A Talentist

Working Myself Out of a Job

I have a great mechanic. His name is Steve. I treasure him like a lamp that has a genie that grants all my mechanical wishes. The man is a genius: efficient, effective and cheap. It is a pleasure to spend time with him, watching him work.

Sometimes I talk to him and tell him how he should expand his business. He doesn’t do tires, or cleaning, or interior repairs, or wheel alignment. I keep telling him he can raise his prices if he was more of a one-stop shop. I tell him I want to give him more of my money because I really don’t understand all this car stuff and I would rather be spending my time focusing on things that I know I am good at and that people pay me to do.

But this weekend I had an epiphany. After reading about how I should put myself out of a job I called Steve. I told him that I didn’t want him to be a one-stop shop anymore. I wanted him to teach me how to fix my car. I boldly announced “All you are is a tax on my driving. It’s time for you to realize how little value you really add! Steve, if you were a good mechanic you would be thinking about how to put yourself out of business!”

Steve said that I should come right over so that he could start to make himself obsolete. There was a twinkle in his voice that made me a bit uneasy, but I didn’t care because I was about to put Steve out of a job. I had important work to do.

I arrived confident of my ability to do whatever it is that Steve does. You see, I am a driver. I had never really thought of it until I read that great article, but the logic is unassailable: just like a manager manages people, and therefore needs to know everything there is to know about people, a driver drives a car, and so needs to know everything there is to know about cars. I used to just hop in the car and go, blithely confident that specialists would handle all the details. But I was completely wrong. If I could drive a car it was without a doubt: I could fix them, build them, design them, pave roads for them... I could do it all.

And let’s face it: how hard could it be? I mean Steve is no rocket scientist. He is a freakin’ mechanic for goodness sake. He turns a wrench and smears oil on himself to look busy. Time to take my rightful place as the master of my driver domain.

Steve started me out on some simple problems. He told me that I needed to gap the spark plugs and ensure that the throd bearing was seated properly. I scratched my head a little. I hadn’t figured that specialist would develop their own language to describe all the complexities associated with their craft. And frankly, I didn’t even know that spark plugs need to be gapped or what the hell a “throd bearing” was. No worries! I quickly picked up a hammer and started beating the crap out of the engine. I figured I would have gaps in spark plugs in no time. Pieces of engine quickly started flying all over the garage. I felt good. I was getting stuff done.

Steve smiled and waited. When I took a break to get an energy drink he patiently pointed out that a hammer wasn’t the right tool, and that in addition to understanding the problem I needed to fix, I would have to understand what tools to use, how to use them and even show a certain talent for understanding how to read engine diagrams diagnostic outputs. He sort of absently stated “You know, an engine is a pretty complex thing. You have to know how all this stuff fits together and how to get this baby to really purr.”

Oh Steve! You silly bastard!

“Steve, you don’t get it” I confidently replied “I am a driver. Experts have told me that as a driver I can and should know everything there is to know about driving a car.” He looked a little puzzled, so I decided to become more direct.  “Everyone knows that mechanics are just hacks who work on cars because they can’t get a real job. This has got to be simple. I mean, I drive a car. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that I would logically be good at everything associated with cars.”

Steve is a patient guy with a great sense of humor. He said “Of course! Tell you what.... here are all my tools, all my manuals, all my diagnostics, the keys to the shop and my phone number. Here is the web address of a course you can take about gaping spark plugs. You just go to it and give me a call when you need help!”

I expressed my gratitude and started to get back to work. As time passed, a shadow of a thought passed through my brain.

What if being a good driver doesn't mean what I think it does? What if the experts have just created a big mess because they are so focused on how broken mechanics are that they don't ever really ask what "being a good driver" means. What if a good driver is someone who focuses on core driving mechanics, handles stressful situations well and achieves their goal of delivering passengers safely to their destinations? My gosh, what if the experts, in their kind-hearted efforts to get me to be good at just about everything associated with cars, are actually making me a worse driver? What if there are people who have a real talent for fixing and building and designing cars, just like I have a real talent for driving them? Wouldn't it be better to find people who are the best at all of those things, so I could focus on being a better driver?

Nah! That can’t be right. Steve needs to work himself out of a job. That means I simply must be as good a mechanic as he is, or at least a functionally decent one. I got back to work, merrily banging away. Sure I had to call Steve a few times, and it took me forever to find the right information in the right manual, but after several days of hard work, I was done. I wearily turned over the starter, and watched as an electrical fire enveloped the engine block and destroyed everything I had worked for.

Dammit! Now I couldn’t be a driver because I didn’t have a car. Maybe I should just call Steve and have him do this the next time.

While waiting for the fire engines to leave, I had another epiphany. It turns out that getting Steve to work himself out of a job was expensive, risky and short-sighted. I thought just because I could drive I must know everything there is to know about cars. And back in the early days of cars that was probably true. But now the entire “car ecosystem”, with all its regulations, technology, options and complexities is way more than just turning a wrench. Its more than just having the right manual, or having access to the latest tools. It turns out that I need specialists to actually make my car run, to source raw materials, to hire designers, to set-up manufacturing facilities, pave roads, write laws and fill ‘er up when the car is empty.

