Talent Management: Is One Page “Good Enough”?

Kris Dunn | Founding Member, HRExaminer Editorial Advisory Board Member

Please welcome Kris Dunn as the newest member of the HRExaminer Editorial Advisory Board. By day, Kris is an HR practitioner, currently VP of People at DAXKO, a progressive software firm dedicated to providing solutions to the best membership-driven organizations in America. At night, he morphs into a blogger at The HR Capitalist and the Founder and Executive Editor of Fistful of Talent. That makes him a career VP of HR, a blogger… but also a dad and hoops junkie, the order of which changes based on his mood. Full Bio…

Look around and you’ll see that it’s true.  To chase the claim of having the best widget, companies over-engineer products as a standard business practice.  Whether you’re talking about your life as a consumer or a HR pro, you’ve been impacted by an over-engineered solution.

First, let’s talk consumer products, and we’ll get to talent management later.  You don’t need a HD video camera with 30 features  and a 400-page user manual, you need a point and click camera that delivers good enough quality to share with others via the web. You’re not going to edit the 15 hours of high-end HD footage you have now, so why would you want more?

The Good Enough Ideology

Enter the Flip video camera.  A snippet from a 2009 Wired article will get you warmed up to the concept of a “good enough” solutions:

“”The Flip’s [Flip Mino, small pocket video camera, which is how we tape FOTv over at Fistful of Talent] success stunned the industry, but it shouldn’t have. It’s just the latest triumph of what might be called Good Enough tech. Cheap, fast, simple tools are suddenly everywhere. We get our breaking news from blogs, we make spotty long-distance calls on Skype, we watch video on small computer screens rather than TVs, and more and more of us are carrying around dinky, low-power netbook computers that are just good enough to meet our surfing and emailing needs. The low end has never been riding higher.

So what happened? Well, in short, technology happened. The world has sped up, become more connected and a whole lot busier. As a result, what consumers want from the products and services they buy is fundamentally changing. We now favor flexibility over high fidelity, convenience over features, quick and dirty over slow and polished. Having it here and now is more important than having it perfect. These changes run so deep and wide, they’re actually altering what we mean when we describe a product as “high-quality.”

So what about your life as an HR pro?  Are you using products that are hopelessly complex?  Are the talent processes that you’ve developed to define your HR practice so complex that they actually discourage line managers and your employee population both from using them?

My guess is yes. Enter Mark Effron and Miriam Ort.

Simplifying Talent Management

Effron and Ort recently published a book, “One Page Talent Management” (OPTM).  I recently picked up a copy, and I couldn’t help but think of The Flip and the concept of “good enough” as I read OPTM.

In the book, Effron and Ort (accomplished Talent Management Pros with strong careers) argue that many companies add complexity to their talent practices without evaluating whether those components add any value to the overall process. More importantly, they rightfully point out that the added complexity adds headache-inducing time-wasters to core talent items like Performance Management, which turn managers off to the whole process and fail to improve results.

When Effron and Ort say “one page talent management”, they’re dead serious – and committed.  They’re proposing you strip down your current practices to contain only the elements that truly add value.  The good news is that they’ve taken a very scientific approach, basing every process recommendation on loads of proven scientific research that’s openly cited in the back of the book.

As a result, it’s clear they’re not guessing or just throwing opinions around. They know more than most people about areas like Performance Management, 360-Degree Feedback, Talent Reviews and Succession Planning, Engagement and Competencies.  That’s what they do. What makes OPTM so different is that even though they have all that knowledge, they’ve opted to dramatically simplify the approach to each of the cited areas of Talent Management.  Most experts with the same knowledge would chose to add features.

Instead, they’re seeking to build the Flip video of Talent Management. It’s just crazy enough to work.

If we stick with Performance Management as our target for simplification, Effron and Ort run through the research and recommend the following:

• No more than three goals total per employee.
• One page total for the whole system.
• No stretch goals.
• No goal weighting.
• No self assessments.
• No labels or numerical weightings.

Many of you look at that list and ask, “What’s left?”  Great question. What’s left is a one page format with three goals, a couple of behaviors you want the employee to focus on, the metric each is to be measured by and space to list the results. That’s it. No more.

