Michael Specht

State of Australian Corporate Career Websites

In late 2008 I spent some time reviewing the career websites of the BRW Top 200 organisations within Australia, based on the work by CareerXRoads in the US. The process included a physical review of each of the BRW Top 200 web sites during September to December 2008.

I sat on the report for a long time pondering what to do with the results. About six weeks ago I decided to release the results publically over on Inspecht for the purposes of discussion and review by others within the industry.

Each site was assessed on a series of attributes designed to assess an organisation’s approach to their careers website. The attributes were based on the CareerXRoads Mystery Job Seeker Reports. A comment on the results several attributes covered during the research required a subjective assessment such as; did the site contain detailed information on remuneration and benefits.

If you are interested you can download the report (oh yes it is free).

Best job title ever?

There are some funky job title’s going around at the moment, Chief Happiness Officer, Chief Trouble Maker but none like the one advertised on Mumbrella Jobs earlier today: “Head of Getting Shit Done“.

Head of Getting Shit Done

PageUp People: Integrated Talent Management

What is Integrated Talent Management (ITM)?

Well that was the question posed at this morning’s breakfast briefing session run by PageUp People to launch their new white paper, “ITM – The Evolution”. Their answer:
Workforce
Credit: Lumaxart

ITM leverages the same data, process, workflow management, security model, user portals, and reporting and analytics tools across all applications.

My answer would be very similar.

The white paper quotes heavily from people such as Thomas Otter, Jim Holincheck, CedarCrestone and Leighanne Levensaler with PageUp People offering their own conclusions on the research which in turn lays out a product roadmap for the PageUp People platform.

Within the white paper reference is made to three stages of ITM evolution:

Stage 1 – Today, multiple vendors, disconnected systems, a lack of analytics, and limited executive buy-in.
Stage 2 – Reduced number of vendors as each widen the breadth and depth of their offerings, tighter integration, initial workforce analytics, and growing executive buy-in.
Stage 3 – The holy grail a fully integrated talent management platform with predictive analytics and high levels of executive buy-in.

What stood out to me was the strong emphasis being placed on workforce analytics, the topic for the rest of this post, as a key indicator of a stage 3 ITM environment.

For well over a decade workforce analytics have been discussed and predicted to come of age many times, and again we have a major talent management vendor still predicting that workforce analytics is in the future! So when will the future become today?

Over the years workforce analytics has been a keen interest of mine, in 2004 I co-presented on the topic and AHRI’s HR Week. During the presentation I referenced work conducted by the Butler Group in 1995 on the issues around data warehousing little things such as; Availability, Understanding, Accurate, Consistent and Predictability, and Privacy. I firmly believe many of these issues need to be resolved before any form of workforce analytics can be confidently undertaken by an organisation.

My co-presenter 5 years ago John Macy referenced work from the Meta Group in 2000 on the 5 categories of workforce information management, the top level being predictive modelling! John went on to discuss trends from the Meta Group, which had vendors incorporate contextual analysis into their products by 2005 and in 2006/7 Leading organisations will develop & fine tune predictive models. I guess the Meta Group was wrong!

Now back to talent management, last year Dr John Sullivan discussed why Talent Management Analytics is still failing, I added my two cents worth as well. Let’s look at Dr John’s list again:

HR Skill deficiency
Lack of business knowledge
Expensive tools limiting deployment
Lack of quality data
Complicated nature of talent management

A system will not solve all the items on this list, other than item 3. This point was emphasised in the PageUp People white paper when they looked at the People and Process implications. A broader organisational change activity is required to succeed in a strategic context with workforce analytics.

Australian Payroll: Chris 21

One of the reasons I have been so busy over the last few months is a specific client project I have been working on: a payroll upgrade and implementation of a new time & attendance system. While I not going to cover the details of the engagement I want to touch on the payroll system that is being implemented: Chris 21 from Frontier Software .

This is the first time I have worked so closely with the Chris 21 product, so I have been learning lots about what it can and can’t do. Overall I am impressed with the product (excluding the employee and manager tools, more on that later) based on what needs to be achieved for the client.

