No doubt, the organizers of the Society of Human Resources [SHRM] 63rd Annual Conference will tell you that their shindigs take a lot of advance planning. One assumes that includes their choice of venue, this year in Las Vegas.

Unable to substantiate my suspicions that the decision to congregate in the Mecca of smoke and mirrors had something to do with “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas,” I shall refrain from speculating that, if not that, perhaps some polyester PR plonker persuaded SHRM’s leadership that there is no better place to engage the dissenting voices going ga-ga for transparency than on the Vegas Strip. Where better to make a show of it!

In the weeks leading up to this year’s swarm I became quite bored with the unfolding drama surrounding the Machiavellian goings-on at SHRM. I’m sure I am not alone among the uncertifiable HR wannabes who now find themselves turned off by SHRM’s reported bully-boy tactics.

If it ever crossed my mind to give my eye-teeth to cover the cost of a few years membership, re-certification dues and and whatever else it takes to get me a GPHR, suffice it to say I’ve started flossing again. Now, if I could only get that interminable “Anything you can do ICANN do better,” tune out of my head, I might find something to celebrate in SHRM’s nearing retirement age.

Small comfort then that the only thing I have is to sit at my computer and wonder as the SHRM conference streams in, captured live in 140 character soundbites.

As I anticipate each new #SHRM11 tagged tweet it occurs to me, maybe SHRM’s politburo are behaving like any establishment icon does when faced with the inevitable flattening of hierarchy that Things 2.0 herald. Words with newly minted meaning come to mind: democratization, crowds, transparency, conversation, collaboration, and trust. The very things it appears SHRM’s leadership are missing. And so it seems they are out of sync with the rank and file, disconnected from the so-called “community” they are charged to represent.

However, It seems to me that if we dig a little deeper than the detestable tabloid commentary that sensationalizes the otherwise mundane, what we might observe is far from ho-hum after all.

I see something of great significance going on. Not so much a changing of the guard among the SHRM powers-that-be but a redefining of who the powers-that-be are, including those who are outside of SHRM’s membership. A hard pill for a once proud champion to swallow.

The transformation of an organization that is by it’s very nature cautious, conservative, elitist and power-centric is never easy when it is being forced by modernity to change its ways. And when the reasoned arguments of the body it claims to represent call for change too internal strife is sure to follow.

Yes, take a closer look.The fascinating stuff happens, not in the headlines of industry screeds but in between the lines of carefully orchestrated propaganda. For example, when the language changes from talk of advocacy [acting on what the membership thinks] to a an Orwellian mantra of “thought leadership” [this is what the membership should be doing] it’s a tell-tale sign of something going on. I’m just not sure what. Do you?

Alternatively, maybe the decision to whoop-it up in Vegas was a test of sorts to see how members react to a behemoth’s emergence into today’s changed world. How much more authentic could you get than having your leadership’s outlook on life reflected in the glitz and glamor of flying first class, living the high-life, and playing games where the odds always favor the house. It’s disarmingly honest reminding me of something I read on SHRM’s site once:

“The first step in creating a culture is the behavior of the leaders…Culture is expressed through behavioral norms, rituals, and symbols that have meaning to those in an organization.”

So could it be, the choice of Vegas for this year’s conflab is another way of saying, “C’mon fellas, get on[the]board?” Who knows? I’m told that some people who get too smitten by Vegas eventuallly end up on skid row with nothing to eat but dog food. Perhaps that’s it.

Don’t get me wrong, I know millions of delegates from all walks of life pass through Nevada’s convention centers, casinos, and nicely appointed brothels every year. And I concede the possibility that SHRM’s choice of Vegas could have been as an innocuous as the rolling of the dice, an easy way to decide between two shortlisted cities, a Mormon Tabernacle Choir / Cirque du Soleil tiebreaker if you will.

Either way, in the final analysis, the choice of venue is a reflection on SHRM’s leadership, like it or not.

What a contrast from earlier years, the choice of venue and message too. For example, in Washington D.C. members were given an esteemed Secretary of State for leadership insight. Fitting I’d say for the industry’s advocate body, expected to navigate the cloistered corridors of power, making friends in high places, and finding themselves a seat at somebody else’s table. 

But in Vegas, what were SHRM’s delegates treated to? A knight with a Virgin. Need I say more than…fitting?

So, the big tent is coming down and the delegates are returning to the familiar comforts of home. All that remains now is for us to observe if the long-term effects of the membership’s exposure to the brilliance of choosing Vegas for this years conference has any lasting effect. If history is to be our guide, it could be years before we know.

Next year, we’ll be hip-hopping in Atlanta. Well, that should be a rap!

