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.

Spiritual Blogging at Work

I got a note from a good friend who is trying to figure out what he wants to blog for his company. He has an active spiritual practice and is a great thinker about workplace issues. With a very smart insight about the way that shifting demographics and economics change people’s views of the importance of spiritual things, he wanted to write about spirituality in the workplace.

Of course, it’s Northern California where spirituality means something vastly different than it does in Tulsa.

I thought about the question a bit and formulated the following response. I’m interested in knowing what you think about the subject.

I think spirituality in business is a very important concern. I have a number of friends who do the Christian version of that topic in their blogs. They are really good and smart people who think it’s important that their ideas on faith get an airing. The stuff generally takes the form of illuminating one scriptural verse, story or principle by using examples from work and business.

I generally find their work to be irritating, cloaked in sect-specific jargon and unintentionally self-righteous.. At it’s most banal, it is Dear Abby with an aggravating level of moral certainty. At it’s most engaging, it is removed from the sect specifics and focuses on things that make us more effective.

But, most of it is just preaching to a disinterested audience.

There’s an aspect of missionary work that depends on being turned away by potential converts. Lots of people who work as missionaries find that their faith is strengthened by being heckled. The general principle is that the more doors that are slammed in a proselytizer’s face, the more certain he or she becomes. Missionary work delivers its greatest benefit to the missionary.

This sort of thing is not appropriate for most company blogs.

So, while I wouldn’t be opposed to a blog that focused on spiritual topics, I think that any such project would have to be consonant with the company’s cultural values.

A really great Muslim company could probably do a blog about Islamic mysticism in the work place. You could easily imagine a Kosher foods company having a Kabala blog. The local homeless mission is probably going to have a blog about the importance of their particular sect.

We live in a secular society. Your company is a particularly secular company. I’m sure that diversity and customer intimacy are prized over spirituality in your hierarchy of values. So, a blog that was aligned with the company’s view couldn’t profess to be certain about sect-specific aspects of spirituality without alienating customers

What that means, I think, is that any work with your brand probably has to deal with universal principles that can not be traced to a single sect. At that point, it’s really not about spirituality, even. It’s about principles for successful living. People like Zig Ziglar are good models to consider… spiritual principles with a focus on business outcomes.

The problem with conversations about religion is that people want to be right. The only sort of work on this topic that’s appropriate avoids ever making anyone feel other than right. The problem is that it’s really hard to do this. When it comes to religious missionary work, some companies prize this above all else. A proselytizing blog is perfect for them. Otherwise, the balance should favor company values.

That said, the realization of people’s fullest potential is exactly a good subject for a company blog, particularly in the HR world. Just because we need to avoid sect-specifics doesn’t mean that principles for effective living should be a taboo topic. As for me, I’d be scared to raise the subject because it could get heated and I’m not enough of an expert to cover the territory.. There are, however, plenty of examples of using heat to generate business success.

What I realized from writing the note is that we’re entering a time where company values is becoming a meaningful issue. The container of culture is best enforced through shared discussion and conversation. It’s really a fatal move to try to cover it all with detailed policies.

As micropublishing takes root, the thing that will separate one firm from another is a clear understanding of values within the walls of the company. The conversation has to be robust enough so that creative workers can answer questions like my friend posed for themselves.

Dissonance

People have maps of the world that they carry around in their heads.

Accumulated experience, conventional wisdom and the insight of the people and institutions that influence us shape our worldview. Certain that we have a handle on the truth, we move through our reality as if we had a clear picture.

We make assumptions about the world we live in as a way of reducing the overheads in decision making.

Our nervous systems are constructed to filter information flow from our senses. Our brains make a map of the world as a part of the organization of our minds.

It’s just simpler to rely on assumptions than it is to constantly reevaluate the fundamentals. The people who spend their time doing heavy reconsideration and recalibration are poets, artists and philosophers. The rest of us get along with minor tweaks and updates to our worldview.

We’re hardwired to believe our maps of the world.

In the mid 20th Century, there was a movement known as “General Semantics” (not to be confused with the subset of linguistics known as semantics). Advocates believed that it was “a form of mental hygiene that enables practitioners to avoid ideational traps built into natural language and “common sense” assumptions, thereby enabling practitioners to think more clearly and effectively.” (from Wikipedia)

The leading thinker in General Semantics, Alfred Korzybski, is famous for saying that “the map is not the territory.” Manny thinkers in the late 20th Century adopted aspects of the idea. It means that the way we think about a thing is not the thing. In the early germination of the idea, it was a brilliant but subtle insight.

