You're on an interview, no I mean RIGHT NOW you're on an interview

In the epic Book of Basketball by Bill Simmons,  legendary player (and failed executive) Isiah Thomas had the most compelling and profound observation about the sport. It was that the 'secret' of winning basketball wasn't about basketball at all - it was about the hundreds of other things like character, commitment, sacrifice, teamwork,  etc. that had to be present for a team to actually realize their true potential and become champions.  If you love basketball like I do, that concept sticks with you.

Much like Thomas' view that basketball wasn't really about basketball, could it be that the future of job seeking and more specifically interviewing, won't actually be about interviewing at all? Before you ask 'What the heck is he talking about?' check out what is happening, or at least starting to happen, in the high stakes recruiting world for software developers.

The San Francisco start-up Gild has created an algorithm that surfaces, evaluates, and rates software developers on the developers' public projects and code samples it finds on the web. The catch, that unlike every 'interview' or assessment typically conducted in the recruiting process, Gild is scoring developers behind the scenes. Programmers are not even aware it is happening, and don't have to give their permission.

How does this work?

Gild assembles profiles of individual developers from their contributions and activities in open-source forums and public websites. It can use formal APIs or simply “scrape” information from popular developer websites and communities. It takes all the data it can find and applies an algorithm to assign two scores, one for work quality, and one for influence in the software community.

And don't think for a moment that this kind of algorithmic-based rating will be necessarily limited to software developers. Here's more on the ambitions and potential Gild sees in this kind of approach to dynamic, always-on 'scoring' of candidates, from a recent piece in MIT's Technology Review:

For now, Gild is evaluating only software developers, whose work can often be freely found in repositories for open-source software, coder Q&A forums, and other online developer hangouts. But CEO Sheeroy Desai says that Gild hopes to bring its “talent acquisition technology” beyond the realm of software programmers, especially as more work products start to appear online.

This kind of real-time, background assessment, while being perhaps invasive or even creepy for candidates, could certainly benefit HR and Recruiters, who can check if resume details, letters of recommendation, and even 'real' interview observations seem to jibe with the Gild score. And maybe they can even use something like the Gild score to surface potential candidates that their normal assessment process would exclude - say the lack of a college degree or the requisite '5 years of progressive experience.'

Either way it seems like the approach Gild is taking is just the first step in what is to come - a world where every action, comment, blog post, tweet, etc. becomes an input into a algorithm and feeds a dynamic professional/personal profile that increasingly will be utilized as a tool into the hiring process. I'm actually ok with this, by the way.

And since we are soon approaching a world where we are ALWAYS on a job interivew, I feel I better start publicly answering some of the most common interview questions. I'll start with an easy one:

Interviewer: So tell me, what is your biggest weakness?

Me: I simply work too hard, care too much, and demand perfection out of myself and my team.

That ought to pass me on to the second-round I think.

Technology, Service, and Dehumanization

My pal the great Paul Hebert had a fantastic piece over on Fistful of Talent titled 'What HR Should be Thinking About in 2013', an examination of some of the most important and interesting business and product/service challenges facing organizations, and how HR departments can or should be responding to these challenges. The entire piece is excellent, and I encourage you to read it all, but I wanted to call out two (related), trends Paul highlighted and compare them to another, different example where business, policy, and pragmatism seems to be at odds with what we 'know' to be sound business advice. Retro Robot

First - the two bits from Paul's piece at FOT:

CUSTOMER-FACING EMPLOYEES ARE YOUR BRAIN AND YOUR BACKBONE.

The crucial element in any customer experience is still people, no matter how much technology has transformed the landscape. The larger an organization, the more it relies on the thousand tiny decisions its frontline employees make on a daily basis. And listening to their collective wisdom is more important than ever.

NOTE TO HR:  Nothing really to add here – just go read that paragraph 100,001 times before starting your next initiative.

HUMAN INTERACTION HAS NEVER BEEN MORE PRECIOUS.

There’s almost no transaction that can’t be automated today, from buying groceries to learning about health issues. And customers are starting to resist. Look for places to act more human. 2013 reverses the trend toward automated everything, as humanity becomes the crucial differentiator between a beloved brand and a commodity.

NOTE TO HR:  This is my mantra for 2013 and on. Just change the word customer to employee in the previous paragraph.  It truly is about BEING HUMAN.  And you all SHOULD be the experts at it!

Both of these trends or areas of focus boil down to essentially the same thing - the return of the importance of real and human interaction at the most important customer touchpoints -, which for many kinds of industries are often the responsibility of the most junior and lowest-paid employees. Think call center reps, cashiers, customer service agents, food service folks, the guy who parks your car at the valet - you get the idea. So the advice from both Fast Company and Paul makes perfect sense - listen to your front-line staff, make your organization more 'human', don't jump to automation just for its own sake, etc.  

Hard to disagree with that line of reasoning. Or maybe not so hard. Take a look at an excerpt from another piece from the Wall St. Journal online titled, 'Can the Tablet Please Take Your Order Now?':

Carla Hesseltine is considering buying a few tablet devices for her bakery so customers can place orders for her signature M&M cupcakes on their own, straight from the counter.

