Success Wakes Up How Early?

I read the post below from CB Insights  the other day and wanted to re-post it here. According to the information in this list provided originally by Laura Vanderkam  of the World Economic Forum there are 14 things successful people do before breakfast. The writing in red was added by CB Insights to point out that - at a minimum - it would take you about 3 hours and 36 minutes to accomplish all this.

Hum - I'm a fairly successful person and have known some other very successful people but I don't know too many of them that wake up at about 4:30 AM to get all this done before heading off to work. Maybe the implication is not that you do it all everyday - it's just these are the kind of things you do?

Oh well - it is an interesting list all the same. Though if it were my list I'd drop off #13. To heck with the email.

Here's to hoping you all have successful mornings!

An HR Entrepreneur in the Navy

When I was a kid my dad told me being in the Navy was all about hurry-up-and-wait. As he explained it you were always supposed to quickly move from one place to the next, but once you got there you typically had to stand around and wait. Hurry-up-and-wait.

As an entrepreneur in HR (probably not unique to HR) I feel like this sometimes. Everything we do is urgent, but when we get there, we typically have to wait. Wait on software development, wait on investor funds, wait on sales prospects, and wait on customers.

Our product Referral Link was over a year in the making and finally went live in November. I felt like a Formula 1 race car sitting at the starting line ready to roar into high gear. 0 to 180 MPH in practically no time. We are ready to win the race.

Thing is, products that break old boundaries and introduce new ways to do things are rarely a race. Maybe a marathon, but never a sprint. Good ideas take time to take hold.

We have started to introduce the Referral Link product to the market place. Like any company full of more smarts than cash, we are following a Lean Start Up model. We are well beyond the MVP, but we are well into Lean Marketing. No Super Bowl ads for us. (Although I do think Jennifer Lawrence would be the perfect person to endorse our product at halftime – fiery and fierce, yet innovative…yes we do have an inflated image of ourselves). Instead though, we are slowly bringing the product to market by introducing it to certain targeted customer groups. We are getting a feel for how customers respond to the product, how the product performs and where the product best fits in the value chain.

So I guess taking over the world with our new innovation in recruiting is going to have to wait. In the meantime, I need to hurry up and get some things done. World domination takes preparation.

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.

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!

No Room for New Innovation in HR?

This is the statement I heard at the end of my day yesterday: “We've heard pitches from four HR Companies already this year and haven’t funded any of them. There just seems to be too many of them.”

Really?

I am in the process of raising seed capital for my company. Yes. A new HR company. And that is what I heard after my latest presentation to a funding group. They said they really don’t get HR (I don’t doubt that) and that there seems to be too many people in the space right now.

Right on.

I can’t think of a more fascinating space to be in right now. The changes that are going to happen in the way people work, find jobs, get paid, sign up for benefits, work mobilely, work remotely, live in Africa…. and the list goes on, is going to radically change what HR means, how it is managed and the tools we use to practice it.

HR is an extremely dynamic field and the lack of support from venture capital is short sighted. HR can compete with almost any other field in terms of dollars spent in the space, growth opportunity, and market dynamics. And the list of truly clever innovators competes with any field out there.

The problem is that most people who fund new ventures grew up in an age when HR was an administrative function that cost too much money. Yesterday’s senior executives saw HR as necessary but not strategic. Innovation in HR meant cutting costs.

That hasn’t changed much in the companies out there today, but it does not take much insight to see the change coming.

If you want to be one of the most dynamic and relevant enterprises of the future, HR advances happening in the basements and garages of innovative HR entrepreneurs will be a crucial element of your success. And the leaders in this space are going to make a lot of money.

Wake up people in the venture funding world; you are going to miss one of the next big things!

Build Something That Matters: 8 Things that Drive Our Business

When you listen to venture capitalists, investors and budding investment hopefuls they use the term Lifestyle Business as though it was a 17^th century plague to be avoided at all costs.

Well – maybe it is, (from the investor’s point of view) but that discussion feels like bell-bottom pants and a tie-dye shirt at a Republican Convention: Out of place and dated.

