One View of Jobs in 2020

It has been said (by some pundit somewhere) that a skill learned today will be obsolete in 3 years. So what do you think….should we all stop learning. Probably not.

One of the more radical views of how jobs will change came from John Seely Brown (a pretty smart guy that ran Xerox research in the 90’s). He suggested the corporation of the future will be made up of one employee and a dog. The employee is there to monitor the machines, and the dog is there to make sure he doesn't touch anything.

We may never go quite that far, but the basic idea is right on. Work in the next decade is going to change radically. The new employment economy is going to be even more radically affected by workplace technology than it was in the last decade (think 3D printers are cool now…). There will be a major shift in worker attitudes about the concept of "employment and career". And location will be replaced by “statelessness:” breaking the link between where you work and where you live.

All this adds up to a very different kind of workplace in the next ten years. Will today’s computer programmer be set aside like an old typewriter?

In the county I live in the Workforce Center commissioned a study last year that said (among other things) that to attract and retain jobs in our county we would have to:

• Dramatically increase the number of workers in physical science, architecture, engineering, arts (yes – arts), media and math.
• Develop a comprehensive infrastructure (clusters) to support talent and talent development
• Create a culture of collaboration and cooperation (wonder if today's traditional CEO will get that concept)
• And strengthen our schools so that they produce better thinkers. Especially ones with a good foundation in math

And, foremost in all of this is that we will have to be a generation of continuous learners.

How will HR respond to that? How will recruiters used to skills based hiring understand how to assess people who may know a little JAVA today, but will need a new (yet to be invented) skill one year from now?

Wanted: Smart person who really knows their stuff and can learn more stuff.

Maybe those kids with liberal arts degrees weren't so wrong. (Especially if they a know a little math as well!)

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.

The Stock Market of Labor Resources

The way labor moves about from one job to the next and the way companies find, recruit and hire labor is the technological equivalent of buying pork bellies in the slaughter yards 100 years ago.

Wingham Rowan, the founder of a British company called Slivers-of-Time recently spoke of A New Kind of Job Market at TED in London. In this talk he asked what would happen if stocks and bonds were traded by a person who got up each morning, outlined the key requirements she needed, posted it on several websites, then waited patiently for someone to respond (with over half the responses not even fitting the basic requirements).

In Mr Rowan’s line of thinking: Labor Markets could be as efficient as Stock Markets and the only thing holding us back is the lack of a national (and international) infrastructure to support the environment. He goes on to use the example of how quickly in both the US and Great Britain, national Lotteries were built in less than a year. This was done because people were motivated by the economic advantage. He suggests governments create a privately funded initiative that would grant exclusive rights to the builders but would be required to grant open access to everyone who wants to use it. (sounds a bit like the phone company of old). 

He thinks that would be incentive enough for big players like IBM, Google, Microsoft and others to want to create and host these labor exchange markets.

Interesting idea.

Just think about it, you could speculate on Java Developer Futures (sounds so much nicer than pork bellies). 

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….

Recruiting Technology Can Be Les Misérables

With apologies for my miss-use of the French word form, a lot of the recruiting technology that is out there today really is “Les Misérables”. If Fantine was a recruiter and left alone, unemployed and destitute – I could hear her sing:


I dreamed a dream in times gone by
And hope was high
Recruiting software was worth the buy
I had a dream my life would be
So different from this hell I’m living
So different now from what it seemed
Now recruiting tech has killed
The dream I dream!



The problem has really been that most of the products on the market out there today take a broken process that was developed 20 years ago and try to make it more automated. The only thing you get from automating junk is faster junk. There have been some attempts to get at the heart of the problem (getting the best candidates to want to apply for your job) but little innovation has really helped much. The standard recruiting organization uses a tool to manage the requisition, create a job post, shove it out to irrelevant job boards, and pray for a good outcome. When that fails they call a headhunter. Ugh.

Maybe there is more help to come. Recruiting is going to change because job seekers (both passive and active) are going to change. The target audience for recruiting is more online today than ever before. They like hearing about opportunities – as long as they don’t get spammed. And they like to move around a bit to find the best job fit.

One area for hope is with referrals. Our employees are connected to huge numbers of people. But we don’t know how to tap the reservoir. Opportunity knocks.
 
So in spite of Javert  trying to thwart the best efforts of change, perhaps there is hope for the dream over this next decade.

(Photo curtesy of iStockphoto)

MY HR Avatar

HR may one day just be an Avatar named Jane (or John if you prefer).

The confluence of technology that makes smart interaction between machine and human more effective, coupled with the increasingly “dummied down” model of HR that some companies think is all they need, could lead to a future where there are no humans who do HR, just machines. (Who will also be very good at telling you which form you have to use for this year’s “up to” 2.2% merit raises, but will probably dress nicer than your current HR rep does.)

