Archive for August, 2006

Leadership: Too Little, Too Late?

Published by Amitai Givertz on August 15, 2006 in Business Matters and Talent Management. 0 Comments

In a recently published article Where Have All the Leaders Gone? Forbes comments on the looming talent crunch for CEOs and other big-chiefs as if that is something we should be particularly concerned about. While the situation described by Forbes should give us pause for concern, I believe the shortage of nurses and teachers and welders may have greater social impact over time than the anticipated contraction among Forbes’ readership. That said, as a potential advertiser in Forbes I do read the article with some alarm.

There are over 70 million American baby boomers born between 1946 and 1964. Based on this fact, more than 40% of the U.S. labor force will reach the traditional retirement age by 2010. Contrast this with the number of workers between the ages of 35 to 44 – expected to shrivel by another 7% over this period – and the failure of our education system to produce the skill sets anticipated to be in most demand like technical, engineering, CEOs and so on – and we can begin to see a picture emerging post 2010 – interestingly the year beyond which the U.S. Department of Labor has been unable to forecast with any regularity – where technocrats, leaders and cronies are the only ones who can enjoy the comforts of modern society. Not unlike Russia during its Soviet heyday, or North Korea today perhaps. While this might sound alarmist, consider the implications of what the well-worn phrase “talent shortage” actually means. Unless Mexico has a trick up her sleeve secretly producing the next generation of CEOs to do the jobs Americans can’t or won’t do, then manicured lawns and fresh-picked tomatoes may become a thing of the past as we struggle with a general economic implosion.

Another esteemed publication widely read along the corridors of power and in executive bathrooms worldwide is the Economist. They have partnered with self-appointed thought leaders DDI and just published a coffee table how-to, The CEO’s Role in Talent Management. Reading the perennial gloom forecast in the Spherion Emerging Workforce Study as a primer, one hopes that in their last few years on the job, today’s CEOs can finally figure out what they should have done eons ago.

Sperm

Published by Amitai Givertz on August 14, 2006 in Blogging, Outlandish, Recruiting and Talent Management. 5 Comments

Coming to terms with my place in the blogosphere and the sorry realization that my esoteric writing cannot compete for readers in the bubble of recruitment blogging, I have decided to revert to a more traditional use for my weblog.

I shall write as if my posts were entries to a personal diary. The advantage of this is that I can now say what I like without having to pander to the sensibilities of those I once sought out for approval or acceptance. And no more replies to fallacious arguments, I’m done. I have ripped out the ability to count page views and the number of feeds from my WordPress dashboard. I will not be monetizing my site. Metrics? Phooey.

From now on I shall try to work out the details of a thing through the creative process of blogging, “musing” in blog-speak and posting a la Recruitomatique

Realizing there may be one or two who might want to read my entries – to fill their own void or loneliness perhaps – I will keep my sentences short. Uncomplicated. Not too intense. I will lighten up. Let the real me shine through.

If you are a recruitment blogger, one of the self-absorbed or self-serving or self-important – take your pick – or just a gentle reader, before you abandon me, disgusted that there is nothing of value here, a thought or two so that our brief time together may not be entirely wasted…

Continue reading ‘Sperm’

David Perry Speaks…

Published by Amitai Givertz on August 10, 2006 in Blog Swap, Business Matters and Recruiting. 1 Comment

I am privileged to be hosting David Perry as my guest for this week’s Blog Swap. Many will know David for co-authoring Guerrilla Marketing for Job Hunters and his companion work Guerilla Job Hunting – The Blog. David is also a partner in Perry-Martel International which is a posh executive search firm based out of…well, they’re international.

David Perry Speaks… 

By the year 2010, the cumulative codified knowledge of the world will double every 11 hours, which means that what you go to bed knowing at night will be outdated by daybreak. Shelf life for knowledge will be the same as that for a banana. Already, product lifecycles are measured in weeks not months or years. In this environment a company’s survival hinges on its employee’s ability to share knowledge - a concept that is foreign to most organizations, where people hoard knowledge to safeguard their jobs.