The report captures the insights of the Nineteenth Annual Aspen Institute Roundtable on Information Technology, where business leaders, technologists, international politicians, academics and innovators explored how global structures and institutions are being confronted by the 21st century realities of distributed knowledge, crowdsourcing, open platforms and networked environments.

Read the rest here [PDF] »

It used to be that something was written, set aside, edited and mulled over before it was published in one of a few media outlets. Today, information, including photographs and video, get Tweeted, posted, linked, YouTubed, Googled and emailed instantaneously.

The opportunities to create havoc and legal liability abound. Part of it is the disconnect of between the author and the audiences. There is a false sense of intimacy in being able to communicate so quickly to multiple audiences of one.

Posting our hearts out from a computer, we are completely removed from the checks and balances of body language and voice inflections inherent in in-person communications. We like what we’re saying. We think we’re right. It’s often difficult to know when we are completely out of line until it’s too late. And once you post, it’s pretty much too late.

Read the rest here »

I spent a good amount of time trying to post what follows to the original post in reply to a rebuff from John.  To no avail. Apparently a plug-in on John’s site may have become unplugged. Feel free to post your comments here or there, at this point it may not matter.

Anyway, reluctant to break the thread, or retire for the night with this undone, here is my closing argument…

John,

I think we can agree that postulating, while helping us work through our thinking on the subject, is unlikely to result in our synthesizing a new paradigm for the industry, let alone rock the world for any employer who might be reading this. So, if you’ll indulge my replying to your comments it is only because I have been reflecting on these things of late and your post provides a safe place for me to fall, not because I want to engage you in a sisyphean debate which will have us both pooped-out before Sunday brunch.

You say, “Sometimes we fall into the trap of confusing sourcing (candidate flow) with recruiting (the right candidates).” That is, indeed, true. I would not split hairs except to say that sourcing is a function of identifying talent while candidate flow is as a result of attraction and engagement. Perhaps it is in the hairline difference between those kinds of thing that has us perplexed.

If research drives sourcing then branding drives attraction and engagement. Clearly, both activities contribute to the volume and quality of candidate flow but attraction and engagement alone carries things to, and beyond, the assessment phase. If qualifying candidates is a function of Sourcing [even up to the point of transitioning a person from candidate to applicant] then it is Recruiting’s responsibility to validate Sourcing’s product through candidate assessment. In other words, Recruiting regulates candidate flow and, ultimately, owns quality control too.

I guess these are the types of distinction some people make describing sourcing [as in talent pool and supply] versus candidate flow [as in talent pipeline/recruiting demand]. No doubt, for others it is yet another source of process-driven befuddlement.  Dare we completely alienate them by distinguishing the difference between recruiting, employer branding, sales and marketing so that at some point those things might be effectively integrated? God, no! What am I thinking!

Perhaps some of our confusion comes about because we don’t have an universal process-speak that describes where and when things like sourcing stop and recruiting kicks in, or how candidate sourcing might be different from sales prospecting, and so on.  Do we argue the toss about what those things mean in effect because we are still undecided on what they mean in practice?

We could split hairs ad infinitum but I sense some may be given to pulling their hair out if I did — or worse kick me in the follicles — and before we resolve other areas of persistent puzzlement. Questions like, “Whose brand is it anyway?” and “How does this brand thing scale/translate?” comes to mind when we talk about RPO and TPR outsourcing for example, if we ever ask those essential questions at all.

I’d like to propose an alternative reading for “the more candidates you have, the more qualification and screening you have to do.” If we can agree that, like it or not, recruiting is hard work can we also agree that, like farmers, it is our process and practice that ultimately decides whether we break our backs whacking weeds or do it reaping a bumper crop. Either way, it’s back breaking work, no less exhausting than changing an employer’s orientation from a reactive to a proactive one.

When I read, “The trouble with your argument is that it ignores the cost of discovering the gems in your database,” I am comforted that you don’t point out the other half-dozen flaws in my argument. In my defense, when it comes to the cost of mining gems, it is not something I ignore. As it happens, I’ll be the first to admit I have wasted a hundred-fold and more on “banner ads, reciprocal links, targeted content, search engine placement, keyword development, job board advertising and outright traffic purchases.” Hell, I’ve spent literally millions of other people’s dollars running full-page ads in USA TODAY and still daydream about what I could do with that money now.

Like you, I haven’t found “a tool that effectively does the right level of screening at effectively zero cost,” and I have long since given up looking for one. Experience tells me that “zero cost” in recruiting is a misnomer. Having failed spectacularly on more than one occasion to build databases and tracking systems for next-to-nothing I am persuaded that, like in any other business, in recruiting you get what you pay for.

Moving on, [and just between you and me, John] the only thing “Boolean hay” is good for is finding an occasional needle and elevating straw men to logical beings. What can I tell you about my progress in that department? Suffice it to say, I’m still rollicking, follicles firmly in hand.

