On Being Radical and Making Choices

Much of this weekend's free time was spent grinding through the ridiculous backlog of Google Reader items that had built up during the five days I spent in Las Vegas last week for HRevolution and the HR Technology Conference. Of the many thousands of items I at least title-scanned, and the hundred or so I actually read - this was by far the top piece of the lot, from the Scientific American 'Context and Variation' blog, a piece called 'The three things I learned at the Purdue Conference for Pre-Tenure Women: on being a radical scholar.'Old-school radical.

At first glance I was tempted to pass by the piece, I am, after-all, not pre-tenure, nor a woman. But for whatever reason I decided to read the piece by Kate Clancy, and was immediately glad I did, because in the length of a standard blog post, Ms. Clancy manages to to touch on not one but two interesting and massively important ideas that transcend the purely academic context in which she writes, and are applicable and worth contemplating in the broader world of work.

Take Number One - Lots of jobs require ridiculous amounts of time, effort, energy, and commitment to succeed.

And to get ahead you often need to 'beat' the other person that wants that title/money/prestige just as much as you do. But if the 'external' demands on your time and your competitor are unequal, (in Ms. Clancy's case she is a parent of a young child), then you are heading into the competition with constraints and pressures that can make the battle seem not worth fighting. I know the whole 'kids vs. career' tradeoff is not a new issue, but Ms. Clancy does a great job of recognizing the issues without asking for sympathy or special treatment. From the piece:

We sit some more. We talk some more. About how we can’t compete against people with kids but a stay at home spouse, about how we can’t compete against our peers without kids at all. He is in a department where people show up early and stay late. You can find a third of the faculty in the department at any given time on the weekends. I’m in a department where folks work from home as often as they work from the office, but they are still getting stuff done. And it feels like they are all getting more done than me.

Pile the ubiquitous Mommy Guilt on top of this, the culturally conditioned guilt that says not staying at home hurts my child despite the intellectual knowledge that good daycare, and the kind of quality investments I make with my daughter, are hugely beneficial, and there are few hours in my day to sleep.

It's the grind most of us, even those of us not chasing a major career objective like academic tenure, but simply trying to do more, better, more innovative things have run into. The more commitments and obligations you have outside of work, the tougher your fight to the top, (or even the middle), is going to be. Neither Ms. Clancy nor I have this figured out yet by the way.

Take Two - On traditional measures of success and influence.

In the Human Resources/Talent/Recruiting space we've had our share of navel-gazing debates about influence, and the challenge of assessing online influence compared to more traditional forms. Lance Haun led a popular session at HRevolution about this topic. While the debate continues, there seems to be little doubt that blogging, social media, and even non-traditional and 'unconferences' like HRevolution and others are chipping away at the established ideas about influence and perhaps even authority in our industry.  In the Scientific American piece that focuses on the world of academics, Ms. Clancy wonders about the continued reliance on publication in academic journals as the standard of relevance, achievement, and influence in her field.  Again from the piece:

But are peer-reviewed publications, read and cited by only by a select group of those peers, the best way to assess influence and importance? They are certainly no longer the only way. My 2006 paper on iron-deficiency anemia and menstruation has been cited by six other papers; my 2011 blog post on this paper has been viewed tens of thousands of times and received almost sixty comments between its two postings.

Boom. The entire 'old school vs. new school' measures of influence argument summed up in two sharp sentences. Again, neither the Scientific American piece nor I profess to have all the answers for this, but it is clear that even in the stodgy world of academia there appear to be calls for change, or at least dialogue about how these newer (they are really not all that 'new' anymore), can and should impact the industry in more significant ways. Ms. Clancy want to be, as I suspect many of you do, to be more 'radical', and more true to their interests and passions in the face of slower-moving organizations of power.

I hope you take a few minutes to read Ms. Clancy's entire article, for me it represents some of the best and most thought-provoking content I've run across in quite some time.

Have a great week!

PageRank for People

Last night on the HR Happy Hour Show we had an interesting discussion with Megan Berry from Klout, Jennifer McClure, and Dawn Hrdlica-Burke about online or digital influence, and its potential effect and use in the recruiting and hiring process. We also talked about some of the implications that relying on these kinds of new algorithms might have in the future. It was a fascinating conversation, and I encourage you to check out the replay of the show here, (or drop it into your fancy iPad, just search the iTunes store for 'HR Happy Hour').

