Traackr

At the end of last week, we started talking about the computer generated Top 25 Digital HR Influencer’s list. We’ll be releasing it on Thursday, noon pacific. It will be a part of the launch of our new periodical, the HRExaminer.

We built the list in partnership with Traackr. The Boston based firm is pioneering a methodological approach to the measurement of online influence. Traackr, launched their first product, the Online Authority List, this fall at Demo Fall 09. (Here’s the presentation which gives a good look at the product …scroll down the videos to the segment labeled Traackr.)

If there’s an online conversation, Traackr’s search engine and analysis tools will help you find and rank the key proponents of that conversation. The “A-list” (as they call the product) shows people, their publications, their web activity, a sense of their reach (traffic), participation in the larger conversation (resonance) and mapping to a key word cloud (relevance). It’s a tool at the forefront of marketing and sourcing in the 21st Century.

The Traackr product line is designed with marketers in mind. The idea is that any marketing exercise is really the formation of a conversation with the market. The people who are the most popular and influential are the moist significant drivers of that conversation. Traackr helps you find them.

“Traackr identifies, qualifies and facilitates the engagement of top online influencers. We sort through the massive amount of data on social media to identify the most influential individuals in their community around specific issues, markets, brands.

Traackr calculates influencers’ score based on proprietary algorithms to help marketers and PR professionals decide who they need to contact and how to reach these influencers.

Our goal is to help companies, community leaders and consumers at large strike a new balance in which the social web is not a counter-culture but rather a recognized force that helps companies collaborate with their customers and reach higher grounds. We believe online influencers to be the pivotal force to lead this change.”

If you are in the business of building a network of people in a region or a niche, Traackr is the key to identifying the central online players.

For example, you might want to reach all of the software engineers with a financial industry background in the New York metro area. Using Traackr, you could identify and reach out to the most influential online members of that community in order to secure the foundation of an online community. Enlisting the support of the influential members of the online community is a central part of any sort of recruiting or market development project.

This way of thinking about sourcing is at once very familiar and very new. Being able to quantify and identify an industry segments’s key players is exactly how you would want to go about building your telephone sourcing method.

Take a poke through Traackr’s website. Just considering what they’re up to is going to change the way you look at social media as a recruiting tool.

On Thursday, we’ll give you a close look at the folks who are most influeential in the online HR conversation.

Jobvite

There are a ton of companies moving into the use of social media for recruiting. None are as advanced and focused as Jobvite. The Burlingame, CA startup, is the industry leader in the development of innovation and functionality in Social Recruiting.

The company began its life as a referral driven Applicant Tracking System. As it began to catch the social media wave, its market presence began to include social media features from Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Ultimately, the market wanted to be able to have just the social recruiting functions.

While Jobvite will easily perform various job board placement functions, the core idea of the service is to build solid referral networks using social media. In other words, Jobvite competes easily with traditional job placement services and the new emerging social media recruiting tools. But it has an astonishing difference.

Where most of the other tools are built on a series of scripts, Jobvite is a standalone software application. The development team is a polished Silicon Valley startup crew with deep industry experience. The application is data savvy and uses the client’s recruiting experience to make the client smarter.

It’s easier to think of Jobvite as great referral recruiting than as a social media dashboard (although it certainly offers the social media dashboard functionality). The real value of the system comes from using it.

Every member of a client organization gets a Jobvite account. The idea is that employees use their referral networks to generate hires. Jobvite provides widgets and tracking tools. Employees evaluate (with some very smart Jobvite automated matching support) which of their friends and connections might be interested in a job. The invitation (a jobvite) gets sent and the system tracks and follows the recommendation.

Over time, you get a picture of who’s connected to whom; which connections are most productive and how hiring works in your particular ecosystem. Jobvite does what I’d call ‘on the fly job matching in the social media ecosystem’. It’s not just a job publishing tool. It gives intelligent guidance and collects data that improves its guidance.

There’s also a great widget that allows a user to have an app from their company on their facebook page. The app offers jobs from the company, edited as appropriate by the user. One of the goals at Jobvite is to make real the idea that every employee is a recruiter.

At Jobvite, the vision is that the Internet is the Job Board. While the tool capably optimizes traditional job posting, its core intent is to harness the power of social networks; not by brand name but as an emerging reality. The platform operates on the assumption that any job is better filled by a trackable recommendation and that clear metrics are essential elements of knowing whether or not your efforts are effective.

Where others provide publishing tools, Jobvite provides an integrated recruiting framework and toolset rooted in the power of referrals.

