Five Scenarios: X Presentation Recap

Last modified on 2010-03-26 12:30:17 GMT. 1 comment. Top.

Five Scenarios: X Presentation Recap

Disruption is what happens when someone figures out a new way to arrive at the conclusion you get to the old way. In pure technical environments, disruption happens when a cheaper, divergent technology replaces a standard. Generally speaking, the new way replaces the old quickly. The dominant players of the old school are left on the sidelines, mouths gaping

When compact flash memory replaced disk drives, none of the hard drive makers were able to make the transition. To the incumbents, the change feels dramatic and unstoppable. To the new moguls, growth feels like it always does.

The Five scenarios project (sponsored beginning to end by Pinstripe) was designed to suggest some of the sorts of things that might cause disruptions in Recruiting. Only one of the five scenarios really involved technology. The rest were from the standard cookbook of disruptive stuff: economics, disease, migratory patterns, shortages.

This year’s ERE Expo was amazing. (Here are some pictures) Part class reunion and homecoming, part trend definition, the Spring Expo was a high energy get together with lots of blazingly bright minds soaking up and giving off powerful ideas.

The Recruiting Disruption session, scheduled cleverly at the end of the last day, was packed with people who had read at least some of the material in this series. The short introductory presentation moved from a high energy Prezi to flipchart paper in a matter of 20 seconds. The hotel’s wireless couldn’t sustain the presentation. It was it’s own little disruption.

Fortunately, the crowd was prepared and the five group facilitators were in rare form. After the initial outline was presented, the room broke into five groups led by

• Claudia Faust
• George Larocque
• David Pritchard
• William Tincup
• Peter Clayton

The bulk of the session was a series of five parallel conversations on the topic of “What’s the impact of this scenario on Recruiting”? The conversations were impassioned as the members of each group debated and synthesized the impact of big things on the profession. If there hadn’t been pressure to finish the conversations and return to the mother ship, things might have gone well into the evening.

One thing was clear. The smartest people in the session were in the room, not on the podium. Conflict, contention, respect and breakthrough happened in each of the five groups.

There were a number of common conclusions:

• Recruiting is dependent on a number of organizational functions. When they stop, recruiting changes
• While there is an important human component of Recruiting, it’s somewhat smaller than you might think
• Outsourcing is a pretty good idea under a variety of settings
• There is a really important role for recruiting in disasters. recovery depends on people who can make good team building judgments
• The real value of recruiting may not be very well articulated under the current circumstances

Scenario planning is not an attempt to address all possible contingencies. It’s a way of understanding competitive weakness and opportunity. It’s a long form of a traditional SWOT analysis that forces you to understand where the breaking point is.

The session, with its preplanning and breakout groups proved to be a useful and repeatable model.

If you’re interested in the whole process, we’ll be publishing a white paper in conjunction with Pinstripe. It will cover all of the material and include a guide to Scenario Planning for your Recruiting operation. Fill out this form to reserve yours. They should ship in early May.

If you were there, we could use your comments and criticisms.

Here’s the whole series:

• Five Scenarios: I Introduction
• Five Scenarios: II The Trends
• Five Scenarios: III The Marketplace
• Five Scenarios: IV The Future Matters
• Five Scenarios: V Guild Cities
• Five Scenarios: VI Invasion of the Shallybots
• Five Scenarios: VII The Pandemic
• Five Scenarios: VIII The Games
• Five Scenarios: IX Opportunities

Review: Jibe

Last modified on 2010-03-23 20:18:37 GMT. 3 comments. Top.

Review: Jibe

Social Media seems to produce more than its fair share of mad inventors. In past days, I’ve seen a swarm of demos from micro-bootstrap entrepreneurs who toil in the evenings on their pet social media recruiting tool while keeping the kitchen table set with the income from their day jobs. It’s as if garage startups just developed mobile laboratories.

You could almost make a musical of the choruses of “I’m the facebook-eharmony-tweeter job search matching engine”. In the second scene, the chorus chants mantra called “We make our money virally”. Social media is becoming everyone’s favorite get rich quick scheme. Like all great get rich quick schemes, most people won’t. Although it’s unlikely, some garage-shop entrepreneur just might come up with the winning formula for unlocking Facebook’s potential.

But, under the surface, some surprising things are happening. The Facebook Applications platform is starting to evolve into a serious enterprise applications environment. Massive applications that combine large chunks of data quickly depend on predictability and reliability ion the platform itself. Over the time since Facebook began its evolution into a piece of technical infrastructure, it has consistently delivered the kinds of stability that are necessary for real investment.

