A Talentist

Looking for a Good Recruiter

Note: I am frequently at odds with myself over posting something such as the following. I count many friends in the world of recruiting, all of them dedicated professionals who care about the value they deliver. And yet I can't help but feel that our profession is at a crossroads that many are ill-equipped to face, no less capitalize upon. It is my hope that these postings help prepare us all for our likely future.

The Clearview Collection (the name of the group of bloggers over at Glassdoor of whom I count myself fortunate to be a part) is primarily targeting candidates rather than recruiters. My purpose for the most part is to get candidates to take control of their careers, building on the theme of Brand Talent. My post this past week over at Glassdoor explained how a candidate can evaluate whether a recruiter is worth an investment of time. 

I started out writing on Glassdoor as a way to connect with candidates, to understand what they are thinking and feeling and to offer my meager advice about how best to take advantage of the changing world of work. But a funny thing happened on the way to that objective: my posts have become a Trojan Horse enterprise, sneaking better candidates into the world of the recruiter. I found myself believing that raising the candidate's game may be the only way to get recruiters to confront the realities of their changing industry.

From where I sit, the millions of hours and dollars that have gone into providing recruiters with improved tools and processes have largely been worthless or wasted. It is not that all the work and advice is without value. It is that the value is not keeping pace with what the market needs.

Imagine if Chevrolet started marketing a car that they trumpeted as "every bit as good as the 1955 Corvette." The 55 Vet is a classic. Compared to a Model T, it was a huge improvement in transportation capability and value. But consumers today are faced with higher gas prices, faster travel speeds, more populated roads and longer average commutes. Therefore the average consumer doesn't pine away for an equivalent of a car that is 54 years old. They require high-mileage, trouble-free vehicles that has creature comforts that make the long suburban commutes bearable.

My latest post over at Glassdoor talks about four things that good recruiters look for in a candidate: business focus, problem solving, agility and purpose. Continuing with the car analogy, this is what I would expect from a recruiting Camry. This is what I believe the average business buyer demands. Nothing fancy. Just the basics. Unfortunately I would have to equate that level of capability to a recruiting Rolls Royce. The recruiting Camry isn't functionally superior to the Model T.

I base this conclusion on my own experience, not on the scientific method. I know of only two recruiters that even attempt to evaluate candidates for their abilities I listed in the post. It is not that they are incapable of doing so. It is that recruiters are caught between two worlds: what they were taught and what is needed.

What recruiters were taught is that hiring manager satisfaction is their number one priority (of course this is a generous assessment - there are many people who believe that recruiters continue to be taught about various tricks for putting butts in seats, many of which do no credit to the profession). The implicit assumption behind this teaching is that hiring managers are wise buyers of recruiting services. And I guess if you are a third-party recruiter you have to assume that whoever is signing the checks knows what they are doing. But if you are a corporate recruiter, you exist for the benefit of the business (rule 18), not the benefit of the hiring manager. The implicit assumption is that the hiring manager really knows how to best attract, engage and optimize talent. That is patently untrue.

Most hiring managers are too busy to understand the depth of their ignorance in the area of talent. They fail to understand the potential value of talent to their organization at the same time they over-estimate the risks of not homogenizing and controlling their teams. They write poor specifications, fail to understand biases that hurt their operational effectiveness, employ sub-optimal hiring processes that hurt organization productivity, evaluate risk improperly and fail to learn from previous hiring failures. This is the customer for recruiting services: march to their tune at your own peril.

This is the recruiting Camry: recruiters blindly accept job descriptions that are thrown their way by harried and distracted hiring managers, scanning resumes for keywords that they don't understand, eliminating candidates based on the "don't fit" criteria that they can't explain, and treating candidates like cattle. And this is not just in the trenches - I run into a lot of executive and retained search specialist who exhibit the same behaviors.

The entire system of recruiting (recruiters, candidates, management, consultants, specialists and hiring managers) continues to reinforce these behaviors even though they add little value. Woe be to the recruiter who dares challenge a hiring manager, or demands that a candidate stop bs'ing them and answer some questions directly. I am not saying that the needs of tomorrow are easy. But the problem remains: a recruiter who merely responds to quixotic requests from ignorant customers is bound to be automated or outsourced.

