Top 100 v1.17 Tony Karrer

Top 100 v1.17 Tony Karrer

By John Sumser

The Landscape

Currently, HR is built on three legs, Transactional, Learning and Development (L&D) and Acquisition. Every HR Department is a unique blend of the three pieces. Some companies choose to primarily develop talent (their acquisition functions are always a little less sophisticated because they focus on raw potentials). Some are acquisition-centric, buying the best available talent for the job (with correspondingly underdeveloped Learning and Development functions). Some are admin-centric (though this group is getting smaller).

It’s worth noting that a fourth “leg” is emerging with a focus on Analytics, process audits and specifications. The “HR as a predictive auditing function” is in it’s earliest years. It’s the component to watch. But, for the meantime, the three legged stool of Admin, Acquisition and Development is the center of the show.

In the old days (before it became cool to want a ’seat at the table’), the admin process was at the heart of HR. Getting payroll out on time, running benefits smoothly and generally keeping a lid on compliance and regulation was how the game worked. The cowboys lived in Recruiting and the professors lived in Training.If you wanted to run an HR shop, you had to pay your dues as a Generalist.

A decade ago, people from L&D or Acquisition never had a career path. The VP of HR was either an external appointment or a battle ax from the Comp and Benefits group. That’s all changed.

Today, leadership is going to emerge from either L&D or Recruiting depending on the organization’s primary orientation. The policies that follow from the leadership choice really define a department’s behavior. The admin players are the ones without a career track.

The difference between a Learning shop and an acquisition shop involves the way people think about investing. In Recruiting-centric places, a premium is placed on having the right player at the right moment. The underlying assumption is that all of the required training and development happens before the candidate joins the organization. She is, in other words, “qualified”.

In a development shop, requirements for new players are a little fuzzier. The company is going to invest in new people to teach them the culture and the firm’s unique methods. Fit is vastly more important than perfect adherence to position requirements.

One of the reasons it’s so hard to get software to generalize in any of the HR functions is that the craft is practiced differently by region, by industry and by the prioritization placed on the legs of the stool. Meanwhile, talented teams throw themselves against deep technical problems on the assumption that HR is practiced in the same way in all or most organizations. This single assumption is responsible for huge amounts of miscommunication.

Like most of the innovators I’ve talked to for the Top 100 Project, Dr. Tony Karrer is uncomfortable being described as a member of the HR community. He and his company, TechEmpower, develop software for the performance learning environment (sales training, operational information systems).

Initially, I got to know Tony as the spearhead of the HRTechCentral project. Tony, whose voluminous output includes amazingly deep content on learning and performance, is experimenting with content aggregation and distribution. HRTechCentral is an attempt to find and categorize strong material form the HRTech spectrum. It’s worth a peek.

Like Dan Hilbert, Karrer believes that real optimization of an organization’s performance involves the measurement and improvement of the human element. He imagines an emerging future of increasingly fragmented jobs. In that scenario, every worker has to become a self-serve learner.

Karrer works in the world of massive data. He and his team are building solutions that focus in making the right information available at the right time. His operations are at the very fringes of the HR universe. That’s where real technical innovation has to happen in our industry.

That’s partly because, in spite of the fact that we’re talking about influence in HR, HR has precious little influence in the organization. When I mention that I work in and with HR, people tend to back away. The entire profession has that problem. It could use a good PR firm.

For serious players like Dr. Karrer, HR has some of the pieces but not all of the oomph. In development organizations where learning is the competitive edge, Karrer and Co are able to build interesting systems that turbo charge performance without much reliance on acquisition. So, he works with the human element, but at a distance form the mainstream of HR-Recruiting. In his world, not all of the Learning function should be in HR. It is more effective, when its tied directly to performance consequence.

The reason Karrer is being added to the Top Influencers list is simple. When business leaders imagine what great HR should be, they are more likely to mention Tony Karrer than the more typical HR-centric player. Karrer’s influence is broad because he thinks well beyond conventional boundaries.

John Sumser is the founder and CEO of TwoColorHat, a company specializing in market strategy for HR – Recruiting Vendors. You can keep up with his other stuff at johnsumser.com. Follow the rest of the Top 100 Influencers project.

Top 100 v1.15 Doug Berg

By John Sumser

Part of the folklore of innovation is the notion that new ideas emerge in a blinding flash of insight. The “Eureka” moment is a Hollywood picture of things. The “discovery” of new concepts is, most often, the result of long years of hard work.

