Key to our growth strategy is a continuous supply of current and future talent. Our greatest differentiator is our employees' collective talent. Talent management means hiring people with the right skills and aligning their career development and goals with our corporate strategy.

To be competitive in the marketplace, we focus on:

• Attraction: We continue to compete with our peers for a shrinking number of skilled workers. We leverage our global resources to provide a superior experience to our candidates and our employees.
• Engagement: We make work exciting, engaging and meaningful for our employees, so they can be productive, innovative and satisfied.
• Development:  We invest in our employees through career development and advancement opportunities. This strengthens our reputation as a desirable place to work.
• Retention: Our work in engagement and development are key to retention, including inclusion and diversity, career management, and work-life balance.

Learn more about the skills we look for in our professional candidates.

As a core function of Corporate Human Resources, our Talent Acquisition team leads global recruitment activities for university, professional and executive talent needs. The team develops and executes strategies that enable Eaton to attract and hire excellent talent while providing a positive candidate experience. Focus areas include: 

• Establishing best practices, workflow processes and standardization for recruiting, assessing and selecting talent.
• Expanding capabilities to identify excellent talent with training, workforce planning initiatives and diversity recruitment strategies.
• Establishing and growing a compelling employer brand.
• Leveraging new technologies to enhance recruiting, hiring and onboarding experiences for candidates and our internal hiring teams.

Success is measured through key performance metrics, including customer service ratings. The team takes feedback seriously, using it to continuously improve the function by taking action on feedback gathered from surveys delivered to candidates, new hires and hiring teams.  

Engaged employees are key to achieving our business strategy and vision. When we fully engage our employees they are more productive, innovative and satisfied in their work. To understand the employee experience and how it influences our success, our employee listening program is designed to gather information at different points along the employee life cycle (onboarding through exit). Our surveys focus on outcomes (removing barriers to achieve high performance and improve the employee experience) and take an integrated approach to measurement and analysis.

We create focused action plans and leverage the right tools at the right time to address what is heard.  Managers across, up and down the organization are engaged in this process, so actions can be addressed at the appropriate level.

Part of attracting and retaining the very best talent is helping our employees weigh work, family and personal demands.

Learn more about balancing work-life effectiveness at Eaton.

We are committed to continuous learning across the organization. The Eaton Business System (EBS) — a set of standardized tools and processes that allows us to work globally as One Eaton across diverse business groups and regions — supports information sharing through courses, resource groups and knowledge transfer tools and sites.

Eaton University, our online corporate university, offers an extensive portfolio of learning resources for our employees and stakeholders to advance their knowledge. Through leadership development courses, we foster our future leaders. We offer individual employees the resources and information they need to continuously improve their skills and performance.

Our performance management system, Achieving Performance Excellence (APEX) links an employee's performance to organizational success. APEX processes and tools enhance goal setting and alignment, development planning, tracking progress, coaching and performance evaluation.

Career management tools provide employees with the knowledge they need to take powerful action and drive their careers forward. A robust website offers training and tools for both managers and employees, supporting engagement in employee career development. The principle elements of the career framework for managers are directly linked to the principle elements for employees. This integrated approach facilitates the dialogue needed to discover, create, and help employees meet their aspirations.  The tools prompt managers to help employees thrive by identifying specific actions and impacts.

We are committed to continual learning across the organization. Eaton University offers an extensive portfolio of learning resources where employees can advance their knowledge including virtual classrooms, which facilitate global audience participation and provide a more cost-effective way of providing key learning programs.

Our regional Eaton University learning hubs and online colleges — including Eaton’s “College of Personal Skills”— offer a variety of learning options dedicated to building employee functional and leadership competencies in key areas such as critical thinking, interpersonal and communications skills, productivity tools and Eaton business knowledge. 

Driving performance in all areas of talent management requires good leaders. Our invitation-only “In the Zone” Leadership Development Programs help employees assessed to have strong future career potential to grow into larger roles. Three levels are offered: Executives; Advanced (mid-level) Leaders; and Future (early career) Leaders. The program covers business, team and personal leadership topics. It is designed to accelerate participants’ knowledge of our business and their readiness for larger roles. “In the Zone” programs are held globally, with strong senior leader engagement and support.

Our focus on leadership excellence is expanding to include a core curriculum for leaders (front line leaders, mid-level, executives, general managers and others). We strive to strengthen current leaders’ competencies and develop a pipeline of future leaders of the company.

Talent management fuels our global growth strategy with talent. We focus on activities with the highest impact on advancing our workforce over time. To determine what those activities should be, we leverage EBS planning processes to get direction and establish targets. For example, our Organizational Capability Assessment (OCA) and succession planning processes regularly measure talent gaps across each region, business and function.

Our partnerships with external organizations help to advance our talent management program. We are a member of Bersin by Deloitte, through which we have access to benchmark studies, research and HR tools.