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  • The shift in the HR career path means that many stereotypes about HR flexibility are outdated.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.