The Web was built on a history of hypertext languages over 20 years. The light bulb was the conclusion of tests of thousands of filament materials. For most commercialised ideas, the “inventor” has to be deeply immersed in the operating details of the thing under consideration.

Our world, the Recruiting & HR space is not the most likely place to find innovation. The relentless emphasis on so called “best practices” builds a culture of imitation. Beyond the borders of this tiny universe, people look beyond the methods of others to find real competitive advantage. It’s simply less likely here.

Even so, amazing things spring from our ranks.

There is no better testing ground for search engine technologies. Recruiters and HR pros have deep needs for rapid access to data. It’s not surprising that search technology is routinely tested and perfected here.

Anything that amplifies or accelerates communication has a ready market in the HR – Recruiting world. When companies acquire talent for competitive purposes (not all of them do), speed is the critical element. We gobble up things that promise an increase in speed.

These days, one problem makes all of the others pale by comparison. Figuring out how to reach potential employees with the right message while integrating that data in the Applicant Tracking System is the toughest data integration problem in the enterprise.

Potential employees come from a variety of sources, digital, analog, referral, vendor generated. Causing all of that information to flow through a single interface with accurate performance measurement is the holy grail. The daunting factors include 50,000 job boards, 450 applicant tracking systems, an infinite array of meanings for referral programs, major differences in the way that companies recruit, differing employment brand philosophies and complex organizational variation are responsible for a great deal of head scratching.

Jobs2Web is a Minneapolis based firm that attempts to crack this nut. Led by serial entrepreneur Doug Berg (Founder and Chief Innovation Officer), J2W offers clients a basket of services that range from site development and SEO/SEM to tight coupling with the customer’s Applicant Tracking System. Berg says “we knew where the problem was. By working on it in a ton of settings, we are really learning about the next layer of innovation.”

Berg is perfect for the job. In his early career, he was the technology guy for a Theater and arts company. Then, he walked on fire with Tony Robbins. Almost overnight, he went from Tech guy to headhunter, opening his own firm and making tons of recruiting bucks for seven or eight years.

In his first online entrepreneurial gig, Berg founded Techies.com, a major player in the dot com er. Techies imploded in the wake of 911. When Berg finally returned to the space it was with the more tightly focused Jobs2Web.

Jobs2Web is a Recruitment marketing platform. No user training is required. Everything is measured. It includes RSS, social software and extensions. The systems ties directly into the ATS while integrating tightly with various sourcing tools and services.

Berg says “I’m building a nest of solutions, not a one size fits all product. Customers are free to join us at the level of their capability and desire.”

The idea that this problem needs to be solved is not new. Berg is leading a team to tackle it by learning about the nuances of various approaches to recruiting. What’s different about his approach is that he doesn’t start from the premise that recruiting and HR are generalizable. He clearly believes that each customer has a unique problem set.

The reason Berg is so influential is a combination of temperament and work ethic. Each new challenge helps Doug figure out the real meaning and breadth of Jobs2Web. As a result, he is full of questions and wants answers from anyone who might give them.

Doug Berg’s form of influence involves really listening to customers and tailoring solutions to their needs while building a tool capable of delivering that result and all of the others. Besides all of that, Berg is personable and easy to work with.

Sometimes, being easy to be with is the essence of influence.

Top 100 v1.16 Allan Schweyer

By John Sumser

Some kinds of influence involve creating the disposition for a deal. There are any number of people who excel in the art of shaping the language and the debate, The terms Talent Management and Human Capital are both examples of the work of people who shape language.

There are a few institution builders.

These folks straddle the line between academia and commercial enterprise, largely because there is no formal academic discipline for HR-Recruiting. Training organizations that take on aspects of the academic world, like testing and certification, are the first signs of a maturing profession. The future of the Human Capital Professions is going to depend on organizations the design and deliver credibility.

The Human Capital Institute has amassed the largest body of research and data on HR-Recruiting topics in the world. The operation has four aspects: online information, education, research and events. For the past five and a half years, Allan Schweyer has been on HCI’s board and operated as the Executive Director and VP of Research.

Trained as a labor economist, Allan came straight out of school into the employment scene. He worked for the canadian government doing labor market research.In an extremely interesting process, he built an early job board as a part of the government job. In Canada, the government is unwilling to compete with private industry so the job board was ultimately sold.

He’s been in the HR arena for a solid 20 years now.

