You will be corrected (if you're wrong)

The alternate title to this post is, 'It's just about impossible to BS your way to the top, or even into the bottom any more.'

If you haven't checked it out yet, I would recommend the latest Malcolm Gladwell book titled David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants, a fascinating look at how we think about (apparent) disadvantages and obstacles in business and in life, and how, often, these kinds of challenges prove not to be disadvantages after all.

One of the 'underdog' examples in the Gladwell book is from about 20 years ago and tells the story of a guy who during a shared cab ride from Wall St. out to LaGuardia Airport in New York, talked his way into an interview (and was a few days later, hired), to be an options trader at at a big financial services firm. The catch was that in fact this guy had zero job experience, no industy connections or references, and did not have the kind of educational background that would have gotten him past the first few knock-out questions that the bank would have had in place (had there been such a thing at that time). But he was able, in that one hour in the cab, to pitch and present himself as a sharp, experienced person that was worth pursuing.

Long story short, he went on to be really successful in that job trading options, (he essentially taught himself, was smart, and a bulldog that out worked everyone), and has gone on in his career to become a rich and powerful executive at one of the big Wall St. powerhouse firms. Great story of someone who was able to overcome some disadvantages, turn at least a couple of them into assets, and succeed where it might have seemed that a middling and non-descript career was probably his most likely outcome.

Great story for sure, but what I almost immediately thought about after reading it was how there is probably no possibility of it happening today.

The 2014 equivalent of the 'Guy conning a busy manager in off the cuff conversation to give him an interview for a position he has no education/experience to qualify for' might be something like a guy hitting up a hiring manager with a well-crafted and interesting LinkedIn connection request, (because LinkedIn is now so big and out of control they have a couple of shared connections), but that shows a profile with thin, and not relevant job experience, an educational story that doesn't 'fit' the candidate profile, and no meaningful recommendations or endorsements. If the hiring manager even noticed the request, and this is a bigger if, forwarded the profile over to anyone in HR or Recruiting to review, there would be little to no chance of the guy getting a second look, much less a call in for an interview or a job offer.

And I totally get why that makes sense, it is hard enough for many jobs to find people that are qualified or nearly qualified so they can hit the ground running (as your hiring manager demands), and there are a raft of other kinds of jobs where you are turning away really good candidates, so in either case chasing after any kind of 'No way he is a fit, but what the heck, he's got charisma, let's call him in for an interview anyway' type of candidate is kind of a long shot no one has time for.

I'm not saying if this is bad or good, really, it's just how it works today. Today, the guy in Gladwell's book almost certainly would not get hired at most established firms. You would check his story first, and you'd find it lacking. LinkedIn is the new scoresheet.

He'd have to find another way in to the industry (or start something on his own).

Thanks to the social net (and more advanced technology), we can now know just about everything about anyone who wants a shot at working for us.

I wonder if that has made hiring easier or harder.

Have a great week! 

Vacation Week - Read this instead #5

Note: The blog is on vacation this week, so you should read this instead...

‘Oh, I’m So Good at Math’: Lessons From the Jay-Z Business Model

From the piece:

The nature of those rules was revealed in the spot’s final second, when the words SAMSUNG GALAXY flashed on the screen. Viewers were directed to a website, where they could make out—amid stylized redactions—directions that allowed Samsung users to download a free app, which would in turn give them the album five days ahead of its general release. Samsung paid $5 each for a million digital copies, assuring the album of platinum status before it even appeared, while also giving Jay-Z the benefit of free advertising. The Wall Street Journal valued the partnership at $20 million—a figure that shocked an industry battered by piracy and declining revenues.

The deal was about much more, however, than solving a distribution problem. Before the release, the free app worked as a machine for data-mining and promotion, trading scraps of information, like lyric sheets and cover art, for access to users’ social networks. Though some critics objected to the crass intrusiveness—“If Jay-Z wants to know about my phone calls and e-mail accounts,” the Times’ Jon Pareles groused, “why doesn’t he join the National Security Agency?”—it didn’t much affect his standing with fans. A total of 1.2 million people downloaded the app, creating a mailing list at the very least and potentially offering something more, like the core audience for a music-streaming service.

Read the rest here...

Have a great weekend!

Vacation Week - Read this instead #4

Note: The blog is on vacation this week, so you should read this instead...

DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOU’LL BE 285 DAYS FROM NOW AT 2 P.M.? THESE DATA-MASTERS DO

From the piece:

Using information from a pool of 300 volunteers in the Seattle metro area, Sadilek and Krumm gathered a mountain of location data. As the volunteers went about their daily lives--going to work, to the grocery store, out for a jog, even for transcontinental travel--each carried a GPS device much the same way they carried a cell phone. To further ensure accuracy, the researchers also installed GPS devices in commercial shuttles and transit vans that the volunteers used regularly, and the volunteers’ own vehicles. After collecting over 150 million location points, the researchers then had Far Out, the first system of its kind to predict long-term human mobility in a unified way, parse the data. Far Out didn't even need to be told exactly what to look for--it automatically discovered regularities in the data.

