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Isometric Contributions for GitHub

Improve your GitHub experience with this extension

Isometric Contributions is a free tool for GitHub, created by Jason Long and currently available as a Chrome Extension. The tool allows you to transform the contributions graph on your GitHub profile. With the extension, the graph allows you to toggle between the standard 2-D graph and a new 3-D version.

The 3-D graph displays your contributions is a way that is both easier to read and more visually appealing. It changes the standard squares on the graph into 3-dimensional towers, which shows how large your contributions are. Additionally, the new graph conveniently displays your:

Longest contribution streak
Current contribution streak
Number of yearly contributions
Busiest day of contributions

Having all this information so easily accessible gives insight that was previously unavailable and makes a bigger impact on the viewer. Additionally, the ability to easily toggle between the new graph and the default means that nothing is being lost with the new tool.

Though it is primarily a visual tool, Isometric Contributions can help you better understand your use of GitHub. The tool is not life-changing, but it is simple and helpful, and can improve your GitHub experience. ~Noel Cocca

See what Dean Da Costa has to say below.

Machine Learning, AI, and You: When Will Sourcers Be Replaced?

The answer to the question “When will machine learning replace recruiters?” is highly subjective. For hiring managers and recruiters who are adept at relationships the answer is never. For others? Well, it’s not going to be tomorrow, but …

Kevin Wheeler, founder and president of the Future of Talent Institute knows that artificial intelligence (AI) – the concept of using machines and algorithms to source and hire candidates – is here to stay. He is less than effusive in its praise, however.

“AI will get better, but right now, AI tools are really stupid,” Wheeler told the audience at CareerBuilder’s 2017 Empower conference. According to SHRM.org, he insisted that no recruiter will be replaced by machine learning in the next five years.

“Some low-level, repetitive jobs may be in danger, but we still need people to make decisions,” Wheeler said.

What does AI do for recruiters?

Artificial Intelligence tools improve time to hire and reduce cost of hire by searching through the plethora of data that active and passive candidates share online. It can look at social profiles, resumes and portfolios, for example. The cost element is quite possibly the most crucial of its benefits. As reported by SHRM, Link Humans CEO Jorgen Sundberg estimates that the cost of finding and onboarding each new employee can run as high at $240,000.
To an applicant tracking systems (ATS), AI can add intelligence, allowing recruiters to much more quickly move through hundreds or thousands of applications for an open position, and to more accurately gauge candidates’ fit for the job. It does so by assessing current-employee performance and turnover rates and their on-the-job experiences, candidate qualifications and skills, and even by searching public sources of information about previous employers. It can, for example, weed out candidates whose salary requirements or personalities are not a good fit.
It can schedule interviews, taking into consideration time conflicts of interviewer as well as candidate.
While still somewhat in its infancy, AI can retain, organize and search a database of candidate information from prior job postings, to help find the right person for a new position.
AI can enable virtual-interview capabilities such as video and chat bots.

Where do humans fit in the process?

As the days of post and pray fade into the hiring sunset, smart employers build talent communities, network at conferences, offer free Webinars, and lure prospective hires for current and future jobs with entertaining, tantalizing, informative, and even amusing social contacts. These persuasive functions cannot be duplicated by artificial intelligence. While some of the technical aspects of attracting candidates can be automated, keeping passive candidates and other prospective employees engaged with your firm on an ongoing basis requires human touch.

Lysha Holmes, founding director of Qui Recruitment, believes that empathy and trust are critical elements of hiring that cannot be replaced by machine functions.

“AI can never hope for a candidate to get their best job; cannot express their opinion or expertise to a client about whether to hire a candidate,” Holmes wrote in her Undercover Recruiter article, “5 Reasons Why AI Will Never EVER Replace Recruiters.”

“If you think about your placements, how many of them come from just knowing that your client will love your candidate and very often they don’t match on paper, but you rely on the history you have built up of both parties and the culture fit,” she wrote. “AI cannot experience a culture or a personality.”

Leela Srinivasan, CMO at SurveyMonkey, highly values AI as a hiring tool. Nevertheless, she is confident no machine learning will replace recruiters.

“AI will save recruiters a ton of time automating simple tasks, stack ranking resumes and more,” she told Undercover Recruiter.

The time saved by AI can be put to excellent, and irreplaceable use, according to Srinivasan, in building rapport and relationships.

“The bots won’t be taking over those aspects of their jobs any time soon,” she said.

The ironic advantage of artificial intelligence and other human resource automation is the creation of new jobs for HR professionals. Robert Bolton, partner at global business network KPMG, on the Personnel Talent Webinar AI’s Impact on Recruitment and Workplace, predicted several new positions. One mentioned was Robotics Capability Manager, to maintain an employer or employer client’s recruitment bots and AI solutions.

“Technology does get rid of jobs -it’s a simple fact of life,” Indeed senior manager of employer insights Matt Burney told that same audience. On the plus side, Burney said, HR technology can act as an efficient matchmaker, eliminating unconscious bias in recruiting, and liberating employees to focus their efforts on the human side of hiring.

Burney discussed a recent Indeed survey of applicants that made it clear why humans are still needed to lure candidates. While 58 percent of survey participants said that digital tools such as AI made it more convenient to apply and interview, 57 percent decried communication obstacles. Close to half of the respondents complained that automation made the application process too impersonal.

“Time and time again, we hear of [candidates] disappearing into a black hole, and not hearing back from recruiters,” Burney said. “We can be more accountable as recruiters. We can also be more transparent. We can actually let them know what’s happening to them, and why.”

These recommended tasks can only be accomplished by humans, he said.

Conclusion

Recruiters should welcome, rather than fear, artificial intelligence and other machine-learning products and tools for hiring. If, that is, they’re doing well the most ‘human’ elements of their jobs – personal connections with prospective candidates. AI as an aid to filling job openings is about efficiency, which aids recruiters and hiring managers in their quest to not only find the best candidate but find her or him before competitive employers do so.

Where recruiters are essential, no matter the number and quality of their recruiting programs and tools, is in the personalization and ongoing engagement with prospective candidates. A recruiter who fails to engage can, indeed, be replaced by AI and other automated processes. A top-notch recruiter who maintains cordial, personable, and timely contact with applicants and prospective hires never will be.

Google Enhancement Suite

Speed up sourcing and recruiting with this Google add-on

The Google Enhancement Suite, created by loftyshaky and available in the Chrome extension web store, adds a great deal of function to the Google search tool. The suite provides a variety of options to users, including infinite scrolling, site icon display, and color-coding, and more.

Once the extension is added, you can right-click on the icon to bring up the options.