The thing about deep influence is that it takes a combination of time in grade, a network and an institutional base of some sort. The Human Capital Institute gives Schweyer the foundation for amazing things.

Being strategic means “skating to where the puck is going to be. HCI, under Schweyer’s guidance moves swiftly to incorporate new ideas into its core. Built on the notion that Human Capital Managers should be strategic, HCI trains and certifies hundreds of HR professionals in the fundamentals of strategic engagement.

Schweyer has one of those seats that gives you a comprehensive view. HCI plans to deliver twelve major research studies and a 2 day conference with each over the coming year. This puts Allan into the thick of the evolution of the discipline.

Over time, we’ll look a little more closely at the institutions like HCI that help shape the industry’s self concept. There are a handful of senior executives like Schweyer whose job is designed to influence the shape of things. In Allan’s case, the name of the organization tells the whole story. From the gitgo, they did not want to be just another HR association.

John Sumser is the founder and CEO of TwoColorHat, a company specializing in market strategy for HR – Recruiting Vendors. You can keep up with his other stuff at johnsumser.com. Follow the rest of the Top 100 Influencers project.

Top 100 v1.14 Dan Hilbert

By John Sumser

So far, the people covered in this series are a part of the industry’s bulwark. These folks shepherd new ideas into our universe with the painstaking care of estate conservators. Much of the ebb and flow of influence is spent on nuanced movement of the status quo.

Influence is precisely a complex calculus of popularity and connection. The development of influence requires a combination of larger than life persona and a level of connection that resembles good ole boy backslapping. You are either in the middle of the self-reflecting giddiness or you are an outsider.

The surprise is that so much energy goes into the maintenance of the existing state of affairs. Influence can not be harnessed nor accumulated if things are changing all of the time. The industry’s resilient sameness is exactly a consequence of the same old people doing the same old stuff.

Except, it’s not really like that at all. When you are gasping for traction; seem on the verge of an amazing insight or trying to peddle the future into our risk averse community, it’s always going to seem like it’s all windmills and you’re all Quixote.

So many people want to change so much. The development and deployment of influence takes patient building of credibility. It often requires a business-like acceptance of the idea that getting something done is preferable to getting nothing done and usually preferable to being right.

Then, there are the very few for whom being right is either a professional posture or a tremendous accident of good timing. Where John Sullivan is a professional agitator, Dan Hilbert has the good fortune of being the right guy in the right place at the right time. And, make no mistake, he is uncompromisingly right.

Hilbert is in HR by accident. The serial entrepreneur builds and sells companies for a living. His work history began with a successful stint as a third party recruiter. He placed systems engineers.

At the peak of the dot com giddiness, he found himself detoured with a very sick spouse and an equally sick company. One thing led to another and he became the VP of HR for a little gas station company called Valero. In Dan’s tenure, the firm went from $2 billion in annual revenue to $95 billion. It was one of the fastest growing companies in the history of American business.

Not knowing anything about HR but external Recruiting, Dan was free to apply his extensive supply chain experience to our standard problem set. Since he was too green to know what was impossible, he built analytics systems that were capable of predicting business performance. When his HR analytics began predicting plant disasters and productivity curves, the management at Valero began to listen.

Hilbert racked up a bunch of awards. Valero peaked. Hilbert collected on his stock options and got out of the business of being in HR-Recruiting.

He built Orca Eyes, his HR analytics company, from scratch in a town between Austin and San Antonio. The firm ties disparate HR databases together to produce accurate and predictive analytics.

Lots of HR people really hate it. While there’s a lot of kicking and fussing about introducing accountability into HR-Recruiting, nothing ever seems to actually happen. HR-Recruiting is high on conflict avoidance. Great business is high on conflict resolution. Continuous improvement requires an applecart upsetting demand for lower prices and higher quality. This is deeply ingrained in Hilbert’s psyche.

Hilbert prefers to talk to the folks in the CFO’s office. They understand that it’s exactly possible to measure and predict much of human performance. They know that well managed supply chains produce sustained competitive advantage. An awful lot of them have given up hope that anyone in HR-Recruiting will ever understand the real nature of business.

So Hilbert stands, at the tip of our evolution as an industry, collecting lightning bolts.

One thing is really, really clear. HR-Recruiting is going to be disrupted in the exact same way that other service professions were plowed under. In the near future, the function will be performed with complete accountability, more reliable results at a price point that’s closer to 10% of current expenses. When that happens, Hilbert’s Orca Eyes toolset will provide the roadmap.

