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HR Metrics: You Have a 2% Chance of Dying in the Next 10 Years

I had to go to the doctor this week, for my annual physical. High cholesterol runs in my family, and my grandfather and father both passed away at an early age from heart related illness. So I go. I don’t like it, but I go.

So I’m at the doctor’s office with Dr. Vahameki, who is a really smart guy but a little crass even though he’s much younger than I am. This annoys me… that he is younger than I am yet he is my Doctor.

So we are doing our thing together, and out of the blue, he says with a slyly disguised snicker, “Would you like to know how long you’ll live?”

And I say, “Um, sure.”

And then he launches into this description of how medicine used to be all about diagnosing a problem, and then prescribing treatment, but that we have finally, because of data and analytics, begun moving into the Age of Predictive Medicine, which is much more useful. I agree on the usefulness piece, but remain annoyed.

So it turns out there’s study called the Framingham Heart Study, in which they took thousands of participants, and ran their LDL, HDL, age, weight and other factors through statistical analysis to create a predictive model of how likely you are to die from cardiovascular disease given ‘your numbers’.

So he takes me to this site, and plugs in my numbers from last year’s bloodwork, and it turns out I have a 2% chance of dying in the next 10 years from cardiovascular disease if my cholesterol levels remain where they are today.

And he says, “See, it’s not very likely…”

I try and hide my annoyance at him.

I reply, “But what if I were healthy and had lower “bad cholesterol” and greater “good cholesterol?” I can never remember which is which between all the Ls and Ds and Hs.

“You’d be at about 1 in out of a thousand, or 0.1%. But I have people in here all the time at 20-30% risk factor and those are the people that I’m really worried about.”

I am not thrilled at this good news. 2% seems high. A 1 in 50 chance of not making it to 2018. Now I am really annoyed.

I quickly get dressed and get out of there.

So for the last week, I’ve started eating healthy again and am back in the gym. But it got me thinking about the power of predictive modeling, and how far behind HR is in this space, generally speaking. This is why I love blogging. It makes you think differently about the world. One minute, I’m thinking about death and my annoying doctor, the next minute, HR analytics. Maybe I really do need a doctor.

I’m not a statistician, but for large sample sizes at large companies, there is a LOT of information that is just waiting to be discovered by progressive HR organizations who can pull the data and turn it into meaningful information. We had talked about doing this at Starbucks right before I left; running multivariate regression analysis against the thousands of store level staff to better predict attrition and the demographic trends that play out when you have large sample sizes of people.

But HR is rarely predictive. It tends to be more like ‘old medicine’, identifying what is wrong and then prescribing a fix. “You see, your attrition spiked so now we need to recruit more…..” Exit interviews. Employee relations. Compensation reviews. Most all of it analyzes post data.

It is admittedly difficult to be predictive, but it is also because we don’t ask enough smart questions. We ought to be significantly better as an HR function at predicting things. Because predictive HR is a lot more helpful that diagnostic HR.

For example, we can reasonably predict what range the US unemployment level is likely to be in the next 2 years, by comparing the delta in unemployment from the top of the boom in 1999/2000 to the peak in unemployment in 2003 (50 basis points, or 2% points overall) and fudge a little for the gravity of the economic issues that we face. It’s probably going to jump to about 8% (we can now wait and see if I’m right). And from that, HR should be able to extrapolate candidate flow and inform a recruiting strategy and resourcing plan. But the vast majority of groups won’t ever do this.

I expect in the next decade (provided I make it that far), that we’ll see much more predictive HR at the best companies.

More Aggregation, Less Aggravation

I struggled with the title for this post. I wanted to call it “Facebook is a Seine Net for People” but that is the worst title for a blog post ever. I figured nobody would know what the Hell I was trying to say. Which I suppose might still be true.

Anyhow.

