The dark side of management: Firing

Management life isn't all glamour and glory. There are downsides too. A people manager also sometimes has to take some decisions of firing people from their companies.

It's not a pleasant thing to do, and while reasons might vary (from not meeting targets, to behavioral issues, or ethical issues) but the unpleasantness remains.

As a HR person I've had more than my share of such experiences and I wish I had come across Guy's post earlier. Here are his points:

1. Consult impartial people.
2. Get professional advice.
3. Search your soul.
4. Give people a second chance.
5. Document everything.
6. Do it yourself.
7. Be firm.
8. Don’t be guilted into anything.
9. Don’t be guilted into anything.
10. Don’t disparage the victim.
11. Look in the mirror.

HR.com too mulling about India entry

India's on everybody's radar, and not just for outsourcing but as a market for HR services. After news that the HCI is entering India, comes the news that HR.com is looking to establish a presence in India.

I think this is good news for the HR community in India. With the range of competency building required to do, and the lack of trained talent available (read previous post) the gap will increasingly have to be filled not by traditional educational institutes, but these virtual forms of delivery which are more industry oriented.

My only scare is that the rigor in areas like Organizational Behavior (which is imperative for a HR professionals) is not lost in the rush to get certifications or superficial knowledge.

More on HR talent shortage

I had blogged about this earlier, but good to hear some more folks talking about it !

According to industry estimates, in the people's business, for every 50-75 persons recruited, one HR job gets created. This roughly translates into a demand for 40,000 people skilled in the HR area for the tech sector alone in the next three years.

This excludes the needs of other booming sectors such as retail, telecom, textiles and the recruitment industry itself, which needs as many people.

In a first-of-its-kind partnership, Accenture has tied up with XLRI, Jamshedpur, to cater to its internal HR needs.

It has launched an HR training academy where recent graduates seeking careers in HR can access specialised skills that the IT and ITES sectors would require. In fact, the first batch of 34 professionals (screened and now Accenture employees) is undergoing training at the organisation.

"What I am very worried about is the shortage of experienced and trained HR professionals today. When the industry hires software professionals in such large numbers, there is a commensurate need for mature HR professionals who would make those recruitments happen and deploy good HR practices across the numbers," says Hema Ravichandar, Strategic HR Advisory, and formerly chief of HR at Infosys Technologies.

According to her, "When I graduated from an IIM (1983), there were probably 10 candidates across all IIMs who specialised in HR. And another 100 from XLRI and TISS. Now, if you take a headcount, chances are that the count would at the maximum reach only about 150 across these same institutions! This is what should worry us."

Search jobs online at Job Central.

Strategy talk is all pfaff ?

Rob has a pet peeve about people not doing rigorous data analysis when it comes to talking about strategy. He calls it Stratanalyphobia .

Some pretty insightful statements there !

The superstars of social media

Steve Rubel posts on the Social Media Power Players. As a friend told me after going through the list "There is so much of this new media that we are not aware of !"

I agree.

If these are the superstars of social media, then there must be a long tail within the long tail ! Seriously, I didn't know any of them before Steve's post, except for the BoingBoing folks !

I actually sense that the long tail is a fractal system, with millions of smaller long tails within the larger system, each mirroring the way audience splintering into smaller and smaller groups down to individual blogs with an audience of less than 10.

John Hagel on the skills shortage

from the edge perspectives blog:

As JSB and I suggested in an oped piece in the Financial Times almost one year ago, a much more productive way to view these developments involves focusing on skill building arbitrage – the opportunity to participate in relationships and environments that can build capabilities more rapidly than would be possible elsewhere. This broader perspective begins to bring into sharper focus the significant management innovations that certain Chinese and Indian companies are pursuing to build capability more rapidly. In an earlier blog posting, I outlined three forms of management innovation that these companies are pioneering.

In this context, the intensifying competition for talent will only accelerate the management innovations that are already under way in these countries, making the companies even more formidable competitors or providers, depending on where you stand in the global value chain. In fact, from their earliest days, these companies have understood that their success depends upon attracting and retaining talent. More importantly, they have discovered that if they develop their talent more rapidly than anyone else, they will also have an advantage in attracting and retaining talent, so that has been the focus of many of their management innovations.

They have also understood that not all talent needs to reside within their enterprise if they can collaborate effectively with a broad range of specialized companies, so another dimension of innovation has been the development of scalable process networks that bring together hundreds, and often thousands, of specialized business partners.

