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.

• Programming Contests, Community, and Business
  Master Burnett pointed out the TopCoder Open as an example of markets in which people compete (as an alternative to Recruiting). He imagines that competitive frameworks will outstrip more rigid assessment processes as a way of producing top performers. It’s a really interesting idea. “Compete for the job of your dreams.” Running them is a good alternative business for the Recruiters who will be dislocated.
• Bing and Google Agree: Slow Pages Lose Users
  As in “Get the fundamentals right before you get fancy with social media.”
• My 140conf Talk: Twitter as Publishing
  Tim OReilly explains how all of the facets of his publishing business are interconnected (from Books to workshops to webinars to conferences to Twitter) Nice model.
• Twitter is Not a Conversational Platform
  “So while an individual user may use Twitter primarily as a conversational tool or a broadcast medium, in its totality, Twitter operates a lot like a wiki: as a knowledge-sharing, co-creation platform that produces content and allows its consumption. Conversation is perhaps the most simple and obvious form of collaboration, but would anyone claim that Wikipedia is a conversational platform? Despite the presence of information sharing, co-creation of an end product, and even discussion pages, Wikipedians on the whole aren’t having conversations.”
• The Economic Crisis and the US Online Job Market
  Are you following all of the amazing new stats on the job market. Here’s an interesting supplement to the great stuff coming out of Wanted.

• Top 100 Tools for Learning 2009
  (via Gautam Ghosh) It’s interesting that Twitter is seen as a ‘learning tool’. Topping this list from the Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies are a set of social media tools. The poll, a sort of People’s Choice for learning professionals, is an annual affair. Social media are making heavy inroads.
• Twitter is a Fad
  (via Shannon Seery Gude) Twitter is just another Friendster. Watch the functionality move into a range of platforms. Fads are the essence of the new Silicon Valley software development model. Twitter is just a step in the right direction.
• Shannon Seery Gude on Social Media
  Video from the ERE Social Summit
• LinkedIn Profiles are more Honest Than Resumes.
  I heard Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn’s CEO say this the other day. Sadly, there’s no backing data. It’s just an unsubstantiated marketing claim. Although it has a certain logic to it, a world with three year average career commitments is unlikely to produce the sort of consensual honesty claimed by the claim.
  That said, use this as an excuse to follow Joey DeVilla / Global Nerdy. He’s changing the face of Recruiting in Canada. Kris Dunn has some thoughts on the subject. There’s something here, however unsubstatiated LinkedIn’s claim. It should be fun to watch this meme proliferate. If this research is right and the half life of a friendship is seven years, the odds that social media can continue to make this sort of claim are kind of low.
• AOL’s IM Client for Apple Shows the way to SMS Disruption
  It’s likely that Twitter’s biggest impact will be to destroy text messaging revenues. Although AOL is first tomarket, the trend is very, very clear.

• Start: 20 Rules for Recruiting in the Creative Age
  Someone just let Jeff Hunter out of his cage. Biting honesty like we’ve been missing for about two years, more or less. We’re so happy to have him back that we’re going to let the use of the word Talent slide this once. Welcome Back.
• You Own Your Own Health Data
  This is the next wave. When Recruiting-HR deconstructs during the disruption, personal ownership of data, health and otherwise will be central issues. Of course you own your employment data. Of course you own your health data.Why is the company playing middleman with our stuff?
• Fortune 1000 Shows Some Improvement in Hiring Demand; Overall Down 30.1%; Within the Group, 244 Companies Are Up
  Things are slightly less worse than they were last quarter. We’re only down 30% as opposed to 37%.The Wanted data gets better and better.
• Salary Freezes and Reductions… Is the End in Sight?
  Anne Bares reviews the details of the latest gospel according to Watson Wyatt.Most companies plan to end / reverse freezes and reductions within a year.
• Classifying Bitterness Embitters Psychologists
  The next ADA protected class will be those suffering from Post Traumatic Embitterment Disorder. Now that they can be adequately diagnosed, the bitter will be able to receve better
  benies, maybe even set aside parking spaces.
• Comicosm
  Another shameless plug for great art. Please order a copy of the poster.

