Last few days

Been very buys over the last few days. On Thursday we had an all day planning meeting, which meant that Friday was catch up day!

The weekend has been interesting on Saturday I spent 1.5 hrs getting new reading glasses (I broke my current glasses on Wednesday) and then the afternoon at the school working bee.

Today we went out to Bondi to view Sculpture by the Sea. Highly recommended to all, despite the people. Today has been such a fantastic day

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Sydney Morning Herald has RSS

Ok, I might have missed this one when it came out, so sorry if you all know about this. However I have just found out that the SMH has RSS feeds. This is so cool as it shows we do not live in a complete backwater.

Now I will link them into Jager which I am trying otu to see if it is any better than NewsGator.

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Would you like a biscuit?

Arnotts the biscuit people (I know they are now Campbell Arnotts but I am a slow learner) have just rolled out their new jobs site to Asia Pacific over the weekend.

Had a look and while they don't have my dream job it is an cool example of a jobs site, if you are looking at setting one up have a peak and get some ideas.

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The user experience

Dean Wong over at the Job Blog has a great reminder to us all about managing user trust and expectations.

I'm sure Dean meant this in his post, however I try to look at this from a customer point of view. It does not matter what you do you need to manage the trust and expectations of your customers. If you run a blog that is the readers, a web site or software application the users and if you are in HR your customers are the employees/management and other business stakeholders.

Dean also pointed me to an interesting item at Fortune on Websites that Appeal to Job Hunters.

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Last post clarification

I have just been re-reading my last post, and a couple of clarifications.

Something I missed in the last post were a couple of fantastic points that Phil made during his presentation. He gave four interesting points that make up collaboration:-

1. Information
2. Communication/Sharing
3. Action/Accessibility
4. Analysis

He also highlighted a fact that I had forgotten. Collaborative applications need to be low friction applications. I think this is the same for ALL workforce applications. If you want lots of people to use your products don't cause them pain in the process otherwise they will give up.

This last point is very important, but you need to know your users to understand what is low friction to them.

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Wikis and HR

Ok, more from recruiting.com (I can't believe I just found this!).

Jason has a short intro into a new company called JotSpot. There are a few differences between Jotspot and other Wikis like SocialText the main one is the guys at Jotspot have created some prebuilt applications for users. This is a fantastic idea and I believe the potential for this application, and wikis in general is huge.

I have a couple of concerns firstly it might be too far ahead of it's time, but that just could be my view from the Australian market. I say this based on several things.

Last week at the People in HR conference I attended a session on using MS Office technology (specifically Outlook) for productivity improvements, infact the session was entitled "Collaborative HR applications: maximising HR productivity with existing MS software". While the presentation was good and showed how existing technology could be reused to provide additional benefits to organisations I was let down on the collaborative side of things. Phil Lovell provided several screen shots on how they have used Public Folders, Outlook forms and basic programming to create a Travel Management application, he stated the next item they are tackling will be recruitment.

Why was I disappointed? Firstly the tools and technologies Phil was using were getting onto being 10 years old and have been available since the first version of Exchange. Now I admit to being an early adopter and so I could be biased here just on the technology. Other issues were no web interface, no other collaborative tools such as instant messaging which would have helped their process dramatically. What disappointed me the most was at during the questions. One HR manager asked if it would work with Outlook 97, answer was yes, the organisation he works for must be embarrassed if that is still there standard platform. The second item during question time was a comment from the two HR managers behind me who said words to the effect of "it is amazing how much you learn from these sessions, I never know such things were possible." At which point I almost fainted.

Coming back to JotSpot. If our organisations are still using 7 year old tools and the HR managers have not even seen basic office automation tools, well JotSpot may as well not exist.

My other concern on the "application side" is it might get clients 50% of the way to their solution and then they hit a brick wall. I say this from the position of not having used to product and just gone through the tour. When I get a chance I might fire up a beta test.

