
• At those pivot points, which are the jobs where performance quality will determine success?
• Do you have the people you need in those pivotal jobs?

If not, now is the time to upgrade. The job market, while brutal for job-seekers, has never been better for employers. You can access talent now that will set up your company for years. If you’d like to discuss whether Chen Partners can help ensure that you get the right talent in those pivotal roles, shoot me an email.

If you do have the right pivotal talent, invest in them now. Wrap your arms around them. Lock them up with incentives. Focus on their development. Otherwise, the next call they take could be mine.

Companies everywhere are trying to reinvent themselves for a future they could not have imagined a year ago. Problem is, their human capital practices are not keeping up with their shifts in strategy.

I was out drinking with a senior partner at a well-known global consulting firm. He was leading a campus-recruiting project to hire students from China as they graduated from American universities. After all, it’s the era of the global consumer, and 53% of executives say that China and India will be vital to their success in the next five years. This project sounded like a good way for his firm to stay ahead of their clients’ needs.

He and his team had just been to UCLA. I asked how things went. Not well, he replied. Now I happen to know that UCLA is commonly called the “University of Caucasians Living Among Asians,” so I wondered why all those Chinese students didn’t fit the bill.

He said that they were uniformly smart and ambitious, but lacked “cultural fit.” In fact, he complained, one student came into the interview in a pastel suit, his hair in a pompadour. Elvis on top, Miami Vice below.

Research shows that, as a matter of human nature, when we meet someone, we size him up within five minutes, and then that initial impression colors not only our entire meeting, but also our recollection of that meeting. In recruiting, we call it the “Halos and Horns Effect.”

A Brooks Brothers model would have had a better chance getting past those crucial first minutes with my friend’s firm.

But this begs the question: What culture is this firm is recruiting to?

The Chinese students at UCLA now are China’s brightest, richest, most connected, best English-speaking, young people. For a firm that has tied its future to winning and executing China business, these candidates could be exceptionally well-equipped to helping the firm execute on those strategies.

It’s in the boardroom that companies announce new strategies and organizational structures, but it’s on the frontlines of people-management that the rubber meets the road.  Companies should routinely review their human capital practices to ensure they’re aligned with their strategies.

Otherwise, that Elvis lookalike who gets away could be the one who walks across the street to help your competitor eat your shorts.