With OrcaEyes, the complex map of HR data is synthesized into actionable reporting prioritized by business impact. Simplified from the cacophony of typical HR reporting, key initiatives are coded in Green (OK), Yellow (watch it) or Red (Something’s broken). The reporting framework clearly and specifically ties HR-Recruiting expenses, policies and practices to precise business consequence. With the tool in place, HR becomes a predictive engine for the organization.

Dan has the kind of sense of humor and self-confidence required to be an industry’s real change champion. Get used to hearing his name bandied about. He’s a classic example of what happens when you let someone with a little Recruitining experience into a decision making role.

Top 100 Influencers v1.13 Dr. John Sullivan

By John Sumser

There are a group of people who influence the industry because of the things they make possible. Generally, these folks are really bright technologists or academics who think they have found ways to get the job of Recruiting or some branch of HR done better. In general, they look at the assembled masses of the current industry with something that borders on contempt. Their contribution is a little direct and a lot about opening minds.

The role of academics and well heeled technologists seems to be to disrupt. These riot instigators persist with uncomfortable questions like ‘why isn’t your profession adding to the bottom line’ or ‘tell me the ROI of your Recruiting operation’. Rotten tomatoes, disruptive technologies and really innovative ways of doing things seem like trouble to old experienced hands. These folks like being that sort of trouble.

Like the sand that produces the pearl in the oyster, these professional irritants interrupt smooth function to produce a new beauty. By making people think, ask questions and doubt their fundamental assumptions, they pry open the world of possibilities. It’s a thankless job and the really great ones expect little in the way of thanks.

Causing people to question their assumptions means upsetting the apple cart, challenging the status quo. In order to really rankle the players, one has to be free to maneuver effectively. Two things make the posture possible: venture financing or a secure position in academia.

Dr John Sullivan has been at it for a long time. Born in New Jersey (there was lots of gambling, it just hadn’t been legalized yet), Sullivan went to school in Florida where he got his doctorate. His friends told him he belonged in California so he moved. Today, he lives on a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, just south of San Francisco.

There are few people who make a stronger case for the importance of recruiting. Sullivan asks, rhetorically, “How long does it take to make a short person tall? Let’s say you could do it in 10 years. The trouble is that your business changed course 10 minutes ago.”

He has little time for the idea of internal development. “If you could hire Tiger Woods for your golf team, how could you say no. Great talent is what draws other great talent. Cost is completely irrelevant if you want to make a competitive difference.”

It’s strong medicine from the good doctor.

I was fascinated to discover that Sullivan and his eponymous firm do not take consulting dollars. They don’t do the things typically associated with consulting firms. Sullivan confided “When you take money from someone, you have to tell them what they want to hear. I’m just not any good at doing that.”

Instead, they tackle a single issue each year and travel widely to investigate the question. The street estimate is that Sullivan makes about 50 speeches a year and visits key companies and constituents as a part of the heavy speaking schedule. Over the years, Sullivan has used this method to cover a spectrum of recruiting issues. “The question is always, ‘What does it take to cause world class performance in this arena.”

Like a great evangelist, Sullivan repeats the same themes over and over again. “It’s about the money. Recruiting is a business decision. Cost doesn’t matter if you produce bottom line results. We should be supply chain heroes. Speed. Speed. Speed. You only matter if you give a competitive advantage.” He’s absolutely tireless And, it’s really refreshing to soak up the energy as he rails against the staus quo.

It takes stroing heretics to make a health profession. While I agree with Sullivan that industry hasn’t begun to behave professionally, that there is room for his brand of fire and brimstone as a good sign.

The people who make their way by stretching the boundaries of the profession don’t do it to win friends and accolades. Sullivan is internally motivated and wants to see the profession made whole and useful.

You can follow John Sullivan on his website or in his writings at ERE.

Top 100 v1.12 J. William Tincup

By John Sumser

As I talked with William Tincup, I couldn’t help thinking about Kinky Friedman. Friedman is an Texan songwriter, novelist, humorist, politician who styles himself after Will Rogers and Mark Twain. Bigger than life and brimming over with ideas, Tincup, who is the public networking half of HR marketing firm Starr-Tincup, tirelessly channels Friedman’s hard-edged and plain spoken essence. The effect is enchanting: hard-charging, cigar smoking, outlaw admiring, creative energy from the heart of Texas.