The economic growth of China and India only marginally depends on their formal education system – much more important has been the emergence of a set of innovative companies that have figured out how to access and develop talent much more rapidly than most Western companies. Both countries have also benefited from a flourishing (and admittedly very uneven) ecosystem of private training institutes and services that help to bridge the gap between what the public schools produce and what businesses require in terms of technical, language and management skills.

Negotiating your salary

So the interview went off really well. You think you might get the job. The hiring manager seemed to like you. Then the HR guy calls you back and asks "So what's your salary expectation?"

Most people don't know how to react.

Should you say a 20% jump on your current salary? Will it sound too greedy?

So here is the inside dope:

• A good salary negotiation done well ensures that you are within the salary band for the level.
• If overdone or not done at all, you end up being an outlier or a lowlier from the band.
• Both extremes cause discomfort.
• If an outlier, the subsequent salary increases can be quite minimal and lead to frustration
• If a lowlier, then you might take a couple of salary cycles to reach the comparable level to your peers, again leading to frustration.

So what should you do?

• Try to find out if the company you are joining is a aggressive salary leader, or brings up the rear of the market.
• Remember, less branded companies or businesses starting off operations who need to hunt for great talent end up being predatory in salaries. They are significantly higher than market medians. If you are interviewing with such companies, don't be shy.
• Check what the company communicates in their cost to company. Are benefits included? How does that compare with your current salary? In short, compare apples to apples.
• Find out how the variable component if any, gets paid out? What is defined as average performance? How does company performance impact the variable component? Has the company been doing well vis-a-vis the market? How much did high performers get?
• Is there any premium for specific skills that you bring in?
• What is the reward differential that top peformers get compared to the rest?
• Do they offer stocks? Is that added in the cost to company? What is the lock-in period?

Some questions won't be answered by your recruiter. So get to know people who already work there!

All the best !

An interesting email I recieved recently

Quoted without comment :-)

Presently, I am working in the US and am planning to return back to India. I have about 8+ years of experience would like to know the compensation levels offered to professionals like me in the IT field, who have extensive experience in Project/Program Management, Information Security, and Information Systems Audit. Of late, as you would agree, the Indian Market has seen an exponential and excellent traction in terms of opportunities and employment. The rate has been terrific and almost every one in abroad (whether USA or UK or Europe or Australia) are making their way back to India due to this. One important component here has been the salary/compensation and benefits package, which seems to be going at or beyond par with International markets. I have a few questions in this regard and would like to obtain your views on this.

Institutionalizing Alchemy

The group at Alchemy is brainstorming ideas on how to institutionalize their blog.

If you have a suggestion about how they can do it go about go here and tell them.

More on institutionalizing (heh, what a word!) alchemy.

Thanks folks !

My post on turning freelance has got be my most "commented-on" post ever !

Thanks all the people from across the world who left their best wishes and advice there. I really value them !

Thanks to Naina, Jim Durbin, the Canadian Headhunter, Sudhanshu and Jason Goldberg for their encouraging blog posts !

Moral of the story: Personal experiences and life event sharing generates more connectedness. I'll keep that in mind and share as much as of my everyday experiences as a consultant as I can :-)

The manager's job

DD has a great post on what Drucker defined as the job of the manager. Notice that this definition does not have the "doing things right" kind of bromide in it !

The manager's job is amazingly complex and as DD explains how it HR manager's fail to do the ir actual job which is to- as Drucker defined - direct the resources and efforts of the business toward opportunities for economically significant results.

Being a support function that yearns to be strategic every task that one does as a HR person needs to be viewed from the prism of this definition. That will get HR folks to ask "What is economically significant for my business?" and I guarantee you a lot of light bulbs will be lighted up ;-)

DD says -

for HR these resources should be directed toward opportunities for advancing the strategy.

However my view is that strategy disconnects happen from the larger organization to SBUs to specific businesses and product lines. Which strategy would a HR person align to in the local level? One can agree that it should be strategy of the local level, as at a national or global level this strategy can be too far away to connect with.

That is why HR needs to have a functionally aligned strategy that links to business strategy. That is the strategy that HR folks need to adhere to.

