A Talentist

The Human Capitalist - "This is the New HR Leader"

Jason Corsello over at The Human Capitalist has a nice post around "Why CEO's are not Plug-and-Play." Jason says:

The new breed of (HR) executive leaders require new, multi-faceted capabilities including domain knowledge, technology understanding, vendor management skills, change management expertise, and regulatory and compliance knowledge.

I agree with Jason, but would add that more important than all of those things is a sound business sense and credibility with line management. Jason's specification is definitely a step-up from the "know compensation and benefits and be friendly" spec that you usually see. But HR will never have credibility in the board room until it can talk business from a talent perspective. Then your executive suite will be complete:

• CMO (business seen through the lens of the market)
• CSO (business seen through the lens of the customer)
• CFO (business seen through the lens of the bankers / capital markets)
• COO (business seen through the lens of the product)
• CTO (business seen through the lens of technology)
• CIO (business seen through the lens of information)
• CPO (business seen through the lens of the talent)

(And of course business seen through the lens of the machine tools and manufacturing process if that is your business.)

Each of these individuals is seeking to build competitive advantage for the company, but focuses on that problem through their individual lens. Business (and NOT finance) is the lingua-franca of the conversation between these parties, with each dissecting the business problem at hand from their organizational lens. In this model, strategy is the responsibility of all "C"s, and the strategy developed must be responsive to each of the realities (environmental and internal) perceived through their lens.

The CPO (Chief People Officer, only because CTO means Chief Technology Officer and therefore can't mean Chief Talent Officer) is responsible for finding, attracting, enlisting, aligning and educating the talent that the organization needs to have competitive advantage. But they can't do a good job at this if they don't understand the basics of business first: advantage, buyers, profits, etc. And since the CPO people encompasses all the other "C"s (since they are all people, regardless of how they act), the CPO has a special duty to be the person that facilitates the alignment and education of the senior management team, just as each of the other "C"s has a responsibility to align the other "C"s with the view they get through their lens.

Finally, in order to run the "people business" inside a company a leader needs all the capabilities that Jason discusses. But an HR leader can be good at all those competencies and still not able to make a compelling case to the other "C"s about why the talent lens is so critical to the rest of their businesses. That's why "understanding business" is every "C"s first responsibility.

Great Job Melinda!

I have never met Melinda White but after reading her article today I sure hope I do some day. And kudos to ERE for providing a place where thoughtful individuals like Melinda (and many others) can publish such great stuff.

Melinda said what I was trying to say with my post about Experience and Education. She just said it a lot better and a lot more clearly.

Thanks Melinda! Lunch is on me whenever you are in the Bay Area.

Fiddling with the Lights

In the 1920’s a bunch of organizational theorists were trying to figure out how lighting conditions affected worker productivity. So they went to the Western Electric plant in Hawthorne and started messing around with the lights. They increased the light level in the plant and the productivity went up. Then they reduced the light… and productivity went up again. They ended up by putting two workers in a dark closet with the door cracked. You guessed it – productivity was great.

The story is true, and while the conventional wisdom that arose from the study may be apocryphal, the lesson is important: pay attention to the workers and they do better work.

This story is called to mind by a certain ATS vendor’s (oh, sorry, “Talent Management System Application Provider”) recent proclamation that companies using their software are worth more than companies that don’t. The correlation is clear: use their software and you’ll get a better stock price, probably because worker productivity goes up when their software is “deployed properly.” ™

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.

Passive Candidate Email Acquisition - Does it Work?

Steven Rothberg of Collegerecruiter.com fame has started an interesting discussion over at ERE.

We use Jobster and are happy with it. As I said here, I don’t think the power of Jobster is the email networking piece. But we use that function, and so I like to keep track of the utility and effectiveness of it.

At this point I can only vouch for my own experience. I get a lot of referral network sourcing requests. I take a quick look at the email: if I know someone that is looking for a job that I care about and their skill set matches the job description, then I forward it on. But if I really have to do passive sourcing (as in, try to go convince someone that this is worth their while), I have to evaluate spending my time helping a recruiter do their job against spending that same time doing my own job. It’s a pretty utilitarian equation – where am I going to get the best return for my time. More often than not, doing my job takes priority over doing someone else’s. I tend to have the same reaction as Steve – the person who is asking for my help is getting something out of it… why shouldn’t I?

It might just turn out that passive candidate acquisition through email has the same exact problem that active candidate acquisition through posting on job boards does: there is an inverse relationship between the quality of the talent pool and the importance of the position. If “good people know good people”, and good people get tired of helping recruiters do their jobs, then you’ll just get referrals from people who aren’t that good (I assume that the counter-point of the “good people” proposition is “disinterested sloths hang out in bars with budding alcoholics who just like to steal paperclips” or something of the sort).

This isn’t true of Employee Referral Campaigns, for the very reason that the true “sourcer” gets paid for their efforts. I think that Jobster is a fantastic tool for ERPs, because the level of tracking and information management exceeds what I can get from other programs I have used. In addition, it cuts down on the work that the employee has to perform to tap into their network, so I am seeing better results than the old disconnected email blast approach.

As I stated in that previous post, I think that there may be a short shelf-life for passive candidate acquisition through email. But I continue to believe in Jobster (for the same reasons that I listed in that post), as well as the ERP management angle, and continue to be a happy customer of theirs. Only time will tell whether there is really an “email” issue, but if there is, I think the team at Jobster can figure it out. Right guys?

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 is Talentism?

CH finally did it. He goaded me into explaining what I mean by “Talentism.” (BTW – Love the new blog!) I have been struggling with getting a more detailed explanation down for a while so I might as well take a crack at it now.

First, someone told me recently that I often write like I am trying to make other people feel stupid. That is really not my intention. This is how I think about these things. Really smart people can take a difficult subject like this and make it easy to understand in one-sentence soundbytes. I am not nearly that smart.

Talentism means that talent is more valuable than money, which is more valuable than need. It’s better than capitalism, which values the holding and exchange of real capital (money), and it’s way better than consumerism (our present system of economics) in that it focuses on the production of value, not the fulfillment of need. It focuses people on how they can make the world a better place and it focuses companies on how they can help people achieve their best.

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.