There are two basic packages you can by from Jobvite: Jobvite Hire and Jobvite Source. JHire is an ATS with social media recruiting capabilities. JSource is a fully functional social media recruiting campaign execution tool.

Since the firm itself resides in Silicon Valley, it has an easy time building smart integrations with various local vendors. The team is composed of seasoned Valley technologists who are well connected in the emerging army of Valley based social media empires. As a result, the company is a good corporate citizen in the areas of privacy and Terms of Use compliance. You’ll never see Jobvite’s accounts at data providers getting pulled for the overenthusiastic use of spidering.

Regular readers will certainly have heard about Jobvite before this piece. My recommendation, though, is that you get a demo sometime soon. The Jobvite toolkit will improve your recruiting effectiveness.

This presentation is a data rich look at the population “shapes” of recruiting markets. The material shows an array of actual population distributions from various regions, countries, states and cities. The shape of the population pyramid tells you  lots about ho the recruiting market works and whether or not innovation is possible.

It’s a lot of data and responds well to quick skimming.

JobScore

The business card sat on my desk for most of the summer. Dan Arkind, the CEO of JobScore, managed to make contact at one of the spring trade shows. I can’t remember what transpired in the transaction. I did remember my sense of obligation and the warm feeling he engendered.

In September, I sent him a note as I was cleaning the pile of cards off my desk. “I know you’re somewhere close by and that I promised to be in touch. Sorry about the delay.”

Without skipping a beat, Dan started to tell me the story of JobScore.

JobScore is a free Applicant Tracking System designed for the most underserved portions of the hiring market – small business. The core idea is to build a ‘networked’ recruiting system that allows every user to strengthen every other user. JobScore is trying to create synergy among small recruiting groups to help them compete squarely with larger organizations.

The service features a shared database of candidates. JobScore is building a treasure chest of data by letting customers exchange their unused resumes (the job boards often generate lots of excess) for credits. You can buy candidate data from the core system on an as needed basis.

The ultimate goal is self-sufficiency.

Today, the JobScore resume database measures 100,000 strong, mostly in Silicon Valley tech. The goal is a viral product that saves small customers money while giving them a competitive advantage in the employment market. The bigger the customer base, the better the database.

So far, they’ve acquired over 100 customers (employers, not users) without a stitch of advertising. Word of mouth, recommendation and attendance at a couple (literally, two) conferences is the extent of their marketing.

It’s a small and focused team. With office space on San Francisco’s Market St., they’re positioned with access to key design and software talent. That’s good for the company – and its customers.

Arkind is a veteran of OTEC, the visionary staffing firm that founded and incubated HotJobs. As a Director, he opened their Silicon Valley office. He’s also been around the entrepreneurial block with a series of post OTEC adventures. Most notably, he co-founded STIRR, a network for technology entrepreneurs..

Arkind believes in the viral future. “We want to build a recruiting system that gets better as people use it. Not just because they give feedback and help us improve it, although that’s interesting. It’s our hope that each recruiting transaction gives the entire system a nudge towards higher quality. When small companies share the candidates they’d normally throw away, everyone gets a boost.”

An hour long demo persuaded me that the system is more than adequate for small scale recruiting. The interface is elegant and intuitive. The years of HotJobs adjacency really seem to have paid off. All of the meat is there with little or none of the fat.

As far as I can tell, no one is really serving the small enterprise end of the hiring market. Job Boards occasionally offer ATS functionality but always go overboard. There are other free systems out there but they’re oriented to shops with thousands of employees.

The JobScore solution offers solid execution, a clear market focus and a smart strategy for value development that grows with the company. The underserved low end of the market now has a viable solution.

Top 100 Most Influential People In HR – Recruiting.

These days, I’m spending a lot of time on the Top 100 Influencers Project. Twice a week (Tuesdays and Fridays), I publish an additional piece of the work. So far, I’ve profiled a dozen people and written about influence from a number of perspectives.

It’s an interesting experiment. For much of my adult life (at least 15 years), I’ve been writing about the world of Recruiting and HR and their related markets. More or less daily, I’ve tried to chronicle the development of the industry while nudging it in some specific directions. I’ve always published my stuff on my own web properties; first at interbiznet and now here, at johnsumser.com

For this project, however, I am publishing each of the installments on Recruitingblogs.com (RBC). It’s a new experience for me. I haven’t had editorial assistance like this since I edited and published the Whole Earth Review many, many years ago. My goal is to help build the credibility and audience of the interesting community at RBC.

