Talentism

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Business does not exist in a vacuum. So while my purpose may be to build better businesses on a better business and economic model, there is no part of how businesses exist in a larger ecosystem that isn't worth examining. Take the education system for example. It's not just that the modern western education system is destroying something of incredible value to the businesses of the future (imginiation and curiosity), it is also that the system is creating massive structural inequalities that will eventually shrink potnetial markets for goods and services. Our education system is driving a massive wedge between the upper and lower classes in America, splitting the middle class between those willing to mortgage their futures to get into the right school district and those who either can’t afford, or think it is imprudent, to take that kind of risk. The fault line that is being created by a lack of corporate recruiting competence is leaving the poor completely behind. They can’t afford to move into the right school districts, to get access to an education and supportive peer group that will ensure that they will get into the right college so that they can get the right job. And since the poor are disproportionately people of color, the corporate system is blasting away at it’s foot in two ways: first, by ensuring that the possible pool of talent it can draw from is always scarce and reinforcing behaviors that are antithetical to sustaintable advantage in the creative age, and second, because diversity of background, opinion, perspective and thought are critical to the creative process. But since corporations are ensuring that every nervous parent in America is obsessed with homogenizing the unique perspectives, thoughts, opinions and backgrounds from their kids as they move in droves to exclusive gated communities, the talent pool needed to sustain competitive advantage is shrinking at a rate that is inversely proportional to the overall value of talent to the enterprise. That’s right: the corporate system of selection based on experience and education ensures that as the possible talent pool grows due to immigration and globalization, and as the potential value of that pool grows relative to the needs of the organization, that corporations will actually have an ever smaller pool from which to pick.

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Whether thoughtful or not, conscious or not, the modern western education system acts as if its purpose is to systematize, normalize and homogenize the K-12 education experience. It focuses maniacally on least common denominator proofs of a young person's ability to work at home (homework being an increasing part of most students grades), take standardized tests, commit facts to memory independent of meaning or context, dissect problems into component parts that an outside expert has already validated and ensure that behaviors that are celebrated in most creative institutions are crushed and burned early. All of this is being coupled with an insane drive on the part of parents to have their children do more homework, take more standardized test and get homogenized even further. Desperate to find validation in a complex world that seems to change its theories regularly about what constitutes good parenting, parents are only too dutifully running to take all the guess work out of education. 10 = 10, and that’s good enough for them.

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The night after my social experiment with the sure and senseless band teenagers my wife reminded me that I may have an especially jaundiced view of those fine little fellows, as the entitlement mentality of the average American is a sure way to send me over the edge. Perhaps I was just being too hard on them, all evidence to the contrary. But my thoughts were reinforced the next day as I was talking to one of the fellow chaperons who I had met on the trip. It turns out that he was a software engineering executive at a mid-sized corporation. He laughed and said “We are all in big trouble. The same thing happened to me. But it’s worse than that. I can find lots of kids to hire these days, kids that come from fancy universities and have great degrees, but they are almost completely incapable of solving problems outside of a narrow band of well defined issues. Against the advice of my recruiting department I have started looking at second-tier schools where I can find kids who didn’t always get the best grades but know how to achieve an objective and make something happen. These kids that come from privilege just can’t seem to add value.”

Who Are You Going to Blame When Your Straight "A" Student Doesn't Do Well?

The Corporate Executive Board is one of the most respected business think tanks in the world. The Corporate Leadership Council is the arm of the CEB that deals with HR issues. In 2005 the CLC conducted a study called "Realizing the Full Potential of Rising Talent: A Quantitative Analysis of the Identification and Development of High-Potential Employees". While the study is only available to CLC members, it should be required reading for every educator, academic and business person.

The study is long and contains much interesting information. For instance, the survey behind the study found that 78% of CFO’s were focusing on revenue growth over cost control. At the same time, the study found that 74% of respondents to the survey indicated that “skill / leadership gaps have a negative impact on product innovation.” A Chief Human Resources Officer in the study is quoted as saying that the skills gap is troubling because:

“These are the people we will call upon to lead us to stronger business performance over the years to come. They will launch new businesses, they will find new ways to strip out costs, they will build better customer relationships, and they will drive innovation. Really, the future of the organization is in their hands.”

The study went on to say that “Employee potential grows when employees are pushed outside their comfort zones in news, personal (and at times painful) ways.” The study examined which of these "growing experiences" had the most beneficial impact on the employee’s ability to grow. 22 factors were sited. Of those, only 4 were factors that are learned or reinforced in education institutions:

• Using specialized skills for daily tasks
• Engaging in business forecasting or planning
• Understanding markets, competitors or customers
• Designing new products (which I would argue is actually a creative exercise)

Only one of those factors ("Using specialized skills for daily tasks") makes into the top five (number 5, actually).

And the top three experiences that have the highest impact on employee growth?

• Modifying work to adapt to changing circumstances
• Creatively solve problems
• Persuading senior managers to take different actions

All three of these capabilities are actively and purposefully destroyed in K-12 education. Students are penalized for changing assignments with diminished grades (as my previous example about my son’s homework shows), penalized for solving problems in new ways (try telling a math teacher that you got the right answer by solving the problem in a different way and see what reaction you get), and teachers almost always discourage students from engaging with them openly about things that could be done differently in the classroom.

So let me frame this for you directly:

The Corporate Leadership Council asks it’s members (which include most of the Fortune 500) "What is important to your business?"

The members overwhelmingly say “Growth.”

The CLC then asks its members “What’s stopping you from growing?"

The members overwhelmingly reply “Lack of people who can innovate.”

The CLC then asks “What experiences would help the people who you most rely on (your high potential employees) to grow so that they could help you innovate?"

The members reply “Unlearning what they learn in school.”

