Read The Weekly HRExaminer v1.31 Now

Human Machines | Feature
The hangover from the industrial revolution still exists in the HR department. Humans are machines to be procured (hired), programmed (trained), controlled (managed), optimized (incented) and terminated (fired) to produce our desired output (profit).

Editorial Advisory Board Member Paul Hebert says a whole new operating manual must be written to help today’s human machine. Names like Airely, Tversky and Kahneman should roll off the tongues of new HR professionals as easily as EFCA and COBRA do today. Read more in our Feature by Paul Hebert Maintaining Human Machines……Re-program Me Now

Review: WorkForUs
You know all of that fuss about social Recruiting? Everyone is so busy trying to figure out the meaning of life that they seem to have overlooked the simplest thing. WorkForUs hasn’t….Read More

Review: New Tools
Much of what passes for social recruiting is neither social nor recruiting. The high value pieces of the recruiting process involve judgment, assessment, selection, evaluation, interaction and conversation. Most internet recruiting tools don’t do much more than publicize opportunity and collect data. Emerging companies are part of a new wave that imagines work as an auction, reputation process or focuses on relationships in small batches…Read More

Virtual HR
It won’t be long before the Virtual Recruiter makes its way to your iPad. Want to remain in the queue for that promising career opportunity? Be a good candidate and keep doing nice things for your Virtual Recruiter. There will be points for referrals, connections to gate keepers, updating your resume. Win enough good candidate points and you’ll make the short list….Read More

In The Know v 1.31: Future of Work
Five links for thinking about the Future of Work: Steve Jobs In Concert, Maintaining Human Machines (yeah, we’re putting it in twice just in case), Best and Worst Jobs: 2010, PWC on the Future of Work, The New York Times on Gartner’s View of The Future of Work….Read More

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Virtual HR

Unique is the new normal. Each and everyone of us is somehow persuaded that we are the ones who are living outside the mainstream. Our little customized universes are separate from and better than.

This is the new universe. Even though it is still primitive, we are able to radically customize huge swaths of our experience. This cements the notion that we’re special and unique.

The surprising paradox is that we’re being fed this diet of content through remarkably identical pieces of hardware, software and libraries of content.

And, in that universe, single guys go on vacation to reenact their virtual getaways with their virtual girlfriends. The worlds we used to imagine as separate, virtual and real, are merging. Social Media Addicts are busily forecasting a future where everyone joins them. Lots of people, late to the last revolution, jump in line in order to avoid being last again.

The weirdness of an important time in cultural transformation is that it just like this. Headscratchingly strange. You think there’s something there and there is and then there isn’t.

I can’t be the only one who is simultaneously awed, confused, threatened, invigorated and overwhelmed.

It’s worth reading the article about the Japanese guys who are going on vacations to memorialize the virtual trip they took with their virtual girlfriend. Creepy? Pretty much. A portent of the future? Pretty much.

Played on a Nintendo DS, the virtual girlfriend thing is like the earlier virtual pets. Behaving along certain lines gets you boyfriend points and keeps the relationship alive.

Recruiting systems of the future will make candidates feel unique, just like an iPod.

It won’t be long before the Virtual Recruiter makes its way to your iPad. Want to remain in the queue for that promising career opportunity? Be a good candidate and keep doing nice things for your Virtual Recruiter. There will be points for referrals, connections to gate keepers, updating your resume. Win enough good candidate points and you’ll make the short list.

The rest of HR will follow rapidly. Need training? Send your avatar to good employee college. Visit the virtual benefits clerk to get benefits management points. Get more points for setting your goals and even more points for making them.

Welcome to Virtual HR.