• Asking More from Talent Acquisition System Providers
  Madeline Laurano notices that employers aren’t happy with their Talent Acquisition Software suppliers. They never are. One of the interesting things about this sort of analysis is the idea that the future is supposed to arrive at all companies at the same time. It would be very interesting to find an analyst who recommended older versions for some customers because that suited their level of tech sophistication. Laurano is one of the best. Still, the relentless push to add features seems to continue whether or not the new thing is absolutely necessary. Part of the reason is that Recruiting has to move at the speed of the market. When candidates get new tools, employers have to ante up. It’s a cold war.
• How Innovation From Google and Microsoft Can Enhance Your Talent Acquisition Strategies
  In this installment, Laurano notes the emergence of Google’s next gen email / collaboration tool, Wave and Microsoft’s Bing. Most of the innovation in Recruiting is coming from beyond the confines of the industry. With the exception of players like Jobs2Web, Jobvite and Entice Labs, the shiny new toys are not even designed for Recruiting per se. The real question is whether new and improved ways of doing unnecessary things is an innovation or a time waster. The problem with being a futurist is that the two look a lot a like.
• Global Nerdy
  Joey DeVilla is a developer evangelist for Microsoft in Canada. Following his blog gives you some insight into real social recruiting. This guy builds (and chronicles) a community of people who fill the development pipeline.
  He organizes tech training over coffee and tons of presentations. Although the job title isn’t exactly recruiting, he’s building an ecosystem of relationships in Canada. It’s a prototype for what social recruiting can be.
• Business Week
  The last dying gasps of the dinosaurs are getting really interesting. The Analysis in Business Week gets more and more useful as the aging periodical craters its way through one near death experience after another.
  In Growth: Why the Stats Are Misleading, the weekly treats us to a wonky deconstruction of annual growth in the GDP. It’s a smart ting to think about if you are trying to grasp the economic situation. Basically, the speedometer says we’re going 50 when we’re actually going 35. In The Failed Promise of Innovation in the U.S., we’re treated to a contrarian view of the pace of change. What if (see above) all the new shiny toys weren’t innovation at all.
• WARNING: Twitter can seriously damage your health ….
  Let’s get something straight. No one, I mean no one, understands what Twitter is just yet. So when you read something that tells you what the ‘right way’ to do it is, head for the hills. Someday, people are going to have two year dead spots in the resumes for the time period that they posed as Twitter experts. The nest it gets is an easy acknowledgement of the ambiguity. If you encounter certainty, be suspicious.

• Social Recruiting: Is The Hype Over Yet?
  Australia’s Michael Specht takes a whack at describing the work that needs to be done. We’re in the very, very early stages and a number if things are predictable. Gartner’s hype model may not be the most useful way to think about things in the HR-Recruiting Industry. Enterprise adoption rates are slow and conservative compared with the IT environments where the Gartner tool makes sense.
• social media v. job sites: the winner
  Cheezhead offers some hard facts on the social media fad: “These tools however, do not replace traditional methods that have proven effective for sourcing and recruiting. Claims that newspapers are dead are misleading generalizations that don’t look at some noticeable exceptions (as the data below shows). The same goes for claims that job boards are becoming a thing of the past.” Seems a little biased towards the job board end of the conversation.
• 8 Free Reputation Monitoring Tools
  It looks like the Australians are doing all of the heavy lifiting these days. This one;s from Everything Social Recruiting, the wiki from down under.
• Social Media and Recruiting Facts, Canadian-style
  ERE delivers some great stats. Canada is not the US.
• Recruiting Controversey: Job Boards v. Social Media
  Great conversation on the great Punk Rock HR Blog.

• Obama / One People
  Don’t let the title keep you away from this amazing visualization. It shows the changes in cell phone traffic over time during the week of Obama’s innauguration. HR should be pioneering the use of this sort of tool to help see and understand the flow of communications and work in the organization.
  The link shows domestic activity in Washington, DC. Also see the global visualization.
• Jorge Camoes Charts
  Follow this guy if you want an ongoing tutorial in how to make your data mean something.
  Always ready with a technique to make your spiel more effective.
• Show Me The Numbers (Amazon)
  The single most practical place to start making your presentations more coherent. Increasingly, we’re all going to be interpreting a sea of data. This is a very good starting point.
• Edward Tufte
  Tufte is the godfather of data visualization. His approach favors quantitative graphics that deliver more information the harder you look. There’s something to be said for ‘hit ‘em over the head’ simplicity, Tufte’s not the place for that. If you’re trying to think about how visualization works in HR-Recruiting., start your thinking here. No one in HR is going to help you much.
• Moving Dependencies
  One of my favorite charts ever. It shows the ratio of dependents to workers (and whether they are older or younger) for countries over time.
  The ‘dependency ratio’ is one way of thinking about the ‘overhead’ a country carries. The higher the ratio, the more dependents per employee.