In the forthcoming book, Building Organizations That Leap Tall Buildings in a Single Bound, authors Ron Wiens, Ken Sudday and I focus on how to build a corporate culture that produces a winning bottom line by focusing on the organization’s Relationship Intelligence. We demonstrate that the ability of employees to trust is a measure of the organization’s Relationship Intelligence.

Companies with high Relationship Intelligence will succeed because they can build new knowledge and therefore new products and wealth on a continuing basis. In contrast, companies that have low Relationship Intelligence and hoard their knowledge and will fail.

Make no mistake, responding to change is not new, but the speed at which companies must make high-impact additions to their leadership teams is new. A company’s leadership equity has a direct bearing on its ability to drive through new strategies, make tough decisions, and turn crisis into opportunity.  

This is an environment for lean companies, driven by a relative handful of highest-quality employees.   Your requirement for people with tenacity, real talent and dogged determination can only be satisfied by using a recruiter who can match those qualities for your recruitment drive.   Recruiting is becoming a “craft” the perfect blend of art and science.

Today, your recruiter needs to be your “success partner” - someone willing to search the world, call the right prospects, get their attention, raise your proposition above the background noise, keep at it tenaciously for however long it takes – be it weeks or months – and be intelligent enough to present the same opportunity in creative new lights until the persuasion works.

In short, your success partner has to know your organizational structure creates your business opportunities, and then work with you until you attain your desired future.  How does your recruiter measure up?

© Copyright 2006 David Perry

Tongue-tied

Published by Amitai Givertz on August 8, 2006 in Blog Swap, Blogging, Business Matters and Outlandish. 1 Comment

This week marks a milestone in my short blog-posting career. In the time that it has taken Lou Adler to post his eight-part omnibus On Becoming a Great Recruiter I have published a good many posts and left more comments around the place than Idi Amin had bastard children. And, as I am reminded that the consumption of human flesh must be an acquired taste – the African dictator was known for eating his detractors – I am also reminded that blogging may be a modern thing but the satirical post is not. Better known for Gulliver’s Travels with its prototypical little people and yahoos, Jonathan Swift is more enduring as one who knew a thing or two about horse-shit and how pretentious polite society can be. All this raises the whole issue of my own emerging online persona. Do I want to be known as a ranting firebrand barking for my own blogebrity or a bloggy-nerd preoccupied with the conversion of manure to live feed? I know for sure, neither of those things reflects who I am or what I aspire to. This online identity thing is a tricky business, difficult to manage for sure.

For others too, managing perceptions in this bubble should not be left to chance. I maintain an independent voice because all I have to share with you here is a part of me, a part of me that may not be PC enough to be corporately sponsored or packaged for mass consumption. And yet, here we are: icons, thought leaders, luminaries, and captains of industry, subject matter experts, professional pundits, front-line practitioners and naked-bloggers all sharing the same space and competing for the same something. Surely, a formula for the occasional ruffling of feathers wouldn’t you say?

If I had a comment for every email I received in response to my post Bill Cosby & John Sumser: Icons or Has-beens? that would have been one of the most commented on posts that I have written to date. The actual number may not seem much in the overall scheme of things, but what could have come of the thread: the realization that John Sumser’s interbiznet is a national treasure, a living history of online recruiting, or having to generate all that daily content is enough to make anyone cranky, or that John Sumser is hoping one day Jason Goldberg – prolific in his own right – will acquire his online franchise too? Why would so many prefer to comment off-line and effectively stump the post? It makes no sense, or does it? You there! Can I publish your email dated July 13, can I? Pour quoi?

Why would my reply properly correcting the Canadian Headhunter on his comments to my CollegeRecruiter.com post College Career Centers: Reality Online Checks Out be censored? Was it really too controversial for Steven Rothberg to publish or just too plain-spoken for “polite” company? Certainly, reproducing the reply here would be utterly useless, out of context. And, as I read what I felt obligated to post instead, I now feel the whole post – my honest effort – was somehow slaughtered in that one email that said, “You can’t say that. It’s too personal.” Why couldn’t I say what I had to say and then Steven Rothberg could have commented too, really got the ball rolling? Of course, if you’ve ever tried posting a comment on CollegeRecruiter.com you’ll know that it is like trying to spring a chastity belt with a bobby-pin. No key, no comment. So that’s a moot-mute point too I guess. Also, why do posts appear in reverse chronological order? To ensure that nothing makes sense?

