What? ANOTHER post on Fistful of Talent about basketball? Yep. And if I have anything to say about it (and I don’t), we will eventually require every post to be about basketball and will rename the site to ‘The 8 Man Rotation’. Besides, this post isn’t really about basketball but rather about what influences people, especially supremely talented people in …
Fear and Loathing on LinkedIn
This week the professional social networking site LinkedIn announced a new feature (initially) aimed at current college students, the LinkedIn Career Explorer. This new capability provides the student the ability to visualize potential career paths based on their field of study, search for relevant job opportunities, find and follow target companies matching their career aspirations, and discover and connect with …
BREAKING: PerformWorks to Buy TalentSoft.Com
The acquisitions and consolidation in the Human Capital Management (HCM) space keep coming hot and heavy, don’t they? Can you believe that PerformWorks, with its history of aggressive sales tactics and its cutthroat culture would be interested in the low-key, clever but under-the-radar set of solutions offered by TalentSoft? For the last couple of years, PerformWorks has been strategically …
Delivering Disappointment: Want Some Cold Fries With That?
You know what job sounds pretty cool? Professional advertising photographer. No, not a high fashion photographer who spends his days in exotic locations taking ‘action’ shots of the world’s top models garbed in the latest ‘you can’t really tell, but it is quite likely that swimsuit is see-through’ outfits. That would rise to the level of ‘incredibly awesome job’, a …
Why You Should Hire Mark Hurd
Bring me your hungry, your disgraced, your convicted – the wretched refuse stinking of scandal, desperate for another chance, for vindication, or perhaps for redemption. Of course by now you have heard, read up about, and quite possibly grown tired of the recent stories of ousted HP CEO Mark Hurd, rebel Jet Blue flight attendant Steven Slater, and ‘Jenny’, the …
The LeBron Effect: Downsizing at a Company Near You
Hey, did you hear the news about LeBron? In case you missed it ‘The Chosen One’ made ‘The Decision’ to leave his team of seven years, the Cleveland Cavaliers, to join Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh, and nine guys that look like Tim Sackett on the Miami Heat. This was huge news in the world of sports. Having the generally …
They Don’t Want a Relationship, They Just Want an ‘Apply Now’ Button
Each term, I survey the new students in my Human Resources Technology class about their experience with, and attitudes toward, many of the commonly found workplace tools and technologies that we cover in the course, and that they are likely to encounter in their professional HR lives. With each class, the survey results are reasonably consistent – one or two …
It’s Not About the Technology… Except When It Is.
‘It’s not about the technology’. ‘The technology should not be the first consideration in any Human Resources project’. ‘Decide what business problem you need to solve, only then start thinking about the technology’. Blah. Blah. Blah. I am sure you have heard (or said) many of these old chestnuts before. I am honestly getting sick of them. These arguments fail …
Potentially Catastrophic Workplace Experiments.
A close friend of mine recommended the new children’s book The Book of Potentially Catastrophic Science for my son thinking (correctly) that most nine-year old boys would be interested in and fascinated by the prospect of blowing things up, experimenting with gross and disgusting substances, and generally causing some good old-fashioned mayhem and turmoil (all in the name of science, of …
Clinging to What We Know – The Jar-Jar Binks Theory
If you are old enough to have seen the original in the series, ‘Star Wars’, in an actual theater, I’d be willing to bet that film, or one of the other ‘older’ films ‘The Empire Strikes Back’ or ‘Return of the Jedi’ is the one you would choose as your favorite. In the world of ‘Star Wars’ movies – most of us adults think older …