Can the Marriage of Watson and Amelia Produce the Perfect HR Robot?

Once conceived as a metal humanoid complete with retractable arms, blinking lights and a synthesized voice, a robot made no attempt to hide what it was: a man-made machine programmed to perform a specific set of functions and tasks. It served a purpose, to serve the human. It absorbed, amalgamated and analyzed large amounts of data.  It took the danger out of jobs and kept everyone safe. It had no need to compete with humans or harm them -except to eliminate the occasional villain of course.

The concept of using artificial intelligence in our day-to-day lives hasn’t changed much over the years other than the fact that it’s become a reality. In many ways, the objective is still the same; to automatic redundancies, increase efficiencies, reduce costs and generate revenue, i.e., make our lives easier and secure. But here’s where it’s evolved…

Today IPsoft Amelia and IBM Watson’s cognitive technology come close to passing the Turing Test: a test used to measure a computer’s ability to think, behave and respond like that of a human. It’s virtually impossible to tell the difference between Amelia, IPsoft’s virtual assistant, and a real live person on the other end of the phone. Amelia even looks like a snappily dressed, blond haired, blue-eyed woman. Not only can she understand what people ask -in 20 languages, she also responds appropriately to the caller’s emotions both visually and verbally. All that aside, here’s where Amelia and Watson fail: they struggle with simulating our less intelligent behaviors. They don’t make enough mistakes and they don’t lie well. Not to worry though, they’re working on that.

As humans, we’ve been anthropomorphizing objects since the dawn of time. Before we learned to talk, stuffed animals sang and danced in our faces by family members, friends and strangers. As we grew, we named our dolls, our footballs, our plants and cars, even parts of our bodies. The habit of naming inanimate things and talking to them never really left us, even as rational adults. So speaking to an avatar about a problem in the coming future, in some ways, isn’t that much of a stretch though I’d prefer to hear the error-free truth from a human let alone a robot.

There is already a movement afoot to have Avatar like support for human resource problems. It's perfect for benefits administration. How well will it work for recruiting and assessing candidates? Is that next?

Ode to the Skeptical HR Leader

I am doing my job quite well; thank you.

I work from dawn to dusk.

And if I feel I can’t get ahead

I am good enough, I trust.

I am an HR leader.

And I do my job quite well.

I hear of new technology.

But I’ve been burned before.

I still feel the pain

Of the last big project we bore.

So what’s all this I hear:

Big data, artificial intelligence and social HR?

I’ve heard it all before.

Risk will tarnish my star.

Too much magic sauce

Promised for HR gain.

So what if I don’t have time

Change isn’t worth the pain.

I’m, an HR leader, I’ve heard it all before.

I was born to question,

I’m skeptical of the sell.

I’ll sit back and see what happens,

More time will surely tell.

I’m an HR leader

And I do my job quite well.

HR revolutions can wait

………until I have more time.

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.

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.

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!

How Many Light Bulbs Does it Take to Change an HR Person

Three….But they all have to be broken first.

In a posting a few weeks back The HR Introvert wrote a Blog entitled: How Many HR People Does it Take to Change a Light Bulb. I liked these three the best:

• None. They're used to working in the dark
• One. But it will take him a while to get the approvals
• We don't know, their committee is still working on it

But I thought it might be fun to ponder the opposite question: How many light bulbs (ideas) does it take to change an HR Person?

Now I am not saying that HR people are any more set in their ways than any other average professional, but then again, there is that employee handbook.

I was talking to a local bank executive the other day who was interested in having my new company as a customer. We are building a set of HR data products using advance artificial intelligence. Pretty cool stuff and he was impressed (OK – he did want my business) but he said he showed it to the HR VP and she said: “We already have too much data.” Hum.

How many times in HR have we used the phrase: That’s the way we do it here?

HR seems to me to be one of the more dynamic fields these days. That’s why I’m in it. Big Data, Social Recruiting, Just in Time Resourcing, Autonomous Work Groups, just read the blogs of the Top 100 Most Social Human Resources Experts on Twitter and you can see how dynamic it really is. But it is also one of the slowest to embrace change. Maybe we are gun shy in the HR field, but change is going to be the most important factor of our success in the next decade!

