Mind Reading for Fun and Profit

A recent post on the Venture Beat site, A Clockwork Orange? EmSense can monitor your emotional reactions to media, about new applications in marketing research of something called 'quantitative neurometrics', a process facilitated by a subject strapping on a slick brainwave-sensing device and allowing their reactions to various forms of media to be monitored and tracked.I predict you will be a '3' on your review...

The basic premise of quantitative neurometrics is that by measuring more precisely and accurately subjects' emotional responses to advertising, creative concepts, packaging and the shopping experience content and campaigns can be better aligned with the target demographic's true emotional responses, and be more accurate than traditional means. The approach plays off the conventional wisdom that people often say they like something or are likely to do something, when in reality what they really like and actually do are quite different indeed.

So naturally for marketers and designers of advertising campaigns, store layouts, product placement professionals, really anyone looking to sell something, (or at least incent a prospect to consider buying something), quantitative neurometrics seems to offer a level of detailed information that could be exploited for commercial benefit. This is of course putting aside the general creepiness factor of strapping a brainwave monitoring tool to a subject while flashing your latest ads for minivans, or detergent, or vacation property in Tennessee.

As I read the piece in Venture Beat naturally I began to think of ways that brainwave monitoring could help organizations solve some of their more pressing challenges (again suspending disbelief long enough to imagine a workplace where employees would agree to submit to this kind of monitoring), and what kinds of long-standing workplace assumptions that quantiative neurometrics could help test.

Off the top of my head here goes:

Company Off-site teambuilding events

You think: Fantastic opportunity to get the team together, to bond and grow as a creative, energized, and inspired collection of problem-solving dynamos as only 'trust-falls' can conjure. The team returns to the office the next day with a new sense of spirit and togetherness.

They Think : If I don't attend, do I have to take PTO? Is there an open-bar? Don from Shipping really needs to put his shirt back on.

The CEO's quarterly message to the troops

You think : The team loves to hear about the news and strategy of the company right from the top. It is great that Joe the CEO is so accessible and open.

They think : If I don't attend, do I have to take PTO? Is Joe wearing a monogrammed shirt? With cufflinks? I hope he doesn't announce another off-site teambuilding session.

The Annual Performance Review

You think : Our process for linking company goals down to individual employee objectives is perfect for achieving optimal aligment, shared vision, and progess towards strategic goals. It is a win-win.

They think: I work in the mail room. I am not really sure what the heck I can do to improve our market share in Europe. Will there be any merit increases at all this year? Can you please tell Don from Shipping to put his shirt back on?

Sure, mind-reading might have a better and more profitable future in the worlds of marketing and advertising, but who says the HR and Talent professionals can't get in on some of the fun?

If you could really, truly, know what your staff was thinking, and have more insight to their honest emotional reactions to your environment, workplace technologies, communications, and so on, wouldn't you want to find out?

Or maybe instead of investing in brainwave-reading technology we could work to create a workplace where we really could just ask people what they are feeling, and they really would be comfortable sharing.

For the record - at the moment I am think almost exclusively on having a donut. But you did not need quantitative neurometrics to sort that out.

Figuring Out Whom to Recruit First

Admission - the title for this post is an almost complete lift from a recent piece on the MIT Technology Review blog titled 'Figuring Out Whom to Please First', an examination of the growing importance and integration into traditional customer service processes of so-called 'social influence' measures, specifically the Klout score.

The MIT article postulates that in addition to the segmentation of customers based on level of spend or history of past purchasing behavior, that more companies are and should consider newer measures of relative customer importance and influence in their customer service strategies.  This consideration and awareness of social influence, (assuming for the moment you believe the Klout score does indeed, measure influence), is made more manageable and possible by the integration of the Klout measure into existing CRM systems and processes, as well as newer third-party tools (Hootsuite, CoTweet, etc), that are used by both customer service representatives as well as corporate PR and communications folks.

From the MIT piece:

Several providers of customer relationship management (CRM) software have incorporated Klout into their applications in the past year. If a customer calls up a company that is using such an application, the phone rep can get a quick readout of the person's score—assuming the rep has key pieces of information, such as the e-mail address that the customer uses on Twitter or Facebook. Citibank, McDonald's, Delta Airlines, and Coca-Cola are among the companies that can pull up a Klout score, according to Jesse Engle, the CEO and cofounder of CoTweet, which incorporates Klout into its CRM software and counts those four companies as customers.