People run businesses for all kinds of reasons these days. In my experience most are motivated to do something that matters and to do it in a way that creates value for employees, customers and investors. It is not a lifestyle business just because you don’t put investors first! Some of the greatest success stories of the last decade prove this point.

With the start of our business, Innotrieve, the first thing we did was develop a simple statement about why we were starting a business. Here is what we said we wanted to accomplish:

1. Put our technology to work in an area that is interesting and solves an important problem
2. Respect and support the freedom for individual employees to work the way they work best
3. Build products that allow us to work in areas we are interested in
4. Do interesting work that can have an impact on the way people work
5. Leverage artificial intelligence to make work more more interesting, and more empowering
6. Extend our ideas and intellectual property through valuable products
7. Build something a lot of people can gain value from
8. Be an important member of “The next Industrial Revolution:” The digital/data revolution

I don’t know if these principles make us a lifestyle business in the eyes of some investors, but I do know that my partner and I are motivated by a range of interests, and that won’t change. To build a better business, you build something that matters to you.

Launching a New HR Product: 7 Items to Consider

I sometimes think there are as many new products being developed for the HR market place as there are number of HR people in the world. Let me guess…. that would be about 243 Million.

Some days it feels like that. 

So how do you make sure your product stands out in this crowded world of new HR products?  Here are 7 items on my checklist that don’t get enough attention:

1. Your Tech is Cool, But Nobody Cares: Don’t get so enamored with the cool new technology you are using that you fool yourself into thinking that’s all it takes to succeed.
2. Messaging is Harder than You've Planned For: In a busy, noisy world, people don’t have time to listen to a long winded story about your product. You think you need an elevator speech? Think again, you need a Tweet!
3. Fresh Air In a Stale Environment: Fads grow stale quickly. HR Trends can be like last year’s Boy Band. You have to be fundamentally sound, and compellingly relevant.
4. End Results Marketing: Most people set the end result of good marketing at the wrong finish line. It is not the sale that you aim for; it’s the success of the solution. With a new recruiting solution, for example, success is a new hire. Sounds simple, but very few companies actually (sincerely) think that way.
5. Don’t Underestimate the Cost of Getting Service Right: HR is a people business and people want help from other people. Don’t assume that an automated FAQ and 3 guys offshore are going to cut it.
6. The Learning Never Stops: Your product has several problems, you just don’t know it yet. Make sure you set up your new product launch as a learning experience.
7. Impact on Culture: All HR products impact people. Really revolutionary products impact them in a big way. You can’t just have the best idea if that idea doesn't fit the culture. You are doomed if you don’t take the time to address culture as part of the product process.

The next decade is going to see an explosion of new products in HR. For you to have an idea with lasting value, you might want to consider these 7 suggestions for making sure your HR product succeeds.

Let me know if you have other ideas to add to the list.

4 Reason’s You Don’t Mess With Kahleesi’s (HR) Dragons

You could say that great HR succeeds with vision and an overriding conviction to mission, mixed with a level of legitimacy backed up by the ability to inflict pain when necessary!

Kahleesi would have been a great VP of HR!

OK – you’ll have to forgive me here on this one. I am a die-hard Game of Thrones fan. Kahleesi is the character who is sometimes known as the “Dragon Queen” (I seem to remember an HR Director we nicknamed something like that) and she is growing her army and her influence through power, legitimacy and an overarching philosophy that people should not be slaves. But if you mess with Kahleesi, the wrath of the Dragons comes upon you.

Just think how much easier your job would be if you had a few dragons to reinforce your rule now and again!

