If You Were Recruiting An Acoustic Guitar Player…Tommy Emmanuel

If you were going to recruit an acoustic guitar player, what attributes would you seek?

If you were recruiting in the traditional manner, you’d seek these attributes:
- college degree in music
- experience working for an orchestra or band
- experience in an educational institution as a music teacher

But if you were looking for a true leader and innovator these measures would miss the hidden gems. People who are self taught are often thought leaders and innovators who lead to breakthroughs because they lack certain limiting beliefs. Tommy Emmanuel is one such person. Let’s look at his unique attributes:
- Tommy is self-taught, having picked up a guitar at a young age
- Tommy has never had any formal training in music
- Tommy has never learned how to read sheet music, yet he knows how to play literally thousands of songs
- Tommy never uses a set list in his solo performances, the creativity flows from circumstance and audience participation
- Tommy constantly innovates and reworks his songs making incremental improvements

Yet, Tommy now plays 300+ nights a year on five continents!!! If you looked at his resume based on traditional measures, you’d likely pass him over. But in the scarce talent, post baby boomer generation we are now entering, people need to look beyond keywords and look into passion and self-taught competencies. Those who do will build industry leading companies. Others will rapidly fall behind and lag in relation to their peers.

I’m fortunate to see Tommy again this evening in Chicago! I had the great pleasure of interviewing Tommy Emmanuel in 2003. Such a remarkable and inspiring person. Here are some samples of his live work on Youtube, enjoy!

HR Technology Conference : Lehman Brothers Leverages Recruiting Beyond Talent Acquisition

Heather Redderson, VP, Global Talent Technologies, Lehman Brothers
Derek Mercer, CEO, Vurv Technologies

When I saw this description I knew I had to attend this session…

The HR systems at Lehman Brothers, the fourth-largest investment bank in the world, have traditionally been siloed, probably just like yours. But, competing with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, VP Heather Redderson knew she had to integrate them all so her 27,000 employees could collaborate around their careers and new opportunities for internal mobility. She’ll tell you how she aligns and compensates them and tries to leverage best practices, and fill you in on the internal community she’s created for employees with new tools and competitive intelligence on those other, bigger guys.

When Heather arrived, Lehman Brothers systems appeared disorganized. How disorganized? A Summer intern gets to give a presentation to a C-level team during the first month she is there. The intern’s presentation? Two slides. One basically system mapped out the systems Lehman has. The second with all demonstrating how many don’t talk to each other. The intern stated that “this was a problem that needed to be fixed” and then sat down.

I don’t know if the intern got a full time job at Lehman upon graduation. If they didn’t I’d love to hire this person at the next company I work at. Why? People who can point out the root cause of problems and say this is what needs to be fixed are all too rare. The intern likely created the vital executive sponsorship for the magnitude of the changes that Heather is now making.

In reference to internal mobility, internal employees were frustrated as they were applying and never got hired. Hiring managers were frustrated with volumes of people applying for roles at the wrong level. Employees were frustrated with lack of execution.

Using Vurv and Congos there is now rule driven reports and drivers. They now focus on the relevancy of resumes and are trying to add other data elements to the mix.

$12 million dollar savings in just four months by reducing outside contingency recruiter fees! Put all new initiatives for 2008 on hold and reallocated budget money. Focused on utilizing what we have better.

Discovered that there were many people in roles with job descriptions that didn’t match. Fixing that through transparent conversations is occurring at a rapid rate.

Lehman HR mantra:
To recruit talent
To protect our employees
To gage our landscape

They are also creating an alumni site. (I wish that BlackRock would create an Alumni site, it would bring me joy in so many ways.

It’s clear that Heather’s efforts are not only transforming HR, they are transforming the process and way the whole organization operates. That’s what it’s all about effective execution with what you have. Develop a data strategy and process then iterate and improvement. I’ve always loved Lehman Brothers scrappy style when I worked on Wall Street, it’s good to see them laying a foundation for future transformation and differentiation.

More on this when I have time to elaborate on an element I saw that fascinates me. Soon.

Jason Alba Author - I’m on LinkedIn — Now What???