Sitting around with Steve later that day, I decided to return to my earlier observation. “Steve, this car thing is pretty complex. You should offer me more services, not less. You should be positioning yourself as the guy who can get me the best possible driving experience, not just as a simple mechanic who makes difficult and complex work appear so easy it causes your customers to doubt your value and gives you a self-esteem complex. I know that you are going to bring on new technology so you spend less time doing all the old tuning and other grunt work you mechanics hate so much, but what do I care? As your customer, I just want the job done. Steve, you should realize that as all this stuff inevitably gets more complex and risky, and as transportation becomes ever more important to how our economy runs, that you should be looking to work your way into more jobs, not work your way out this one.”

Steve just looked at me and smiled. “Your a great customer Jeff” he said. “You just keep listening to the people who tell you how I should do my job better, and I’ll just keep taking more of your money.”

Thoughts on This Week's Time Magazine

Perusing through the last issue of Time Magazine and had some thoughts:

Arnie Duncan may be the Apostle of Reform, but is he Peter or Judas? I like the focus on student achievement, but the lack of clarity around “achievement in what?” makes his statements a placebo at best. He is also falling into the trap that most education reformers are – comparing our scores to other countries. That is less than pointless – it is destructive. We aren’t competing against Finland – we are competing against ourselves. But even more, external factors such as culture are as important as education in a country’s success. The objectives of our education system must be aligned with our culture, so comparative test scores are not the way we should measure success.

Logging on to the Ivy League. Nice article. Here is what I think it means:

• The brand of a fancy college won’t mean much when your content is evaluated by a broad community. Guys like me don’t care about the Ivy League – if there is a better content provider at San Jose State, then I’ll get my content there. Finally, a real market for knowledge, where the validity of knowledge is not based on who said it.

• The students will be grading the educators within the next 10 years. Finally. This will start to undo some of the upside down market dynamics of the education system.

• Some people love to talk up “choice” but then don’t do anything about the structural tyranny of the present bad system. Why are some people so caught up in socialist boogey men when real socialism (in corporations and formal education institutions) goes completely unchallenged? Maybe because the light is better where they look.

• What happens when you get your education from the web? You have a “What not Where”  situation, because having content expertise about a subject is not the same thing as being a good teacher. So when you break the “Where” of teaching into “Whats” you get people who specialize in conveying information and other people who can match excitement to skill to opportunity, and then others who can excite students about learning. And when you put the content purveyors in the web, increase the percentage of people who are telecommuting, and look at other effects of putting gigabit into the home, you end up with a situation where kids can get their content when and where they need it, and then they will work with other kids on projects to solve real problems under the guidance of guidance experts (i.e. a person who can recognize their specific talents and match them to specific future needs) and real teachers (i.e. people who can encourage children to pursue a life-long love of learning).

Stacktacular – is it just me, or does the increasing speed of innovation mean not only greater technical opportunities, but also physical and emotional as well?

Spinning a New Strategy. Even a mundane business like spinning yarn can be competitive if it moves from mechanical and knowledge work to creative work. Patrick Yarns is the only major textile firm left with major operations in the U.S. because they focused on solving problems, not blaming everyone else for their crappy management. This story is probably the best story I have seen to demonstrate that mechanical and analytical jobs will go overseas, but creative jobs can stay here, even when the industry started in the mechanical age (read the first post on the Three Ages here).

Same Game, Different Team

Sometimes I feel caught in the middle. My language and concepts seem too esoteric for hard-nosed business people, and my focus on increasing economic effectiveness seems to pedestrian for academics. I get to live with the blank stares of corporate executives every day, so that I have grown relatively used to. But for some reason I am always hopeful that people who spend their lives thinking about education will understand me better. The greatest disappointment is when I realize that the academic professionals who are engaged in education are just as invested in continuing a bad system as the corporations believe they are. I realize that modern western education systems are really good at producing three kinds of professions: academics, investment bankers and attorneys. Since all three work in the field of analyses, they are all deeply invested in making sure that the education system continues to pump out more of them, however damaging that may be.

Perhaps it is just my native cynicism, but I don’t think that there will be a spontaneous societal recognition of the need for changing education, nor will there ever be a conversation amongst powerful people about ideas that will result in fundamental changes to our education system. Systemic inertia and myopic self-interest being what they are, nobility, goodness and wisdom are not the best way to get a bureaucracy to change what it does.

But that doesn't mean all is lost. I do believe that if you can get alignment between what is right and what is good, between what corporations need to succeed in the creative age and the capabilities of education to increase the generative capacity of wise, connected and emotionally aware agents in an open civil society where production of value is assessed on the basis of true cost and sustainability… then you will start to change the education agenda.