It’s fair to say that there are not a lot of guys like this in the world of HR. William says that this is exactly what you want in a marketing consultant…out of the box and over the top. The thing is , when you dig just a little bit below the surface, you find the mind of a strategist.

Tincup extends his high volume high intensity approach to his networking trips. “I want to see as many people in San Francisco as I can in four or five days. So, I schedule 20 to 25 meetings from breakfast to late night. The best part of my job is that I get to talk with everyone.”

That’s why top level marketing people are such an important part of the fabric of the HR industry. They see trends from across a broad range of perspectives. Their views are inherently strategic and include broad market dynamics. Tincup is one of the best.

I asked him what he thought the biggest trends in the HR Market are right now.

Tincup believes strongly that the market has been “bamboozled” by Talent Management vendors. With some examination, this means that he believes that Mercedes level expectations were created just before Smart Car realities hit. He uses very strong language to describe the predicament of the mid market HR leader.

“The Talent Management Suite rhetoric exposed critical weaknesses in most HR operations. The clear identification of deficiencies and redundancies in most HR operations simultaneously scared and attracted the customer. Then, when the bottom fell out of the market, they could not afford to fix the problem that they’d identified to their bosses. The customer has egg on her face. The economic landscape is unravelling the idea of an integrated Talent Suite.”

“Recession has exacerbated the problem. They know the problem but the solution is out of reach. It has set the stage for powerful positioning by point solution providers. By simply ignoring the data redundancy problem and the risks of dis-aggregated tool sets, the sales of individual solutions should accelerate at the expense of complex suites.”

We talked further about the market.

“Little vendors are doing better with smaller customers. In the large players, the contract advocate is as likely to be replaced in the next round of shrinking as not. As a result, big ticket sales are slowing down even where there is budget. Meanwhile, smaller offerings from smaller vendors are taking hold. The enterprise level sale is too complex for the market and they have the messaging all wrong.”

Social media is making a big impact on the HR community though very little has made it to the level of policy. Individual practitioners are engaged in individual experiments while the issues sort themselves out. One of the key questions is the difference between public and private personas in an online world.

New individual brands like PunkRockHR, HRBartender, and Cheezhead are at odds with conventional notions of branding and decorum. I asked William what he thought about the matter.

“First of all, great new talent is surfacing. Have you seen Kris Dunn at Fistful of Talent? He’s simply amazing. A guy like that offering all that value and insight would never have had a hearing in the old days. So, the benefit is lots of great new ideas entering the conversation. Ultimately, this will accelerate the development of the HR profession.

The rest of the personal branding – private persona dichotomy is fascinating. Over the long haul, it boils down to credibility and authenticity. If the people with those brands deliver real value and it is consistent with their off line reality, they will flourish. The thing about massive distributed transparency is that it roots out deception and inconsistency. If they are not people of integrity, their futures are short.”

The conversation with William was amazing and vastly exceeded our allotted time.

Top 100 v1.11 David Perry

By John Sumser

The interesting thing about the Top 100 process is that I continue to discover new areas of influence. So far, every aspect of influence covered in the stories has involved the insides if the industry,. Each of the first ten people profiled are influential within the domestic American HR-Recruiting Industry.

Peter Drucker famously said that the insides of an institution are cost centers. Results only happen outside the institution. While leaders are responsible for the performance of an organization or an industry, the real results happen outside.

If you search for “Job Hunting” on Amazon.com, the number 1 result is Guerrilla Marketing for Job Hunters: 400 Unconventional Tips, Tricks, and Tactics for Landing Your Dream Job by David Perry. Following in the footsteps of the legendary Richard Bolles, Perry and other writers on job hunting present the public face of HR to the people who encounter it most….job hunters. Where else can you find the HR Department and all of its foibles chronicled.

Career Management books, of which there are many, uniformly paint HR-Recruiting as obstructionist. All of the bad reputation comes from these sources.

It’s an interesting dichotomy. The public reputation of HR-Recruiting is created and delivered by people who are generally telling their readers how to make an end run on the system. No one in the profession is particularly interested in the consumer face of the HR-Recruiting brand. The story is told by people whose basic message is that effectiveness is the opposite if what HR-Recruiting does.

Since no one defends, the industry is tarred. It makes you wonder what it is that the professional associations actually do. One way of thinking about the dynamic is to guess that the industry creates a self-fulfilling prophesy.