The reason: She fears the $7.25 an hour that she currently pays her 10 customer-service employees, mostly college students, could rise, perhaps to $9 an hour under a pledge by President Barack Obama earlier this month.

In order for her Just Cupcakes LLC to remain profitable in the face of higher expected labor costs, Ms. Hesseltine believes the customer-ordering process "would have to be more automated" at the Virginia Beach, Va., chain, which has two strip-mall locations as well as a food van. Thus, she could eliminate the 10 workers who currently ask customers what they would like to eat.

Did you get all of that? A local cupcake shop thinks it smart, cost-effective, and beneficial to replace their front-line, low-paid workers, the ones that make up the vast majority of customer touchpoints, with a couple of iPads and a custom menu app that will allow customers to place orders without having to actually talk to any of the staff.

And Ms. Hesseltine's cupcake shop isn't the only one thinking about how technology and automation can reduce or even eliminate or at least reduce the human interaction between customers and front-line staff. More from the WSJ piece:

Tarang Gosalia, of Cambridge, Mass., hopes he can get away with having fewer employees waiting on customers at the three hair-salon franchises and one frozen-yogurt outlet he owns by using Square, a three-year-old technology brand designed to streamline credit-card transactions. He is planning to test it out starting in June to see if it will make accepting payments easier and faster for his staffers—and therefore allow him to downsize. About 70% of the 35 employees who work for his combined businesses currently earn $8 an hour, the minimum pay required in his state. Raising prices to offset the higher payroll costs strikes him as too risky, because he worries his sales may suffer.

Some entrepreneurs see a promising market in selling technologies to small businesses that might help them to streamline operations and do away with low-wage workers, or retrain them for higher-skilled jobs. An automatic hamburger flipper currently in development could replace low-wage line cooks at a beachside burger joint, for example.

FastCompany could very well be correct, that '2013 reverses the trend toward automated everything, as humanity becomes the crucial differentiator between a beloved brand and a commodity', but as the examples from the WSJ piece tell us, at least for small businesses, (and I bet many large ones as well), cost, compliance, and even the lack of available talent are still conspiring to drive organizations to at least consider further automation and technology-driven substitutions for human interaction.

Technology can be liberating, it can free up time and resources for people and organizations to actually provide better customer experiences, but it also can be really dehumanizing at the same time. When tablets replace counter help, when robots are the new short-order cooks, when the check-in, check-out and everything in between becomes just a series of user interfaces, touch screens, and customer-machine interactions, we are moving in the opposite direction from humanity as a differentiator.

I think the real challenge for HR and business in 2013 (and beyond) isn't deciding whether or not to automate, but rather making the critical decisions about where and how the organization can afford to automate and where it can't.

Have a great weekend!

Work, productivity, and driverless cars

The last 30 years or so have seen the dramatic impact of technology upon the workplace - from the PC revolution, to email, to sophisticated ERP systems to better manage the flow of material and information, all the way to the present day, where social, mobile, and video technologies continue to disrupt how, where, and with whom work gets done. Certainly the workplaces and the methods of getting work done, almost to a job, look nothing today like they did just 15 or 20 years ago. And no doubt technology will continue to advance and impact work - what the future of wearable computing like Google Glass holds is of particular interest to me.

But our friends at Google are at the forefront of another new technology development that also has the potential to dramatically alter work and productivity - perhaps just not in the ways we are accustomed to seeing how workplace technology changes our jobs, patterns, and behaviors. While Google Glass has enormous disruptive potential, in some ways the autonomous car, being developed at Google (and several other places as well), perhaps has the potential to have a more direct and sudden effect on work and how work gets done, (and how much more of it potentially gets done).

According to recent statistics, workers in large US cities spend as much as 40 minutes each-way commuting to work, and just about 75% of them make the journey by themselves in their car.  In the worst cities for commuting, perhaps a city where your organization has facilities, as many as 3/4 of your workers are, on average, spending more than an hour each day in their cars, stressed, getting frustrated, and with the exception of the occasional business call, (taken 'hands-free' of course), getting almost nothing productive accomplished. 

The driverless car - and don't think it is THAT far away from becoming a reality, Google's testing has logged well over 300K miles so far - would instantly transform that hour or hour and a half from empty time to potentially productive time. From the Google piece linked above:

This is an important milestone, as it brings this technology one step closer to every commuter. One day we hope this capability will enable people to be more productive in their cars.

Imagine cleaning our your entire email Inbox before arriving at work, or having that conference call with clients while actually paying attention, or even doing a video chat with colleagues that are kicking back in their driverless cars on the way to the office.

If the recent hubbub from Yahoo! and Best Buy around the need for employees 'physically being together' catches on more widely - then it will just put more workers back on the road. Driverless cars are the one technology solution that has the potential to almost instantly turn down time into productive time, and enable your commuting workers to take back just a little bit of their lives. Which is kind of ironically what teleworking policies were meant to do.

The next great workplace tech breakthrough just might be the one that takes you to the workplace.

