Category: General

A category for everything else.

Popular posts

I had a thought over the last couple of days; “What are my most popular posts?”

About 7 years ago I installed a plug in called WP-PostViews as I cannot remember exactly when I installed it I have no solid starting point for the numbers. However it is still interesting to see what has been popular.

  1. 52 ideas on using social media within HR  – 61,258 views
  2. Social networking sites in Australia – 52,986 views
  3. Less posting here – 47,358 views
  4. Is Facebook good or bad? – 42,426 views
  5. Job Board consolidation – 35,764 views
  6. Become a recruiter for your friends – 29,455 views
  7. What generation are you – 28,153 views
  8. Internal Social Networks Analysis – 25,649 views
  9. Australian Payroll: Chris 21 – 23,783 views
  10. Jeremy Wright was fired and other notes on blogs and work – 20,242 views

The list has mainly very old posts, in years that is, and very SEO keyword friendly so I am not surprising about them being in the list. The most recent post was the one on Chris 21 back in August 2009.

Inspecht Software Directory

Over the last few weeks I have had a new site/service built, the Inspecht Software Directory.

Basically a service to help Australian and New Zealand businesses learn about the different options they have for their HR/Payroll/Talent Management/Recruitment/Applicant Tracking systems. Right now there is basic information on over 100 vendors who service the Australian and New Zealand across  seven different major categories:

  • Business Intelligence
  • Consultancy
  • Core HR/Payroll
  • HR Service Delivery
  • Recruiter Tools
  • Talent Management
  • Workforce Management

Continue reading “Inspecht Software Directory” →

Jamie Oliver TED Prize Winner

“I wish for everyone to help create a strong, sustainable movement to educate every child about food, inspire families to cook again and empower people everywhere to fight obesity” – Jamie Oliver

I posted the 20 minute video of Jamie Oliver this year’s TED Prize winner over on Inspecht TV but wanted to cross post here as well. In the video he shares stories from his anti-obesity project, specifically food in schools call for an all-out assault on obesity. At one point he shows a classroom full of young children who do not seem to know what some of the most common vegetables even look like!

What struck me was only this week here in Australia burger chain Hungry Jacks has admitted to breaking advertising rules that limits the advertising of high fat foods to children. The reason? Contractual obligations to the “US-based licensor of The Simpsons which specified how and when the children’s meal promotion was to be advertised.”

Now just think of the workplace impacts in 10 to 15 years when all these children start suffering type 2 diabetes and requiring time off for medical treatments! (Yes I had to connect this to the blog in some way.)

http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf

Building your technology business case

FinanceOne of the most important tasks of any project is building and maintaining your business case. Unfortunately the business case is so often a single document not covering full life cycle costs and produced to obtain funding approval and never looked at again!

Bad!

In fact your business case needs to document the full cost of the business change you are creating and be monitored for viability on a regular basis.

A business case has many components and will usual vary by organisation and it’s own requirements. However in general a “good” (I use the term to define the scope of a business case not the output) business case will include information on:

  • Background reasons
  • Expected Benefits
  • Anticipated Costs
  • Known Risks
  • Timelines
  • Investment Appraisal and Evaluation

This content will help your organisation ensure that the business cast is justified and that the reason for your project to continue is aligned with overall corporate strategy.

The business case is also a living document. As such you should review and update the contents at regular/various stages in your project, at least when ever something significant happens within or to the project. The project board or steering committee should be reviewing the ongoing viability of the project and if the business case is not longer valid the project should be stopped. Stopping a project is always a political issue however if the benefits no longer outweigh the costs (sunk and future) then it should be stopped.

Best in class organisations also conduct post project reviews including benefit realisation assessments to ensure that the project achieved the expected outcomes.

So does your current technology project have a valid business case?

(Photo Flickr User: alancleaver_2000)

Social Recruiting Summit

I arrived this afternoon in Palo Alto to attend the Social Recruiting Summit, catch up with several people here in San Francisco and have a few meetings. While it is a damn long way to come for effectively 1 day event I am hoping it is worth the effort.

We kick off tonight with a Tweet Up, which happens to be in the hotel where I am staying. Some of the sessions from tomorrow include:

  • A Conversation with LinkedIn Founder Reid Hoffman
  • Google Campus Tour
  • Mobile Marketing
  • Ubiquity & Authenticity in Social Media
  • No Sacred Cows: Making Sense of Social Recruiting
  • Online Employer Reputation & Social Recruiting

The event is very community focused, while each formal session is 1 hour in length on 30 minutes has been allocated to presentation. The rest of the time is for audience engagement. In addition there are three unconference sessions which anyone can speak, including yours truly.

I hope to blog and tweet (#socialrecruiting) about the event, although Twitter will be limited to PC based tweets as I could not get a decent prepaid SIM with a data plan.

Following the summit I have meetings with several key influencers within the recruitment industry, attending the San Francisco HR Technology Breakfast and catching up with Karen Beaman from Jeitosa.

I also hope to duck away and check out some of the Redwood Trees.

Cedar Crestone HR Systems Survey

The 12th Annual Cedar Crestone HR Systems Survey is in progress. Over the years many of my clients have participated in the survey and also used the results to define their go forward strategy. If you are in a position to participate I would highly encourage you to do so.