The standard retort to this indictment is that I don't really understand recruiting. I am glibly told that transactional recruiters will always be in demand because those same harried managers don't want to have to deal with talent problems themselves. The recruiter may not be doing brain surgery, but what they are doing is valued. The people who say these things are dangerously mistaken.

At the turn of the 19th century there were more people employed as household servants than as almost any other profession except farm laborers. The advent of household self-service destroyed the domestic help industry. Technological advancement always displaces work. Today I type my own memos, book my own meetings, arrange for conference rooms, book my own travel and manage a budget. How many of those tasks do you think were done by executives in the early 70's?

Transactional recruiting is a costly luxury. As costs continue to be eradicated more work will continue to be pushed from specialist (i.e. recruiters) to internal clients (i.e. hiring managers). The same trend that reduced the steno pool to a distant memory and that demolished the number of secretaries and AP clerks to just what is necessary to manage the work that hasn't yet been automated will inexorably reduce the role of the transactional recruiter. The technology exists to make this a reality today, but the corporate will required to force hiring managers to take the load has not widely existed. That is changing as companies look to deeper cost control as a competitive advantage. And that is the reason that what recruiters were taught and what is needed is growing into an ever widening gap.

But all is not lost. There is still a huge market opportunity for talent services. The changing world of work is challenging hiring managers too. Good hiring managers understand that just as manufacturing needed to bring in supply chain, robotics and computer control specialists to increase throughput, most hiring managers will need to bring in talent specialists to provide the capabilities needed to redefine who specifications are created, talent sourced and engaged, people motivated and organizations formed.

The two recruiters I mention above are already delivering this service. They force their clients to be clear about their desired business objectives, require that inefficient and ineffective talent practices be modified, challenge bad specifications based on their deep knowledge of the industry, the company and the businesses needs. They operate as true consultants, winning the trust of their clients so that when they have to deliver the hard news the client is open to change.

These recruiters usually don't have direct candidate relationships, because they know that this is increasingly the role of the corporate sourcer and the hiring manager themselves. Instead they are the translator of the businesses objectives into talent specifications, practices and processes that can be implemented, measured and improved upon rapidly. They don't just own the client relationship - they own the client's success. They take accountability for failure to make the numbers. In short, they are an integral part of the business. They are the ones who are truly at the fabled table.

And now to the punchline: Dolby is looking for someone to be the talent consultant for the sales and marketing organization. Put another way: I am looking for a good recruiter. Do you know of any? Would you be willing to loudly proclaim their existence in the comments section of this post, quickly desrcibing how this rare individual has already been delivering the next generation services that are described above? Or, if you are too shy for that public display, would you be willing to send me an email at [email protected] with your narrative and link to your public profile? And if you are in the market for a talent consultant, know what they are and how to use them, please let me know that as well. Creating a market for this higher-value recruiting is the best possible way to ensure the longevity of the profession.

John Lennons, The Future of HR and Talent Camp

John Lennon was a great musician and a bad business person. Anyone reading the recent Rolling Stone piece on “Why the Beatles Broke Up” would be struck by this. But the fact that Lennon hired bad management, broke up the group and did other generally silly things doesn’t really matter. Given his body of work, the fact that he wasn't Jack Welch doesn't seem important.

Great artists are rarely great business people. For every Picasso there are a hundred John Lennons. This doesn’t seem to prevent great artists from existing, and some times even thriving. But HR may be standing in the way of John Lennon joining our band. This is a subject I hope my compatriots at Talent Camp will discuss, even though I may not be present.

As we have discussed before, business tends to look at work in vertically integrated slices. A job title and level covers an increasing scope of capabilities. A Vice President of HR may be expected to have a great eye for talent, the capability to negotiate complex contracts, the analytical ability to assemble complex compensation structures and the knack for coaching CEOs to greatness. Everyone takes for granted that as one climbs the ladder that they have demonstrated proficiencies in an ever greater number of areas. HR writes job descriptions, selects talent, manages performance and compensates people based on this deeply held assumption.

But this vertical integration means that we never get someone who is great at just one or two things. And this is preventing us from developing agile, competitive and productive organizations.