When I talk of strategy it's not articulated vision or mission statements, but strategic choices that I am talking about. About how our business is doing this and not that. Therefore the people we hire should be motivated by this and not that. And what can we do with the people we hired keeping in mind the old strategic choices who are out of sync with the new strategic choices. How can we redeploy, reskill and develop them. Even choices about being a employer of choice, of having a 'collegial culture' or large campuses ;-)

You'll find entry level jobs at CollegeRecruiter.com.

Four years of blogging

Just realised that it's now more than 4 years ago that I first wrote something on this blog.

It's been a great time and I've made some great friends (and some miniscule amounts of money ;-) thanks to blogging.

Four years, and it's time now for the new games !

Turning freelance

The word freelance has a mercenary ring to it. After all, it was derived from being a lance (spear) guy who was available to fight on your behalf. Sort of like, a "gun-for-hire"

So last week when my wife and I made one of the most momentous decisions of our lives so far, martial glory was the furthest thing from our minds.

Friends and family told us we were stupid.

• For me to leave a firm like this
• For us to say goodbye to fixed monthly salary like, er...OK, take my word for it...it was (is) good!
• To jump around from firm to firm to firm like this and then to chuck it all up and start our own firm !

So why are we doing it?

• Because this is the place we feel that our purpose, passions and gifts intersect.
• Simply because we feel that it's about time we listened to our hearts and our dreams
• What we actually want to work on, isn't available in larger organizations
• If we make excuses now, we will continue to make excuses even 10 years down the line

What do we want to do?

We believe that organizations and employees have a relationship that could be much more trusting and open and authentic. We would work with organizations who like to become such employers.

So what exactly will we be doing?

• Blogging, Social Software and related tools will be a major part of this new venture. For some hints check these posts out in the recent past.
• Focussing on helping small and medium businesses with HR systems, strategy and development of their HR function is a mission that close to both our hearts. There is a tremendous skill shortage in the mid-size organizations and HR audits, assessments, development and strategy facilitation is what we would like to bring to them.
• Related to the above point, Organizational structure, culture and services related to them would also be offered.
• Individual training programs would also be a major service offering. These would typically be focussed on internal HR skills development so would cover areas like Competency Based Interviewing, Facilitation and Coaching skills, Internal Client skills.

What are our point of views? Here are some samples

By the way, we are on the lookout for a name for our firm...got any ideas?

Blogging big in India?

Debashish has some news:

The Recently released India online 2006 survey has revealed that of the 21.4 million net users of Indians a staggering 85% (that’s roughly 18 million people) regularly check blogs. The study conducted by Juxt consult, New Delhi also revealed that there is a 22% rise in number of Indian net users from last year’s figure of 17.7 million. The users are mostly urban and most of the blogs, the report says, are maintained by net savvy people. A recent Economic Times report, published during the blanket ban on blogs initiated by the government, had cited that there are approximately 40000 Indiblogs around.

So 18 million people check out 40,000 blogs? Hmm, that's an audience of 450 readers per blog (and we know how skewed averages are). With around 300 daily visits and 174 bloglines readers accessing my blog I guess I am fairly average ;-)

However, one needs to understand the power of blogs in shaping popular opinions. Specially focussed blogs like YouthCurry, India Uncut, War For News and Death Ends Fun (has it ended?).

A sign of maturity for the Indian blogosphere is the emergence of group blogs like Desipundit which strive to drive traffic to great content.

The next steps would be the emergence of paid blogging for Indian bloggers. For fun I searched for Blogger jobs on Jobster and there emerged interesting jobs like these:
Marketing Blogger
Blogger Program Manager
Pro Blogger for #1 Outdoor Blog on the Planet
Heh, there's even one for a gig I already do ! Contributor to Recruiting.com

Are organizations in India ready to embrace blogging and put their money where their mouth is? I think we still need to hold for a year to see this emerging. C'mon folks, surprise me !

Update: Of course, if outsourcing is India's core competence, even blog coding can be outsourced ;-)


Recruit.net provides jobs in Australia.

Some managerial talent to be freed up soon !

With Intel's development centre in Bangalore planning to downsize managerial jobs.

That will give some middle and top management talent for IT companies in Bangalore to breathe easy about !

News:

Intel to downsizes managerial jobs
Pink slip inside

Quote of the day: HR's real job

“Leaders need to put their money where their mouths are and let HR do its real job: elevating people management to the same level of professionalism and integrity as financial management.”
- Guess who? (hat tip - Max again!)