One Page Talent Management is a great read, and Effron and Ort’s work should be on everyone’s reading list. It’s rare that experts in the field attempt to downsell you on what you really need.  And when you hear an expert attempting to downsell you – whether it’s your local auto mechanic, the kid at Best Buy or a Talent Management expert – you probably need to listen closely.

Once you move through OPTM, the only remaining question is the toughest issue you’ll face – are you brave enough to strip down your current practices (which you probably built) and tell your company they need less, not more?

Good luck with that.

Recruiting is Hard Work

Recruiting is hard work. Typically, the recruiting professional is given requirements without adequate time or preparation. She is then expected to deliver a seamless and enthusiastic presentation to a series of prospects with the goal that each of them hopes they get the job. The mindset shift from reactive participant in internal goings-on to smooth salesperson is the most obvious emotional challenge of the job.

Working from ill defined job descriptions in areas beyond her expertise, the recruiter is expected to simultaneously wear generalist and specialist hats. Often armed with no more than a set of loosely defined questions and just enough time to get a cup of coffee, she wades through a sea of faces trying to keep notes on the differences between the choices. While the hiring managers who use her services a periodic entrants into the game, she faces an onslaught of identical problems from the managers she serves.

In the 1980s and 1990s, the rest of the company (at least the parts that produce real revenue) went through a massive house cleaning process that redesigned processes and focused on the measurement of quality. The Recruiter, sadly, is usually mired in the business mindset of the 1950s. Firefighting is the norm and the consistent lack of planning creates massive amounts of rework. Maintaining a positive keel in this primitive environment requires a deep personal commitment. Since Recruiting is a dead-end career path, there is no way to tag aspirations to rewards inside the company. This drives the perception that external competitors, who are usually compensated for performance, are somehow a bunch of thieves and bandits.

While the external players work in the same sad pile of reactive pressure, compensation solves some of the embedded morale problem.

We believe that there is hope on the horizon. Increasingly, CEOs are being queried about the management of critical teams, their development and their relationship to the overall performance of the company. We’ve seen large company executives taken to task in shareholder meetings for the methods they’ve used to reduce headcount. Most of the current offerings in our industry, however, don’t seem to support either team development or the real tasks of the working recruiter.

Recruiters need timely information that helps them make better decisions in situations of high pressure and mission criticality. This doesn’t exclude the automation of routine administrative tasks, that’s a start. The decision support required to make precious hiring decisions, however, is all but absent from the current playing field.

Who is this person? How well do they get along with others? How do they respond under stress? Are they passion players or just looking for a job? What is the day to day work environment going to be like?

Imagine being put on the spot, over and over again and then ask yourself what information you’d want to have at your hands. Most of the tools in use today don’t even have the means to store and present the stuff, let alone gather collect and analyze it. Recruiters, more than most professionals need rapid access to the knowledge of the organization and a means to have it at their fingertips.

Great recruiters know the personalities, needs and desires of their hiring managers. Have you ever seen a recruiting system that provided a framework for managing and understanding this insight? Somehow, hiring managers, from the systems perspective, are not as important as customers are in a CRM system even though they drive the entire process….Lots of tools to manage applicant data and no structure for managing hiring authorities. What aren’t there simple assessment tools that a recruiter can use to create the match that matters…between boss and new employee?

Part of the problem is that few of the developers and executives in our industry have any meaningful experience as Recruiters. We’d love to hear stories of CEOs who spend time in Recruiting desks so that they can constantly improve their grasp of the hard work involved in recruiting.

The Weekly HRExaminer v1.25

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Feature | Dot Jobs

Some say the dot.jobs proposal is a lemon. Backers say they’re just making lemonade with the lemons they’ve been given. Who is right? Read our take plus reviews of Jobscience and Beyond.com and meet our latest Editorial Advisory Board Contributor…Read More

Last Chance
It’s your last chance to register to attend the IPMI HR Management Institute’s event next week in Atlanta. Join John Sumser and register today (more details below).

In an increasingly knowledge-based economy, a well coordinated, highly motivated and engaged workforce is one of the key, if not the key driver of quality output and productivity improvements. The IPMI Human Resource Management Institute is a 2 ½ day meeting designed to address these issues by facilitating dialogue amongst leading HR practitioners and experts. Join us along with John Sumser in Atlanta July 25-27, 2010.

Have a fantastic weekend!