An old friend got me thinking about the question. About seven years ago, I profiled a number of players in the industry (see the interbiznet archives for October, 2002). My friend enjoyed the series and kept asking why I didn’t do another round. As I thought about the question, I began to realize how much things have changed.

Our industry is fragmented into a variety of small niches. the HR people don’t consider recruiters to be a part of their world. The RPO and HRO citizens get little respect at SHRM. The traditional HR functions (transactional but critical) are shepherded to a corner while the Learning and Development crowd basks n their own aura. Vendors scratch their heads and try to find a market. The enterprise HR practitioner operates in a world that is only remotely related to her colleagues in Small to Medium sized business.

It’s amazing. Everyone I talk to is certain that they stand at the center of the world. That other place over there is always dark and unexplored. When you go visit that other place, it turns out to be vibrant. I’ve talked to so many vendors trying to make sense of the marketplace that it simply seemed easier to try to document it.

So, the purpose of the Top 100 Inflencers in HR project is to deliver a map of the industry. My goal is to interview 400 people over the course of a year (about 2 day) as a way of building a clear picture of how the industry works and what makes it tick. I’ll publish routinely and hope to paint a picture that lets the industry see itself as it really is.

Influence is the ability to move people towards action (where power is the ability to directly cause action). Our industry rides on waves of influence from a variety of corners. I’m trying to figure out who has influence by asking people who they think is influential. I add weight to the ‘voting’ by evaluating the financial and industrial consequences of someone’s influence. There are a host of figures who have caused change by virtue of their position, teachings, editorial selection or promotional skills. There are some (but fewer) practitioners who set extraordinary examples. Influence happens by word of mouth, web traffic, software architecture, external impact and a number of other methods.

Most of the time, when I choose a person for the list, I spend a good deal of time in the article explaining another facet of the story. Currently, each entrant gets the story on RBC and a detailed interview which is awaiting publication elsewhere.

The more I learn, the more this project changes my mind. Here are the pieces so far:

About Influence and the Project
- Key Influencers (an introduction to the project)
- Keys to Influence (How Influence works)
- Recruiting and HR (about the industry, a little context)
- Influence Happens in a Context (Why Context is Important)
- A Progress Report (The project at 10% completion)

Key Consultants
- Naomi Bloom (The Software Architect)
- Kevin Wheeler (The Futurist)
- Elaine Orler (Recruiting Strategist)

Third Party Recruiters
- Bill Vick (The Innovator)

The Connectors
- William Tincup (The Frenetic Connector)
- Jeanne Achille (The Gentle Connector)
- Kevin Grossman (The Clarifier)

The Financiers
-Robin Ferracone (The Boardroom Player)

The Practitioners
- Rob McIntosh (The Game Changer)

The Cutomer Facing Influencers
- David Perry (The Guerrilla)

The Hosts
- David Manaster (The Community Builder)
- Bill Kutik (The Technology Czar)

The Academics
- Coming Soon

I continue to look for suggestions of people. Send me a note or comment on this post. Who do you think the most influential people in HR – Recruiting are?

Thought for the Day: Disruption happens when the price drops and the profit increases. Incumbents fail.

• The Myth of Macroinnovation:
  “My experience with large companies and governments shows me that it is not a simple or trivial matter to recognize the benefits or marshal the resources. A common failure mode is where the leadership say they want disruption and innovation, the grass roots want it, but the middle management tiers aren’t incentivized to deliver it because their bonuses are tied to metrics on existing product lines. Disruption eats into existing businesses. “Maximizing Shareholder Value” is a wonderful focusing device but, without an explicit time-frame for that value, innovation risks shareholder lawsuits for sabotaging profitability.“
• The Disruption Talk
  A remarkable hour of video in which a VC explains the mechanics of disruption to assembled Googleheads. Beautifully delivered in a Jimmy Stewart presentation style. The irony does not seem apparent to either Fred Wilson, the presenter or his audience.
• The Law of Disruption (Wikipedia)
  It’s this year’s buzzword, a great follow-up to disintermediation. Real change can not be embraced by the status quo. Losing this year’s profits is always too high a price to pay. Incumbents are always vulnerable to disruption. “Alvin Toffler in Powershift writes that a “…revolutionary new system cannot spread without triggering personal, political, and international conflict.” Because current personal, political and international relations rest upon the old system any new comer holds the possibility of upsetting that balance. In the midst of the “dilemma,” chaos reigns.“
• Unleashing the Killer App
  Here’s how Google does books. Note bookstore choices and the ‘find it in a library‘ link. The “library project” is an interesting one in which Google becomes the global card catalog. More disruption
• How Technological Disruption Changes Everything
  Consider this an official recommendation that you read  “The Innovator’s Dilemna“. The HBS synopsis is a good start. Big companies don’t innovate because it rots their hearts out, literally. Agile entrepreneurs can always beat the incumbent.

