Revealing organizational strategy via job ads

I caught this piece on Gamespot.com about Google's recent job listing for a position called 'Product Manager - Games', located at Google's Mountain View, CA headquarters. Here's the information about the role straight from the job listing on the Google careers page:

Rare opportunity to grow a brand-new business - Games at Google! We are looking for a strategic, technical and game-loving Product Manager to drive Google's gaming strategy. You will design strategies for game distribution and discovery, player identity, game mechanics, and more. In addition to designing a great user experience and building out key partnerships, you will be significantly influencing Google's social platform as you work directly with a critical set of early adopters, game developers. Interesting and impactful decisions involving social gaming, privacy, virality, business, and technical APIs await you and the strong, passionate team of gamers you will work with.

Sounds like a pretty interesting and challenging job, right? A chance to really shape and drive what one day might end up being an important line of business for one of the biggest tech companies in the world in a space that is super-hot right now - think Farmville, CityVille, et. al.

So Google is getting more serious about social games as evidenced by this job listing.  Before the news of this listing broke, perhaps that was not so obvious. According to the Gamespot piece 'indicates that Google is definitely planning to get into the games business.' The strong implication is that the posting for the Games Manager job was the validation of some ongoing rumors about Google's potential involvement in the space. 

But I am not highlighting the post just because it seems like a cool gig, but to wonder a bit about how often organizations reveal their business strategies via public job ads. Let's play devil's advocate for a second and pretend that Google had some kind of skunk works project underway meant to try and make a splash in the social gaming space. It would make sense to keep that information on the DL, grab some engineers from other internal groups, have your execs and recruiters work their networks on the phone or online to seek out the talent they need, and really do what they could to keep the word that they were looking for a rockstar Games Manager off the radar of the rest of the Silicon Valley talent sharks.

Again for the purposes of this piece we are assuming Google would benefit from keeping these aspirations for Social Gaming under wraps for a while, so posting an ad like this sends a red flag up to all the other competitors in the space, and gives them public affirmation and impetus to take action, either offensive or defensive. Does the job ad serve as a signal of strategy that a smart recruiter would have never posted publicly, preferring to work this under the radar so as not to broadcast the company intentions in the space?

Is lazy or ineffective recruiting giving away too much?

Or is Google pulling a classic sleight of hand maneuver, posting a job it really will never fill, fr a business it may or may not be interested in, just to throw the pack off of the scent?

How much do you monitor the job ads of your competitors?

Notes from #SHRM11 - Day 2

Trying to come up with four or five notes from SHRM Annual Conference and Exposition - Day 2 has proven to be a little more difficult than I figured. Mainly because I have realized I am not actually attending the event, but rather participating in it in kind of an odd way. I have not had a chance to go to any concurrent sessions, and have only caught parts of the keynotes.

I have spent most of my conference time hanging out in the Dice booth, taking a few meetings with some interesting vendors, and catching up with some of the HR Social Media posse that has descended en masse on this event. The booth work has been fun, a little crazy at times (fuzzy dice are a really popular swag item), and we have had a chance to meet lots of nice and interesting people.The bass player looks like Rick Fox

So we'll give the SHRM Day 2 notes/rundown with a nod towards some of the ancillary activities and sights and sounds surrounding the event. 

1. Expo Hall and other circles of Hell

I finally had a chance to stroll around the Expo Hall yesterday and after a few minutes it becomes a kind of numbing experience. Sort of like all the casinos here in Vegas. Similar kinds of displays, giveaways, pitches, and sort of hard to differentiate providers from each other. Sure, here and there you'll see a few innovative ideas, but honestly one of the most effective ones I saw simply involved giving away water to tired and slightly dehydrated attendees. I think you can stand-out by doing a few simple things, rather than massive, over-the-top demonstrations of force. 

2. Vegas - Part 4.

The only thing I have left to offer is that it is kind of amazing that a city so dependent on the tourist trade makes it so difficult to actually get from one place to another in a reasonable amount of time. Cab lines, hotel check in lines, interminable waits in numerous hotels to have simple requests answered and addressed somehow are not enough to keep people away. I guess the potent combination of gambling, sunshine, and Elvis impersonators make for too compelling a draw.

3. Industrial Pipe Manufacturing

The best question that Laurie Ruetimann and I got in the Dice.com booth was from an HR professional at a traditional, B2B manufacturing company about how she can better promote, organize, educate, and support social media efforts in her organization. It was a great question, and while I hope Laurie and I offered a few decent suggestions about how she can try to move the needle in the B2B space, it reinforced to me how there is still a huge swath of the workplace for whom 'social' is still new and scary territory.