The infinite scrolling option eliminates the necessity to click from page to page; instead, all sites are shown in a constant stream.
Choose to have the search bar remain at the top of the screen while you scroll, have the search show site icons directly next to the links, and even color code keywords to make them stand out in the search.
Have the ability to display the server locations for each site.
Another great feature is the ability to customize an image search. You can choose to have the option to download, view, search by, or copy the link to an image directly from the search page, saving you time and energy.
One of the best parts of the Google Enhancement Suite is that it is a low-resource extension. It packs a lot of capability into a simple add-on and allows you to eliminate other, now-redundant, tools from your browser.

The Suite is a great resource when doing research, searching through resumes, or really anything else. It simplifies the search process, helps you easily pinpoint exactly what you’re looking for, and allows you to customize your Google experience! ~Noel Cocca

See what Dean Da Costa has to say below:

Scheduling sucks – but it doesn’t have to

Stop us if you’ve lived this nightmare before:

You have a couple of great candidates in your current recruiting process, at least per top-of-funnel evaluations.
You want to get them in front of a hiring manager or technical expert/team member to see what they truly know and advance the process.
Then the cycle begins.
“Does Tuesday at 10 work?” – “Well normally it does but I have something then.”
“What about 1pm Tuesday?” – “Lunch with an old mentor.”
On and on and on.

Scheduling is a massively time-consuming part of any recruiter’s ecosystem and average day — studies on this vary, but in general many recruiters claim that about 65% of their time is taken up by these types of repetitive tasks that need to get done in order to advance the process, but never seem to get done in any type of streamlined way.

This shouldn’t necessarily be surprising, however — many studies about human beings and time management reveal that humans generally don’t use their time very effectively, often opting for seemingly “urgent” tasks over tasks of true priority. This has gotten worse with the rise of digital and mobile; since so much of mobile is about alerts and pings, it can distract recruiters (or any professional) from more pressing strategic work to a constant barrage of emails about whether Tuesday 10am or Thursday 1pm is better.

What do we do?

One of the best approaches for your brain is to view things in terms of “The Eisenhower Matrix,” which looks like this:

In other words, you have too much to juggle as is and scheduling doesn’t have to be such a big part of that. (At least it shouldn’t be.) There are only so many things you can delegate to technology to handle throughout the day – and scheduling isn’t something that you can risk being wrong (ever). It’s something that requires time and attention – but again, this shouldn’t a major part of what you’re juggling.

Figuring this out is hard for professionals. We have bosses, they have needs, our candidates have needs, we have needs, and there’s only so much time in the day. Work is stressful as is — and time-consuming — and while no one is trying to make it more stressful (you’d hope), the desire to schedule out everything and please everyone in the process can make for lots of anxiety.

Beyond thinking about priority and “urgency” differently, the next step is involving technology. The tech stack for recruiters has gotten to a place with a healthy dose of automation tools, so that some of these balls we’re dropping — interview scheduling, candidate feedback, where they stand in the process — can be handled with a simple program setup.

Change your mindset and change your tech stack and maybe the anxiety associated with scheduling will go away.

We want to hear your thoughts – take this brief survey and let us know how you feel about scheduling.

The awesome contents of this article are sponsored by our friends at Clara Labs.

It’s time to be more honest about WHY you need a specific hire

I realize that job role is often unclear at most companies, and the hiring process is usually fairly broken, but I think it would make sense if we were a bit more honest about what exactly we expect from new hires.

Let me root some of this in research

A couple of important things to know at the beginning:

In the U.S., entrepreneurship just hit a 40-year low
Productivity is not doing too much better:

Most companies are actually becoming more bureaucratic

Now, this is confusing to a lot of people. We hear about companies like Facebook and Google in every business article ever written. All of us seem to have fast phones and cool new tech/apps come out every day. So why is everything seemingly so fast and innovative, but companies are becoming more bullshit-laden every day? Here’s one good hot take via Greg Satell:

To many, this is surprising because we seem to see innovation all around us, from smarter smartphones to speakers that talk to us and respond to our commands. However, the truth is that information and communication technology makes up only 6% of advanced economies. Silicon Valley can’t build the future alone.

True.

So, companies are increasingly bureaucratic…

… and look, even though we should be changing that and making them more innovative and having self-contained entrepreneurial hubs, we need to look at the reality. Well, two realities.

A lot of managers just want box-checkers. They want to get projects off their plate and have them handled without any fires or brushback. They don’t want “innovation hubs.” The game is slicing down your to-do list and getting home at a semi-reasonable time.
Bureaucracy rises up because it makes it easier to make money without having to actually make decisions. That’s comforting to millions of people.

How does this all tie to hiring?

We tend to open a lot of white-collar hiring processes and say we’re looking for …

“Innovative”
“Entrepreneurial”
“A-Player”
“Hit the ground running”
“Collaborator”
“Out of the box thinker”

… but look at everything above. We’re not headed in that direction. We’re actually headed the other way.

And look, some roles are fucking drone jobs. It’s unfortunate, and it shouldn’t be — this is why automation concerns so many people — but some jobs are just mindless spreadsheet-updating and PowerPoint-creation, and then the people with real authority barely glance at those assets.

If you think I’m just ranting, cool. The New Yorker, who is more respected than I am, just covered this too.

(Some of the problem here is how we structure jobs, of course. A social media manager should be a powerful person. In some forward-thinking companies, they are. At most places it’s a complete drone job.)

But look, if you want a drone employee, make the salary low and go get an early-career person who will check your boxes and hopefully not screw up a lot. That’s it. Stop couching everything in buzzwords. If you know the actual boss of this person will barely if ever speak to the employee because he/she won’t face anything tied to the boss’ incentives, NOTE THAT.

“This is an entry-level, early career-stage position without a lot of major responsibility, although you will be a member of a solid team and there is some room for advancement…”

We need to be more transparent about what people are getting into

So much of hiring is rooted in lies that we now have words for it, like:

“Employer branding.”
“Behavioral interview questions.”

It’s largely all a dog and pony dance whereby one side claims how hard they work (they’ll ask for PTO on Day 2.25) and one side claims how innovative and employee-centric they are (if revenue erodes on your third week, you’re gonna get laid off before you qualify for health insurance).

Why not just be honest?

We need a drone here.
We need some boxes checked.
We’re not really going to respect you, and we know you’re job-seeking too, but while we got each other, let’s try to make it work.

Actions speak louder than words anyway, right? But what if the words around what was needed in hiring were just a bit more honest?

Transferring knowledge across generations

What happens to decades of knowledge when employees retire?