Just as organizations have had to go through the “mission / purpose” exercise in order to align their productive capability with an ever-more dynamic market landscape, I believe that once schools understand that what they do doesn’t get their products (educated children) jobs (and therefore doesn’t get them money), they will start to change their behaviors and fundamentally examine why they exist and how they deliver value.

Inevitably the education academics will change the subject and move to America's weakness against other countries in standardized testing, especially math and science. I think they are using this as a blunt instrument to show that the education system is working but inefficient; that we are doing the right things in education, but just not hard enough or with enough focus and fervor. They are dangerously wrong.

I don’t believe that a solid grounding in deep math and science is a prerequisite for future economic success in western economies. Saying that we should be concerned because we are falling behind other countries in standardized testing is exactly that same as equating America to a football team whose front linemen are small compared to other teams. The logical conclusion from this data is that we need to get bigger lineman in order to compete.  So we start building up our linemen and buying better, bigger front line talent at the same time another team comes out with the west coast offense and makes running up the middle less of a competitive advantage. In short, you can achieve the objective of optimizing a certain capability but lose the game anyway.

Learning math and science are not ends in-and-of themselves. They are means to increasing production in economic and scientific endeavors. We may all be competing on the same field, but limiting how we play the game to the standard model will surely result in a loss for the United States.

We can’t use the old linear progression type of thinking in assessing future competitive dynamics. You would think that China would have to put in a copper-based communications capability before they could progress to cell phones, but you would be dead wrong. As is reported on the Earth Policy Institute website in February 2005:

Nowhere is the explosive growth more visible than in the electronics sector. In 1996 China had 7 million cell phones and the United States had 44 million. By 2003 China had rocketed to 269 million versus 159 million in the United States. In effect, China is leapfrogging the traditional land-line telephone stage of communications development, going directly to mobile phones.

The U.S. will not be competitive in the long-term in analytical skills. The simple fact is that a middle-class kid from the U.S. will never be as competitive as a poor kid from China in math and science on the playing field of pure rote learning and fundamental mechanics. It’s not a xenophobic generalization. It is a recognition that China is going to invest more in math and science education than the U.S., that a middle class American won't wake up hungry and thinking that a good math and science education is the only way to get food and that the kid in China is going to have access to cheaper goods and services than the kid in U.S. In short, the problem is structural: it’s an economics, cultural and initiative problem more than anything else. This means we are playing the same game (global economics) but we need to put a fundamentally different type of team on the field in order to “win” (however loosely that may be defined).

Again, all is not lost. Far from it. Even innovations in math and science will be far more dependent on Einstein-types of skills (fundamentally reformulating the problem to arrive at a totally different perspective and solution) than Newton-types of skills (increasing precision in the description and prediction of a phenomenon).  While Einstein clearly understood math, it was not his forte. He was first and foremost a creative who was given the space to think differently because he wasn’t deeply embedded in the physics community of that day which was proclaiming that all things that could be discovered about physics were in the past.

Leveraging the comparative cultural advantage of the U.S. in a creative economy (openness to failure, experimentation and connection across cultural and economic boundaries) should be our first goal. It aligns what is good (increasing the generative capacity of all children, independent of race, creed, color or disability to produce sustainable value that benefits them and the buyer) with what is right (providing more jobs for more people while decreasing the cultural, societal, environmental and economic waste created by those jobs). I believe that the structural deficiencies of the corporatist system that feeds a consumerist dependency on individual gratification as the heart of economic prosperity is at the core of a lot of what ails us. Of course, I could be totally wrong. But one thing I learned long ago is that it is better to be clear than certain. And on this, at least, I am clear.

Coach Luke or Embrace Darth?

“Darth Vader or Luke Skywalker: who would qualify for a career coach?” That was the interesting question posed at a meeting I attended the other day. After some quick conversation, most of the participants agreed that Luke was the better candidate for a career / personal development coach. The reasoning was straight forward: Luke has trouble controlling his emotions and is a bit of a loaner. He’s a lot of potential but mostly gets mixed individual results. Darth, on the other hand, has already had a bad coaching experience (the emperor), doesn’t adhere to the stated values of most companies and is evil incarnate. Pretty easy decision, right?

Wrong. Like most business discussions, the need to get to the “results phase” of the conversation completed obviated and eclipsed the two basic philosophical questions that would make-or-break any possible response: “What problem are you trying to solve with the coaching?” and “What is acceptable behavior to achieve business results?”

Just for fun, I thought about other ways to start the conversation. What if you asked everyone at the table “If you had a choice between being Luke Skywalker or Darth Vader, who would you chose?” Any doubt as to the outcome of that poll? I would then have asked “OK, let’s say Luke fails in the end and Darth succeeds. Who would change their vote?” Again, I am guessing that most people would stick with being the fair-haired fighter for truth and justice rather than the plasticized epitome of evil.