I started writing this post a few months ago, after spending way too much time being completely wrecked by jetlag and not being able to sleep in Dublin, Ireland and also trying to decide if I was going to attend my 20 year high school reunion after receiving the invite that week. I ended up not making the reunion (too much travel) but want to finish my thoughts on the experience related to the reunion.

It struck me after getting the invite to the High School Reunion (Evergreen High School, Vancouver, Washington, class of 1988) that this is likely the last time my friends from High School won’t be aggregated and assembled for me for a 10-year reunion. It’s the last time I won’t easily be able to keep in touch with them, from now until the end of my life. Never again will we accidentally lose touch with people; unless we want to (we all have some of those, er, friends). It’s a great example of the evolution of technology.

Because Facebook is a Seine Net for people. Which as I’ve said I am certain is the worst analogy you could use in a blog post, but that’s the image that I am stuck with in my mind. One big net, scooping up all the people and putting them in order…

10 years ago, in 1998, on of my best friends, Greg Boesel and I had to organize the 10 year reunion for Evergreen High School. Way back in 1988, he was President of the Class of 1988, and I was Vice President. Our other friend Tom Miller was Treasurer, and we ran as The Three Amigos as a ticket, and threw burritos to the crowd of constituents.

10 years later, when we then had to organize the 10 year reunion, the Internet was barely adopted (circa 1998), and we had to manually send out postcards and started the process with a 10-year old hardcopy list of everyone’s contact information, that I think we had leftover from high school that was printed out on one long sheet of dot matrix printer paper. Those were The Days. The reunion went off without a hitch as I recall, but we really didn’t keep in any better touch with the people over the last 10 years then we did in the 10 immediately years after high school. Of course we said we would, and then we didn’t. Or at least I didn’t. And they didn’t with me.

This year, the same company that did our 10 year reunion recreated the list from the data they had 10 years before, and they are leveraging some very rudimentary web technology to do it. But since this year’s event, nearly everyone is on Facebook (or will be) and we’ll now always be aggregated so that at the 30 year reunion, we’ll have kept in touch more and also be assembled and organized for future events. I’ve already connected with at least 20 people from my class in 1988, that found me on Facebook after one of the attendees got things started by patching the social graph back together. And they’ll see a newsfeed of this post on Facebook.

People talk a lot about the interconnectedness of the social graph, but I haven’t heard many people talk about its sustainability. This sustainability will be important, because it will create significant efficiencies in the world. For example, I just helped one of my classmates from High School get connected with some job opportunities at Microsoft. Because of the recent connections we made on Facebook. This created efficiency for him, but also for Microsoft because I delivered a viable, executive level candidate right to them.

Now here’s the big idea in this post: think about how efficient business and the world would be if all the people were perpetually better organized and all their related data and those interconnections were constantly organized by a (very much larger) Facebook. Everything goes faster and is more efficient when it’s tagged and organized. People. Business. Dating. The Talent Marketplace. High School Reunions.

Really think about that for a moment:

Right now, there’s estimated to be something like 6.7B people in the world. If we exclude third world countries that are not as active in the world economy, that leaves about 3.5 or 4B people that are really participating and engaged in the world economy. Facebook currently has 120M users (probably more), so they’ve already indexed 3 to 4% of all the economic participants. This to me sounds like a lot for a company that’s only been around a few years.

So maybe it’s not a seine net for people, but Facebook, or something like it, will be around for a very long time, helping all the world’s people do things faster, cheaper, and more efficiently, by scooping up all the people, and getting them organized.

On Paying Attention

This week I was the Conference Chairman for the fall ERE Expo conference, and I it was great to connect with so many people I hadn’t seen in awhile. I also met some truly incredible people.

It also turned out to be a period of discovery and clarity for me, as being back at an industry conference like this (I haven’t been to one since I joined Google, which was nearly 2 years ago) really brings a lot of perspective. We often get lost in the tracks of our lives and it’s so beneficial to step off the track that you are on every day and step onto another track for a change, and to really pay attention. Like when you ride a fast motorcycle, if you do that, you are really paying attention.