As Baby Boomers move into retirement, field service organizations scramble to transfer knowledge from seasoned pros to the next generation of workers. This is especially important as the hiring pool for field service organizations dwindles—The Manpower Group found that 40% of employers have difficulty filling roles, and skilled trade positions – electricians, carpenters, welders, etc. – are the hardest to fill.

Without a proper strategy to ensure that tribal knowledge is shared with younger generational workers, companies suffer from both a decrease in the number of workers and a decrease in the level of talent and expertise. To avoid this, companies are carrying out initiatives and investing in technology to ensure they successfully transfer knowledge to new hires before veteran workers retire or leave.

How does corporate knowledge loss impact your business?

Knowledge is an important building block of any company’s competitive advantage. But unless knowledge is effectively shared among employees, it can’t be fully utilized.

In the field service industry, seasoned technicians with years of job experience are the gatekeepers of their company’s knowledge. When they turnover or retire, it can severely impact the business if a plan isn’t in place to ensure their know-how is passed on to other employees.

According to the Harvard Business Review, there are four areas in particular where businesses feel the most pain from expert departures:

Relationships – experts know who the other experts are, as well as when to use them
Reputation – customers may doubt your company’s capabilities if their experience with a newer employee doesn’t compare to their experience with a former, more seasoned employee
Re-work – new hires have to spend time learning things the departing employee already knew (regardless of how much new knowledge that new employee brings)
Regeneration – innovation is often built on years of experience and expertise with a particular product or service, so losing seasoned employees can impact the development of new ideas

These pain points translate to dollars lost—HBR found that the cost associated with losing subject matter experts could be estimated at up to 20 times higher than typical recruitment and training costs.

5 Practical Ways to Transfer Knowledge Across Generations

Creating a formal offboarding process is crucial to protecting tribal knowledge from literally walking out the door. Without a formalized process, knowledge transfer often takes a backseat to more time-sensitive priorities.

While capturing employee knowledge during offboarding should be part of the process, successful companies begin to transfer knowledge from expert technicians well before they give notice and get ready to depart. The following 5 ideas ensure that knowledge is captured and shared continuously throughout an employee’s career.

1. Leverage technology to connect the dispersed workforce

In many field service organizations, technicians are spread across cities and states, always on the move to the next job. They don’t get much face time with their coworkers and have no way to feel connected to the organization the way that office workers do. Connecting and empowering field service workforces with new technology is crucial on multiple levels. It gives your company an advantage when recruiting new hires who are naturally tech-savvy. It boosts engagement and retention levels, and it provides a mechanism for teams to share on-the-job knowledge and hacks.

Communication and collaboration technology plays a big role in field service today—giving teams a way to get work done and a way to socialize and get to know each other without needing to be face to face. These connections (that should be backed up with intermittent in-person meetings) are crucial in getting employees to feel comfortable with each other so that they are more likely to ask for help and advice on how to do something.

This can also be influenced by a culture of connectivity. When effective communication and collaboration is part of the job every day, employees will feel more of a responsibility to share knowledge. This is especially true when accountability is built into their communication app with read receipts.

2. Start new hires off with in-person job shadowing

Job shadowing is a popular onboarding technique that allows employees to learn the ropes from an experienced coworker. When executed well, job shadowing can set employees up for lasting success.

It’s important to match new technicians with seasoned pros who are willing and excited to share what they’ve learned over the years and provide hands-on learning. Depending on the new hire’s experience, job shadowing could last a few days or few weeks. Even if new technicians have previous experience, there are still new types of equipment to get familiar with, company processes and protocols to learn, managers and teammates to get to know, technology to learn, and so on.

Adding job shadowing to your company’s formal onboarding process is a great way to transfer knowledge from the very get-go. The next step is to make this kind of learning available throughout your technicians’ careers.

3. Create an employee mentoring program for continued learning

Setting up a formal mentoring program is a great way for different generations to learn from each other and ensure knowledge is continuously transferred from subject-matter experts to the next generation of workers.

Managers can match highly knowledgeable field engineers with newcomers and establish a schedule of regular 1:1s or on-the-job training. A successful mentor program hinges on finding experienced employees who want to join. Try to create hype around the program, perhaps frame it as an exciting opportunity for them to be teachers and mentors and get to know the team. It often turns out that relationships become reciprocal, with experienced employees learning just as much as the younger ones, particularly in terms of new technology.

4. Send out quarterly “critical incidents” surveys and share the results

Quarterly or monthly “critical incident” sharing is a great way to keep the information flowing while also being able to document knowledge and store it in the company’s content repository.

The idea behind this is to send out surveys to veteran employees where they describe the most difficult situations they’ve ever encountered on the job, why they were so difficult, and what they did to resolve them. The answers can then be collated together into a document that is shared with all technicians. Additionally, insights from such survey results can be used to create new training curricula.

5. Encourage employees to use troubleshooting groups

When technicians are on the job and run into a new issue, troubleshooting and expert hotline groups are a powerful way to get immediate answers and share pro tips. On the field team’s communication app, there are a variety of ways to set up help groups.

One option is to have a designated help group, such as “Save My Bacon,” where all field technicians are members and know that if a question comes through—say a customer is in jeopardy—it needs to be answered ASAP. And in conjunction, there could be a less urgent group such as “Pro Hacks” where technicians share tips and tricks about how they solve customer problems. For larger companies with thousands of field service workers, creating smaller groups specific to certain regions or products can be much more manageable.

Another option is to create even more targeted troubleshooting groups that are staffed by subject-matter experts where technicians can message in for help. These groups allow technicians to get 1:1 help from the person who has the right knowledge without needing to know who that person is beforehand. These conversations can be exported and collated into a document every quarter to generate improved training materials and increase the amount of captured tribal knowledge.

Build knowledge sharing into the fabric of your business

As your skilled workforce ages and begins to retire, it’s imperative that their knowledge is transferred to the next generation of technicians, as well as is captured by the company and leveraged for improved training and onboarding.

Mobile-first communication technology, on-going programs and a culture that values and encourages peer-to-peer knowledge sharing are key to ensuring knowledge isn’t lost as employees retire or turnover.

This is … America?

Has some of the below info/research about polarization seeped into your recruiting, hiring, or sourcing funnels?

I’ll say this: some have recently called us “The United States of Nervous Wrecks,” and we’ve got research that this is one of the most socially-isolated, lonely times in American history. Even if you don’t vote — i.e. more than half of you — it’s hard to argue the 2016 Presidential election wasn’t a microcosm of all this. Each side was screeching at each other, there was hate/fake news everywhere, and ultimately the more-qualified candidate didn’t respond to the reality of the situation and lost to the lesser-qualified candidate. Now pregnancy is a pre-existing condition. Go figure.