For Australian readers you might be wondering why I am impressed as I like many hear horror stories of tier 2 payroll implementations from all vendors. One reason: the administrative tool kit allows significant configuration and customisation of the core product to meet a client’s needs.

The downside is most clients are unable to take full advantage of these functions as it requires significant Chris 21 and technology knowledge to use the tools. For many clients I suspect the implementation consultants have locked them out of these sections as in the wrong hands you payroll system could easily be broken.

Additionally the integration options on paper are very robust, the product includes the ability to track data changes for outwards integration into message based platforms like an EAI. Inbound integration is a little harder and to achieve fully automated integration requires IT support and potentially custom development. Inbound processing is completed using General Transaction Requests (GTR) a specific data integration language provided by Frontier Software. GTRs allow clients to build complex integrations with their Chris 21 system, however IT support is a must.

The Employee and Manager offerings within the HR21 product are limited in usability, however this is due to the HR21 product being built on an older technology platform. The biggest issue is the lack of configuration offered to clients, without having to engage Frontier Software. Frontier Software is actively working to build a replacement based on more recent technology offerings. But, and a big but, HR21 implemented in an innovative manner could provide significant benefits to an organisation.

A final note I am not commenting on specific payroll processing functionality as this is very client specific.

RecruitTECH September 2009

On September 18 in Canberra I will be speaking at RecruitTECH with a host of other people. What is RecruitTECH?

The RecruitTECH conference will provide delegates with an insight into the future of recruitment and how technology will increasingly impact upon the sourcing of employees in coming years.

Themes to be covered during the conference include: the use of social media (eg. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn), user-generated content, the distributed workforce, the evolution of recruitment advertising, the use of employer-branded career sites, and the trend towards Software as a Service (SaaS).

My contribution will be about social media in the workplace, other speakers include:

Laurel Papworth
Stephen Collins
Ross Clennett
Brett Iredale
Geoff Jennings
Kelly Magowan
Thomas Shaw
Kate Sykes
Phillip Tusing
Riges Younan
Clayton Wehner

Registration is only $299 with a maximum of 75 people, so book early to make sure you are not disappointed.

Social media in the workplace

The use of social software tools inside the firewall is called Enterprise 2.0, a term coined by Professor Andrew McAfee in his 2006 article “Enterprise 2.0 The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration“. Within this article he talks about the building blocks of Enterprise 2.0, SLATES.

Search
Links
Authoring
Tags
Extensions
Signals

This makes sense as they mirror the growth components that have made Web 2.0 what it is today. Unfortunately while consumer tools and services are delivering on these promises when employees come to work the tools provided by your average IT department are, well, less than average when it comes to enabling emergent collaboration.

The places where most enterprises fail first is with search. How many corporate Intranet search tools provide the ease of use, speed, relevancy and accuracy of Google?

In a survey completed last year AIIM found that almost 70% of respondents believed that only 50% or less of their organisation’s information was searchable online! With only 10% saying that findability of information inside their organisation was an “Imperative”.

This issue is only going to get larger the more and more people who experience Web 2.0 on the “consumer web” as they will begin to expect the same features and usability internally.

A blog story 5 years on

5 years ago today I started blogging with a small and unassuming post called “Welcome” (original I know), with the first topic to be covered being recruitment. Over the years I have written a lot about recruitment, but also technology, management, and HR.

In summary over the last 1,825 days:

I have typed out 1,313 posts, a little under one a day
You have made 1,873 comments
I have worked for 4 different companies, well 5 as I now work for myself
Watched the rise and fall of many companies
Watched the rise and fall of many blogs
Met some amazing people, I was going to try and list a few but it became too hard.

When I decided to start a blog after reading several blogs for a while and finding very very few covering HR, Recruitment and Technology, ok there were none! I also want a place for my ideas in a format that others could provide feedback so the blog format was perfect.

Thank you to all who read my writing, I really appreciate it. If you have never commented it would be fantastic to hear from you over the next year.

Finally I am looking forward to another 5 years of typing away on this blog.

Social Recruiting Summit

A quick summary from the Social Recruiting Summit that I attended yesterday at Google in San Francisco.