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On Auto Mechanics

Working Yourself Out of a Job vs Being Worked Out of One

My good friend Jeff Hunter occasionally writes parables at Talentism. Jeff, if you don’t know him, is one of the great practitioners in our little corner of the world. Currently responsible for recruiting, analytics, operations and technology in HR at Dolby, Jeff is one of the few folks in the business who have played all of the positions. From technology entrepreneur to Recruiting czar, Hunter offers one of the deepest sets of perspectives of anyone in the game.

Recently, Jeff read Putting HR Out of Business in these very pages.

His response, worth considering for its wonderful tribute to the people of HR who deliver excellence, compares the HR profession to automotive mechanics. He tells the story of his mechanic Steve. Jeff has a complex relationship with the mechanic who knows the intricacies of automobiles in ways that are hard to imagine.

Jeff points out that the jargon and affectations of a profession are important markers for specialized knowledge. He notes drivers do one set of things whle mechanics do another. He wonders whether or not the ‘experts’ have created a big mess by focusing on the broken-ness of things.

Using drivers and mechanics as a proxy for line supervisors and HR folks, he asks:

“What if being a good driver doesn’t mean what I think it does? What if the experts have just created a big mess because they are so focused on how broken mechanics are that they don’t ever really ask what “being a good driver” means. What if a good driver is someone who focuses on core driving mechanics, handles stressful situations well and achieves their goal of delivering passengers safely to their destinations? My gosh, what if the experts, in their kind-hearted efforts to get me to be good at just about everything associated with cars, are actually making me a worse driver? What if there are people who have a real talent for fixing and building and designing cars, just like I have a real talent for driving them? Wouldn’t it be better to find people who are the best at all of those things, so I could focus on being a better driver?”

This is one of those fantastic cases where multiple points of view are accurate and important.

I remember when there was a mechanic on every street corner. In those days, they did all sorts of things. Pumping gas, changing tires, fixing flats, overhauling engines, calming children and smoking cigarettes. It always seemed to me that mechanics smoked a lot of cigarettes. You could almost always buy a pack (particularly if you were under 12) from one of the guys at the gas station. Thinking back on it, I’m surprised that more mechanics didn’t die from cigarette ashes falling into gas tanks.

In those days, cars didn’t work very well. There was an unspoken conspiracy between the replacement parts brokers (the mechanics) and the automotive companies. Gobs and gobs of money was made because the entire system was broken.

Today, that type of mechanic is long gone. Factory mechanics are now the norm. You take your car to one of those places (either a dealer or a specialty shop). The specialists specialize because the tools required to do the job are so horribly expensive.

My car, a teensy little convertible, has a special spare tire that is deflated and comes with its own pump. Once you use the spare, it has to be reinstalled with a special piece of equipment. The same is true with brand specific computer testing and so on.

The old mechanics (who sound a lot like Jeff’s do-it-all kind of fellow) are lost with buggies and buggy whips. Outsourcing, at a consumer level has taken their place. The various functions, once performed at the gas station are now performed by people in clean uniforms who do repeated procedures.

Where did all of the mechanics go? They didn’t work themselves out of a job, they were disintermediated. That is, some of their work was automated; some of it evaporated (car quality kept getting better); some went to outsourcing, some was reabsorbed by the automobile companies in their quest for revenue.

The same thing has happened in medicine. All complex repeatable functions are performed by specialty units. The trend seems to be “if it’s repeatable, outsource it.”

It makes sense to have specialists do what specialists do, just as Jeff suggests. In fact, that’s one of the best ways to work yourself out of a job in HR. Find smart specialists who do the task routinely for other customers. Hire them.

From here, that looks like a view of HR as gateway. That’s certainly one of the important models for the future of HR. HR could become the place you turn to for excellence across the board, the keeper of the contracts. It’s small and hypereffective.

Another future looks like the gas station future. Take a good close look at the next gas station you visit, remebering all the while that this used to be the pivot point in the automobile service and parts supply chain. Today, the $100/hr mechanic (like Jeff’s mechanic, Steve) has been replaced by a $15/hr Twinkie and chips salesperson. You can still get the cigarettes.

Still another future moves HR into powerful, analytics driven value delivering gatekeeper role.

