1. Data? What data?

It can be difficult to make sense of the data that gets reported under “Social Media.” Harder still, accepting it could be useless in the context of traditional HR metrics, or under any circumstances, come to think it. Teasing intelligence from a new data set can leave one befuddled. Correlating things like “authority,” “increased awareness” “mentions,” and “sentiment” to the traditional metrics like time-to-fill and cost-per-hire may not only be a challenge of Rubik proportions, but ultimately an exercise in futility.

Such are the pitfalls of staying ahead of the HR technology curve, early adoption and social media illiteracy.

An absence of meaningful data can result from poorly designed programs, management oversight, technical problems like gathering the wrong data, or even having no data to collect at all. It happens. While glitches may indicate the pedestrian problems that affect every organization, the greater concern is this: Without the means to quantify performance or predict future outcomes, confidence is eroded in future leaps of faith and good judgment compromised.

For those of us who are used to winging it when there is insufficient data to chart the course, measuring results from social campaigns provides a rude awakening. It is impossible to fly by the seat of your pants when there is no indicator that one is even airborne. In white-out conditions, without an instrument panel that knows the difference between up and down, a corrective ascent may just result in an unhappy end.

2. Curve Balls

Unable to pace internal adoption with the dizzying rate at which the social web proliferates, escaping the gravitational pull of a world in a state of perpetual beta can consume more time and effort than staying in the game. Besides, where else can you get your emotional needs meet with 140 characters or less?

Many who impulsively jumped into the scrum of promiscuous linking did so without proper preparation or guidance. Now, forced to find meaning in a virtual space of auto-generated mediocrity, recalibration is too daunting a task. With little value to assign to “relationships” or “reputation,” it is easier to ride the long tail of diminishing returns in the hope a real crisis will legitimatize the abandonment.

What use are social media metrics now? For the me-too crowd the tools and technology that promised fulfillment in real-time don’t work that well when fashioned after conventional HR technology. Their struggle is in reconciling the fact that their application of Twitter looks like a default RSS-powered job board and the only way to get a thumbs-up on their Facebook fan page is to raffle-off an iPad.

Facing a seamlessly never-ending eruption of indistinguishable hash-tag jobs, tweets go unnoticed. One is reminded that in the good ol’ days you could line the bottom of the parrot’s cage with the Sunday help-wanted ads. The fact that your 1×1 agate ad was lost on a broadsheet didn’t preclude one from the hope that a job-seeker would find it by happenstance. If not, where better for Polly to poop?

Unfortunately, some providers assume that just-above-stupid is the new normal. LinkedIn continues to hybridize a next-generation job board for employers and job-seekers, while recruiters protest that rampant commercialization is squeezing them into network conformity.

Part real-time search engine, crowd sourcing bazaar, content curating machine, company directory and International Kiwanis watering hole, LinkedIn describes itself to users as an network where “Relationships Matter,” while describing itself to investors and developers as a platform. A modest differentiation for what is clearly something that seeks to be all things to all men. For those who may benefit the most from LinkedIn, well, they never go there. As a percentage of the world’s “most desirable” talent 100 million user is not that big a deal. And, supposing we could double that number? Who cares, so what?

3. We’re not in Kansas anymore

For America’s HR homogeny these kind of problem are compounded by an outdated playbook that insists employees are ultimately defined by profile, pay scale, performance, production and potential contribution. The HR playbook has no response for the kind of indiscretions at work that the social web invites from life in general. But then again, nor does the Church.

The social web [and depending on your place of worship] celebrates human experience with an exuberance that is is out of sync with boardroom decorum or budget meeting handouts. And while a KPI in a world of paradigm shift, sentiment remains hard to quantify in dollars and cents. These are the kinds of thing HR now has to contend with. But, steadfast, stoic and risk-averse by nature, HR’s unfortunate stereotype is itself at odds with the type of intrapreneurial champion most organizations need to get their Whatever 2.0 initiatives underway.

Yes, the social web invites risk. Yes, HR needs to mitigate it. This apparently irreconcilable tension presents quite a conundrum it appears that only tweeps, bloggers and unconference organizers are uniquely qualified to fix. It underscores the disparite nature of HR with societal trends. This prevailing condition does little to advance the cause of progress.

Hoping to avoid the potential workplace meltdown this type of divergence portends, Directors and VP of HR are subscribing to RSS feeds and trekking off to former Soviet Bloc countries in droves.

At the other end of the spectrum, the flawed humanity that clocks in for work each day has to resolve a different set of issues than those facing workplace engineers.

A layering of innovations has transformed personal computing. Once a desk-bound activity, today’s portable means for self-service, self-segmentation, self-expression, and self-actualization, comes in a tablet form that is perfectly suited for the occasional poke on Facebook and simultaneous Foursquare shoutouts from any airport anywhere.

But the advantage of widely available and affordable technology has not, as predicted, empowered an Army of Davids as a mobilizing force against the Goliath of work. Ironically, it has emasculated it. As opium was for the masses, so social media is for the herd.

