You read a lot about talent acquisition (that’s what fancy people call recruiting) from consultants, agencies and analysts paid to attend conferences. Who don’t you hear from? Corporate Recruiters. Corporate recruiters, in the trenches everyday, knocking it out for companies everywhere. Not for commission (in some cases), but for the love of the company. For the love of connecting. For …
Have You Heard of Unit Testing in HR?
I have a friend named Shane Gray. He’s awesome. I’m not a technical person, but he introduced me to the concept of unit testing. Do you know anything about it? Building software is like cooking a beef stew. Let’s take Instagram, for example. It looks like a simple app, but it has subtle and not-so-subtle ingredients from other pantries called …
Showing Up: The Most Important Piece Of The Puzzle
No one at that dinner had been sleeping properly for weeks, and it wasn’t just the impossible heat of an impossibly long Auckland summer. My phone was ringing on the table, face down, slowly vibrating its way towards my lap. As it breached the edge the lit screen suddenly caught my eye in the darkness of the bistro, broke through …
Using Talent Data For The First Time… It’s Complicated.
Um, yeah. Talent Analytics, Data analysis, Big Data, Small Data. Heard about them? Of course you have. Lots of folks are on the HR circuit talking about data or selling tools so HR folks can better leverage data. Keep in mind, folks, lesson number one about HR data. It’s just like giving a turkey fryer to your cousin Eddie—make sure …
De-scaling Employee Engagement?
Scale. The holy grail of technology. Scale. What VCs look for in any new application, service, technology. Scale. The thing in the bathroom I avoid like the plague because I can’t avoid Twinkies. Scale. Does it scale? That’s the question everyone wants to know. It’s almost a religion today. Everything needs to scale. What do I mean by scale? I …
The Engagement Survey and The Democratization of Data
We’re in the midst of a major transition point in how we access and share information about our organizations. And not a small one mind you—this is more like the film-to-digital, flip phone-to-iPhone or CD-to-streaming music type of transition… where once you reach the other side, you ask yourself how you could have ever lived in that old world. When …
Would You Hire Any Of The Presidential Candidates For Your Company?
FOT Nation! I’m trying out a new app called Anchor.FM today. Anchor was one of the hottest stories to come out of this year’s SXSW and so far it looks like a fun way to drive conversations around a topic. It’s pretty simple. Download Anchor.fm to your iPhone (not Android app yet). Follow me. Then you can actually respond back with …
The Only Skill That Really Matters for Recruiting & Sourcing
While there’s been some slight advances in the tools and technologies available for finding top talent, even the most advanced systems are simply automating what the most effective sourcers and recruiters have always done and will always do, because you don’t need a matching algorithm, machine learning or even any professional certification or credentials to be a kick-ass sourcing pro. …
The HR Technology Nightmare That’s Keeping You Up At Night…
I saw a post on FB the other week for the venerable Gerry Crispin that gave me the shivers because it hit way too close to home. He shared the experience a friend of his in a Fortune 50 company went through when an external candidate contacted them and requested to be “unsubscribed.” So what happened next? They… Manually deleted him from their …
In Case You Are Not Done Shopping, I’d Like A Flip Phone For Christmas
So Christmas is a couple of days away, and I bet if you are actually reading this today it is only to provide a brief respite from your crazed last-minute preparations (if you are someone who celebrates the holiday) or your internal seething of having to be stuck at work picking up the slack for everyone else who has already …