Relooking at what I have written this sounds like I am down on things. I am not I am concerned.

Everyone who is involved in the HRIS industry in Australia should be out there communicating to their clients (HR managers) and helping them develop visions that include even the most basic office productivity tools. We should be helping HR managers understand the potential of technology, this does not mean the news terms and buzz words. Instead maybe we should all sit down with one HR manager and show them JotSpot to really one their eyes!

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More on Moral, ethical or what?

Just having a peek around recruiting.com and found some further comments on, take a look.

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Weblog policies

In the continued battle to have HR departments produce workable acceptable use guidelines for the internet, I stumbled across this old items from Ray Ozzie.

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Recruiting & technology the future

Lou Adler has a great article on as he puts it "a story of missed opportunities, lack of vision, not enough courage, and hope for the future."

He talks about the lack of vision in applicant tracking systems, pointing the finger not at the vendors but recruiters instead. He feels that recruiters are not forward thinking enough to drive the vendors to deliver better solutions. He states that the main target for vendors should be "Improving the effectiveness of their systems to increase recruiter productivity and improve the quality of candidates should be the goals." not the improving of processing speeds for unnecessary functions.

A great read for everyone in the HR technology space.

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Resume recognition?

Heather over at "Marketing at Microsoft" blog talks about lots ovf different things ranging from marketing, recruitment and like me follow bright shiny objects.

Anyway she has suggested that I you want her to find your resume just link to her blog post and she will follow the referrals (technical term, ).

I don't have a resume here but I wonder if she will find me?

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The planets are out of alignment!

Ok, this has nothing to do with HR or technology. I found this on Yahoo News a man died yesterday in north Queensland after accidentally stabbing himself.

After reading the short news item, I just cringe at the thought of how he went, ouch. For all us men out there BE CAREFUL!

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More silly (really silly) recruiting ideas

I originally saw this early in the week and dismissed it as just dumb, kind of like an April Fool Joke. Not being a recruiter I did not know that this was once a serious activity.

However this morning while I ate my cheese on toast, drank my coffee I saw Johanna Rothman's comments at HR Blog.

This scares the he be ge be's (I think that is how you spell it) out of me that somewhere on this planet people think that the way I write is a predictor of how I will perform in my job! Let me think. I would write maybe 5% of my time at work, and I would be honest in admitting that my writing is very bad, and is getting worse because I guess I do not practice enough.

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Sun 2 : HP 1

It is interesting to watch a public fight, it is even more interesting when it is between two well known companies.

From Boing Boing: HP sends Sun's President a nastygram for blogging

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Moral, ethical or what?

I got up this morning to pay some bills, however I noticed an email this morning from Jason from the Semiconductor Jobs blog. So now I am writing a blog entry, as my wife would say I have just followed a "shiny object", she thinks all guys do it.

It is very nice to get emails, this in its self is a strange statement, as my work email account is overloaded with spam although I do not see most of it as I am using ChoiceMail.

I spent a bit of time at Jason's site and have to say it is an interesting experiment (his term not mine) which I hope is working. In short this is a job blog, a collective place for recruiters and candidates in the Semiconductor industry to communicate. Personally a great example of a social network within the big wide world we call the Internet.

Anyway back to the title of my post. Jason posed a question in September about a client who took referral's from a candidate but did not want to give the recruiter credit for the referrals. This is a very short summary so you should read the full text at his site.

I initially was going to post a comment but thought no, it needs a full post. The question Jason posies is both ethical and moral but might also be legal depending on the recruiter's contracts. In Australia I have been talking to many different client organisations who put recruiters in the same class as used car sales people and personal injury lawyers, not the best compliment. Infact this week I was being chased by a sales person who wanted some advertising, he called 3 times one morning and the client I was at still thought recruitment agents were worse! Now before I get done over by the recruiters out there this is a perception and as we all know perception is reality in the eyes of the holder.

