Two posts on differentiated workforces and a third on personal reputation management In this week's Three To See.

Professor Dick Beatty of Rutgers University talks about the importance of differentiation in Be Strategic With Your Workforce on the HarvardBusiness YouTube Channel.

This clip leads into my next pick How and Why we Must Differentiate Talent, posted by Josh Bersin to The Business of Talent blog.

Bersin poses the following questions:

1. Who differentiates talent?
2. How do you differentiate?  Who are really the High Performers?
3. How do you create more of these High Performers?
4. So what does this mean to HR?

In his answers he refers to the challenge of identifying "pivotal" talent (a term that cropped up in "The New Science of Human Capital" featured in last week's Three To See) and a technique that he describes as "a "heat map" of the specific characteristics which "define" high-performing managers in this particular company."

In Matrix: Building and Managing Your Online Career Reputation (Unvarnished, LinkedIn, Blogs and More) web strategist Jeremiah Owyang offers advice on how to protect and develop a personal brand.

Owyang outlines the Control Rating, Opportunities, Risks and "What No One Tells You" about your online footprint, reference submissions, LinkedIn references, Unvarnished references and Google listings.  If you've not yet heard of Unvarnished, Owyand describes it as "a website where people you’ve worked with can leave anonymous comments about working with you, both good –and bad."

This is an interesting post that puts individuals in the same position as organisations in having to deal with the perceptions propogated by others - sometimes a welcome, solicited endorsement but at other times a much less welcome "anti-referral" - perhaps because it is negative, unsolicited or accidental (i.e not intended for public consumption) - another useful contribution to the online background checking debate.