I liked Kevin Wheeler's article on ERE today (The Language of Success). Kevin is spot on, and yet I have to believe that there aren't a lot of recruiting / HR professionals who are going to understand what he is saying.
There is a certain entitlement mentality that exists within all corporate functions, but especially in HR. The assumption is that "If my customers like me I am doing a good job" or "If I am putting butts in chairs I am doing a good job." That's why so many people in HR / recruiting are so surprised when they get outsourced (as I said in the post "Can Client Satisfaction Lead to Outsourcing?"). They weren't using the right measures or the right language to demonstrate and explain real value to the business, but in their mind they have been doing a great job. It's like that famous quote (at least to us geeks) from the movie Office Space: "But you can't fire me, I'm a people person!"
Kevin said it better than I did, but I meant the same thing he is talking about when I wrote "Business People in HR have Something to Say" back in August of 2005. Interesting how these themes appear again and again, and yet when I go to conferences (just returned from speaking at the HCI conference) I hear things like "The biggest surprise for us is that we needed to take the business' needs into account when we were designing our metrics package" (actual quote from a panelist at the conference).
Wow. I wonder how long it is going to take before HR and recruiting people get that as long as they think they operate outside the world of business and value creation, they are just so much Kleenex - handy and disposable.
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