Then I would take a different tack. I would ask “Who has more integrity… Darth Vader or Luke Skywalker?” Everyone would laugh knowingly and say “Why Luke, of course.” And they would be wrong. There are several times where Luke withholds the truth from people who need to know it (as when he fails to tell Leia that they are siblings), while Darth always tells the truth. As a matter of fact, I am pretty sure that you can go down any business-book definition of success and find that Darth is a better “business person” than Luke. Luke consistently fails to achieve milestones. In fact, if he didn’t achieve the one big objective he is after (become a Jedi, blow up the death star, redeem his father, save the galaxy for freedom and justice) Luke would be widely considered a bad employee. He has lots of character defects, whereas Darth is strong, confident and obedient.

Let’s face it, Darth Vader is the perfect employee and Luke is a bit of a knuckle-head who is a loose cannon. Darth follows the company line; Luke is a rebel. Darth is a commanding leader; Luke is a rural hick who doesn’t really fit it. Darth can mobilize resources quickly to achieve his objectives and is feared inside of his own organization; Luke is a bit of a wimp who always seems to need everyone other people’s assistance to achieve his objectives.

And yet, here we are, all keeping our hands raised in a vote for being Luke. What gives? And, even more fundamentally, why the hell would you try to change Luke from being the youngster flibbertigibbet he so often seems to be when he is the one guy who consistently saves the universe from evil and destruction? Why would you get the coach for Luke?

I think if you went through this exercise at any company across America (and perhaps Western Europe too) you would find the same fundamental disconnect: everyone wants to be Luke and everyone thinks Luke is the one that needs coaching. I have a theory about why this happens: we all see ourselves as the potential hero from a young age, but we have been programmed to believe that a corporate environment can’t accept the risky behaviors of heroes. So we quietly dream about who we want to be and then squelch that dream when we put on the suit and walk through the lobby door. Once the corporate armor is on we willingly (and evenly eagerly) accept that our individualistic tendencies towards intrepidness and fearlessness need to be “coached” out of us so that we can plug into the larger paternalistic / militaristic structure that corporations purposefully create to avoid surprising shareholders and getting executives fired.

I am not here to make moral arguments about whether crushing human beings into conformity is a good thing or a bad thing. You can be he judge of that. I will propose that today’s organization is best served by heroes, and that the nature of a hero is that she makes a lot of short-term mistakes on the way to a glorious end. You might want to consider that before you try to take your Lukes and turn them into Darths.

Recruiting B.S. – And How to Get Rid of It

I recently moved into an HR strategy role at EA. This doesn't mean I won't be writing and speaking about talent: far from it as I am booked for 5 conferences in the next 6 months. But it does mean that Talentism will deal with broader HRIT and C-level challenges around moving to a Talentism business model (when I have the chance to write at all).

It was no secret that I was starting to grow disenchanted with the world of recruiting. I started exploring the nature of my discontent here, and by the time December rolled around I was in a bit of a lather. Under Cindy Nicola's leadership EA had fixed so many of these fundamental issues  that I couldn't quite understand why more recruiting / staffing / talent acquisition departments weren't seeing the light and making the necessary changes to become a true value-add, competitive-advantage-driving, business partner.

That lather, and the freedom of moving to another role,  exhibited itself in the following broadside printed in the March issue of "employee Recruitment & Retention", a monthly newsletter for HR professionals and hiring managers.

The article is the artifact of pure serendipity: I got Frank Sennett's email requesting my views of what was wrong with the typical recruiting department at exactly the time that I had decided to take the gloves off and write a turgid synopsis of all my beefs with the recruiting world before I moved on to my next role.

If you want a copy of the article (and to learn more about employee Recruitment & Retention) click on this link (Download ERRReport307.pdf ). The full article (without Frank's merciful edits) follows:

Recruiting BS - And How to Get Rid of It

Requisitions – Don’t have anything to do with recruiting. They are a way to stay on the CFO’s good side.

Job Descriptions – Don’t have anything to do with the job.

ATS – Not only isn’t it the center of recruiting systems, it’s the worst part of it.

TPR vs. Corporate – It’s a silly war started by corporate recruiters who are trying to justify their poor performance and TPR’s who are trying to justify fees they don’t earn.

Recruiting – Isn’t about filling one position with the lowest cost candidate.

Customer Satisfaction – Isn’t the ultimate measure of whether you are doing a good job, especially if you are corporate recruiting department.

OFCCP – Isn’t about expanding opportunity for more people, it’s about giving bureaucrats a way to look like they care.

It’s About the People – Bull…. It’s about the business.

So, if you don’t want to get outsourced and work in a call center for the rest of your life, think about the following:

The offer is your ultimate control document. If you don’t trust your corporate recruiting department not to waste their time interviewing people the company won’t need then you have a bigger problem than “time-to-fill.”

Job Descriptions should be about the job that needs to be done next year, not the job that was needed last week. By the time you have spent 90 days hiring the right person for yesterday’s job, tomorrow’s job still needs filling.