Recently I blogged about how retained recruiting firm executive search activity on Linkedin was rising. Maybe they got an advance of Jason Alba’s new book, I’m on LinkedIn — Now What???, and started putting the concepts to immediate good use! I had this to say about the book:

“Jason has written a highly practical guide to Linkedin that will quickly allow a new user to understand and utilize Linkedin. It’s also a great guide to the Linkedin’s hidden gems - finding high quality people through endorsements and off Linkedin content such as groups and identifying thought leaders through blogs linked from profiles.”

I’m honored to have been asked by Jason to contribute ideas to the book as well as some Linkedin best practices at the end of some of the chapters. Jason is one of the people I’ve met via Linkedin and I know my life is much better for that as he always makes himself available to talk and help my goals in any way he can.

While certainly any Linkedin novice would benefit, Jason’s book most needs to be read by c-level executives, all HR executives and recruiters who don’t yet understand how to fully utilize Linkedin. There tools on Linkedin besides last company worked at and job title - the community would function better if people learned to use the community more wisely and this can happen quickly if people read Jason’s book.

LinkedIn View Quality Rising After Non Eventful September 11

I logged into my Linkedin panel the other day and saw top tier retained search firms viewing my profile…I’ve had several other recent experiences that I can’t make public that seem to indicate a healthy reallocation of capital away from the mortgage and housing market is occurring and may in fact be accelerating after a non eventful September 11th. I’m hoping this will be part of a long term trend, not just a blip.

Your profile has been viewed by 9 people in the last 3 days, including:

Senior Associate at Heidrick & Struggles

  • Director at Gap International
  • Someone in the Marketing And Advertising industry
  • Research Consultant at Russell Reynolds Associates

    • KickStart Solves the Wrong Recruiting Problem

    While I have not seen or used the reported Kickstart, Techcrunch described it in the following manner:

    “Yahoo is reported to be working on a new social networking service that matches college students to employers.” (emphasis added)

    This is not a knock on Yahoo!, but this is not solving the actual problem that the entire recruiting industry fails to address well - highly intelligent people with excellent life experiences that are applicable in many ways in the secondary market, what some people would call experienced hires. A marketplace that is badly broken and fails to hire the highest potential, most innovative candidates that are capable of creating new paradigms.

    The high value problem is the getting the productive utilization of underutilized assets in the US economy in the roles they should be in already. These can be people with resume gaps due to the events of September 11th, the increasing usage of temporary workers using checklists of keywords who aren’t truly qualified to do the screening based on what matters education and competencies, suffer from an out of favor job title due to a reorganization in their company or increasingly can be subject matter experts who research extensively on their own and often write blogs. Or the fact that position searches simply take too long. I’ve been told of companies with some roles that have been open for three years and they’ve been interviewing people all of that time. I have personally have been involved in search that is over 9 months old.

    If Yahoo! (or anyone else for that matter) wants to be a hero by building a hiring application, I highly suggest building an application that reduces the insane amounts of friction and dysfunction in the experienced hire marketplace that reduces cycle times. I’m working on a few ideas of my own with some amazing people. It would be a pleasure to be a part of creating the solution in this arena.

    Is Google Starting to Change Recruiting Methods?

    Those of you who have read this blog for a long time know that I’ve been critical of Google VP of People, Laszlo Bock, due to lack of execution in the past. Things like placing an ad in a magazine and forgetting to launch the microsite or worse ignoring employee referrals that were highly relevant frustrating employees and creating brand damage externally.

    Google held an event with several senior executives last night in Chicago. Eric Olson told me about the event, I recently spent a fun day serving as a volunteer website judge with Eric at the annual FBLA-PBL convention - you can read those details here.

    I was told by one source that they wish to personalize the recruiting process more and make it less about numbers, keywords and passive candidate recruiting and more about soft skills, knowledge and passion. Time will tell if they succeed in this attempt at change but even stating this shows that they are listening to numerous types of stakeholder feedback and innovating from that. It’s a positive sign. So I have to acknowledge these communicated goals as they suggest that change is a priority.

    Yahoo! Launches New Applicant Tracking System

    Yahoo! recently launched a new applicant tracking system interface over the past few days. It has a much cleaner interface than the previous one. It also has a box titled concept search, where one could enter educational and leadership qualifications, technical and speaking skills, passions, competencies and blogs to get suggestions of potentially appropriate roles. Changes that were immediately apparent to me include shorter career position id numbers and a smaller set of categories that make it easier to navigate clusters of open positions needing to be filled by qualified applicants.

