WordPress Tutorials

Thanks to James Farmer for beginning a series of tutorials in WordPress, the first is on “How do you format WordPress posts?”.

While this is fantastic, it got me thinking.

WHY?

Why do we need a tutorial? I must admit I was a little taken back by the basic-ness of the posting features. But then, with an installation process so fantastic, features and plugins what more should I expect from open source?

If I look at Blogger, you need to undertake some interesting HTML/Javascript editing just to get trackbacks. MovableType requires almost a PHD to complete the installation, TypePad a monthly subscription, Drupal , etc etc. These are all barriers to entry. The only service with no barrier is MSN Spaces but then again you do need to go to the dark side :-).

Seriously from an HR perspective for blogs and wikis for that matter to be truly accepted by employees the user experience needs to improve. We need to lower the barrier of entry!

James is doing this with IncSub and for this he should be congratulated.

Just a thought.

The power of blogs

I had a another interesting experience today. An email from a new company wanting me to review their new service in my blog. Why is this interesting? For several reasons.

Firstly GMail picked up the email request as spam, I have written before about “business spam“, and got myself in hot water with ResumeFit, a cool service by the way. I just happened to check my Spam section in GMail this morning otherwise I would not have found the email. This is a whole other discussion.

The company is G2Bay the service allows people to buy and sell information, first industry of focus is recruitment buying and selling of resume’s. Curious I thought, filed under “look at in on the weekend”.

Now here is where the story gets interesting. Reading my RSS feeds I notice Andrew Marritt wrote a posting on the service.

Hmmm, let me guess what is happening. The guys at G2Bay have sent out an email to several different bloggers within the recruitment/HR area to get publicity. Ok you might not think this is that interesting but I do. Firstly I am faltered to have been included, secondly Andrew got to “break the story” (no offence Andrew ;-), boy now I sound just like a journalist need to be careful 🙂 ) and finally that vendors/service providers within the recruiting/HR space feel that bloggers actually have some influence in what people buy!

I guess this is the future, if we are to believe Scoble. A couple of weeks ago he spent 15 minutes writing a post about Team 99, then in the next week there are more than 20 news stories. Now I am not sure we have the same power but it does look like organisations do believe that blogs have “amplification power”.

So look for a review on G2Bay over the weekend.

Quality of Hire some measures

Sam Greengard from Workforce.com interviewed (registration required) Kevin Wheeler of Global Learning Resources who provided several different measures around the quality of a hire. The high level listing is:-

  • Goal Completion
  • Capacity
  • Motivation
  • Knowledge and Skills
  • General Performance
  • Problem-Solving Skills
  • Experiential Contributions
  • Customer Compatibility
  • Work-Group Compatibility
  • Organizational Compatibility
  • Change/Learning Attitude

While I personally think the list is a good start the interview does not resolve one of the fundamental’s, getting to hard core numbers.

The measures are the things that would be assessed as part of a 90 day performance review (I hate “probation review”) and are mainly subjective by the reviewer. This limits the credibility of the results as they are open to interpretation. Which is a pity.

A formal 90 performance review process for all new starters would give you the ability to produce a metric like percentage of new hires performing at level X. While based on a subjective assessment it is still something but should not be the only metric provided around quality of hire.

Can I have some private time?

Following up on my posts from last week around workplace privacy. I was reading a similar post from Michael Fitzgibbon (Thoughts from a Management Lawyer) on the whole issue of Workplace Privacy in the US.

Of interest were the statistics which while are US centric I have a feeling probably would transpose fairly well to any industrialised nation.

Employees need to realise what they do does have an impact on their employer and as such the employer might have an interest in these activities. However on the flip side is that employers need to also realise that employees have the right to privacy.

Personally I do not see any need for human reading of emails, there are enough tools out there to track what is going through the ether and stop the viruses and inappropriate attachments (there is even a patent registered on the automated detection of pornographic images). Systems can also track where the emails are going and the amount of network traffic being generated by a specific user on the network. What these tools cannot track or stop is the dissemination of proprietary information, they never will. Both sides of the fence need to come to an understanding, through education, as to what can and can’t be done.

A question does your organisation run specific information/training courses on acceptable use of the internet in the workplace? Probably not, however maybe they should. In the same way as employees have to go through health and safety or sexual harassment training maybe the same needs to be done on the internet?

My feed

It occurred to me while in the shower this morning that when I changed theme’s I did not modify the feeds to point to FeedBurner.