ATS is commodity. Recruiting is about sales, and sales is about relationships. CRM is the right software for recruiting. It’s easy to embed ATS functionality in your CRM to handle your compliance issues. When it comes to selecting your system, focus on winning the relationship game, not making best friends with the CIO and the General Counsel.

You use the best resource that will produce the best results for the lowest price. It’s business 101. If your corporate recruiting department can’t hire someone after 90 days, and the position is critical to fill, it’s cheap to put a TPR on it. And if you aren’t proactively sourcing all the time, even in downturns, for the talent that drives your business, then every TPR you use when you get surprised by a new requisition for one of these critical positions is too expensive.

Recruiting is about driving the business forward. Competitive advantage. Period. Nothing more, nothing less. It doesn’t exist to get people jobs and it doesn’t exist so that people who couldn’t get jobs being a camp counselor can make 6 figures. That means that you figure out the positions that will make or break your company and you get the perfect person for that job, and you pour your blood, sweat and tears into that, and not into making sure that your hiring manager / client is baffled with bullshit and a pile of resumes so that you can get an “attagirl / boy” and a pat on the back. This means that you need to be able to show that you are driving the business forward even if the ego-maniac hiring manager who is slowly destroying his department right in front of your eyes doesn’t like you because you keep bringing him the right people, and not people he can browbeat into submission so that they leave as soon as they get another position.

And finally, if you really, really care about getting a more diverse work population, then partner with your lawyers to keep the bureaucrats at bay and go find great people where you wouldn’t normally look. They are there. If they don’t dress the way you like, or talk the way you like, or even smell that great, then get over yourself. You aren’t Este Lauder for God’s sake, you are there to drive the business forward, and that smelly kid that rubs you the wrong way may be the one person who can pop that product that’s been going nowhere into an open field run.

Recruiting is about talent, and talent is about results. Period. It’s not about whether your hiring manager loves you, or whether you use the right software, or whether you can source from the same pool of Harvard tightasses every day of the week… it’s about you being able to provide more punch, more value, better business results than a determined hiring manager with a computer and a secretary. If you can’t meet that standard then you don’t belong in the business and it’s time you move on to teaching macramé at the local JC.

Oil Changers and Car Designers

There are some fiery words flying around over on the wonderful new blog Recruitingbloggers.com. Apparently some people find no use for recruiting blogs, saying they are a waste of time and fail to provide any value. The logical challenge posed by people who spend so much time reading recruiting blogs that they can claim with certainty that the blogs are worthless aside (just how bored are you guys anyway?), the diatribes did get me to thinking once again about the value of blogging and the nature of recruiting.

Everyone inhabits the world of vanity press for their own reasons (and we should all be clear – given the nature of blogging, serial commenters are as much “bloggers” as the publishers themselves). When I started I hoped to create a forum for discussing the idea of a Talent-centered economic system, along with the possibility of changing the systems, technologies and concepts we use to identify, locate, connect with, close and utilize talent. I believe that every business, including it’s component functions, must innovate or die. Recruiting is no exception. But of all the many and various corporate departments I have worked with or for, recruiting is by far the most intractable and resistant to change. It appears to be a combination of the arrogance of sales (“I am too busy closing to learn something new!”) and the business ignorance of HR (“You can’t fire me… I’m a people person!”). Recruiting’s bad rep is well known business-wide, and so I walked into blogging with my eyes wide open. It just seemed that the best possible place to affect corporate and economic change was in the “identify, locate, connect with and close” pieces of the puzzle. And so I have maintained consistently that recruiting is a strategic function and that if recruiting really was going to add to the top and bottom-line capability of an organization that it would have to operate a lot differently. In fact, I go one step further: there is no way to sustain comparative advantage without innovating around the concept, systems and technology that affect how you identify, locate, connect with, close and utilize talent. Talentism has been a way for me to explore how best to achieve that objective.

By that measure, this blog has largely been a failure. It’s more than just Mr. Sumser saying “Nobody gets TQM” when we have been putting it into practice for the last two years, and more than some grumpy web denizens saying that blogs don’t have value. It’s this sneaking suspicion that I am tilting at windmills: recruiting is as recruiting does, and by that measure, not much is going to change outside of isolated businesses that get the value of talent and innovate to win.

The variety, depth and passion of the recruiting blogosphere was a valid indication that there were other Quixote's out there. But if even those fine individuals are saying that they are islands in a calm sea of "who gives a damn?" then it is perhaps time to evaluate the reason that sea exists. As I have peeled the onion of my own feelings of despair, I have come to the decision that at its core, I have a frustration with oil changers and car designers.

When the oil light goes on in your car you take it to Jiffy Lube (or your favorite mechanic). You want fast, cheap, reliable service. You don’t have conversations about epistemology or the purpose of oil, or how oil will someday run out and what exactly will that mean for the plastics and organic fertilizer businesses? You just need to know that the person in the coveralls knows how to drain your oil, replace the filter, and fill ‘er up with the right stuff. It’s not rocket science, but if it isn’t done well you are a lot of trouble, so you tend to value people who do it well.