Imagine an HR leader who has just one competency: coaching. Whenever a search firm is looking for talent, they always land on this person, because they have been a long-time leaders at a very successful company. And yet, as the firm digs into the individual’s back story, they hear a long string of complaints: doesn't understand compensation, bad manager, doesn't understand technology, etc. We know where this story ends: the search firm passes the individual over and heads to the vertically integrated example of "executiveness."

But what if this leader is the John Lennon of coaching: the best in the business? This leader gets the CEO to do the right thing nine times out of ten. In fact, the reason that their company is so successful is because this leader has John Lennon's ability to create hits, but instead of writing and playing a guitar, our theoretical leader creates hits through their unique coaching ability.

Because this mythical hit maker doesn't fit the mold of the vertical genius HR is likely to pass them over. How would you compensate them? Where would they fit in your organization? Who would they report to? How would you measure their success? What the heck would you do with John Lennon?

This is why the HR of the future will have to change the structure of the organization. In the creative age, no company will be able to turn away John Lennon. And the company that puts in systems and supports that turn your average Joe's into John Lennons will have competitive advantage.

Finding, unleashing and commercializing these talents will be the key to sustainable innovation. HR won't care that the “John Lennon of Coaching” can't manage a team, program a system or develop a compensation plan. Why would they? There is a "John Lennon of compensation" and a "John Lennon of systems". Expecting someone to suboptimize what they love and are good at so that they can climb a ladder that requires a broad spectrum of adequate mediocrity will be (must be) a thing of the past.

Many will point out that the present business structure of hierarchically stacked positions with every greater vertical integration won't support this vision. They are right. HR will have to become "system architects."  But the system that will be established isn't going to be easy.

The system we need is a series of interconnected nodes, a network, not a hierarchy. People will be able to access the nodes given the problem they are trying to solve or opportunity they are trying to create. This networked-based system is often dismissed as being unworkable due to its chaos and inherent risk. But these naysayers fail to understand that the present miltary-type organization is simply unsustainable. It creates too much waste. It pays people for delivering a whole host of capabilities, none of which are world-class or market leading. Organizations simply can't afford to pay for something which adds little value.

Unfortunately, HR is largely engaged in other conversations. Engagement to prevent the coming recovery exodus, moving jobs offshore to help the CEO with their operational cost obsession and helping the CFO meet the street's expectations by changing compensation plans seem to be at the top of most HR leader's list of priorities. Unfortunately this will leave them at a significant disadvantage when the CEO finally realizes that none of what they are doing will help their organization compete on value in a global market.

HR's obsession should be creative productivity: increasing the creative commercialization opportunity of their talent investments. Here are some questions that such a new "creative productivity-centric" HR organization might ask:

• What is a person’s unique capability? Where are they “John Lennon”?
  
• What is the value of that unique capability to the business?
  
• What does that unique capability say about a person’s purpose (their sense of direction towards achieving a larger goal)? How has this been exhibited through previous work (the portfolio)?
  
• How does that purpose align to the organization’s purpose?
  
• Assuming that the purposes align, that the capability is unique, and that the business can effectively commercialize that capability to achieve its purpose, how will that individual’s work be integrated and supported so that they are as productive as possible?
  
• Assuming that you can solve for all that, how do you connect that “John Lennon” node into a network that will both utilize that unique capability AND challenge that individual to constantly grow and extend that capability into other areas that could be of value? How do you set up a structure that gets the maximum unique creative value from that node?
  
• And finally, how do you compensate that individual for the value they add (not the position they hold) in a way that is uniquely meaningful to the individual (give them a uniquely compelling return for the successful investment of their capability)?

Notice that these questions do not even remotely touch on identifying managers, putting people in boxes in an org chart, training, engagement exercises, detailed global compensation plans, performance management, feedback, employee relations, benefits programs, back-office systems or any of the other standard tasks of today's HR department.

And yet, only HR is really positioned to do this work. A functional manager cannot possibly see their way to this future vision, since they suffer from the problem of vertical integration even more than the HR professional. And executive leadership is heads-down worrying about operational cost management and the other obsessions identified above. Finance, IT? Only HR is ever called on to even think about topics like this.