4. Parties

The Monday night combination of the SHRM/BranchOut Tweet-Up followed by the Monster.com party/concert made for a big night. You know you are in the right place when you see a Tim Sackett in the front row of a Natasha Bedingfield concert. Natasha put on an excellent show, cementing her place in the illustrious category of 'singers you think you have never heard of but once they play a few songs you say, 'oh yeah, I know her'.

5. Tony Hseih is not smarter than you

I am writing this while listenting to Zappos.com CEO's Tony Hseih speech. Tony's speech really stands out compared to the last two keynotes since it is seems much more personal, a bit less formally structured, and more directly relevant to HR professionals in the audience. Ideas about company culture, hiring and firing for cultural fit, specific approaches to interviewing and onboarding are all practical and meaningful to the SHRM population.  Sure your company can't simply mimic Zappos, and Tony agrees that you shouldn't, but that you can take the lessons from Zappos (and others), and apply them in your organization.  But the takeaway really is most if not all of the success of Zappos stems from simple things - hire people that fit, stay true to your cause, find a higher purpose than making money. Tony Hseih is not smarter than you, really. But he makes it happen, and most of the rest of us get stuck in rhe reasons why we can't make it happen.

That's it for now, probably only one more of these posts coming to try and wrap-up the event.

Notes from #SHRM11 - Day 1

The second field report from the SHRM National Conference & Exposition sadly will offer no more insight than yesterday's Day 0.5 dispatch - but in the spirit of not allowing a lack of compelling content from grinding out the content, we continue unabated.

So without further ado, here are Steve's Notes from #SHRM11 - Day 1.

1. The Opening Part 1 - SHRM really loves talking about SHRM

The first part of the event's opening address covered lots of SHRM housekeeping, including the formal announcement of the removal of the 'Interim' from SHRM's now CEO Hank Jackson's title. Hank gave a decent enough review of SHRM's opportunities and challenges going forward, strikes an impressive prescence and command on the stage, and generally seems to be the kind of guy that people want to follow and rally around. He talked mostly about SHRM stuff to SHRM people, and even though after about 15 minutes of the SHRMy-ness, it got a little stilted, I get the reasoning and the value.

2. The Opening Part 2 - Packaging Really Matters

The opening 'keynote' was from Virgin CEO Sir Richard Branson. I put keynote in the dreaded 'air quotes' because Branson did not deliver a speech or talk of any sort, rather he simply sat down for a 45 minute of so Q&A session interspersed with several Virgin companies propaganda inspirational videos. Branson is a legend, an icon known all over the world for daring, innovation, success, and a kind of legendary consuming personality. To have a person of such magnitude simply sitting down for a chat, rather than giving a talk, articulating a vision for the future, or a set of challenges for today's and tomorrow's leaders, or even telling a few of the best stories from a unique and inspiring career would have been a far superior option to use Branson, and could have created a keynote that attendees would be talking about for year.  It was an opportunity that was kind of wasted. Branson is a star for sure, but packaged up like a guest on the old Larry King show was a disappointment.

3. Vegas - Part 2

It is still hot. And I still want you to shut your trap about it. This includes me.

4. Vegas - Part 3

It is really hard to get around in this town. Cab lines are impossibly long anywhere that masses of people congregate. This problem is worsened by the situation described in Part 3 of this list that I am not allowed to mention. More planning is required to get from Point A to Point B in any reasonable amount of time that most SHRM-weary attendees are ready to muster after a long day of speeches, Expo Hall swag, and free cocktails. If you want to get somewhere at night, better start planning this morning.

5 Parties and Scarcity

Last night saw the first 'must-attend' after-hours event of the conference, the TLNT.com party held over at the Palazzo resort. What was planned as a little gathering of about 100-150 people soon turned into a (depending on who is doing the talking), a 700-900 RSVPed oversold, capacity challenged, long line to try and get into happening. Throughout the day whispers of 'Are you coming to TLNT? You better get there early...' were overhead in the Expo Hall.  My group (about 10 or so) managed to subvert a ridiculous cab line at the LV Conference Center (see Item 3), by securing an on-the-spot party bus, (nice work Robin Schooling), to shuttle us over to the TLNT event. We then cut the line, (sorry), and made it to the event only a few minutes late.  It was a fun time, made more fun I think by the fact that we had been hearing all day that if we didn't get over there on time (or early), we would not have made it in. This (sort of fake) scarcity elevated a normal conference social happy hour into more of an 'event' that was not to be missed. Nice work TLNT, StarrTincup, and everyone else involved.