As far as databases go, it is true the efficacy of search remains unproven. However, I don’t think failures to deploy enterprise-wide search in recruiting necessarily indicates a shortcoming in the search tools or techniques themselves. Rather it highlights one of the problems of a misaligned sourcing strategy and branding effort. That misalignment leads to enough “garbage in” to guarantee a good measure of “garbage out.” But don’t blame the messenger.

You are also right to point out that dedicated data mining is not something any Tom, Dick or Harriett can do. You say, “That a focused player can sift some crap in or out of the database is not the question,” and again we are agreed. But sifting crap in or out of the database is not the answer to anything either.

Suppose our distraction with perennial problems keeps us from focusing on sustainable solutions, and the resulting systems we implement continue to fall short of what the lowest common denominator needs. How hard would it be then for us to cost justify acquiring the more evolved recruiting skills we obviously need to get the job done? Surely, if we can increase the volumes of crap being sifted in an 8-hour shift, based on the premise of your argument, that would result in our surfacing a gem or two more than before. We might even find success in this department will afford us the development dollars to eventually come up with a dumbed-down search tool for the masses.

Conceding my personal opinion and amnesia-ridden experience is no substitute for hard facts, the issue is not so much how our resume databases are structured, populated and/or what operators we use to run queries, generate reports or surface talent.  And it certainly isn’t about clinging to arcane methods of deductive reasoning either.

While all of the above may help define our present reality, compounding the problems you infer are intractable, I believe we can expect to see changes soon. I imagine things like data visualization and analytics, intuitive data exploration, semantic search, conceptual linking, and AI will start to better facilitate the information needs of our increasingly complex recruiting, and justify, at last, our continued obsession for employing the lowest common denominators to mechanize and staff our mission-critical operations.

I cannot fault your thinking about “limiting your outreach to people who might actually give a crap about a job,” any more than I could defend “employer of choice” aggrandizement in place of that being something that is objectively measured and independently validated.

Demonstrating a workplace environment that is valued by its employees — be that a chicken factory in Arkansas or a Silicon Valley powerhouse — is an altogether different form of branding than the chicanery promulgated by magazine publishers and assorted plaque pushers.  Traditionally aided and abetted by recruitment advertising agencies and boiler-room sales operations, they feed a brand’s vested stakeholders’ addiction to chintzy blog-bling, vacuous press coverage, and hanging adornments.  Like everyone else who profits from selling impressions and delivering eyeballs, they further cloud the real issues ensuring we remain…confused.

Again, John, thanks for providing a safe place for me to fall and indulging my thinking out loud.

John Sumser poses some interesting questions in a post on HRExaminer: Structural Unemployment in HR , commenting:

The market will face a dichotomy: a surplus of people with HR resumes and a shortage of people with the right skills. This is how structural employment looks within a single discipline.

Today, it is hard to find a cobbler who can resole your shoes. The gradual elimination of that trade has not impacted the demand for shoes or the industry’s ability to keep occidental pedestrians fashionably and/or functionally shod. In fact, demand for shoes is improved by the passing of the humble cobbler.

It may be some ways off but I wonder how long it will be before we see no results for HR-discards looking for their now outsourced jobs online?

Ex-cobblers would be stupid indeed to make their experience as a cobbler the centerpiece of their resume when applying for any job other than Al Bundy’s perhaps, the type of worker “a shortage of people with the right skills” often produces. I think the same may be true for displaced HR workers too.

What say you?

In a wildly dangerous post entitled 22 Tutorials and Insight Posts on #Recruiting with #Linkedin sourcing specialist Ryan Leary highlights the problem. He links to a potpourri of posts that may have been useful at the time of their publication but are, as they age, a depreciating asset and thus, a waste of any self-respecting researchers’ time. Worse, for the untutored recruiter they pose a serious threat. The assumption is, validated by the expert’s pen and more that 25 tweets for endorsement, this stuff must be good for consumption — wrong!

Now, before anyone gets their loincloth in a twist, I admit it: I’ve compiled a list or two where inevitably the links did rot and the content may have putrefied a bit. And no, I don’t always update them before sharing them even now but I have never knowingly lead a would-be hack up the garden path with things like Threat 7001: “If the Swami said it, you can take it to the bank.” No, Baba, not me.

In fairness to Ryan he does clearly indicate the broken links in his post by striking them through.  I have to question why they would be included in the first place. Is this an historical record or what? Perhaps it has something to do with bloat, I don’t know. However, their presence would suggest that the other links are all good but they’re not — they pose hidden  threats!

Oh, Swami, what are you doing?