About five years ago I had an extremely effective interaction with an Avatar that helped me rent some furniture while I was on temporary assignment in Atlanta. I don’t remember her name, but she will long be with me. I asked what furniture she would recommend for my 1 bedroom apartment that would fit within my budget and not look too much like faux early American press-board. She had a hard time with that last part – but quickly gave me a design that suited my needs. We talked some, adjusted the design a bit and three days later it arrived. I was in love.

Huge parts of HR can (and in many cases [almost] already do) work like this. Benefits, HR policy, payroll and a host of other frequent interactions with HR can all be done better by a well designed self help system. This You Tube video by Guile 3D shows a fascinating example of how interactive this stuff can be. The problem is, some companies act like that is all there is to HR and, unfortunately, some HR departments are too complacent in this view.

There are glimmers of sunshine in HR thinking, but too much of HR has been marginalized by the drive to cut spending and increase automation for pure efficiency sake without much thought going into how to improve performance and not just cost ratios. How many companies have the HR department report to the CFO! Way too many.

Really good HR people in really forward looking companies realize HR is like the line coach on a championship football team – they don’t just relay the coach’s messages, they make sure that everyone is ready, motivated and able to play to the best of their potential. (Sorry for the sports analogy – but you get the point).

HR should not be about efficiency – it should be about effectiveness. If we don’t get the dialog back on track, Jane (or John) will be the only love of our HR lives.

Recovering from Company Disasters

As people up and down the east coast struggle with the effects of yet another storm, I started thinking about how companies respond when faced with severe problems. A key question that comes to mind:

Is disaster response a lot easier than disaster recovery?

The recent headlines about the areas hit by Hurricane Sandy are no longer about the devastation. They now talk about how long it is taking to relieve the suffering left in the hurricane’s wake. Sometimes the process of getting people back on track is a lot harder than managing the original disaster.

In my career I have been called on several times to do organizational “disaster recovery.” I worked with a firm for several years helping them turnaround difficult acquisitions. I recall one company in particular where the employees, the managers and the customers were so dysfunctional that it was a wonder that any work got done at all. I vividly remember the HR Director meeting with me and several other senior executives from the acquiring company. With a serious look on his face (and I think a sense of empathy for my plight) he turned to me and said: “Think of it this way Jerry, at least you have a lot of room for improvement.”

He was right. We saw the disaster as a chance to make things, not just better, but truly great.

The employees, managers and customers (and suppliers) were starving for relief.

As with all disasters, the first step is to stem the bleeding. Disaster recovery really is a lot like emergency room triage. You have to relieve those things that cause the most suffering first. In the case of the victims of Sandy, it is things such as housing, electricity, clean water, heat, safety. When a company is in disaster recovery it is usually about trust, poor communications, and dysfunctional processes. If you can plug a few of the worst holes, you can give yourself time to work on the foundation that will completely turn the situation around.

That is the key to recovering from any kind of disaster: First make sure the people’s biggest needs are met and then move on to creating bigger changes. Thankfully I have never had to deal with the level of suffering that a hurricane can create. But my experience with the very real suffering a poorly run organization creates suggests that people who have experienced it are ready and eager for something better. They just need someone to take charge (and remember there are people involved).

Who Are You Connected To? It Might Get You Hired

In the not too distant future, will people hire you based on the strength of your connections in Linked In and other social and professional networks? Is it happening today? Should it ever happen? Hire me – I know HR Margo! (With all apologies to Margo for admitting that we are connected on Twitter)

There is a constant struggle to find high-performers in any organization. Companies have tried all sorts of things to figure out how to beat “dumb luck” as the best way to find that special person who is able to contribute more than any of his/her peers. Employee referrals, new fangled interview techniques, improved reference checking have all had their go at the problem with varying degrees of success. In the 90’s and early 2000’s job fit assessment tests were all the rage. One company I worked with in the late 90’s spent several hundred thousand dollars building a complex assessment tool to figure out what made top performing store managers so special. Could they use assessment science to improve their odds? It worked, a little bit.

Now I hear talk of a new trend: Who do you know.

It is not as crazy as it seems. The basic premise of the “Who do you know” school is that really good people tend to cluster around each other like an exclusive flock of birds soaring around in a Starling-like murmuration. Good people know other good people, and they often stay in touch.

If you don’t believe me, look at Twitter. People connect randomly to people all over the place, but in any profession or special interest (Like HR) you will notice that there is a core of folks that rule the pack, and hang together closely. These people are real influencers (not to be confused with those weird ego-games that Klout seems to measure). But are they also great contributors in their own companies? They might be. Here are a few things to consider about leveraging good people’s networks:

• Good people are usually great at recommending other good people (just ask a recruiter)
• Good people often fit the axiom: “If you want a job well done, give it to the busiest person”
• Good people like to get things done and like to hang out with other people who think that way too
• Good people thrive on success and want to be a part of any team that likes new challenges
• And lots of good people are making a noise on social media

The challenge for the “Who do you know” movement is to show value and consistency. Do social media contacts help you understand a candidate’s potential value? If you are a recruiter – do those contacts really help you discover hidden gems?