In The Know v1.31

Five links for thinking about the Future of Work

• Steve Jobs In Concert
  Rental, Streaming, Subscription. That’s the model for digital rights management unveiled by Steve Jobs yesterday. It’s the future of music, video, books and other content. It’s the future of hirer-worker relationships. Some compensation, some variable pay, some licensing, some retainer. No more insidious ownership of the employee.
• Maintaining Human Machines
  Paul Hebert’s amazing piece is a must read. “The key today, and in the future, is to understand how to maintain and get the most out of humans in order to drive business results.” In a world where work is about brains, the structures we use to manage it are changing.
• Best and Worst Jobs: 2010
  One of the things you never see in the workforce planning stuff is the relative attractiveness of the job. The relative coolness of a job is a critical factor in the availability of workers in the medium and long term. Great workforce planning involves understanding social trends as well as the demands of the organization. Labor supply remains misunderstood.
• PWC on the Future of Work
  A starter library for the big consulting firm view. Don’t miss the world’s least interesting use of graphics to describe scenarios. In spite of the misguided graphic, the library is a good starting point.
• The New York Times on Gartner’s View of The Future of Work
  If you get beyond the futuristic jargon (swarming work is another way of saying ‘project), this is a nice cluster of topics. Work is going to change from a variety of pressures, demographic, economic, technical. Gartner has a good bead on the process.

Review: New Tools

Much of what passes for social recruiting is neither social nor recruiting. The high value pieces of the recruiting process involve judgment, assessment, selection, evaluation, interaction and conversation. Most internet eased recruiting tools don’t do much more than publicize opportunity and collect data.

Ultimately, the recruitment advertising model is going to change. Job ads, regardless of the setting (your website, a job board or in the flow of social media) have a very low conversion rate. As other methods mature, the generation old practice of matching traffic with opportunity will give way to better targeting. It’s not clear whether any of that evolution will have a meaningful social component.

There are glimmers of new models at eLance and BountyJobs. Both companies are a part of a wave that imagines work as an auction and reputation process (ebay for individual projects or recruiters). Demographic targeting projects from enticeLabs portend a future in which candidates are actively hunted as they browse the web. Jibe makes it possible to convert your facebook network into job hunting information. StrictlyExecs (a new project from visionary Hank Stringer) focuses on relationships in small batches (and therefore gets closest to Social Recruiting)

For the most part, innovation is a slow and halting process in our neck of the woods. Rather than a leap into the unknown, most HR buyers prefer tools that look like the stuff they are already doing. Job Boards are more like newspaper classified ads than they are like network objects. Social Recruiting really means placing job ads on social media sites. Getting the market to fully embrace something new is an uphill battle.

That is why the market will go towards offerings like WorkForUs (reviewed recently) and JobMagic in the short to medium term. Familiar functionality set in newer, hipper communications channels is a key to fast market traction. While the ultimate shape of Recruiting is not an extension of the past, it’s much less risky to embrace something familiar. There’s not much in the way of early adopter advantage but there’s not a lot of downside either.

Where WorkForUs has a focused set of functions, JobMagic is growing to look increasingly like a fully featured cross posting tool for all social media. The WorkForUs integration with Facebook is cleaner and simpler. The JobMagic approach resembles more fully featured tools that cross social media property boundaries. Where WorkForUs is a Facebook job board application, JobMagic has broadcast capabilities that reach 300 different social networks.

Years ago, job posting services differentiated themselves based on how many outlets they reached. If social recruiting were simply another variant of traditional recruitment advertising, it would be a fine thing to post your jobs, like blanket bombing, across hundreds of networks. It will probably work very well until the downturn is over (that may be a decade!)

Meanwhile, the rest of the advertising industry is getting clearer and clearer about the importance of targeting precision. You really don’t want to waste your employment brand on people who are not interested in the message. As people get used to very targeted advertising, they will come to expect it from Recruitment Ads as well. Job Board style broadcast techniques are spam regardless of the context.

If you are experimenting with Social Media as a recruiting environment, try WorkForUs. By focusing on a single environment (Facebook), you can control your investment and costs. If, on the other hand, you are committed to broadcasting your way into the hearts of your future employees, JobMagic is right for you. Both tools will provide a smooth transition from Job Boards to Social Media without requiring new skills or much in the way of change.

If you want to get a real bang for your buck, you’ll need to get on board with some of the more visionary operations we mentioned. Like all decisions, next generation platforms offer risk and reward. The greater the risk, the greater the reward.