Extremophiles

(April 22, 2009) In a world of writers and verbal intellects, Eileen Clegg is a visual thinker. She is a prototypical Renaissance person with broad interests and deep networks.

The seasoned newspaper reporter (10 years at the Santa Rosa Press Democrat) spent an additional chunk of her life working at the Institute for the Future. You may have run across her at a Future of Talent get together. Eileen is the one making the visuals, capturing the essence of a conversation in a picture. (Here’s an image she developed with old friend Hank Stringer).

Ideas are big things. The narrative form (written word) has some pretty serious limitations. Eileen makes the picture clearer, so to speak.

Interestingly, she has a range of her own notions that haven’t mapped onto a visual somewhere. With a pile of books under her belt, she’s at least as accomplished as an author as she is as a visual clarifier.

I’ve been fortunate enough to get to spend some time learning about one of her most powerful notions: Extremophiles. There are a class of organisms that inhabit the toughest parts of our planet…under the poles, in the salt desert, near or in volcanos, in the intertidal areas. Clegg uses these organisms as a metaphor for a range of people who inhabit the harshest parts of our organizations.

"Extremophiles are nature’s pioneers, organisms that not only survive but thrive in the harshest environments. Some live undersea in hot volcanic vents at temperatures above 200 degrees Fahrenheit, others in sub-zero Antarctic waters. There are Extremophiles in saline waters where other life forms shrivel, and those living in acid where all other organisms instantly break down. They are thought to be the oldest form of life on Earth. Yet the scientific inquiry is fairly recent. The term “extremophile” – literally, “lover of extremes” – is less than 30 years old." From Extremophiles

And then,

"Extremophiles are simple organisms; they are single-celled or in a filament of identical cells in alignment. Although their structure does not immediately appear analogous to a corporation or a country, their brilliant survival mechanisms raise questions how certain individuals or groups might rise to the fore (or should be brought into the organization) in threatening times, and how leaders can promote an “extremophile response” within their companies to fend off threats and thrive where others may succumb." From Extremophiles

The military, over its 10,000 year history has learned to cultivate
just this sort of thing.

In order to function effectively, the military has two operational modes. In peacetime, decisions are made by consensus and politics is a well refined sport. In Wartime, decisions have to be made in a hurry by people who understand the implications and remain able to act. The military employs a group of people who are known as "Wartime Generals". These people are terrible peacetime leaders and great at the job during a war. If you let them be in charge during peacetime, they’d destroy the place. Good wartime leadership and good peacetime administration are really different from each other.

Human Extremophiles are like that.

Clegg’s notion, that "certain individuals rise to the fore under threatening circumstances" points in a direction we rarely consider in the Recruiting and Human Capital arenas. The idea that our people are more than a list of skills and credentials, the notion that they may behave in unpredictably positive ways during stressful times, is simply not a part of our evaluation protocol.

Somehow, we’ve come to believe that a job is a set of requirements. We think that the person who does the job is a set of skills that match those requirements. That’s some kind of weird, don’t you think?

Last week, when I was talking with Josh Kahn about Best Buy, I asked him how things worked when there were cutbacks. Everyone has cutbacks. Because the Best Buy architecture depends on a relatively ad hoc network, I was sure that there would be drawbacks. I guessed that the network would break when key players moved around or left.

Kahn’s answer surprised me. He told me a story about a very key network contributor leaving (he took the buyout, Best Buy doesn’t really do traditional layoffs.) He wasn’t replaced. How did the network work get done? Kahn says that other people filled in and the complexion of the network changed just a little bit.

That’s the thing about people who are trusted and encouraged. They pick up the slack. It’s just like the hidden characteristics that Clegg thinks we can learn to tap.

• I’m on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Friendfeed. Catch up with me.
• I’m doing a Free Webinar:
  Regional HR Marketing and PR – Tailoring Sales to Market Realities
  - Thursday, May 7, 2009,
  - 10-11 am PT (1-2 pm ET)
• I’m leading an Intensive workshop called Recruiting Strategy in a Down Economy: Identifying What’s to Come in the Upturn at the Kennedy Recruiting Conference in Las Vegas on May 19.