The point of working yourself out of a job is not to belittle the extraordinary work done by excellent mechanics. Rather it is to face up to the reality that the march of progress against inefficiency is relentless. All the happy customers in the world go away when a better car arrives.

On a final note, mechanics and drivers exist within an overall system. Their roles are shaped more by the system than by the details of their expertise. Neither side has to do anything for the roles to change. Progress takes care of that. Working oneself out of a job is the way that you become a part of the steam roller and not a part of the road.

Review: Beyond.com

Review: Beyond.com

No matter what they say, the job board is far from dead or dying. There is simply no other effective vehicle for communicating employment opportunities to people you don’t know. Job Boards have become an essential channel of the employment market.

They never were and never will be a panacea. No information distribution channel is a ‘one-size-fits-all-tool’ for very long. While newspaper classified ads had a long run as the reigning monopoly, the replacement technologies are all simply elements of an ecosystem.

It may sound overly esoteric but there is no real definition of the term ‘job board’. Businesses provide a large number of services under that banner. Employment branding, resume databases, traffic wholesaling, banner advertising, search placement, candidate management, niche-specific news, alternate media for communications, matching services,job wrapping, targeted Email, company profiles, micro sites and newsletter sponsorships all compete for attention in the Employment Website sales force.

Some of the most interesting business models keep a really low profile. Aaron Matos’ Jobing is highly visible in local markets but unseen in the majors. The same is true of JobDig which has a similar model. The low to the ground, somewhat distributed operation that delivers job info is increasingly common. It makes sense. Recruiting is local and nichey. It works differently (as does all of HR) depending on industry and region.

Last we, we talked with the folks at Beyond.com. On the surface, the operation looks surprisingly like the DirectEmployer’s vision for the future. The Beyond.com system features thousands of domain names operating on a single technical platform. Beyond.com hosts over 2,000 job boards (of the obvious search for jobs type) and has distribution in another 15,000.

A big technical challenge, for sure, but that’s not what makes this operation sing.

I spoke at length about Beyond.com with Mark Anderson. Anderson is a long term industry player who has spent time at Trustar, Hodes, Appendant and now calls Beyond.com home. A recent addition to the team, Mark is responsible for ‘growing and managing a team of experienced business development professionals across various territories to expand the company’s brand, market share and overall recruitment advertising portfolio across major markets”

“We get to know candidates at the aggregate level and then build ever deepening relationships,” Anderson told me. “Once they’ve come and registered, we try to move the relationship to email. The various portals help us segment the traffic in a very refined way. For us, each piece of email we send a potential candidate helps us get a clearer and clearer picture of who they are and what they want.”

It’s an argument against too much focus on direct web experience and for a deepening reliance on data about specific candidates.

Beyond.com is sort of the opposite of the great job aggregators. They take all of the data they develop and use it to deploy clearer and clearer understandings of the market. Rather than starting with the goal of making a great big pile of stuff, beyond.com begins with a huge pile of job boards and uses traffic patters to clarify. Their very design produces meaning and anticipates the data structures of the semantic web.

It’s also great SEO. Beyond.com has the leading career page in a significant number of its 2,000 direct and 15,000 indirect niches. Because the company drives content to so many discrete niches, they end up serving lots of very fresh content, ‘:just the way the search engines like it.” The net result is that their jobs get extremely high search engine visibility. The try to harness the traffic, not as repeat visitors like most of the competition, but as tightly defined segments of job hunters by industry and niche.

Anderson says, “We’re the tool that you use even when you don’t know it.” By that, he means that no one knows the Beyond.com brand. Instead, they interact with the trench level implementations. Hundreds of sites like EEJobs, PhillyJobs, SalesHead, and TechCareers are the daily face of the company.

“We want to be a part of every company’s recruiting strategy,” says Anderson. “No one tool fits all circumstances. We are a smart and cost effective answer for a strategy that includes a portfolio of communications tools.”

As media continues to fracture and communications opportunities continue to multiply, there will be increasing value associated with narrow reach. While the rest of the players try to figure out how to add targeting precision, Beyond.com delivers it by design.

Review: JobScience

Review: Jobscience

That’s quite a name. Jobscience. At first, you’d have to guess that it was some sort of mad industrial psychology scientific laboratory where they tweak jobs into better alignment with something or other. Then you hear that they have a great legacy business in the health care field. Ah yes, Jobscience. What began as jobs in science is becoming the science of jobs.