Two different points of time

Recently Max blogged that, According to this survey,

more than 66% of workers describe their jobs as a source of “personal fulfilment.” But just when you think you’re getting somewhere on this whole engagement thing, they hit you with: “the survey also confirmed that work remains simply a way of making a living for many people. Half (51%) said their work was 'a means to an end'.”

And some years ago some people wrote some chapters on the internet called the Cluetrain manifesto

That said:

It is also the source of a deep hunger that pervades modern life - a longing for something entirely different from the reality reinforced by everyday experience. We long for more connection between what we do for a living and what we genuinely care about, for work that's more than clock-watching drudgery. We long for release from anonymity, to be seen as who we feel ourselves to be rather than as the sum of abstract metrics and parameters. We long to be part of a world that makes sense rather than accept the accidental alienation imposed by market forces too large to grasp, to even contemplate.
And this longing is not mere wistful nostalgia, not just some unreconstructed adolescent dream. It is living evidence of heart, of what makes us most human.

Making mistakes in job postings

Came across this blog which tries to post technical and software jobs in India.

Check this post by a third party recruiter which starts off trying to keep the name of the client secret but eventually lets it slip out by the third sentence. The client is Microsoft. And I am wondering if the slip is deliberate or a really stupid attempt to cut paste the job description from another email !

Recuiters also have to learn to use proper English and understand that not everyone understands their jargon. For example, this post says: "Pl see specs below"

For most laymen in India "specs" means spectacles and not specifications !

As a recruiter you are a sales-person. Do you speak your customer's language?

A blog is just the beginning...

The problem with talking about tools is that they become ends in themselves.

People feel that since the tool is done, the "stuff" will happen on its own.

So when a business launches a blog, it thinks the rest of the ROI will just follow.

Unfortunately, that's not true.

A blog, like a tool, is only the means to an end. It's the most visible and tangible part.

As we say in HR, the "soft stuff" is usually the hardest part of the job.

You have designs on Janet Jackson?

Ok, sorry for the sensationalist headline, but the Sister is getting into all the web 2.0 stuff. User-generated content and all that jazz.

The business innovation insider reveals:

As seen on Yahoo! Music, music superstar Janet Jackson is soliciting the help of her fans to design a cover for her new album, "20 Years Old," due out on September 26.

For examples of Janet Jackson artwork that fans have already created, check out the Design Me site and click on "most popular cover designs."

This is the kind of stuff that'll get normal folks interested in the principles of web 2.0. It's all about participation and co-creation ! Is your organization utlizing the creativity and innovation of its fans and customers?

Why not?

Jobster raises more money

Jason Goldberg gave me the inside scoop yesterday, but issues at work and concern about the blog ban in India ensured that I am only blogging about it today.

Jobster raises $18 million.

Wow! That's a lot of money for a web 2.0 company. And if you haven't noticed, jobster now has a new look too.

Om Malik's blog says:

Jason Goldberg likes to call his job search web site “MySpace for the workforce.” Given the company had only three million job searches for the month of June, it might be a bit of a stretch. All of Jobster’s revenues come from its deals with Fortune 500 employers like Starbucks, Boeing and Google. Jobster sells its web-based tools to manage finding workers, which cost between $1,000 to $9,000 per month, depending on the companies’ size. It has 400 business customers. There’s enough revenue coming in from that booming business for Jason to say the company will be profitable in the middle of next year.

And the biggest scoop for us in this part of the world:

He’s got big plans to offer service in India and China sometime next year he says. It’s ambitious, but so is the company. It already acquired 3 companies even though its just 2.5 years old, and last Thursday launched a new site, which Jason says has pushed the search stats up 50 percent from June.

The new site has got all the Web 2.0 and community-based features you’d expect from a company calling itself the MySpace of the working world. Now that Jobster’s got the new money and the new site, maybe it could come close to bringing in the users to match that moniker.

However, I think Jobster should not really go down the "mySpace" route. Getting traffic is great but the money is with the big boys, the customers whom Indeed and SimplyHired are not targetting. Getting inside scoop about organizations has been around from web 1.0 days with Vault and WetFeet. However, the money has always been in value-added content, like their reports on industry and how to make a career. Will Jobster go in that direction?

Keep an eye out for these guys!

You'll find SEO jobs at Oaseo.

Rediff opens up free job listings

Is Rediff going the Google Base way?

Seems like that. It now allows recruiters/hiring managers to register and upload job wanted ads free of cost.

Check here.