Not sure about the survey here is a quick run down from Aleixa Martin Cedar Crestone’s Director or Research and Analytics:

CedarCrestone is requesting participation in the CedarCrestone 2009-2010 HR Systems Survey: HR Technologies, Service Delivery Choices, and Metrics Survey, 12th Annual Edition through June 22, 2009. The survey is a comprehensive research effort designed to provide organizations with important data to plan, justify, benchmark, and execute HR technologies and to address key deployment options. The survey questionnaire is available online at www.cedarcrestone.com/hrssv3.

The 2009 HR Survey is broad in its coverage, including questions about:

  • Technologies to support talent management, business intelligence, service delivery, and workforce management as well as SOA and Web 2.0 innovations
  • Deployment options and related expenditures (on premise, software-as-a-service, hosting, business process outsourcing, etc.)
  • Comprehensive metrics such as employee/HR staff ratios, administrative costs per employee, links between technology adoption and financial performance, and many others

The survey collects responses from HR and IT management with knowledge of the HR technologies in use and planned, as well as those with an overview of key deployment decisions. The survey is targeted to respondents from organizations in all industries (commercial, public sector, and educational organizations) with over 500 employees.

While you are into surveys remember to take the Australian Sources of Talent survey and join over 390 Australian organisation’s who have already participated.

Future Summit

Over the next couple of days I will be attending Future Summit 2009 a great big think tank in Melbourne run by Australian Davos Connection (ADC), covering the theme  shaping the future. If you don’t know about Future Summit it was founded by some “big business dudes” after returning from the World Economic Forum a few years ago.

Steve Hopkins is working for ADC and pulled together an awesome selection of social media people to attend to provide a unique perspective on the event. Along with myself others include:

If you are on Twitter watch for the #futuresummit tags.

ATC: James Elliott National Recruitment Director Deloitte

James Elliott took the stage after lunch to give us a run down on Deloitte’s (Update: to clarify this is only the Australian operation and does not reflect the US operations.) recruitment function, specifically their Sourcing function. James indicated he was a little concerned about presenting, mainly because of the real time feedback that would be on Twitter. Some of my notes from the presentation are below:

  • Globally 160,000 people with $27 billion in revenue!
  • They got into sourcing because while operational excellence had meant recruiter efficiencies were up 50%, vacancies where still going up, something had to change
  • In 2007 while 3rd party agencies as a source were low their costs were still very high
  • The Deloitte definition of sourcing is:
    1. Identifying and mapping passive talent for current and future roles
    2. Approaching passive talent
    3. Maintaining talent pipelines through a systemised CRM cycle
  • As part of the move to sourcing they had two key learnings:
    1. Wholesale changes to recruitment processes were needed as sourced candidates need to be treated differently
    2. They had to focus on planning & forecasting which was much harder than first through. Lots of change management, and recruiting team structure to make the transformation possible
  • In general Australian resume databases are extremely poor in quality
  • While they use Taleo as an ATS, it is not a CRM (they use SalesForce) which they needed to:
    • Map competitions
    • Track contacts
    • Segment contacts
    • Manage ongoing CRM through tasks, reminders and emarketing
  • Deloitte’s sends out 4,500 e Newsletter a quarter to people in the CRM
  • The sourcers at Deloitte’s get their prospects from:
    • People who withdraw from the rtecruitment process
    • People who did not get a job they applied for
    • Graduates
    • Phone lists
    • Conference & professional associations
    • Name generation workshops
    • New hire competitor intelligence
    • Web search
    • And dumpster diving
  • Social Recruiting is starting to be used to:
    • Enhance brand & position as an innovative professional services firm
    • Engage external talent by offering an authentic insight into working
    • Leverage employees networks
    • Search for talent directly
  • Deloitte YouTube channel has had 25,000 views
  • They use Twitter to connect applicants to other Deloitte Twitter users in similar areas
  • Built a custom Facebook application called Join Me @ Deloitte to facilitate referrals. The application had 90% of employees install, good number of hires have come through but less than 3 figures even with that James felt the ROI was very good as it was cheap to build
  • As a source 3rd party recruiters provide the worse quality of hire whereas referrals are the best

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Joining HR Tech Central

A few weeks ago I received an email from Tony Karrer from TechEmpower about a new blog consolidation service he is building called HR Tech Central.

HR Tech

So what is HR Tech Central?

The HR Tech Central community collects and organizes great information on human resources technology. 

I figured why not. So I have given permission to re-publish my blog feed on the HR Tech Central site, at http://www.hrtechcentral.com/&source=michael-specht.

But what is very good is they are summarising tags and categories so you want to learn all about Taleo? Subscribe to the Taleo feed. Workforce planning? They have a feed for that as well.

Head over and check them out. Some of the other blogs they are syndicating include:

Survey closed

Just a quick note to say the Job Seeker survey is now closed. If you completed it thank you and if you opted to go into the draw to win an Amazon voucher they will be handed out very soon.

That’s it from me, a very busy week so there will probably be no further communications until March sorry.