Perry himself is an amazing ambassador. Routinely chronicled in the Wall Street Journal as the”Rogue Recruiter“, David is famous for stunts like masquerading as a snack food vendor in the parking lot outside of the building his target candidate worked in. With 999 completed projects (worth $175M is annual salaries), he’s a member of an elite group of recruiters.

He’s quick to tell you that the real work is building companies, not hiring people. “I work on a project basis but the end goal is always to build the best team. Nobody does it by him or herself. My skill is figuring out who works best together.”

Being very visible (writing a best selling business book gets you a lot of attention), Perry has unusual experiences. “One day, a guy knocked on my door. I opened it and he pointed a gun in my face, saying ‘If you don’t get me a job, I’m gonna kill you.’ What was I gonna do? I invited him into the kitchen, made him some coffee and asked him to put the gun away. We talked for three hours. Ultimately, I helped him get a job in the high tech industry.”

Perry runs an executive search firm, Perry-Martel as the foundation for some world-changing projects. Following the completion of version 2.0 of the Guerilla Marketing for Job Hunters, (now with 1,001 Unconventional Tips, Tricks and Tactics for Landing Your Dream Job), he’s launched a business selling home study courses in job hunting and is raising funds for a “Put America Back To Work Campaign.”

The home study course is part of Perry’s long term view of HR-Recruiting. “Hiring is cyclical. If we want to give recruiters real careers, we have to figure out what they do when there is no hiring. The home study course gives recruiters a product and service that is helpful for candidates in a downturn.” By aggressively decentralizing the outsourcing business, the “Job Hunt Kit in a box” gives tem players a smart job in the down time.

In the “Put America Back To Work” project, he’s planning a 25 city tour, sponsored by local governments, to teach job hunters how to get work. “It’s a perfect marriage. Local governments need aggressive programs to get people working. Jon Hunters need to understand the real business problem. We’re going to jump start the job market with a direct infusion of strategies and tactics that work.”

“I receive a fair amount of hate mail from recruiters and HR folks who say I am giving away the store. I know that transparency and clarity about business value are the recipes for a smart future. It’s worth ruffling a couple of feathers.”

So, David Perry gets this week’s nod for the work he does outside the industry. It would be nice if more folks focused on the industry’s external reputation.

Top 100 Influencers Progress Report

By John Sumser

I am really surprised by what I’m learning as I tackle the Top 100 Influencers in HR-Recruiting project. Each day, I am surprised by the way that people see the industry. There are entire aspects of the picture that are invisible to some and plain as day to others.

The 10% mark seems like a good point for a status report. Here are the high points:

• Influence and power are not the same thing. Influence is the ability to shape opinion and increase the probability that something will happen.
• Very few people seem to understand that Third Party Recruiting is what a successful outsourcing ecosystem looks like. After two generations, there is an informal, eBay style marketplace. Fees are typically reflective of value in spite of the complaints associated with the fees. Generally, the health of the outsourced recruiting ecosystem can be measured by the complete lack of complaints about quality.
• It’s becoming clear that there are few people who actually have a comprehensive view of the HR-Recruiting Industry. This is caused by a couple of key factors.
  • The past decade has seen a shift in the HR career path. Where generalists used to be the ones getting promoted, today’s HR leaders come from either the Recruiting or the Training (Development) function.
  • When HR leaders change jobs, the six or seven vendors who were a part of the last leader’s regime are changed for a new crop.
  • The emphasis on HR as a Strategic function has come at the expense of good operational thinking.
  • The shift in the HR career path means that many stereotypes about HR flexibility are outdated.
• There are a number of overlapping silos. While information and ideas percolate around the industry, the various silos are somewhat ignorant of each other.
  • Enterprise organizations do different things and solve different problems than small to medium sized organizations.
  • The industry’s professional associations are generally myopic.
  • The broad temptation to generalize about HR-Recruiting flies in the face of reality. HR-Recruiting is different by industry and region. What works one place doesn’t work in another.
  • There are very few ultimate principles in the HR-Recruiting world. Retention, Development, Organization, Recruiting Strategy and Recruiting Tactics are not in the group.
• Influence doesn’t have to be flashy to succeed. Good ideas and the ability to execute them are really important.
• The market for ‘benchmarking’ is really a quest for peers solving similar problems. It’s an underserved market because the desire for professional exchange gets distracted by market influences. There’s no real clearinghouse for the unadulterated exchange of success stories and learnings from failure.
• Not all smart people are influential. But, most people who are influential are smart. It’s easy to confuse microcelebrity with influence. The difference is usually that influential people don’t set out to be influential.
• Innovation and influence are different things. Innovation follows a predictable path into the industry. Innovation virtually always enters through the third party recruiting world where speed is the essential differentiate. It moves into small and medium sized business. From there, it goes to other operational parts of HR (learning, talent management) and finally hits the generalist group. This is the reason that legacy HR systems from huge software vendors retain their install base.

