Most software products and services are developed in the absence of clear understanding of the customers. That’s a good part of why technology adoption rates are so low in practice. As the Software as a Service (SaaS) model shoves success metrics off on the customer, new and exciting approaches to getting user level buy in will be trotted out. You can bet that gamification is going to figure prominently in the misguided attempts to automate stakeholder commitment. Beware.
I’m going back to school. I’ve joined an amazing group of learning professionals in a short and intense class led by Howard Rheingold, one of the leading voices in virtual community, digital literacy and online learning. Let me share Mind Amplifiers with you.
I was talking with a colleague about the buzzword problem in HR Technology. Most of HR is discussed in a jargon that has been slowly evolving since the first personnel departments emerged during the depression. As technology began to penetrate the HR Marketplace, buzzwords became a feature of product marketing. As a result, the language is getting sketchier and meaning changes too fast for anyone to be able to agree on anything.
For all of the noise, Social Technology is slow to enter the HR Marketplace. After all, LinkedIn is nearly a decade old; Facebook is 7; and Twitter is 5.While there are legions of trainers who purport to show how to use collaborative communications tools in organizational settings, there is little real progress in standardization. Armed with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, RSS Feeds, Slideshare and a host of other accounts, most of the news is the heavy breathing of early adopters.
In 2003, I launched a small endeavor called “CandidateVoice”. The idea was to audit websites based on their ability to deliver a sound experience for each candidate who visited the employment section of a website. What’s happening with Candidate Experience now?
When job hunters are given the opportunity to examine endless opportunities, what do you think they do? Truth is that after about a dozen thorough readings of job ads, they revert to skimming. The web actively encourages this approach…it’s a skimming medium. Following a skimming phase, the job hunter reverts to reviewing opportunities briefly and punching a resume button in response. It’s extremely Pavlovian.
The world of referrals is changing rapidly. What used to be the province of personal relationships and intimate references is becoming a transactional marketplace for contact information. The notion that executives think this is the best source of new employees is balderdash.
When you look at the majority of the material that flows from the marketing departments of our industry, you have to wonder if the idea that ‘markets are conversations’ ever penetrated our world. Loud shouting and ridiculous claims drown out any possibility of nuanced conversation. It is completely impossible to tell the difference between one vendor’s claims and the next.
I’ve been writing about the Human Capital Industry for most of two decades. Over that time, I’ve made a lot of forecasts and predictions. A surprising number of them were right on target. Unfortunately, a fair number were way, way off. What about my predictions for the death of the resume?
This past month, I’ve been involved in any number of conversations about the future of the resume. The LinkedIn IPO has made that a hot topic. I’m not so sure that the resume is dead.
Influence fatigue.
To say that the topic of influence has been flogged within an inch of its death is to deeply understate the volumes of smoke that have billowed out of the conversation. Rich intensity and strong opinion are the characteristics of a debate which featured magnificent posturing and little insight.
The critical question is, ‘why should you care about influence’?
Recent Comments