When you are deciding to get into the car business, you go the Art College of Design, or RISD. You talk to people about your envisioned purpose of the car and the possibility of oil cartels gone bad and the nature of design and the meaning of transportation, because all of those things inform the creative process in a deep and meaningful way. You don’t really care whether the person in the funny glasses with the wild hairdo knows anything about 10W-40, or how you have to replace the brass washer on the oil plug because vibration wears it down. You just care that you get the straightest possible line between your vision and the reality of a new car.

Now the simple fact is that you can’t have one without the other. No car designer, no cars. No cars, no oil changes. No oil changes, no cars, No cars, nothing for the designers to design. Like every other complex industrial system, it is a large web of connections and shared dependencies, even though most people who change oil don’t think twice about who designs the cars, and the people who design the cars usually can’t care less about how you change the oil.

Most societies, all modern industries, and increasingly, communities… they all act on this principle: specialization and interconnectedness.

But in recruiting you have this somewhat weird phenomenon: the oil change person not only doesn’t care about the designer, but believes that all designers are grandiose idiots that can go to hell because they don’t know how to change oil. And the designers (the few that there are in recruiting) sit around and say “Hey, if we don’t design you don’t have anything to change the oil on” which leads them (the designers) to think that all the oil change personnel are backwards hicks who have the business sense of your average lemonade stand owner. The fighting and the finger pointing vary in pitch and frequency, but it is always there below the surface.

The recruiting oil changers know that recruiting is just about getting butts in seats, and that any attempt to complicate it beyond that is a fools-errand, a desire to take something beautiful in its simplicity (find, talk, close) and turn it into something that is needlessly complex and almost completely divorced from the reality of most day-to-day recruiters. And you know what? They are right.

The recruiting designers know that all business functions, without exception, exist for the purpose of increasing return on capital above the cost of capital (true profit) and that any process, system or work that isn’t optimized towards a sustainable approach to achieving this objective is the playground of social workers and mechanics who are just one req away from getting outsourced. And you know what? They are right too.

The number of people in the recruiting world who are truly attempting to get those two sides together is unfortunately small. The “thinkers and designers” haven’t spent a whole lot of time running recruiting organizations recently (if at all), so they think that the cretins who man the halyards are the unfortunate individuals that stand in the path between their vision and today’s reality. And many of the “oil changers and mechanics” have little desire to learn new ways and methods of doing their job, and therefore think the prognosticators are a bunch of blowhards that never deliver value. The people in the middle, who both design and change the oil, read what the designers have to say and think “nice theory, but your failure to ever put it into practice means that your theory and two nickels are worth ten cents” and then hear the plaintive cries of the mechanics and say “You know what, you are just teeing your whole profession up to be commoditized and outsourced.”

Maybe it’s just that the middle isn’t for me. I know that EA is doing things that have never been done before, and that we are getting superior results at both the design and mechanic levels. It may be a complete waste of time to be questioning the execution capability of the designers, and I don’t need to be convincing people who leave comments like “blogs have no value” that they are one step away from becoming the butlers of the 21st century.

John, You Partisan Slut!

Can it be? John Sumser, counter-culture guru of the recruiting world, Mill Valley iconoclast and purveyor of contrarian wisdom, has finally gone completely around the bend to the other side? Has he become a partisan, a person who advocates for a point of view independent of any sound logic to support his conclusions?

That's right folks, John has become a neo-recruiter, a partisan for those halcyon days when all you needed was a telephone, your wits and a pack of Camels. When men were men and content was sacred. And in order to get us back to those days John is prepared to do whatever it takes, including scaring the hell out of us.

For those of you who haven't read it, John has decided that vertical search engines picking up your job content is like people showing up to mow your lawn without your permission. John is a little rusty at the fear-mongering thing, having given it up during the Carter administration, but given some time he can flesh this whole analogy out to:

"Speed-freak illegal aliens show up and mow your lawn, taking your clippigs (FOR GOD’S SAKE, NOT THE CLIPPINGS!) and then graffiti your house while you sit cowering inside AND THERE IS NOTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT!" Yes, unbeknownst to you, those perfectly crafted, Shakespearian job descriptions are being defiled by being ripped from your innocent website and posted in the company of other jobs! Heavens forefend! I believe I am about to swoon.

Allow me to “John Jack” here and reprint the most salacious parts of his article:

Job Jacking

Imagine this.

You wake up one morning and discover that your lawn has been cut. It's not particularly well done. It's long enough so that it will need to be cut again next week. The trimming has not been done.

There is a note stapled to your front door that says: If you do not want your lawn trimmed next week, please place a sign in your front yard saying so. If you want a better job done, please do one of the following:

• Contact an LEO (Lawn Equipment Optimization) Consultant,
• Buy outdoor advertising from us, or
• Place our billboards on your front yard (we'll pay you for this)

This is significantly more intrusive than the standard scam in which a donation is requested after the street number is painted on your curb. You'll notice that the process is opt-out rather than "opt-in". You'll also notice that the requirements for opting out are entirely the responsibility of a customer who never solicited the service in the first place. In this peculiar set of circumstances, none of the options really allow the lawn-owner to control his yard.