Thought For The Day: “There is no such thing as a leprechaun. It is a complete waste of time to spend your energy trying to find one. However, when you do find one, cherish it.”

•  Social Recruiting Summit
  An interesting spin on the old fashioned Trade Show. ERE Media is delivering an event that wants to be part conference, part unconference. They’re doing it on the Google campus. In what has to be the recruiting marketing coup of the year, the site contains a massive volume of retweets for a free Jobvite webinar. It’s taking place on June 15.
• Collaboration
  How do we find the magic that makes small teams come to life?
• Social Recruiting | Candidate Expectations and Community Manager
  Last week, we talked about Josh Kahn’s conversations about Talent Community Managers. Here’s a post from last August by  Shannon and Julian Seery Gude on  EXCELER8ion. It was the first time the idea was discussed. On EXCELER8ion, they called it “Recruiting Community Manager”. Josh’s term of art, “Talent Community Manager”, places the focus clearly on the potential employee, which is where the value should flow.
• Future Employee Parking And Social Recruiting
  Kristin Gissaro is a director at NAS Recruitment Communications. She believes that recruiting has become the art of mashing talent and technology in order to provide optimal results.
• Community managers and the evolution of the recruiting function
  Susan Burns on the four key skills of a Recruiting Community Manager.

• I’m on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Friendfeed. Catch up with me.
• I’m doing a Free Webinar: Regional HR Marketing and PR – Tailoring Sales to Market Realities
  - Thursday, May 7, 2009,
  - 10-11 am PT (1-2 pm ET)
• I’m leading an Intensive workshop called Recruiting Strategy in a Down Economy: Identifying What’s to Come in the Upturn at the Kennedy Recruiting Conference in Las Vegas on May 19.

Josh Kahn

(April 15, 2009) I’ve been getting to know Josh Kahn for a couple of years now. We met through the Recruiting Roadshow®.He generously navigates the Bet Buy decision matrix to support the Minnesota Recruiters events which are held there. The first Recruiting Roadshow® was held in the hallowed halls of Best Buy. It became, under Paul DeBettinges guidance, an enduring model of local collaboration.

Josh is the “Sr Pipeline Generation Expert with Accenture at Best Buy”. Roughly, that means that he is responsible for the flow of relationships that become the recruiting supply line. If you want to see the state of the art in recruiting, the operation at Best Buy is a good place to work. Eternally modest, Josh always credits his tem and the amazing leadership at Best Buy.

Josh is an amazing synthesizer. That puts him in the position of asking very interesting questions. In a sea of answers, it’s really refreshing to find good questions.

Here’s a blog posting that caught my eye. New Job: Talent Community Manager.

With all of the talk about using community as a recruiting tool, Josh did an extremely practical thing. He went to Google and searched for “talent community manager”. To his surprise, he found nothing. That prompted him to imagine the roles and responsibilities of the Talent Community manager.

The dialog has blossomed. Like a skilled zen master who asks the right question at the right time, Josh’s posting has generated about 100 nodes in the conversation in the three weeks since he wrote it. In addition, he seems to be handling some of the most troubling parts of community right there on his site.

Somehow Knowing that Josh worked for the Best Buy Team, a dissatisfied customer from Boulder posted an angry broadside on Josh’s blog. Rather than trying to squash the note, Josh, at his soft-spoken best, left the post standing and informed the unhappy customer that his concerns had been forwarded to the appropriate people.

Take a look at New Job: Talent Community Manager. Read the comments. Then join the evolving conversation about what exactly social recruiting is either here, here, or here.

Meanwhile, keep your eyes on Josh. Follow him on twitter @jokahn

• I’m on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Friendfeed. Catch up with me.
• I’m doing a Free Webinar:
  Regional HR Marketing and PR – Tailoring Sales to Market Realities
  - Thursday, May 7, 2009,
  - 10-11 am PT (1-2 pm ET)
• I’m leading an Intensive workshop called Recruiting Strategy in a Down Economy: Identifying What’s to Come in the Upturn at the Kennedy Recruiting Conference in Las Vegas on May 19.

What Is Social Recruiting

(April 08, 2009) I’ve started a conversation about the nature of Social Recruiting on an Australian Wiki. It’s my contention that using Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn et all to recruit is not necessarily social recruiting. It’s a desktop variant of Recruitment advertising. It’s an advanced form of sourcing.

That’s not to say that using the amazing new social software communities as your own personal talent fishing pond is wrong. It’s just that there’s little new or interesting about the idea of researching a list and sending opportunities out to it. Calling it ’social recruiting’ makes it seem like something different is happening.