General Semantics provided a framework for mental clarity. Knowing that your fundamental view of reality is flawed can be enough to keep you correcting for the bias.

The information explosion forces us all to specialize. It’s just not possible to wade through everything you’d like to read, watch, discuss or think about. The fundamental defense against information overload is to narrow your focus. The net result is that we live in an increasingly fragmented world… lots of pockets of excellence and no big picture.

The more we specialize, the more we leave areas of our map to assumption or the expertise of others. As long as big media remained intact, the fact that we shared a set of bad assumptions was culturally good enough to get by. The smart people in the media were in charge of managing the big picture.

Today, the big picture is that there’s no big picture. The gap between what we think we know and what’s actually there is getting wider every day.

This is the first piece in a series that try to get at the difference between our broad generalizations and the specifics. The starting point is demographics. The world is very different than we think it is. The demographic story showcases the gap.

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.

Sustainable Work Force

(April 07, 2009)  Over the course of a decade, Kevin Wheeler has compiled a massive contribution to the HR – HCM – Recruiting Industry. Relentlessly travelling the world, he always finds time to head home for ERE. I bumped into him very briefly last week.

To paraphrase James Brown, “Ain’t no dog, Kevin’s got a brand new blog“. As he travels, he connects with HR Leaders and practitioners from all over the place. His great gift is synthesizing all of the points of view. The new blog is a place to work that out.

I particularly enjoyed “What’s a Sustainable Workforce Look Like?“. Kevin notes the need for a more mature and analytical discipline.

What people policies will lead to a sustainable workforce model over economic cycles and changes in skills? This is the central issue that must be solved. Binging and purging people is a zero sum game; neither you, the employees, the candidates, or the organization gain anything. What each gets are anger, frustration, and fear.

He mentions modeling and analytics, key components of a sustainable operation.

HR needs to learn how to use modeling techniques to determine whether it is more efficient to hire a replacement for a position or to train someone internally. The decision needs to be made on data, not on the opinions of HR or managers. Finance has developed models to help guide investment decisions, and over the next few years HR will be developing similar models for talent planning.

I think there’s much more. On the way to more effective workforces, we’re going to need:

• Better planning
• Better tools for planning
• Better data, better visualization and better analysis
• Clearer measures of success
• Revisions to conventional wisdom

I think the first four are somewhat obvious. The last, revisions to conventional wisdom, is where we need to look hard.

It’s getting clearer that there are very few generalizations that can be made without reservation about HR. While the function recurs across many organizations, it’s role, customs and importance is variable. Unfortunately, consultants usually make their money by generalizing.

This has resulted in some serious flaws in conventional wisdom:

• Is a referral program the best way to recruit or an invitation to mediocrity and nepotism?
• Is retention good for our organizations or the prime reason for layoffs?
• Is building a coherent team and keeping them in their jobs important or a self-destructing tunnel of myopia?
• Will aggressive job rotation strengthen or ruin an organization?
• Is it better to have structure or ad hoc organization design?
• Training and certification or bootstrapped OJT?
• Job descriptions: liberation or kiss of death?

It turns out that these policy level debates are answered by each organization in its environment. What works as a manpower plan in Boeing is a great way to strangle Microsoft. What makes perfect sense in manufacturing is a disaster in advertising. Most of what HR does well is situational and hard to defend to binary thinkers.

The most important part of workforce planning and design is understanding the culture and its supplies. Sustainability is ultimately rooted in the specific traits of a specific organization.

It’s nice to have Kevin’s voice so close at hand. I’m looking forward to a meaty debate or two.

Song lyrics | Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag lyrics

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

As budgets tighten, companies are beginning to wrestle with standard cost-effectiveness questions. Advertising and advertising-like functions are one of the first places that budget shaving takes root. Since much of Recruiting and Talent acquisition uses an advertising business model (upfront expense, limited quantification of returns), the cost cutter’s eyes are inevitably drawn towards expenses in our operations. 

The partial truth is that “I know I waste 50% of my advertising spend. I just don’t know which 50%”.  Sadly, that sort of 20th Century thinking doesn’t fly well in the face of performance monitoring advertising like Google’s Adsense. So, Recruiting leaders are facing and asdking key questions about the value they receive.

There are many ways of finding, attracting and hiring candidates. None of them work perfectly well. All of them are better at some things than others. What works and doesn’t work is industry, region and company specific.

There is almost no company of any significant complexity (say, over 100 people) that can proceduralize a Recruiting approach across all of the positions that have to be filled. You simply can’t find a CFO the way that you find a technical writer. You can’t find Software design Engineers in Cleveland the same way that you do in Silicon Valley or Seattle. You can’t fill auto industry slots in the South the way that you do in Detroit.