Paul Hebert is a founding member of the HRExaminer Editorial Advisory Board. As the Managing Director and lead consultant for I2I, an influence consultancy, he guides companies in their alignment of the behavior of their employees with the goals and objectives of the company through incentives and rewards. Full bio…

Paul Hebert | Founding Member, HRExaminer Editorial Advisory Board

Business back in the early part of the 20th century really didn’t care about employees. Machinery and assembly lines were the focus of production and the nexus of value. Henry Ford is (in)famous for wondering why workers brought their heads to work when all he really needed was their hands and feet. Mr. Ford, along with many others, took the industrial age and put it on steroids. The moving assembly line and interchangeable parts created mass production and the need to reduce variation, reduce customization, and reduce costs. The goal was to put everything into a process that could run almost without intervention. Or as little intervention from humans.

This worked so well in the plants it became the dogma for the rest of the organization. Including the personnel department – soon to be renamed Human Resources.
But even with a name change – the hangover from the industrial revolution still remains in the HR department.

Most of the work done in those cubes and offices is to streamline, control, process-ize and reduce variations in the way in which employees are treated. Some of that is driven by government regulations – but I submit, most is simply because that’s “what we know how to do.”

The industrial revolution elevated the machine over the “man.” The process, and the machines that chugged away within it, created the value for the company. People were extensions to the machine – the tail to the dog.

Value = People

But that changed about 20 years ago. Humans are now the nexus of value at almost every company. But most companies still manage their business and their people like Henry Ford did over 100 years ago.

That is the disconnect.

In the past HR was required to manage “human” resources in order to make the machines and the processes more cost effective.

The key today, and in the future, is to understand how to maintain and get the most out of humans in order to drive business results.

Humans require a much different maintenance manual. For the future HR needs to be expert at psychology – not just a dusting off of old theories like Maslow but an understanding of evolutionary psychology, social psychology and all the theories. HR folks should know about Deci and Cialdini. Top level HR professionals should have a strong understanding of behavioral economics and the way in which humans make decisions – rationally and irrationally. Names like Airely, Tversky and Kahneman should roll off the tongues of new HR professionals as easily as EFCA and COBRA do today.

HR also needs to transfer that knowledge to the front-line management who are tasked with managing the workforce. Too often however, stuck in the industrial age mind-set, the focus is still on creating systems and processes for management – eliminating the key fact that humans are infinitely variable. Management is a messy process – one that doesn’t play well with rote processes, forms and rules. Those are “operations” concepts – not human ones.

HR is the place where efficient production of yesterday’s product/service and innovation for tomorrow’s comes together. How a company creates value is becoming less reliant on the machines in the factory (most of those are now in third-world countries anyway) and more on how the humans get along and produce within the company.

Ultimately, someone will be (in)famous for saying…

“Why do workers need to bring their hands and feet to work – all I need is their brains.”

That’s when we will know that HR has arrived.

WorkForUs

The United States is a tasty market. These days, companies from countries with sturdier economies are mining the domestic market. Little footholds, smart functionality, intelligent pricing and good customer service go a long way.

The US HRTech market is significantly more sophisticated and ready to buy. Offshore vendors find the market to be easier to penetrate for just that reason. While customer acquisition costs are very high in the domestic market, they are higher still when the customers are not ready from a technical perspective.

Last week, I spoke with Stephane Le Viet, CEO of Multiposting, a 4M Euro company in the same business as eQuest, Arbita and other Job Ad Distribution companies. Le Viet, who is a seasoned player with experience at McKinsey and as an internet cinema entrepreneur. He exudes a kind of self-confidence that is often missing from the entrepreneurs in our space.

Throughout our conversation, Stephane emphasized ‘the proper way to get things done’. At first, it was extremely off putting. Much of the contemporary view of the HR market is that there is no such thing. Our models in the HR industry are almost always about adaptation, innovation, improvisation and discovery through mistake making. The idea that there was a proper way to do anything was grating.

And then Le Viet showed me WorkFor Us. (TechCrunch covered it about 60 days ago) WorkForUs is the simplest and most proper of things.

You know all of that fuss about social Recruiting? You’ve got to admit that there’s a lot of fluff and not much substance. Everyone is so busy trying to figure out the meaning of life that they seem to have overlooked the simplest thing: a repeatable interface that stands in between a fan page and the ATS; a simple application process; the fundamental recruiting tool.

And that’s what you get with WorkForUs … a tool that properly solves one problem. It takes the people who want to apply for jobs on your Facebook Fan page and helps direct them through the process. For a modest fee per job, you can route job hunter traffic just as you’d like it.

