A Contrarian View of Life in the Recruitosphere
Well, its Christmas Eve. It seems everyone is at home googling this and googling that.
A larger number of visitors than usual are flocking to this ever so ‘umble blog today. To read my learned works? Nah, its that Kingsbury fellow!
Being a contrarian has historically been a mixed career move. On one hand, it may get a statue put up in your honor. On the other hand, it will likely be erected on the spot where you were hanged, drawn, and quartered before a cheering crowd of thousands.
Bill Vick gave an excellent — albeit abbreviated — presentation last week at John Sumser’s Dallas Recruiting Roadshow. It was interesting on many levels. Taking the elevator up, first floor…
Bill’s presentation introduced “bleeding edge” technology to recruiters who by and large — by their own show of hands — were hemorrhaging on old notions of how to use the Internet. It was that that was was most interesting to me. I wondered, “Is the so-called war for talent going to be won with what most recruiters are currently equipped with?” I don’t think so.
Mezzanine level, going up: On the topic of the importance of online profiles — why recruiters should have them, how they are used in recruiting, and how they will be used in the future — Bill made an interesting comment, something to the effect that the day is coming that everything that could be known about a person will be available for anyone to sniff out online. Hmmm…that may have some downside, don’t you think?
First floor: Listening to Bill, I was reminded of a couple of things taken off my morning reader earlier in the year. The first was a post by John Sumser on ERN called More About Search and the other was posted on Proverbs31 titled He Knows My Name. Somewhere there was a stream of conciousness that went from technology for recruiters to playing cards to house of cards to, well, frankly I don’t remember — I’ll have to read the posts again!
Second floor: Somehow in that flow of confused recollection I concluded that in what Bill was suggesting — our being sorted according to relative value [good deeds] and reputation [good name], and all that for some omnipresent recruiters’ advantage — it would be just as well to remember what happened the last time tried to create such a thing — a whole heap of confusion!
Roof top parking: Just a thought.
Part 2 in my Food for Thought series…
Early on in my professional career I worked as the Manager of Market Planning for BIS Banking Systems, a U.K.-based subsidiary of the now defunct NYNEX Corporation. That was back in the ’80s.
One of my earliest assignments was to input to the organization’s five-year strategic plan. BIS had never produced a five-year plan before, at least not to the exacting specifications of a U.S. monolith.
The project required my assessments of things like market size and potential for a variety of segments across international banking, computing and communications. Without the aid of anything remotely resembling the Internet, let alone search engines — or in Banking Systems’ case a library even — I took the task in my youthful stride thinking I could get away with semblance over substance.
Well, I was wrong. Expected to slice and dice markets with precise measurement and translate all that with something “strategic” left me stumped from the get-go. In short, I was well and truly buggered.
Blogging for business continues to be a fascinating study for me.
As I continue to wrestle with the potential and problems that go with my efforts I am coming to accept that I cannot always grasp enough of what it all means, reminded of the adage: “There is no comfort in the learning zone and there is no learning in the comfort zone.”
Amidst my current bout of self-examination I can at least say why I started blogging: I wanted to be more involved in the online conversations about my work-related passion and interests, coming to understand at the same time how to use social media to help reposition my then employer RCI Recruitment Solutions. A simple enough task or so you’d think, not! As it turned out the “conversation” too often fell on deaf ears, the audience preoccupied with other things. C’est la vie…
The problem with being a boomer is being so easily bamboozled. The source of today’s bamboozlement is ki work, a “new model” for brokering professional relationships and outsourcing projects.
The site aspires to being a marketplace where ki work acts as the intermediary for globally dispersed talent that is otherwise available in everyone’s virtual backyard.
I don’t understand why reasonably good ideas go to market with nothing more than a reasonably good idea, do you?
I came across a new social network called projectstars, yet another killer startup. The site touts “blog for stock in the largest enterprise business blogging network” as if to suggest the potential payoff for participation might be worth the mind-numbing prospect of having to fill out yet another blessed profile first.
How ironic. In an attempt to free me from the walled gardens of the Web 1.0 internet I find that I am now trapped in the particulars of my online ID, technographic profile, group identity and now with projectstars, my “net worth” too.
projectstars claims to be an online business community for enterprise professionals. I don’t want to appear to be dim-witted but what is an enterprise professional exactly and do they/we really need another business community? And if the site’s purpose is indeed to “share expertise, build relationships, and find projects” one wonders if there have been problems with existing networks liked LinkedIn.
…or the Naked Blogger meets Gareth Morgan:
It is embarrassing to be tapped as a “thought leader” when the output of trying to write my Recruiting Trends inaugural post is a waste-paper basket full of candy wrappers and a mind numbed with hyperglycemic confusion. If you could just see this “thought leader” in action! On my hands and knees I am reduced to digging through discarded pay stubs to recover half-scratched notes tossed out two hours ago, trying to work out what I was thinking when, for a brief moment before the sugar kicked in, I thought I had a thought…
Teaser scribbled under the heading, The Talent Management Time-Bomb:
If metrics is to planning what sourcing is to search, and assessment is to performance management what leadership development is to succession planning,’ then isn’t that like saying ‘if you keep doing what you’ve always done, you’ll keep getting what you’ve always got’ because ”past performance is no guarantee of future results?
Now that’s a doozey, huh? Try this, scribbled on the back of another:
If the personnel department [the Reagan/Bush years] preceded strategic HR [the Clinton years] then what does talent management [the GW years] precede?
I do hope all this A-musing will keep my detractors off the scent of a post published a year ago to the day of my scheduled debut on Recruiting Trends in which I said:
Thought leadership” is one of the phrases, like “best-of-breed” and “mindshare” that have an Orwellian ring about them that simply agitates the rebel in me. I know that those things in of themselves are not bad, no more than seed-money is sleazy, but anything that suggests that my brains need to be scrambled as part of a leadership strategy leaves me, well, muddled.
To my own defense, that post was written in a similar state of sugar-induced confusion, all “thunked out” I was.
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