Another nail in the coffin for job boards with paid listings? Rediff is aggressively marketing this concept to the traditional heavy users of jobsites, employers. Third-party recruiters would also not need too much of an incentive to move away from the job boards as they like to maximize their profitability as much as possible.

The question remains, will the traffic move from the traditional sites to sites like Rediff and Google Base?

This blog maybe unavailable for Indian readers

Apparently the Indian government is asking ISPs to block access to some blogsites and other webpage providers like geocities.

You can however follow this blog at bloglines.com or use sites like http://www.freeproxy.ca/

Hmm, how come Wordpress escaped?

I don't know how long we can continue to post using blogger.com

Branding vs the blogosphere

Just what is true and authentic speech?

When does the corporate vs. human speech change?

Whom do you trust?

On my earlier posts on Employer Branding (one and two), here are two posts, one by Seth Godin who says in Fear of a small enemy :

While some organizations are trying to flip the funnel and give a megaphone to their happiest customers (leveraging their positive word of mouth) more are
obsessed with silencing the dissenters.
Just as asymmetrical warfare has turned our geopolitical system upside down, the same thing is happening in the marketing world. While it's tempting to spend all your time stamping out the little enemies, the architecture of the system favors a strategy of embracing and leveraging your happy constituents instead.

And the other an experience shared by Jeff Jarvis who says how a summer intern working with Dell's PR agency called him a worm on a blog comment. Poor, poor, PR depts !

The focus for organizations who want to engage with the conversations would be to:

1. Focus on your happy employees (or customers) and let them be heard
2. Focus on giving authority and discretion to your grassroots employees

Update: Dell has started it's own blog one2one

NVJobSearch provides Las Vegas jobs for workers hoping to relocate to Nevada.

The big question - one blog or many?

Wendy ponders over some questions that people who maintain multiple blogs frequently come across. She asks us:

Do you want to hear about internet marketing and work and kids? Or do you
also want to know about what it takes to keep yourself motivated day after day
when there is no boss to hold you accountable? And what to do to if you start
getting really depressed because you are stuck in a basement office with no
light and you can’t get out because you don’t have a sitter for days on end?

Sometimes when the audience is very different it pays to keep the blogs separate. But if the audience gains from both perspectives one could think of merging the blogs together. My blogs don't have any overlapping content so I keep them separate.

Do go thorough other posts also, specially if you are a solopreneur !

Recruiters' Fake Profiles Damage Social Networks

Hi folks, as part of the recruiting blogswap, we have GG's post on GG's blog ! Er, I mean Glenn's post on my blog !

About Glenn
Glenn Gutmacher is a Recruiting Researcher for Microsoft Corporation and creator of one of the world's first online sourcing courses in 1997. His blog was voted the #2 recruiting research blog for 2005 in Recruiting.com's annual competition, which answers Internet sourcing questions submitted by real recruiters and researchers like you. Visit Glenn's blog at: http://recruiting-online.spaces.msn.com to read the Q&A or submit your question.

This is part of the Recruiting.com Blog Swap

A couple of weeks ago, Gautam commented on the damage to employment brands from outspoken commenters on the social networks . I'd like to look at another way damage is occurring: how rebel users of the social networks are gaming the system to damage the brand of the social networks themselves.

Lately, I have been receiving an increasing number of network connection invitations on LinkedIn from users who are clearly lying on their profiles. Though I will not cite specific profiles (the accused are innocent until proven guilty), it is clear they are breaking the rules of the network they agreed to follow. For example, one who claims to be a software engineer has listed over a dozen employers who are all direct competitors, for all of which the person is supposedly "currently" working. On another profile, it's again over 10 direct competitors, and the employment dates on each are 1900 - present. This last person is particular brazen - she lists her current employer, that she is a recruiter, and lists the same email address under each employer description for you to contact for career opportunities. Most of these rule-breakers are anonymous: they list an obviously fake name or just their initials. Sometimes their email address (the one you see in the initial invitation) corresponds to a corporate entity, but doesn't correspond to any of the employers on their profile!

As anyone who's visited my website or blog knows, I am all for creative online sourcing techniques. But this kind of gaming of the system is inappropriate for a few reasons:

1) it reduces the trust factor that people have about LinkedIn, and social networks generally, which may contribute to an eventual implosion of the social network phenomenon;

2) more immediately and personally, it makes me feel suspect about the intentions of the user, because I don't know anything about them. And I don't know how they could help me (though it's clear they only want me to help them in terms of building up their network reach when they search for names on LinkedIn). This approach is especially troubling, since it was a generic LinkedIn template invitation (I'm fine with people using template invitation messages as a time-saver, but at least they should be YOUR templates and be targeted at least to the category of the user you're inviting), which shows no forethought about who they're contacting.