So in no particular order, here is what I discovered at ERE this year as I stopped to really pay attention:

Some of us experience the world radically differently than the rest.
Case in point: I met this intriguing woman named Melissa Sconyers that frankly, made me feel like I have been completely left behind.

We had an in depth discussion about Digital Natives (the Gen Yers who have grown up being digitally connected by cellular phones, Twitter, Facebook and other forms of social media) and the Digital Immigrants (I guess that’s me… those who are moving into understanding this other, more connected world that the younger generation takes as de facto.) It was really interesting to hear her perspective and realize that although she’s “young” (I think in her early twenties) she has lived a rich life that in large part is due to her passion for social and digital media. She is one of those ‘special people’ that are going to do amazing things in her life (she was one of the ‘Smart Kids’ featured on Oprah a few years ago), but what struck me most is that she really pays attention – to what’s going on in the world, to what makes her happy, to what her values are… Melissa chronicles the discussion on her blog.

In part because I met Melissa, I realize that I absolutely have to start blogging again on a regular basis. As someone who sees clearly that a lot of my success has come from the relationships I have in my life and career, not having a digital presence that is up to date is a huge liability and is a faulty career and life strategy. In fact, when I met Melissa, one of the first things she said was, “I read your blog. It’s really good, but all the stuff is too old…” Literally I think that was her first sentence when I sat down with her. I was embarrassed.

And then we had this great discussion about how social media creates precursory bonds that allow in-person interactions to be that much closer and stronger because people have connected in advance over the web. So social media serves as an accelerant for regular, in-person relationships which creates more meaning in our lives. And I knew this, but I had stopped paying attention. This is something that is important to understand in today’s world.

I bet Melissa will always be paying attention.

I need to go to Dubai.
Just last week I finished this book by Ben Mizrich (I like his writing because he seems to find the smart true stories in the world) called Rigged: The True Story of an Ivy League Kid Who Changed the World of Oil, from Wall Street to Dubai. He's the same guy that chronicled the real life adventures of the MIT students who starting beating Vegas at the blackjack tables by being smarter at playing the game (they never cheated). They made a terrible movie out of the story called "21" that doesn't even begin to do the story justice.

And then I’m having a Cuban dinner (how are plantains different than a banana?) with Dr. John Sulivan, Master Burnett, and John’s wife Addie. John believes that you don’t really experience the world when you travel unless you eat the local food. Dr. Sullivan has paid attention to this.

And we get talking about Dubai and the experiences they have had there recently. They told me some of their stories. It’s an incredible place that rarely gets talked about in your daily routine, but there’s an economic boom happening that is changing the way the world views economic booms. And the culture implications strike at the heart of many of the reasons the world is in so much conflict.

So I am going to figure out a way to go to Dubai next year, just to see What is Really Going On Over There. Dr. Sullivan is speaking over there in May, so there might be a win-win and a connection for me to go.

It became clear over dinner: I need to start paying attention to Dubai.

Penelope Trunk loses cellular phones like most people lose pocket change.
I met and became great friends with Penelope long before I ever met her in person. Like 2 years before we ever met we were blogging together and talking on the phone and we really got to know each other well. So well that we talked about going into business together in some way. But we had never met until about 3 months ago when she came out to Palo Alto. For the longest time I had this funny pipe dream that we would start and run a company together, but never actually meet in person (ever). And then we would write a book about it. Or something like that.

Penelope and I had the opportunity to host an impromptu, Brainstorming Breakout session at the conference (one of the other conference speakers had to cancel at the last minute, so we pinch-hitted without a lot of advance notice).

Given that she’s often on an airplane, interviewing people, etc, it’s a little funny that she loses her cellular phone or hasn’t figured out a solution for tethering. She lost it at the conference (she can swear like a trucker incidentally), and she shared that she actually has two cellular phones ready to go at any one time (already set up with the cellular service provider), as a preemptive counter-measure because she loses them so frequently. I think it would be easier to get a belt clip, despite the fashion faux pas associated with doing so. Another lesson in paying attention.