Most kids show up to school creative, curious and brave. Most kids leave school programmed and afraid. As a parent you might be able to rationalize this destruction if it helped your kid live a healthier, happier and more productive life. But as this shows, it doesn't. It actually does just the opposite: if your kid is getting straight A's there’s a good chance they won't be a high potential in a world that demands innovative approaches and innovative thinking.

Think about that the next time you tell your kid the only thing that is important is getting good grades. Who are you going to blame when they eventually get bad reviews at work?

What Does “Good” Mean, Anyway?

I am a big  fan of Dr. Steve Hunt. One of the most fascinating and wide ranging discussions I ever had about the world of talent was with Steve as we traveled to a lunch together. Steve is very bright and a deep thinker about most things near and dear to my heart.

So I read Steve’s article this morning over at ERE with great interest. I generally agree with his basic assertion that “hiring the wrong person is worse than hiring no person at all” (depending on whether the position is efficiency or effectiveness focused). But I am still left with the most fundamental question: what does the wrong person mean?

As I have discussed before, “good” and “bad” are terms that reference quality. (If you have a spare moment, read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and then read the Wikipedia entry on quality for two different takes on this fascinating topic.) Quality is defined by the scope and frequency of variation to a specification. So I have to assume that when people talk about a “bad hire” they are saying “I hired against a specific description and the person ended up not meeting that specification.”

If you have worked in a company for any length of time you know that the truth is more often “we really didn’t know what we needed, so we hired the perfect person, but not for this job.” Most bad hiring decisions have little to do with candidate misrepresentation or salesmanship, nor do bad assessments generally lead to bad hires. The problem is almost always a bad specification. And that means that Steve should be saying “Not knowing what the hell you want is worse than making any hiring decision whatsoever, right or wrong.”

“Back that up!” you say in alarm. Love to.

The Corporate Leadership Council conducted an extensive study of the hiring of executives. Executive hiring is instructive because most companies will wait to hire the right executive rather than just fill the seat and hope the investors look the other way when it goes wrong. There can be little dispute that more time and effort goes into the average executive hire (either an outside or inside placement) than the average mid or junior level position.

The CLC survey covered member companies such as HP, First Data, Nestle, Pepsico and RBC Financial: all companies known to think more progressively about HR practices than your run-of-the-mill company. So how did companies such as those feel about executive hiring? 59% of the survey respondents said that “Failure of externally hired executives” was a “significant problem”, with another 17% saying it was a “moderate problem.” Only 24% of the respondents said it wasn’t a problem at all.

So much for external hiring. What about internal promotion as an alternative? 50% of the respondents said that “failure of internally promoted executives” was a “significant problem”, with another 25% saying it was a “moderate problem.”

Later in the same study there is a quote that drives it home. A VP of HR for a manufacturing firm, commenting on the efficacy of their internal high potential program says:

We select our high-potential employees based on performance out of practicality—it’s the only measure that our managers trust. But it’s not sufficient. The success rate of our HIPOs might be 50% at best. Managers are beginning to recognize that the link between performance and potential is incomplete, but until we find something with greater accuracy managers will continue to use it.”

In other words – pick anybody and flip a coin. You’re success rate will be roughly the same as wasting everyone’s time and a lot of money ensuring that you get the “right” candidate. We can’t seem to reliably pick external candidates even when the vetting process is exhaustive and we are willing to spend a lot of money to get the right person. We can’t seem to reliably pick internal candidates even after we have watched them work in the same culture, in the same company, as the new opportunity.

For all the process work and lean staffing and other initiatives which make valid claims to reduce waste in the talent supply-chain, the dirty little secret is that we have bad specifications. And given that our spec is wrong, talking about good and bad hires is largely an exercise in futility. We need better specifications.

(I hope that Steve will still let me buy him a drink when I see him in Boston in a couple of weeks.)

(Quote and data from “Realizing the Full Potential of Rising Talent (Volume 1): A Quantitative Analysis of the Identification and Development of High-Potential Employees” published by the Corporate Leadership Council in 2005)

What you Talkin' About?

I liked Kevin Wheeler's article on ERE today (The Language of Success). Kevin is spot on, and yet I have to believe that there aren't a lot of recruiting / HR professionals who are going to understand what he is saying.

There is a certain entitlement mentality that exists within all corporate functions, but especially in HR. The assumption is that "If my customers like me I am doing a good job" or "If I am putting butts in chairs I am doing a good job." That's why so many people in HR / recruiting are so surprised when they get outsourced (as I said in the post "Can Client Satisfaction Lead to Outsourcing?"). They weren't using the right measures or the right language to demonstrate and explain real value to the business, but in their mind they have been doing a great job. It's like that famous quote (at least to us geeks) from the movie Office Space: "But you can't fire me, I'm a people person!"

Kevin said it better than I did, but I meant the same thing he is talking about when I wrote "Business People in HR have Something to Say" back in August of 2005. Interesting how these themes appear again and again, and yet when I go to conferences (just returned from speaking at the HCI conference) I hear things like "The biggest surprise for us is that we needed to take the business' needs into account when we were designing our metrics package" (actual quote from a panelist at the conference).

Wow. I wonder how long it is going to take before HR and recruiting people get that as long as they think they operate outside the world of business and value creation, they are just so much Kleenex - handy and disposable.

Recruiting B.S. – And How to Get Rid of It

I recently moved into an HR strategy role at EA. This doesn't mean I won't be writing and speaking about talent: far from it as I am booked for 5 conferences in the next 6 months. But it does mean that Talentism will deal with broader HRIT and C-level challenges around moving to a Talentism business model (when I have the chance to write at all).

It was no secret that I was starting to grow disenchanted with the world of recruiting. I started exploring the nature of my discontent here, and by the time December rolled around I was in a bit of a lather. Under Cindy Nicola's leadership EA had fixed so many of these fundamental issues  that I couldn't quite understand why more recruiting / staffing / talent acquisition departments weren't seeing the light and making the necessary changes to become a true value-add, competitive-advantage-driving, business partner.