3) if I were to accept that connection request, then sure, my network grows a bit thanks to their connection, but it's trivial and a net loss compared to the message I'd really be sending: implicitly encouraging their behavior. Then they will grow their networks, have more searching success, and tell their friends to do likewise. Before you know it, the network will be filled with meaningless profiles and no one will know what to make of the "people" in their search results.

I have reported a number of these individuals for abuse to LinkedIn -- only when it's very clear they're abusers (I merely decline the invitations of those who are questionable but seemingly not outright liars and gamers). Use the privacy {at} linkedin {dot} com address, and include the URL to the profile in question. LinkedIn's outgoing business development manager, Mrinal Desai, assures me that all these inquiries will be investigated and appropriate punishments meted out. I'm all for building one's network large, and keeping stronger relations with a smaller inner circle of your highly-trusted connections, but it's time to clamp down on this particular type of excessive behavior, and I hope you'll join me.

Bomb blasts in Mumbai

In India's financial nerve centre several bomb blasts targeted trains yesterday. Blogs like Mumbai Help and the related The MumbaiHelp Wiki are doing great work to update information and help people connect with loved ones in the city.

Management and people skills are really tested and proven in times like this crisis. Let's take some time and remember people who were either heading to home or office, expecting it to be just another evening, and getting caught up in this mindless mayhem of violence.

Observational interviewing

Dave has a great post on how people behave when they think they are not being observed, and how that could be a better gauge to behavior than Behavioral Event Interviewing.

However, doing the cloak and dagger stuff of asking people to observe candidates is not the only way you can find actual behavior patterns of people. There is a far more traditional way - it's called the Assessment Center.

The issues with these selection processes is that it takes time and energy and hence are used only for selection of high impact roles. Checking references, if done properly is also a great way to find out behavioral patterns of the past.

Of course, the correct person should be doing the reference check and should be asking the right questions. Larry Bossidy talks about a bad hire in his book Execution, and lays the fault on his (Larry) not knowing the person from whom he got the reference check done.

Some tips for effective reference checks:

1. Call and give notice of the check
2. Ask specific behavioral questions
3. Tell the role you are considering the candidate for and ask if you are setting him up for success or otherwise.

Who knows, maybe a great reference check might give you additional candidates ("hmm, so you have such a role? Maybe X won't be great fit for reasons A, B and C...however you might want to see Y who works on company LMN")

Accountant Careers.co.uk provides accounting jobs in the UK via its employment Web site.

The promise of web 2.0 - True Organizational Development?

The goals of OD in the the last century were to make workplaces more open transparent and honest. The focus was on generating authentic and non-threatening conversations. About creating workplaces where people were not merely 'resources' or 'talent'.

Sure 'empowerment' was the oft-abused mantra that fell out of favor from organizational life in the 80s. Ditto with 'self-managed teams'. However, the overall culture of organizational life never let these concepts come to fruition. Most organizations were and still are, places where your goals are set by others, your performance is judged by others, and your rewards are measured by others. Very often, these 'others' are either one person, or a group of people who are in no way answerable to you about there decisions.

While management gurus from Drucker to Sumantra Ghoshal have trumpeted the cause of the 'knowledge worker' or 'the individualised corporation', demands of Wall Street have ensured that organizations focus more on short term goals than long term rewards.

However, web 2.0 applications are churning the battle of organizational change by employing technologies whose leitmotifs are openness, transparency, and which reward authenticity.

What's the difference?

Earlier OD had tools and technologies which were group-based and needed buy-in of the top and all in the group to succeed.

Today's tools focus on the individual and are being driven from bottom up.

The sceptics are not being co-opted into the change effort underway. The wave of openness is however forcing them to change. Blogs, wikis and tools that help people create and connect are making it easier for free agents to network, mimicking large organizations, while the drive for innovation is forcing organizations to unblock the potential of their employees. People are also looking at their purpose, gifts and passion (hat-tip Dave Pollard) and their own awareness about themselves is on the rise.