An October night in South Florida can stay with you forever…
So I was at the conference and couldn’t sleep. This happens to me pretty much every time I travel. In fact, when I know I am traveling for business, I pretty much resign myself that it’s a slow road to complete physical disaster, because I simply don’t sleep. I try to sleep. It's just that I can't.

On my recent to trip to Asia, I got Ambien, which seems to help if I have an 8 hour window that I can use for sleep, but if I don’t have that much time, I just get ready for The Long Slow Meltdown. And I rarely have a full 8 hours of sleeptime when I’m on the road, given the pressures of work and meetings and after hours dinners et cetera. So I melt down a lot. Which is not so good when you are speaking in front of 500 people.

So anyway, I couldn’t sleep and so I went outside and created the most amazing memory on the patio with the pool and the beach right behind it. It was one of those perfect nights. The doors opened and the perfection of the blue of the pool in the darkness with the clouds and the wind (so much wind) and the crash of the waves…the memory is burned and seared into my brain in the most indelible way. Even if I had taken a picture it wouldn’t have been the same as the memory in my head. It’s one of those rare memories in life when Everything Is Just Right that you end up carrying it with you forever and smiling back on it.

So on that night, even though I should have been sleeping, I was really paying attention.

And I am so glad I did.

Going just a little bit farther can achieve a whole lot more.
I had the pleasure of meeting and introducing at the ERE conference, Steve Lavin the famous UCLA basketball coach and now ESPN sportscaster. If you watch college basketball you’ll recognize him and his voice, he commentates with Brent Musberger. He is a really genuine, honest guy when you meet him in person. It’s impossible not to like him. One of those types of people. As head coach at UCLA, Lavin and his staff recruited and signed the No. 1 rated recruiting class in the country in 1998 and 2001. Hence, he is speaking at a recruiting conference.

One of the things he spoke at length about was what he called ‘incrementalism’ or doing just a little bit more over time, and how that can create dramatic life results. He used it in relation to sports, but I think the same is true in one’s career.

I’ve been assessing and observing talent in my career for something like 15 years. I’ve observed that most successful people practice incrementalism in some form or another, and sometimes in only very small ways, and it dramatically changes their trajectory in both life and career. This is a life strategy that everyone should adopt. Most people have lofty goals that usually can’t be achieved unless they step off the track of their formal career and practice incrementalism in other things.

It’s one of the reasons I speak at conferences, even though doing so is something I find to be pretty difficult and speaking in front of 700 people is something that always makes me nervous (I get physically nauseous actually…but then come to think of it maybe that’s from the lack of sleep…) and it takes a lot out of me mentally. The most successful people do things that are hard or scary or risky in order to increase the average returns they get out of life. By doing so, they increase the chance that more value will to come to them.

I don’t know exactly what value attending a conference, or continuing my blogging, or speaking in public even when it’s inconvenient or difficult to do so, or doing the other entrepreneurial things that I do outside of Google will ultimately net for me, but I know that as a strategy of incrementalism it has the potential to provide great returns. And I’ve observed that the most successful people all seem to do it.

Blogging and participating in social media is largely an act of incrementalism, a relatively small investment, but one that everyone I know who does it claims has tremendous value to their lives and career. The people I know that practice this form of incrementalism all swear by it.

And so I discovered a lot at the ERE conference this year. More than any other event I’ve attended actually, and I met a lot of amazing people and created some really great relationships, and one really great memory from a night I couldn’t sleep because I was really paying attention.

And it got me started blogging again. And thinking more.

And most importantly, it got me paying attention again.

And all of that is a very good thing.

Your Birthday Will Be Different This Year

Okay, so I've been away but now I'm back and figured I should start writing again.  There is a Very Long Story on why I haven't been blogging that perhaps I'll write a post on someday (but not today).