That lather, and the freedom of moving to another role,  exhibited itself in the following broadside printed in the March issue of "employee Recruitment & Retention", a monthly newsletter for HR professionals and hiring managers.

The article is the artifact of pure serendipity: I got Frank Sennett's email requesting my views of what was wrong with the typical recruiting department at exactly the time that I had decided to take the gloves off and write a turgid synopsis of all my beefs with the recruiting world before I moved on to my next role.

If you want a copy of the article (and to learn more about employee Recruitment & Retention) click on this link (Download ERRReport307.pdf ). The full article (without Frank's merciful edits) follows:

Recruiting BS - And How to Get Rid of It

Requisitions – Don’t have anything to do with recruiting. They are a way to stay on the CFO’s good side.

Job Descriptions – Don’t have anything to do with the job.

ATS – Not only isn’t it the center of recruiting systems, it’s the worst part of it.

TPR vs. Corporate – It’s a silly war started by corporate recruiters who are trying to justify their poor performance and TPR’s who are trying to justify fees they don’t earn.

Recruiting – Isn’t about filling one position with the lowest cost candidate.

Customer Satisfaction – Isn’t the ultimate measure of whether you are doing a good job, especially if you are corporate recruiting department.

OFCCP – Isn’t about expanding opportunity for more people, it’s about giving bureaucrats a way to look like they care.

It’s About the People – Bull…. It’s about the business.

So, if you don’t want to get outsourced and work in a call center for the rest of your life, think about the following:

The offer is your ultimate control document. If you don’t trust your corporate recruiting department not to waste their time interviewing people the company won’t need then you have a bigger problem than “time-to-fill.”

Job Descriptions should be about the job that needs to be done next year, not the job that was needed last week. By the time you have spent 90 days hiring the right person for yesterday’s job, tomorrow’s job still needs filling.

ATS is commodity. Recruiting is about sales, and sales is about relationships. CRM is the right software for recruiting. It’s easy to embed ATS functionality in your CRM to handle your compliance issues. When it comes to selecting your system, focus on winning the relationship game, not making best friends with the CIO and the General Counsel.

You use the best resource that will produce the best results for the lowest price. It’s business 101. If your corporate recruiting department can’t hire someone after 90 days, and the position is critical to fill, it’s cheap to put a TPR on it. And if you aren’t proactively sourcing all the time, even in downturns, for the talent that drives your business, then every TPR you use when you get surprised by a new requisition for one of these critical positions is too expensive.

Recruiting is about driving the business forward. Competitive advantage. Period. Nothing more, nothing less. It doesn’t exist to get people jobs and it doesn’t exist so that people who couldn’t get jobs being a camp counselor can make 6 figures. That means that you figure out the positions that will make or break your company and you get the perfect person for that job, and you pour your blood, sweat and tears into that, and not into making sure that your hiring manager / client is baffled with bullshit and a pile of resumes so that you can get an “attagirl / boy” and a pat on the back. This means that you need to be able to show that you are driving the business forward even if the ego-maniac hiring manager who is slowly destroying his department right in front of your eyes doesn’t like you because you keep bringing him the right people, and not people he can browbeat into submission so that they leave as soon as they get another position.

And finally, if you really, really care about getting a more diverse work population, then partner with your lawyers to keep the bureaucrats at bay and go find great people where you wouldn’t normally look. They are there. If they don’t dress the way you like, or talk the way you like, or even smell that great, then get over yourself. You aren’t Este Lauder for God’s sake, you are there to drive the business forward, and that smelly kid that rubs you the wrong way may be the one person who can pop that product that’s been going nowhere into an open field run.

Recruiting is about talent, and talent is about results. Period. It’s not about whether your hiring manager loves you, or whether you use the right software, or whether you can source from the same pool of Harvard tightasses every day of the week… it’s about you being able to provide more punch, more value, better business results than a determined hiring manager with a computer and a secretary. If you can’t meet that standard then you don’t belong in the business and it’s time you move on to teaching macramé at the local JC.

Recruiting in the Creative Age over at SimplyHired

As I announced here :

Talentism will be getting less content, and the content that it does get will be more around business strategy, global HR best practice and cutting-edge technology...  SimplyHired is about to do something really cool with it’s blog and you can read my thoughts about recruiting and the job seeker experience over there.

It appears that I am true to my word, as during the last month I have put up only 3 posts on Talentism but 10 posts over on the SimplyHired blog.

My original intent on the SH blog was to put up two paragraph hit pieces that would generate conversation. But I don't think in two paragraph chunks and so have found myself putting up the typical long-winded explorations of conventional wisdom that I have typically left for Talentism.

The present series around explaining and exploring "New Rules for Recruiting in the Creative Age" (originally posted here) might be worth your time if you are given to more philosophical flights of fancy. But even if you aren't it is worth noting that the role of the HR and recruiting department, and the practitioners therein, will be changing pretty radically. I may be long-winded and didactic, but I feel confident that the points contained within these posts will come to bear within the next three years. In fact, I believe many are already in progress and impacting the recruiting profession.

Rules for Recruiting in the Creative Age
Porfolios
Marketing & Sales
Be a Business
Run as a P&L
Real Artists Ship

As always, thoughts and comments welcome (especially over at SimplyHired!)

U.S. Education: "My Incompetence Fragged your Business"

Mr. Sumser talks today  about a subject near-and-dear to my heart – the massive gap between what the U.S. education system provides and what the companies of tomorrow will need.

Implementing an ATS is a lot like trying to change the United States education system. You start  at your new implementation customer and find out within a couple of weeks that their processes, systems and objectives are almost completely unchanged since the late 50’s (around the time that the U.S. educational system got scared by the notion of pink satellites raining bombs from space). You, being the clever consultant, realize that it is going to take almost a year to get through requirements gathering, specifications development, process design, systems selection, installation, training and process improvements. So (and here I am about to make a real stretch, because ATS consultants rarely if ever do this), realizing that the customer’s business may be radically different in a year than it is today, you start asking questions like “Where is your business going? Who will be your customers a year from now? What kinds of products will you deliver to them? What kinds of skills do you need to deliver those products? And (most importantly for your job) what kinds of tasks will recruiters undertake to find those newly skilled people?” And, still quite the clever if almost completely mystical consultant, you develop your specification against that future need.