Of course, the evolution to social recruiting is going to take time and make slow progress. Each wave of technology hits the Recruiting beach-head in much the same way. Once the dust settles, we essentially deliver incremental improvements to the old way of doing things.

Here is the essence of the argument :

The potential to build community as a way of recruiting is not something new. I’ve been writing about it for fifteen years and only wish that the idea was mine. As  technology changes the face of recruiting, what happens most often is that recruiters do exactly what they used to do. They just use new tools to do it.

This phenomenon is not unique to the Recruiting world. Our culture is littered with software stuffed with features and capabilities that no one uses.

In Web 0.0, we learned that no one comes just because you build it. What that means in this case is that just because you can build community using social software doesn’t even vaguely mean that that’s what will happen. And, the techniques and values required to build a community have little to do with the technology.

I don’t mean to be cynical here.

Community based Recruiting is a necessary strategy for organizational survival in the 21st Century. But, it requires a whole new way of thinking about the people we have objectified as ‘candidates’, ‘applicants’ and ‘job hunters’. We have to treat them as if they are actually community members. That’s a big commitment.

For a community strategy to work, members need to receive a constant flow of value and be held as a part of the team in some way. Most organizations will view that as a discretionary expense rather than as a necessary investment. Every time you stop investing, you have to start over.

Social recruiting is not cheaper, it’s more effective.

While it might be possible to envisage a world in which the cost of social recruiting is covered by the interactions between community members, that day is a ways off. For now, the rationale for community based recruiting will have to be higher quality and speed. If you are going to call it a community, the members have to get real value from communicating with each other.

If the communication flow is only one way (recruiter to people) or two-way (back and forth between recruiter and people), it’s not community in any real world sense of the world. When the communication happens between community members then it’s a community. Community means conversation amongst the members.

If you use the word community to describe one-way or two-way conversation, you are setting an expectation that will not be met.

That’s really bad branding.

You can see all comments on this post here. I’d love it if you would join me in that conversation. Do you think that community is an inherent an necessary part of ’social recruiting’?

This discussion echoes a conversation between Raghav Singh and a couple of well known contributors over at ERE. Singh maintains a perspective similar to mine. The other side of the argument is something along the lines of “a face book recruiting page already is a community. Employers are running communities and don’t even know it. 

There are 7 Million employers in the United States. Trying to capture them in broad generalizations doesn’t work very well.  Nonetheless, it’s disengenuous to suggest that employers are already engaged in social recruiting. We don’t even have a good definition yet.

I’m leading an Intensive workshop called Recruiting Strategy in a Down Economy: Identifying What’s to Come in the Upturn at the Kennedy Recruiting Conference in Las Vegas on May 19.

Relocation Trends

(April 07, 2009) This is a really good time to figure out the future of your workforce. The downturn changes a lot of things. If you’re still at your desk (and lots of folks in HR are gone), start wondering and planning. After this is all over, we’re going to be living in a different world and we are going to have to recover.

We’re a nation of movers.

Most Americans have moved to a new community at least once in their lives, although a notable number — nearly four-in-ten — have never left the place in which they were born. Asked why they live where they do, movers most often cite the pull of economic opportunity. Stayers most often cite the tug of family and connections. (Pew.Who Moves? Who Stays Put? Where’s Home? full report)

But, the rate at which we move has dropped by 40% since 1986. From 20% to 11.9%.  (Pew. Who Moves? Who Stays Put? Where’s Home? full report)  The Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey indicates that the number of people who moved between 2007 and 2008, 34 million, was the lowest since 1959-60, when the population of the U.S. was 41% smaller than it is now.

Generally, the more affluent and educated, the more likely you are to move. But, "57% say they have not lived in the U.S. outside their current state: 37% have never left their hometown and 20% have left their hometown (or native country) but not lived outside their current state."

A Population Refence Bureau Survey shows the correlation between High Unemployment rate and net migration. When unemployment is up, people move to find work.

High unemployment rates are not just creating a drag on the U.S. economy, but are also linked to lagging population growth in economically distressed areas, according to a PRB analysis of data from the U.S. Census Bureau. Between 2007 and 2008, the population in distressed counties—areas with unemployment rates of 6 percent or more in 2007—grew 0.3 percent, compared with a 1.2 percent growth rate in areas with relatively low unemployment (less than 4 percent). Nationwide, the population grew 0.9 percent during 2007-2008. (PRB: U.S. Regional Population Losses Linked to High Unemployment)

The takeaway is that high net worth, well educated individuals leave the places they live when economic times get tough. At the very same time, age is reducing mobility in general.