So how many ideas does it take to change an HR person? Here’s a few thoughts that come to mind.

•          One – It just has to come from the CEO
•          Two – One from a SHRM conference and the other from someone already doing it
•          None – I don’t have time right now
•          Will it be on the SPHR test?

Give me some of your ideas.

Hire A Network: 3 Examples That Already Pay Off

What if you could get a whole lot of people to think about your problem and come up with a set of ideas, and you really didn't have to pay for it, and none of the people thinking about your problem really work for you? Is that kind of thing possible?

By now we have all heard of Crowd Sourcing. There are lots of crazy stories about finding gold mines, building space ships, solving social ills that come out of crowd sourcing. I tried it: I got nothing.

But this got me thinking: Isn't all this connectivity that is going on really the next step for crowd sourcing. Isn't posting a job on Twitter or Linked In or any other social media site a form of crowd sourcing? Does this mean recruiters are really cool geeks in disguise (OK – I am going too far now!)

When we hire a new employee we just added (on average) 200 new Linked In connections, countless new friends on Facebook and who knows how many Twitter-heads will now be able to re-tweet on behalf of our company.

Does that mean our company just got more connected?

It is not as far-fetched as it might seem, and the road to “hire a network” may be closer than it seems. Here are three examples of jobs that take advantage of their network every day:

• Sales: it has always been about connections for people in sales. Now, instead of a Rolodex, it is a huge network of social media connections. Do you think they just try and push product on those connections: No way.  
• Technology: When one of your software engineers is baffled today, they go online to multiple user sites and pose the question to their peers. Within minutes there are a host of answers.
• Researchers: Same thing. They keep well connected through a variety of specialized sites that allow them to work with other people in the science industry who tackle similar types of problems.

Really, when you think about it, don’t these three jobs really count on some form of crowd sourcing to help them get their job done each and every day?

Will the operations manager be next?

How about HR? You bet.

We’re Spending Too Much on HR

The CEO just stopped by your office and said all the company’s resources next year are going into a major growth initiative and we need to cut cost in all non-essential functions. He wants 10% reduced from the HR Budget.

I was listening to the radio the other morning and there was a story about the wildfires in the west. The interview was with the government manager in charge of forest fire management. He made the following statement:

“We spent so much money last year on putting out fires there was no money left for fire prevention”

I am not making this up.

I am not making up the HR budget story either.

I was with a company a few years back that was hell-bent on growth: Acquisitions, expanded sales, development of overseas markets, new products; anywhere we could grow we pursued. It was expensive and money had to come from departments that weren't directly contributing to this big push. That (it was assumed) included HR.

Do you wonder about cause and effect when you see that two years later the growth is behind schedule, employee turnover is up, morale is down, service quality is down and reputation in the industry suffers?

There wasn't enough money for fire prevention.

Are we spending too much on HR? After a decade of squeezing more and more out of our HR budgets, has this helped make companies better?

Did you see this headline the other day? Americans Hate Their Jobs, Even With Perks.  Here’s a quote from the article:

“Just 30% of employees are engaged and inspired at work, according to Gallup's 2013 State of the American Workplace Report, which surveyed more than 150,000 full- and part-time workers during 2012. ….. A little more than half of workers (52%) have a perpetual case of the Mondays — they're present, but not particularly excited about their job.”

We are spending so much money on putting out fires, there’s not enough money for fire prevention.

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! 

Quick Study (2): Employee Feedback on Referrals

A couple weeks ago in a blog post entitled Quick Study Finds 3 Reasons Employees Don’t Refer, I highlighted the reasons employees gave for why they were reluctant to provide referrals. I mentioned in that post that I would share some of the other results as well. So here you go:

First some quick data points:

• 170 employees were asked to participate in a new referral program
• 24% agreed to participate (41 employees)
• 6 jobs were posted – ranging from a help desk position to marketing to very technical
• 44 names were referred during the 5 week test
• Number of referrals per job ranged from a low of 4 to a high of 13
• The most referrals was for a marketing position, the least was for an HR position (go figure!)