This all ties to political polarization.

This stuff happens all over the world — see the French election just yesterday? — but in America, it’s a unique mess. But why?

Reason 1 and 2 on U.S. political polarization

Here’s Jonathan Rodden, a Stanford political science professor, doing some research on geography and politics in the U.S. A summary of that research is then here, including this section:

Rodden says that this battle pitting a set of urban interests against a set of rural interests didn’t happen overnight and isn’t unique to American politics. However, the severity of the problem is. This, he argues, largely stems from the fact that American politics is dominated by only two parties and features a geographic system of representation. As long as this geographic polarization continues and Democrats remain an urban party, he says, they will continue to be dramatically underrepresented in legislative bodies.

OK. So specific American issues:

Two-party system
Geographic style of representation

Can we fix this?

Are these problems going away anytime soon?

Probably not. There are possibilities for the U.S. to move beyond a two-party system, but it probably won’t happen in the next few cycles. The geographic style of representation isn’t going anywhere either.

Most of these discussions ultimately land on gerrymandering or re-districting, which helps sometimes but exacerbates the problem more often than not. This Rodden professor actually argues that winner-take-all districts will always benefit the GOP, and always hurt Democrats. He says we’d need a redistricting process that emphasizes parity. That ain’t arriving anytime soon.

So, 2020, 2024, 2028 … will political polarization end? Probably not. In fact, it’s likely to get worse before it gets better.

If you view every President as a reaction to the previous eight years, which is often the case, one thing to note would be Trump’s successor is likely to be super-liberal. That will intensify the ire of the right, increasing political polarization again.

One more money quote on political polarization

From Rodden again:

“There is nothing about population density that automatically generates this kind of cleavage. There are lots of places that have cities and suburbs and rural areas — and suburbanization is not just an American phenomenon,” he says. “But single-member-district, majoritarian systems that produce two parties that hate each other — that’s the worst of all worlds.”

The dominant society on Earth right now is, in some ways, “the worst of all worlds.” That’s comforting.

Any path through this?

Not anytime soon. But over time, here’s what we’d need:

Education has to matter: Right now, the importance of education is major lip service — because it can’t make old rich white guys richer. But if education sucks, people don’t know how to distinguish fact from opinion. Without that skill + continued increases in technology, we’ll all just continue to retreat into bubbles. Bubbles create political polarization when combined with district-laying decisions.

Seek out new ideas: Very hard to do this these days, but it’s crucial.

Make yourself knowledgeable about candidates and issues: Again, bubbles are the foe. But many non-profits and advocacy groups put out unbiased candidate guides/packets. Find and read them. Share them with others. This might make you vote cross-party on 1-2 elections, which would reduce political polarization a bit.

Try to escape your confirmation bias: Again, a challenge — but also crucial.

Anything else you’d add on the current climate of political polarization? Or how it impacts your recruiting processes?

Understand the core of inclusion

Inclusion in the workplace, at its core, is about hiring and promoting without consideration of a candidate or worker’s gender and / or ethnic group.

Entrepreneur and Forbes Magazine contributor Anna Johannson described diversity and inclusion (D&I) programs as “designed to include more people from minority groups and non-majority cultures in active discussions and decision making, allowing more perspectives for consideration within an organization, and more influence from previously overlooked groups.”

Inclusion must expand beyond its core, however, for a firm to take full advantage of workforce productivity and creativity.

StubHub North America business operations leader Bari A. Williams explained, in her Fortune Magazine article Eight Ways to Measure Diversity that have Nothing to do with Hiring.

“Diversity gets people into the room, but inclusion keeps them there,” Williams wrote. “True diversity is about more than just numbers; it must come with a heavy dose of inclusion. That means a company must be intentional about creating and fostering a culture where everyone has a seat at the table, not just entry to the room to watch as a bystander.”

Amir Ashkenazi, Founder & CEO of talent marketplace Uncommon, agrees that employers cannot just look at a firm’s staff and decide that its variety of skin color equates to successful diversity and inclusion.

“You have to look at education, geography, family and so forth,” he told attendees on Teamable’s Unwrapping the Core of Inclusion Webinar. “If we have a team of four and one is black, one is white, one is Hispanic, and one is Asian, but everyone went to Harvard, everyone loves basketball, and everyone has children, then the conversation this group has probably won’t be innovative.”

Knowing your firm is inclusive requires careful measurement, of course. But just how do you measure? What’s the formula?

Measuring Inclusion

The traditional D&I measurement is a simple workforce head count; that is, a close-to-equal percentage of each ethnic group or race among employees, and staff evenly divided by gender. Many human resource experts stress that this doesn’t go far enough.

Nzinga Shaw, Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer for the Atlanta Hawks, is the NBA’s (National Basketball Association) first diversity leader. Having held similar positions at the NFL (National Football League), Essence Magazine, and elsewhere, her inclusion experience is vast.

Shaw decried the headcount measurement process to the Teamable audience.

“[You have to look at] are they staying, are they getting into senior level positions,” she said. “When you have people impacting the bottom line and making and driving business decisions you know you’ve reached inclusion.”

Johansson concurred.

“There’s no set of numerical data that can accurately tell you how influential a given minority group is within an organization, or how seriously their ideas are considered in a meeting,” she wrote in How Can You Measure Diversity and Inclusion Results? Millennials Have An Idea. “Even if you have a handful of board members representing minority groups, it means nothing if they aren’t taken as seriously by the rest of the team.”

The suggestions of the millennials she surveyed:

Measure each person’s title and level within a company, to show how much relative power they have.
Measure how often they attend pivotal meetings, or how much they’re involved in key decision-making processes, such as documenting the makeup of your core hiring team.

The New York City-based Center for Talent Innovation measures firms’ inclusion by way of internal company surveys, focus groups, and one-on-one interviews with staff. The non-profit, which conducts ground-breaking research to leverage talent across gender, generation, geography and culture, evaluates inclusion according to four criteria:

Authenticity – Workers being true to what they are, without work reprisal. The Center found this an especially thorny problem in the tech industry. Its Accelerating Female Talent in Science, Engineering and Technology study determined that, for women in these industries, acting “like a man” provided a leadership advantage. For its Cracking the Code: Executive Presence and Multicultural Professionals study, 37 percent of surveyed African-Americans and Hispanics and 45 percent of Asians reported that conforming to their company’s style and demeanor standard required that they “compromise their authenticity.”
Inclusive leadership –In her Harvard Business Review article Diversity Doesn’t Stick Without Inclusion, the Center’s co-president Laura Sherbin shared the six behaviors of inclusive leadership:

Ensuring that workers speak up and are heard
Making it safe for any staff member to propose new ideas
Empowering staff to make decisions
Taking advice and implementing feedback
Giving actionable feedback
Sharing credit for team success

Networking and visibility – Members of minority or disadvantaged groups participating on teams and in work projects that give them prominence in the firm. To make this happen, Sherbin recommended sponsorship, defined as a senior-level firm leader to elevate the worker’s visibility within the firm, and advocate for the protégé’s team assignments and promotions.
Clear career pathing – The firm clarifies to all workers the processes for advancement.