And after all is said and done, it boils down to this tension: the opportunity of an incredible future of value and innovation being held back by the reality of a transactional and misguided present. How do we all help get HR to that new future? How do we help create a million John Lennons with a million different unique value propositions, helping our companies commercialize creativity and build global advantage?

This is what I am hoping gets discussed at Talent Camp.

Brand Talent Over at Glassdoor

There is a new article over at the Glassdoor blog that I would love to get your comments on.

Almost four years ago I was struck by this idea of Brand Talent. Three years ago Dave Lefkow and I spent an exciting couple of days locked in a beach house, drinking Jack Daniels, trying to develop Brand Talent into a book idea. Dave got smart and decided to go Bacon and get all famous, leaving me to keep muddling this idea over in my head.

Every once in a while I would put something new up about the topic, but overall it just sat there in the corner of my brain. And then about two months ago I was approach by the eponymous Rusty Rueff and asked to be a part of a new blogging adventure over at Glassdoor. I eagerly and gratefully accepted.

That was the easy part. Thinking about what I wanted to write about was of course the much tougher follow-up to acceptance. I wanted to have freedom to cover areas that are interesting to me and (I think) important to job seekers, but also wanted a certain coherence to my arguments at the same time. And I also wanted the topics to help both Glassdoor achieve their objectives, but also help support Dolby as I started to work with my new team over there to create the "next big thing."

One night, during a late writing binge, it struck me that Brand Talent might fit the bill. As I mulled it over, I became more excited about the topic, and am now fully committed to it. I hope that the few readers who haven't abandoned me due to my unpredictable writing schedule will kindly help by reading and leaving comments to drive the discussion forward. If you do, I can promise you a front-row seat at the next unconference, which is indeed going to happen and be focused on the "next big thing." More on that later.

The Glassdoor experience has been wonderful so far. I would heartily recommend reading all the posts. Of course it is no secret that I am a John Sumser partisan, and when he writes things like:

"School did not prepare you for twenty-first century work life. It’s no longer a question of jumping through the right hoops. You can’t get good enough grades. You have to be your own employment agency."

Thus my partisanship becomes even more entrenched. John is exactly right, and I am looking forward to using the venue to riff with all the authors about topics that are near and dead to our talent futures.

What Not Where

Recently I was watching an episode of the TV show "Lie to Me" and I had an epiphany about the future of work: work will be defined by what, not where.

The lead character of "Like to Me" (Dr. Cal Lightman, played by Tim Roth) has a skill that is much in demand*: he can detect the truth by analyzing a person's face, body, voice and speech. The show centers on how Lightman and his team use that skill to solve different problems. Often the problems are crimes, but the fictional team also use the skill to solve hostage negotiation stand-offs, disaster rescue operation bottle-necks, mysterious romantic entanglements and business negotiations gone wrong. In the show Lightman has built an entire business around this one skill, and it looks like the business is thriving. It also looks like the limits of the opportunities afforded by application of the skill exists only in the writer's imagination. Apparently being able to tell when someone is lying is much in demand.

One evening I was turning the show over in my mind, thinking about how cool it would be to have that particular skill (my kids would beg to differ), and then it struck me: "Lie to Me" is a dramatic revelation of one of my central problems working in a big company. That problem is that a "job" is a concept focused on groupin a bunch of problems that really don't have much in common, but that somehow define what value you can provide to the organization. In other words, the modern concept of a job places a premium on "where" you work (i.e. finance), and devalues "what" you do (i.e. tell if someone is lying).

In most companies you are labeled by what group you work in, not by what you do. Your brand is about your domain, not your skill. HR is a great example. A good HR function has people who are good at quantitative reasoning (comp), effective social interaction (employee relations), and systems thinking (workforce planning). Anyone of these skills can be applied in almost any domain, including operations, finance, engineering and manufacturing. But if you work in HR you are "an HR person." Which means that it doesn't matter whether you are good at math, or great at systems analysis or a great negotiator. What matters is that what someone thinks about HR, and what they think about HR (or finance, or engineering, etc.) is what defines your opportunity to apply your skill to the greatest advantage for the company.