My favorite line of the night was from Megan, when she described one of Klout's goals is to have the Klout score be perceived as the 'PageRank for people', a comparison to the famous search breakthrough invented at Stanford by the founders of Google, which sorted and presented web search results not simply by the amount and location of keywords in web page content, but rather by an evaluation of the number and quality of other sites that linked to the site in question. More simply put, if lots of other sites on the web, that were judged to be of good quality linked back to a particular site, then that destination site was assessed at a higher relative quality, and thus its 'PageRank' would improve.  

It is a concept as simple and as fundamental to any evaluation we'd make of the quality, reliability, and trustworthiness of any person, business, or service - if enough (or even just one if it is the 'right' person), people that we respect and value their judgment indicate that Candidate 'X' would make a good hire for a specific role, or that Jimbo's Plumbing Service can be trusted not to rip you off, then we are far more likely to heed that advice than we would from simply doing a cursory analysis of online 'presence' or marketing material.

So when Megan from Klout told us on the show last night that Klout's new '+K' feature, where users can log in to Klout.com to 'award' other users a '+K' to indicate their explicit agreement to the Klout assessment of topical influence, did not directly factor into the person's actual score due to concerns about potential gaming of this process, I was a little surprised. Because to me, at least once Klout can sort out the correct way to control to remove the element of potential gaming the system, then the +K component would stand to be a fundamental aspect that would support the 'PageRank for People' idea. 

It's really not that not different from Angie's List, or Amazon book reviews, or the consumer product ratings that pop up on pretty much every electronics retailer website.  For some reason we don't seem to worry too much about Jimbo the plumber 'gaming' the system, but when we get to discussing Twitter, Facebook, Blogs, and such, the conversation about 'influence' starts to get a little funky.

Again, I am not sure Klout has the answer to all this yet, or if some one else will figure out a better way to come up with that just right blend of algorithm, evaluation, and personal touch that will result in a measurement or score that will become more universally accepted, but I am fairly confident someone will.

And I am also fairly confident that soon after some other disruptive technology will emerge that will make us reconsider 'influence' once again.

Anyway, I am done talking/writing about this for a while, unless my Klout score keeps tanking!

Have a great weekend!

Can you give a brother a +K?

Tonight on the HR Happy Hour Show (8PM ET/ 5PM PT, rest of the country you are on your own), we'll be talking about Klout, and other measures of online or digital influence in the context of sourcing, recruiting, and career management. Can tools like Klout accurately measure a concept to ambiguous as 'influence?'  Does the Klout score and others of its like, have any role at all in the recruiting process?  How about some +K action?

You can listen live at 8PM ET tonight on the show page here, or on the call in line at 646-378-1086.

Before you jump to the high and mighty ground and declare that Klout, and other lists of digital influence, whether created using proprietary algorithms or hand-curated by actual people, have no place in professional recruiting processes, you might want to ask yourself if you've ever researched a candidate on LinkedIn, and made some kind of subtle evaluation of said candidate simply on the number of connections they have.

Recently, none other than my friend Kris Dunn, on the HR Capitalist blog offered this observation, in the context of candidate evaluation for a sales position:

My client in that search forwarded me a profile of a Salesforce candidate from LinkedIn.  "Have you talked to this guy?".  I looked at the candidate, which remember, was for a hunting sales pro.  43 contacts in LinkedIn.

43 Contacts.  For a hunting sales pro.  I could hear "I need some leads if I'm going to close business" in the background.  Your cost of customer acquisition just tripled by hiring that guy."

For better or worse, the (lack of) LinkedIn contacts factored into an instant perception being formed about the guy. He could be carrying around a tattered, 25 year old Fil-o-fax (Gen Y'ers, Google it), stuffed with all the names and contact information of the key decision makers and influencers in his industry, but chances are the paltry 43 connections on LinkedIn were not going to let anyone find out.