There is no one way that is best.

Instead, each job class in each region in each industry has a set of approaches that are optimal today. Not for always. Just for now. Approaches with longer time horizons tend to have better ROIs. That may not matter if the position is time-critical.

Here are the ways that you can find, attract or develop talent pools. They are organized from cheapest and fastest to slowest and most expensive. The first four, Employment Branding, Talent Pool Development, Employment Site and Job Specific Microsite are the cheapest and fastest after the initial investment in time and money are complete. (If you think I missed something or think the order is wrong, please let me know)

• Employment Branding
• Talent Pool Development
• Company Employment Web Site
• Job Specific Microsite
• Internal HR Databases
• ATS Databases
• Referral Programs
• Proactive Internet Sourcing
• Phone Sourcing
• Free Job Boards
• Major Job Boards
• Specialty Job Boards
• Company SEO/SEM
• Job Specific SEO/SEM
• Temporary Help
• Long Term Contract
• Contingency Placement
• Specialty Search Firm
• Boutique Executive Search Firm

The idea of a sourcing hierarchy is simple. For every class of openings ina company, there is an optimal place to start in the hierarchy. For example, you probably won’t find a CEO in using the first seventeen approaches. That measn that when you are filling the C-level slot, you should jump down the hierarchy to Boutique search Firms.

Similarly, great low level professionals are easily identified and processed using tools that are much faster and cheaper than a retained executive search firm.

It’s the sort of common sense that’s hard to see when you are in the middle of a reactive process.

Recruiting Strategy is the essential element in cost control and containment. As long as Recruiting remains a reactive sport, costs will be controlled by circumstances. A well thought out Recruiting Strategy will provide guidance for where to start on the list for each job class that will be filled. A well defined data collection process will help refine the decision with experience.

(Oct 29, 2008) If you haven’t had a chance, tune into the ERE conference. The page at ere.net is featuring live material from this week’s conference. With an emphasis on outreach and interaction, things are shifting at ERE. David Manaster continues to set a high standard for the relevancy of national conferences.

The first panel featured Gerry Crispin, Mark Mehler, Joel Cheesman, Shally Steckerl and an extremely insightful woman from Yahoo (Carmen Hudson.) It was a reprise (though en extremely interactive one) of the technology panel that has been a part of every trade show since the early 1990s. Really smart people who know about relatively obscure things coaching the audience to invest now.

I wonder if anyone can give me the name of a company that lost a competitive advantage by being slow to develop a corporate website? Why would the current (Web 2.0) wave be any different. The only urgency I can see is the urgency to enrich the consultants focused on the utilization of new technology.

Invest in the technology now or you will be a corporate laggard. Really?

An audience member asked how to get the rest of the organization blogging and twittering. “It’s al well and good that we’re recruiting this way,” she said, “but it isn’t worth a hill of beans if the hiring managers and trench level supervisors are not doing it.”

I wonder when it became the recruiter’s job to lead the organization into new technology usage. Isn’t the job to staff the existing organization? Aren’t other people supposed to be moving the technology ball forward? Are Recruiters really supposed to spend their time at the cutting edge?

Of course, the answers that will come back will center on the competition in the labor market, the importance of belong cutting edge, the labor shortage and so on.

The real problem is that technology should follow strategy, not lead it.

The panel was extraordinary and each member did a fantastic job. This question of the relationship between tactics and strategy is one we’ll follow for a while.

I spent the end of last week in Toronto at Recruitfest. A one (plus) day get together for members of the recruiting industry, the conference was designed as a networking event. Jason Davis’ brainchild, Recruitfest tackled the idea of a conference from a fundamentally different perspective.

It focused on intimacy and enjoyment.

I’ve been to a ton of conferences. I have never seen so many smiling faces so actively engaged in meeting with their peers.

So, here are the basic pieces:

1. The day started at a reasonable time.
Every industry event I have ever been to makes a point of starting early. It seems like the days at those things are getting longer and starting earlier. While that’s perfect if you are trying to give as many vendors as possible the opportunity to present, it’s not so good if you are trying to meet adult education objectives. With registration and breakfast at 900 and the first event at 1000, no one felt rushed, jet lagged or groggy for the first parts of the day.

2. A Drumming Circle
Yes, a drumming circle. During the first hour of the day, we banged on drums together. Jason found an enthusiastic leader for the circle who provided lots of instruments and entertaining guidance. The important thing was that we all got physical together. The drumming was a good way to communicate that work is sometimes best done by doing a few right things at the right time. It’s not always about who can be the busiest.