You take this spec to the employment manager, who has a vested interest in bringing in cool new technology but who wouldn’t recognize a “web 2.0” if he got caught in it by a giant man-eating spider, and they (the employment manager) laugh and says, not too kindly, “This doesn’t address any of the problems I had last week!” To which you reply, fully prepared (remember, I said this consultant was mythical, so I can endow him or her with powers that consultants rarely display) “Sure, but you won’t have the same problems in a year that you have now.” And the employment manager thinks “Hey, sport, my boss isn’t any rocket scientist, and if I go to them and tell them some story about how the world is going to change when they are confronted with all these problems today I am going to get fired” and instead says “You know, people would be more likely to use the system if they felt it addressed their needs today rather than the possibility of their needs tomorrow, so let’s just focus on what’s wrong today.”

And thus the ATS is implemented and, almost universally, the chorus echoes from the cubicle walls “This doesn’t address the problems I am facing today! It is worthless!” But by that time the notoriously transitory employment manager is on to their next job, a big “Implemented ATS” on their resume.

I take you through this adventure down the modern business rabbit hole as a way of exemplifying why the modern public education system has such a wide gap between what companies will need when their young charges graduate, and what they will produce anyway.

If you were a consultant coming into the education system to help them reform, you would quickly realize that their processes, systems and objectives are almost completely unchanged since the 50’s (sound familiar). Whole language learning has come and gone, as has new math and other erstwhile “fuzzy” programs that were purported to help students learn new and exciting ways to read, write and compute, but each of which failed miserably. You would do a little research and find a recent New York Times Magazine article called What it Takes to Make a Student which shows that, even with the “No Child Left with a Chance” law voted into law (and then ignored by everyone except the people who withhold money from local schools because test scores aren’t going up):

(D)espite the glowing reports from the White House and the Education Department, the most recent iteration of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the test of fourth- and eighth-grade students commonly referred to as the nation’s report card, is not reassuring. In 2002, when No Child Left Behind went into effect, 13 percent of the nation’s black eighth-grade students were “proficient” in reading, the assessment’s standard measure of grade-level competence. By 2005 (the latest data), that number had dropped to 12 percent. (Reading proficiency among white eighth-grade students dropped to 39 percent, from 41 percent.) The gap between economic classes isn’t disappearing, either: in 2002, 17 percent of poor eighth-grade students (measured by eligibility for free or reduced-price school lunches) were proficient in reading; in 2005, that number fell to 15 percent.

The most promising indications in the national test could be found in the fourth-grade math results, in which the percentage of poor students at the proficient level jumped to 19 percent in 2005, from 8 percent in 2000; for black students, the number jumped to 13 percent, from 5 percent. This was a significant increase, but it was still far short of the proficiency figure for white students, which rose to 47 percent in 2005, and it was a long way from 100 percent.

So, being the clever consultant, you seek to discover what exactly will make for a “good employee of the future.” What skills and abilities will someone need 20 years from now? You quickly that:

• Information gathering will increasingly be mechanized and automated, but this will make interpreting the meaning and value of that information increasingly difficult.
• Most work will be done by distributed groups of individuals who will need to be able to communicate in short hands that are richly descriptive to the respective reader but almost meaningless to people outside the group.
• Information retrieval and number calculation will be nominal problems, highly commoditized across any one of a number of systems.
• Individuals at an early age will expect to be able to form clear objectives, select the team that will achieve those objectives, assess their team by their own standards, share disproportionately in the benefit of the gain if they succeed and be fired quickly if they don’t.
• Teachers will no longer be considered “the font of all knowledge” since it will be virtually impossible to keep up with the volume, diversity and velocity of information needed to bring our kids into the 21st century. Instead of tacit knowledge, teachers will be evaluated on their ability to inspire, innovate, challenge and integrate people and knowledge being applied towards reinforcing the social, intellectual and creative capacities that almost all humans beings natively posses.
• Since society will still, inevitably, require person-to-person (f-2-f in the common lexicon) interactions, and since students will decreasingly have early childhood exposure to the physical presence of other children as they spend more time in virtual play and communication, a special emphasis will have to be spent on teaching emotional intelligence, group dynamics, systems perspective and economic theory (none of which is widely covered today).

(By the way, you will notice that the modern MMORPG video game includes many of these elements, and that John’s assessment that the “My Gamer Fragged Your Honor Student” is a harbinger of bad things to come is exactly right.)

So you go to the school board and provide a spec that recognizes these changes and calls for sweeping overhauls in processes, systems and educational objectives that, since they will take about 20 years to fully implement, should be just about right by the time they are completley integrated into the education system. You present these findings to the district superintendent and… well, you read the rest of the story above. The superintendent says “That’s nice, but the school board isn’t going to get this, the education bureaucracy isn’t going to fund it, the teacher’s union is going to fight it and the parents are just going to want to know how their kids can get ‘A’s’ in this stuff.” And they will be right - especially about the parents, who may be amongst their kids worst enemies in helping their kids prepare for the future.

And where is business in all this? The ultimate consumer of the services and products of the educational system is sitting on the sidelines warming it’s thumb and hoping that the next quarter’s results won’t be too bad. Trying to invest in the K-12 education infrastructure to dig us out of this hole, focusing some time and energy convincing shareholders than investing in education is better than having a corporate jet, investing in their own training systems to address the gap left by the educational system (university level included) and otherwise trying to play a leadership role in solving this huge problem – well, all of that just doesn’t make the strategic radar of the average large business.