While WordPress has an RSS feed which I see some of you have subscribed to I prefer to use FeedBurner. I have now tried to update all of the feed links back to my FeedBurner feed.

Why use FeedBurner over the standard RSS feed in WordPress? Two reasons, one for you the reader and one for me. For the reader it means if I decide to move platforms of locations you are protected by a “middle man” from the change. For me I get statistics on what posts are interesting and how many people are subscribing. This means we all win.

A point to note. WordPress allows you to subscribe just to comments, I am not sure how to get FeedBurner to take the comments so they will stay coming directly from this site.

Corporate blogging and knowledge

Hugh Macleod has drawn a very simple picture what has lots of words to go with it that describes the beauty of corporate blogging.

So where is the knowledge bit?

By breaking through the membranes that Hugh discusses help the overall communication within an organisation, and opens the gates to the movement of knowledge to different groups and layers across the organisation. In fact you could almost say it is also facilitating learning, which is what happens when your share knowledge, people learn. This is all summed up in his points 11 and 12:-

11. The answer lies in “x”, the membrane that seperates A from B. The more porous the membrane, the easier it is for conversations between A and B, the internal and external, to happen. The easier for the conversations on both side of membrane “x” to adjust to the other, to become like the other.

12. And nothing, and I do mean nothing, pokes holes in the membrane better than blogs. You want porous? You got porous. Blogs punch holes in membranes like like it was Swiss cheese.

An interesting side thought is the organisational change impacts of the holes in the membrane. Many a manager holds onto their power by controlling the information provided to their employees. What happens when the internal membrane has a hole and the CEO or other C level executive blogs? Middle management gets very concerned, but that is for another day.

New HR Metrics?

Tom Lutz (from HR for the leader in you) has written an interesting post on HR Metrics where he highlights some of the concerns with some measures and provides a listing of leading edge metrics from Saratoga/PricewaterhouseCoopers. The list of his leading edge metrics are below:-
1. Percent of High Potentials in the Talent Pool. Bench Strength
2. Number of succession Plan Candidates per Key Role to be Filled. Succession Plan Ratio
3. Average New Hire Performance Ratio divided by Average Performance Rating. Average Hire Performance Score.
4. Voluntary Separation Rate in the First Three Months of Service divided by New Hires. New Hire Separation Rate.
5. Employees receiving Higher Performance Rating than Previous Cycle divided by Headcount. Workforce Performance Improvement.
6. Total Promotions divided by Headcount. Promotion Rate
7. Total Voluntary Separations of High Performers divided by High Performer Headcount. Voluntary Separation Rate of Top Performers.
8. Total Separations of Low Performers divided by Low Performer Headcount. Total separations of Low Performers.

An interesting list to be added to our previous discussions on recruiting metrics.

Patients in USA hospitals blog

ComputerWorld had an interesting article about a hospital what is trying to use blogs as a form of marketing.

I found the last comment very interesting, would complaints be vetted, and doesn’t that go completely against the whole transparent nature of blogs?

“This is not a forum to discuss politics or anything like that,” Wall said. Hospital staff vet entries for profanity and anything “extremely off topic,” according to Wall, though he said that editing has been virtually nonexistent to date.

Trials and tribulations of technology

It seems Jobster is having some teething issues with getting recruiters to think strategically. They seem to be having difficulty in getting traction within organisations, they can grab a couple of strategic recruiters but the line recruiters are a challenge.

As I had mentioned in my review in April the change management was probably the biggest issue facing Jobster. Andrew Merritt from Resourcing Strategies posted yesterday about the same thing and provides some very clearly thought out reasons for the issues and gives us some places to look at solving the problems.

At a fundamental level Jobster is a technology and technology is an enabler it is not the answer. The question to ask is: “Can I implement the process without technology?” If not then implementing technology will not help. This may seem strange but if you cannot clearly define and implement a process without technology you do not understand the problem, yes the implementation might be inefficient, difficult, costly and slow but these are the things that technology will solve. Andrew even mentions this in comment on the post.

Privacy in the workplace

A day after NSW banned employers from monitoring emails Victoria and South Australia are looking to do the same thing. Over the last 9 months I have written about these moves here, here, here and here.

This is a really interesting topic that has significant potential to cause all sorts of ER/IR issues within the workplace. If you do business in Australia, make sure you are aware of these changes and how the impact your business.

Interestingly this does have impact on the whole time tracking thing I just posted about.