Let us take the fictional Dr. Lightman as an example. If he came to work for a big company he would likely go into sales, because he would make the most money sitting across from the table with prospective buyers, quickly determining whether the prospect was going to really sign the deal and what the optimum price point would be. But since Lightman would be sitting in sales, he probably wouldn't be asked by business development to help figure out whether a critical partner was secretly looking at a competitor's deal. And he certainly would never be asked to talk to an engineer who was leaving the company in order to best figure out how to retain that person.

Of course selling is very important. But it may not be as important as keeping a key partner in place, or saving the organization's top talent. The company would be far the poorer for it's inability to internally source a valued skill for a problem that would get the best return for the shareholder. But it wouldn't matter, because Lightman would be thought of as a "sales person", even though his skill of "truth teller" is so much bigger and more important. In other words, no matter how valuable his skill, he would be reduced to being identified with a domain. He would be a "where", not a "what."

The problem with the "where" orientation to determining a person's potential value to a company are many. But among them are:

Lack of Engagement - People usually enjoy application of particular skills more than the preservation of a particular domain. This is easy to prove. Go talk to anyone within your company and ask them "What do you really enjoy doing?" The answer will not be "engineering" or "human resources." It will be instead "solving complex problems" or "helping people find a better job." Engineering and HR are domains. Problem solving and job placement are skills.

Poor Performance - When work is oriented around domains it means that problem sets are artificially aggregated based on a belief in the commonality of the work. For instance, HR work is about people, finance work is about money, etc. But this means that a person who is in finance has to do a lot of work that has nothing to do with money, including negotiating what chart of accounts to accrue something to, how to apply certain financial regulations in certain circumstances and making presentations about financial data. None of those is a "money / math" skill, but because they are aggregated under the header of finance, a person in finance can be expected to do any one of those things.

Expensive - The "where" orientation causes companies to compensate individuals regardless of what value they provide. For instance, the head of finance usually gets paid a lot. But what do they really do as the head of finance? It may be that they are only good at financial forecasting and that they have progressed up the career ladder by finding themselves in situations where forecasting saved the day and brought rewards and recognition to this individual. But the reality is that financial forecasting as a skill is not really worth that much. Supply probably roughly meets demand. So you are paying the head of finance much more than you need to based on their title in their function, not based on the skill they posses. The hierarchy of the function artificially inflates the compensation range relative to the value of the applied skill.

But the trouble with "where" just starts there. Like many ironies of the present business system, big companies spend more on talent than small companies but get less out of it. There are many reasons for this, but one of the most significant factors is that as a company gets bigger it places less of a premium on what a person can do and more of a premium on their job type, title and location. By comparison, a start-up must make the best use of its investment dollar, and will constantly look for the best person to solve a problem or innovate their way to a solution, regardless of their title or specific domain. For example, in a start-up the head of engineering may get to do the big marketing presentations because it turns out they are better with certain audiences than the CMO. That would never happen inside a large company. The "what" (presentation skills) would be far less important than the "where" (engineering vs. marketing).

Think about it: don't you have a skill or competency that you really enjoy, that makes a difference, that can be applied across many different domains or specialties and that has value for a company? Most people do. You may not know how to think about it in that way, but trust me, it is far more likely that you have one of these skills than that you are expert in a domain. It is far more likely that you like what more than where.

If you are willing to take a moment and put on your "what" hat, I would love to hear comments about how you think your job would change.

Want to Reduce Turnover? Turn your Employees into Brand Talent!

It is increasingly difficult to separate the act of finding great talent from the act of keeping great talent. In many ways it is a math problem: there aren’t enough people out there to replace the people you are losing. Reducing voluntary turnover is turning out to not only be the most cost-effective recruiting program you have, but maybe the only option left to you.

As recruiting managers come to this “ah-ha!” moment, they inevitably turn to the option of employee loyalty programs. The idea is simple: if you give the right rewards and say the right things then employees will stay around. It’s just like selling detergent: make it cheaper and sexier and people will overlook that your clothes don’t get clean. Fortunately people value their work experience more than they value their cleaning products, so the average consumer marketing cons aren’t going to work.