    Below is a screen shot, I wish Yahoo! good luck with the new system!

    Career Distinction : Stand Out by Building Your Brand

    Co-written by Kirsten Dixson and William Arruda have written an unique book in Career Distinction : Stand Out by Building Your Brand. On the Amazon review, you can see several reviews already about the usefulness of the messages about personal branding. More important is that it’s the first book of it’s kind that I’m aware of that discusses the increasingly complex and critical world of online branding and reputation management.

    I’ve heard some of their Reach Branding Club seminars and while I’ve made a ton of progress using their concepts and other related ideas, I think the major lesson is that we all can improve our personal brands and to ignore the issue is a risk that one should not take!

    One great lesson of the book is unintentional. In the Preface, there is a discussion of William’s and Kirsten’s life journey. I learned many things about them that I did not know that personalized their brands for me in a new way. Don’t be afraid to discuss your struggles they are likely critical areas that define you. You should definitely check out this book.

    Post an MBA Alumni Job or Career Posting

    Why post that experienced level Top 10 MBA business school or retained search opportunity to the masses when you could contact already well connected innovative thought leaders in Internet, search engines, mobile commerce, investment management, private equity and venture capital directly via the blogosphere?

    My contact info is in the Bio page. Thanks for dropping by via your search engine of choice.

    Unethical Hiring Practices: Job Search Sites Serve Up Ads With No Intent to Hire US Workers

    James Carlini wrote an article on Hiring Practices: More Talent Often on the Street Than at Many Companies outlining the sleazy practices of these lawyers he mentions in the article and on the Youtube video he mentions on his site. A good reform would bring transparency to this process and the real harm it brings to people and our economy as a whole. It’s time to start considering how to stop this type of nonsense and go back to conversation about hiring the most qualified worker with quality as a priority.

    Maybe Yahoo Needs an Injection of “New”

    I missed this post last week on the Internet Marketing Monitor.

    It says:

    “Maybe an infusion of new thinking, new experiences, and fresh perspectives would be good for Yahoo.”

    Then later:

    “Maybe employees who weren’t yet ingrained with Yahoo’s past ways of doing things would be able to breathe new, renewed life into the one-time Internet king. “

    Time will tell if they wisely chose this path.

    Online Passive Resume

    Chicago area resident (OK Naperville) Rick Klau put up his resume up on a wiki last Fall. He talks about how to put your resume online here. It was also interesting to Mazyar Hedayat who spoke to Rick about it. This concept of putting your resume online is interesting to me and I’ve seen people put up resumes in many different ways with varying degrees of success. It’s certainly different than a candidate or alumni resume book.

    What examples have you seen of putting resumes online and them effectively seen by sourcers? What did and didn’t work with your online resume? I’d like to hear your ideas and learn from the best practices that are developing out there. How do the sourcers out there select to search or use university alumni resume books?

    Rick Rubin Doesn’t Read Music

    Per this Time article, Rick Rubin (just like Tommy Emmanuel) doesn’t read sheet music. Yet few would argue his skills and ability. The irony is that based on today’s recruiting processes in North America, neither would be granted an interview, yet they have been self-taught and are the leading innovators in their fields.

    When are the majority of recruiting departments going to realize that compliance based hiring doesn’t build best of breed companies?  They should try competency and potential based hiring as the magic formula?

    Arrington Calls for Less Niche Job Boards

    Michael Arrington has a thoughtful post on this subject. It’s become challenging to figure out what job board is which and have a centralized effort. One can only register for some many of these things and it’s clear that by the number of players, the barriers to entry are too low. It also doesn’t solve major problems like authorization of people to present you in they are a contingent recruiter and only then for that one job. Sadly, the prvacy and best interest of the candidate are not served well in the present system.

    Does anyone have ideas on how to make this space more functional? I’d love to hear and see the ideas!

    Education is Becoming Prepared - Is Your Hiring Process?

    From Page 52 of Time, in an article about education, December 18th, 2006: “Jobs in the new economy-the ones that won’t get outsourced or automated-”put an enormous premium on creative and innovative skills, seeing patterns where other people see only chaos,” says Marc Tucker , an author of the skills-commission report and president of the National Center on Education and the Economy.

    It’s interdisciplinary combinations-design and technology, mathematics and art-”that produce Youtube and Google” , says Thomas Friedman, the best selling author of The World Is Flat.

