Amitai Givertz’s Recruitomatic Blog

Leader, luminary, larger-than-life David Maister posts Screening for Character and draws an interesting set of comments from an international audience on the subjects of screening, interviewing and what-have-you. Rather than quote the post and comments at length, I suggest my friends in the Recruitosphere click over and take a long, hard read. These are our clients talking.

Two more suggestions:

1. A few bloggers in the recruiting bubble might want to take the time every now and then to find opportunities like this one to engage, educate and excite people who exist “in the real world,” readers who might just benefit a little more from our blogging, knowledge and resources than we sometimes do from our own self-absorption and pathological introspection.

2. Leave a comment for David Maister and his readers. Who knows – someone outside of our community may bookmark one of us. David Maister may even reference this eclectic group of bloggers blogging in the bubble in one of his articles. That would be nice.

I’m having fun tracking blogs that seem to be talking to me and/or that I would recommend to my clients. I have been following Eric Jackson’s blog Breakout Performance. His post Carly’s Biggest Shortcoming takes an interesting view of Carly Fiorina’s leadership at HP and that company’s recent changing of the guard.

Perhaps Eric will post more often if we tell him we like his blogging. I hope so.

Peter Gold makes an interesting point in his Myspace – Mydetails – Ornot! post on the Hire Strategies blog, adding another layer of conversation to the debate about MySpace, privacy and the role of the Gladys Kravitz wannabes.  As Peter’s posts often do, this one really got me thinking. As my train of thought went from no privacy online to Rupert Murdoch’s recent acquisition of MySpace to CEOs blogging, I made a startling discovery – Rupert Murdoch has a MySpace profile.  Looking at it, I wonder if you would give this man a job. 

As online persona, personal brand and digital fascism have entered the employers’ screening and assessment debate, true to form, “The Dirty Digger” reminds us – you can’t believe everything you read in the papers, hear in the news or see online. It’s too two dimensional, don’t you think?

The 25th Annual Medtronic Twin Cities Marathon weekend will be happening soon. The three-day weekend through October 1st is a festival of fitness and life. It includes lots of activities for children, fat people, fit people and the truly athletic among us – runners who can cover 26 miles of city streets without dropping down dead at the finish line. Now, to the casual viewer watching the six o’clock local news, or thumbing through the Star Tribune, one could easily overlook this annual event as another local happening that marks the changing seasons, feeding the human-interest stories local news media needs to balance the reports of mothers cradling dead babies in places far, far away. The Medtronic Twin Cities Marathon is a call to the community to participate in the beauty of being a community. It is both a celebration of life and metaphor for business.

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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.

I was drawn to a recent post The Wobblies (IWW union) at a food co-op? which you can read on George’s Employment Blawg. As usual, George raises some interesting questions for which there are no simple answers. However, his post got me thinking:

1. The Wobblies could never re-emerge as a political or acitivist entity today any more than there is currently a mass market for manure. When the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) was conceived horses were as important to the economy as was the wholesale exploitation of downtrodden workers and the lumpenproletariat. Of course, times change. The Wobblies today represent a romanticism that should not be confused with political activism. No, I’m afraid the 24-year old new-age Wobblies are about as connected to the political past as their Goth cousins are connected to ancient history. I think George should have known that before asking, “Is there something inherently inconsistent about unionizing a co-op?”. With all due respect, George, that is a stupid question. Should all Catholics be priests and nuns?

2. The irrelevancy of the IWW today should not distract us from the legitimate debate regarding human rights in the workplace. Who is going to say there is not a good case to be made for mobilizing in defense of those enslaved around the world – estimated to be around 27 million – or for agitating for improved working conditions for sweat shop workers, exploited children, women forced to work as prostitutes, and so on. As long as economic interests transcend human decency there will always be a need for someone to stand up and say: “This is not a good enough society for me, or you, fellow-citizen, human soul!” I agree it may not be the Wobblies, but who then?

3. I understand famed intellectual and social commentator Noam Chomsky is one of the most celebrated Wobblies in the “movement” today. Anyone who has an interest in digging deeper to better understand the legacy of our sepia-tainted and uniquely American anarcho-syndicalist organizations should read Chomsky’s work and his contribution to modern thinking that argues a case for the evolution – not revolution - of an anarcho-capitalist society.

