When the VP of HR slot is filled from within the ranks of the department, people with Recruiting backgrounds have the advantage.

Five Links: Talent

• Talent Communities: The Next Generation of Employee Recruiting and Sourcing
  From ADP!! An intelligent snapshot of the dynamics of Talent Community Development. This is a picture that you can comfortable cycle around the organization.
• Skills Gap Continues To Be An Issue in Pittsburgh
  Traditional ideas about the skills gap are rooted in the notion that the problem is national. In fact, what’s in short supply varies by region. As major industries get disrupted, local governments work hard to find replacement business. The Skills Gap is often a function of the difference between the legacy industry and the new industry.
• Robots Will Take Our Jobs
  From Wired.
  “It’s hard to believe you’d have an economy at all if you gave pink slips to more than half the labor force. But that—in slow motion—is what the industrial revolution did to the workforce of the early 19th century. Two hundred years ago, 70 percent of American workers lived on the farm. Today automation has eliminated all but 1 percent of their jobs, replacing them (and their work animals) with machines. But the displaced workers did not sit idle. Instead, automation created hundreds of millions of jobs in entirely new fields. Those who once farmed were now manning the legions of factories that churned out farm equipment, cars, and other industrial products. Since then, wave upon wave of new occupations have arrived—appliance repairman, offset printer, food chemist, photographer, web designer—each building on previous automation. Today, the vast majority of us are doing jobs that no farmer from the 1800s could have imagined.It may be hard to believe, but before the end of this century, 70 percent of today’s occupations will likewise be replaced by automation. Yes, dear reader, even you will have your job taken away by machines. In other words, robot replacement is just a matter of time. This upheaval is being led by a second wave of automation, one that is centered on artificial cognition, cheap sensors, machine learning, and distributed smarts. This deep automation will touch all jobs, from manual labor to knowledge work. “
• The Post Productive Economy
  Kevin Kelly, in his usual brilliant way, takes on economist Robert Gordon. Gordon, in his essay Is Economic Growth Over?, argues that economic growth is rapidly declining. Unseen before 1750, growth is a consequence of the industrial revolution and an anomaly in the history of the world. He foresees a rapid decline to .2% average growth (just like the forst 100,000 years of our history). Kelly’s view is that we stand on the edge of an extraordinatry time whose value is difficult to articulate today. It’s an important debate. Successfully navigating a company in the next decade will depend on which of these two views prevails.
• Three Lessons for the Industrial Internet
  From O’Reilly, this piece offers a summary of the underlying principles of the Internet of Things. They are also useful as key principles in contemporary organization design. The real question here is ‘will HR lead or follow the evolution of new organizational design parameters’. If it’s not leading, what is its role?
  – Standardize as little as possible, but as much as is needed so the system is able to evolve
  – Create an architecture of participation that leads to unexpected innovations and discoveries, and builds a new ecosystem of companies that add value to the network
  – Build the ability to tolerate failure and degrade gracefully rather than catastrophically.

Events, Interesting Happenings and New Resources

• HRExaminer Radio
  Industry News and Commentary. First Show: Friday, Jan 4 2PM EST – 11AM Pacific
• Skills Gaps: Understanding Talent Shortages and What They Mean
  This webinar (recording) covers the underpinnings of the Skills Gap. It’s part 1 of a series. Parts 2 and 3 available in 2013.
• Social Recruiting Strategies Conference
  (San Francisco, Jan 30-31, 2013) John Sumser keynote on the history and future of social recruiting
• HRTech Europe: Spring Warmup
  (London, March 19-20, 2013) Sumser on Where Ideas Come From and the Big Data Showcase
• Learning Analytics Summer Institute
  (Stanford, Palo Alto July 1-5, 2013) This looks like the right place to be if you’re interested in Big Data for Learning.