It turns out that no matter how spontaneous we think we are, humans are actually quite predictable in our movements, even over extended periods of time. Not only did Far Out predict with high accuracy the correct location of a wide variety of individuals, but it did so even years into the future.

Read the rest here...

'And we're going to track one of our employees'

There you go, happily wandering around the internet and the social networks. A Twitter conversation here. A Foursquare check-in there. Maybe a quick cruise up and down your Facebook feed dropping a few 'likes', and uploading a cool snap from your weekend trip to winery or petting zoo or ballpark. It's fun, it's social, and in 2013 for many of us, updating, connecting, and participating in social networking and contributing to the colossal Big Data set that is the social graph is an essential part of our lives.

Sure, every so often we get a little tired of it all, maybe we take a Facebook vacation, or go on a little Twitter hiatus. We forget to update our LinkedIn profile for a while, (at least until we decide we need a new job), or decide 'checking-in' every time you get a coffee on the way to work is kind of silly. But eventually we come back. Too much of our lives, personal for sure, and increasingly professional, are wound up in the social web. 

That essential nature of social networking that not only compels us to Instagram our pancakes before digging in or fighting over meaningless 'Mayorships' at your kid's preschool also leads to a kind of softening in our views of privacy and security. Through a combination of often confusing and shifting privacy policies, and a pessimistic, (probably realistic), rationalization that no matter what 'privacy' settings or controls one chooses, that their data, once submitted to the great big social graph in the cloud, will eventually become if not public, at least privy to people and programs for which it was never intended.

We sort of get it, we get the tradeoff, we (mostly) accept it as a 'cost of doing business' where the value we derive, (fun, connections, business opportunities), is greater than or at least equal to the darker side of social - loss of privacy, more and more ads, the occasional backlash in the form of 'If your not the customer, you're the product' bitterness. Ok, that last one is mostly my pet peeve.

But despite all that, and our real understanding that nothing on the internet is ever truly private, it is enlightening to catch a glimpse, a snippet, of just what is happening with all that social exhaust we leave as we traverse the social networks and live our lives online.

The UK's Guardian site managed to get a hold of a pretty amazing video created in 2010 by the defense and security firm Raytheon, that features a short product demonstration of a tool called RIOT (Rapid Information Overlay Technology). The Raytheon system was designed to exhibit just how simple and powerful social network data can be for the purposes of identification, tracking, and predicting one's movements. Take a look at the video below, (RSS and email subscribers please click through)

Pretty incredible, right? And remember this video of RIOT is from 2010. No doubt development has continued on RIOT, and no doubt that Raytheon was or is not the only company interested in this sort of thing.

But a great reminder nonetheless. 

We KNOW the data that we publish, push, and post on social media is never private.

But we don't usually get to SEE a reminder of what that actually means.

What's your take? Creeped out by RIOT? Or simply do you chalk it up as the way the world works today?

Happy Thursday.

Aside - Did you notice the Raytheon demo guy from the video looks just like comedian Louis C.K.? Weird.

Here's the social media video you'll see 1,418 times in 2013

There is no doubt we love, love, love the 'Social Media Revolution' series of videos created by Erik Qualman.

If you have been to any kind of conference, event, presentation, webinar, etc. that had even the remotest tie-back to social media, social networking, or mobile technology in the last 5 years or so, then you have definitely sat through 4 minutes of increasingly incredible social media statistics fly in and out of the frame, while tapping your toes to the pulsating soundtrack courtesy of Fatboy Slim's 'Right Here, Right Now.'

Well the latest version, titled 'Social Media Revolution 4' was released a couple of weeks ago, (embedded below, email and RSS subscribers will have to click through to get your Slim on), and in keeping with the structure, format, and presentation of the first three videos in the series, this latest installment presents numerous facts and statistics about the state and growth of social media and networking.

Take a look below and then come back to read my sincere request of you about this video in 2013. 

Great stuff, right?

Facebook is really big.  Lots of folks sign up for LinkedIn every day. People like to read online product reviews and check out recommendations about restaurants from strangers on the internet. Fatboy Slim (sort of) holds up in late 2012.

So here is my request for 2013 - don't include this video in any presentation you may give, webcast you present, or informal talk you might have with your colleagues. If you find yourself in attendance at an event/presentation, and the speaker cracks out this little beauty in an attempt to convince the audience by virtue of the statistics and volume of our pal Slim that 'social media is a really big deal' then you need to walk out and send a strongly worded letter, (that will teach them), to the event organizers that you expect better from speakers in 2013.

We just can't keep trotting this one out, and we can't keep trying to 'impress' people with it either.

We can't, trust me on this. Someone's head will explode at SHRM13 and with all those HR people in the room the workmen's comp discussions will be epic. Actually, that might be kind of fun.

There is nothing wrong or bad about this video, (or the ones that came before it in the series), but we have, all of us, heard and seen it all before.

Especially the 'Right Here, Right Now' bit, which by the way was released back in 1999.

I think the song is about the Y2K bug.