    Yet human resources, hiring managers, executive recruiters, candidate sourcers, chief marketing officers and  chief financial officers haven’t yet mastered the art of finding this skill set of thought leaders seeing big picture patterns and seek out one dimensional candidates with “experience”.

    What has to happen to integrate these skills into a recruiting and hiring mindset of what is this person capable of rather than a limiting belief frame of compliance? A discussion of how to recruit these types of skills more proactively is certainly welcome in 2007!

    Best Blog Post of 2006 (non-search engine related)

    On October 9th, I wrote this about Kathy Sierra’s “Knocking the Exuberance Out of Employees”.

    It’s a great post and it relates to a lot of problems in the business world in terms of having innovative customer service. Let’s hope her post prompted some people to realize that operating in this manner is a mistake.

    Congrats!

    Andy McKee Featured on Youtube Front Page!

    I first met Andy McKee at an acoustic music festival in Kansas in 2003. He is among several awesome fingerstyle guitar players including Tommy Emmanuel (see my Tommy Emmanuel interview), Neil Jacobs, Brian Henke, Peppino D’Agostino and others that don’t get mass media exposure. For several years these great players have labored with little or no media love. Yet when they play - some people will drive hundreds of miles to witness the art. It is a strange contradiction indeed.

    One of Andy’s videos “Drifting” made it onto the front page of Youtube this week and has now received over 700,000 views! While it’s great that this occurred, it’s a sad reminder of a broken music industry that categorizes people much the same limiting way online recruiting does, not being seen by all of the people who might be interested in the competencies and skill set that a person offers! It’s great when you start to see these barriers and limiting beliefs starting to be broken, hopefully 2007 will be the year we see this happen in not only music, but also recruiting as well. If you like this video be sure to check out his remake of Toto’s “Africa”.

    An Example of the World’s Data Crisis

    The World Trade Center had one zip code, 10048. Five years later after their destruction, mail of all kinds arrives there daily! It’s an all too sad and vivid reminder of the crisis in our society with businesses not putting priority on cleaning data. This happens every day with catalogs sent to people who have moved or are now deceased.

    In this case it’s inexcusable because it’s all one zip code that would be easy to surpress: 10048.

    Whether it’s mail, e-mail, web pages, web 2.0 social networks and/or social media, the value creation foundation starts with data integrity. To build the superior ideas of the future, this area will play a pivotal role. Unfortunately, all too many people do not properly value data integrity or value not been blessed enough to be immersed in a culture who is obsessed with it as I have been in the past.

    Consider whether you have a good enterprise data strategy before you launch your next project!   

    Thought for the Day

    Imagination is more important than knowledge, for knowledge is limited while imagination embraces the entire world.
    - Albert Einstein

    An Indeed.com Alternative

    Getthejob.com is a new job aggregator that differentiates itself from indeed.com in that it doesn’t pick up  postings from headhunters, third party recruiters or too-good-to-be-true scam jobs. They claim that 70% of the postings can’t be found on commercial job boards. They do have Ladders affiliate ads however, so the option is still there, it’s just in a less spammy format on an ad on the side. I like this and it’s potential. What it lacks in comparison to Indeed is the freshness date of the listing, this is a major oversight that, once rectified, would make it a superior product.

    What I’m not certain about:

    - Mr. Amato states, ”Most employers don’t post ALL of their openings on traditional job sites because it would be cost prohibitive, but they do post them to their own corporate career center, which costs nothing, we help jobseekers find these hidden jobs.” This is not 100% true - for some reason many employers do not post all open jobs, choosing to keep senior jobs private and undisclosed. This is most unfortunate as many qualified and passionate seekers are not enabled to be looked at and more employers need to look at becoming fully transparent.

    - How does one know that these companies actually utilize posted resumes and not primarily from recruiters?

    - Mr. Fulton then states, “This allows jobseekers to read the entire job description and apply for the job using the companies preferred application method. It is believed that resumes passed directly through a company career site are more visible than those transmitted through a third-party site.” Based on what?

    - Not having a searchable resume database is interesting, but it’s very time consuming to fill out things with an uncertain outcome.

    Overall, I appreciate Bob Etheridge for calling me and informing me about the service, with a few tweaks, I could see it becoming a strong player in the marketplace.

    keep looking »