And with the incredible growth and use of the social networks, and the getting-too-many-to-count examples of major social media PR disasters stemming from poorly handled customer service situations, more companies are keenly aware of the potential harm that even one highly aggrieved and motivated customer can cause on the social web, a situation that is potentially even more risky when that customer in question can effectively connect to a wide audience of friends and followers. 

So does or should this new and emerging ability to attempt to quantify 'influence' impact organizations in the recruiting and assessment processes? More Applicant Tracking Systems are delivered with pre-built and simple to deploy integrations with the social web for a variety of purposes, (sending referrals, looking for common friends, porting job listing to social outposts), so incorporating a candidate's Klout score would likely be a simple matter of inserting a small bit of Javascript. 

Could we see a time where it made sense to include these kinds of scores in conjunction with more traditional screening processes, and not just for the kinds of roles that 'require' some kind of social chops, but really any rank and file job throughout the organization?

If you buy in to the notion that employees from any part of the organization can be your best brand ambassadors, then wouldn't it make sense to think about influence scores and a given candidate's potential to help communicate, promote, and define your company brand? All things being equal, would companies be more interested in 'influential' candidates? Or is there a down side to online influence and popularity that could actually work against the candidate? 

We know not all customers are 'equal'; anyone who has walked past all the premium status passengers in first-class on the way back to seat 29B gets this. All candidates are not equal either, but figuring out which ones get the upgrade to the front of the plane seems to be getting more complex all the time.

Have a great weekend!

The Company Soundbite

Recently the Tech news aggregator Techmeme, launched a neat little sidebar titled 'Who's Hiring in Tech', that contains a list of some of the biggest names in the tech space that are actively looking for talent.

Not terribly interesting on the surface, many companies, especially tech enterprises are facing targeted talent shortages, and increasingly pitched battles to duke it out for the best developers.  But the cool aspect of the 'Who's Hiring in Tech' ads, are the little soundbite messages that follow the company names, that according to Techmeme, are written by the hiring companies themselves.

Take a look at the image on the right and see what you think of some of the even-shorter-than-a-Tweet taglines that attempt to answer the 'What's it like to work here?'  or the 'What do we actually do here?' questions. 

What taglines seem to connect and resonate with the most?

I kind of like Zynga's - 'It's fun over here. Let's play.' and Foursquare's funny URL redirect that actually takes you to their home page, (it might have been smarter to have the kitten URL redirect to their Careers page, but still it is kind of neat).

It is interesting to see these mostly recognizable and complex organizations try to distill their employment branding message down to a short phrase, and kind of instructive as to the aspect of their company that they decide to emphasize, when clearly the format allows only an incredibly targeted focus.

I would think it would be a good exercise for those corporate recruiters and talent pros to undertake, to see if you could distill the essence of your unique employer value propostition to a short phrase. 

I suspect if your phrase comes easily to mind, or if you ask 10 people to craft one, and 7 or 8 of them are really similar, then you likely have a pretty good idea of what your company offers current and prospective employees.

On the other hand, if you struggle to come up with your tagline, or if their are widely divergent opinions on what the tagline should read, then it may be time to step back and sort out what you do indeed want to portray to the outside world of candidates and prospects.

What do you think? Does it even make sense to try and sum up an EVP in about six words?

The Wisdom of Jeff Van Gundy - Part V

The sage was at it again the other night during the Oklahoma City - Memphis NBA playoff game.

In case you don't know what I am referring to, former NBA head coach, and current TV analyst Jeff Van Gundy (JVG) dropped another bit of simple, yet essential knowledge about basketball that I think is also directly applicable to the workplace, management, and organizational dynamics.

By my reckoning, that is nothing new for JVG, and if you wish - you can check out the previous installments of the JVG 'wisdom' series here -  (Parts I, II, III, and IV).

But back to the story. During the game Oklahoma City forward Nick Collison made a smart play on defense to cause Memphis to lose the ball, hustled to the offensive end of the floor, and then positioned himself properly to make a scoring move when the ball was rotated to him in the flow of the offensive play. It was a brief series of actions that were not necessarily terribly athletic or skilled or even that remarkable, but as a kind of orchestrated series did add up to an excellent and winning (apologies Chas. Sheen) play.

Immediately after Collison, who is not a starting or star player on the team, completed the play, JVG observed that winning teams need guys like Collison, players that may not have all the physical skills of the top players on the team, but have found ways to contribute using capabilities and attributes that are mostly 'choices' and not simply genetic gifts.