That's it for me from Day 1 - I spent most of my Expo Hall time in the Dice.com booth, so I don't have a swag report to offer, but I hope to make some rounds today, and hopefully catch a session or two. If you are at the event, please do come by the Dice Booth #2616 to say hello.

Notes from #SHRM11 - Day 0.5

The two most uneventful blocks of time at a major conference are the first half-day or so before the event properly begins in earnest, usually with a flashy, exciting, get the crowd pumped up opening keynote by someone famous; and the last half-day where a slightly less flashy, exciting but not quite so exciting and not quite as relevant or famous as the opener, and meant to help wind down (what's left of) the crowd winds down the proceedings.Maren Hogan loves HR

I'm sitting in the SHRM National Conference & Exposition Press Room, with maybe 2 or 3 other folks, in the former time block I just described, it is about 4 hours or so until Sir Richard Branson's opening keynote gets the conference officially launched.  Now there are a number of pre-conference sessions and workshops going on prior to the opening keynote, but certainly the vast majority of attendees see the keynote, and the subsequent opening of the Expo floor as the start of the three-day swag-a-palooza.

So without much real content or news to mention, I'll just toss out a set of random notes and observations from #SHRM11 - Day 0.5 (before anything significant has actually happened).

Travel - man air travel in the US in the summer is a nightmare. Five hour delay yesterday, followed by three separate flights to get to Vegas only to find my room in the Las Vegas Hilton was essentially flooded from a leak in the A/C unit. At midnight last night that was not fun.

Vegas - It's hot. Stop talking about it. And stop with the 'What happens in Vegas goes on Twitter/Facebook' jokes. They stopped being funny in abour 2008.

Facilities - You know the 'wear comfortable shoes' advice you were given about SHRM? I hope you followed it. The LV Conference Center is a massive place. There seems to be lots of excellent wifi coverage here, in fact most of the wifi hotspot hubs have been crowded with people eating donuts, drinking coffee, and essentially doing all kinds of things you don't need wifi for.

Gambling - I love sports. I sort of like gambling on sports. But in the dead of summer, there really isn't much in the way of sports to bet on. Matt Stollak just told me he took the over at +8 on the Brewers - Twins game. I think I may find an MLS Game to bet on.  Does David Beckham still play in the league?  

Swag - Haven't seen much of the swag yet. Lots of printed materials for sure. And SHRM has set up some nice donation boxes for attendees to drop off unwanted swag items to donate to charity. I am not sure what kinds of charities are really interested in back issues of HR Magazine.  But still, it might better than getting another gross of 'Miami Heat - 2011 NBA Champions' hats. And it does seem like every vendor is giving away iPads this year. My sense is that none of them will be dropped in the charity box.

So that's it from Day 0.5, check back soon for more dispatches from the front. 

#SHRM11, TLNT, HRevolution, FOT, and Nirvana

Tomorrow I am heading out to the SHRM 2011 Annual Conference & Exposition in Las Vegas, the first time for me attending the big annual SHRM extravaganza.  While I am there I'll be spending time with my friends Laurie Ruettimann, China Gorman , and Terry Starr from Dice as part of Dice.com's event programming. You can learn more about what Laurie, China, and I will be doing, and see our schedules for Dice's booth #2616 here. Dice.com is the leading careers site for Technology professionals and for the companies looking for them, and it is 100% true that the best job I ever had I found on Dice.com.

And also out at SHRM I'll be joining the crew from TLNT.com for the debut of TLNT Radio, broadcasting live from the SHRM Social Media Lounge on Tuesday June 28th at 2PM ET / 11AM PT. Lance Haun and John Hollon from TLNT will be on board, and we have a great lineup of guests slated to join us for the first show.  You can learn more about the show on TLNT.com and listen live next Tuesday on the show page here.

And don't forget that tickets for the next HRevolution event, this one taking place in Las Vegas on October 2, 2011, are on sale here. The early discounted tickets are all gone, but there is still time for you to be a part of the most exciting event happening in the HR space today.

Also, today is my turn on Fistful of Talent, with a take on change, electric cars, and anxiety - Range and Change Anxiety: Electric Cars Are More Like Your Company Than You Think..... I'd love for you to give it a read and let me know what you think.

And last thing, the 'Nirvana' in the post title is in recognition that this coming September marks the 20th anniversary of Nivana's essential album 'Nevermind', and this week the band's label Universal, announced plans to celebrate with a bonus-packed reissue. Nothing like the 20th anniversary of a seminal album to make you feel old. Maybe grabbing up the 'bonus-packed' reissue will help you relive some of that teen spirit yourself (email and rss subscribers click through)

Have a great weekend and if you'll be at SHRM National please come by the Dice.com Booth #2616 and say hello.