Bari A. Williams studies the following StubHub criteria: If two people with the same experience and education are hired as peers, are their titles and pay equal? Do minorities have to “count more wins” than everyone else to get promoted? How integrated and influential are employee resource/affinity groups (ERGs) in the company?

Experts agree that a company’s diversity and inclusion efforts must be top-down to succeed.

Ashkenazi stressed that the best executive buy-in eliminates the attitude that diversity is charity.

“It’s not just the right thing to do, but the right thing to do for your business,” he said. “If all your staff is the same race and color, all your customers aren’t well represented. The best way to talk about it is coming from the impact inclusion makes on the business.”

“Diversity without inclusion is a story of missed opportunities, of employees so used to being overlooked that they no longer share ideas and insights,” Sherbin warned. “But diversity with inclusion provides a potent mix of talent retention and engagement.”

Evidence abounds that diversity and inclusion are indeed good for business.

In its 2018 Delivering Through Diversity study, McKinsey researchers determined that the most diverse and inclusive of the 365 participating companies outperformed their less diverse competitors by 35 percent. Business management software provider Cloverpop, in its 2017 study of 200 companies and their project management teams found business decisions improved by 73 percent with gender diversity, and a whopping 87 percent when diversity included age and geography. Inclusive teams cut their decision-making time in half as well.

University of Illinois sociology professor Cedric Herring extensively researched the D&I influence on business profits. His conclusion: “For every percentage increase in the rate of racial or gender diversity up to the rate represented in the relevant population, there was an increase in sales revenues of approximately 9 and 3 percent, respectively.”

While at its core, inclusion is about gender and racial parity, for the embracing organization it’s clearly about improving the bottom line as well.

Will inbound marketing work on technical talent?

Increasingly apparent to a growing number of recruiters and hiring managers is that traditional post-and-pray is no longer a workable plan for finding the right candidates. In fact, in its recent Future of HR Technology report, HRWINS found that employers now use, on average, 24 different technologies such as federated search and applicant tracking (ATS) to find the right candidates. Top recruitment technology trends, according to the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), additionally include AI, blockchain technology, and bots.

Integrating the latest HR technology doesn’t necessarily equate to luring the best candidates, however. That’s because most of these enlightened recruiters fail to use the tools well in three key areas: Engagement; mobile optimization; and branding according to what workers really want. Specific to the technology industry is a fourth issue, the failure to hire tech-savvy recruiters who can speak the language during the interview process.

Nor is failure to hire, or hire well, just a job vacancy problem. It’s a company success and bottom line issue as well. This is especially true in the world of technical recruiting, where the Bureau of Labor Statistics expects hiring needs to jump 12 percent by 2024. Unfortunately, Code.org projects that by 2024 IT job openings will exceed qualified applicants by one million.

Add to this dismal candidate outlook CEB survey results that determined an average job vacancy cost of $500 per position per day, and it is abundantly apparent that inbound marketing tactics must be outstanding, timely and fruitful.

Yes, the use of new recruitment technologies such as federated search, which allows a recruiter to combine a search of multiple databases of prospective candidates, and sourcing analytics that assess candidates’ fit for the job, decrease a hiring manager’s time and effort spent in recruiting and hiring, and help defray an employer’s cost per hire.

If, however, that recruiter has failed in her follow through of the latest recruiting techniques, such as talent networks, social-media and other branding, or the long-standing ad posting process; and if that recruiter has failed to convey a company culture and benefit package that appeals to candidates, the number of applicants may well fall below what’s needed to find the perfect new worker.

While thousands of recruiters and hiring managers believe in and practice some elements of inbound marketing – that is, drawing customers to products and services via branding, content and social media marketing, as well as search engine optimization (SEO) – they fail to practice its most important element, engagement. Getting candidates to their talent network, career site, or job posting is the first half of the battle. Keeping them coming back and persuading them to apply – or encourage others to apply – is the other half.

Here, then, are five key strategies to make that happen.

1) Branding – Inbound Talent defines employer branding as “your reputation as an employer.” According to Linda Davis, founder of Next Generation and Inbound Talent contributor, branding is “What makes your firm unique … what shows what it means to work here.”

Fairly obvious branding elements include career sites, talent networks, and social media. Others specific to technology hiring by way of passive candidate sourcing are the employer’s participation (perhaps sponsorship?) of Hackathons, technology workshops and conferences, and relevant Meetup groups.

Passive candidates are vital to an employer’s productivity. According to Inbound Talent, the international recruiting firm Hays discovered that this year’s severe candidate shortage in technology and other growing industries is negatively impacting both turnover and productivity. According to the Hays survey, a huge factor impeding technical hiring is that 95 percent of the best candidates are simply not looking for the jobs.

2) Employee participation – A crucial element to a firm’s branding and hiring process is the front-and-center participation of its best employees. They’re the folks who know best what keeps workers happy, and happy to stay. Let them tell that story to prospective candidates, by way of video, chat, online content, Webinars, teleconference, e-books, white papers, and social media. Bring them into the interview process, giving them a chance to talk face-to-face or by video conference, to the candidate. Let those long-standing employees be the ones to take the candidate on a tour of the facility.

But what do they talk about? What’s important – and often unaddressed – that candidates should hear?

According to Gallup’s 2017 State of the Workplace report, what job seekers want, beyond the obvious compensation packages and advancement opportunities, are work-life balance (important to 38% of Gallup respondents), collaborative environment, training and continued education, a firm with strong ethics, and work from home options. While 25 percent of the study’s respondents emphasize the importance of a remote-work option, that figure jumps to 38 percent when singling out millennials. Two of every three candidates seek flexibility in work hours. Nearly half of all surveyed job seekers want tuition or student loan reimbursement. Paid Paternity leave is sought by more than one-third of candidates, and 30 percent are looking for child care reimbursement. More than one in every five candidates consider the ease of commute as crucial, while 17 percent want to know if the company culture emphasizes fun. A sense of camaraderie is essential to 10 percent of surveyed candidates.

Many, if not most, of these perks go unaddressed in job postings. Thus, they’re the very things that current employees can and should highlight in their discussions with applicants.