Pricing runs from $9/month for 5 jobs to $499 for unlimited usage. (See the details here) It’s a proper and interesting project from Work4Labs.

Feature | Looking for Talent
We know all too well that today there are real problems and challenges in society, companies and HR. But is the glass half full or empty? With great challenge comes great opportunity and that’s what we’re talking about this week at HRExaminer. We start it off in our feature about the loss of talent (and perhaps innocence too) in Looking For Talent and continue with more views on how HR can use these times to achieve meaningful transformation…Find It

The problem you are trying to solve is not the problem you have | HRXformation II
Don’t write this off as yet another whiny, negative piece on the failings of HR – this is a story about how great HR makes money. There are many, many ways that HR can be the generator of massive transformation and huge economic success. It’s just that none of those things involve doing HR faster, better or cheaper. They all involve applying smart Human Capital planning and practice to the business…Transform It

In The Know 1.30 Still More HRXformation
Five links to improve your view of HR Transformation. Here’s what we’ve got: The Next Silicon Valley, Thousands of Workers are Standing By, The Future of The Internet, The Big Lie (Thoughts on Why School Is Not Only About Workforce Development), and A Deeper Kind of Joblessness…Have a Fiver

Unprotected Classes: Prejudice and Double-Standards | Amitai Givertz Editorial Advisory Board
Amitai writes: “Our society fails on so many levels to anticipate workforce needs that allowing sanctioned, institutional prejudice to compound the problem should be an anathema to any right-minded HR leader …the truth is, sometimes it is more politic to practice the double standards embodied in “pragmatism” and “expediency” than champion change.” Change This

That’s it for this week’s HRExaminer.

Have a fantastic weekend!

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In The Know v1.30 Still More HRXformation

Five links to improve your view of HR Transformation

We’re in a challenging time. Seeing the present is as difficult as seeing the future. The rules don’t seem to be operating properly.

This week’s links will stretch your thinking about the future of the Internet, the role of schools, the way work is distributed and how cultures of innovation are created. Each idea has its place in the macrocosm and in your enterprise. HR ought to be the source of this conversation in the organization.

It isn’t always.

• The Next Silicon Valley
  For more than 100 years, the San Francisco Baty area has been turning itself into a global model for innovation and technical development. When things go well, the world is envious. When there is a bust (like now) there’s not so much envy. The culture of innovation jas been built over that history. Developing a similar phenomenon requires a similar horizon. This is a great think piece about the intersection of technology, capital, education, culture and human capital.
• Thousands of Workers are Standing By
  Why crowd sourcing may be the next outsourcing. Labor on Demand is like cloud computing for staffing agencies. This function, which would be run under purchasing in the current construct, is how organizations will interface with many of their people.
• The Future of The Internet
  Save this one for a serious hour of your time over the weekend. The 45 page pdf is the product of a project between Cisco and the Global Business Network. The report offers four different potential futures. Underlying those scenarios are several simple and important ideas… the keyboard will disappear quickly; the Internet’s real growth will be in lower economic strata; digital natives will interact in ways beyond our imagining. The scenarios will give you a range of input with which to imagine your future.
• The Big Lie (Thoughts on Why School Is Not Only About Workforce Development)
  A public education that centers first around workforce development will put a high premium on following directions and doing what you’re told. A public education that centers first around citizenship development will still teach rules, but it will teach students to question the underlying ideas behind the rules. Workforce development will reinforce the hierarchies that we see in most corporate culture, while a citizenship-focus will teach students that their voice matters, regardless of station.
• A Deeper Kind of Joblessness
  A reminder that Henry Ford knew that economies were grown by paying workers more.

Amitai Givertz | Founding Member, HRExaminer Editorial Advisory Board

Please welcome Ami Givertz to the HRExaminer Editorial Advisory Board. Amitai Givertz has over 25 years experience in business with the majority of that time spent in the talent management space where he has held a number of leadership positions. Through his unique brand “disruption,” Ami has helped numerous organizations to innovate and develop their organizations. Full Bio…

Some would argue that America has come a long way since people could be denied employment based solely on the color of their skin, their sexual preference, physical ability, religion or other “protected” classes. That may be of little comfort to those who experience workplace discrimination on a daily basis, otherwise qualified workers who are stigmatized for their lifestyle choices, unfortunate circumstances, medical conditions and so on – the “unprotected classes.”