And here's one more, from the marketing space taken from a post by Mark Schaefer on the Business Grow site:

Let me relate a few of my experiences this week …

• A very talented friend told me he was rejected for a job at a major ad agency because his Klout score was too low.
• A B2B marketing agency Managing Director told me he chose between two qualified candidates based on their Klout score.
• A friend in D.C is creating a Klout 50 Club exclusive to people with high Klout scores. Why? He wants to find good hires for social media marketing.
• A woman told me her boyfriend was accepted to a prestigious conference based on his Klout score alone.

These experiences occurred in the span of 72 hours

Sure, I know what you are thinking - those jobs are all in digital marketing and PR, and therefore using Klout as a screening tool might make some sense, but out here in the real world, where 99.3% of people don't even know what Klout is, it really does not matter. Possibly.

But on the show tonight, while talking about Klout, the discussion is really a bit more expansive than that, and I hope we can avoid getting caught up in the nuances of algorithms, and talk about online and digital influence at a more fundamental level. I think it will make for an interesting show.

Our guests will be Megan Berry from Klout, and Jennifer McClure, aka CincyRecruiter, and the feisty Dawn Hrdlica-Burke, aka DawnHrRocks will be along for the ride as well. 

I hope you can join us tonight at 8PM, and if you listen and enjoy the show can you share the love with a little +K action on Klout my way? My score has been tanking lately.

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!

Trust, but Verify

Recently an organization called Klout, the creator of the well-known measure of online influence, the eponymous 'Klout Score', released an extension for Google’s Chrome browser that lets you see the Klout score of all the people you follow on Twitter when you go to the Twitter.com website, (example of the Klout score, the number that follows the small orange 'K' icon, on a Twitter timeline below)

Now it certainly can and should be argued that the Klout Score may not truly be an accurate measure of online 'influence', and in fact it could also be argued the attempting to measure online influence is not even practical or even possible. How the Klout Score is calculated is not really well-understood by most, and in the grand tradition of other newer or arcane statistical measurements like football quarterback rating and barometric pressure it helps to attach well known performers to the scale in order to help contextualize the numbers.

Last year Tom Brady had the highest NFL quarterback ranking at 111, and Justin Bieber (among others) has a perfect Klout Score of 100. While we may not understand the raw scores of Brady's 111 and Bieber's 100, most football fans noted and can appreciate the great season Brady just completed, and in the online and offline world's, Bieber's ubiquity needs little explanation. The numbers themselves don't really matter, only how they allow us to slot and evaluate others in comparison.  If you are interested in this sort of thing, the full NFL QB ratings for the 2010 season can be found here.

Once I installed the Klout Score extension for Chrome, and went over to Twitter.com, it almost immediately changed the experience and also the perceptions I have of Twitter users I am following.  As the Tweets flew by I found myself constantly thinking, 'He is only a 50?' and 'Wow, how did she get to be a 72?'. I know Bieber is an 100, but I confess I really don't grasp the Klout Score all that well, but I can (for the most part), compare a pair of two-digit numbers and tell which one is higher, and therefore theoretically more 'influential'.

But 'influence', or lack thereof, is a highly personal thing.  A relatively higher Klout Score for one person I am following compared to another might say something about statistical measurements like replies and retweets, but it says nothing about a person's importance, value, and influence to me. As I looked at more of the Klout scores of the people I follow, I actually started to get a little ticked off when I saw a relatively lower score against someone I follow closely and whose updates I find highly valuable, and higher scores attributed to some users that quite honestly aren't all that interesting or influential to me.

These kinds of online influence scores while potentially an important initial step for people and organizations to better understand reach, connections, and possible value are still marred by the inability to apply the kinds of personizable filters and tags that could make them even more powerful. 

And sometime in the near future, as more organizations adopt internal social networking tools, be they microblogs or fully deployed social platforms, the ability to measure, assess, and compare influence and reputation of employees will likely become more and more important.  But before that can happen, at least in a fair and equitable manner, the methods to calculate these influence scores will have to evolve beyond the current mathematical and universal, and move more towards the situational and personal.

I think I am going to de-install the Klout extension for Chrome, I am pretty confident in my own ability to assess the influence of the people I follow. It's not that I don't trust the Klout score, but since I need to evaluate and verify them anyway, why have them (at least at this point), cloud up my judgement. 

And no, it is not (completely) because Bieber has almost double my Klout Score.