There seems to be a general move away from using recruiters. I see this comes from two trends first the continued growth in job boards and secondly the low ROI received from recruitment agencies. Figures I was reading recently (of course I cannot find them now) show more jobs are now on jobs boards than in the paper. (Open to being corrected if this is wrong.) The ROI question I believe stems from low quality candidates being sent to clients vs what a client could get if they sourced directly. At the People in Business conference this week there were many comments about the movement away from supplier agreements with recruiters, is this a true trend in the market I do not know.

Given this I can clearly see what a client might want to circumvent the recruiter if they did not feel they were getting value out of the relationship. However it would be sad if the client was just using recruiters to get candidates (knowing they will not match the job but might be in the industry) through the door so they can then get referrals to then not pay for the sourcing process.

I hope this all makes sense, in reading the post it seems like a rant.

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The stupid recruiter

Ok, there are many ways to determine the skills and fit of a candidate some good and some bad. Adam Barr refers to a very old post from Joel Spolsky on some bad recruiting tricks. Both are very interesting to read, even though Adam slams Joel, Joel does provide some interesting perspectives on things.

On a side note it is interesting to see that Adam wrote his item this month, while Joel in March 2000. I wonder if the timing of the pieces has anything to do with the approaches? Joel's was before the DotCom bust? Probably not, but an interesting thought.

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More on blogging fear

Corporate blogging believes the lack of blogging is about knowledge not fear as per Scoble. This is probably true, however before we get everyone out there to blog we must have clear acceptable usage policies from within organisations.

Otherwise more and more workers will get fired.

Ok, after 9pm is not a good time to blog.

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Mainstream news on Google

CNET News.com has just found out about Google's hiring practice.

They might soon find out about how blogs are being used to attract people?

Ok so I am cynical.

Thanks to BostonWorks.

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Stapler Testing?

Found an interesting item on stapler testing of all things, ok maybe that is an overstatement. However Mike Kelly provides a really interesting listing of tests he created for a stapler. You might ask why did he do this, well Johanna Rothman "made him do it". These two posts provide great content for today.

Firstly, from an interviewing perspective, how a simple test can be used across several job areas within a single company and as such would provide some interesting benchmarks on how potential recruits handled the activity.

Secondly, Mike's posts shows just how complex testing can be, I wish most HR applications were tested as completely as Mike is testing the stapler ;-).

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People in Business photos

Here are a couple of photos from the exhibition, they are not very good sorry.

Update:- Sorry for the double post, just learning about Flickr.

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RIP Powerpoint ;-)

Chris Holland has pointed me to a very interesting tool for internet based presentations.

This is very cool, light weight, and portable.

Next stop, my phone!

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Are you afraid to blog?

An interesting perspective on blogging from Michael Gartenberg of Juipter research. He talks about the differences in organisational culture and industry and how this impacts blogging. (thanks to Scoble again).

However having spent the last day and half at the People in Business conference and seeing the response to the SurfControl session I am now 100% convinced that HR has dropped the ball on this one, and in fact all internet acceptable usage. SurfControl have produced a white paper that states over 100 people have lost their job or been disciplined in Australia over the past 12 months for Internet or email abuse. This is an interesting figure, but what scarces me is that most HR managers have no idea about the technology or the damage it could do.

(Watch this space as there will be more movement very soon to help educate HR managers in Australia on this issue.)

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Ikea, Volvo and HR?

Today was day 1 of the People in Business conference, while I will not give you a complete run down of the first day I want to share a couple of things.

The first key note was very good, I must say I was skeptical, based on reading the brochure. The topic was "Energy, trust and success in leadership - the essential links" given by Dr Göran Carstedt the ex CEO of Ikea and Volvo Europe. Now given my background is IT and not HR I wondered what new soft HR things I would hear, sorry if I offend.

Dr Carstedt was very interesting. Firstly he presented with overheads! No powerpoint, no fancy things just plain old overheads! Compared to some of the other speakers who battled with the technology this was fantastic. It was clean, clear, easy to read and most importantly relevant!

