Victor Assad

Improving Organization Performance

2000-12-15

Implementing a multi-year strategic initiative to improve the organization's cost cutting and innovation through strategic communications, an organization-wide gain sharing program, chartering department-by-department project teams, and monthly reviews. The outcome was improved one time performance and improved employee morale and financial performance.

Improving Recruiting

2006-04-28

Cut recruiting cycle time by 50% and costs per hire by 25% and hired over 650 medical device employees in 18 months, enabling R&D development and improved sales.

HR Technology

Member of Cardiac Rhythm Disease Management Strategic Team selected and implemented new global payroll, benefits and talent management system. Selected and implemented Workday.

St. John's University, St. Cloud, MN

Bachelor of Arts

History

University of MInnesota, Minneapolis

Master of Arts

Industrial Relations

Principal, Metrus Institute, Inc.

Metrus Institute, Inc.

“Hack Recruiting is an essential read for anyone hiring employees or gig workers today—from employer branding to technology to recruiting processes, it offers fresh thinking based on research and years of experience. Victor Assad is a rare author who understands that strategy and metrics drive successful recruiting in a world of intense competition for talent—many kudos to Assad for Hack Recruiting.”

Founder and CEO

Bevov

Praise for "Hack Recruiting" - Must read book if you are a recruiter or talent acquisition head. It goes over best practices and hacks each step of recruiting.

Founder and CEO

ThisWay Global

Victor Assad uncovers longstanding empirical research from I/O psychologists on how to best match job candidates to jobs and the best of today's digital technology. He sees a world (that is emerging today) in which AI ontologies (which are identifying information and relationships about today's global and diverse workforces) will make significant improvements for matching candidates to jobs while reducing recruiting cycle times, costs and selection biases. Victor points out that HR now has the digital tools it needs to dramatically transform recruiting and the role of the recruiter. HR can now build strategic talent pools, improve the employee experience, and digitally collect insightful analytics that will open up a new era of understanding on what truly drives employee performance and innovation.

“It Is Time to Face the Truth About Employee Engagement”

DisruptHR San Francisco Bay Area  Domenico Winery, San Carlos, CA

2018-05-31

“Ten Talent Strategies to Support Innovation"

“Toward Better Innovation Metrics for Business.” Sponsored by The Conference Board and hosted by Xerox PARC.  Xerox PARC in Palo Alto CA

2018-07-26

“Talent Strategies to Support Cultures of Innovation. Stanford Park Hotel, Menlo Park, CA.

Bay Area HR Executive Council  Stanford Park Hotel, Menlo Park, CA

2018-10-17

Learn the traits of highly innovative companies and how they drive profitable growth!

Executive teams face continual change, the challenge of digitizing their operations, and disruptive competition from outside their industries. They find that their own innovative solutions for new products, services, and business models are lacking. As a result, their financial projects for profitable growth are below stakeholder expectations.

Executive teams will learn the traits of companies who have mastered ongoing innovative while also maintaining outstanding financial performance. More critically, they will learn approaches they can implement to improve their ability to change, innovate, and grow profitably.

The No. 1 non-pay employee benefit that improves your productivity and cuts costs.

Whether called telecommuting, remote work, or mobile work, flexible work arrangements are the number 1 non-pay benefit for today’s workforce. They are equally beneficial for companies because they create a more engaged, loyal and productive workforce, cost savings of up to $10k per employee, and reductions from carbon emissions.

Flexible work arrangements solve the problem of attracting and retaining great employees in our tight talent economy and improving productivity and employee engagement.

Flexible work arrangements, as well as open office design, have been hot topics for articles and blogs, especially over the past four years. Passions are high on both sides of the discussion. Unfortunately, the debaters often miss the point. It is not one vs. the other. Rather, it is a customized approach, where every company creates the flexible work arrangements and office design that best fits its culture and business strategies.

Attendees will learn the criteria that make jobs ideal for flex-work, and the workplace norms, digital technology, and office designs to put in place to maximize flexible-work. A successful case study will be shared, which enabled a company to move out of two buildings, save over $1.2M a year in real estate costs, and improve employee recruiting, productivity, and engagement.