How will organizations react? I am not sure, but as I keep thinking, modern organizations need to move into the post-modernistic phase of looking at the parts and the power of the pieces of the parts ! Read related stuff at Terrence's blog here

More later...

You'll find jobs in London at Canary Wharf Jobs.com.

The future...

"The future will bring industries we can't imagine and jobs which we lack the vocabulary to describe." - Geoffrey Colvin, Fortune Magazine

It's all happening online...

Resignations, job offers ...the works !

What is truly amazing here is that all of this—Congdon's weird online announcement (to both the world and to her former partner Andrew Baron) that she will no longer work at Rocketboom, as well as Calacanis' opportunistic and very public job offer—is unfolding online. The jockeying for career that used to happen behind closed doors (or, for big network TV stars, through well-placed stories in the WSJ or the New York Times) is now happening in plain view. It's so appropriately democratic.

Dave Pollard on Peter Block's thoughts

As some of you might know I am a big Peter Block fan. I haven't yet read Stewardship so this review by Dave Pollard makes it a must read for me !

Way back then, Block had already learned what I was a decade from realizing, that entrepreneurship is natural to all of us, and that hierarchy, money, growth and self-interest are not necessary ingredients of true entrepreneurship but rather obstacles to its effectiveness

One of the hardest parts, he says, is convincing managers to give up managing (in favour of stewardship) and at the same time, ironically, convincing line employees to give up comfortable dependency, where they're not really responsible for anything. It's a difficult trade-off, and I am sure it would take enormous patience to pull this off, but Block is the master, and he's covered all the angles.

The Recruiting Blogswap

OK.

I've done it.

Bitten something that's more than I can chew...I think !

The JobGals and Recruiting.com asked for participants for the first Recruiting Blog Swap and being a total junkie for new things, I signed up.

So what does that mean?

That means, you, dear readers, are going to see some eight different bloggers posting on this blog over the next 2 months ! Yeah, you're finally getting some break from me :-)

But that also means (gasp!) that I have got to post eight times over the next 2 months on eight different blogs, keeping in mind their focus areas, and adding my perspective (and help, the first one in my schedule is in Chinese !)

For the list of all the talent bloggers participating click here

More on employer branding

I guess you can't win them all :-)

My post about Orkut and repercussions on employer branding turned frequent commentators Ajit and Indian Blogger, disagreeing with my thoughts.

Ajit said:"If you think that Orkut groups and profiles can shape employee's perception about organisations then I guess you are taking your imagination too far. Social software will make an impact but not with frivolous and non-serious profiles like the one you've posted."

Maybe I did take my imagination too far. That picture was only an instance. No where did I insunate that Orkut is only misused to malign organizational images. There are umpteen number of organizational communities which are overwhelming positive about their organizations.

According to the Wikipedia, a brand "

is a collection of feelings toward an economic producer; more specifically, it refers to the concrete symbols for the brand, such as a name and design scheme. Feelings are created by the accumulation of experiences with the brand, both directly relating to its use, and through the influence of advertising, design, and media commentary. "

These feelings about an employer can be positive and negative. These are shaped by two factors. The individual's values and perceptions, and the organizations policies and processes. I agree that large organizations have got them both right most of the time, however, when either of the two is out of sync, then we have a dissatisfied employee. We can say as Indian Blogger says "The "cribbing" factor is very evident in freshers who join the place. It is more to do with the expectations mismatch.I am not sure if companies should really be bothered if there is talks like that about the organization."

I disagree, IB, I think companies need to be bothered. Because, in today's world, a dissatisfied employee has the power to communicate that dissatisfaction to a large number of people in a short span of time. We could argue, that is not what it should be or ought to be, but do recognize this is what they are like. (read more on Generations in the Workplace)

Companies have discovered, a dissatisfied customer who blogs or can communicate his/her dissatisfaction can have a vital dent on the companies' reputations online. Check out Jeff Jarvis' troubles and battle with Dell on "Dell Hell".

Yesterday, several dissatisfied employees could be spread over various functions and locations in an organization. Today they can form an "army of davids"

That is the one reason why organizations need to be aware of and monitor social software. If your company's name is CoolCompany search for "I love CoolCompany" and "I hate CoolCompany" on Google as well as blog search. Search for CoolCompany on Technorati, Icerocket and Bloglines. See what are people talking about CoolCompany. Search for it on Flickr. Any photographs that you would rather not see associated with your company? How about Youtube? Any weird videos of your project manager doing an embarassing dance there?