At the helm of JobScience is an amazing guy, Ted Elliot. In the sea of conflicting advice about social media usage and policies, Elliot is a trained lawyer who is organizing his company to deliver effective and legal social processes. Ted is an interesting combination of early adopter, process innovator and conservative business decision maker.

JobScience is the first Recruiting as CRM tool to be built on a major CRM platform. The company, which has legacy ATS products in the health-care niche, is spreading its wings. Their toolset is the second largest application in the Salesforce.com ecosystem and a pioneering design effort to keep the wheels greased while Salesforce.com. does its thing.

That matters for a couple of reasons

• Salesforce.com has a level of service delivery that is hard to duplicate in the HR niches. Reliability, configuration control, and scalability are the places where customers face big risk in SaaS deployments. The Salesforce.com platform is a kind of guarantee that can’t be easily duplicated.
• JobScience is virtually collocated with the Salesforce.com corporate headquarters. This gives the company access to a huge store of CRM related experience. The difference between theory and reality is an important variable in CRM based HR applications.
• JobScience easily leverages the huge Salesforce.com R&D budget giving Recruiters light years of competitive advantage.

Given the company’s deep history, the fielded application has all of the bells and whistles you’d expect in a mature Applicant Tracking system. Workflows, smart search technology, alerts and compliance management tools are ready to go.

The team itself is an unusual kind of ‘family company’. On first blush, the idea that this is a ‘family centric’ operation is pooh-poohed. Jobscience has a couple of family members at the top of the hierarchy. They have worked hard to leave family at home while developing a professional work environment. It’s not that kind of family company.

Rather, each and every one of the folks I met at JobScience had a family story to tell. These were ‘family people’ with big stories. The company is great about making sure that people get to work in their own family environments preferring to have distributed operations. The team was stronger for operating from their lifetime homes.

And then, there’s Ted. As the role of Recruiters and their home organization, HR, is transformed by economics, demographics and social software tools, having a lawyer at the helm is a competitive advantage. Rather than shoveling risk into the legal department, Elliot’s shop sees the legal risk and uses it as a foundation for design and innovation.

The world of platforms is in flux. So is the archetype CEO for HR Tech companies. JobScience is going to be changing the way the market understands itself.

Leaders Are Planning For Future Growth – So What Does This Mean For HR?

Chris Howard | Founding Member, HRExaminer Editorial Advisory Board Member

Please welcome Chris Howard as the newest member of the HRExaminer Editorial Advisory Board. Chris is a vice president and co-founder of Bersin & Associates. He leads the company’s research and product strategy as well as many internal corporate initiatives. Howard has an extensive background in learning and enterprise systems technology. Over the past decade, he has contributed numerous articles and has been quoted in learning and technology publications and has served as speaker at leading industry events. Full Bio

Periodically, Bersin & Associates surveys senior business executives about key talent trends, including those related to workforce planning, HR and learning investments, and priorities.   The latest survey drew responses from 225 corporations in a wide variety of industries, including a good representation from smaller companies  (44% with fewer than 5,000 employees) and companies outside the United States (about 25%).  We put a lot of stock in the findings; over the course of more than a year, we’ve established a strong baseline for results.

The trends are encouraging, despite recent reports of terribly slow job growth.   The big take-away:  From a talent standpoint, business and HR attitudes have shifted.  For the first time in the last 18 months, the need to accelerate innovation has jumped up as the second highest business priority (with number one being “reducing costs”). This increased focus on innovation (34 percent of all respondents versus 30 percent last fall), coupled with a major increase in focus on market expansion (26 percent of all respondents versus 16 percent a year ago), shows that leaders are now planning for future growth.