Every executive suite should be required to read John's post and the New York Times Magazine article and think of the following: those kids that can’t read and can’t add are coming your way. Millions of them. Your corporate future (and the democracy which made it possible) are hanging in the balance.

Oil Changers and Car Designers

There are some fiery words flying around over on the wonderful new blog Recruitingbloggers.com. Apparently some people find no use for recruiting blogs, saying they are a waste of time and fail to provide any value. The logical challenge posed by people who spend so much time reading recruiting blogs that they can claim with certainty that the blogs are worthless aside (just how bored are you guys anyway?), the diatribes did get me to thinking once again about the value of blogging and the nature of recruiting.

Everyone inhabits the world of vanity press for their own reasons (and we should all be clear – given the nature of blogging, serial commenters are as much “bloggers” as the publishers themselves). When I started I hoped to create a forum for discussing the idea of a Talent-centered economic system, along with the possibility of changing the systems, technologies and concepts we use to identify, locate, connect with, close and utilize talent. I believe that every business, including it’s component functions, must innovate or die. Recruiting is no exception. But of all the many and various corporate departments I have worked with or for, recruiting is by far the most intractable and resistant to change. It appears to be a combination of the arrogance of sales (“I am too busy closing to learn something new!”) and the business ignorance of HR (“You can’t fire me… I’m a people person!”). Recruiting’s bad rep is well known business-wide, and so I walked into blogging with my eyes wide open. It just seemed that the best possible place to affect corporate and economic change was in the “identify, locate, connect with and close” pieces of the puzzle. And so I have maintained consistently that recruiting is a strategic function and that if recruiting really was going to add to the top and bottom-line capability of an organization that it would have to operate a lot differently. In fact, I go one step further: there is no way to sustain comparative advantage without innovating around the concept, systems and technology that affect how you identify, locate, connect with, close and utilize talent. Talentism has been a way for me to explore how best to achieve that objective.

By that measure, this blog has largely been a failure. It’s more than just Mr. Sumser saying “Nobody gets TQM” when we have been putting it into practice for the last two years, and more than some grumpy web denizens saying that blogs don’t have value. It’s this sneaking suspicion that I am tilting at windmills: recruiting is as recruiting does, and by that measure, not much is going to change outside of isolated businesses that get the value of talent and innovate to win.

The variety, depth and passion of the recruiting blogosphere was a valid indication that there were other Quixote's out there. But if even those fine individuals are saying that they are islands in a calm sea of "who gives a damn?" then it is perhaps time to evaluate the reason that sea exists. As I have peeled the onion of my own feelings of despair, I have come to the decision that at its core, I have a frustration with oil changers and car designers.

When the oil light goes on in your car you take it to Jiffy Lube (or your favorite mechanic). You want fast, cheap, reliable service. You don’t have conversations about epistemology or the purpose of oil, or how oil will someday run out and what exactly will that mean for the plastics and organic fertilizer businesses? You just need to know that the person in the coveralls knows how to drain your oil, replace the filter, and fill ‘er up with the right stuff. It’s not rocket science, but if it isn’t done well you are a lot of trouble, so you tend to value people who do it well.

When you are deciding to get into the car business, you go the Art College of Design, or RISD. You talk to people about your envisioned purpose of the car and the possibility of oil cartels gone bad and the nature of design and the meaning of transportation, because all of those things inform the creative process in a deep and meaningful way. You don’t really care whether the person in the funny glasses with the wild hairdo knows anything about 10W-40, or how you have to replace the brass washer on the oil plug because vibration wears it down. You just care that you get the straightest possible line between your vision and the reality of a new car.

Now the simple fact is that you can’t have one without the other. No car designer, no cars. No cars, no oil changes. No oil changes, no cars, No cars, nothing for the designers to design. Like every other complex industrial system, it is a large web of connections and shared dependencies, even though most people who change oil don’t think twice about who designs the cars, and the people who design the cars usually can’t care less about how you change the oil.

Most societies, all modern industries, and increasingly, communities… they all act on this principle: specialization and interconnectedness.

But in recruiting you have this somewhat weird phenomenon: the oil change person not only doesn’t care about the designer, but believes that all designers are grandiose idiots that can go to hell because they don’t know how to change oil. And the designers (the few that there are in recruiting) sit around and say “Hey, if we don’t design you don’t have anything to change the oil on” which leads them (the designers) to think that all the oil change personnel are backwards hicks who have the business sense of your average lemonade stand owner. The fighting and the finger pointing vary in pitch and frequency, but it is always there below the surface.

The recruiting oil changers know that recruiting is just about getting butts in seats, and that any attempt to complicate it beyond that is a fools-errand, a desire to take something beautiful in its simplicity (find, talk, close) and turn it into something that is needlessly complex and almost completely divorced from the reality of most day-to-day recruiters. And you know what? They are right.

The recruiting designers know that all business functions, without exception, exist for the purpose of increasing return on capital above the cost of capital (true profit) and that any process, system or work that isn’t optimized towards a sustainable approach to achieving this objective is the playground of social workers and mechanics who are just one req away from getting outsourced. And you know what? They are right too.

The number of people in the recruiting world who are truly attempting to get those two sides together is unfortunately small. The “thinkers and designers” haven’t spent a whole lot of time running recruiting organizations recently (if at all), so they think that the cretins who man the halyards are the unfortunate individuals that stand in the path between their vision and today’s reality. And many of the “oil changers and mechanics” have little desire to learn new ways and methods of doing their job, and therefore think the prognosticators are a bunch of blowhards that never deliver value. The people in the middle, who both design and change the oil, read what the designers have to say and think “nice theory, but your failure to ever put it into practice means that your theory and two nickels are worth ten cents” and then hear the plaintive cries of the mechanics and say “You know what, you are just teeing your whole profession up to be commoditized and outsourced.”