While I might feel like the famous remark by Groucho Marx that “Any organization that would accept me as a member, I would not want to be a part of,” the opposite might be true for many of you! (OK - for at least some of you).

If you are out there – we’ll find you. 

Will “The Crowd” Drive Tomorrow’s Business?

Pebble Watch had a great idea. Build a watch that would directly interface with Android technology thus allowing you to search the internet directly from your watch. Pretty cool, but no one wanted to fund it. They turned to a Crowd Funding site called Kickstarter. They had a modest goal to raise $100,000. Instead they raised over $10,000,000. Take a look at the Kickstarter page for Pebble Watch. Just looking at that $10,000,000 number and the 69,000 people who sent them money boggles the mind. And the other amazing thing: Not a single one of these 69,000 investors got any part of the company. What did they get: a watch.

Goldcorp had a problem. They owned a gold mine but none of the geologists could find the gold. As a last ditch effort they turned to the concept of Crowd Sourcing. Crowd sourcing (as opposed to Crowd Funding) is where you put a challenge out into the broad public and see if anyone out there has a great idea. They created The Goldcorp Challenge to tap into the crowd-source to identify likely veins of gold on one of its properties. The challenge was won by a graphics company! Who would have thunk?

Crowd Funding and Crowd Sourcing are radical new approaches to traditional ways of doing business. It is a “democratization” of the process (so to speak) and speaks volumes about the way business is changing.

To me, these two processes are a perfect example of how business is enabled by the giant leaps in technology that make the world so much more accessible. A small company with 5 guys (or gals) and a dog can access capital and ideas in ways they never could before. And all 5 of the guys can live anywhere they want to. (Presumably the dog still has to live with one of the guys – but that may be changing too).

What will the company of the future look like? Ideas such as crowdsourcing and crowdfunding are freeing companies from the traditional boundries for doing business. Companies – and the people that run them – are going to be more and more like loose partnerships where groups of people come together for (whatever) self-motivation they have. And because we can so easily participate in a wide range of activities from the convenience of our home computers, many of us will work on several things at once.

Whoohoo. Soon pajamas will be the new attire for Casual Friday (all week long)!

What will this mean for HR? I'll talk about that in my next blog post. 

Could Twitter Predict the Next Great Applicant?

In the days before Paul Ryan was chosen as Romney’s running mate the noise level around Paul Ryan was increasing on Twitter. In an article posted on the ReadWriteWeb entitled “How Twitter Predicted Romney’s VP Choice”  the author, Dave Copeland says “Even as some of the men Mitt Romney considered as a running mate waited for a call from the presumptive Republican presidential candidate, Twitter had already predicted that Paul Ryan would be tapped for the ticket.” How so? According to the article:

“TweetReach, a unit of Internet analytics firm Union Metrics, released data over the weekend suggesting that Twitter was already onto the Romney campaign as early as last Wednesday. The firm tracked what it calls Ryan’s "reach," defined as total number of impressions, tweets about the candidate and the number of unique contributors.  After racking up numbers similar to other likely nominees for the preceding 30 days, Ryan's reach surged as mainstream media outlets and other politically influential Twitter users began to bandy his name about more fervently.”

That got me thinking – what is it about our social media participation that might help us manage and understand our human resources. Could Twitter help predict the next great job candidate? Could social media be used to identify impending employee morale problems? Can we assess a candidate’s social network to determine if they can really do their job? Would social media participation help us figure out the next great salesman? Some people think so.

At Innotrieve we are looking into just these questions. They want to know if our electronic footprint can be used to help predict employee performance, goodness-of-fit, employee engagement, or any other number of critical elements that help make sure both employees and employers are getting the most out of the human resource potential. I was recently asked to help them with their quest. We believe we will be able to see patterns in the social media footprint that can help employees and employers match up better. Both people and companies have personalities and traits that define them. Understanding these traits and mapping them together might help make better matches. So Tweet away – it just might help you and your employer work better together!

Exciting times.

Can HR Be Innovation Revolutionaries?