Has anyone noticed that this year everyone knows your birthday?  If you haven't had a birthday, you'll see what I mean shortly.  2008 is The Year That Everyone Remembers Your Birthday.  Just wait.  You'll see.  Between LinkedIn and Facebook (and probably some other things that I don't even recognize) everyone knows, which created a new experience for me yesterday (which was my Birthday).

So in actuality, my birthday was spent on an airplane flying from SFO to New York so I could attend a meeting at Google New York City the next day, and generally was not that eventful because I was away from my friends and family.  But I did make a new friend as I sat next to a woman on the plane named Erica Sandberg who happens to be a writer and wrote a book that sounds pretty interesting given that I'm a parent of young children.  She needs a blog (and I told her so) but then I'm barely a blogger so what do I know?  But if you are reading this, maybe you should visit her site and tell her she needs a blog and then maybe she'll start writing one. 

But what's interesting is that I must have received 50 emails from various people (some friends, some not so much) wishing me Happy Birthday yesterday.  Which, you would think, wouldn't mean very much because half the people I barely know.  Except that it made me feel good all day as each little note trickled in.  And really it was a combination of emails (I think these were from the LinkedIn connections) and a multitude of people who wrote on my FaceBook Wall.    I think it was the collective birthday wishes actually were somehow additive in nature.   So, like 10 somewhat random birthday wishes is equal to one really thoughtful but cheap gift from a close friend in terms of my psyche.  (Or something like that.)  Which is an interesting economy in a world where we are all more connected.

So even though you wouldn't think that one little email saying Happy Birthday would create a human connection in today's day and age (it is just another email after all), it really did.

I wonder what next year will bring? 

Job Seeker Advice for the New Talent Economy

I’ve written and spoken a lot about the chasm that has been created between people outside of companies and the people inside of companies as a result of technology.  This is more than just the oft-noted resume black hole; it is a social phenomenon with regards to how companies and people interact.  Let me explain.

This nearly predates my career history, but as a job applicant before the Internet if you wanted to get hired for, say a marketing job at a particular company, you generally:

·         sent a resume via mail or fax in response to an ad in a written publication
·         called or returned a call from a recruiter (either at the company or an independent headhunter)
·         Called the company’s Job Hotline via telephone to hear about the available jobs and learn what to put on your envelope (Marketing Manager Job #2987) so your resume has a chance of landing in the right pile.
·         Called the front desk and asked to speak to a recruiter or someone in marketing.
·         Found someone at the company that you could network with to speak to someone close to the job.

I am fairly certain we don’t receive any calls to the front desk at Google saying, “Hi, I’m really interested in your company, can you tell me if you have any open jobs in the marketing department?”  This used to be the case at front desks of all major corporations however, and it wasn’t that long ago; 10-12 years maybe.

The irony in all this is that the ‘old system’ was no less efficient than the current system. This can be explained by the theory of compensating behavior:  it is now so easy to apply for a job that more people apply for many more jobs, which means that recruiting teams at companies across the world now have to review a significantly increased volume of unsuitable resumes, which creates monumental inefficiency in the overall system.

In the past, it took substantial amounts of work for an applicant to apply for a job, so the majority of applicants only applied for jobs that they actually really wanted, that they really felt suited for, and at company’s at which they really wanted to work.  It was so much work to apply for a job, applicants didn not apply for nearly as many as they do today.

Hiring managers were less selective 10-12 years ago then they are today, because the volume of candidates was less.  This is really a problem of economics:  we have lowered the cost of job advertising and resume submission so much that we now have a systemic problem of resume and job ad spam.

There have been a lot of studies done on compensating behaviors.  One of the more interesting is that taxing the sale of cartons of cigarettes doesn’t lower nicotine consumption.  Smokers in more heavily taxed states simply smoke fewer cigarettes but that have more nicotine than those in states with lower taxation.  People change behaviors to compensate for changing environment factors.  This is what has happened in the recruiting industry.