3) Mobile application process – As early as 2014, Glassdoor reported that 45 percent of job seekers used their mobile devices to search for jobs at least once a day. Yet, by 2016, the number of recruiters offering a mobile career website or apply process was a mere 19 percent. The ability to reach job seekers anytime anywhere, and allow them to quickly and easily apply, ask questions, or otherwise engage recruiters by way of a mobile device, is still a standout, even among companies hiring for technical positions.

4) Tech-savvy interviewers. Other than IT-specific companies, employer firms often fail to retain or hire tech-savvy interviewers to help fill technical positions. These luddite recruiters struggle through the interview process, often leaving the technical candidate with a failure to bond, and a less than attractive picture of the firm’s suitability for their career dreams.

The bonding aspect of the interview process is crucial. According to Mattersight’s Take this Job and Love it white paper, 80 percent of people would take one job over another based on personal relationships formed during the interview process. In a recent Jobvite study, 47 percent of the surveyed job candidates said that the interview made the greatest impact on their decision to accept or reject the job offer.

5) Ongoing engagement. When a job candidate joins an employer’s talent community, follows the firm on social media, applies for a job, or visits the company’s website, the employer’s inbound marketing has barely begun.

Digital followers are fickle, with short attention spans. The recruiter must engage and keep on engaging.

Nor is this just about putting the firm’s best foot forward. While engagement should involve pushing company products and job opportunities, 90 percent of its online content should be helpful, informative, creative, amusing, and entertaining. In other words, not self-serving. In the world of recruitment, this involves not only keeping prospective candidates updated on the latest job openings, and their progress through the hiring process if they’ve applied, but as well industry outlooks, and the latest relevant tools, gadgets, subject matter experts, and ideas. A recruiter who has talked one-on-one with a candidate who loves to hike might periodically send the candidate the latest ideas on great hiking gear or treks, for example. The engagement should offer ease of two-way conversation, and the opportunity for that candidate to share openings with others or refer other candidates.

While recruitment technology evolves on a nearly-daily basis, these programs and tools enhance rather than replace a recruiter’s inbound marketing efforts. When seeking the right job candidate for that hard-to-fill technical position, recruiter follow-through is still the key to hiring success.

The numbers on feedback to understand

So you’ve put your best efforts into finding the perfect hires, after the endless screening, endless interview processes, reference checks and finally decisions are made! Managers are happy, new employees are appointed and excited about joining a new organization. How do you ensure your hard work doesn’t go to waste? There is nothing more disappointing for a recruiter than finding out their great hire left within 6 months of joining.

During the hiring process, we are focused on the attraction experience, giving the candidate a taste of the organization that entices and attracts. Throughout that hiring process, we ask for feedback and managers openly offer feedback on candidates; feedback flows naturally throughout the process. However, all too often, that natural flow of feedback stops when the candidate moves from the attraction experience of recruitment to the engagement experience of being an employee and here’s where the problems start.

Chances are your candidate has joined your organization because they saw an opportunity to develop, to grow and progress their career. If these are the key drivers for joining, they continue to be the key drivers for staying, yet we often lose sight of that in organizations. We stop giving feedback, we let the candidate sink or swim in their new environment. A new culture can be daunting for a new hire and this is the time that they really need feedback and lots of it. We tend to automatically worry about giving and receiving feedback as we assume nobody wants to hear how they are getting on. Well, the good news is that fear is unfounded! According to a recent survey of 1,000 employees & managers about their feelings on feedback, it turns out they are open to wanting more feedback, they think it improves their performance and they value it highly.

People want more feedback:

60% of employees and managers surveyed would like to receive feedback on a weekly or daily basis. Waiting for a probation review or a monthly 1:1 is not enough. It’s easier to understand how we need to improve when we are told in the moment and ideally as early into our career as feasible.

Feedback from every direction:

4 out of 5 employees and managers believe feedback from a colleague is just as valuable as feedback from their manager. In the modern workplace of cross-functional agile teams & remote working, a manager is only one stakeholder in an employee’s performance and development. Employees recognize the value in getting more feedback, from multiple sources helps build a real picture of their strengths & weaknesses.

In-time feedback changes real-time performance:

7 out of 10 employees believe that good feedback can be more effective for their development than a training or learning course. And they aren’t just looking for praise and re-enforcement. They want constructive feedback, so they can improve areas of weakness. In fact, 74% of employees believe feedback that gives direction to improve is more valuable than praise.

Aligning your attraction and engagement experience:

So having created an incredible attraction experience, its time to ensure our onboarding experiences match. While our candidates may have been wowed by the great start, we need to focus on ensuring the employee experience continues to deliver. Getting a strong feedback culture in place from the outset can make the difference between your great hire staying or leaving. Let’s keep our best hires in-house with great feedback practices.

How your management core is hurting your hiring process

If you read this headline and work as a recruiter/sourcer, probably the first thing you’re going to think is “They give unclear job descriptions and expect us to work magic!” or “They want detailed reports on every candidate but then read nothing!” or the dreaded “They claim to want data in their hiring processes but ultimately only trust their gut!”

All of these are true to a large extent. But there’s a bigger problem: digital and mobile are massively at scale. Word-of-mouth is very real. And when your managers internally are bad, that leaks out. People — or at least people who research organizations before taking jobs with them, which are the people you should be aiming for — know how to find out what your management core (middle to high) is really like. It’s beyond just Glassdoor, although that $1.2B price tag was nice for them. There are lots of ways that a crappy front-line management team can be “outed” on the talent marketplace.

So what should companies do? How can they make their managers better and, in the process, strengthen employer brand? We all know that we spend $44B a year globally on “leadership,” and yet, it doesn’t ever really seem to get that much better — begging the question “Why don’t bad leadership styles evolve out?” Get us Darwin on Line 1.

In all seriousness, though, as a big craft IPA dude, I was interested when I saw this jam about how Dogfish Head is using Saba Software/Halogen Software for talent management and culture. The end goal was making it “more about conversations and less about numbers,” which should almost undeniably be the focus of end-to-end talent management.

