Can I Refer A Co-Worker

I think the guy I go to lunch with everyday really would be great as a business analyst in the IT department but I don’t think anyone over there takes it seriously when he applies for a job. I want to formally refer him next time they have an opening.

We've been having an interesting dialog with some of our customers about whether or not they would include current employees in their referral programs. Our application, Referral Link, automatically searches an employee’s network and prompts them about potential candidates they could refer. Everybody has lots of their co-workers that they are connected to in various social and professional networks. Should we filter out those names?

A few customers say absolutely yes. Filter out all current employees. That was not too unexpected.

But what is more interesting is the companies who are saying, NO: do not filter them out. Their argument is that a co-worker’s opinion about a fellow employee is valuable input and, when you are a fairly large organization, it can be hard to stay close to everybody’s interests and skills (even when you believe you have a good program to promote internal movement and career growth).

This can freak out employees too. When they get a name forwarded to them as a potential candidate for referral and that person is someone they already work with, they usually discount it as a bad recommendation. But is it?

How many of us know employees who languished in their organization for years and then finally left for better opportunities elsewhere. Don’t we wish someone would have let us know they were well suited for a new job within the organization?

"I work in PC support but what I’d really like to do is work in customer service, but no one over there seems to take me seriously when I apply."

Maybe a little “internal referral” help would push this along before the company, pushes them out. 

Hey buddy, can you spare me a referral!

Change and the Death of the Chocolate Santa Claus

The chocolate Santa Claus first poked his head out of my stocking in 1965. All you could see was that shiny, silvery red head just above those glinty Santa eyes. He’s appeared in my stocking every year since then. That’s 48 years of Santa heads peering out at me. There won’t be one there this year. My family informed me that it is a waste of time, we already have too many sweets around the house during the holidays that are a lot better. (I am willing to concede the second half of this argument but, REALLY, I did not know there was such a thing as too many sweets).

I've reluctantly conceded. Santa will be missed.

Tradition is a hard thing to break. Have you ever noticed how “traditions” are romanticized when you talk about personal traditions but professional traditions can be seen as pejorative; as in “mired in old traditions”? I don’t think it is that simple. As a boss when do you give up on doing things the way they've always been done? The question is not easy to answer.

Tradition reinforces culture, creates a foundation. I don’t know if the story attributed to Pablo Picasso is true, but it is rumored that he said you must first learn to paint like the masters before you can extend the boundaries of your own art.

As an HR entrepreneur I continuously challenge myself and my customers to extend the boundaries of their art. So maybe I shouldn't really complain that the “art” of great Christmas Chocolate has moved beyond stale milk chocolate Santas.

I am going to begin a tradition of dark chocolate peppermint bark.

Being an HR Entrepreneur is a Piece of Cake

If I had a dollar for every HR start-up, I wouldn't have to start up my own HR venture!

Have you noticed how many people seem to be starting HR companies lately? I talked to an Angel Fund manager a few weeks back and he said “We've already talked to 2 HR start-ups this week.” There was no room at that Inn.

I wonder if these people starting new ventures in HR feel like HR is a piece of cake. There are certain things in the world where people think they are experts without putting in the effort to gain expertise.  Parenting is one example, marketing seems to be that way too, but so is HR.

I find HR entrepreneurship very hard. I have helped many HR companies over the last 30 years discover and build new products for HR. After helping sell the last one, I decided to start a business on my own. I have (as I said above) 30 years of experience building HR products. But I have never been an HR practitioner. So the first thing I did was form an advisory group made up of some of the best HR people I know. They are my life blood and my muses. It took several ideas developed, proposed, adjusted and revised before we came to anything we thought made sense and would truly fill a hole in existing HR processes. (We didn't want to build the same thing everyone else is building). It wasn't a piece of cake.

The result of this effort is what we call Referral Link: http://innotrieve.com/referrallink/

We just released yesterday – but we still have miles to go. The product is good but it is not everything that it can be. HR is a crowded market, HR Directors and Managers are smart, savvy buyers, HR has extremely tight budgets and very demanding ROI requirements, and HR people know when a product really helps them and when it is just another version of something that already works well enough. 

And boy has this been anything but a piece of cake.

How Far is Far Enough for A Lean HR Product?

Better is the enemy of done. I heard that saying about a decade ago from a business development executive. I was the senior product development guy and he wanted me to hurry up. I didn’t. We had a great product release too, I might add.

But now that I have gained experience and respect for the Lean Start Up strategy, I think about that sentence differently than I used to. I am beginning to realize that customer reaction to your product may be the best way to (eventually) get it right. But how much “not yet right” is too much?

I was very comfortable with our Minimum Viable Product release. It did about 50% of what the production release will do, but the test customers knew that, and the things it didn’t do did not distract from the basic customer experience. I felt good about that.

