Into the grey zone

Leon Gettler from Management Line posted a couple of days ago about the grey zone in organisations ie the things you make for personal use while on company time and which companies secretly endorse. This is an interesting dilemma.

How does the HR profession react, while the issue is not new people have been calling in sick when they really are perfectly healthy for decades. For this we have use reports such as unplanned absences to see where possible issues were.

But what about employees mindlessly wasting away the day online? Do we now review reports around internet usage and track down the abusers? Do you limit personal internet time to 10 mins a day like some companies? And what about those employees who need to use the internet for their job, do we now have equity issues? Are there privacy issues with this monitoring? You notice a specific employee has been spending a lot of time on recruitment sites, how can you deal with this and keep the confidence of the employees, managers and not breach a privacy regulation? Your average HRIS/HRMS/Payroll product will not help you here.

Moving on from internet usage. The Telegraph article starts hinting at managers who spend their day building political empires for self gain and satisfaction. While they look like they are “working” are they really adding value to the organisation? Once again technology will not help you here.

Leon followed on with concept of the underemployed and how they are on the rise. I’m sure we have all seen them in the workplace. Do we start time and motion studies to hunt them down and hope the workers don’t all go on strike? Only joking.

These topics raise an interesting challenge to managers and HR departments. With the looming skills shortage how do you leverage the underemployed, how do we limit the grey zone? How do you reengage them into the workplace so that their skills can be put to use and their needs? Just getting people into the organisation will not solve the problem either. Unless they are the right people.

Engagement in the workplace is one of the biggest issues that organisation face in the coming decade. So how do you get people to engage at work? Invite them to something that is meaningful.

Yes I know it is more complex than that but it is also as simple as that. And if someone is participating in something meaningful then they are engaged, they are also more likely to be retained, less likely to be underemployed and abuse the grey zone.

The referral buzz

Oh the noise about referrals over the last month or two is making my head hurt. Who is right and who is wrong? Is it ethical is it not? Do they work or not? I just don’t know. What I do know is all western world countries are heading down the same path.

Skills Shortage!

We all have very similar issues. Ageing workforce, multiple generations, growing economies, competitive offshore outsourcing offerings to deal with. We are all trying to understand engagement and how that influences retention. But what can the average HR professional do?

Unfortunately I do not have all the answers, and if you have read this blog for a while you will realise I tend to just create questions.

Then this morning I read something that made me really think. Are referrals the long tail of the recruitment industry? Now I am not sure John’s article fully explores the concepts and he does drop back into the looking at the viability of online referrals but that little phrase has had me going all day. Thanks John I will send you the bill for my drop in productivity! Below are some rough thoughts on this.

If you do not know the long tail, well I could explain but it would be wrong so go read the original Wired article and then come back, I’ll wait….. Back good. Its a numbers game basically. To quote John

That’s where the niche is small and the customer desires so specific that you can really deliver service.

For the recruitment outcome to be a success you need to get the right candidate and the long tail might be where these people are. To find referrals in the long tail we need to make sure that we target the niche group of potential candidates who make up this referral market. John makes this point loud a clear. It is in this area where CRM, personalisation, data mining and other techniques that are used by the Amazon’s of the world will really begin to add value to an organisation. Imagine a recruitment toolset that is tracking the movements of potential candidates/referrers. Mapping the social interactions and networks that are used by the potential candidate/referrers. These are the same tools and techniques being used by companies like Amazon to personalise an experience with their organisation. Lets take this a step further, imagine if the tool was integrated into the corporate web site and if a candidate/referrer landed on the site specific advertising or messages would be delivered to them to ensure you got access to the niche. Maybe you even customised the banner advertising on other sites to drag them in, this is technically possible through advertising networks.

“Welcome back Michael, by the way we are looking for experienced network engineers and offering $1,000 per successful placement would you be interested in helping us out?” Because you have collected background information about this person you are now targeting the niche. Ok you might not know the name of the person but you get the idea. And yes this could be classified as underhanded tactics in the same manner as some of the previous discussions but marketers are doing it all the time for product sales, and let’s face it a vast amount of attraction today is just that marketing.

This might only relevant for certain industry groups and certain roles, but then so is an online referral program and as John pointed out many could just end up as untargeted email floods, even spam.

Look for another post tomorrow on retention, once you snag the right candidate.

Email problems

Over the last couple of weeks I have had several issues in sending mail from GMail. A couple of organisations have started to completely block GMail, in particular PageUp which is anonying as I have to deal with people there. When I send a message I get a reply :-

A message sent by this account comes from a domain or host not allowed by this mail server.

A couple of days ago I sent an email to bugs at gada.be about an issue I was having with the AND|OR operators with certain sources they are aggregating. Today I get an email back saying that there is a temporary failure while I do not need to resend the message is very strange:-

TEMP_FAILURE: SMTP Error (state 9): 451 is not yet authorized to deliver mail from 451 to . Please try later.

I am going to try a different method. Hey Chris Pirillo are you listening I am trying to give you feedback on your new service. My feedback:-

I have been trying out gada.be and found what looks like a bug when you combine dots and dashes in a URL for a search that is limited by a category. Specifically is I have a URL of http://michael.specht-sap.gada.be/g the results returned have SAP Resources that do not contain the term “michael specht”. I suspect that it might be an issues with the source search engine not playing ball correctly and using an OR where they should be using an AND.

Other than that a cool service.

links for 2005-10-13

Workforce analytics event

A bit of cross promotion.

The AHRI Victorian HRIS Special Interest Group will be holding an evening case study on 10th November covering understanding and developing business information solutions through collaborative technologies. We will be having two speakers Glen Gabie from Yellowfin Solutions and Lyndall Bradilovic of Corrs Chambers Westgarth. Should be an interesting night if you are in Melbourne please feel free to come along even if you are not a member of AHRI.

What is gada.be?

Over the last 4 or 5 days there has been a huge buzz across the geek blogosphere with Chris Pirillo‘s release of gada.be a meta search engine. (If you don’t know who Chris is check out his blog, he has hosted a couple of TV shows, runs Lockergnome, Gnomdex has a Podcast and generally is an all round geek.)

Chris has been building the tool for a while and seems to have hit a home run on the idea. Basically the tool is a tag based metasearch that returns only the top results from about 140 sources via the browser, RSS and in OPML. Today I found a few minutes to play with the tool and while it is not as fast as Google it is very cool.

You can submit a search to the service before you actually see the front page. By using a fairly simple subdomian process http://hr.blogs.gada.be returns you the top search results for the term “HR Blogs”, however http://hr.blogs.gada.be/b returns results from blogs and http://hr.blogs.gada.be/n from news sources. Now things get interesting, ad a /opml and you get an OPML file of results which you can turn into RSS. This simplified approach is also really cool for searching from slow bandwidth tools such as phones and PDAs.

I would expect to see many new features over the coming weeks.

Now the HR spin.

Recruiter/Candidate can background check each other before they get back to their desk. An HR Generalist needs to know a specific piece of information they can now quickly and easily search. All while using a hand held device while not at their desk.

But the best bit! Just try this, a meta search of meta searches, and http://sap.project.manager.gada.be/j/opml gives you an OPML file that will drip feed the results right into your RSS reader! Jobster, Monster, Indeed, SimpleHired, Hotjobs, etc all come up in the results. Give it a go!

Where the tool will not work is when you want all of the results and are willing to look through several pages of content.