4. Capital Ideas

Unwilling, to risk everything in the cause of noble values, the average person is emotionally and psychologically ill-prepared to unleash the social web’s potential for unbridled individuality, transparency, authenticity, and trust. Such naivety would undoubtedly result in more harm than good.

Everyone who wants to make a living must think long and hard before declaring themselves online. In a workplace environment where human potential is valued as capital, human potential applied to otherwise prohibited pursuits off-the-clock, even in a life gone by, renders the person worthless as an employee, a liability, or both.

Unable to concede the social web’s failure to significantly level the playing field, which he or she takes personally, Everyman congregates where the contradictions of group-think and having a voice are wonderfully blended in the soothing drone of social validation. Personalized homepages and one-of-a-kind avatars further reassures one that Self still matters, if only existentially.

In this incubator of bi-directional communication and content proliferation, mutant-concepts like “authority,” “influence,” ““reputation,” and “personal brand” are the standards by which our value is calculated. And, in a supremely ironic twist, this is how HR adjusts its measure of an individual’s “net-worth,” the new metrics of assessment.

When the time comes, and the data is in, getting hung-up on uninspired number crunching will slow down the “social human convergence” we all desire. Surely, now is the time to integrate social network analysis into our planning and decision-making processes. Our newly quantified social capital can then temper the otherwise cynical terminology that describes people as capital, and humanity like animal fat.

At last, with the convergence of personal, professional, corporate and social values is finally consummated — true to its Aesopian nature — the corporation can begin its acquisition of all the value, capitalizing on the intrinsic value of past, present, potential and future employees’ networks. Using their social graph to grow the organizations’ networks exponentially, at last an even wider audience of consumers can be imagined, engaged, bought and sold.

Hello, John? John? Are you still there?

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 am afraid that the bad news today emanates from me, yours truly. But please, don’t shoot the messenger.

Like a lottery winner who chooses anonymity to avoid the onslaught of distant cousins, meth-addicted ex-common-law-wives, and long-aggrieved landlords I asked that the announcement today of my own top-ranking not be turned into a media circus. Besides, I for one know they don’t have the Oscars on the same night as the Emmy’s for good reason.

However, for the record and so as to not disappoint Mother who, I might add, would turn in her grave if she thought that I could ever be ranked among a computer-generated list of “influential people” — “Bah, new money,” she would say — a modest announcement of my own: Recruitomatic has been ranked top on the Marquee of SADE List of Online Recruiters.

Of course, many of you will know that the Marquee organization is a “big tent” of sorts, and the SADE acronym stands for: “Self-Appointed Digital Experts.” Suffice it to say, my being nominated and subsequent elevation to alpha-blogger came as no surprise to industry insiders such as…myself.

For those who imagine that my recognition for this prestigious award was a forgone conclusion, think again. Recruitomatic faced a field of strong competition including some worthy contenders hot on my heels:

• First Runner-up: BROWN BAG RECRUITER
• Second Runner-up: Blogversity Blog
• Third Runner-up:  The G-Recruiters Blogspot

Yes, indeed…Mother would be pleased. Congratulations to all.

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.

Ray’s patterned release of status updates gave me the feeling of being clued in. The dribs and drabs of online small talk were a convenient substitute for real connectedness. The mere threat of losing that connection created a palpable fear in my heart.

Right there, after my parental instinct to fix something, was a series of surprising insights.

Read the rest here ».

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?

You can read John at his finest on the subject on the GlassDoor.com blog: Why Workers Get Left Behind.

Oh, John…Gareth Morgan, your friend and mine, sends his regards, as does Paddy Mac!

For starters, I’m not sure changing scapegoats addresses the underlying problem.  There really is very little difference between abdicating responsibility to trainers for recruiting excellence — or whatever standard we used to aspire to — to  expecting “recruiters” to stop buckling under the weight of a hiring manager’s passed buck.

In the final analysis, managers and their direct reports need to pick up the mantle of developing their “human resource.” That’s what I say. Recruiting is no less a management task than planning, budgeting, organizing stuff, and troubleshooting.

If the decision to hire and fire is a managers’ prerogative shouldn’t a manager be capable of taking care of the attraction and screening bits too? One might expect to see improved results across the board if they did.

Imagine, no need for template intake calls or getting chewed-out for presenting literal and proverbial misfits; no more waiting for overdue feedback on interest, availability and offers;  no more having to explain that a credit score of less than 590 doesn’t automatically mean salespeople can’t sell, nurses can’t nurse, programmers can’t code, and engineers can’t build missile-defense systems.

Needless to say, there are exceptions to the “looks like managing” modelIn those instances where the need calls for high-volume hiring the issue is not the caliber of the recruiting personnel per se but the process and underlying technologies that are deployed in the name of cost and time efficiencies. If the economies of scale aren’t there then maybe the path of least resistance is to outsource the problem. Even then, the consumer-manager needs to be intimately involved in every aspect of the process, not just selection. The manager should be held accountable for results post-RPO too, why not?