So what does this mean for HR?  Here are some things to consider:

• Get ready to assist business managers with their plans.  As HR budgets increase, you may need to improve recruiting processes, select and purchase new HR systems, and quickly align onboarding and new employee development programs.
• Prepare to move people into product, service and customer-facing roles again.  We’ve seen strong evidence that people succeed in these roles when the environment includes knowledge-sharing, informal learning, broader spans of control and strong onboarding programs.
• Make engagement and retention of key employees a top priority.  After nearly two years of recession, many managers tell us that their employees are “burned out” and, as the market heats back up, top talent is beginning to move.  Almost a quarter of respondents indicated they are focusing on improving employee retention and engagement – nearly double the number from the prior period.   Build performance planning processes that create clearly visible and aligned goals throughout the organization and include career development, coaching, compensation reviews and skills development in your talent programs.
• Don’t lose sight of the inevitable retirement of baby boomers.  Include in your planning efforts skills transfer, mentoring and emerging leadership development to meet these impending talent gaps.
• Revamp your talent acquisition process and employment brand so that you are prepared to attract the highest-quality candidates as your business needs grow.  Know that talent acquisition today is far different than it was during the last business cycle.  To compete, you’ll need to get highly interactive through social media and a savvy employee branding strategy.

In short:  we’re hopeful.  Now is the time to try and get out ahead of the curve, and change your talent mindset from one of cost-cutting and restructuring to one of growth.  Click here if you’d like to read the full findings of the TalentWatch survey.

The Weekly HRExaminer v1.24

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Feature | Top 25  Online Influencers in Leadership

If you’ve read our previous Top 25 Online Influencer lists you’ve been surprised at some point. How about this one?

“Finding 1: The list appears to have missed virtually everyone with a name in the leadership business.”

Renowned author Tom Peters is #3 on our list and while that’s no shock you may be surprised to know that our #2 spot was earned by Cindy Esposito, a dynamic voice in corporate social responsibility. We encourage you to dive in to the list and don’t just scan the names. I mean, I know that’s what we all do so go right ahead. But when you’re done, please peruse a few posts and look at the scores for the list makers for reach, resonance and relevance. As you look more deeply into what these leaders are saying and where they’re saying it, the Top 25 list starts to shape up nicely. Read More

Workforce Strategy 101 | Neil McCormick, Editorial Advisory Board

Neil joins the HRExaminer Editorial Advisory Board from Australia, representing the Asia-Pacific Region. Neil writes, “As the world crawls out of the global financial crisis, the inevitable reality of skills shortages will return…How long will it be before planned expansions or growth will either be shelved or falter due to the lack of skilled human resources?” Read more

In an increasingly knowledge-based economy, a well coordinated, highly motivated and engaged workforce is one of the key, if not the key driver of quality output and productivity improvements. The IPMI Human Resource Management Institute is a 2 ½ day meeting designed to address these issues by facilitating dialogue amongst leading HR practitioners and experts. Join us along with John Sumser in Atlanta July 25-27, 2010.

In The Know v1.24 | Featured This Week

• Regulating Distributed Work (Why It’s a Good Idea)
• Challenges of the Social Technology Industry, July 2010 Edition
• How To Run a Great Unconference Session
• Why today, June 30, 2010 is my last day on Twitter
• Hopeful Monsters and the Trough of Disillusionment

Just Work (From The Vaults)
There’s a growing movement. It’s something like the  slow food movement as it applies to work. Slow food is an antidote to fast food. It’s a part of the Slow Movement which features websites like Slowplanet. There is a subset of the Slow Movement called Slow Work. It’s like that but not quite. Read more

That’s it for this week’s HRExaminer.

Have a fantastic weekend!

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Dot Jobs

Dot Jobs

Years ago, when dot jobs was introduced as a Top Level internet domain (.jobs), I had a hard time taking the idea seriously. HR is no more separate from the operation than marketing or sales. You don’t and won’t see proposals for a dot sales, dot marketing, dot engineering or dot operations as Top Level Domains. Why? Because it’s a nonsense idea.

In those earlier days, I was repeatedly approached for support of the concept. I laughed and got on to the pressing things in my business and family life. I have, for those exact same reasons, stayed out of the current conversation about Direct Employers, SHRM and ICANN.

If you haven’t followed the story, here’s a synopsis. The dot jobs initiative, shepherded by SHRM and a firm known as Employ Media, more or less failed. After five years, 15,000 domain names had been issued. Basically, no one used dot jobs for much of anything.

In stepped Direct Employers, about a year ago. Direct Employers is a weird sort of anti-job board coalition of large US Employers who operate as a job board cooperative. Founded by Bill Warren (who famously sold his non-profit company, the Online Career Center, to monster for a fraction of its value), Direct Employers is a quasi job board that offers membership rather than subscriptions or job postings. The company delivers a variety of services from job scraping to job post distribution to its ‘members’.