Similarly, I would argue that job applicants, on average, invest the same amount of work effort to find a new job as they did before the Internet.  Because it is now so easy, the volume of applications are much greater, but the overall work effort per applicant is the same.  What has changed significantly is that the work investment and commitment level of an applicant to a particular job opportunity has been dramatically reduced.

The best way to understand this is that if you apply for only 1 job, and it is the only job you really want or know of, or are qualified for, you are going to spend a large amount of effort trying to land that job.  For example, you might customize your resume to the particular job and company, you might invest a lot of time learning about the company and department by doing research and talking with people and you would most certainly follow up with a thank-you note afterwards.  But if you apply for 20 jobs, some degree of reduced commitment sets in, and you stop doing all those little things to try and win each of the 20 jobs.  In essence, many candidates do very little to win each of the 20 jobs, beyond the minimum resume submission and (maybe) some light interview preparation.

This is supported by my first-hand experiences as a career recruiting guy.  For example, I just wrote a post on this blog where I reference how few thank-you notes I receive as an interviewer.  Now consider another example:  I have had a work-related cellular phone for the last 10 or 12 years of my recruiting career.  I’ve interviewed literally thousands of people during that time.  I cannot remember a single instance where a candidate called me on that number, even though it’s been listed at the bottom of my email signature for the last decade or longer. 

Social norms related to job applicants have changed to the degree that most job applicants essentially do nothing to win a particular job.  The whole job search event has been commoditized.

Savvy job seekers can and should leverage this social dynamic to get ahead in their job hunt.   The place to start is to always do the basics to set you apart:

·         Invest time learning about the company and interview team:  At least do the basics.  An hour of research will make you more knowledgeable than 90% of your competition.  Do an internet search (please use Google) to learn in advance about the interview team.  You should be able to figure out what the business challenges are related to the job you interviewing for, just by doing a little work.  You’d be surprised how many people apply to Google and don’t really understand our business model or even many of our products.  It has been my experience that most candidates don’t do this.

·         Really understand the required qualifications: Take the time to really understand the qualifications for the job and map them to your qualifications.  If there’s not a clear fit, I would recommend really reconsidering whether you should apply for that particular job and instead spend more time finding one that is more suitable.

·         Always send thank-you notes.  In fact, I recommend sending two thank-you notes, one via email directly after the interview, that also includes a relevant additional question or two related to the job (no fluff), and another hand-written thank-you note as a marketing impression to the interview team.

On the other side of the equation, as the talent marketplace continues to heat up and relative scarcity continues to play out, companies that are able to scale while preserving an authentic connection with the talent marketplace will win.  This requires foresight and commitment.

My Trip to Napa (and a Peculiar Example of Employment Marketing)

My wife and I were blessed with a babysitter this weekend, so we went to Napa to 'get away from it all'.  It has been a hectic couple of months with the move, starting the new job at Google, conquering the California DMV, finding a place to live, and generally getting settled in Northern California.  So off we went to Napa; neither of us had been before.

So I'm driving to the hotel after making a Starbucks run this morning, and I suddenly slam on the brakes (which is never really a good idea with my wife in the car) and stare at this corporate campus near the hotel, because they are displaying a banner that I found to be unique.  So I asked my wife to take a picture of it, and knew that I'd end up writing a blog post about it.  This ended up spawning a conversation on whether blogging was work-related or a personal hobby and whether I should even be thinking about it whilst vacationing in Napa.  This never really got resolved (which is it?)

But I did get the picture.  I blurred out the company name in the picture, but posted it here.

Download emp_app.jpg

What I found intriguing about this banner was I could not identify the intended audience.  Was it for potential candidates, as some sort of employment branding collateral?  Or was it intended as a reminder to employees of the corporation's commitment to them as they arrive to work every day?  Or maybe it was both.  It certainly was...blazoned in a highly conspicuous way. 

I couldn't tell, so thought I would post it here, and ask  "Why do you think they posted this banner?"   