Building an ecosystem (or applications coral reef) demands that developers be able to trust both the performance and the direction of the Facebook team. While the future probably includes Facebook as a large scale player, today’s entrepreneurs are making an investment in a relative unknown. All sorts of things could happen.

Building a recruiting tool requires a significant amount of capital. There are a number of things that you simply can not do well without a sound investment basis: build a sales team; develop candidate traffic and scale computing resources in advance of demand. The technical challenges associated with delivering real value in a high-volume, high-data flow environment are enormous.

This is where Jibe shines. Backed with real investment and engineered by a seasoned development team, Jibe looks like the first full spectrum Facebook based job application with a chance of making it. The combination of VC backing and competent management make this a play to watch.

By now, you’ve seen Rapportive, the gmail plugin that gives you a social media driven data dump on the person who just sent you that email. (It’s simple CRM for gmail rooted in a huge pile of social graph data). Jibe is kind of like that.

Once you’ve joined Jibe and imported your linkedin profile, you begin to search jobs. For each job result, you’re presented with the members of your network who have some association with the opening. They work in or with the company offering the job. Since they are in your facebook or linkedin network, you can ask them about the job, the company or arrange a referral to the hiring manager. It’s turbocharged job hunting that helps you harness your network.

It works in a complementary way for a Recruiter. Jobs are matched against your network. You get a list of people in your network who are likely candidates complete with social media connection details.

Making it work quickly is the whole secret. The Jibe team is scaling the operation over the next ten or so days with full launch planned for April 1. In the interim, the are slowly adding members and bandwidth as they test the product into existence. 50 jobs, 100 members and the associated network data is one thing. Tens of thousands is another. Watching them grow will give you a great insight into the way that social media job services actually scale.

The invite only beta test of Jibe begins today. Use the code HRExaminer. The first 100 people will get access.

Top 100 v1.61: ERE Expo – Center of Influence

Last modified on 2010-03-23 20:22:24 GMT. 1 comment. Top.

Influence is hard to distinguish from celebrity. Being well known is one of the components of influence. (It’s almost impossible to be influential if no one knows who you are.) We are in the age of the democratizion of celebrity, the post-privacy world. People rise to the top and fall back down faster than one hit wonders with a 1970’s recording contract.

The more enduring an influencer is, the more the influencer is like an institution. It’s sort of a circular definition that means that tenure is an important aspect of the scope of a particular influencer. It’s not the only factor, however. Some people accelerate onto the world stage quickly and have influence that is disproportionate to their time on the stage.

That means that influence is a balance of momentum, duration, impact and reach. New technologies enable their early adopters to achieve a faster success. The fundamental mechanics are the same. Momentum, duration and reach are readily measurable online. Impact is harder to quantify.

There are also ‘nests of influence’; places where influencers congregate and the story gets developed. There are a number of online communities ranging from ERE and RecruitingBlogs to HR.com and the recent HRTechConference group on LinkedIn. Over the past couple of years, these niche communities have dominated the online conversation. Their aggregate influence has grown dramatically over the past decade. Before that, ERE was alone in the field. The online ‘nests’ shape the daily dialog of sales reps and industry players. They drive the small talk in conversations between industry members.

They can’t hold a candle to to the impact of the physical events in the industry. The landscape is littered with some obvious and some not so obvious centers of influence. ERE’s Expo, HRExective’s HRTech Conference, SHRM events and the OnRec events all come quickly to mind. Each of the HR Silos (Talent Management, Learning, OD, Compensation, Benefits, Performance Management) all have their own professional associations and events. There are also a number (maybe as many as 40) of small intimate groups that offer peer to peer networking for executives in the Industry. There are even other events that blur the line between the large public expos and the small intimate gatherings. The SharedXpertise family of events falls into this category.

We’re going to look more deeply into these ‘nests of influence’ and their aggregate impact on the industry in a later piece.