Loyalty programs will have decreasing effectiveness because the days of blind commitment to a company are done. In the past a company was an embodiment of a principle: security. Employment was rewarded independent of the value someone contributed, so you could be loyal to a company because they would be loyal to you. No longer. Too many employers view talent as a cog in the economic wheel: less valuable than the money and machinery, more valuable than the lobby décor. Many employees see an employer as an abstraction consisting of institutional shareholders wagging the dog that is management. Whether these perceptions are warranted or not is besides the point: it is the reality of our world. The days of executives taking a hit from Wall Street because they want to keep their employees around is a rare event indeed.

Employee loyalty programs have been a small but key contribution to this tsunami of cynicism. Management credibility is paid in the coin of authenticity, and nothing feels more contrived than an “attaboy!” followed by increased work hours, lousy bosses and decreased wages. Piecemeal changes to the relationship with employees won’t turn this situation around. It really does take a radical new approach.

What Do We Want From Our Social Networks?

Social networking is reaching a natural inflection point where we should all start to examine exactly what we are getting out of it and what we really want.

We are starting to formalize and systematize what all good business people have known for the past 5,000 years: relationships are at the heart of how work gets done. When we look to formalize and systematize we are really trying to optimize. Optimization is a way to get more output for less input (“pay less, get more”). All things that become optimized are subjected to the same basic process: scoping, then defining, then naming, then atomizing (breaking into discreet parts), then analyzing and finally measurizing (I made the last one up, but it’s the point where we all become concerned about how to measure the discreet parts we just analyzed). The process has one objective: to turn the intangible into the tangible in such a way that we can improve it and communicate it.

Buildings that Stand

In 1979 Christopher Alexander published a book titled The Timeless Way of Building. Alexander opens the book by saying:

There is one timeless way of building… It is not possible to make great buildings, or beautiful places, places where you feel yourself, places where you feel alive, except by following this way.

For recruiters that “one way” is transparency and authenticity.

The Book is Fat

I recently finished reading Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat. I have taken to calling it The Book is Fat because Friedman breathlessly describes every conversation he has ever had with anybody on the Indian subcontinent. It seems that every cab driver in India is a sage who is one step away from building the next Infosys. I have been an erstwhile fan of Friedman’s for years, but it seems with each book he gets a bit more garrulous and self-absorbed. I am never sure whether his books are going to turn out to be insightful economic analysis or self-congratulatory travelogue.

What is an Employee?

An asset? No… assets are depreciated. They have a useful life and then are discarded. You know exactly how much value you will get out of an asset (at least in accounting terms). When was the last time you knew exactly what you were going to get out of a employee?

Capital? No… capital is exchanged. Capital is arbitraged. When was the last time you got a group of employees together and sold them to a competitor for a price? Or, better yet, when was the last time you saw the value of a knowledge worker listed on the balance sheet?

Investments? No, no, no… long story, but when you invest you make an explicit risk / reward calculation. When was the last time you heard a hiring manager say of a new hire “Well, they will probably really mess up the whole project, but if they get it right we are golden!” If employees were investments we would seek to reduce all possible risk for the return we get. Small problem: human beings tend not to do well when managed for risk. They like to be inspired for return. While it seems to be popular, I am not a fan of "employees are things" metaphors, and an investment is a "thing." 

Volunteers? Closer, but still no. In most organizations the expectations of volunteers is low. The expectations of employees is usually more than "try to show up when you can".

No… employees are investors. They provide you with something of value and you in turn give them a return. You want the good ones to give you more and the bad ones to give you less. As a manager you don’t want T. Boone Pickens investing, but you do want Warren Buffet.

What Exactly is "Talent" Anyway?

When I first started blogging I put up a post called “New Rules for Recruiting in the Creative Age.” That post is my manifesto about what I believe about recruiting and the concepts, technologies, systems and processes that it involves. Often, when I think I am going to far astray, I check back in what that post to make sure that I am still on the same page with myself (a sort of “strangelovian” concept).

Three of the rules from that post have a direct impact on our exploration of the meaning of talent. They were:

6.) Talent is defined by production, not opportunity ("Real artists ship").

12.) Talent is not a person. Talent is a capability.

13.) Talent is not an employment contract. Talent is the delivery of the capability.