Job Titles of the Future #2 - Hacker in Residence

Over the weekend while cleaning out the files of 'Stuff I meant to blog about, but never got around to it', was this piece from Fast Company - 'How LinkedIn's "Hacker_In-Residence' Transformes an Ordinary Job Into a 'Dream Job'.

The piece is a brief interview with LinkedIn's Matthew Shoup, the afore-mentioned 'Hacker-in-Residence' for the professional networking leader. And yes, that it his real title - check out Mr. Shoup's LinkedIn (natch) profile here. The Fast Company piece is set up to take us through how his role at LinkedIn evolved over time, he was hired into the much more sedate and traditional title of 'Technical Marketer', and to give some insight into the unique ways he approaches his role as H-I-R, (his 'office; is a picnic table outside, he measures interactions with colleagues like a marketer would - impressions, clicks, and conversions, etc.).

But the individual employee evolution and the quirky new job title is only part of the appeal I think. What is more interesting and meaningful in a general sense is the idea of transformation that is inherent in the story - both as an individual (moving from 'Technical Marketer' to 'Hacker-In-Residence') and organizational, (a company that is wildly successfully and growing rapidly and like many before it, is certainly in real danger of losing the speed, agility, and innovation capability that is a strength of begin really small).

How does LinkedIn manage this?  Shoup attributes this to the idea of transformation:

LinkedIn gives employees the ability to transform their careers in order to do things they’re super passionate about. There’s a culture of transformation and innovation at LinkedIn, and that's one of those things that keeps employees engaged.

When you think about it, it seems incredibly simple for organizations to describe, but for some reason(s), harder to execute. And usually when founders, early employees, or other 'stars' leave growing companies it gets chalked up to 'Well, the same skills that are needed to start a company are not the same ones needed to help run an established company.' Mix in the ever-present growth the bureacracy and administration and rules, (about job titles, pay grades, office locations, PTO, and on and on), and for truly innovative types (and hackers), life as a corporate drone seems pretty unappealing.

But even established companies like LinkedIn still need these kind of people, maybe more than ever. And chances are your company needs some of them too.

How to make a start? How about crafting your own Hacker-In-Residence role, or re-writing the job description of the most creative person you have and include something like this:

'The common thread between all of the hats you will wear is that you will get to traverse multiple disciplines to solve business problems with creativity, and bring innovative ideas to life.'

Sounds like a cool job to me, and one that the people you never seem to be able to find (or keep), would be a perfect fit for.

Happy Hacking out there.

If Yahoo doesn't kill remote working, then Big Data will

A little bit lost in the continuing fallout from the decisions by Yahoo to end remote working arrangements for their staff, and Best Buy's move to end ROWE (Results Only Work Environment), at its corporate headquarters was this much more interesting, (and potentially more important), report in the Wall Street Journal, 'Tracking Sensors Invade the Workplace', that hints at a data-powered future workplace where 'being physically together' is not just mandated, but is tracked, recorded, and interpreted by algorithms and leveraged by management.

How exactly does Big Data, (which usually sounds kind of benign, or at least non-threatening), play a role in the future of telework?  Take a look at this excerpt from the WSJ piece:

As Big Data becomes a fixture of office life, companies are turning to tracking devices to gather real-time information on how teams of employees work and interact. Sensors, worn on lanyards or placed on office furniture, record how often staffers get up from their desks, consult other teams and hold meetings.

Businesses say the data offer otherwise hard-to-glean insights about how workers do their jobs, and are using the information to make changes large and small, ranging from the timing of coffee breaks to how work groups are composed, to spur collaboration and productivity.

"Surveys measure a point in time—what's happening right now with my emotions. [Sensors] measure actual behavior in an objective way,"

The next step in figuring out how people work, communicate, and interact in the workplace and with their colleagues involves wearing an always-on tracking device, (bathroom breaks optional), and harnessing all the data the device collects about who a worker talks to and for how long, how often they get up, when they hit the coffee room and vending machine, how long they stand waiting outside a conference room because the prior meeting ran long - all of this and more.  Mash up that 'experience' data with other electronic data trails (email, IM, internal collaboration tools, etc.), and boom - the data will be able to prescribe optimal amounts of employee interaction, recommend the timing and duration of breaks, send push notifications alerting you that the guy you need to connect with about the Penske account is two stalls away from you, and crucially - keep your managers informed about just what the heck you are up to all day.

But it seems really likely to me that if these workplace tracking sensors gain more well, traction, that organizations will quickly realize that the only way to really exploit them, and the data they collect to its fullest potential, will be in a traditional workplace environment - with all employees together in a physical location and 'on-duty' at the same time. Let's face it, for a remote worker wearing a tracking sensor probably won't produce much valuable data - unless its to try to 'prove' to a suspicious manager that a remote worker is slacking off.

The tracking sensors, if they catch on, will change the anti-telework argument from 'We need you to come in to the office so we can keep an eye on you' to 'We need you to come in to the office so we can track everything you do, say, touch, and feel all day.'

It's a brave new world out there my friends...