So then we got to talk with Anita Bowness of Saba about their general approach to improving managers. I love hearing new people’s takes on managerial improvement. Saba’s “Big Five” — Un-Fab Five? — were:

Vague feedback that doesn’t focus enough on team or organization dynamics
Holding back too much with constructive feedback without directly addressing how an employee can improve
Waiting too long to provide feedback (good or bad)
Not offering ideas on how to improve performance
Inconsistent recognition for desired behaviors or selective and unpredictable constructive feedback to poor performance

Would agree with all this. No. 3 is especially a big deal — we live in an on-demand economy now. What do you think Amazon is mastering faster than most companies and killing everyone else in the process? Organizations can be oil tankers, sure (hard to turn around) but they need to make an effort to make their people processes “on-demand.” That means communicating with candidates — and heck, if you need to embrace tech and use a chatbot, go for it — and it means communicating with candidates when they become employees in the form of legit, real-time feedback. Avoid 360 though. Noted:

My colleague David had spent time in a re-education camp in North Vietnam during the Vietnam war. He reacted when I told him we were going to use 360-degree feedback in our HR programs. “I cannot participate in that,” he said, very softly and respectfully.

“That’s how they got us to turn in our colleagues and keep everyone off balance, back in the re-education camp,” he said. Three-sixty-degree feedback was used in the re-education camp — essentially a concentration camp in the jungle — to intimidate people and keep them from trusting other people. It was a form of psychological torture.

Wow. That’s depressing.

Bottom-line: performance feedback is not nearly as hard as we think. Do it more consistently. Get happier employees. Have a better name in the talent market. See your revenues rise with better people. Go drink some Dogfish. Rinse and repeat.

Do your employees believe there’s a gender pay gap in your business?

When I ask women about their experiences with the gender pay gap, most of the stories I hear usually go something like this:

“I was working late at the office one night and unexpectedly ran across a document that listed all the salaries in my business unit. I was shocked to discover that I and other women on the team were being paid far below what our male colleagues were making, all of whom were junior to me and had much less responsibility . . .”

Or:

“A bunch of us went out for drinks after work and I overheard two of my male colleagues talking about their bonuses and was astonished to hear the figures mentioned – much higher than both my base and my bonus. But I consistently out-perform them and bring in more business than they do . . .”

Up to this point in history, it’s probably safe to say that most gender pay inequities have been exposed by chance. Organizations haven’t been eager to bring them to their employees’ attention. Remember Lilly Ledbetter, for whom the Fair Pay Act of 2009 was named? Ledbetter received an anonymous note in her mailbox at work that disclosed the salaries of her male colleagues, all of whom held the same title and responsibilities. They were all paid 40% more than she was, and this had been the case for many years.

I’ve heard far fewer stories about women (or men) receiving salary adjustments because their organizations conducted a pay audit and discovered gaps. In the case of Salesforce, which has been conducting annual enterprise-wide salary audits since 2015 and making the results public, some men were found to be underpaid as well as women, and adjustments were made.

But for the most part, I hear from women who have made this discovery inadvertently, and many more suspect that they are making less money than their male colleagues, but they don’t know for sure—open salary conversations are still taboo in most workplace cultures. Which means that some of us are walking around wondering about it. Or ruminating about it. And suspicion doesn’t exactly go hand-in-glove with engagement and productivity.

But social media is changing this. What was once off-limits (like talking about who makes how much and who’s a not-so-great manager) is becoming much more of an open dialogue; the days of relying on the old-school code of silence to avoid the gender pay gap question are over.

What do your employees believe about pay equity in your organization? Have you asked them?

Of the 367 professionals (71% identified as managers, directors, VPs, SVPs, or C-level) who participated in a recent survey about gender and pay conducted by the Institute for Corporate Productivity (i4cp), most (49%) said that gender pay inequity is not a problem in their organizations; just 22% said that gender pay inequity is indeed a problem in their companies.

But here’s an interesting data point: 29% responded that they don’t know. They have no idea if it’s an issue or not, which can be as problematic as those who believe it is an issue.

And while 45% of survey respondents told us that their organizations have conducted a pay audit to determine if men and women are paid equally for comparable work, and another 14% said their organizations are planning to do this soon, 25% said they don’t know if their organizations have ever conducted a pay audit. This can suggest a few things: maybe those organizations have conducted audits, but they haven’t communicated internally about it. Or maybe they haven’t done an audit and have no plans to do so, which is what 16% of survey respondents reported, and that’s troubling in terms of the long-range impact of avoiding an audit.

We are in a new era—early-career talent is coming into the workplace with their eyes wide open (i.e., they expect to be paid fairly and equally, period). And whether an organization is transparent or not about their pay practices, more and more, the conversation is happening anyway. On some levels, organizations cannot control the narrative about who they are and how they treat their employees.

But ensuring that there is a level playing field is a step in the right direction, and the foundation of this is ensuring equal pay for equal work and access to opportunity. Because this is about so much more than what your workforce looks like today—it’s about your ability to attract and retain the talent that’s going to drive innovation and carry your organization forward.

The (continued) War for Tech Talent

1998 was when McKinsey released a paper on “the war for talent.” That was 20 years ago.

In the intervening time, we’ve had much less a war for talent — i.e. getting good people — and much more a war on talent, i.e. alienating the hell out of job-seekers. That’s not good, and you know what? Talent management experts agree, telling Fast Company recently that:

Instead of winning a war for talent, organizations appear to be waging a war on talent, repelling and alienating employees more successfully than harnessing their skills. The result is a highly inefficient job market where most companies complain about their talent shortages while most employees complain about their pointless jobs. The definition of a bad deal is when both sides lose.

How can we improve what’s happening here?

Step 1: Understand the reality

Most people who come to run businesses believe these concepts are important:

Cost
Processes
Products
Services
Scale
Repeated processes

People are important, but these concepts are often more important. Even if we don’t always want to admit it, many executives view people in the lower and middle ranks as interchangeable. This is why companies often don’t invest in training, because the executive-level theory is “Why pay for something if those people are going to leave anyway?”

Step 2: Understand the second part of the reality

The cost/process/scale model is a little flawed, because of a few other factors:

Almost every company right now is, to some degree, a tech company.
While automation is getting to scale, it’s never going to fully replace humans working in companies.
You still need good people.
But the market for those good people is incredibly tight, especially in “tech hubs;” we’ve seen numbers that tech unemployment in certain North American cities is under 4%.
Many companies currently use agile or road map models where you need the right people in place to start Project No. 1, and that builds to Project No. 2, No. 3, etc.
When you lack quality employees in a road map model, it’s very easy to go over-budget quickly — and that is a major worry for executives.

Level-Set: Where do we stand?

We mostly have inefficient hiring processes and we oftentimes alienate our best candidates at a time when we need to be doing the opposite.

Step 3: Let’s try to fix this

The No. 1 complaint that most tech job candidates have is a variation on the following:

“I wasn’t communicated with.”
“The hiring process was very generic and didn’t get into technical skills; I’m not even sure the hiring manager understood the role he was hiring for.”

These are both solvable problems.

