Talentism

The 8th Habit: Why HR is Important

You are a smart person. You got good grades in a good school and you had your choice of careers. Some people thought you should be a doctor, and some people thought you should be a lawyer. A few said “Investment banking.” The world is your oyster.

And then you pick a career in Human Resources, and everyone from your college career counselor to your parents scratch their heads and wonder why you are throwing your life away. You could be so big and important in those other jobs. Why HR?

Here’s why:

Great Job Melinda!

I have never met Melinda White but after reading her article today I sure hope I do some day. And kudos to ERE for providing a place where thoughtful individuals like Melinda (and many others) can publish such great stuff.

Melinda said what I was trying to say with my post about Experience and Education. She just said it a lot better and a lot more clearly.

Thanks Melinda! Lunch is on me whenever you are in the Bay Area.

Fiddling with the Lights

In the 1920’s a bunch of organizational theorists were trying to figure out how lighting conditions affected worker productivity. So they went to the Western Electric plant in Hawthorne and started messing around with the lights. They increased the light level in the plant and the productivity went up. Then they reduced the light… and productivity went up again. They ended up by putting two workers in a dark closet with the door cracked. You guessed it – productivity was great.

The story is true, and while the conventional wisdom that arose from the study may be apocryphal, the lesson is important: pay attention to the workers and they do better work.

This story is called to mind by a certain ATS vendor’s (oh, sorry, “Talent Management System Application Provider”) recent proclamation that companies using their software are worth more than companies that don’t. The correlation is clear: use their software and you’ll get a better stock price, probably because worker productivity goes up when their software is “deployed properly.” ™

What Do We Want From Our Social Networks?

Social networking is reaching a natural inflection point where we should all start to examine exactly what we are getting out of it and what we really want.

We are starting to formalize and systematize what all good business people have known for the past 5,000 years: relationships are at the heart of how work gets done. When we look to formalize and systematize we are really trying to optimize. Optimization is a way to get more output for less input (“pay less, get more”). All things that become optimized are subjected to the same basic process: scoping, then defining, then naming, then atomizing (breaking into discreet parts), then analyzing and finally measurizing (I made the last one up, but it’s the point where we all become concerned about how to measure the discreet parts we just analyzed). The process has one objective: to turn the intangible into the tangible in such a way that we can improve it and communicate it.

Buildings that Stand

In 1979 Christopher Alexander published a book titled The Timeless Way of Building. Alexander opens the book by saying:

There is one timeless way of building… It is not possible to make great buildings, or beautiful places, places where you feel yourself, places where you feel alive, except by following this way.

For recruiters that “one way” is transparency and authenticity.

SaaS, Salesforce and Our New Central Sourcing Business

There is a great article over at Businessweek titled “Software as a Service Myths.” (Thanks to Yves Lermusiaux at Taleo for pointing the article out .)

We have launched a new Central Sourcing Business (if something is strategic it is a business, not a function – see Draw the Lines), and we are using Salesforce.com as our technology platform of choice. We have developed a “central platform / local service” approach that extends leading-edge sourcing management capabilities to all of our studio sourcers while ensuring that they can maintain local control, support and configuration management.

We looked at a couple of vendors to build this new integrated application set on, and it was a tight race between Microsoft CRM 3.0 and Salesforce, but in the end Salesforce won the initial deal because I didn’t want to have to deal with installing and managing a platform. I sold some of the first ASP solutions in 1996 and I have been a fan of that approach ever since. Now ASP has morphed into SaaS (Software as a Service), but the concept is essentially the same: if you don’t make money by supporting software, give the business to someone who does. EA does not make money by hosting front- or back-office applications, so I wanted to work with someone who does. Salesforce did, Microsoft didn’t.

It was clear that Microsoft wouldn’t be left behind for long, and I think their Live concept will work (and I am really excited to see what Ray does with Groove in the next Office suite). In the meantime, Salesforce was the logical choice. I’ll keep you posted.