I like this idea. And here are 4 (only somewhat) tongue-in-check reasons why:

1. HR has the moral high ground: Think about it, while everyone in the company should be focused on making money (or in Kahleesi’s case, overthrowing all the other kingdoms) HR seems to be the only one that really understands that people – more than any other single resource – are the key to this. Kahleesi would agree. Free the oppressed and they will be loyal to you forever!
2. HR could use a little magic: Most people in HR recognize the fact that they are generally being asked to achieve the impossible.  They might commiserate with each other about this, but they don’t let it faze them. If need be, HR will walk through fire to show you they are endowed with certain magical powers. Be awed mere mortals!
3. HR could do so much better if they had some real power: You have to get 95% participation in the employee satisfaction survey by the end of the month (and it’s December). Does anybody ever really open up those emails from HR? Ah….but if you had a few dragons to enforce your commands!
4. HR has legitimacy – but is anyone acknowledging it: Poor Kahleesi (or did I mean HR manager), she knows she should be Queen of the 7 Kingdoms, and most people know she has a legitimate claim, but by gosh, if she is going to get anyone to pay attention, she is going to have to kick a few butts!

So march on HR leaders….one day you will conquer the world.

In the meantime, I am hoping my new company is building you a dragon! 

Doing Laundry: 4 Lessons for Building Great HR Software

Doing The HR Laundry

Doing laundry is only drudgery if it keeps you from doing something else.

  

One of the many advantages of being a “basement-office entrepreneur” is you can do the laundry during the day, and today I thought about 4 lessons that doing laundry can teach us about building great HR software. (OK, it’s a stretch – but hang with me here….)

Lesson 1: Separate the Light from the Dark. OK, this is no missive from a Jedi Master, but its roots are the same. Developers get so bogged down in the problems and exceptions that they forget to focus on the really good stuff. I have found a much better approach is to build in all the good stuff, make the software as delightful as possible, and then go back and eradicate all the evil with your Light Saber.

Lesson 2: Don’t Overload the Machine. Stop putting in so many features that you can no longer tell what the real purpose of the application is supposed to be. Have you ever tried posting a job in one of the “Top 3” recruiting solutions? Give me a break. I just need one button that says GO.

Lesson 3: Watch out for Imbalances During the Spin Cycle. This is all about evaluating your solution (taking it for a spin). Most HR solutions designers get too fixated on one or two issues and then over design the system to deal with that; while forgetting that the whole system needs to be in balance. This problem becomes particularly obvious to your customers when all your sales staff can talk about are two features. OK, I understand that your system can be in both English and Urdu, but can it actually track employee leave?

Lesson 4: Take Things Out Before They Wrinkle. This is not a statement supporting age discrimination.  This is the fact that most HR solutions designers don’t know when to stop. Have you ever noticed that Version 1.0 is often so much better than Version 2. Who told them we needed a feature to automatically schedule a lunch break when setting up the interview schedule (and to make it impossible to change it). I’ll eat when I want to eat!

Now, back to folding socks, maybe it’ll teach me how to play tennis. 

Ask Employees What They Think When Designing HR Products

70% of employees hate the HR systems they have to use. I just made that up, but in my own informal survey of the 10 people sitting next to me, seven of them said they think the systems we use for payroll, benefits, HR, etc. was designed poorly. We use one of those “highly rated systems”.

Who do they ask when they conduct surveys about those systems anyway? HR people – right.

There is an old saying in the design world: Don’t just design for your customer, design for your customer’s customer.  The customer’s customer for HR Products is the employee.

But how many of the companies building HR products do that? I mean really do that? I will admit that I do not know all of the companies out there, I have not directly seen the processes of more than a dozen of them, but what I have seen is the results. Most of the software out there does not make it easy for an employee to do what they want to do.

You see it at trade-shows too. And you see it in that terrible sales and marketing stuff they send you. They don’t talk much about the employee. Oh sure – they give it lip service: Employees will love it, or It will make employees more productive. How do they know? Who did they ask? Mostly it is all about HR productivity and HR improvement and HR happiness.  HR is not happy if the employees aren't happy.

So to all you builders of HR product solutions; next time you build a new feature, don’t just interview a bunch of your customers. Interview their customers. Ask the employees what they need!

Four Pitfalls To Lean Start Up in HR Products

Can human beings in the work place ever be guinea pigs? 

I recently started an HR data company. We are using a proprietary artificial intelligence tool to help us discover critical human resource information that can help both the employer and the employee. At least that’s the idea. Our first product is in the social recruiting space and we are in the process of testing our assumptions. Tune in later and we’ll let you know if we are on to something.

