Talentism

A Welcoming Community

Being welcomed back to a community is a wonderful experience. Colin Kingsbury calling me "John" aside (it's my middle name, so I guess it makes sense), the many people who have reached out to congratulate me on my new position and to welcome me back into the recruiting world have warmed my heart.

Ami Givertz, one of the many friends I made over the last 4+ years of blogging, writing and speaking, asked me the following question via Facebook:

If I was asked what is the motivation behind your rekindling of Talentism is what would be the best answer?

To which I respond: 68 Posts !

As I said in that post (oh so long ago):

But the secret to participating in the creative economy ...is that I have to pay in advance, before I ever get anything in return. And the market that I am paying ...sits in silent witness to my authenticity, commitment and competence. Because each of the participants in my market is seeking the same things I am. Those customers can’t evaluate whether I am worth adding to their market if I am not trustworthy, consistent, and valuable. (In talent markets value gets discounted heavily for lying and flaking out.)

So what is my motivation? To reconnect to the community I worked so hard to engage those many years ago, and through that reconnection fuel my passion for innovating and making a difference through the world of talent.

Why now? That will be the subject for another post at another time.

Thanks again to everyone. Onboarding to a new position is my focus for the next month, but I will try to post as often as possible to answer questions. Hopefully, at some point in the near future, I will have regained credibility with the community and be able to start having some interesting discussions about how to make the 20 rules a reality.

28

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.

25

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.

22

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.