The money line from JVG:

'Guys like Collison, guys that grind, are essential. The best ones are coachable, accountable, and professional. And you can win with guys like that.'

Coachable - willing to accept suggestions, able to make adjustments in style of play to fit the team goals, and cognizant that what may have worked in the past (in college, or on former pro team), might not be the desired behavior on the current team.

Accountable - understands the role, knows how the role impacts and contributes to the success of the team, makes the effort to put himself in the right situations, and simply does his job fully knowing the rest of the team depends on him to meet his objectives. And if other guys on the team, maybe the star players, are having an 'off' night, then he knows when to try and give a little more than normally needed.

Professional - in the narrow sense, we are all professional, i.e. we are paid to perform. But what JVG really meant was a level of personal integrity, pride, and dedication to himself as a player, to his teammates, and to the supporters of the team. This means showing up and giving your best effort even when times are tough, when the team is down, or when you are not meeting your personal objectives. It means being proud of your contribution in every game, and even every practice. It means setting an example for others to follow, even if you don't hold a formal title or leadership role.

Coachable, accountable, professional. All important. All under your control every day. Super talented people in any game or industry or field can get away with only one or two of these, and can still make incredible contributions to the organization. But if you are like most people, and are not in that rare category of naturally talented superstars, just focusing on being coachable, accountable and professional will go a long way in determining your success in any role.

And stacking your team, no matter what the game, with those kinds of players will make you look pretty smart as a leader as well.

And that my friends, is the Wisdom of Jeff Van Gundy.

HRevolution 2011 - Thoughts and Thank-You's

Wow.

What a fantastic event.

HRevolution 2011 took place over the past weekend in Atlanta, Georgia and at least for me, was the best of the three HRevolution events we have put on thus far. And certainly as one of the members of the HRevolution organizing committee I could be accused of having a biased opinion. I freely admit it - I am biased. So if you don't want to take my word for it, connect with any of the 130 or so people that attended, keep an eye on the Twitter stream for the tag #HRevolution, and read some of what are sure to be dozens of reflection blog posts that will be posted in the next few weeks.

I am not so biased though as to suggest that somehow HRevolution is better than other events, be they large and traditional major conferences like SHRM, or the many other 'Unconferences' that one can find these days. But I do believe HRevolution is different, and really kind of unique in the space, and really quite special. The level of commitment, passion, engagement, and enthusiasm for this event, at least for me, surpasses what I have seen and experienced for any other event in our extended industry.

Attendance at professional conferences and events can be driven by many reasons - some are attended for specific learning opportunities, some for the chance to meet and network with one's colleagues in a professional community, and some simply are used to re-charge and energize and hopefully re-ignite passion for one's career. I think HRevolution succeeds as an event because it offers attendees all of these things. Intelligent and insightful session leaders, relevant and engaging content, a format that encourages connection and engagement, and finally the chance to spend time with 130 other folks as passionate as you are about the worlds of Human Resources, Recruiting, Talent Management, HR Technology, or whatever precisely matches your interest.

After the event one of the attendees Bonni Titgemeyer tweeted the following:

It is a fantastic and interesting question, and I think gets to some of the core or the essence of why so many people feel so passionate about the HRevolution event.

Particularly for first-time attendees, the event can be seen as a bit of an enigma. It kind of looks like a 'regular' conference - we were in a large, professional conference center, there was an excellent catered lunch and a General Session room and smaller breakout rooms; some of the sessions had elements of more traditional presentation formats. But other sessions had attendees standing in front of the room holding up posters of cartoon characters and rap stars, and as Matt Stollak and Dawn Hrdlica-Burke both observed, the F-Bomb was dropped sort of casually and reasonably often during the day. But contrast that to the big-brained Josh LeTourneau exploring the depths of complex Social Network Analysis, a topic and conversation to challenge your ideas about talent management to their core.

So is HRevolution a phenomenon, movement, or a cult?

I am not sure. Maybe it is all three. For a small event, the HRevolution manages to be a collection of different, complementary, and interesting elements, and to me, that is why it really is unique and special. Maybe the event is anything the attendees want it to be.

Lastly, many, many thanks for all who attended, presented, supported, and come toghether to make this event what it is.

Most importantly, my thanks and undying respect and admiration for Trish McFarlane, Ben Eubanks, and Crystal Peterson. It is an honor and pleasure to work with you.