I Learned About the Internet Yesterday

I thought I knew about the Internet but now I know I didn't really get it.  Which is pretty remarkable because I work for Google, am 36 years old (37 in two days), and have followed technology pretty closely.  I'm also a medium adopter, an investor in a Web 2.0 start up, and generally consider myself to be fairly in-the-know on this stuff.  I guess I have to play the, "but I'm only in HR" card to let myself off the hook (not too many times I can use that actually).

But today, I'm different than I was yesterday, because I experienced the reach of the Internet in a unique and very personal way.  One of my guest posts on Brazen Careerist got picked up on Wired.com, and then over to Valleywag, and then InformationWeek, and onwards around the Internet.  The number of hits to this blog, and to the Brazen Careerist site were substantial given the traffic patterns that developed.  Now, intellectually, I know all about the reach of the Internet and how it truly creates a World Wide Web, the theory behind The Long Tail, yada yada yada.  It was just so...mind-boggling... to see it happen, hour by hour, with the traffic counters spinning up and all.  When you are involved in it personally, it gives you a whole new appreciation for the power of the Internet.  I'm sure many other bloggers have experienced this sort of spike in traffic, but until it happens, I think it's hard to appreciate.  For example, here's a reference to that post in German.

So all of this is good and well, and there's a 'cool factor' to having something you created spread around the world and having others read it (although being called a douche by Valleywag readers was ...er...odd) but what is amazing is the personal connections it created.  I had authentic, very human interactions with people I may never meet that either commented or email me or generally connected with me.   

Blogging is such... a remarkable thing.   Ironically today it has left me at a significant loss for words.

I guess it's like this: Sometimes you hear about things that are big, and you see them and see that they are big, you rationally understand that they are big, but you don't really understand that they are big until you experience them.   

That's what happened when I learned about the Internet yesterday.

 

Netflix Prize: Stories in Stories, Part V

In my continued following of the Netflix Prize, I popped over to the Netflix Leaderboard again tonight, and there are now 21,076 contestants competing for the prize, from 140+ different countries.   That's 50% more contestants added to the captive pool of software development talent they have gathered since November of last year (only 4 months ago).  From a talent acquisition perspective, it's fascinating that the momentum continues to build even after the media buzz has worn off. 

The group that I interviewed in a previous post (see the categories at right to review the history on this topic) has dropped to number 5.   

Many companies pay for referrals of talent through employee referral programs and also external programs such as H3, or simply by buying research (essentially lists of names) from recruitment companies.  Buying names can be expensive, and good researchers will charge $100 an hour for their work (sometimes more).  Many companies pay thousands of dollars per successful referral.  It is interesting that on a per name basis, each software developer that is working on the prize cost Netflix less than $50 apiece (assuming the $1M is the all-in cost - which it probably is when you consider net present value; ie they haven't had to pay anything yet). 

The teams are nearly 70% of the way to the 10% improvement goal of improving the Netflix collaborative filtering engine. 
 

On Hedgehogs

I've been thinking a lot about value creation and creating a link with the customer. I think it's because I've been reading this really great book from the 1990's called Lean Thinking.  It is a great book and applies to recruiting in ways that are highly relevant but not readily apparent.  Now, I know there is a whole new iteration of TQM/Six Sigma/Lean/Whatever the Next New Thing of This Decade Is but applying these principles to an HR value stream has the potential for huge returns.

I can trace a large portion of my success as a recruiting leader of large corporate recruiting departments to Hedgehogs.   Or, more specifically, to the idea of a Hedgehog Concept.  My team at Starbucks I'm sure got tired of me talking about hedgehogs.  I actually have bought little stuffed hedgehogs for everyone on any of my teams, for the last 5 years of my career, because I believe the idea is paramount to driving organizational success.  So I guess I'm a Hedgehog Zealot.