Now, imagine that twenty services were doing this to your front yard simultaneously.

That's what it's like if you have a set of job listings on your corporate website. It's what it's like if you run a legitimate job board, collecting fees for postings.

The gang member pulls up to your house, mows your lawn, takes your clippings and tells you that you can only stop him by placing a big sign in your front yard. Then the next one comes and so on. No respect for ownership, no respect for a particular approach to landscaping, no compensation for the value extracted, no consideration of the impact on the yard. It's just grab and run.

This incredible set of bad manners is brought to you by the likes of Jobster, Simply Hired, Indeed and a host of other examples. The model was established in days gone by FlipDog, CareerMosaic and CareerCast. "Spidered" job content has always been the ploy from job boards who were unable to muster a real sales force.

You have to go to his site to read the rest of the article, although I have to caution you that I just engaged in the “bad manners” of taking John’s writing and putting it on my site, all the while shoving money into his pockets against his will by driving up his traffic numbers. I guess my evil plan to trim John’s hedges for free is officially out of the question.

Now, first, I hope you will forgive me if I indulge in a confession. John has Jacked me before. A lot. And I liked it each and every time. John Jacks me when he takes the Talentism feed and puts it on one of his pages where he sells ads. I know I shouldn’t like it. After all, he is using me. Golly, I didn’t ask him to Jack me. He just did it all by himself. But like it I did, because it was better for me than it was for him. My “lawn” received a wider distribution which enabled it to better achieve its purpose. And after all is said and done, it’s about what you are trying to do with the content that matters.

But all this talk has got me thinking. You know, after the initial flush of excitement, maybe John jacking me isn’t so great after all. Especially when I see that he has ripped up my lawn, put it in front of his house, and then posted this sign on the front yard:

All the material on this website is the property of Interbiznet. Redistribution without permission is strictly prohibited.

Hey John, are you seeing other blogs on the side? I mean, isn’t this just so typically male! I put myself out there, ready to share my lawn with you and then you cast me aside and claim it as your own. You bastard! My mother was right about you.

Yes, content is property and as such it is protected. Just like the content of a flyer inviting people to a free concert is copyrighted. Just like speeches and campaign clippings and demo songs. As the owner of the content it certainly matters to you where your stuff is displayed. Punk bands don’t like their announcements displayed in stores that specialize in Barry Manalow. I get it. But Punk Bands do like their stuff displayed, because it means more people are likely to come see them. Sure, for their brand’s sake they would like the flyers to be found in methadone clinics and crack houses, but a full house is a full house. Better to play to a packed crowd than three committed fans.

So if you are trying to pack the hall (or drive traffic to your site) put the content up and know that it’s going to be disaplyed in places that you may not like or approve of, but that your ultimate purpose (a lot of traffic) is better served by wide distribution than no distribution. True, the mental picture of John standing in his front yard beating the crap out of anybody who walks by with a power mower was worth the price of admission. But if you want people coming to your show, you should avoid neo-recruiting partisanship and get yourself jacked. I highly recommend it.

Administrative Helper Therapy Victims

or: How I Still Keep Worrying and Can’t Seem to Love Cognitive Dissonance

HR is all about “cognitive dissonance”. Cognitive dissonance is the massive headache you get when you are trying to hold two mutually exclusive thoughts at once. For me, cognitive dissonance is represented by my beliefs that “the HR function is strategic” and my experience that “the HR system creates Administrative Helper Therapy Victims.”

Administrative Helper Therapy Victims: it’s my new term to describe the mind-numbing system of HR that most of us get to experience regularly and which we all hate. Like all bad systems, HR takes good people and turns them into bumfuzzled dolts.

Most people ascribe bad behaviors (i.e. behaviors that we don’t like) to some evil intent on the part of the person who is bothering you. Spend any amount of time with that same person outside the conflict context, however, and you will usually find that the other person is likable and reasonable. I have run into a lot of people who bug me, but very few who I think are genuinely bad (as in “Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Amin” bad). Likewise, it is trite and irresponsible to run around saying that HR is filled with social workers. It’s just as likely that they could be great capitalists in another system, but HR has a way of turning them into a cross between Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud.

It’s an important point to bring up, because I have seen many HR people leave HR and become successful in some other field or endeavor. I once reported to a gentleman who ran a very typical HR shop (e.g. Administrative Helper Therapy Victims). He then went on to be the GM of a large manufacturing division of the same company and did quite well. What was different about this fine fellow? HR as a system is a soul-sucking exercise in CYA futility, and running a P&L business really let him shine. That’s the difference.

We can sit around and blame the CEO and blame the client and blame… well, just about everybody, but we are the system, and the system is making us into Administrative Helper Therapy Victims:

Call with the Average Software Sales Person

Sales Person (SP): Hello, Mr. Hunter?