He spoke about change, not a new topic but personally I found his point of view very engaging. Ideas such as "when you introduce change look at what you should conserve and what you should adapt, not just changing everything."

And "approach each day not thinking what is good for your company, instead what is your company good for?"

And "if you are not serving the customer then you are serving someone who does"

And " the mission is not the issue, the issue is what does the mission do for you"

And probably the one that got me thinking the most "who would miss us if we were not here?" The last item gives a foundation or a centre point or philosophy for an organisation.

Dr Carstedt also presented on what leadership means to him, he made a comment about inviting people to something that is meaningful. This process provides engagement, meaning and helps with change. To help develop this meaning he suggested we look at 3 factors, economic, ecological and anthropological. These there elements can form the invitation.

This got me thinking about Scoble and his post a couple of weeks ago on product philosophy, your product's philosophy should be the invitation. The invitation as Dr Carstedt puts it is kind of like evangelism. Which is really funny (or ironic depending on your point of view) as I am currently re-reading "Rules for Revolutionaries" from the master of evangelism, Guy Kawasaki.

Another interesting point he made was about ideas vs things. If you give away a thing you have nothing left, however if you give away an idea (aka share an idea) and someone shares back you now have three ideas, yours, theirs and the combined.

Overall an interesting session.

The other two key note's I attended were on emotional intelligence and linking metrics to the bottom line. Summaries of these will have to wait.

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Jonathan ate Kangaroo!

Sun's CEO Jonathan Schwartz was in Australia last week, he writes about his visit and seems to have taken a liking to a portion of our national coat of arms.

Well, good on him, kangaroo is fantastic, and with the over population of them if he feels inclined to eat a couple good.

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No False Positives

Something all recruiters (and managers,CEOs, shareholders etc) fear is hiring the wrong person. When you are very big it does not matter who you hire, if you are big enough you can even screw up with the CEO. (When you do this it seems only the shareholders suffer ;-) .)

However when you are small hiring the wrong person can cause death or worse bankruptcy.

Joe Kraus, co-founder of Excite, has a blog on entrepreneurship and wrote his third post about hiring. Good to see! This follows his second post about an organisation who posted everyone's salaries on the Intranet in an effort to promote openness!

Joe is now on my blogroll as a regular item.

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People in Business : Making HR Happen conference

Tomorrow and Wednesday I am off to AHRI's second major conference for the year "People in Business : Making HR Happen" at Star City. It will be interesting to see the conference from a participants point of view, it has been 5 years since last time, usually I am attending as an exhibitor, sometimes a speaker.

The conference is designed to focus on practical tools for HR a new focus, in previous years the conference has been on eLearning and before that technology.

I urge all participants to fill in the delegate questionnaires that will be available during the conference so that AHRI can evaluate the success. SIG members have been asked to feedback on the conference as well from the SIG's perspective.

The HRIS SIG will be presenting the official AHRI and Cedar Workforce Technology Survey results. These are very interesting and should provide a great insight for people looking to improve their workforce technology tools.

I will try to post a couple of summaries and maybe even a few photos!

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The next big thing?

During one of my meetings yesterday we were discussing what the next really big thing would be in the HRIS space. The list below was some of the items that we were looking at, the question is which ones, if any will be the next big thing?

• HR CRM
• Workforce planning
• Workforce analytics
• Collaborative tools
• Knowledge management

I briefly looked at alternative communications a couple of months ago and in 2001 HRIS tends which covered a similar list, interestingly we are still waiting for many of the 2001 trends to become reality while several are here and now.

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Wireless blogging?