And, why would David Manaster choose a curiously contrived email rather than reply to my Schmaltz Herring post when he could have embraced the readership, refuted the post, and leveraged the opportunity and forum to his own advantage perhaps? For example, he could have left this comment:

“Amitai, thanks for pointing out that I have been too busy to post but if you spent less time worrying about what I was doing and waited patiently for my reply you would have known soon enough that my time and effort has been given over to the launching my charity ERE Foundation – philanthropy I consider to be altogether more important than your silly little blog.”

“Ere, okay, David. Sorry.”

Yes, our online personas, personal brands, the management of perceptions – even the occasional marketing spin – becomes more important the more important you are. Blogging is a complex medium and it requires more than just an occasional post. When I started this blog, I didn’t know that, but I’m learning fast. Confusion and commitment are unkind teachers.

The democratization of the web, soap-box blogging as much a part of that as wikis, digging this, tagging that and what-have-you, cannot be realized when those who exploit blogging – legitimately I would add – for their own publishing gigs and empire building forget that, unlike political democracies, as leaders they are self-appointed, bought and paid for by favors and advertisers, elected to positions of “authority” by jerry-rigging the “election” process. They cleverly manipulate their “popularity” by building “credibility” by incredible means – search engine optimization and blog swapping and blending repurposed content, modern-day princes. And that’s okay, reality is what it is. But even in the virtual world we need a reality check from time to time. I say, the process of disenfranchising the dissenting voices – cutting us off at the comment – will not work. We’ll just blog and take another path of least resistance. We cannot be silenced unless we are scared into submission by the thought of being served up on some dictator’s dinner table. What bile!

Jonathan Swift was a brilliant satirist. At least I think so. I can only speculate how his “corrective purpose” would have taken shape if he had the benefit of real-time comments to reframe arguments and advance a meaningful social intercourse. When one chooses off-comment email to respond to a post, its potential is thwarted, the possibility of truth denied. If the suppression of discourse is not deliberate, the undertaker cares not. The post is dead. The stink is stunk. When comments are suppressed or avoided the cry for discourse becomes the shrill rant that blogging can so easily become. And when one’s emerging online persona appears to be mutating into something that does not reflect the real you, you are bound to try and fix it, no? I define who I am – not you. I don’t define who you are – you do. The sad part is we will continue to blog regardless of whether we should have started or not adding with varying degrees of regularity to the mind numbing cacophony of online drivel that on the one hand affirms our existence and on the other, simply negates it.

Here we are – a milestone in my short blog-posting career. The posts that I hoped would define me in this space – Hyperinflation, Possibility Recruiting, The Double Agent, India Stealing Jobs?, Your HR Guy Faces Off for example – eclipsed somewhat and temporarily by my own struggle to assert that I too have a voice. I will be heard. What resonates within me cannot be silenced until such time as I choose to return to a more sedate form of blogging: reading the feeds and being fed.

Which Side of the Fishbowl?

Published by Amitai Givertz on August 7, 2006 in Blog Swap and Recruiting. 1 Comment

Thanks to Tod Hilton for his guest post this week as part of the Blog Swap, and for being a Recruitomatic stalwart. As you can see, Tod needs no introduction from me…

Which Side of the Fishbowl?

A quick little intro for those of you tuning in to the Big Bad Recruiting Blog Swap … My name is Tod Hilton and I will be your host for this post. What I am: a software developer at Microsoft and a bunch of other things [father, husband, gamer, snowboarder, etc.]. What I’m not: a recruiter or hiring manager, although I do interview candidates and give the infamous ‘hire’ or ‘no-hire’ recommendation.