Human Resources is not traditionally thought of as a hot bed of innovation. Most HR people are steady, thoughtful and deliberate. Good thing too – who would want HR to be a “risk taking” group. But in my opinion this is exactly where the next decade of innovation has to come from. The way people (employees if you must) interact with the company they work for is rapidly changing. Traditional concepts around career growth, employee engagement, recruiting, screening and retention are all changing rapidly. The relationship that kids in high school today will have with the companies they work for in the future will be radically different than what we see today; and most forward thinking companies associated with human resources in any form are beginning to see this change. Whether you are in recruiting, onboarding, background checking, employment verification, drug testing, employee development or payroll you are going to be impacted. We see it every day in many forms but don’t always slow down to think about the impact. For instance I saw an article the other day about how “Gen Y” is having their midlife crises early, they don’t want to stick to just one thing. A few other signs of the change: independent contractors are the fastest growing job category, job hunting on social networks sites is exploding, Gen Y loyalty to the company they work for is at an all time low. The term employee is anachronistic. People (resources) will have relationships with employers (resource consumers). And this relationship will be much less permanent. It is a relationship of convenience. This change in relationship is being fueled by the rapid growth of data and open communities (like social networks or company “Alumni Communities”) that make free agency so much easier. What happens to HR when the workers of the future won’t have to worry about a steady job but instead “bid for work” when they feel like working? What will this mean for recruiting, staffing, background checking, credential verification and employee development? It will mean that the process will shift from being company centric to being worker (or resource centric). People will manage their brands and market themselves as “ready to perform”. For instance, free agents will probably be “pre certified” to do certain kinds of work. They will bid on a job and show that they are already screened, confirmed, and ready for work. This is not so far-fetched really. Take the evolution of doctors (and now nurses) who staff hospitals. Not too many years ago the majority of the staff were employees, now it is exactly the opposite. I see no reason why this type of shift won’t happen in all industries. It is going to be an exciting decade to watch the innovation and invention that comes out of the HR community in the years to come. Will HR lead the way - or continue their squabbles about employment law!

Big Data Should Be a Big Deal for HR

After the movie Moneyball came out there were lots of blog posts about how Moneyball had lessons for HR. Essentially this was a Big Data argument. The essence of what the money ball process was all about was taking vast amounts of information about your people and your potential recruits and applying data analytics to see that information from new angles. The new angles allowed them to see productivity and efficiency differently than conventional wisdom had always said it should be viewed.

Take out the subject “Moneyball” and this sounds a lot like an HR problem we all face: How can we make our staff more productive and more efficient by being better at recruitment and deployment (and do that better than the competition)?

That is what Big Data is all about. There is more information out there than we have ever had before. Over one billion photos are posted on Facebook every month. There are over 200 million “tweets” per DAY posted on Twitter and there are 140 million professionals with profiles on Linked In. Couple that with all the data companies compile about people and production and you have one huge pile of data (Big Data to be sure). Pulling that information together and looking at it from different angles allows you to see things that could never be seen before. How does participation in social media predict employee performance, how do patterns of participation in internal and external groups help understand employee engagement, how do hobbies provide guidance for employee learning styles? This is information that was not readily available to us in the past but can be gleamed from multiple sources these days. Enough of the noise about social media and invasions of privacy (that is a real problem but it clouds the real opportunity this data provides). HR needs to think about big data as a tool for tracking, managing and adjusting how we recruit, on-board, develop and deploy our resources. 

The Death of the Employee

My son graduated from college last year. As with so many young people just out of school, there were not a lot of job opportunities that awaited him. Rather than move back home (whew, we avoided that bullet), he and a group of friends piled into his car and took off to Boston to find their fortunes (or at least hang out for awhile someplace other than back at home). My son is extremely energetic and is a bull dog when he sets his sights on something, so I knew he would find some sort of job to tide him over. I figured he would call me to say he’d found a job in retail or maybe selling burgers. He was, after all, a history major – so I figured his immediate prospects were limited. But here is where the story took a different turn. My son never left his new apartment. What he did was pursue his dream online – but not just search for a job online – he actually found a job WORKING online. And not just one job, but about 4 or 5 jobs. He found he was able to be a writer/researcher/blogger for hire. He became an online freelancer picking up jobs in an open market for talent. He would work for 3 weeks editing a manuscript, work part time writing for an online publication,  develop marketing collateral for firms seeking quick, affordable help, and then do the cycle all over again. He was a resource for hire. No job title really - just a bundle of varied talents that could be deployed as needed. A sort of on-line utility player. 

This experience got me thinking about the world of employment in the future and how my industry – human resource technology – will have to change radically to be able to serve the new careers of the future. My son’s experience is the epitome of that saying I have read several times in airports around the US: “10 years from now, the fastest growing jobs will be ones that aren’t even invented today.” Professional blogger, online editor, content developer, Social Media analyst, these are jobs that did not exist 10 years ago and now are very much a part of our working world. What comes next? In my opinion we will see more and more people holding multiple jobs all at the same time. The word “employee” will one day be a quaint old term from the past. There will be a large workforce of professionals who offer their services for hire.