3. Engaging conversations with thought leaders
Each four conversation leaders held three sessions of an hour each. The design anticipated the fact that the conversation would build through the day. While everyone had access to everything, participants were forced to choose and prioritize among sessions. This put a grounding of commitment and energy into the structure. The presentations themselves were highly interactive and intimate.

4. Some great food, a magician, Jason’s home and family
You could tell that Jason (really, his wife Michelle) had a good time pulling the details together. There was this amazing magician. Jason’s Mom, Dad and sister turned out in force and turned on the charm.

5. A really good party with a charity poker game
It’s interesting to consider the possibility that the party is the most important part of the conference. The design of Recruitfest allowed all participants to have roughly the same grounding so that the talk at the party could easily move through the content from the day.

Imagine a conference where everyone in attendance liked each other. Imagine that they got to know each other better in the process. Imagine that having fun is the foundation of great work and real effectiveness.

Imagine that people will talk about this one for a long time.

My takeaways?

- Less is more. Learning depends on negative space, not fullness.
- Busy is not better. Limited input and simple choices build big results.
- Size is not everything. You better believe that the sponsors of this event got their money’s worth.

(September 02, 2008) Good conversations have give and take. It’s hard to do that when there’s a lot of shouting. It’s hard to do that when manners get left at the door.

“An ad hominem argument consists of replying to an argument or factual claim by attacking or appealing to a characteristic or belief of the person making the argument or claim, rather than by addressing the substance of the argument or producing evidence against the claim.” (Wikipedia)

A filibuster is a tactic for disrupting conversation (or the legislative process) by rambling on and on and on. A filibuster works by taking all of the air out of the conversation.

A bozo filter (or “kill file”) is a tool that allows the reader of an online conversation to completely ignore the posts of a list of people. “Her filibuster was so obnoxious that I added her to my bozo filter.” “His ad hominems were so extreme that I added him to my kill file.”

The bozo filter makes freedom of speech possible in online communications. Freedom of speech requires the freedom to ignore, the freedom to not have to listen. Diversity flourishes best when individual choice is the foundation of the conversation.

This weekend’s strong responses to a filibuster made me dream about having a bozo filter for my online communities. With a bozo filter, conversation moves forward smoothly because it can route around the interruption. Bozo filters are a good technical implementation of the philosophy that makes the internet work.

It might be best to think of the conversation that went haywire as an example of a flaw in the technology.

(August 22, 2008) Every morning, I take a five mile walk around the perimeter of Schollenberger Park. It’s a wetlands area with 200 varieties of bird. This morning, I saw a juvenile mountain lion.

I am a huge fan of tropical birds and love big white flying things. The park obliges me with swans, herons, egrets and American Pelicans. Daily visits give me a growing inisght into the behavior of a range of species.

One of the interesting things that I have been learning is that birds imitate each other. In some cases, herons eat in ways that are characteristic of pelicans. Though one species is known for a certain behavior, a different bird will do the exact same thing under some circumstances. Crows act like hawks when the wind is right.

The other thing I notice is my tendency to idealize. I like to imagine perfect instances of the wildlife I encounter. I’m always somewhat surprised when the reality is a little (or a lot) different.

The ducks around Schollengerger are a great example. They line the banks of the pond. When they swim, it’s a graceful paddle. I never cease to be astonished when I hear the slurping noises in the paddy-like parts of the marsh. These lovely little creatures feed themselves by wallowing in the mud, mouth first. They scoop it up, gargle with it and spray it out.

I prefer my more idyllic version.

American Pelicans are beautiful from afar. Pure white elegance with an orange bill and distinct black markings on the wings (you can only see it when they fly), they are fun to watch and imagine.

Up close, things are a little nastier. These are water birds. Their fathers, always damp, are smelly and dirty. They, too, scoop mud in search of a bug or two. An older Pelican tends to have the most unlovely charateristics of a worn out teddy bear.

Still, when I look, the first thing I see is my idealized version.

In Recruiting, we tend to idealize both jobs and candidates.

Great writers are often unpleasnt cubicle mates. Brilliant workers rarely make effective managers. Great managers predictably have monstrous egos. Well appointed offices can feel like prisons. Certain desirable traits always have a balancing set of the undesirable. Really nice people are often terrible at their jobs.

But, we skip and jump happily through the selection process acting as if the beautiful Pelican  is the bird we’re moving into the bedroom. Sometimes, we even try to run background checks to make sure that it isn’t smelly.