I have been in the HR products business for awhile (longer than I like to admit – I remember using punch cards in graduate school) and know a thing or two about product development. When my partner and I formed our new company and decided on our first product we also opted to follow the product development guidelines espoused by Eric Ries in his book The Lean Start Up. 

Lean start up techniques were more than a fad concept we wanted to try. We really were lean (as in we had no money) and wanted to be very smart about what we built and how much we spent building it.  We are also building something no one is doing today (more about that later) and we weren't sure that employees and employers would adopt the concept. Lean Start Up seemed like the perfect answer. And it was. But there are four pitfalls that need to be addressed if you are going to follow Lean Start Up processes in the HR space.

These four pitfalls start with a core concept of the Lean Start Up process called the MVP – Minimum Viable Product.  In a nutshell (he wrote a whole book about this so excuse me if I miss a few of the details) you invest in building only enough of the product to test your major assumptions. In our case – this involved employee adoption and sign up. We built the MVP and found a company willing to be our BETA test site. 

After weeks of testing, these are the four pitfalls we see:

1. Human resources is a bad place to experiment. HR by its very nature is conservative. You really don’t want to mess with people! If you are going to do an MVP in the HR space, you can’t disrupt the work place and you can’t give the employees a bad experience.
2. Workplace versus home environment. People don’t mind “playing around” with a concept at home. Most people love to experiment with a new website or software tool or tinker around with a new app on their phone. They don’t like to do this at work. 
3. Limited test period. Many of the examples in the Lean Start Up talk about getting feedback from early MVP experiences and tweaking the product to see what happens. You can’t just tweak away in HR. Employees won’t tolerate it and the HR department can’t allow it.
4. Greater need to know. At home, you are comfortable going down the rabbit hole. Not so at work. If you really don’t understand what the application does or exactly how things work, you tend to freeze up. This means that you have to give employees a lot more training with an MVP in HR than you might need to do with a typical consumer based product. 

I am a huge fan of The Lean Start Up and think it has its place in building Human Resources products and solutions. But anyone opting to follow this process should be careful about how far you take the process of experimenting in HR.

Now, if you will excuse me, I need to run off and explain to our BETA customer why that button in the upper left hand corner of the screen really wasn't supposed to offer a job to the employee’s dog.  (Although I stand by the fact that the dog’s social media profile looked like a perfect fit). 

(image courtesy of Gerd Altman on Pixaby)

I'm Melting: The Woes and Worries of an HR Entrepreneur

My new product goes into Beta Test next week (or for those of you initiated into the ways of Lean Start Up: The Minimum Viable Product). After all the work we've done thinking and re- thinking, testing, designing and finally building the MVP you would think I am excited.

I am scared out of my socks.

I stopped sleeping about a month ago. Now I wake up and think about the product. Usually at 2:06 A.M. I question every level of my sanity: What in the world was I thinking. By morning I am less pessimistic, but still rather saturnine. It takes a few hours to pull the manic back out from the deep recesses of my depressive.

There are days I feel like the Wicked Witch in a room full of Dorothys:

I'm melting......

My wife did not sign up for this. She thought she was doing me a favor when she agreed to let me spend all of our “rainy-day-fund” to start a new business from scratch. Now she is searching for a therapist (I am not sure if that is for me or her).  I am quitting when she starts to Google divorce lawyers!

But man I’m having a lot of fun.

It is hard work, and very risky to embark on building a new tool for HR. But HR is an exciting space with so many things going on. Being in the middle of that is what keeps me going. This product may not work – at least not at first. But if the money doesn't run out and I delete all search criteria for divorce lawyers: I’m there.

Now back to worrying so much that my headaches, my back hurts, my stomach feels sketchy, and my neck has a serious kink: The true badges of the entrepreneur!

An Ode to SEO for Recruiters

If I were to SEO

What would be the way to go?

Would I blog or would I write

A mighty pen to make me bright?