I am particularly impressed by the degree to which I am routinely learning something in this process. People who I was certain fit one category end up in another every day. This first 10% has been a good time to learn the ropes.

If you’re following along and have questions or suggestions, I am all ears. I am calling everyone who gets suggested and attempting to figure out the depths of their influence. More suggestions are a good thing. The list isn’t complete yet.

Top 100 v 1.10 Rob McIntosh

By John Sumser

Influence encompasses a broad range of behavior and experience. The difference between influence and power is subtle. Power is the direct ability to harness resources to get things done. Influence is like power without the underlying resources. Influence is the ability to cause other people to use their resources in a certain way.

According to the I Ching, China’s legendary Oracle, the difference between seduction and courtship is persistence. That same difference holds true across all forms of influence. Some high-volume direct marketing operations rely on instantaneous buzz and rapid decision making. Longer term influence comes from more modest approaches of greater duration. Both are forms of influence, each has pros and cons.

The point of this Top 100 Influencers series is not to judge right or wrong. The goal is to illuminate patterns of influence so that the reader might better understand the operating context. Some influences are quick burns, others are slow and sustained.

Bill Vick, profiled earlier this week, is one example of a sustained influence. Over the course of decades, Bill’s businesses and practices have enriched and shaped the very meaning of Recruiting for hundreds of thousands of practitioners. Combining information distribution and technological advances, Vick continues to mold the core idea of Recruiting.

Bill Kutik and David Manaster, who both operate at the faster, more seductive end of the business, take great pride in steering the industry towards greater effectiveness over time. The platforms they operate are more seductive but their contributions are sustained. The current rise of social media is  quick and enticing. The presumed experts generally offer little sustained influence but do create quick shifts in market perception.

At the ERE Social Media Summit, we got to see Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn’s CEO, proclaim that LinkedIn profiles were more honest than resumes. The idea rapidly migrated from the Google conference hall to mainstream via the hordes of twittering participants. No facts were ever presented as evidence. This is quick alluring influence. There’s influence in Twitter’s speed of transmission (and fact checking agnosticism), Hoffman’s position at the helm of the next generation job board and LinkedIn’s own provocative sway.

Rob McIntosh (ERE , LinkedIn and RBC) holds the middle ground. The Australian native has been plying his trade in the states for a decade. Currently, Rob is the Senior Vice President of Global Talent Acquisition at Avanade. The company, which is a Microsoft – Accenture joint venture has 10,000 employees engaged in various forms of enterprise software solutions using Microsoft products. The company is reaching a stage of maturity where it is wrestling with the apron strings of its parents. It’s financially viable and has a distinct and interesting employment brand.

McIntosh’s work history looks like he was preparing for the job. Time leading various recruiting initiatives at Microsoft and Deloitte are just the pieces required for a company as focused as Avanade. “It’s a very defined recruiting sphere and a focused problem,” says Rob.

For several years, Rob put together the SourceCon Grandmaster challenges. The clever contests were designed to stretch and strengthen the members of the sourcing subset of our industry. McIntosh always creates influence by teaching in this sort of way. At the center of the emergence and professionalization of sourcing, McIntosh insists on an extraordinary level of excellence in the people he leads and mentors. (He was the ’sourcecon dude.)

The list is extensive. As sourcing emerged into the mainstream, McIntosh’s various ex-employees, team members and colleagues started to occupy central positions throughout the industry.

One of the things that makes McIntosh so profoundly influential is that he seems to always be giving credit. He must have mentioned forty other Recruiting – HR players over the course of our conversation. He’s well versed in industry dynamics and singularly focused on his task.

It’s an interesting problem set. Avanade is uniquely configured to respond to a relationship based recruiting approach. The company hires a very specific kind of person who can only emerge from a narrow range of sources. Where McIntosh was focused on sourcing, he now has to consider long term relationships and the implications of experience.