Advocating for their real or perceived rights, many unprotected classes are finding a voice to many employers’ chagrin. But to avoid dealing with the underlying issues and implementing necessary but difficult change, the conversation is recast as a defensive strategy. The most vocal disenfranchised are applied with new labels: the attention-grabbing, the insecure, the victimized, the disgruntled, and the politically-motivated. Anything but a “human resource.”

At its primal core, the categorization of certain classes of worker as “protected” has less to do with legal framing than it does the type of social stereotyping designed to identify “outsiders” as just that, outsiders.  People who are tattooed, scarred, pierced and otherwise self-mutilated experience discrimination as widespread as the haplessly disenfranchised. Decidedly an unprotected class under the law and with no common sense of injustice, the pierced and tattooed are likely to continue suffering for their art, at least until such time as issues of supply and demand converge with a new set of norms – as so it has been traditionally for homeless, the morbidly obese, rehabilitated drug-user and now the growing number of unprotected classes who represent an increasing percentage of marginalized American workers.

While it follows that inclusive hiring practices, whether mandated or not, are designed to counter the exclusion of those who historically “don’t fit”, there is little evidence to show that employers feel they should be making similar accommodations for modern-day social outcasts.

Institutional Responses to the “Unprotected Classes”

A case in point: According to The Society of Human Resources [SHRM], 60 percent of employers rely on credit-checking to qualify hires in or out of the running for employment. However, in the wake of an economic meltdown, many people find themselves broke.  Unable to pay bills, once unblemished records now show credit ruined by lengthy unemployment, late payments, closed accounts, liens, foreclosures  and repossessions.  This alone can be a deciding factor in employment decision-making.

Systematic discrimination that excludes a worker based on their economic circumstances, the obvious exceptions accounted for, is madness. One imagines someone desperate for a job would be more likely to do everything to keep it, no?

In addition, The Association of Certified Fraud Examiners [ACFE] recently produced a report suggesting that the recent recession, and its subsequent impact on staffing levels, actually leaves employers at greater risk of theft and embezzlement as a result. One would think that might counterbalance the fear that desperate people do desperate things, implied in checking credit as a condition of employment.

Not ones to miss the opportunity to recast the conversation, some employers opposed to the passage of H.R. 3149: The Equal Employment for All Act which seeks to restrict the practice of pre-employment credit checking, interpret the report differently.  For example, in a letter to Members of the House Financial Services Committee [PDF] they cite the same sources to argue the case for keeping broke workers broken. In essence their position is people who have fallen on economic hard times cannot be trusted.

Protecting the Unprotected?

Countering worker marginalization should be a part of every employers’ thinking if they are sincere in their boasts of inclusive hiring, workforce diversity, “employer of choice” status, and good corporate citizenship. Unless perhaps that is all it is – boastful.

So, as a starting point, ask yourself:

• Are “fairness” and “equality” overrated in employment decision making?
• To what extent do you, corporately or personally, discriminate against otherwise capable workers based on convention or “traditional values?” Whether sanctioned or not, how do you justify that?
• If you could add one group of people to the list of “protected classes” which group would it be and why?
• Under what circumstances would you bend the rules to employ a person that would otherwise be denied employment based on their personal preferences or circumstance?
• To what extent should HR leaders be change-agents, for both their employers and society-at-large?
• Will America ever have a tattooed President?

Our society fails on so many levels to anticipate workforce needs that allowing sanctioned, institutional prejudice to compound the problem should be an anathema to any right-minded HR leader.  Affecting change is never easy though.  It often takes more time than most HR leaders have tenure. And the truth is, sometimes it is more politic to practice the double standards embodied in “pragmatism” and “expediency” than champion change.  After all, being an agitator carries a stigma all of its own.

Looking For Talent

This piece was sitting in the archives at my old job. Just before the economic collapse, I took a walk through my neighborhood in a small California town. I saw a reality that I’d been avoiding.