If there’s one thing I quickly noticed about Amitai’s personality it’s that he calls it like he sees it…no matter what. :-) Behold the evidence here, there, around-the-bend, over-that-hill, on-top-of-that-fence-post and oh-yeah-here-too. He’s been blogging for less than 2 months and his bluntness has made me laugh out loud [mostly in agreement] more times than several of the people I voraciously consume as often as they can post. That’s a tough act to follow [and I sincerely hope that he continues], but here goes nothing…

Imagine if you will, a goldfish [let’s call him Percy] swimming around a nice round little fishbowl. Percy knows that fishbowl like the back of his fin [yes, I’m assuming fish can see the back of their fins]. He knows exactly how deep the water is. He knows exactly where the tiny fake plant is placed. He knows exactly how many strokes it takes him to swim completely around the bowl. He knows everything there is to know about that bowl. Well, at least the inside of it…

That’s where I come in. You see, I’m not in that fishbowl with Percy. Sure, I see how big it is and that the water is X inches deep and that the tiny fake plant is placed a little off-center to the right side [of course, unless you turn it]. But I also see that the bowl itself is sitting on top of a counter. And next to it on the counter is a picture frame with a lovely family smiling back at me. Hanging on the wall above the fishbowl and picture is an Ansel Adams print [Oak Tree, Snowstorm taken in Yosemite]. In fact, the bowl is surrounded by all sorts of items that the fish doesn’t even really notice. Sure, Percy can see outside of the bowl, but it’s all a bit distorted to him. Obviously it would be distorted because of the convex shape of the glass bowl. But perhaps not so obvious, what is outside of the bowl is distorted to him because it doesn’t really affect his daily life. Percy can swim all day long, but that picture sitting next to his bowl doesn’t do anything for him. Or does it?

You can read about fish all day long [I’m not sure why you’d want too, but I suppose you could do it nonetheless] so let me get to a point…and yes, there actually is one. :-) As a non-recruiter participant in the recruiting blog swap I see myself as sitting outside of the fishbowl while all of you recruiters are inside. Now, now, now…before you go and get all upset with hurt feelings let me continue. I have read many, many great posts over the past 5 weeks solely as a result of participating in the blog swap. Stuff I never would have been exposed to if I hadn’t made the rash decision [yes, it was definitely an impulse thing for me] to participate. You are all opening my eyes to issues you face [as recruiters] that I was only vaguely aware of. I’ve learned about how the recruiting industry is leveraging technology beyond just a simple listing of a company’s job opportunities. I have read several pieces about how recruiting should deal with individual transparency becoming the norm because of people revealing so much personal information online (i.e.: MySpace). I’ve gotten some insight in to how you view resumes [or the death of them]. All of it is great information and it has been a valuable learning experience for me.

But consider my perspective. I’m a software developer. I only spend time recruiting in an official capacity if I absolutely have to [like the recent SDET position we filled on my team]. And trust me, I didn’t particularly enjoy it so I’m not looking to make any career changes in that direction. To me, on any normal day, the conversations y’all are having are like that picture outside of Percy’s fishbowl. I can see them and hear them, but they’re distorted because they don’t directly affect me. For me, it’s like I have jumped in the fishbowl and am now swimming around with you recruiter-type-goldfish for the first time. :-) But where does that leave you recruiter-type-goldfish?

Now think about that for a minute.

OK, minute’s up. I’ll tell you where it leaves you…you’re still swimming around in the same fishbowl with the same goldfish and the same tiny fake plant. Sure, you might be talking more than you were before, but what are you talking about? Survey says…recruiting [ding, ding, ding].

In all fairness, not all of the posts have been focused solely on recruiting issues. I would be doing a disservice to everyone if I inferred that the subjects were so narrowly scoped. There have been several discussions that moved outside the normal boundaries of recruiting [although I don’t know whether to count Gretchen’s haikus :-)]. I think it’s great that you’re all cooperating like this and getting the conversations started, but I challenge you to break out of your comfort zones and move the discussions into unexplored territories. I have learned just how much recruiters can affect my life by simply jumping in to the bowl with you. That’s something I never would have known if I hadn’t noticed that family picture sitting next to my own little fishbowl.

A fish, a bowl and a picture. Which side of the fishbowl are you on, or rather, should you be on?