More communication: Use email automation and chatbots. Allow FAQs to be handled in that manner. Set up a trigger with your ATS so that candidates get updates on their status at 1, 3, and 5 weeks. Design a more empathetic “Sorry, you didn’t get advanced” email.

Generic Process: Bring in third-party experts, or have members of the team that the candidate will join do early-stage interviews. Make sure the hiring manager has justified why he/she needs this job open. Make sure the hiring manager can explain what the role does. Make sure he/she can explain that to the recruiter.

Step 4: The bottom line

If you want to improve your recruiting processes and get the best tech talent possible, you need to operate at this intersection:

Figure out where your problems and bottlenecks are
Look at how technology could help solve those
Make sure your people are working on relationship-building instead of scheduling and other repetitive tasks
Work on convincing the top tech talent of your value prop and let tech handle the nuts and bolts

Why so Stressed? 1 in 3 Workers Feels They Can’t Take Time Off

The ideal office culture is one where workers feel empowered to perform, driven to succeed, and supported in their endeavors. Find a way to evoke all these responses, and you’ll likely see plenty of productivity and — as a result — profit.

But productivity isn’t just the product of an environment that encourages hard work and dedication. It’s also the bi-product of employee happiness. Stress your employees out to the point they dread coming to work every day, and you risk losing not just valuable productivity, but valuable employees as well.

Considering prospective employees spend a lot of time reading over company reviews, you may find yourself in an HR hiring conundrum, having to pull from a pool of applicants who aren’t really the best of the best. After all, the very best people want to work somewhere that has a good rapport with past and present employees, right?

So what if someone told you that your company had a nasty, underlying culture? One where employees felt discouraged from taking time off, either because their manager made them feel bad for making such a request or because their peers sustained the belief that taking a vacation was a sign of laziness or lack of drive or selfishness?

Unfortunately, the possibility that culture exists in your company is more likely than you think.

32% of employees feel pressured to not take time off

According to a recent PTO survey commissioned by TSheets by QuickBooks, 1 in 3 workers feels like they can’t take time off — even when their time off is paid. When asked if they used all their PTO by the end of last year, only 35 percent of respondents could say they had. Sixteen percent reported not using six days of their PTO or more.

Reasons for not taking PTO varied, though 23 percent of respondents agreed: Their workload was the cause. While 52 percent of respondents said they saved some time off from the previous year because they wanted to roll it over into the next year’s balance, nearly 1 in 10 respondents reported they didn’t take PTO because their manager wouldn’t approve it. Another 1 in 10 said they were trying to earn a promotion. Presumably, these employees felt if they took time off, they would be out of the running for a higher position.

60% of employees work on vacation, 89% come to work sick

When companies value employee attendance more than employee health, workers have a tendency to prioritize work over wellness … to the point of taking their work on vacation.

That kind of dedication would be fine if it didn’t lead to increased levels of stress and to potentially expensive court cases. Think about it — if your nonexempt employees are working off the clock and your company has a history of rewarding that behavior, that’s a pretty juicy setup for a Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) lawsuit.

On a personal level, working while on vacation actually impacts how well the vacation is remembered, according to a study conducted by the University of Texas and the vacation rental site HomeAway. A survey of 713 adults from six countries found those who worked on vacation for an hour or more were 43 percent more likely to have trouble remembering their trip than those who worked less than an hour.

And what about those who work when they’re sick? Nearly 1 in 4 employees surveyed by TSheets admitted to working, even while taking sick leave. The vast majority (89 percent) of employees said they also come to work when they’re sick. Forty-five percent said they do this more than five times a year.

The problem with this behavior is putting stress on an already exhausted immune system prolongs symptoms. And we already know workers are feeling stressed out. In fact, survey results showed 1 in 3 workers experience an unhealthy level of work-related stress, while 43 percent of workers admitted to experiencing work-related stress “often” or “always.”

Additionally, some co-workers may have weakened immune systems, making them extra susceptible to catching whatever virus is going around the office. Believe it or not, the Centers for Disease Control estimated 707,000 people were hospitalized for flu-related illnesses from 2014-2015. Coming to work sick isn’t just detrimental to the person muscling through the mucus — it’s a threat to those around them as well.

No wonder employees prefer cash

While 60 percent of employees said they would turn down a job if it didn’t offer paid time off, and 48 percent of employees said they’d like more time off, 73 percent of workers said they’d rather get a raise than additional PTO.

Some of this may have to do with the fact that many workers today feel bad about taking all the time off they already have. What good is more PTO if the prevailing attitude toward taking a vacation is negative?

As an HR professional, it’s your job to protect employee welfare and wellness. Encourage a culture where employees feel comfortable taking the time off they need, and reap the benefits of a less stressed workforce. Not only will your company enjoy improved productivity and performance, but worker happiness will also go up. And when workers are happy, they spread joy, making your job of recruiting the best candidates simpler than ever.

Danielle Higley is a copywriter for TSheets by QuickBooks, a time tracking and scheduling solution. She has a BA in English literature and has spent her career writing and editing marketing materials for small businesses. Last year, she started an editorial consulting company.

We live in a platform economy now, and that changes everything

When you think about “old-school elements of business that went away, subsequently scaring executives,” you’re really talking about platform thinking. Business used to be about resources you controlled and market power/position. That’s almost entirely not the case anymore. Business was once dominated by asset-builders; now it’s dominated by a group some have called “network orchestrators.” Consider the case of what marketers need to do, too: for decades, it was about “power branding.” Now it’s much more about developing customer relationships and stories. Most CMOs and marketing middle managers still operate in the “power branding” mindset and worry about “their campaign assets.” Meanwhile, someone is tweeting at the company’s Twitter account about an issue and that’s going unresolved. In 2017, that stuff is how you lose business. A campaign will probably get lost in the ether, in all honesty.

This business shift is tied to the idea of platform thinking. Instead of viewing your company as a group of tangible + intangible assets, now you need to think of it as a platform. That’s really hard for a lot of seasoned executives. If you came up one way and that made you and your company successful, pivoting to a completely new way of thinking is a challenge. It honestly terrifies many of these guys. As a result, they kick it to HR, where it usually dies a relatively-lengthy death at the hands of process, forms, and compliance. Whenever Sally from HR begins to “own” a change management process, you immediately know 74% of the company will never care. People listen to Sally re: compensation and potentially getting fired. They do not want Sally owning strategy. We’ve been talking about empowering HR (and Sally!) for decades now. Still hasn’t happened. Why? Because to be completely honest, no one cares. People are comfortable vaguely understanding who “owns” what, and HR doesn’t own “revenue-driven strategy plays.” The COO or CEO needs to “own” that, right?

Continue reading “We live in a platform economy now, and that changes everything”