The principle is simple, but it seems like so many organizations get it wrong.  I think it's rooted in human nature to get it wrong and overthink things based on faulty assumptions.   The idea of a Hedgehog Concept is to really understand, in foundational terms, how doing X drives the economic engine of the organization (or the customer).  This is where a lot of HR departments go awry.  For talent acquisition departments, it is really clear that we drive the economic engine of the company by delivering the best talent, for the lowest cost, in the shortest amount of time.  It is really that simple. 

But what inevitably happens is organizational inefficiency sets in (like a cancer) because people make decisions based on faulty assumptions, which creates huge waste in the talent supply chain.  Pretty soon people have completely lost track of how they drive the economic engine of the company, and productivity is replaced by activity, much of which creates no economic value.  Having a very clear Hedgehog Concept helps prevent this.

One key to driving organizational success is distilling the Hedgehog Concept down to the level of each member on the team, so that their efforts in turn map only to organizational value creation, and not to ancillary activities.  In many ways, this is the differentiator between top talent and average talent:  top talent can always see the hedgehog concept in any pursuit, and they are able to strip away the unnecessary activities and focus on the value creation.  That's why they get more done than their counterparts to the left on the bell curve.

Spending time doing a deep dive to understand value creation for the customer is one of the most productive things you can do when defining strategic direction.   

 

The 12 Phases of Becoming a Blogger (for an average guy)

So it's been awhile since I've posted, but mostly because I've been guest-blogging over at Brazen Careerist so it's not for lack of effort on my part.  I've actually been writing a lot, in fact.  Just not posting here.  It's interesting to be writing on someone else's blog, as it creates a whole new dynamic for me.  It's a little strange really. 

I think many bloggers like me go through a series of steps in their blogging career.  I'll call them The 12 Phases of Becoming a Blogger (for an average guy).

1. I can't do a blog.  I'm not qualified.
2. I could do a blog, but no one would read.
3. If I did do a blog, some people would read.
4. Once I started a blog, I would run out of things to write about.
5. I'm going to try blogging, but I don't know how to set it up.
6. People would probably help me set it up, so I'm going to try and do this.
7. I now have a blog, and it's hard to fit writing into my life, but I think about things diferently.
8. I've been writing a little bit, and I'm running out of things to say.
9. I'm starting to fit blogging into my normal weekly routine.
10. I have way too much to write about that I no longer have the time to write about everything I want to say.
11. I've met a few people through my blogging.
12. Blogging has changed so much about my life.

At least that's how it went for me.  Every step for me in my blogging experience has been from other people pulling me into the blogosphere.  In that, blogging is unlike so many other things in life.

I had a pretty funny example of Radical Transparency happen to me today while in a meeting with my executive team at Google.  We were having an offsite at The Four Seasons Hotel in Palo Alto, and discussing the strategic direction of the Online Sales and Operations group and some other topics.  At one point we got to talking about the people side of the business, and the idea of employee engagement.   Google's employee base is a pretty happy bunch of people, as that's why we won the top spot on Fortune's 100 Best Companies to work for in America this year. 

So I'm new, and trying to make an impression and generally contribute to the discussion, even though my head is spinning from trying to get up to speed in my new job.   And then right in the middle of the meeting I say, in my most profound voice, "Someone once said that most jobs are too small for the human spirit..."  Now, I really believe this is true.  And apparently, it really resonated with the team, because a bunch of the leaders in the room were nodding their heads and asking me to repeat it so they could write it down. 

So here's where it get's funny.  One of the leaders says, "Hey, let's find out who said that..." as in, let's found out what famous person coined such a remarkably insightful proverb.  So I think nothing of it, and 1-2 minutes later, this guy starts laughing and says, "I found out who came up with that quote."  And everyone looks, and he points at me.  The only reference on the entire Internet to that specific phrase is by yours truly in an interview with Jason Goldberg a year or two ago.  You can see for yourself here.

So, you have to be careful what you say in a Radically Transparent world, in more ways than you might think.