Hack Recruiting: You Won't Recognize Recruiting in the 2020s

Recruiters and human resources now have the same tools available to them that have been available for years to marketing leaders: chatbots, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and soon blockchain.

HR leaders can transform HR and make it more strategic and analytical, and an essential partner for driving profitable growth in companies. HR leaders can build an employer brand just as effectively as marketing leaders build a company’s customer brand.

It is time to put these digital tools to use. But technology is not a silver bullet by itself. HR organizations need also to lean out their recruiting operations, use the best interviewing techniques and assessments, measure their progress, and deliver the applicant and employee experiences that live up to their employer brands.

It is time to start hacking!

Managing Partner

C. Brooke Dobne, PhD. and Ed Colby InnovationOne

2017-01-02

InnovationOne LLC is a research and consulting organization that assesses and benchmarks the culture and innovation capability of organizations. The assessment identifies the organization's strength and development issues across the 12 drivers of innovation. We then assist organizations with improving their innovation strategies and capabilities and their cultures of innovation.

Our InnovationOne Health Index is an empirically developed assessment which has a database of over 3,000 organizations. It has been used by over 70 organizations.

View more

Global State of Innovation 2019

The Conference Board

2019-11-20

New research is underway which will provide extraordinary insights for you on how companies become innovative.

InnovationOne, LLC and The Conference Board are tabulating the results of our 2019 Global State of Innovation Survey.

Our 2017 Global State of Innovation Survey showed that highly innovative companies invest in developing collaborative and innovative cultures, digital technology, and steadfastly measure their innovation programs and projects. These innovative companies also elevated innovation to a strategic imperative and maintained strong relationships with their customers and external partners.

Our 2019 Survey will add to your knowledge of innovative companies and the new practices, methods, tools, and talent strategies that drive innovation in organizations.

Watch for its release!

View more

New Team Kickoffs — One and Two Day Options

This workshop is designed to kick off new project and enterprise-wide teams to jump start their problem solving and innovation.

Many teams are doomed to struggle because they don’t fully understand the problem they are to solve and the importance of their work for the success of the company. Many team members never learn to trust each other and therefore never are comfortable taking risks. In addition, many teams don’t understand the their goals, the resources they can call upon, their key milestones, the roles among the members of the team, how to effectively raise and resolve conflict, and how to make decisions.

In this workshop, the team leader and team members will learn:

--The vision or end state the executive had in mind for them when they were created and how their work will impact the company and its customers.
--The end goal and they will define the step goals which need to be attained to reach their end goal by the deadline.
--The roles of each team member.
--The operating norms for the team to communicate with each other, for meetings, and storing and accessing key materials and documents.
--What resources or experts from the company or from outside the company that are available to assist the team in resolving issues and being innovative.
--How to constructively problem solve, resolve conflict and make decisions that stick.
--When and how to quickly escalate issues so the team does not bog down.

I invite you to read my blog on effective teams, “What Makes A Team Smart?” This training is offered in one or a two-day version.

Day 1: The team will build a shared alignment to company’s vision, strategies and long-term outcomes, and the team’s role in achieving those outcomes. The team will establish goals, operating norms, and decision rights.

Day 2: Each individual team member will go through the Skills Deployment Inventory (SDI), which will help each team member, and the team as a whole, learn their personal communication styles during normal circumstances and when they are under stress.

This training also provides essential steps to diffuse and resolve the conflict. During this training, team members will learn the strengths and weaknesses of their communication styles and how it positively and negatively impacts each other and the team as a whole.

The result will be a more harmonious, trusting team that is better aligned to their common goals and produces higher results.

View more

Accelerate Innovation Group Hack--Two Day Workshop

In many organizations, no process exists to allow employees to brainstorm ideas, collaborate, move ideas forward, prototype and evaluate their projects. In many cases, employees do not know how to conduct an analysis and prepare a business case with a return on investment analysis to justify their innovative ideas.

The Accelerate Innovation Group Hack remedies these concerns and provides organizations with a methodology to generate, evaluate and approve innovations—through top management–in two days.

With our methodology, organizations can rapidly break through the barriers of their organizations and generate, build upon, and implement innovation that improves their organizational success.