Working at Electronic Arts

Talentism is not a “recruiting blog” in the oft-used sense of that phrase: my topic of choice is not usually how great it is to work at Electronic Arts (EA) . This is a personal blog and maintaining the freedom to discuss the topics that are important to me is something I jealously guard. Never once has a post been published here with the idea “Hey, prospective hires are just gonna love this!” Even the “Join the EA Talent Network” widget is more an experiment in technological utility than a shill for my employer. I always figured that (as was said in 68 Posts) that this blog was a “payment in advance,” a way of creating a market for my ideas based on their value to the reader. I always assumed that if readers got value from the posts and they knew I worked at EA, then by the transitive property some people might think better of EA.  I never put more thought into it than that.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the forum. Last week I was asked a specific question about EA in an interview and an apparently repressed desire to sing EA’s praises came pouring forth. It was astonishing, to me as much as anybody else.

My self-description would be “contrarian entrepreneurial innovation information junkie” in that I have spent most of my career starting and running small companies. Since 1992 I have not recieved a paycheck from a company with more than 100 employees. And as my regular readers will likely recognize, I have never been a fan of corporate America. So it was more than a bit of a shock to my friends and family when I told them that I was “going corporate”, not only because that didn’t seem to be in my DNA but also because I have a family to feed and my off-the-wall approach to creative problem solving didn’t seem to be a big company’s cup of tea. Frankly, even I was perplexed about my decision to join EA. It felt like the right thing to do, but any further examination of the situation always ended in “Are you nuts?”

And yet here I was, 14 months and 20 days later, telling the Fortune Innovation Blog that “I feel lucky every day I get to go to work.” What happened? Do they literally serve Kool-aid from the drink dispensers that I frequent in the HR department? Perhaps, but the truth of the feeling is inescapable: I have never had more fun working. I am having a blast. That doesn’t mean that it’s all daisies and love 24/7 (but if your idea of fulfillment is a big kumbaya session then you probably need to stick to the camp counselor listings in the want ads). And I wouldn’t say I have gotten hitched – I continue to believe in a free agent market and that all employers need to be recruiting their employees every day. But the much prognosticated (perhaps there was a bit of schadenfreude in there, hmmm?) homogenization of my personality hasn’t occured. I haven’t had to go through some sort of genetic mutation in order to survive here. Quite the opposite – I find that I am rewarded for innovating and hard-charging without the worry of making a payroll (those of you whom are entrepreneurs know the dread of which I speak). Best of all, I get to work with a lot of incredibly smart people who charge my learning battery in ways that I haven’t enjoyed since… well, ever.

Passive Candidate Email Acquisition - Does it Work?

Steven Rothberg of Collegerecruiter.com fame has started an interesting discussion over at ERE.

We use Jobster and are happy with it. As I said here, I don’t think the power of Jobster is the email networking piece. But we use that function, and so I like to keep track of the utility and effectiveness of it.

At this point I can only vouch for my own experience. I get a lot of referral network sourcing requests. I take a quick look at the email: if I know someone that is looking for a job that I care about and their skill set matches the job description, then I forward it on. But if I really have to do passive sourcing (as in, try to go convince someone that this is worth their while), I have to evaluate spending my time helping a recruiter do their job against spending that same time doing my own job. It’s a pretty utilitarian equation – where am I going to get the best return for my time. More often than not, doing my job takes priority over doing someone else’s. I tend to have the same reaction as Steve – the person who is asking for my help is getting something out of it… why shouldn’t I?

It might just turn out that passive candidate acquisition through email has the same exact problem that active candidate acquisition through posting on job boards does: there is an inverse relationship between the quality of the talent pool and the importance of the position. If “good people know good people”, and good people get tired of helping recruiters do their jobs, then you’ll just get referrals from people who aren’t that good (I assume that the counter-point of the “good people” proposition is “disinterested sloths hang out in bars with budding alcoholics who just like to steal paperclips” or something of the sort).

This isn’t true of Employee Referral Campaigns, for the very reason that the true “sourcer” gets paid for their efforts. I think that Jobster is a fantastic tool for ERPs, because the level of tracking and information management exceeds what I can get from other programs I have used. In addition, it cuts down on the work that the employee has to perform to tap into their network, so I am seeing better results than the old disconnected email blast approach.

As I stated in that previous post, I think that there may be a short shelf-life for passive candidate acquisition through email. But I continue to believe in Jobster (for the same reasons that I listed in that post), as well as the ERP management angle, and continue to be a happy customer of theirs. Only time will tell whether there is really an “email” issue, but if there is, I think the team at Jobster can figure it out. Right guys?

HR Systems Starts Blogging

Welcome to the mysterious Mr. HR Systems. You can find his (or her) new blog here.

Fortune Innovation Blog Interview with Talentism

This was fun.