The day kicked off with Reid Hoffman CEO of LinkedIn giving us an amazing presentation on LinkedIn. One of Reid’s main messages was that every individual is now their own small business, which means everyone needs their own brand. Therefore you need to build the asset value of yourself. Further if every individual is a small business, every individual is an entrepreneur and everyone will have/need an online profile. Some interesting food for thought.

Reid also provided some interesting statistics on LinkedIn ; 1 million new signups every 17 days, 41 million professionals in over 1 70 industries across 200 countries with the highest per capital membership being from the Netherlands!

Next up was our tour of the Google campus. While only short it was still very hard to take it all in. Some of the highlights included:

Meng’s wall of Presidential photos
Free food, of course!
Two outside lap pools with a lifeguard
Lots of random things such as old style phone booths, steal shark fins, pink flamingos all over the campus
24 hour free gym
Free blue bikes that you can just take to get around the campus
Posters. There were posters everywhere advertising all sorts of things. Not like most companies where there are “official” locations for posters. Not at Google it seems you just grab your poster and tape it up where ever you want.

For the first concurrent sessions I decided to try the unconference sessions on the assumption that the others were being streamed and I should be able to download the video and audio later. The session was Social Recruiting ROI. As with some other unconference sessions I have attended the session was a bit confusing and didn’t really answer any questions. The reason I believe was a mismatch in expectations between the audience and session facilitators. We had about 80 people in the room most hoping to hear from the panel how to identify ROI, while the panel was wanting to hear from the audience. My takeaway from this session is we need some metrics, but no one really knows what they are, yet.

After lunch we had Sacha Chua from IBM talk about the “most awesome job search ever”. A fantastic session looking at social recruitment from the candidates point of view. Sacha had been blogging while at university and during the process had connected with several people from IBM. She told a very funny story of going for her first interview at IBM. Beforehand she did all the right things and prepared for the interview but was very nervous about the process given she really wanted to work for IBM. At the start of the interview, the hiring manager introduced themself and essentially said “it is great to finally meet you I was a bit nervous about meeting you face to face”! Sacha was in shock because that was exactly how she felt! The profile she had developed online meant that IBM wanted her to join them and they were concerned that IBM would not be “good” enough!

Sacha then went on to talk about how productive she was from day one because she already knew so many people inside IBM. She knew more about IBM before she joined than she could ever get off a career’s site. This is essentially Cluetrain Thesis 84:

We know some people from your company. They’re pretty cool online. Do you have any more like that you’re hiding? Can they come out and play?

So why don’t more organisations allow their employees to connect with potential candidates? Don’t know how to do that just find employees who are passionate about your company and let them tell stories. Don’t have employees who are passionate? You might just have a problem.

Next up was Joshua Khan who’s presentation was about sacred cows and social recruiting. An interesting look at some of the work he had been doing with Geek Squad and Best Buy. Josh went through multiple examples giving the audience a great run down of what worked, what didn’t and what he has learnt from each experience. One of the key messages from Josh was that lots of social recruiting ideas don’t really cost a huge amount of money, if any at all.

The greatest learning here was that there was nothing new. The work I have been doing with clients in Australia is basically the same as what Josh has been doing in the US. So is Australia really 2 – 3 years behind? Now I will admit I had been speaking with Josh in the morning on the shuttle bus to Googleplex about the level of social media maturity of the audience, which neither of us knew. So this does mean he could of held back some of the really forward thinking ideas and approaches?

The final session was from Shannon Seery Gude on employer online reputation and social recruiting strategies. Even though I have known Shannon and her husband Julian for many years we have never actually met! Shannon knows her stuff and this was the best presentation of the day. Shannon gave the audience an inside look at how Bernard Hodes develops online strategies for clients, just this session provided enough practical tips and hints to cover the cost of event ticket.

You can see her full presentation on her blog.

So the real question is was the event worth the travel and expense. Yes.

My only regret I wish it went on for two days, in fact several people mentioned the same thing. The main reasons were the day felt rushed and I had to make some very hard decisions on which sessions I attended.