Direct Employers proposes to upstage the existing market for jobs (job boards and other services) by creating a ’single platform for jobs’ in the dot jobs domain. Essentially, this means that any of a kajillion domains (like stupid.jobs, boring.jobs, callcenter.jobs, eastlansingwastemanagement.jobs and so on) will point into a single technical platform, a huge data base of jobs scraped and maintained by Direct Employers.

It’s a great big giant SEO scam whose success is dependent on the capabilities of the Direct Employers’ marketing and sales teams. In other words, from a ’should you take this seriously’ perspective, you probably shouldn’t. More likely than not, this is a tempest in a tea pot. There is nothing about the history of Direct Employers that suggests they’d actually be able to turn the dot jobs domain into something damaging. If they were that effective, they’d be a lot bigger.

For sure, the moment that Direct Employers gets their hands on the domain, there will be more confusion in the job market. Job hunters, who might have to flip between company job boards and the company web page will have diminished capabilities to find a job. Job boards and other job distribution channels will be forced to spend more money on advertising and traffic development (which might be good for the HRExaminer). The job market is already confusing and the move won’t help anything.

Today, my phone has been ringing off the hook with calls from people who want me to weigh in on the question. I’ve listened closely to the various concerns and questions raised by the folks who called. I’ve decided that the issue is more than a little thing.

The question isn’t whether or not Direct Employers will make a mess of things, after all. There is a more important and fundamental question at stake.

When the dot jobs Top Level Domain (TLD) was authorized, ICANN made it clear that the domain was for the use of individual employers using individual employer names (like Boeing.jobs, HRExmainer.jobs and so on). The TLD could only be used by an employer to publicize its jobs on their domain. In that agreement, Employ Media could sell domains under SHRM’s watchful eye.

The new proposal subverts the original idea in order to create an SEO behemoth and creates a charter for a monopoly. The Direct Employers notion of a TLD that is a single database would be unlike any of the other TLDs. A TLD is supposed to be agnostic about the platforms that run using its names. TLDs are for naming, not operations.

Additionally, SHRM has been demonstrating some pretty bad behavior recently. In this case, it abandons its users and customers again with little in the way of public comment or oversight. SHRM’s support of the Direct Employers juggernaut is evidence that they are out of tough with technical reality. More and more, it’s starting to look like the problem with HR is SHRM.

I have been an independent analyst of the online employment industry since its inception in 1994. I have authored nearly one hundred reports on the subject for public and private consumption. I understand the detailed technical issues associated with this case.

I want to offer my support for Gerry Crispin’s position, as outlined in his letter to ICANN. As he says,

““I strongly oppose Employ Media’s history of dissembling, lack of transparency and willingness to enter into backroom deals and, am even more strongly concerned with SHRM’s inability to choose to act as a trusted referee…..due to misinformation, lack of interest etc. etc. it goes without saying that the community of legitimate job boards feels threatened by the proposed expansion of the .jobs top level domain.”

Further, I note that this is the wrong time, economically, to disrupt the job hunting process. Adding friction to job discovery, as this initiative obviously will, couldn’t be more ill timed. The last thing that global job hunters need today is more confusion in the online employment marketplace.

Here are several links to the necessary background if you want to understand the issues more completely:

• Gerry Crispin’s letter to ICANN against the proposal
• A summary article on ERE about the debate
• An article on CollegeRecruiter opposing it
• The Dot Jobs Universe website
• The About Us page of Second Generation
• The Direct Employer’s letter about the SHRM survey
• Harry Joiner’s strong objection to the expansion
• The formal .Jobs Policy documents and amendments

Top 25 Online Influencers in Leadership

Top 25 Online Influencers in Leadership

This is the fourth in our series of Top 25 Influencers. Prior lists covered the Top 25 Online influencers in HR in general, Recruiting and Talent Management. Today, we unveil the Top 25 Online Influencers in Leadership. That is, we used Traackr (again) to discover which people are the most influential on the subject of leadership.

Dr. Todd Dewett, a professor at Wright State University agreed to partner with us on this project. Dr. Dewett specializes in leadership and organizational effectiveness. We asked him to help tailor the algorithm we used to crawl the web to figure out who matters on the topic of leadership.

