Yesterday I was lucky (or unlucky depending on your point of view) to be invited onto the Recruiting Animal Show.
The Recruiting Animal is Michael Kelemen from Canada. Michael holds a weekly live show for people to call in to talk recruiting.
I was on the show with Australian recruiters Dan Naroo, and Ross Clennett. There were others from across the pond but they don’t really count now do they :-).
I have written lots of times about employee engagement.
Today I saw a great video from Box of Crayons, here it is.
Now give all of the doom and gloom around it is very easy to lose sight of the productivity benefits you receive when employees are happy. The secret is once employees are happy your customers are happy and guess what they spend more money with you!
Many people have commented that there is still a session in the HR Futures Conference without a speaker, could they fill the slot. The issue has not been there was no speaker, more that I had too many speakers to choose from! Over the last month I have been working with several people to finalise who will speak and what they will speak about. I wanted a case study so that attendees could get an “in the trenches” view of HR , Social Media and Web 2.0.
I am very happy and excited to announce that Joris Luijke HR Manager from Atlassian will be speaking, and that the program is now full!
If you don’t know Atlassian you really should.
Atlassian is an Australian software company specialising in collaboration and development tools. An amazing success story, founded in 2002, they have 14,500+ customers, 195 employees worldwide, offices in Sydney, San Francisco and Amsterdam with FY08 revenues ~$35 million. Altlassian’s wiki product Confluence was listed 2nd in the 2008 Top 100 Australia Web 2.0 Applications, top in Gartners Magic Quadrant for Social Software report, and the founders Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar have been listed multiple times as some of top Australia’s entrepreneurs.
Now the talk.
I have asked Joris to cover what it is like leading the HR team in a fast growing Web 2.0 organisation, where all employees are encouraged to blog, policies are stored in a wiki and generally culture is Web 2.0 in nature.
More details to come.
A short follow up on my post about using Twitter to find a job and find candidates.
As a recap, Brandon Mendelson (@BJMendelson) created two hastags, Have A Job? (#HAJ) and Need a job (#NAJ), the details can be found on his blog. I said the real power was you did not need to use Twitter to access the jobs or candidates that is very true but more. Now there is a tool, Hash#Jobs that is aggregating tweets that contain the following hastags, #job, #jobpost, #NAJ, #HAJ, #employment, #recruiting, #hiring.
The tools was built by Australian developer Warren Seen (@warren_s) as a bit of an experiment.
Reading my feeds, news reports and email lists everyday it would seem that the world is coming to an end. Jobs are being lost, organisations are cutting back, contracts are on hold, revenues are down, generally things are bad. I know personally that business has dried up very quickly in the last 2 months.
Which brings me to talent management and the role it plans in this market. Managing talent is not just hiring, it is also about developing the good employees, and removing the poor performers. When organisations need to cut back, having a good understanding of your talent pool is critical.
There are options features within most existing HR systems that can be used to support the potential downsizing activities of organisations. The features needed include workforce planning, recruiting, performance, competency, learning management, succession & career planning, compensation management. Sometimes information from modules such as eLearning, training administration, and core position management are needed as well. There are specialised tools within the HR systems framework called Talent Management Software (TMS) to support these functions and processes.
When an organisation plans a downsizing activity the workforce planning, performance management, succession planning and competency management features within the system would ideally be used as part of the decision process. Core being workforce planning, however findings from a 2008 Taleo Research report “Unified Talent Management: Vital for Australian Business Performance” indicate that 80% of organisations in Australia do not include their entire workforce the workforce planning activities instead it is usually restricted to either senior management or just high potential employees.
So without a TMS implemented across the whole workforce most organisations are unable to clearly identify the impact of cutting certain roles from the organisation. They have no way of knowing, without significant manual work, what knowledge will exit with people on the downsizing list, what projects they were working nor the potential future roles the person currently filling the role could have filled.
Organisations could be relying on “best guesses”, “hunches”, word of mouth or immediate manager recommendations, when identifying which roles stay and which go! At best they might have previous performance review data, at worse nothing.
Organisations who have invested in talent management over the last few years should now have a very clear view on the impact of any downsizing decisions. Organisations without, well they might just go out of business.
A little experiment in recruitment has been kicked off by @BJMendelson on Twitter. Using Twitter to connect job seekers with employers through the use of hastags. Hashtags are a community driven tagging process for adding additional context and metadata to your Twitter. You create a hashtag by prefixing a word with a hash symbol: #hashtag.
Brandon has created two hastags, Have A Job? (#HAJ) and Need a job (#NAJ), the details can be found on his blog. While Brandon is saying he will retweet the job ads the real power is you do not even need to use Twitter to gain access to the jobs and candidates.
If you are looking for staff, head over to Twitter Search and search for the hastag #HAJ, http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23HAJ. If you are looking for a job go to Twitter Search and look for the hashtag #NAJ, http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23NAJ. (Update: Ok I go the search the wrong way around!) If you are looking for staff, head over to Twitter Search and search for the hastag #NAJ, http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23NAJ. If you are looking for a job go to Twitter Search and look for the hashtag #HAJ, http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23HAJ. You can pull this data into an RSS feed and get the jobs or candidates delivered directly to you.
Nice and creative!