• JobScience on Social Recruiting
  Ted Elliot has built JobScience into a technical powerhouse. They’re a primary sponsor of the Social Recruiting Summit. The add-iness distracts from the message. The service itself is extremely powerful.
• Who Owns Your Social Media Accounts?
  Michael VanDervert starts a good conversation on the question of who owns personal accounts that you build on the company dime. Probably the company but the area is murky.
• Finding New Employees, via Social Networks
  It’s weird to see a direct marketing datamining operation referred to as Social Recruiting. That’s part of the problem with the definition of Social Recruiting. Most of the tools really just automate a sourcing process. Nonetheless, this NY Times piece is a watershed moment for the burgeoning movement. The best advice in the piece is that job hunters should get social even if their prospective employers aren’t.
• Job seekers say social networking sites aren’t effective job search tools
  You’ve got to love any operation that will say “research says” without linking to the research. It’s like it’s 1950 all over again.
• Energy-Northwest Jobs
  Is a podcast social recruiting?
• Heather Bussing on Contact Ownership
  Our favorite lawyer weighs in on the Social Media Account Ownership question.

(June 01, 2009) If you’ve been following along, there’s a gentle undercurrent about Disruption in my writing these days. The ravages of Moore’s Law ultimately find their way into every pocket of our culture.

Moore’s law describes a long-term trend in the history of computing hardware. Since the invention of the integrated circuit in 1958, the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit has increased exponentially, doubling approximately every two years. The trend was first observed by Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore in a 1965 paper] It has continued for almost half a century and in 2005 was not expected to stop for another decade at least

Almost every measure of the capabilities of digital electronic devices is strongly linked to Moore’s law: processing speed, memory capacity, sensors and even the number and size of pixels in digital cameras. All of these are improving at (roughly) exponential rates as well. This has dramatically increased the usefulness of digital electronics in nearly every segment of the world economy.[8] Moore’s law describes this driving force of technological and social change in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

The consequences of Moore’s Law are everywhere. Major industries, from electronics design to banking have been reshaped by the combination of Moore’s Law and the expansion of digital communications. Advertising, news and the rest of the old industrial media are reeling from the impact. There is virtually nothing left.

Disruption is what happens when Moore’s Law meets your world.

You’ve seen it and you now the symptoms. First, the seasoned folks all swear that their business simply can’t be digitized. Then the digitization starts in earnest. New players emerge, like Apple in music or Google in news and advertising. Whole new approaches to doing the same old thing arrive.

Take a moment and think about the news industry. For nearly a century, owning a newspaper was a license to print money. When the disruption came, the incumbents simply couldn’t figure out what to do. Those country club memberships and six figure salaries were absolutely necessary (to everyone but the disruptors). Imagine what it’s like to watch your world crumble while you’re unable to save it.

That’s what’s coming to HR and Recruiting.

How do you think it will get here?

One thing is for sure. Anything that resembles conventional wisdom is out the window.

• Just Work
  Having a basic job is an asset. If you live in Merced, CA, where unemployment is in the 20s, a job is an asset. This essay from earlier in the Spring, looks at the value of plain and simple work.
• Steve Boese on his First Job
  Somehow, a bunch of liquour is the rite of initiation in some Enterprse HR shops. This story makes an onboarding experience seem much more like an on-flooring exercise.
• First jobs - seeking meaning in the ordinary
  As a drycleaning clerk, HRMaven found and returned people’s treasures.
• “Escape Arts in Delusionville”: My Average Life
  Zen Master John Tarrant thinks about ordinariness and its importance.
• Employee Engagement: Treating the Symptom Instead of the Disease
  The problem with focusing on “employee engagement” is that makes it sound as though employees were disengaged because of the lack of employee engagement programs. But engagement programs treat the symptom not the disease The real disease is poor management—and that’s you, bucky. Employees don’t need programs and engagement strategies. They need managers with vision, an understanding that employees want and need to work to the best of their abilities.

It looks like black magic, particularly when your lunch is getting eaten. Disruptive moments are not really the result of a competitor’s behavior. Craigslist and Google are eating old media lunch, in part, because they were in the caferteria line when it was first served. Disruptive moments are a matter of timing. Capitalizing on them begins with simply being there.