If you’ve followed the previous Top 25 lists, you might remember the Traackr process. First, we build a set of keywords thst describe the area under investigation. Traackr then scavenges the web with spiders and scrapers to capture all of the results of searches featuring those terms.

That body of data is then mined to determine the names that reoccur most often. Those names are further evaluated to determine a score on each of three variables:

• Reach: This is an estimate of the size of the person’s audience. Website traffic, connections and friends on social media and other factors are weighed and calculated.
• Resonance: This is a measure of inbound links, mentions in other peoples’ content and other proxies for credibility.
• Relevance: This is a measure of the way that the person’s content maps against the original key words. A score of 100 indicates a perfect correlation.

Together, the three measures are combined into a single score which is the foundation of ranking.

Here’s Todd’s view of the project:

“Leadership” and “influence” have been studied and commented upon for ages. It is not clear, however, that they have been examined in light of the quantum changes underway in online communications. Consequently, we sought to examine leadership influence within the realm of popular online social media channels.

Our simple desire was to understand the match, or lack thereof, between more commonly cited measures of influence in the leadership realm (for example, common name recognition or book sales) and influence as measured via activity in social media outlets. An algorithm was developed, the internet was scoured, and the results will be discussed shortly.

First, however, it is important to discuss both influence and leadership a bit further. In a definitional sense, influence is not a difficult concept. To influence is merely to affect indirectly. To bend the behavior of a thing, absent overt forcing. Thus, through some combination of communication skill and intellectual prowess, a preacher can lift a flock, a manager can elevate his team’s performance, and a teacher can be a catalyst for meaningful student growth.

Whereas influence seems straight forward, it becomes more complex when combined with the word “leadership.” Leadership has been practiced for millennia, yet scientifically studied for only a century, give or take. Several unanswered questions remain and, for us, two in particular stand out. First, who owns the intellectual body of knowledge pertaining to “leadership.”

To put it kindly, several major camps have staked a claim to the leadership space. At different times and in different ways, these groups have included business school professors, executive practitioners, military scholars and personnel, political science professors, human resource professionals, and a host of others.

In our view this is odd, given how widely leadership is practiced across so many domains. Somewhat unexpectedly, our results support this notion. The second question concerns whether all versions of influence are created equally. Is it, for example, the same thing for a thought leader to deeply and profoundly influence one person as it is for that leader to mildly influence many thousands of people?

No sane person doubts that Oprah has influenced many millions of people. Chris Argryis likely influenced far fewer people, though we suspect more deeply. Does one have stronger leadership influence than the other?

One thing is certain: the channels of communication available to any though leader today are far more capable than in decades past, and one channel may trump the all – the internet.

We found a number of surprising things this time.

• Finding 1: The list appears to have missed virtually everyone with a name in the leadership business.There are plenty of ways to generate a list that matches predetermined expectations. For instance, Jurgen Appelo has used an algorithm to compile a list of the Top 150 Blogs on Leadership. He combines Google Page Rank, Bing hit count, Alexa Ranking, Technorati Authority, Twitter Grader, PostRank and FeedBurner count into a single measure. (The method is described here). Jurgen’s approach begins with a list of the blogs you want to rank. The Traackr algorithm is more oriented to discovery.
  
  Implication: Established authors and thinkers are losing ground to newer voices.

• Finding 2: No One Group Owns Leadership Thought There are several groups of people who believe they have a clear franchise on the ‘leadership business’. Motivational consultants and authors, the academics who specialize in Leadership and Organizational Development,
  leadership trainers, sports organizations and the military are just a few of the groups who think they ‘own’ the franchise. In fact, what seems to be happening is that amatuers, bloggers and social media enthusiasts are developing first mover advantage on the social web. Leadership (and other academic specialties) appear to be in the process of being disrupted.

  Implication: Older and more established voices need to learn new communications channels in order to stay relevant.

• Finding 3: There is a Shift in The Importance of Breadth versus Depth Another way of digesting this point is to notice that speed and volume trump ‘quality’ in the current web content environment. As long as search engines reward based on the volume of work, thoughtful and better researched material will fall to the bottom of search results. In a prior time, influence couldn’t be measured in any particular way. These early experiments involve measuring based on output and content. An inherent bias towards quantity will be hard to overcome without sematic search.Implication: Communicating in the new media is critical to being heard.

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