I know, I know – where’s the relevancy of this for us, today? Where’s the connection here? Well, I submit:

Blogging and the democratization of the web are classic examples of the type libertarian society characterized by anarchist thinkers like Chomsky – a society itself characterized by freedom of association, mutual aid, loose confederation and social networking in the absence of governmental oversight and authoritarian regulation. While silly Wobblies may be all screwed up trying to get food co-ops to spill the beans – ridiculous – perhaps we should start getting passionate about “sticking it to the man” ourselves. Before it’s too late.

U.S. chip-giant Intel Corporation sends a clear message to crazed Hezbollah bomb-throwers from its underground nerve center in Haifa, Israel: Kiss my Katyusha! Life goes on for an employer of choice.

I suspect in the coming weeks we are going to hear a lot more talk about India and the continued outsourcing of U.S. jobs. On the one hand I think the types of position that will be outsourced to India will change – salaries in India are inflating annually at a rate 15% among IT professionals for example, making the lower costs of outsourcing less attractive than they say, two years ago – but the attraction of offshoring jobs will continue, and perhaps for the same old reasons.

My experience with outsourced jobs to India – entirely as a U.S. consumer/customer at this point – has been nothing but positive. I am particularly struck by how in Indian society – so exotic, mystical even – people are called Philip and Peter and Patrick. Just like in Wisconsin, in fact.

So, while some U.S. workers can feel less endangered as the wages gap continues to close, others can only hope that India’s apparent failure to learn from U.S. hiring practices will draw India under the spotlight once again, albeit for altogether different reasons, and give employers pause to think – not whether or not we should be exporting jobs – but how to export best practice recruiting too. We’ll see. I’m sure a background check would reveal many Indian customer service reps are going under assumed names. What next?

Namaste, Baba.

I got this email from LeadershipIQ in my box this morning:

“Poll: Enron and Corruption

Ken Lay, the former CEO and Chairman of Enron died yesterday.  Leadership IQ has launched a poll to measure your views on the convicted former CEO.  Take 2 minutes and make your views known (only 10 questions). 

This poll is only open today.  If you take the poll, you’ll get a special early preview of the results before we release them to the media.  And we encourage you to send this email to your friends and colleagues.

Visit the link below to take the poll:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=553502330892”

All I can say, having gotten to the end of the survey is, this is about as tasteless as marketing can get. I will be junking every email LeadershipIQ sends me from this point forward. I suggest you do the same.

Job boards are very good indicators of what is really going on around the world. Undoubtedly, North Korea is the archetypal military industrial complex. A clear and imminent danger? You decide.

HR Guy: I read your post Announcement: Resume Workshop and would like to comment.

Increasingly I find it difficult to suggest practical uses for resumes. I have come to view them as problematic on a number of levels and look forward to the day that the Curriculum Vitae will go the same way as the Didus Ineptus.

I am aware that resumes continue to be a sort of currency in some circles and that too much criticism may draw more ire than interest. But for something that justifies such huge investments of time, money and effort for an ROI measured in piles and piles of paper that end up on managers’ desks gathering dust, and eventually, at best, shredded to make bedding for hamsters and defecating puppies, I have to question what is really going on. Don’t you?

The real rant for me is this: it’s not that resumes can be used to pervert the truth or skew meaningful data; it’s not that resumes fill applicant tracking systems and slow search engines to a crawl; its not that entire industries have been built on subjective views being expressed as objective facts. And it’s not that we have institutionalized navel contemplation.  My overriding problem is that most everything to do with resumes is fundamentally flawed. Otherwise, how is it they draw so much comment?

In the interests of full disclosure: I am a consumer and trader in resumes and human souls. That’s not an apology. It’s a fact. Like you, HR Guy, I’m a recruiter. Good luck.

I live in Jupiter, Florida. It is a beautiful place to live. I don’t remember which esteemed organization voted my home town one of the top ten places in America to live in but, I for one, think they got it right.

But there’s another side to the story. You see, Palm Beach County has its challenges as far as work is concerned. Our primary industries are service-oriented, and we have near full employment. Unemployment runs at 2.7%. Employers who need talent to drive and grow their businesses must have a solid strategy for sourcing passive candidates and had better have an understanding of why and how to manage private talent pools if they are to compete for the fewer and fewer number of available candidates. Unfortunately, only a small percentage of local employers do.

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