I have flown to Melbourne this morning on the 6am Qantas flight, getting up in time to meet this flight should be against the law, but I digress. I had a few minutes and wanted to post a blog so once I had my coffee I decided to see if I could find a wireless hotspot in the domestic terminal that the general public can use. My brief investigation found none, which does not mean there is not one.
I checked out the Internet cafe, which at $2/12 minutes is not as cheap as I would have thought. I have previously used Optus Wireless on their casual plan and this is $2.64 for $12.
The end result no real time blogging, instead I tapped this up on the plane and posted during the breaks in my meetings.

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The office view

Just signed up with Flickr, now I can Moblog! Here is the view from my office taken with my phone.

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TGIF

Well then end of another interesting week. I have not had a chance to blog everything that I have been doing in the last couple of weeks, just too many exciting things. In summary, in reverse order:-

• Been following Web 2.0 on Feedster, some very cool stuff coming out.
• Playing with IPodder (all I need now is an IPod) and GmailFS
• Thursday as a waste, I spent 6 hours installing and uninstalling software to try and get Infragistics's NetAdvantage product going. Only for find a bug with W2K running .Net framework 1.1. now the decision, do I rebuild my laptop to XP or not?
• Spent several hours researching some very cool new workplace technologies, you might see them in a new version of EmployeeConnect
• In the process of organising the parent & teachers end of year dinner at my Son's school.
• Had a wonderful long weekend

So until next time, cya!

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Another one bites the dust (Maybe)

Steve Rubel has an interesting item about a Delta Airline's flight attendant who has been suspended for Photo Blogging. You just cannot be to careful what you do on your blog.

It seems more and more people are ending up on the wrong side of their blog, IT workers, CEO's, daughter's US presidental candidates.

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HRIS component software

I have been having some interesting discussions with John Macy over the last year or so about his activities related to the "Human Resource - Component Software Application Standard" (HR-CSAS), things are starting to get moving on the standard.

John has undertaken a significant amount of work on this with the recent release of the Global Component Exchange (GCX, you need to be registered to view this), which will eventually allow organisations to view different components and the vendors who provide them. Initially the GCX is being used in John's course at NSW TAFE. I have been lucky enough to be able to view the GCX as EmployeeConnect is a company who John has been working with.

In quoting John from his draft standard HR-CSAS is "providing an infrastructure foundation layer to enable component based development (CBD) to operate. CBD, in turn, will enable Human Resource Management Systems to integrate component products from multiple vendors, for so long the Holy Grail of software development." This means organisations can "plug and play" different components from vendors into their HRIS environment. If you are interested have a look at a presentation John has put together.

A component based architecture has some very exciting implications for all players in the HRIS begin to release products. Imagine an environment where you could purchase your payroll engine from one vendor, your performance management tool from another, and your recruitment from a third. You might think this is possible today, but it is only so if each vendor installs their own database, with it's own data structure. Moving information between each system is an IT headache (read increased time and cost). Now what happens if you want to purchase a Workforce planning tool from a fourth vendor, you need to build integrations (again read increased time and cost) before you can use the solution effectively. In a component based environment this would not be required, as each vendor would know-how to work together, with a common database layer.

Ok, you might think I am off my tree but I believe that such an environment would do wonders for helping with the struggling ROI most HRIS projects seem to deliver (as different to promised).

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Sun vs HP and blogs

It seems Sun's CEO Jonathan Schwartz has caused a stir over at HP with his blog. I found in it in ComputerWorld has been reported in several blogs, including Scoble who provides some really good advice, "only say nice things about your competitors. It drives them nuts. " I love it!

I wondered when Jonathan started his blog how long it would be before something like this happened.

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New ADSL provider

I have successfully transferred from Bigpond to Swiftel Broadband. The transfer process went very smoothly, about 9:30am the Bigpond connection went down, 9:45'ish I noticed the WAN link was back up. I then spent about 30-40 mins to reconfiguring my router and modem and everything was back up by 11am.

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Who wants to work for Google?

Many of us have seen the tests bootlegged around the Internet I guess they have taken to heart the old saying "If you can't beat them join them". Google labs have published their standard test and asked if you complete it, send it in.

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