Maybe it’s just that the middle isn’t for me. I know that EA is doing things that have never been done before, and that we are getting superior results at both the design and mechanic levels. It may be a complete waste of time to be questioning the execution capability of the designers, and I don’t need to be convincing people who leave comments like “blogs have no value” that they are one step away from becoming the butlers of the 21st century.

Talent and Spiritual Identity

I had the opportunity recently to talk to some people about their jobs. They came from different countries, different backgrounds and represented diverse genders and ethnicities. I started by asking the following question: “Picture that you have decided to retire. You feel content that your time at work has been well spent. Tell me about what you have accomplished with your professional career.”

The responses were highly individual and unique. But all answers shared one common attribute: everyone wanted to know that their work had contributed to making the world a better place. Some people defined “the world” as their workplace, where many others focused on much broader social, economic and political contexts. Not one person answered from an economic perspective. Nobody said “Well, I’d like to be as rich as possible.” Not one.

This was not a scientific study. There is no statistical validity to the results, But the exercise reinforced for me that people hunger for meaning in their life, and since work has become an increasing part of their identity, there is an ever growing desire for individuals to be able to equate the value of their daily work with impact beyond their pocketbook.

From an HR perspective, I believe this will be the greatest challenge that medium to large-scale companies will face in the coming 20 years. How do you balance the need to squeeze every last ounce of waste and inefficiency out of your processes, every last penny of value from your resources while creating systems that summon the human spirit? Or, to put a capitalist (talentist?) spin on the question “Which for-profit organizations will define spiritual fulfillment as their competitive advantage.”

There is a real danger that companies will look for easy answers to this question, much as nations have over the last 2000 years. Why spend the time to define a treacherous path that innovates spirit-summoning systems, that finds the good and the profit in connectedness, compassion and truth when you can coopt a religious theme and let the holy men do the heavy lifting? It may seem laughable now that large corporations would shift from secular worship of mammon to managerial religious zealotry, but in a world where talent is scarce and management is confused, benchmarking successful spiritual organizations will seem like a logical business decision.

But the spiritual problem that companies face is not a belief in a higher power. People have seen 1,400 CEO’s be fired or walked out the door this year alone. The higher power of the working class is spending too much time in minimum security to be worthy of idolatry. The spiritual problem confronting today’s organization is a belief in their own creative capacity and the inherent risks that come with that ability. The hierarchical control structures of work are designed to limit the unpredictable variations of the human being. When muscles or mind are the key component of the human cog then you must homogenize the diversity of the human spirit in order to maximize the utility of the human body. And therefore it was accepted (and rarely contradicted) as the appropriate and conventional wisdom that seeking a profitable path between the needs of fickle buyers and the opportunity of the unpredictable heart was a fool’s errand. The epithets “soft” and “wishy-washy” were issued with snickers and sneers. When work was solely about the accumulation and preservation of capital, and when the acquisition of that capital was dependent on the ability to run machines or maximize the value of information, tapping into the infinite creative capacity of the human sprit was seen as sure path to disaster.

The human body, enraptured by the human mind for the purpose of rendering products from natural resources, was the unquestioned domain of the capitalist. The human spirit, unleashed for the purpose of creatively solving many of the problems of our own creation, will be the privilege of the talentist. As companies increasingly compete on their ability to summon that spirit of creativity in the form of continuous innovation it will be job of HR to mine the natural resource of the human heart. But unlike the human body and the human mind, access will be denied to those who seek to profit through control, obfuscation, manipulation or opacity. Only time will tell if corporations are willing to take the risk to becomes temples that summon the spirit more often than the bankers.

Economics to Identity

Your grandfather probably worked to live. Your mother and father most likely tried to make a living. Your children will be working to define a life.

The inexorable trend of personal economics is from work as a fiscal necessity to work as expression of self, from safety to actualization. Work has always served as a basis for psychological affiliation (i.e. "I am a business person"), but now the expression of the work and the community of people you create with is as much a part of that identity as the role you play. I may be a business person, but I am more likely to describe myself as a over-forty family guy who works in the video games industry.

This means that I will probably search for my next job based on a specification that constrains my search based on those attributes with which I most commonly identify myself. Of course I will still care about company, geography and compensation. But I understand that I will spend more time at work than with my family or friends. And since work will become increasingly important to our identity you will want to make sure that you are spending that time with a group of people with whom you share similar values and principles, in a company that supports the growth and extension of that identity.

That is why I have always been a big fan of SimplyHired’s specialty searches. TechCrunch announced last week that SimplyHired is expanding their growing list of specialty searches to include "age-friendly search" (check it out here).  As with their previous specialty searches SimplyHired turned to a reputable partner to help define the nature of the identity. This continues to be a great business model: technical expertise and reach from SimplyHired, and content and expertise from the specialty partner. Both partners win, and the job seeker who is looking to "make a life" has a new tool in their search for the right fit between their need for connection and the employer's need to recruit more individuals attracted to their specific culture.

John Sumser has an great post today about the new specialty service. As John says "Nice move for both. It's the kind of win-win deal that should be a model for others." I agree, just as I agreed when SimplyHired introduced Dog Friendly search, Eco Friendly Search, Mom Friendly Search and GLBT Friendly Search. It has made great sense each and every time SimplyHired has added a new partner and extended the reach, relevance and power of their search engine.

For individuals who already view work as an exercise in community building, empowerment and actualization, the ability to see what employment opportunities exist across multiple companies that actively support your community and lifestyle choices puts the job seeker further in control of their economic destiny and affiliation. I think it is a good thing for Job Seekers and something that we will see more of in the future.

(Full Disclosure: I am a SimplyHired adviser, shareholder and writer for their blog. I am a completely interested party in their success.)

Fact or Fiction; Fiction or Fact

I am hoping to start a conversation over on the SimplyHired blog about Job Descriptions. Some people tell me that it is best to write fluff pieces and then separate the good from the bad later. I think they are wrong, and that honesty is the best policy.

Help me out... which one is it?