What you can know for certain is that this economy is changing the talent pool in your town. If you live in a place that is both young and has high unemployment, things are going to change fast.

Five Things HR Can Do

(March 13, 2009) The line between HR Basher and patriotic critic is lost on some. While many seasoned HR professionals are an active part of their company’s strategy design and execution, many more are not.

I spoke with a colleague last night who said, there are three types of HR professional:

• Tactical … managing and controlling administrative problems, monitoring compliance, managing organizational conflict, most training.
• Tactical but Wants to be strategic … understands HR is mostly a cost center and wants to return more value than they receive
• Strategic … part of the heart of the business making playing field decisions and competitive distinctions

A fair part of the HR mandate involves getting lots of little administrative details right. From payroll and benefits to recruiting information and scheduling, these details are critical to the smooth functioning of the organization. Screw them up and the world falls apart. Get them right and no one notices. Like most great logistics problems, the tactical part of the HR workload is thankless and mission critical. Things really do fall apart when this stuff doesn’t get done. Great progress is measured in incremental cost reductions.

It’s the tactical part of HR that uses measures like “cost per hire” to determine value. In tactical matters, improvement is incremental and measured in single digit percentage improvements.  At the other end of the spectrum is value multiplication. Imagine that there is a bar. Above it, pennies multiply into dollars. Below it, dollars turn into pennies. Above, value. Below Cost. Above strategic. Below tactical.

The strategic part of HR might include identifying a major competitive advantage in a plant location decision. Or, it might be seeing that an average of five hours of overtime causes a systemic decrease in productivity. A strategic picture helps redeploy the existing team in a new venture. It knows where to find synergy. It understands real multidimensional planning. It manages itself the way that other C-level functions are managed…to targeted performance values with out of your control variables.

If the HR profession is to move ahead and put an end to the annual cycle of profession bashing (see yesterday’s piece), here are some practical suggestions.

1. Be curious about the business.
   Always ask questions like “how does the staffing level affect performance”. Get people to help you understand what they do. You don’t have to be an engineer but you do have to know what makes one tick. Understand the core functions of the business. Learn to tell which kinds of people are good at those jobs and why.
2. Measure stuff.
   The currently available metrics are wretched. Don’t focus on cost, focus on benefit. Metrics are your friend, you just have to figure out what to measure and what it means. Being able to show quantitative impact makes you a part of the team. There are really valuable bits of information stored around the organization. Measuring helps you find them. Invent crazy metrics and see if they mean anything. (Number of bald men per thousand lines of code)
3. Stop focusing on cost cutting and expense
   These are not bonus activities, they are the basic job. Survival is all about expense management, strategy is about growth and multiplication. Do the basic job, focus on contributions that change the game.
4. Free people to manage themselves
   One of the greatest contributions HR can make is to unencumber workers from overbearing procedures and forms. Throw away the job descriptions. Reduce the number of categories.
5. Plan, Plan, Plan
   It’s not a strategy if there isn’t a plan. No one ever expects the plan to come completely true. Making it is an act of vision. Learn about scenario planning. Anticipate the next five years of hiring requirements and reorient your operation to navigate there. Make a list of everyone you’re going to hire in the next five years.

Be prepared, it’s HR Bashing season and a really good time to demonstrate the Strategic value you offer. Avoid the mistake of responding to criticism by saying “You’re wrong”, or, “Stop whining and become a resource.” The first step in recovery is admitting you have the problem.

The Human Capital Institute offers useful training to HR professional who are trying to move from tactics to strategy. Find out more about them. (They don’t know I’m a fan)

News: Accuracy and Trust

(March 10, 2009) How far can you trust the news that comes to you through a social network? That question has come up a couple of ways in recent days. There’s a big question, context, and a little question, accuracy. Maybe there’s a third, credibility.

As a bit of background, I’ve cancelled the newspapers, don’t watch TV and recently moved to a place where the local paper reports on the fire department’s crab and polenta feeds. If I didn’t have a hunger for global news, I wouldn’t need to get any out here. The finches, raptors, seals and starfish don’t seem to notice our silly little economic troubles.

But, I’m curious and want to see the big picture. So, I get lots of news online. You can see the flow by following me on Twitter. Lots of news is a good thing. Seeing the big picture is an entirely different question.

While Google News provides an interesting flow of material, it lacks editorial vigor. Google can only tell you about stories that have a lot of traction. If the news were a popularity contest, Google would have a very clever angle. But, the news is moved by little things that explode into the national consciousness.