But now Release 1.0 is going out the end of this month (IT-Gods Willing) and I feel like a teenager on prom night: All I can see are the pimples.

I asked this question of my advisory team. They said it has to be measured by the customer experience. The product has to be good-enough for the customer. I liked that answer, but it doesn’t fully work. Most features are (or should be) oriented toward the best customer experience possible. So when I look at the recruiter dashboard and think it needs to have data displayed more clearly, does Lean SU suggest I let that go and see what the customer thinks. Maybe. It depends.

I am comfortable with our first product. But I stay awake thinking about that last pimple.

5 Considerations When Pitching an HR Product

We are trying to raise money for our world-beater new HR product. Problem is, we have to convince a bunch of very skeptical people to give us their money to help us do it. I think they should recognize our brilliance and open up their wallets. But since that isn't going to happen, we have been refining our story: Our Pitch.  For those of you who are embarking on a similar path, here are 5 considerations when pitching your product (with tongue only slightly in cheek)

1. Size Matters: How big is this market we call HR? You can argue that it is a $4.5 Billion industry or even a $21 Billion industry. If you are going to argue that you have a world-beater product, you better know how much of the world you are going to beat.
2. The A Team: The senior management team should have some clue about what they are doing, and should have some experience doing it. That's not to say a really smart tech guy and a great product person can't figure out something worth doing, but your learning curve could be rather steep. 
3. Be an Aspirin in a Room Full of Headaches: You have to build something that people really want. You have to solve a problem worth solving. If you are doing one of those projects where your main product mantra is “they just don’t know they need it yet” you are going to have a very long sales cycle.
4. Be Jack in The Bean Stock: You need to show that with only a little bit of water, that puppy is going to take off! (This may not be 100% true, but the people you are talking to have to be told it is).
5. Know where the Exit Sign is: Strangely enough, when people give you money they really want to know when they are going to get it back. You need to be very clear about what happens in about 5 years from now. The fact that no one has ever been accurate in this prediction is not relevant; you just need to show you are going to try.

After you have these 5 ideas down, now all you need to do is say them over and over again about 40 or 50 times. If you are lucky (and yes, luck does have something to do with it) you eventually find someone who believes in you. It is a beautiful thing!

Wish us luck…we are almost there!

Do Recruiters (or Hiring Managers) Get the New Career Path

A fellow named Sir Ken Robinson who is famous for a TED talk about how schools kill creativity said in a recent Fast Company article the following:

“It’s important to note, that there just isn’t a straight line between what you do at school and what you go on to do in your career. I argue that it is like being in the ocean. You keep correcting your course according to the things that happen to you. But companies force us to write resumes as though it were a plan.”

He goes on later to say that “…companies need people who can think differently and adapt to be creative.” And finishes his argument making the point that we live in a world of ideas and concepts where imagination is the most important element of our long term success.

But do we look for imagination when we recruit? How often do we throw out the resume that isn’t an exact match to a specific set of skills? Is this getting even more pervasive now that we let automation drive our screening process? The HR space is rife with companies claiming they can find you the better candidate faster. But they can only find the candidates that fit narrow criteria.
 
How can that work if – as many studies have shown – skills learned today will be obsolete in 3 to 5 years?
 
How do we recruit for the “best athlete,” the one who has that well rounded set of skills that allows them to adapt, and to be creative and productive in uncertain and changing times?
 
When I was in the early days of my career I worked in a consulting firm. We specialized in building automated tools to help support complex business systems problems. As we grew very rapidly we wanted to understand how we could grow managers more quickly. Accordingly, we set about assessing what the common characteristics were for our most accomplished leaders. We found two things: 1) it was not our best engineers who succeeded, but the ones who had some form of liberal arts education in their background. And, 2) they had experienced a wide ranging and diversified set of experiences at the firm. They had not stuck to a single career path.
 
So that kid with the degree in art history, take a second look. S/he just might be your next CIO.

It's Flooding Out There

I awoke this morning to the phone ringing at 5:45. It was the Assisted Living facility that my mother-in-law lives in. The entire first floor is underwater. It has been raining in Colorado for 4 days. That is unheard of.  We are practically a desert here. Average rainfall for this area is around 15 inches in an entire year: we've had 12 inches (and more) in the last 3 days. This has not been one of those flash flood types of events (although some places have had a bit of that); it has been just a steady rise of water. My wife and I want to go get her mother.

We can’t

The roads are all closed.

I can’t get to my office either. There are about 4 different ways that I can drive from my home to my office. But they all pass over the Poudre River. I tried all four this morning. The river that is usually about 10 to 15 feet across is as much as 50 to 100 feet across. The bridges are still intact, but they won’t let us drive over them.

When things like this happen, perspective changes. I had a lot of urgent things I had to do today. Not so much now. Now we need to try and make sure those we love are safe.