Key word phrases all strung out

Makes my writing all flung out.

Search for hires

High and low

Better with my SEO

20 key words and long tails to sell

If I try and say them all,

will you promise not to tell?

My marketing Director does insist

That all my writing should consist

Of random words

Thrown to and fro

Just so Google loves me so.

And then there’s Mack

I love her too

She’s our queen of SEO

But write a word that sounds just right

And suffer wrath at all her might

So homage to the SEO

Throw those words in, watch them flow.

Add some funky phrases too

Let them know that hiring is what we do.

Have some job postings

And offer up a referral or two.

Get alumni in the game

Contact everyone fit or lame.

Company name, best hires too

JAVA, Lava, and Code Blue

I’ll get those words in as I can

And hope you understand my plan.

So if what I say seems out of sorts

Trust my words to the Google courts

State of the Union, Twitter and Social Workplace Innovation

“…what makes you a man isn’t the ability to conceive a child; it’s having the courage to raise one” was one of the most Tweeted about statements in the recent Presidential State of the Union Address. That probably does not surprise you. But how did viewers respond to the rest of the message? Climate control got a lot of tweets, so did helping to fight poverty, but surprisingly, the very emotional appeal around gun control did not get much twitter reaction.

This information comes from The Social Reaction Group which monitored the volume of twitter traffic for every line the President spoke and created an Infographic to display the results. If people tweeted about something just a little bit, the words were small in print, if they tweeted a lot about it the words were much bigger. If the tweets were by a man they were in blue, if they were by a woman they were in pink. (cute). Check out the link – the data is fascinating and the graphics are fun: Social Reaction State Of The Union.

Tracking ideas, trends, concepts, proposals, new products, you name it, is something that is getting more and more sophisticated. This is big data in action. It is not really very useful to know what one person might say about a topic, but it is extremely valuable when you can track how millions of people respond to an idea. That is what Social Reaction Group and InferLink are all about.

The founder of InferLink and a member of the Social Reaction Group is Dr Steven Minton. He’s also my partner. Dr Minton and I are exploring the use of advanced AI (artificial intelligence) search techniques to find data relevant to HR professionals. We believe this kind of data can help with recruiting, employment screening, on-boarding, employee development and even more.

People put a lot of effort into their social and professional networks and helping them harvest that effort to improve their work-life is what we believe in.

We haven’t had time to name our company yet, but stay tuned; there will be interesting new products to come.

In the meantime – keep tweeting away.

Can HR Practitioners Be Entrepreneurs?

My colleague and fellow blogger Ian Welsh, recently wrote a blog post entitled The HR Entrepreneur – Moving the Business Forward where he asks these questions:

“Do you see the HR entrepreneur as in the strongest position to support business moving ahead?”

“Do you think that if we moved a little further in that direction we would gain greater acceptance by our peers, achieve at a higher level and finally sit at that elusive table?”

He has gotten a lot of responses ranging from NO – HR people aren’t entrepreneurs to absolutely YES HR people can be creative and can lead the charge.

I come down somewhat in the middle. By nature, most people in HR are not risk takers. That is not their role. HR people tend to be rule followers (and – though they generally don’t like this part of their jobs – they are often rule enforcers). That doesn’t usually make for a good innovation foundation.

I call myself an HR Innovator – but that might be interpreted by some as co-opting HR. I am not an HR practitioner and never have been. I am an HRIS professional. I have spent 25 years building solutions to support HR. Over those 25 years I’ve been able to work on a range of innovative HR projects, ranging from designing a payroll system for the International Labor Organization in 1987, to developing artificial intelligence routines to extract HR data from the web in 2008. In all these endeavors I have been able to tap the huge reserves of very clever HR people. Without their input – these projects would not have been as innovative and would not have been as relevant.

At the core of Ian’s excellent blog is this very point: HR people keep HR Entrepreneurship relevant.

I have not met many pure HR practitioners who are natural entrepreneurs. It is not their training and not their mindset – but HR entrepreneurialism would be much diminished without their participation. They may not be the engine that drives the change, but they are at least passengers, and may even be the ones doing the steering. 