When employees from the tests were interviewed, here was some of the key feedback:

• It’s Personal: Referrals are so personal. I had a hard time referring people unless I knew both the company and the person I was referring really fit perfectly, even though I knew that some people I rejected might have been OK.
• It’s a Noisy World: Even though this new tool was very easy to use and minimized my time, I am still just too distracted with so many other things during the day.
• What’s It All About: Our Company seems to hype referrals a couple times a year. A quick email and a mention at the company meeting just isn't enough to get my attention.
• Incentives Get Attention: The odds that I will ever see that $1,000 referral bonus seem remote (I don’t play Lotto) can there be other incentives for me to spend time on this?
• It’s My Network: I am reluctant to send too many referrals onto HR. What are they doing with the names? Will they spam my friends? This is my network of friends – leave them alone!
• Is Anybody There: I hate sending on a name and never hearing anything back. It’s just rude and turns me off!

And the last main bit of feedback:

• I Wouldn't Wish This on My Best Friend: It is all about the strength of the culture. I like working here, but I am not sure I would recommend this place to someone else. It’s a job, but nothing to brag about.

What are your thoughts about these results? Do you experience some of this in your referral programs? 

Quick Study Finds 3 Reasons Employees Won’t Refer

We recently conducted an experiment with 178 employees to find out how they would react to a new employee referral program. 42 signed up. That is 23.6%. Not bad, but also not anywhere good enough. I wanted to know why more did not participate.

Before we started this experiment we did a little researching of our own to find out what to expect. How many employees usually participate in referral programs? I had a hard time finding a study that focused specifically on that, but the number seems rather small. Less than 10% seems to be a common number I hear. (If you know of a study that provides good data about this – please send me the link)

That means if you have a company of 250 great employees that you would love to clone, you only get about 20 to 25 of them that ever pass on names for you to consider. Why is that?

After running our test for 3 weeks I interviewed a subset of the employees that participated in the referral program and a subset that did not. The responses were interesting and I will write about some more of them in future blogs, but here are the top three reasons employees did not want to participate in referrals:

1. Email Noise: This one surprised me (though maybe it should not have). An overwhelming number of the participants in both groups interviewed said they barely read emails that aren’t critical to the task at hand. Emails from HR or “corporate” get perused, but unless it really affects them right now, today, they put it aside. It is not that they have anything against participating in a referral program; they just didn’t slow down enough to read the email.
2. Fear of Failure Effect: Employees don’t want to be associated with a bad referral. They even stated in our conversation that they realized referrals usually resulted in better employees, but they were unwilling to pass along any name that might not be seen as a great referral.
3. Refer vs. Recommend (or just passing along a name): This reason was related to the Fear of Failure reason above but was different in a very important way. They did no trust that HR would still put a referral through the same kind of scrutiny they would a non-referred candidate. The employees said they knew a lot of people, but that was not the same thing as knowing whether they would fit in as employees. They were happy to pass on the name, but were not comfortable saying the person was a guaranteed good fit.

What's your experience with referrals? If you have any information on employee participation in referrals that you're willing to share,  I’d love to hear about it.

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. 

Take a Slice out of Big Data

Big data is a lot like refrigerators are to teenagers. Even though there’s a ton of food in it, they can’t find anything to eat.

  

How many new Tweets, blog posts, Link-In updates, Google+ posts are there in a day, or even in an hour. It is mind boggling. Yet there are companies out there screaming at HR professionals to get into BIG DATA, as though it is some kind of parachute that will help you from your inevitable fall.

Just because you now have access to every bit of information about your employees, your potential recruits, your competition for resources, or what your boss ate for breakfast doesn't mean any of this information is really going to help you run your business.

I have worked for big data companies in the past, and now I am starting up my own company that focuses on big data. But we never called it big data. If anything, we might have called it small data. You don’t need to know about everything going on out there; you only need to know about the things that are important to you.

Most people in the big data business don’t get HR. And because they don’t get HR they stick you in front of the refrigerator and tell you there is everything you need in there to make a meal.

But data is like ingredients, it needs a recipe to make it a meal. The recipes have to come from HR. 

Those crazy data-wonks that come to you with a "show and tell" full of charts rarely know what it is you do and what data you need to succeed. So if you plan on spending any time growing your big data capabilities, make sure you – the HR professional – pick the recipe and decides what ingredients need to be gathered.

Together we can make a fine soufflé