Talentism

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.