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). 

Lines Between Work and Social (Media) Are Blurred

There are several dimensions to the question of privacy and how it plays into trends in human resources, but the one I want to talk about here is what I call the “always there” trend. The trend itself is not all that new. Since the invention of email and laptops employees and managers have felt an increasing obligation to always be available for work: Nothing new there. The new part comes when you start to look at the opposite side of the equation:

How much does our “social life” blur with our work life?

The huge rise in social media has lead to the situation where an increasing number of us are “always there” for our friends and family who want to Tweet Us, Friend Us, Tube Us, Plus Us or whatever else may be the latest social media trend. We are connected to social media the entire waking day (and some don’t seem to sleep much either). http://www.briansolis.com/2010/02/time-spent-on-social-networks-up-82-around-the-wrold/ . While a lot has been written about how the lines have blurred between work and home, very little has been said about the fact that the reverse is now truer than ever: The lines between home (our social media connections) and work have blurred. Keeping track of the kids, catching up with old school mates, seeing what past colleagues are doing – it’s all in a day’s work.

With this blurring of lines – where lies the distinction between what employers should know about your “social media life” and what belongs only to you? Do companies have a right to assess some aspects of an employee’s social network “footprint” when they are conducting a pre employment screening for instance? Can employees make the case that they should be allowed to have access to Facebook, Linked In, YouTube etc. but companies don’t have the right to know what they are doing on these sites?

Let me be clear. I am a strong believer that companies don’t need to meddle in the personal life of their employees. They should focus on things like performance, productivity, and effectiveness, and leave the personal stuff alone.  But I also believe that what we do in this new world enabled by social media has a great deal of relevance to who we are as employees.

The digital “footprint” we leave says a lot about who we are.

If you believe a person’s previous employment, hobbies, outside activities, volunteerism are all areas that impact how well a person will fit into your organization, then why not also assess what they do on social media? I, for one, hope companies do look at my social media profile. I think it only helps define who I am.

I am no longer defined by my job – I am defined by my Linked In profile – so get on board and tweet me!

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.

Nine Months In Jail

I have a friend, a fellow that I used to work with. He just got out of jail. It all started with drinking. Most of these stories do. He was an IT director, very successful, had a wife, one young son, nice house. But he and his wife drank a lot. I never knew they did, it did not show up in his work. He hid it well. But things got worse for him over the years.

He lost his job, got a DUI or two, and violated his restraining order one too many times. They put him in jail.

Now he needs a job.

Would you hire him?

This is a guy with a lot of great technical skills in an economy where there is high demand for those skills. But he has an arrest record. That is challenge enough. But I learned something else about his struggle to find a job: he can’t get there. Or at least he can’t get to a lot of places.

I had breakfast with this friend of mine the other day. He was excited to announce that he had finally been offered a job. The interview went well. They questioned why a guy with so much experience and background would want this lower level position, but they also understood that someone with his past history needed to start over. Job offered, job accepted.

Then they told him the job started at 7:00 AM.

The buss that he has to rely on to get from where he lives to where he wants to work can’t get him there in time. When you have a DUI you lose your license. When you are in jail you can’t take the mandatory courses to gain it back.

I said I would drive him for the first two weeks.  

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….