© Copyright 2006 Tod Hilton

Schmaltz Herring

Published by Amitai Givertz on August 3, 2006 in Blog Swap and Blogging. 5 Comments

At the time of this writing I have been unable to determine the wellbeing if industry icon David Manaster. It is possible that personal matters have kept him from participating in the Blog Swap over recent weeks. I suspect one of his minions has been putting up the guest posts which appear to have gone unreciprocated in recent weeks on the inferior blogs now lacking for want of David Manaster’s thought leadership.

I concede that David Manaster is out of circulation for reasons which are perfectly legitimate – worthy of our sympathy even. It could be that he underestimated the difficult of recovering Jason Goldberg’s Blackberry from the bottom of Lake Washington or the challenges of working with union labor as he gets the pipe and drape ready for the upcoming ERE soiree in Hollywood, Florida. Who knows? Perhaps it is simply a matter of poor scheduling.

What I can say is this: It is very rude indeed to make commitments and break them while taking advantage of those of who are nice enough to provide content for your blog and a guest spot for your posting each week. I can only compare it to his breaking wind during a group hug. At best, that type of behavior is antisocial, unpleasant. As we all come to terms with our online personas it would be a good idea for the well-to-do’s among us to realize that their behavior sometimes appears to be arrogant and uncouth, even though that may be far from the truth.

Thankfully, I have been wrong on many occasions and, surely, I am wrong again. In the meantime, for those of you who may have scheduled a little time this week in anticipation of some value from David Manaster you will not go away disappointed. Courtesy of a Hire Calling - David Manaster’s elevated blog – I offer you these quality posts:

Online Communities - The View from My Window posted by Frank Mulligan

Perils and Potentials in Community Building posted by Yvonne LaRose

Talent Wars 2.0 – Does your recruiting strategy reflect what’s important to your candidates? posted by David Perry

Should your outside-of-work-online persona be considered by employers? and posted by Tod Hilton

As evidenced by the quality of content on David Manaster’s blog, it is obvious that a thoughtful and intelligent post takes some time and effort to produce, perhaps more than David Manaster’s personal or business circumstances might permit. I understand that. But, would the courtesy of a reply email have been too much to ask? Or am I being silly?

Just-In-Time Posting, Jack

Published by Amitai Givertz on August 1, 2006 in Recruiting and Talent Management. 0 Comments

Today, John Sumser claims on interbiznet that he has been waiting nearly fifteen years for someone to come along with a method for bringing recruiting into the same shape as the rest of the modern organization adding there’s been no one who fully understands the implications of Total Quality Management (TQM), Six Sigma and/or Lean Thinking. For tomorrow’s installment, John Sumser promises to develop the thread with a conversation on “waste,” prepping for next week’s Kennedy Information’s Recruiting 2006 soiree in New York no doubt.

The other day Jeff Hunter – another highly respected and revered thought leader - who also manages a rather sizeable recruitment organization, a practitioner if you will – suggested that John Sumser has “jacked” his content before, and may feel that way reading John Sumser’s lean postings. But, I cannot imagine why. Has Jeff Hunter come up a method for bringing recruiting into the same shape as the rest of the modern organization? What could he possibly know about “waste?” Where the dickens was Jeff Hunter fifteen years ago anyway?

So many questions, sensing a disturbance in the force I am. Really, come on, with the Kennedy conference just around the corner - and with everyone getting to meet at last - shouldn’t we know who is jacking who? I don’t know, it must be tough at the top.

In the meantime, today’s other picks come from Kevin Wheeler – another young pretender on the recruiting scene – Recruiting: Applying the Principles of Lean Manufacturing to Recruiting.

Microsoft: Cunning on Campus, Exposed

Published by Amitai Givertz on August 1, 2006 in Blog Swap and Recruiting. 0 Comments

As part of this week’s Blog Swap I have a rambling rant College Career Centers: Reality Online Checks Out that will be published – unedited we hope – on CollegeRecruiter.com’s blog. In my research I came across this journalistic coup via Jeff Sandquist’s blog: Investigative Reporting Video Uncovering the Secrets of Microsoft College Recruiting. I hope you will find my post on CollegeRecruiter.com as helpful as I did this one in formulating an alternative view of college recruiting.