Today, three short years later, we hardly ever talk about the war for talent. Economic shifts turned us into a nation of underemployed and undercompensated people who owe more than they make.

Still, there’s a consistent truth. What you think and what’s really there are disconnected.

If 50% of homeowners are upside down in their houses, why isn’t anyone talking about what it like to go to work under those circumstances. We’re simply not acknowledging the new reality. It’s never going to fix until we articulate the problem.

Long term readers know that I love it when something doesn’t quite fit together.

This afternoon, I took a walk up the hill that stands behind my little town. The place is postcard idyllic. The streets run 1,2,3,4,5, Mission. The Mission church itself seems to be at the gateway to the hill. From behind the Mission Church, you can see out to San Francisco Bay.

Fourth Street is hopping most of the time. White upper middle class singles jostle with Latinos who have made it. The street is a picture perfect rendition of a diversity poster though it, like most of California, is short of black faces.

Fourth Street is the picture of Northern California as paradise. There’s the arts cinema, home to the California Film Institute where I’ve gotten to see most of the Academy Award nominees in the foreign film category. There are more than fifty restaurants in an eight block radius… Italian, Mexican, Guatemalan, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Chinese, Brewpubs, Thai, Donuts, Vegan Pizza, Puerto Rican, Vietnamese, French, Greek, Fusion.

There are easily a half dozen coffee shops with wireless. Japanese home furnishings, Scandinavian Designs, four new age/Tibetan Buddhist stores (including one with live entertainment). Music stores, bakeries, rug stores and on and on.

It really looks good but something is caddywampus.

The hill I climbed goes to the top of the city. It passes through a half mile stretch of “Public Land: Open From Sunrise to Sunset. As I looked closely, I saw large clusters of homeless people, mostly Latino, clearly dirt encrusted from living outside, very threatening, moving in groups of six to eight.

I saw white homeless people surrounded by clothes sitting in the cars on the street across from the Public Land. As I walked up the hill I drew harsh stares from local residents of the houses that bordered the land. I drew equally hostile looks from the homeless. The people in the homeless cars tried not to make eye contact.

I was surprised.

This is not my image of my town. Anxiously, I walked quickly back down to the apparent safety of the main drag. It was as if some magic dust had been sprinkled on the town.

The homeless seemed to spring up from every sidewalk crack. The city took an entirely different texture. It became clear that the main white drag was a thin veneer on something very, very different. People see what they believe.

I am sure that I am not the only one who looks right through the reality of the world I inhabit. I’m reasonably sure that few people take the time to notice. It takes living and working in the town when the only others who seem to do so are lower class and/or homeless. I just didn’t get the magnitude.

It’s a shame to call it a war for talent when it’s really a question of human development and talent optimization. Today, I walked through a world of wasting resources.

In those three short years, I have come to understand that jobs are a part of the problem. The whole employment notion, handed down from feudal practice, creates a nagging sea of entitlement. Today, the wasting resources are hanging on to the payroll and the hope that they will one day be able to afford their home.

Great talent management and optimization ought to focus on creating independence and self-determination. In any company, employees who possess those things add the greatest value. Talent management that doesn’t address the impact of the economy on the workforce is a Pollyannish exercise.

Retaking our organizations from the depression that haunts them is one of the real transformational challenges of HR. Who’s doing that?

HRXformation II

The problem you are trying to solve is not the problem you have.

At the very core, this is the issue facing HR operations around the planet. Focused on internal measures, cost efficiencies and process improvements, the generic HR operation looks straight at the question of value creation. More often than not, the distinction seems either too subtle or impossible to achieve.

Before you write this off as yet another whiny, negative piece on the failings of HR, let’s get a couple of things straight.

1. The tendency to confuse improving your processes with making a difference is a normal part of being human. In a way, it’s what organizations are good at doing.
2. That HR seems to specialize in solving problems that don’t make a difference is mostly caused by a lack of examples for tying the function to business results.
3. There are solid examples of how to move the ball forward; not best practices but insight generating stories. Best practices, as you might guess, doom the function to irrelevance.
4. The question of HR’s essential value is critical. Knowing what to outsource and what to keep is the primary decision being made in HR organizations today.

There is an old Sufi story about solving the right problem:

A man was walking home late one night when he saw the Mullah Nasrudin searching under a street light on hands and knees for something on the ground.

