Amitai Givertz’s Recruitomatic Blog

I have had a number of conversations in recent days about authenticity and transparency and evangelism and corporate blogging and the human condition. I have to admit, these things rattle around my cranium causing me to have a headache, raising more questions than answers. How these converging and sometimes colliding concepts are being applied – talent management, marketing communications and selling, the points of intersection for me – is interesting but not quite understood yet.  Trying to reconcile the absurdity of all this hypothesizing with the working realities we face every day leads me to wonder how I will ever translate these value propositions into deliverables, actions that count for something in my world – productivity and profit, self-actualization. I guess I should just get on with it, right?

Creating the impression of being more self-assured than I am, I get by winging it: transparency this, authentic that, accountability up, turnover down, this one’s in, that one’s out, yada, yada, yada… Hardly real is it, creating an impression that you might be in the know and then winging it. You would think my er-um speech and fidgety behavior would give away my discomfort fluffing it with the experts who champion such lofty things. Amazingly, some acknowledge me as one of the initiated. Others, too polite to tell me that they see right through my highfalutin tootin’, stop returning calls. How transparent is that?

Even so, when we talk about the new paradigm for business and talent management – without quite grasping what it all means and how it might all work – it is because we want to believe that there is more to our dealings than the routine chicanery, the marketing spin, the misleading sales tactics, and the shark-chumming that we have somehow confused with best-practice, deal making and winning the war for talent. If that desire alone is not enough to advance the agenda, the bubbling of transparency and authenticity among our leaders, vaporizing in conversation and online, amounts to nothing more than reflux.

Of course, all these confessions affect my personal brand don’t they? At least I have come to realize the therapeutic benefits of this openness. I am mildly amused that my being so uninhibited and honest – about faking for example – is, in of itself, quintessentially authentic, doing my brand good. But then again, I might be kidding myself or worse, you might think I’m kidding you – like one of those synthetic blogger types – unwittingly unravelling any good this baring of my soul might have done. Ouch! That would be awful, wouldn’t it?

So there you are, there you have it. How much more transparent could you want me to be? If my being upfront with you in this candid and reflective way does not make up for my being poorly versed in the new lingo of naked conversations, forgive me, do.