Three to See this week looks into the "near present" with posts on the blurring of the physical and digital worlds, CV mash-ups and Generation-Y in the workplace.
Pranav Mistry's talk for TED: The thrilling potential of SixthSense technology is truly awesome. Mistry has been working to develop ways of bringing the physical and digital world together and has succeeded with SixthSense Technology. Watch the clip:
In Mash-Up my Career on Digital Recruiting, Sinead Bunting makes the connection between the CV or Resume and new mapping tools that allow individuals to tag their personal history, experience or aspirations to a location. Bunting suggests that in the future candidates will be logging their career history not on CV's or Resume's but will instead create "a 3G biography" or "digital Career portfolio" that includes this type of information.
After reading the post I realised that, almost without thinking, I've been laying the foundations for the kind of mash-up journal described - every photo or video tagged or event RSVP'd represents a stop-off in my own trail across the Earth - some of which I share professionally and some personally. I'm interested to know what recruiters make of this - will information presented in the way described by Bunting help to make sourcing and selection decisions?
My third pick this week comes from Jason Seiden: This Is Bullsh**t: Managing Generations. Seiden opens the post with the statement "Picking your managerial approach based on someone's birthday is astrology not strategy". This is a fantastic and provocative piece in which Seiden argues that organisations should worry less about perceived differences in generations because they are not actionable and are masked by others factors such as:
I enjoyed Peter Gold's contribution Recruitment 20??: You will sell "product" which appeared on his Social Recruiting Blog. For a long time I've been intrigued by the candidate "aftermarket" concept and the game theory surrounding it. On one hand, for some types of role, the aftermarket provides simple advantages to job seekers (quicker and easier access to employment) and to primary recruiting and secondary recruiting organisations (lower costs) but on the other hand, huge complexity, for example:
Primary recruiting organisation (PRO) - the talent pool trade off. At which point would a PRO be happy to release an "also ran" to another organisation? How does it choose its SRO community? Would the PRO prefer to recommend an "also ran" to its SRO community rather than see that candidate hired by a competitor?
Secondary recruiting organisation (SRO) - aligning supply. How closely do the sourcing and screening practices of the PRO align to those of the SRO? What is the selection/quality gap between the two organisations? Are there "no approach" agreements between the PRO and SRO if an appointment is made?
Candidate - the engagement question. Could the candidate have the same level of committment/desire for the SRO? If appointed would the candidate achieve the same level of performance? Would the candidate be accepted by other employees? How would the offer to recommend affect the candidates perception of the PRO and SRO?
In the UK University system, "clearing" is an established principle that matches students that failed to secure a place at their first-choice institution because of disappointing grades to vacancies at another. As an example of the application of the aftermarket concept based on selection criteria, I'd be interested to know what the Assessment community makes of introducing the concept to the workplace.
My third pick: On Twitter and in the Workplace, It's Power to the Connectors by Rosabeth Moss Kanter appeared on the Harvard Business Publishing blog. This is a great post on the relationship between social capital and power. In the post Kanter argues that when it comes to getting things done an individual's social networks or "spheres of influence" has more sway than their status within an organisation.
"This changes the nature of career success. It is not enough to be technically adept or even to be interpersonally pleasant. Power goes to the "connectors": those people who actively seek relationships and then serve as bridges between and among groups. Their personal contacts are often as important as their formal assignment. In essence, "She who has the best network wins."
Perhaps not a new concept - the rainmaker, the agent, the broker or fixers like Pulp Fictions' Mr Wolf, have long been features of corporate life but Kanter suggests that every individual can bring their networks to bear in the workplace echoing the sentiments from one of the contributions in my post last week.
This week's Three To See is solely social with posts on the decline of the website as the single point of online audience engagement and the need for organisations to embrace Enterprise 2.0.
Hepburn provides some interesting graphs, such as the one above, that shows the rise in social media traffic (red line) against the decline in traffic to destination websites (blue line) and suggests that the reasons for these trends are:
"Social Networks (obviously) are growing and most people prefer to hang out there instead of searching the big brands websites for content to interact with. Your friends on Facebook and Twitter share what you’re already interested in. Everything is relevant and you don’t have to leave to get the best content from 10 of your favourite brands / websites.
Off-Site Content Distribution is rapidly growing, I’m talking RSS Feeds, Twitter, YouTube Channels, Facebook Fan pages and so on… All the best brands and websites now actively push their content (the same stuff you use to get from their website and still want to access) to as many various “off-site” sources and platforms as possible.So naturally this removes unique visitors from their main sites, channeling them into a maze of various networks, feeds and tweets…Oh, and ofcourse, widgets/apps – we’ve only just seen the start of these."
In the post Hepburn goes on to make observations about what organisations need to do to connect with target audiences in an increasingly distributed environment and what that means for the corporate website and microsites.
In The Uber-Connected Organization: A Mandate for 2010 posted to Harvard Business Publishing this week, Jeanne C Meister and Karie Willyerd put forward an excellent case for organisations sponsoring use of social media, citing three business benefits:
Access to social media improves productivity
Companies that provide access to social media create a more engaged workforce
Millenials will seek jobs that encourage the use of social media
The last of these points reminded me of something that I heard at the HR Technology Conference - Day 1. In the HR Technology Doesn't Stop In a Down Economy session a panellist was describing a conversation with a candidate who was adamant that he needed access to his social network at work, explaining that he had attended a top University, then completed his MBA at another prestigious institution and not having access to such a valuable support group could hamper his performance. I think its a great point - by the same token, would organisations stop employees from interacting with peers in other organisations such as professional bodies?
If you don't buy the arguments put forward by Meister and Willyerd, there are useful references to related research in a recent whitepaper from Messagelabs: Is Social Networking Really Bad For Business?
The whitepaper (available through Computing.co.uk) not only suggests some of the benefits of Enterprise 2.0 but also highlights some of the risks in terms of productivity, cost, security, legal and brand impacts.
The paper concludes that use of social tools in the work place is unavoidable and that organisations need to accept this and develop sensible and acceptable ways of mitigating the risk.
The majority of HR-related-posts about the "evils of social media" tend to be based around the issues of trust and productivity and so I have to ask - are these the concerns of organisations that lack appropriate performance management processes?
In the post Bennett makes the point that executives have accepted the need to develop measuring and analysing skills, especially for financial management, yet HR pro's are not using them to measure talent, suggesting that "HR labors under the false assumption that everybody else has “precise numbers”.”
Hebert offers advice on how organisations can avoid "gaming the system" or inadvertently fostering an attitude where "the ends justify the means":
"Marry your outcome based goals with behavioral goals to keep the program in check. The behaviors - the things the individual can control - should bear the weight of the program.
Putting too much of the award on the outcome communicates you don't care how they hit the goal - just that they hit it."
In the post Adler argues that "Quality of Hire" is a much more important measure than "Cost per Hire" because it takes account of the downstream impact of the individual on the organisation - an impact, whether negative or positive, that could far outweigh the costs associated with recruiting that individual.
So, what did I take from this week's Three To See? When choosing what to measure, make sure that the implementation of the metrics has been thought through and that the value of the analysis is understood by those being measured and those using the data.