"Mullah, what have you lost?" he asked.

"The key to my house," Nasrudin said.

"I’ll help you look," the man said.

Soon, both men were down on their knees, looking for the key. After a number of minutes, the man asked, "Where exactly did you drop it?"

Nasrudin waved his arm back toward the darkness. "Over there, in my house."

The first man jumped up. "Then why are you looking for it here?"

"Because there is more light here than inside my house."

It is normal and very human to look for the keys where there is the most light. In HR, we know all about retention, time to hire, cost per hire, and a thousand other measures of our work. What we lose sight of is the business impact.

In a few really visionary companies, HR leaders are assigned real business objectives. One really large and innovative Silicon Valley firm measures recruiting performance for the director with "revenue per employee" (RPE). There is a single RPE goal and bonuses and performance begin with that objective.

So, when faced with a choice between hiring 30 people in a declining subset of the business with low margins and a trend towards commoditization (which would improve overall cost to hire and cycle time measures) and finding two really difficult positions in a fast growth high margin operation, the prioritization is obvious.

Far too often, HR Leaders who express their objectives in the few things that they can control lose sight of the rest of the business. It doesn’t matter how fast or slow you hire people if you are hiring the wrong people or even the right people for the wrong business segment.

There are many, many ways that HR can be the generator of massive transformation and huge economic success. It’s just that none of those things involve doing HR faster, better or cheaper. They all involve applying smart Human Capital planning and practice to the business.

Great HR makes money.

Feature | Transformation Week

We know that all things change, it’s the only constant in business. But what the heck are we supposed to do when we’re trying to steer the transformation of an HR effort? Is it easier with a plan, do we need outside help, is there a process for it, and what tools have been developed to aid us in our journey? We go looking for answers in this week’s HRExaminer…Xformation Transform Now

Plus…

What fears are shaping employee views on social media?
Jessica Lee attended BlogHer recently and found an anxiety fueled conversation about how employers are using social media. If you’re worried about your personal brand online you’re not alone…The Fear within your Workforce

Some Highlights from This Week’s HRExaminer

• John Sumser sizes up HR transformation after two days with 100 Leaders at the HR Management Institute conference in Atlanta
• The Reframing Matrix
• The Starr Tincup HR Psychographic Report
• Transformation Videos
• 10 Minutes on Transforming HR
• Delivering On The Promise of HR Transformation

That’s it for this week’s HRExaminer.

Have a fantastic weekend!

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During July, I attended the HR Management Institute conference ini Atlanta. It was a gathering of about 100 senior HR leaders in a secluded setting north of the city. I’ve been integrating the things I learned in the weeks that followed.

HR in large organizations is staffed and operated by amazing people who are focused on solving problems that range from operational efficiencies to projects that completely transform the way companies see themselves.

it looks like there are several kinds of transformation in HR:

• things that improve the delivery of HR Services as currently conceived
• Projects that dramatically change one aspect of the enterprise
• Ways of operating HR that transform the very idea of HR

A quick review of online literature on HR Transformation is almost exclusively focused on the first category. So called ‘shared services’ approaches are really a new twist on the long standing questions about centralization and decentralization that characterize all fads in organizational thinking.

There is simply nothing serious out there about HR as an intentionally transformative function.

Even the best of the emerging thinkers about HR as the engine of organizational excellence are stuck in the mud trying to get enough velocity to establish a real vision.

But of course, many are clamoring about how great, how powerful, how effective social media tools can be in the business setting. Revolutionary! Think about how great of a recruiting tool it can be! Game changer! And what about as an employee communications tool! Tweet, tweet, tweet! The reality is however that many more are clamoring – likely under their breath – with fear about how you, as an employer, are going to impact their usage of social media.

I had the good fortune of being in New York the other week for BlogHer, a conference dedicated to… nothing but women bloggers. Seriously! Over 3,000 women converged on New York to enthusiastically share with one another about their blogging efforts and learn a trick or two about how to be a better blogger including leveraging blogs for both personal and professional growth. One of the unique features of this particular BlogHer event was a conference track dedicated to jobs and careers for bloggers in which I participated on a panel where we discussed when blogging could possibly hurt your brand. And the question we attempted to answer was this – when there’s an (inevitable?) intersection of your personal and professional lives online, how might it impact your work?