He makes the transition look graceful. What seems to happen when he moves through an arena is that he professionalizes it and moves to the next accomplishment. Rob McIntosh’s deep influence on the HR-Recruiting industry comes from a deep practitioner’s focus on the work at hand, an enormous regard for the power of cost-cutting and a desire to make a real difference.

The scores of associates whose careers are turbo charged as a result of working for and with him are his gift to the profession.

Top 100 v1.09 Bill Vick

By John Sumser

The origins of American outsourcing are found in “third party recruiting” (TPR). The Recruiting task is so complex and innovation so rapid that most companies choose to outsource some component of the work. Long before there were organized process oriented management companies (RPOs), the “headhunter” moved onto the organizational stage.

In good economic times, about 500,000 people work in the TPR niche. They range from contract recruiters to tony boutique firms resembling investment banks. They fill slots for every aspect and level of the labor market. The rich diversity of business models and target markets makes it extremely hard to generalize about the various TPR operations.

TPRs come in a variety of flavors:

• Retained Search Firms (Sometimes Called Executive Search)
• Contingency Search Firms (Working for a percentage of annual salary)
• Contract Placement Agencies (Generally Technical Contracts, high-end Temporary)
• Staffing Firms (Temporary Help)
• Contract Recruiters (Guns for hire who maintain a desk inside a corporation)
• Recruitment Process Outsourcing Companies (RPOs)
• Sourcers (who provide names and connection but no closing services)

Each of these types of business approaches the task of providing labor from a different perspective. Within the industry, there is a strong differentiation between ‘temp agencies’ and ‘executive search firms’. The differences (since even the most permanent hire lasts about 3 years) has more to do with the relative status of the employees being brokered than the duration of their employment. TPRs make their money on the same basis as the people who they process: salaried employees are priced as a percentage of annual wage; hourly employees are priced as a makeup on each labor hour.

The animosity between TPRs and internal employees working in HR is the stuff of legends. One side views the other as lazy and stupid. The other side sees its external competition as opportunistic and overpaid. Good communication between the camps is a rarity.

To complicate things, the TPR universe is the source of all interesting innovation in Recruiting and most of HR. The reciprocal animosity is one of the primary barriers to the rapid adoption of new technologies that work. The situation is so intense that one never sees TPRs briefing new technology at HR related conferences. This is in spite of the fact that all of the interesting new techniques have emerged from TPRs over the past 40 years. Fax machines, web sites, job boards, SEO/SEM, social recruiting, community development, email marketing, profiling all have their roots in the world of TPRs.

It’s a simple thing to explain. The only relative advantage a TPR ever has is speed. New technologies are the only source of new speed improvements. Finding them is a question of survival for all but the most networked, button down, good-old boy recruiting operations.

Bill Vick has been the driving engine behind the TPR segment’s innovation for almost two decades. With a history that ranges from the Marine Corps to the Fuller Brush C, Vick has led the life of an entrepreneur in a wide variety of forms. He’s half sales genius, half nerd. He says, “I’ve never met a gadget I didn’t like.”

A Karate sensei, Vick entered the Recruiting business after a long and varied career which included a stint where Zig Ziglar was his boss. In the 80s and early 90s, MRI revolutionized the TPR world with a system that provided consolidated training and services for franchise holders. Vick went to work for what is arguably the most interesting franchise in MRI’s history, the Dallas off that eventually became Kaye Bassman. A recruiting natural, Vick began breaking all sorts of records. No matter how great his success, he never lost touch with the computer industry (he founded and ran a chain of computer stores in the early 80s). With over 20 years in the Recruiting trenches, Vick offers the unique perspective of someone who knows the business and how to improve it.

In the early days of the web, Bill founded and grew the Recruiters Online Network, a precursor to today’s recruiting communities. The network featured recruiters who helped each other fill openings, share long-distance expenses and collaborate. These days, he continues to expand the effectiveness of the Recruiting profession through a couple of key initiatives:

• Extreme Recruiting TV Showcasing the use of video, Vick interviews the thought leaders and real performers. If you want basic Recruiting training, watching all of Vick’s videos is a good start.
• EmploymentDigest.net is an ongoing set of essays about the labor market.

Bill Vick exemplifies a necessary kind of influence. Over the years, he has been willing to make grand experiments in public places. By risking real failure, he creates the opportunity to demonstrate the utility of a new idea or technology. In an arena where influence usually flows from an advertising budget, Bill Vick sets an extraordinary example.