Last week marked the 10th anniversary of the ERE Expo. Held in San Diego, the event saw about 400 industry influencers, practitioners and vendors swirl together for something that resembled a wedding with education modules. Like all of these events, there were a number of recurring themes:

• One of the most interesting demos I saw was from an unlikely source. PCRecruiter is an industry stalwart ATS and Recruiting system used by high end professionals. Their latest iteration essentially eliminates the application specific interface in favor of a deep integration with the Microsoft Office suite. What you end up with is new toolbars and reports with no pure application interface. It seems like the beginning of a powerful trend…the rapidly disappearing user interface. More on this later.
• One could be excused for having the feeling that social media is the second coming. Many speakers waxed on about the ultimate consequence of new publishing tools and social networking. Any attempt to suggest a modified view was met with disbelief;
• Another key theme, often expressed by vendors and practitioners alike, was the idea that all job applicants should receive relationship treatment; that every applicant is entitled to certain inalienable rights. Again, suggesting otherwise was met with incredulity;
• Social media was also heavily represented in the vendor arena. The vendor floor offered the full spectrum from substantial booths by JobVite, BrazenCareerist and Jobs2Web to single person alliance machines from Jibe, InsideJob, BraveNewTalent and LokLoq
• Rather than dying, the job boards seem to be having a renaissance. SimplyHired, Indeed, Monster and CareerBuilder all exerted heavy influences on the dialog.
• Partly because SourceCon was held on the first two days of the week, it seemed like sourcing really developed industry respect. There seems to be a real career path emerging in the sourcing disciplines.
• It was the year of the RPO. As costs continue to be cut, the outsourcing of all or part of medium to large company Recruiting is increasingly an option.

The influence of an event like ERE is something to behold. Over the course of the event, you could hear vendors shifting their pitches as they came to understand the positioning of their competitors. Ideas flow quickly at ERE as the networks rub up against each other and swap gossip, intelligence and insight.

It’s easy to lose sight of the fact that something less than 1% of working professionals attend trade shows. When you’re in the swirl, it’s all consuming and all encompassing. It really feels like ‘this is the market’. The ‘echo chamber’ effect makes it feel like the messaging from the event is viral and very contagious. The truth is somewhat different.

There are plenty of bigger events. None have the influence per capita of ERE’s twice annual expos. The show is really about the schmooze that goes on in the halls outside of the formal conference.

Our sponsor Pinstripe, Inc. designs, builds and delivers high-performance talent acquisition and management solutions. Pinstripe’s innovative approach to Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) integrates sourcing, recruiting, hiring, on-boarding, and engagement into a complete, end-to-end solution. Pinstripe on-demand hiring solutions are tailored for specific clients across a spectrum of industries including financial services, healthcare, technology, telecommunications and other major industries. For healthcare organizations, Pinstripe Healthcare works with clients to attract the best available talent so they can deliver high quality patient care and reduce overall labor costs.

Learn More about Pinstripe

100325 In The Know v2.12

Last modified on 2010-03-26 11:49:57 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

credit: Artist rendering AP Photo/European South Observatory

• Does Your Strategy Rely on a “Pan-Asian Identity”?
  Colonial stereotyping is alive and well in our approaches to outsourcing and partnership in Asia. This Harvard Business Review article takes a look at what works.
• America’s Real Dream Team
  Tom Friedman on the importance of immigration.
  “My favorite chat, though, was with Amanda Alonzo, a 30-year-old biology teacher at Lynbrook High School in San Jose, Calif. She had taught two of the finalists. When I asked her the secret, she said it was the resources provided by her school, extremely “supportive parents” and a grant from Intel that let her spend part of each day inspiring and preparing students to enter this contest. Then she told me this: Local San Jose realtors are running ads in newspapers in China and India telling potential immigrants to “buy a home” in her Lynbrook school district because it produced “two Intel science winners.”
  How does your company support the growth and education of young scientists?
• Warning: Your Reality is Out of Date
  The article introduces the concept of “meso-facts” facts which evolve slowly over time. i.e., Pittsburgh is now an interesting place to live; world population is nearly 7 Billion (6.8), scientists have discovered 32 planets outside of our solar system. Meso facts are contrasted with simple facts (the height of Mt. Everest) and rapidly changing facts (sports rankings, current pop hits). Staying on top of Meso-facts keeps you on top of places where your assumptions should be evolving.
• Scaling Social Media
  Assuming that social media really takes root, this is a good first stab at the specifics of integrating the tools into your business. The article focuses on social media outside the organization. How we use SM inside the firewall is an amazing set of possibilities.
• Lessons From Nestle’s Struggles With the Greenpeace KitKat YouTube Video and Facebook Fan Page Revolt
  Nestle got to learn in real time under public scrutiny when Greenpeace assaulted them with an anti-KitKat campaign. The lessons from this episode will resonate throughout the corporate world for some time to come. Don’t resist, don’t censor. Engage and talk about it.

Bonus Links

• The Cult of Busy: Ever notice that most really busy people don’t get much done?
• List of Social Media Management Systems: Bringing it all under one tent
• Selling On Demand: Industry veteran George Larocque on dealing with sales people and being a great sales person