One of the biggest things about BlogHer that left a mark on me was how there are a whole lotta bloggers out there struggling with their “personal brand” and how to be “authentic” (which is what will gain your blog an audience at the end of the day) through not only their blogs but their Twitter streams, or Facebook profiles when their employers or potential employers are likely “Googling” them as part of the employment process. And mainly, there seemed to be a lot of fear on this topic. Specific questions these bloggers asked of me ranged from…

Are employers really checking out what people say and do online? Are employers using information that they may find online about candidates and/or employees in their decision making? Can I be fired for what I say online? Can I be denied a job for what I say online? But what if what I’m blogging about is strictly personal and unrelated to what I do professionally? Do I need to separate my personal online identity and assume two identities so it doesn’t hurt me professionally? And just how do I technically separate that stuff from my professional persona? And is any of this “snooping” on the employer’s end of things legal?

There were questions. Many, many questions. And all were laden with fear. Lots and lots of fear.

Granted, this was a conference for bloggers so the level of fear was likely to be higher. But let’s take a step back and take stock in what we know about the usage of social media in general. Americans spend nearly a quarter of their time online on social networking sites and blogs, up from 15.8 percent just a year ago (43 percent increase) according to new research released from The Nielsen Company. There’s no question about usage. But what employers may be forgetting about, or simply not even considering, is that with social media usage comes a lot of fear based in those very same questions I heard at BlogHer.

Fear comes from the unknown, which I think means simply that there’s a lack of communication in many workplaces about what’s acceptable and what’s not when it comes to social media usage. So what’s an HR pro to do? Communicate clearly, and communicate often. Have a policy on social media usage? If yes, re-review it, then communicate it. If no, develop one, quickly. Beyond this however, as an organization, you’ll have to assume a stance on your current/future workforce’s usage of social media in their personal lives and its potential indirect impact on one’s job. If you were to scroll back up, take a moment, and read through those questions again, would you know how to answer them for your workforce? Or a potential hire? Know where the fear is then get proactive about how you’d respond. There’s fear out there, but there needn’t be.

In The Know 1.28.1 More Transformation

• On Social Learning, Sensemaking Capacity and Collective Intelligence
  This slide deck illuminates the importance of ‘sense making’ as a new strategic competence. As the data tsunami rolls through our organizations, HR is the point of responsibility for the adoption of new competencies. How is your organization keeping track of critical emerging skills?
• Workforce Analytics & Workforce Planning Group on LinkedIn
  Contemporary HR requires the use of workforce planning and standards. They don’t really make an organization’s HR function transform but they do create the opportunities to ask some of the right questions. The reasons that HR Analytics and detailed workforce planning are important may surprise you. Increasingly, the data used to define organizational performance will come from beyond its boundaries. Navigating that hurdle will require competence with internal analytics.
• Transforming the Human Resource Function Through Shared Services
  What if transformation is just code for cost efficiencies. This white paper, from Buck Consultants, offers the shared services model as a way to “Transform HR”. What they mean, it turns out, is an approach that takes the best of centralized HR, the best of decentralized HR and blends the two. The result, they hope, is tighter coupling with the customer. It’s a good idea that gets you more of the same for less expenditure. It’s not a game changer but a smart way to maneuver if you can’t handle a game change.
• 10 Minutes on Transforming HR
  Seems like HR Transformation is a big topic in the large consultancies. This simple thought-piece from PWC tries to identify the opportunity and action steps in a digestible bite. In this view, HR can be a brand steward, optimizing the meaning and autheticity of brand communications while shepherding in an era of external measurement. What if great HR was measured as “revenue per employee”?
• Delivering On The Promise of HR Transformation
  from this 2004 article: “Nearly 80 per cent of companies globally have completed or are in the process of, HR transformation, but many HR departments have yet to deliver improvements from the transformation process, and there remains a significant gap between what is expected of HR leaders and what they deliver. An 18-month Mercer Human Resource Consulting study involving 1,100 organisations found that companies are being driven by the need to align the HR function more closely with business objectives and by the desire to offer more strategic support to the organisation.“