How IC Reports can benefit prospective employees

Employee turnover is an undesirable byproduct of the Information age. Gone are the days when employees were known to eke out a career in a single company, be counted as a loyalist and retire with a healthy pension and a company embossed gold plated watch. Today’s knowledge workers seek challenges every day in the hope of maximizing her knowledge and hopefully her income. Job dissatisfaction in today’s age is not something that knowledge workers take lightly or tolerate for long. The worldwide mushrooming of job portals and manpower staffing agencies has ensured that fresh opportunities are always just a click or a call away. More often than not the new opportunity also comes tagged along with a higher pay packet, negating all resistance to the lure of the switch. At the same time changing jobs is fraught with peril lest the new job parallels jumping from the frying pan into the fire. Hence just as investors study the balance sheet of a company before putting their money in it, prospective employees should study the Intellectual Capital (IC) Report of the company before betting their career on it.

An IC Report is a statement of the change in intangible assets of the company linked to the core competencies that create value for the company. Prospective employees, especially those at the mid to senior management levels, should scour this report to pinpoint exactly where they will be able to add value and where they will be able to gain value in the value chain. They should approach personal interviews armed with this knowledge, using the meeting only to confirm their assumptions with the interviewer. The interviewer on the other hand should be armed with data about the human skill gaps that need to be plugged in the company’s value chain on order to be in a position to make hiring decisions in a snap. Thus an IC Report would enable prospective employees to select the right Company as well as Companies to select exactly the right employees. Performance Management would remain a mere formality thereafter.