Me: Yes?

SP: I am with (fill in the blank software company) and I have GOOD NEWS to tell you about our solution, which is the number one in the market.

Me: How do you measure that?

SP: Excuse me?

Me: How do you measure “#1”? You’re not a public company so I can’t independently verify that you sell more product than your competition. You advertise with the magazine that just gave you that big award, so that’s not very helpful. I don’t hear much about you from people I respect. So what exactly does “#1” mean?

SP: Well sir, we are the most configurable system on the market.

Me: OK, so you don’t have an answer to the “What’s #1?” question. Got it. Now, how do you know that you have the most configurable system on the market?

SP: Well, we consistently get high marks from (fill in name of pundit or publication).

Me: Do you have an economic relationship with that (person / publication)?

SP: Excuse me?

Me: You know, do you pay them money before they say nice things about you?

SP: Oh I assure you sir, integrity is very important to our company.

Me: I’ll take that as a “yes.” So let’s examine integrity for a minute. Do you pay your sales people immediately upon closing the sale, or do you stagger the commission based on measurable customer satisfaction?

SP: Excuse me?

Me: Do your sales people get rich once the contract is signed, or do they only make their money once the customer actually achieves what you told him / her they were going to achieve?

SP: What does that have to do with anything sir?

Me: Well, you mentioned “integrity.” Integrity is when one’s words and one’s actions match. Companies that pay salespeople for closing a deal as opposed to customer success tell salespeople that they should do whatever it takes to close the deal, leaving the mess for the professional services team to clean up. But if a sales person’s personal success is aligned with the customer’s success, you are more likely to practice integrity as you obviously preach it. So which is it?

SP: Sir, our sales people are the best in the business. I assure you that they are absolutely committed to your success.

Me: Uh huh. Tell me please, what percentage of your customers that have been in operation for over six months picked up a phone and called a friend to recommend your system in the last month?

SP: Um, sir, we don’t keep those statistics.

Me: OK, how about this one. What is the average tenure of your sales professionals?

SP: Excuse me?

Me: You know, how long do the sales people hang around?

SP: What does that have to do with anything?

Me: My experience has been that sales people who sell a good product want to stick around because the margins are good, and their repeat business is a high percentage of sales, which means they make club faster which means they make money easier. Good sales people leave companies that sell crappy products because their percentage of repeat business to new business is low, which means their cost of sales is higher, which means it is harder to make their number. So they sell what they can and leave. Or the company hires bad sales people who hoodwink the prospects, get the company in deep puckey, and then split before their commission gets dinged. Either way, the longer your sales people stick around, the better it is for me. So how long have they been around?

SP: Sir, if I could just direct you to the fact that there is no better system on the market to handle your recruiting / compensation / hiring / onboarding needs…

Me: What are they?

SP: Excuse me?

Me: You can’t possibly know that your system is the best fit for my needs without knowing my needs. So what are they?

SP: Sir, our research shows that everyone is trying to (lower costs / get better data / implement faster / get leading edge technology).

Me: But I don’t have any of those problems. And by telling me that those are the problems you solve, you are telling me that you sell the same piece of commoditized junk that everyone else is selling. So, can you relate any of my problems to any of the uniqie features of your solution such that I will look like a genius for picking you and my company will sell more widgets in the marketplace?

SP: No, sir, but if you would let us come in an do a presentation I am sure we could figure that out together.

Me: OK, how much?

SP: Excuse me?

Me: How much of your commission am I going to get for helping you figure out how to sell to me?

Click... brrrrrrrrrrrrrr......

 

The Battle We (I) Have Been Waiting For

Originally this piece was published on Recruiting.com. I thought it was a wee-bit controversial so I asked Jason to publish anonymously. He agreed (you can his great intro here). But after my post yesterday about the battle between HR and the CFO I thought it worthwhile resurrecting it and taking ownership. So here is the deathmatch we all (or at least I) have been waiting for...

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Hi, I’m Bob Anweave, and I’m here with you tonight as the World Work Federation brings you an exciting cage bout. Money meets people in a head-on-head collision to see who will rule the capitalist ring. We are coming to you live from Wall Street, New York City, with an exclusive look at two powers, one mighty, one not, but both with lots of history to claim the right of “Capitalist Master.” In the far corner we have the People team, composed of the frail HRdini and the mighty Talentismo. And in front of us, wearing green silks and eye shades is team money: the diabolical CFOinster and his malevolent henchman, the Dark Lord of Treasury.

What do you think will happen here tonight Dave?

Dave: It’s not even a contest Bob. CFOinister and the Dark Lord of Treasury have been clubbing every corporate function team then have come up against. They left team IT reeling with their famous thoughtless over the shoulder “cost cutter” maneuver. The only team that looks like they can beat these demons is legal, and they are demanding that the World Work Foundation let them join team money. I would have to say this contest is money’s to lose Bob!