I was told once by a VP of Legacy Thinking that that it makes no sense to ask a $150-an-hour manager to do $75-an-hour “grunt work.” Therein lies part of the problem, viewing recruiting as piecemeal work instead of quantifying its  intrinsic value to the organization, assigning responsibility for its proper execution to a capable manager.  As a result, despite lauding quality-of-hire metrics — however fuzzy — stakeholders continue to demand time-to-fill, cost-per-hire and money-in-the-bank metrics not knowing how else to measure recruiting value.

That said, “grunt work” like sourcing should be passed off to a $75-an-hour bod, and perhaps other elements of the process could be unbundled too. But, when all is said and done, these things need to be delivered in support of the manager, not a recruiting cohort or talent management overlord.

Faced with the possibility of being held accountable for recruiting outcomes, management surrogates like John Sullivan go on the attack.  For the purposes of throwing recruiting under the bus, “failure metrics” will do. Googling those “facts and numbers” keep us from considering the possibility that, instead of getting the bus from point A to point B, when it comes to taking the talent management lead, most  hiring managers are asleep at the wheel.

In defense of the recruiting professionals who are among the most gifted, and in reply to those whiny people John Sullivan’s quotes as saying, “Selection decisions are often about as accurate as a coin flip,” I say, “Then render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s.” Newsflash! Recruiters don’t make selection decisions, “hiring managers” do.

So, what could a trainer do but compound the problem?

It’s trendy to talk about talent management in the context of strategy and  “best practice.” Invariably we default to transactional recruiting because we are forever driven by short-term imperatives. Maybe a decade of “talent shortages” combined with an institutionalization of JIT and “the arrogance of supply” has deepened the inherent flaws that have doomed modern-day corporate recruiting to the sorry state reported on ERE, not just in John Sullivan’s piece, but repeatedly over the years.

I’m not aware of any new training methods that enable recruiting-centric management thinking over process-driven behaviors, are you? That’s not to suggest training couldn’t enable managers more capable of strategic recruiting. But how do you justify the expense of that when the ROI may be harder to quantify than the number of candidates that over the years never even got an automated reply, let alone a recruiters’ call.

Last, how badly do we want to train our manager-gazumping competition? After all, if we could increase the value of our managers’ contribution by having them grow and develop their people from beginning to end, would we be prepared to pay them what they would then be worth? Probably not.

Consider: If we paid managers a percentage of the their new hires’ first years compensation, and an annual bonus for each one still engaged, managers might spend too much time on end-to-end “talent management.”  Granted, while recruiting may now be at the level John Sullivan imagines is good enough, who will then sign-off on department expenses or decide who gets the cubby-with-a-view when our longest serving team member finally kicks the bucket?

We don’t need better recruiters. Actually, I don’t think we need recruiters at all. We need better support for managers, managers who can grow and develop their teams free from the money- and time-wasting recruiters represent. Those managers who are good at getting the job done, in its entirety, should be rewarded accordingly.

To John Sullivan’s attention-grabbing intent, and  John Sumser’s suggestion that we should “line new employees up with the right people,” I hope my contribution here adds some weight to the scales of wishful thinking.

1. U.K. blogger Katharine Robinson [aka The Sourceress] posts Performing Sourcery at The Recruiting Unconference. Hmmm…Nothwithstanding timezones, recruiting unconferences are so yesterday, don’t you know: Jeff Hunter’s Talent Unconference [2007]; John Sumser’s Recruiting Roadshow [2008]; Jason Davis’s RecruitFest [2008/09]; Susan Burns’ Talent Camp [2009] and some I’ve missed, I’m sure. Now, Bill Boorman’s The Recruitment Unconference taking place in London on 19th November…a sign of the times, no doubt.




2. In Feel Sorry for the Recruiter… Lisa Kaye laments that recruiters “worry if they will wind up on the other side of the desk, interviewing for jobs that well frankly are no longer in high demand.” Look on the bright side: if they ever make it back into recruiting they’ll have a better grasp of what “candidate experience” really means. That should make them better recruiters, don’t you think? [Counterpoint: My Future in Recruiting]




3. In his post It’s all about the message Michael Specht rightly notes: “…that clearly communicating the employment deal up front is a critical first step in having an engaged employee,” going on to say, “Employees who blog openly and honestly will allow prospective employees to see what it is really like in your workplace.”I guess shooting the messenger is out of the question then, eh, Michael?

1. Who said: “A wise person should have money in their head, but not in their heart” - John Sullivan, John Sumser or Jonathan Swift? Such studious fellows all…Rub-a-Dub-Dub
2. Erecting the new recruiting edifyce…Bob the Builder meets Smiling Bob
3. “When we win, we all win.” So, what happens when we’re counting the rations?…Man overboard!