(Image by Frits Ahlefeldt Public Domain Pictures)

Innovation, My Dog and Persistence

Have you ever had that feeling (this is a rhetorical question – because I know we all do) that when you take on a task it is supposed to be successful the first time you take it on? In fact, isn't it rather hard to find motivation for a task when you are not sure of the outcome?

How in the world do we ever survive as entrepreneurs?

Those who must be certain of the outcome don’t have a chance.

I was observing my dog the other day. Actually I was being quite irritated by my dog the other day. She has this habit of always expecting a positive outcome. For her, a positive outcome is either food or a walk. She is OK with just paying attention to her. But she believes that every motion I make has the possibility of resulting in food or a walk. She never gives up on this belief. She is never daunted by the failure of previous attempts. She always plows on. She is the epitome of persistence.

How many innovators have the same persistence?

How many of us who toil to discover and bring to light the next great idea give up too early?

Sometimes I think that old saying about repeating the same thing over and over again and each time expecting a new result is the definition of insanity might have a double edged meaning for innovators and entrepreneurs: Persistence in the face of overwhelming odds is crazy and YES, we have to be a bit insane to make innovation work.

I think going forward I am going to start acting more like my dog: Whatever new idea pops in my mind, I am going to assume it may one day result in food. And when it doesn't, I’ll just take a walk around the block.

My HR Innovation Rant: Why I Write My Blog

I wake up trying to think of new ways to tackle much of the old thinking that most of HR is bogged down by. I am fascinated by the potential for real, positive change that technology can bring about. I hate the fear-mongers who worry more about the risk than the reward. I love fighting the fight for a truly open information environment.

Traditional employment is stale and stultifying. 

I want to see people liberated by a new employee economy. I love the reaction I get when I write or speak about this topic. Most people love it, some are skeptical and some are afraid of it. 

Stirring up the dialog is what is exciting.

The New Employee Economy is powered by the flow of data that will enable a workforce that is not based on jobs and careers, but based on the free market of resources, ideas, skills and tools that move about the marketplace in much the same way other goods and services do today. The corporation of the future is predicted to be made up of less than 20% traditional employees. To get there, human resource data has to flow freely.

There are two problems that keep us from an open market for human resources. The first is fear of data privacy. People don't want too much of the data about themselves to be "out there." The second is tradition. We have always done work the same way (or at least for the last 100 years or so). The more knowledge we can share about how the world of work can change - the sooner we will overcome these obstacles.

I want to be an oar in the water pushing along the ideas that will change work forever.

Digital Recruiting is Not Mission Impossible

A few months back I read an HBR Blog called Digital Staffing: The Future of recruitment-by-Algorithm by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic where he started out by mentioning that “Americans are now spending more time on social networking sites than on all other sites combined” and that “As a consequence of spending so much time online, we now leave traces of our personality everywhere (and that) these online behaviors are of increasing interest to recruiters and employers, who are desperately trying to translate them into "digital reputations" and use them to find talent online.”

Dr Chamorro-Premuzic felt there were three primary reasons that employers are likely to find their future leaders in cyberspace.

• First, the web makes recruiting easier for employers and would-be employees. 
• Second, the web makes recruiting less biased and less clubby. 
• Third, web analytics can help recruiters become more efficient. 

I could not agree more. About 8 months ago I partnered with a colleague of mine who is a PhD in artificial intelligence to begin building a data access and retrieval solution to help recruiters. Our first product is going to focus on leveraging internal referral networks. But we have several more ideas planned. The information available in public and private networks – our electronic footprint – is exploding, and while there are still several important issues to resolve around privacy, data miss-use, data ownership, etc. the growth of social data mining for recruiting, employee engagement, employee development, contract staffing, you name it, is going to explode in the next 2 to 3 years.