Overview:

Participants in this workshop will learn-by-doing the Accelerate Innovation Group Hack Process. This is a seven-step process, which includes empathy, definition, ideation, business case development, prototype, test, and implementation.

Participants will engage in the first four stages and develop a proposal with a business case to take back to their executive leaders for a decision. Participants will learn about group processes. They will use tools for brainstorming, prioritizing ideas, developing a business case and for pitching an innovation proposal to top management.

Key Learning Objectives –Participants will learn:

-The research behind what drives innovation and transformation in organizations including a review of new innovation-methodologies and digital technologies.

-How leadership, culture, processes and systems, and decision-making accelerates the implementation of the best innovation projects. This review will include The Six Traits of Highly Innovative Companies and the findings of our 2017 Global State of Innovation Survey with The Conference Board.

--Learn and use a group brainstorming process to improve innovation in the strategic growth and opportunity focus areas for their organizations.

--Use a group process to define categories for the ideas proposed, and then group those ideas into these categories. From each category, choose the ideas that have the best opportunity for success.

--Develop project plans for for each selected idea that will create the opportunity and solution statement. The project plans will also report on analysis, steps for implementation, expected outcomes,

View more

Executive Innovation Workshop- One Day, with Assessment

This one-day workshop is for executive teams who, for one reason or another, are struggling with igniting the innovation of their companies. Many of these executive teams have recently tried different solutions to ignite their innovation but did not obtain all the outcomes they wanted. For many, they are uncertain about what to do next.

These executive teams are usually facing new disruptive competition from outside their industries or find that their own innovative solutions for new products, services, and business models are lacking. And as a result, their financial projects for profitable growth are below stakeholder expectations.

The executive teams who take this workshop see the big picture challenging their organizations. They realize that only a comprehensive approach to improving innovation will truly create a competitive advantage and improve profitable growth.

In this workshop, the participants will be provided a review of the latest research on innovation and will learn the traits of highly innovative companies and how they are able to remain innovative, year in and year out. Workshop attendees will also learn the six mistakes companies make when trying to improve their innovation, and the steps to take to overcome these common mistakes. Relevant case studies of innovative companies will also be shared during the workshop.

Participants will also be asked to complete the InnovationOne Health Index—Executive Version. Based on the Health Index, the participants will learn the strengths and weaknesses of their innovation capability and culture. In addition, they will receive a benchmark report based on their Health Index results, which will show them their relative strengths and weaknesses based on their industry or country. More importantly, participants will receive recommendations on the steps they can take next week, next quarter, and over the next couple of years to become a leading innovative company in their industry.

Unlike other innovation organizational assessments, the InnovationOne Health Index is based on over 15 years of scientific research by InnovationOne founder, C Brooke Dobni, Ph.D. Dr. Dobni’s research has uncovered how innovative companies become and remain innovative. Because we have over 3,000 organizations in our database, we can confidently compare your results to the results of other organizations and provide specific recommendations the steps to take to improve your innovation.

View more

Why Flex Work Is Not a Stretch

Ed Frauenheim

2013-05-29

Yahoo and Best Buy have reduced job flexibility for workers. Is the trend toward all hands on deck in the office or creating a schedule that's friendly to employees' lives?

Despite blows to flexible work at Yahoo Inc. and Best Buy Co., the practice is alive and well at medical device-maker Medtronic Inc according to Victor Assad, Sr. H R Director for Medtronic's Coronary and Peripheral business. Their flexible work arrangements are improving productivity and employee morale and saving millions in costs and carbon emissions.

View more

CEOs Must Do These 3 Things To Turbocharge Innovation

Victor Assad and Ataman Ozyildirim

2017-11-25

Across the globe, one business challenge has the ear of CEOs like few others: innovation.

Six in 10 surveyed executives think the chance to avoid falling behind their competitors has passed. Much of the anxiety from today’s business environment ties back to their commitment – or lack thereof – to innovation.

For CEOs looking to make their companies competitive amid unprecedented competition, taking three innovation-focused steps could go a long way.

View more

3 Ways Talent Executives Can Accelerate Innovation in 2018

Victor Assad and Ataman Ozyildirim

2017-12-20

Managing culture, embracing metrics and pursuing evolving technologies are among the top priorities talent leaders should focus on in the New Year.

View more