Ryan points to a Shally Steckerl classic,  Becoming A Promiscuous Linker on LinkedIn, [Oops, my bad!...Daggit!]. Hypothetical questions like “Yeah OK Shally, BIG DEAL… why should I care?” aside, the underlying premise of the post has long-passed its expiration date. It seems to me the time and effort required to sleep with every recruiter in Seattle serves very little purpose today [as if it ever did] given search results are no longer proportionate to the size of your member, network that is. Things change, including the Swami.

Contrasting the hopelessly out-of-date stuff we have other threats lurking within the contemporaneous posts. Among them a Glen Cathey piece, LinkedIn X-Ray Search Results Change: Update Your Strings.

Not that I would question Guru Glenn’s syntax but the extent to which advanced operators are so liberally used [for example: site:linkedin.com (inurl:pub OR inurl:in) -intitle:directory "Charlotte, North Carolina Area" "current * controller"] it won’t be long, with repeated use, that Google sees you as threat and slams on the brakes with a CAPTCHA page [or two]. Threat 4487: “The Internet changes faster than you can update your technique/posts, refresh your links or catch your breath” comes to mind, doesn’t it?

So, somewhere between the dynamic nature of the internet and its ever-complex web of links, and Threat 2092: “Online, one things leads to another but it’s rarely a real lead” notwithstanding, there are potential hazards that every digital traveler should be aware of.

I hope Ryan will take the time to revise his list and reorder the entries by threat level. That would be a useful. For me, I will look forward to hearing how these issues are resolved at decidedly chaste gatherings like SourceCon, continuing my own search online.

While Jobster still has employees on the payroll it would serve their brand — not to mention Recruitopians and the community at large – if someone took a moment to monitor who is submitting what on Recruiting.com. Today, Filipino Hot Babes, tomorrow what – incest, donkey-love?

Anyone who has a blog knows that there is some horrible stuff that seaps through the sewage pipes. Suppressing the spammers is a tiresome job but it comes with the territory. Sure, it starts with something innocuous but quickly spirals down from exotic teapots to erotic sex-pots, and from chai in Calcutta to tarts in Thailand.

Who is monitoring Recruiting.com’s content, Jobster’s brand?

For what it’s worth, my advice to the now faceless Recruiting.com suits: Keep it clean. Remember, no brand was served well by treating its audience with contempt any more than the cause of Web 2.0 and the values on which Jobster was supposedly built is served by turning over the space to new levels of wrecklessness.

I like an industry that is defined by some really great class A players

Outgoing Chief Jobster Jason Goldberg on the same subject:

Crap product!

In the final analysis, money talks.

Hat tip:  Jason Davis, RecruitingBlogs.com

Wired posts The See-Through CEO that explores the advantage corporate top-dogs gain from understanding and managing transparency as a strategic tool. The article weighs the pros and cons of radical transparency — as questionable a term as “totally honest” as if to suggest there are degrees of integrity — and cites some examples worth thinking about.

Read the rest of this entry » ‘The See-Through CEO’

“I am still searching for an example of being “too transparent” costing someone a company, where there are many examples of lack of transparency (or “being caught in a lie”) doing a lot of damage.”

Well, needless to say, I can’t think of an example where being too transparent cost someone a company either, but then again, I do have a migraine dammit! And, as for “being caught in a lie” and “doing a lot of damage” let’s consider for a moment the scandal de jour.

Ex-U.S. Congressman Mark Foley is demonstrating the cynical side of transparency, coming to full disclosure late in the game. Mark Foley resigned his office in disgrace over his sexually explicit text messages to underage boys, confusing the roles of Congressional Page with Washington call boy.  In damage control mode, Mark Foley is now being very open about his homosexuality – not a crime – and is sharing with the whole world his struggle with alcoholism, made worse by the unresolved emotional fallout resulting from his own being manhandled as a boy by a priest. Sound familiar?

In reply to Jeff Hunter’s post, one wonders how this type of “transparency” would have advanced the politician’s career had he made these revelations on his resume, before being labeled as a hypocrite and corrupt pervert. If Mark Foley had made his problems known up-front perhaps the resulting debate would have led to a more constructive outcome with the possibility of our being sympathetic, not as we are now, disgusted.  But of course, that would not have been possible would it? Who wants an emotional wreck – another drunk – at the seat of government?

Being “too transparent” – drawing a parallel between the ambitions and power plays in business and politics, as illustrated here – can be a decidedly bad thing. True, coming clean after the fact makes the offense seem more pathetic than sinister and one could argue there was some authenticity in Mark Foley’s decision to resign on-the-spot, without creating an even bigger circus of the whole affair but really, at this point, who cares?

The connection here may be tenuous, I accept that.  My question is, is there not a time and a place for everything, including transparency?