In his HBR Blog, Dr Chamorro-Premuzic predicts that “We will soon witness the proliferation of machine learning systems that automatically match candidates to specific jobs and organizations. Imagine that instead of receiving movie recommendations from Netflix or holiday recommendations from Expedia, you receive daily job offers from Monster or LinkedIn — and that those jobs are actually right for you.” LinkedIn, of course is already doing this – just not very well yet. But it will get better, and companies like mine will be layering new products on top of these networks to improve these data services even further.

I look forward to the day when I can wake up in the morning, choose the “job” I want to do for that day, and head to sleep knowing I will have new options again the following day.

Good morning, Mr. Hunt. Your mission, should you choose to accept it….

6 Things In For 2012, Out For 2013.

I predict that 2012/2013 will be seen as the death of an old paradigm in human resources and the beginning of the new paradigm: The New Employee Economy. As with most major shifts, this won’t happen overnight (and many will think it didn't happen at all) but it will. While there are many changes that will happen, here is my list of 6 Things that were (still) in during 2012, but will be on their way out in 2013:

Things that are out	Things that will be in
Monster.com and all the other monstrous big job boards and sourcing behemoths who can’t see the change coming	Hire Rabbit and all the other furry creatures who are leading the way to a more clever way to map resources to jobs
Labor Acceptance of things being the way they are.	Labor Activism to lead the change for a more open market for resource exchange. We don’t need jobs; we need places to ply our trades. If we can’t find them, we’ll start our own company!
ATS Systems and all the complexity they have built in to manage a job force that doesn't want to work that way.	Virtual Resourcing where employees can decide each morning where they want to work.
Background Screening and all the fear based, overly conservative, “who done it” mentality	Culture Fit and the idea that screening people into the right job is more critical to success than screening people out.
Social Media which is a lot of fun but has nothing to do with your job performance. Leave Facebook posts alone. What the heck, we all like to get a little crazy after work sometime.	Professional Media and the multiple environments that let you speak for yourself. There will be even more growth of places where professionals interact, share ideas and grow their value by growing their network.
Management Driven Product Design: Closed door meetings where managers discuss customer needs, commission lengthy studies and decide what is best for the customer.	Crowd Source Driven Product Design where people decide what they want and let you know by the way they are using it.

This New Employee Economy is going to be characterized by a less hierarchical mindset and a more open flow of resources. Sounds like fun.

See you in 2013.

Can HR Thrive in “Generation Flux”

In Robert Safian’s words, “Generation Flux" is a term he coined several months ago, in a Fast Company cover story that explained "how the velocity of change in our economy has made chaos the defining feature of modern business.” He mentions examples of Apple, Facebook, and Amazon as fast risers and Research in Motion, Blockbuster, and MySpace and rapid fallers. He goes on to say that “accepted models for success are proving vulnerable, and pressure is building on giants like GE and Nokia, as their historic advantages of scale and efficiency run up against the benefits of agility and quick course corrections. Meanwhile, the bonds between employer and employee, and between brands and their customers, are more tenuous than ever.”

In a more recent article from Fast Company entitled  How To Lead In a Time of Chaos, Safian describes “Fluxers” as people who thrive best in these rapidly changing environments. He says it is “a psychographic, not a demographic--you can be any age and be GenFlux. Their characteristics are clear: an embrace of adaptability and flexibility; an openness to learning from anywhere; decisiveness tempered by the knowledge that business life today can shift radically every three months or so.”

Yet most of HR’s structures and processes support predictability, consistency; everything and everyone the same. In traditional human resources we are concerned about the legal and regulatory implications of everything from calling the Christmas Party the Holiday Party to worrying that job descriptions are written for every single position. How do you have a job description for a true GenFlux position? Do we understand that employees won't stand for traditional models in the future? And that traditional models won't support the company mission any more?

Will HR be able to change as rapidly as the world is changing around them, or will HR be this generation's elevator operator (that guy in the 1900’s that became irrelevant when changes in technology made it so anybody could operate an elevator)?

What are your thoughts? How will HR change to support this new employee economy?

One final quote from that same Fast Company article to leave you with:

• “We’re in a new era, and that better get you excited. Being scared by change doesn't help” says Troy Carter, CEO of Atom Factory 

May the Change Be With You.