Managing your talent is one of the most critical activities an HR professional undertakes. Starting with the workforce plan, the right mix of hires, supporting performance and development, to planning succession which feeds back into your workforce plan. Of these steps succession planning, and workforce planning tend to be overlooked by many organisations.
For many HR professionals one of the challenges is having the time and money to develop and execute these plans. Succession planning can be viewed by senior management as not adding value to the organisation due to the long lead time it takes before the benefits are realised.
The events over the last two weeks should be a rude awakening to all business leaders who have not supported their HR team’s efforts around succession planning.
Which brings me to Apple.
For a long time there has been speculation over Steve Jobs’s health. With even rumours of his death circulating every few months. In September 2008 Steve joked about these reports in a presentation to the Apple faithful.
Which brings us to 2009. On January 5th Steve Jobs admitted to some minor health issues, caused by a “hormone imbalance”.
Then 2 weeks later, Jobs takes medical leave until June 2009. Sending the technology world into a spin and Apple stocks dive 7%. Now there are talks of investors suing Apple over the health issues. Ouch, costly.
Time for the board to execute the succession plan.
Who will step in for one of the world’s greatest visionaries? Tim Cook. Tim has stepped in before to run Apple, during 2004 when Steve Jobs was recovering from surgery. Or could it be Philip Schiller who delivered the recent MacWorld Keynote? It seems Apple’s board has been thinking about succession. But more needs to be done, most people do not know who they are, a fact highlighted by a recent Knowledge@Wharton article on the issue.
Apple has a strong bench of executives who could succeed Jobs, but major stakeholders, such as investors, customers and partners, don’t know much about them, according to Wharton faculty. The first step in any succession plan may be illustrating that Apple is more than Jobs.
But if Steve does not come back from medical leave is Tim or Philip the visionary leader to replace Steve Jobs? Or is there another solution, like the Microsoft process with replacing Bill Gates. Business guy as CEO, Steve Ballmer and technical guy Ray Ozzie.
Succession planning matters.
Just a short post.
Early bird registration closed yesterday, if you missed out sorry it is now $400 for the day. Still great value if you compare with many of the other events where you can spend $400 for half a day or even a few hours!
I have had a TBD session on the agenda as I have been playing with ideas on what and who to fill the session. While I can’t announce yet who the session will be I am very excited and hope to have things finalised in the next few days.
Finally if you are trying to justify coming along remember there is the executive overview PDF you can provide to your manager. We so far have people attending from Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra, hopefully Perth and Adelaide as well. There are spots left so register today!
Today Australian job referral tool, Hoojano, announced a partnership with MYOB under the banner of StaffSearcher. An interesting move by both organisations, release here.
MYOB is moving more and more into SaaS offerings to small and medium business, they even own a web hosting business! Providng these businesses a cost effective method of recruiting candidates is a smart move.
From Hoojano’s point of view an interesting move and one that will give them great visibility to small to medium business owners in a difficult market. Many industry obversers, I for one, have been wondering, after launching their beta in February 2008 what Hoojano has been up to. The main Hoojano site has no jobs which had some wondering had they pulled up stumps!
I registered and took the site for a bit of a test drive. Still very much like the original Hoojano offering, a few bugs still in the service such as wording errors in emails, but overall a pleasant experience. The biggest complaint is still the one from February 2008, the building up of your contact for referrals is a good concept but time consuming for the user. Also the system does not seem to allow me to create a profile to find myself jobs.
The StaffSearch fees are a bit complex:-
Listing Fee $25 + GST
Reward – $ Specified by Hirer + GST
StaffSearcher Reward Commission – 20% of the Reward
Referrer Reward Commission – Referrers share of reward
Sponsor Commission 5% of the Reward net of Reward Commission
The reward is variable and up to the advertiser, and for the initial roles seem rather high but then that’s what the advertiser is will to pay.
A different model to 2Vouch*, who have a zero listing fee and the rewards based on salary levels.
A comment MYOB with StaffSearcher have decided to go around recruiters, a tactic not used by 2Vouch who have been actively partnering with recruiters. A move that might back fire, it has Geoff Jennings off side already:
Hoojano/StaffSearcher, know this. Probably a better approach to your marketing would have been to engage recruiters, rather than rally for their departure from the recruiting process.
Hoojano CEO Mike Wilkinson responded to Geoff in the comments:
Can I respond on the line that MYOB has added to the homepage. By the way, I respond objectively as it is not a line our business (HooJano) adopts. MYOB is free to attract custom however they see fit.
And
What we have found in our discussions with recruiters is that under certain conditions and if the rewards are at a certain level, they are completely open to submitting candidates. (FYI, recruiters can chose to be overt or not in disclosing their core business, the customer simply wants candidates.)
I hope recruiters do at least give it a go and more so I hope they make money at a good margin so it can evolve as a long term, mutually beneficial part of their business.
I say game on! The more the merrier and the only winners should be candidates and employers!
(Disclosure: 2Vouch are a current customer of mine.)
Just a short post to let you all know that early bird pricing for the Inspecht HR Futures Conference finishes in 3 days, 15th January. After this you will need to spend an extra A$50 to attend.
Remember you can register online, or download the offline order form.
| REGISTRATION TYPE | DATES | PRICE |
|---|---|---|
| Early Bird | Before January 15 | A$350 |
| Regular | After January 15 | A$400 |
If you are planning to come from interstate, which I know some of you are, check out the venue details for accommodation options.
Michael Specht 