The opportunity for disruption comes when incumbent organizations develop a clear picture of what they are doing. As soon as reality becomes fixed, the chance to undercut emerges. In a uniquely human paradox, success is usually at the root of the problem. “Getting it right” almost always produces a myopia that prevents further exploration. Success prevents learning.

“Winning Generals Always Fight the Last War”

That’s one way of encapsulating the disruptive moment. Being well prepared and planned for more of what happened yesterday makes any person or organization susceptible to an assault by entities that simply see things differently.

I was on the phone with a leader of one of the great HR-Recruiting professional associations. We talked about disruption, the need to rethink the entire profession and the importance of leadership in times of rapid change. He was extremely proud of the energy being poured into the ’strategic transformation’.

So I asked him, “Who is in charge of asking the hard questions? Whose job is it to ask if HR is relevant to anything anymore? Or, who is asking ‘What if HR is not strategic nd never should have been?’ Or, ‘What if everything we know about organiziations is an anachronism, an artifact of 20th Century Industrial thinking?”

“Oh,” he said, “Our transformation isn’t that big.”

I found myself remembering the (now deposed) big time editors and owners of newspapers and media I’ve worked with over the years. Certain of their role and value, they simply could not step up to the realities that being an anachronism is fatal.

Earlier this week, the Daily links section included a series of Disruption links. They’re really worth reading.

• GRecruiter
  Ami Givertz is singlehandedly revising the sourcer’s desktop. GRecruiter is the emerging outcome. Get onboard.
• Boolean BlackBelt
  A unique combination of spin-free observation, good training and smart views about Recruiting. Here’s how he makes the case for sourcing: “”
• Top Influencers v1.04 Elaine Orler
  Knowledge Infusion’s Recruiting powerhouse. Sourcing is a waiting game.
• Claudia’s Wednesday Wisdom: Lying Sack of Recruiters
  “It’s your job search, tied to your career. Nobody has a higher stake in the outcome than you do, so stop whining, get a stopwatch of your own, and start firing the bad ones. If you’re not sure how to assess a good recruiter from a bad one, RBC is an excellent forum to engage in that conversation; put up a post and I’m sure you’ll get an earful.“
• Sourcing Webcasts from HCI

• 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.

Hiring and Keeping the Best People is a standard goal in most organizations. Identifying key talent and promoting them is such a core part of conventional wisdom that we take it for granted. Most leaders aspire to be surrounded by trusted colleagues who are well seasoned and deeply experienced.

When this idea spreads through an organization, it is called “Retention”. In a harsher light, it is the essence of cronyism and featherbedding.

Is it really a sound business practice?

Good, strategic workforce planning is virtually nonexistent. Instead of accurately knowing and describing the specifics of our workforces, we rely on tired generalizations. We want to manage attrition down and become the “employer of choice”. In other words, our HR Departments lead us down the primrose path and make our organizations home to people who retire in place.

It should be no surprise that we have downturns. Preparing for them, hiring wisely and continually pruning the organization is the right way to approach the problem. Too few hands always leads to greater productivity.

Time and again, our organizations act surprised when the downturn comes. RIFs mean that we “hired too many people”. Said another way, “We didn’t let enough people go when times were good.” Retention and retention programs, therefore, are the primary cause of RIFs.

“Why do we have layoffs?” Because the retention programs work too well. The idea that great people should be retained in their jobs for a long time is the exact opposite of growth and innovation. Retention breeds seniority and bureaucracy. Innovation requires youth and inexperience.

• Social Recruiting and Your Job Search
  The dos and don’ts for candidates. Quotes David MAnaster heavily. Light on the “How to be social” part of social recruiting.
• The Future of Recruiting Technology
  You have to read this so you’ll know what to talk with Michael Specht about at the Social Recruiting Summit. He’s thinking hard about the way that technology moves through our industry. (PS… it moves in a non-uniform way. The future of technology in HR-Recruiting is not evenly distributed. It happens at differing rates in differing sectors.)
• Social Recruitment Gaining Grounds
  Australian blog publishes Jobvite statistics. Seems a little suspect. Read the actual Jobvite report for yourself. 68% of companies have mad a hire using social media?
• Define Your Efforts: Social Web Recruitment Funnel
  From the folks in Higher education… a way to visualize the social recruiting strategy. It’s like herding sheep into the shearing pens.
• The UK’s First Conference Dedicated To Social Media In Recruitment
  I happen to personally know someone who would make a great addition to this lineup.