If you are a Job Seeker, is it Fact or Fiction?

If you are a recruiter, is it Fiction or Fact?

Please check it out and add your voice to the conversation. Thanks!

The Battle We (I) Have Been Waiting For

Originally this piece was published on Recruiting.com. I thought it was a wee-bit controversial so I asked Jason to publish anonymously. He agreed (you can his great intro here). But after my post yesterday about the battle between HR and the CFO I thought it worthwhile resurrecting it and taking ownership. So here is the deathmatch we all (or at least I) have been waiting for...

==================================================================

Hi, I’m Bob Anweave, and I’m here with you tonight as the World Work Federation brings you an exciting cage bout. Money meets people in a head-on-head collision to see who will rule the capitalist ring. We are coming to you live from Wall Street, New York City, with an exclusive look at two powers, one mighty, one not, but both with lots of history to claim the right of “Capitalist Master.” In the far corner we have the People team, composed of the frail HRdini and the mighty Talentismo. And in front of us, wearing green silks and eye shades is team money: the diabolical CFOinster and his malevolent henchman, the Dark Lord of Treasury.

What do you think will happen here tonight Dave?

Dave: It’s not even a contest Bob. CFOinister and the Dark Lord of Treasury have been clubbing every corporate function team then have come up against. They left team IT reeling with their famous thoughtless over the shoulder “cost cutter” maneuver. The only team that looks like they can beat these demons is legal, and they are demanding that the World Work Foundation let them join team money. I would have to say this contest is money’s to lose Bob!

To Neither Shareholders nor Talent do the Spoils Go

John Sumser brings up an interesting point about most corporate compensation programs: "Compensation systems are really all about managing conflict within an organization." He is exactly correct. Which begs the question: conflict between which parties?

It's no secret that corporate compensation systems are designed to ensure that people don't fight at work. The reasoning is pretty simple: if two people with the same title make different amounts of money then the person who makes less will be upset. Since few organizations have any rigorous and meaningful way to determine the contribution of an individual employee, we default to "market surveys" and "title leveling" to settle the issue.

The Human Capitalist - "This is the New HR Leader"

Jason Corsello over at The Human Capitalist has a nice post around "Why CEO's are not Plug-and-Play." Jason says:

The new breed of (HR) executive leaders require new, multi-faceted capabilities including domain knowledge, technology understanding, vendor management skills, change management expertise, and regulatory and compliance knowledge.

I agree with Jason, but would add that more important than all of those things is a sound business sense and credibility with line management. Jason's specification is definitely a step-up from the "know compensation and benefits and be friendly" spec that you usually see. But HR will never have credibility in the board room until it can talk business from a talent perspective. Then your executive suite will be complete:

• CMO (business seen through the lens of the market)
• CSO (business seen through the lens of the customer)
• CFO (business seen through the lens of the bankers / capital markets)
• COO (business seen through the lens of the product)
• CTO (business seen through the lens of technology)
• CIO (business seen through the lens of information)
• CPO (business seen through the lens of the talent)

(And of course business seen through the lens of the machine tools and manufacturing process if that is your business.)

Each of these individuals is seeking to build competitive advantage for the company, but focuses on that problem through their individual lens. Business (and NOT finance) is the lingua-franca of the conversation between these parties, with each dissecting the business problem at hand from their organizational lens. In this model, strategy is the responsibility of all "C"s, and the strategy developed must be responsive to each of the realities (environmental and internal) perceived through their lens.

The CPO (Chief People Officer, only because CTO means Chief Technology Officer and therefore can't mean Chief Talent Officer) is responsible for finding, attracting, enlisting, aligning and educating the talent that the organization needs to have competitive advantage. But they can't do a good job at this if they don't understand the basics of business first: advantage, buyers, profits, etc. And since the CPO people encompasses all the other "C"s (since they are all people, regardless of how they act), the CPO has a special duty to be the person that facilitates the alignment and education of the senior management team, just as each of the other "C"s has a responsibility to align the other "C"s with the view they get through their lens.

Finally, in order to run the "people business" inside a company a leader needs all the capabilities that Jason discusses. But an HR leader can be good at all those competencies and still not able to make a compelling case to the other "C"s about why the talent lens is so critical to the rest of their businesses. That's why "understanding business" is every "C"s first responsibility.

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.

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?

The Book is Fat

I recently finished reading Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat. I have taken to calling it The Book is Fat because Friedman breathlessly describes every conversation he has ever had with anybody on the Indian subcontinent. It seems that every cab driver in India is a sage who is one step away from building the next Infosys. I have been an erstwhile fan of Friedman’s for years, but it seems with each book he gets a bit more garrulous and self-absorbed. I am never sure whether his books are going to turn out to be insightful economic analysis or self-congratulatory travelogue.

What is an Employee?

An asset? No… assets are depreciated. They have a useful life and then are discarded. You know exactly how much value you will get out of an asset (at least in accounting terms). When was the last time you knew exactly what you were going to get out of a employee?

Capital? No… capital is exchanged. Capital is arbitraged. When was the last time you got a group of employees together and sold them to a competitor for a price? Or, better yet, when was the last time you saw the value of a knowledge worker listed on the balance sheet?

Investments? No, no, no… long story, but when you invest you make an explicit risk / reward calculation. When was the last time you heard a hiring manager say of a new hire “Well, they will probably really mess up the whole project, but if they get it right we are golden!” If employees were investments we would seek to reduce all possible risk for the return we get. Small problem: human beings tend not to do well when managed for risk. They like to be inspired for return. While it seems to be popular, I am not a fan of "employees are things" metaphors, and an investment is a "thing." 

Volunteers? Closer, but still no. In most organizations the expectations of volunteers is low. The expectations of employees is usually more than "try to show up when you can".

No… employees are investors. They provide you with something of value and you in turn give them a return. You want the good ones to give you more and the bad ones to give you less. As a manager you don’t want T. Boone Pickens investing, but you do want Warren Buffet.