For instance, using my approach to following the news, I completely missed the virtual bankruptcy of the FDIC. This is really something. I missed it because I glaze over a certain range of national news. It took a good editor (Dave Winer) to point out the importance of the story. Being your own newspaper means that you have to trust other people to find things out for you.

That’s where we get to the second piece, accuracy.

On Monday, I followed the Tweets (sorry) of a person sometimes known as PunkRockHR (Laurie Ruettimann). She was microblogging from the a speech   given by Laurence O’Neil, the president of SHRM at the Legislative Conference. (The Tweet Flow is here).

In her coverage, Ms Ruettimann noted that O’neil said “HR is nothing less than civil rights and human rights.“Jessica Lee, another microblogger at the convention heard “Wow. HR is the continuation of civil rights”

Now, you know me. I am a fan of social media and believe that this thing is quickly shifting the world. But, I have a hard time basing my worldview on the twitterings of a PunkRockHR person and another whose blog opens with “I hate the saying but sometimes isn’t karma really a total bitch? you know what i mean?“

So here I sit with an outrageous quote, an itchy keyboard finger and nothing in the way of context or credibility.

It’s really easy to believe that the president of SHRM could be out of touch enough to think that it’s okay to say “HR is nothing less than civil rights and human rights.” HR people are that out of touch with their organizations. They see no conflict between having an external political agenda and ‘having a seat at the strategy table’. Which flavor of human and civil rights do you suppose HR stands for? Are they for or against the human and civil rights of the unborn? Is HR really supposed to be the PC police, extending and policing rights? Are they really supposed to be an organizations arbiter of politics beyond the law?

Or is the job simply educational and administrative?

Please don’t misunderstand me. I have a deep and longstanding history as an activist in Human and Civil Rights work. My personal views extend them well past their current boundaries. I just don’t think that it’s the business of a function in an organization to serve that agenda.

HR is an important administrative function. HR can make an astonishing difference by controlling and improving talent acquisition, development and deployment. HR has an important role to serve in education and documentation.

However, to suggest that HR is an arm of the Human and Civil Rights movement is to misunderstand HR and to insult those precious rights movements. Typically, legislation is written to correct HR practices, not to enshrine them. To say the “HR is nothing less than civil rights and human rights.” is the worst sort of doublespeak. It sullies the teensy bit of credibility that HR Departments work so hard to build.

How Do You Manage Data From Social Networks?

(Feb 25, 2009) There’s no question that social networks are a huge part of the future of Recruiting. With roughly 65 Million users in the domestic US, social networks are rapidly becoming the norm. Youth (29 and under) adoption is in the 2/3 range.

Here are the detailed stats (from an analysis based on Pew Research here and here. Stay on top of Pew’s Research):

• users aged 12-14: 5,560,749* (45% of total population 12-14: 12,357,222)
• users aged 15-17: 8,331,631* (65% of total population 15-17: 13,018,174)
• users aged 18-29: 34,251,555* (67% of total population 18-29: 51,121,724)
• users aged 30-39: 8,599,930* (21% of total population 30-39: 40,952,050)
• users aged 40+: 8,235,988*,** (6% of total population 40+: 137,266,473)
• # Total users (excluding ages less than 12): 64,979,853 (+/- ~4,000,000)

Barely over five years old, the social networking phenomenon is the communications vehicle of choice for people under 30.

These days, there’s no shortage of tools and trainers who help you find individuals of interest in the various sites. Learning to do search in these pools of people is an important skill for the next phases of recruiting. Sadly, though, little has been done to

1. Proceduralize the maintenance of data discovered in social networks;
2. Coordinate and integrate the disparate email systems;
3. Automate the organization and tagging of individual relationships; and,
4. Introduce the various members of a talent pool to each other.

People are using spreadsheets, bulk email programs, Outlook and bastardized CRM systems to try to get their arms around the problem. Over and over again, the new sources encounter the time honored problems with recruiting tools. Data rot, that horrible decay of your time investment, is standard in most approaches to developing data from social networks.

The weird thing here is that each social network depends on the members updating their own information. The members of our industry, busily reinventing the wheel, are currently unable to take advantage of the greatest strength of the social network phenomenon…user generated content.

Free Webinar:

Sumser and Dimitri Boylan : Adding Strategic Value In Downcycle Recruiting

Feb 26th 1PM PST  
Register here

Take a quick look at this. Though the sites have changed, the fundamentals of Recruiting Strategy remain the same.