What is Talentism?

CH finally did it. He goaded me into explaining what I mean by “Talentism.” (BTW – Love the new blog!) I have been struggling with getting a more detailed explanation down for a while so I might as well take a crack at it now.

First, someone told me recently that I often write like I am trying to make other people feel stupid. That is really not my intention. This is how I think about these things. Really smart people can take a difficult subject like this and make it easy to understand in one-sentence soundbytes. I am not nearly that smart.

Talentism means that talent is more valuable than money, which is more valuable than need. It’s better than capitalism, which values the holding and exchange of real capital (money), and it’s way better than consumerism (our present system of economics) in that it focuses on the production of value, not the fulfillment of need. It focuses people on how they can make the world a better place and it focuses companies on how they can help people achieve their best.

What Exactly is "Talent" Anyway?

When I first started blogging I put up a post called “New Rules for Recruiting in the Creative Age.” That post is my manifesto about what I believe about recruiting and the concepts, technologies, systems and processes that it involves. Often, when I think I am going to far astray, I check back in what that post to make sure that I am still on the same page with myself (a sort of “strangelovian” concept).

Three of the rules from that post have a direct impact on our exploration of the meaning of talent. They were:

6.) Talent is defined by production, not opportunity ("Real artists ship").

12.) Talent is not a person. Talent is a capability.

13.) Talent is not an employment contract. Talent is the delivery of the capability.

Response to Heather's Question on Metrics

I want to thank Heather for commenting on the previous post. And while I cannot take her up on a dance off (we haven’t met face-to-face Heather, but large overweight bald white guys are not a pretty sight on the dance floor... I could trip over my two left feet and kill somebody accidentally), I felt her question deserved a response. I decide to do this as a post rather than a comment in reply because long comments are even more tedious (if that’s possible) than long posts.

Also, I apologize for any errors in this post. I had exactly 30 minutes to throw it together before my next meeting.

Investors decide the validity of metrics. They usually decide by evaluating the return along two factors : efficiency and effectiveness.

It's All About the Smarts?

The other day I explored the whole “talent = star” concept. The problem with the star-system approach to talent aquisition and management is that a single individual can rarely achieve the value creation level of a team of well aligned individuals. Banking on a star's next big hit is not the same thing as predicting future success by past outcomes. "Big hits" are not the same thing as "ongoing success." Thinking that Marc Andreessen is going to create another Netscape is just pure folly. There are too many elements of a big hit that are outside of the individual producer's control to believe that lightning will strike the same place twice.

Clear or Certain?

On Monday we talked about the concept of "Right versus Rich." Today we will talk about "Certain" versus "Clear."

"Right" people need certainty. It is a psychological signature; you can see it in how they approach people, projects and their work in general. You want to find "certain" people if you are hiring for advanced technical research positions, scientists, financial analysts, compensation specialists or safety inspectors. You want people who display the "certain" signature for any job where getting it wrong costs lives or costs millions of dollars, and where the cost of getting right is always worth it.

Right or Rich?

Here is an easy way to see if there is alignment between a hiring manager and an employee. Ask them both the same question: "Do you want to be right, or do you want to be rich?"

Said another way: "Which is more important to you: your ego or your value?"

Hey Joel - What About This?

Just saw this on Seth Godin's blog. Thought maybe Joel would tell us how the convergence of Google Talk, Chat, Gmail and IP telephony would put us just one click away from any candidate, anywhere, anytime. With respect to the "put in a phone number and we'll call you" scenario - I could only see that working in recruitment if Joel was on your side: your key word targeting would have to be pretty amazing to not end up wasting a lot of time. But it's worth some discussion.

PS - Great piece on Seth's blog about The Culture of Dissatisfaction. We are all experiencing the downside of this everyday in the recruiting world (how much turnover is the failure of the corporation and how much is a congenital "Grass is Greener" problem?). Coupled with kids bringing their parents to interviews.... pretty interesting world we live in.

Dave Lefkow's Question

Dave Lefkow has started a great conversation over at his blog. Check it out. And make sure you add your $.02.

Dave's question this week is great. It was the very first topic I discussed on Talentism.

We Need a Better Spec

John Sumser has a nice piece on Online Job Ads today. It has struck me as I have read various takes on this topic that the contrarian, Brand Talent approach would be to list more detail rather than apply more spin. We need a better spec, not a better sell.

Seller, Buyers and Branders (and one Piker)

Every once in a while something or someone bothers you so much that you have to address it. Some people go to the gym and work out and get healthier. I sit down and write about it and get more sedate. Perhaps it is time to go outside.

It's All About the Stars?

Yesterday I explored why “Its all about the talent” is sometimes wrong. From our discussion yesterday, it should be “Its all about the recruiter’s talent” (as in “It’s all about the recruiter’s ability to figure out what kinds of talent will work within a particular corporate system.”)

It's All About Talent? Maybe Not...

“It’s all about the talent” is a favorite phrase of a lot of business people. I can understand that. It’s direct and sexy in politically-correct kind of way. I have used it more than a few times. But this morning, as I was reading some great posts over at Recruiting.com, it just struck me that the general popularity of the phrase demands a little contrarian investigation.

Strategic Response - Steve Levy

I have heard people talk about Steven Levy for years. Reading his blog (The Recruiting Edge) is a must for both information, insight and great “fiction.” Whether it was the outrageous costumes or the piercing insights, Steve is a the recruiting industry’s answer to Tom Peters. So I was surprised and pleased when he started commenting on the Strategic HR posts. His comments are fantastic, but I was especially intrigued with this one:

Strategic Response - Nancy Gray-Starkebaum

Today’s strategic response finds me totally off in left field. I have to apologize to my readers for this exploration, but it is not often that I get to talk about the second law of thermodynamics, military strategy and Burt's ex in the same post. So I decided to just go into the proverbial void and see where it leads.