Discussions of Human Resource Functions in Social Media and Web 2.0 Companies
We were finally able to announce Bill Baker as our new CTO. He was one of 30 some odd distinguished engineers at Microsoft. I had the chance to spend about an hour with him a couple weeks ago discussing his new team and various issues. I am totally excited with having him come on board.
Check out the story at Brier Dudley’s Blog
Dan Hall
Seattle Human Resources Manager
Read an interesting article where the CEO of Facebook discusses their take on the future of the social web ( a direct competitor to Google’s OpenSocial platform). OpenSocial has had some challenges out of the gate including it’s first application being quickly hacked in just 45 minutes.
Mark Zuckerberg discussed the evolution of the social network through Connect and, presumably, similar services such as Google Friend Connect and MySpace Data Availability.The goal of all these initiatives is to make the Web more open and social. Check out Zuckerberg’s response:
“Social applications are going to start [to] decentralize a bit more. Instead of just having a few big social networks like we’ve had over the last five or six years that are basically just these large communities that have a few applications that they’ve built themselves inside, what we’re going to see is that they are going to split up into more, different types of social applications. “
Without a doubt social advertising and network portability will be a certainity of the web in the near future. It will be interesting to see who comes out on top. From a personal standpoint the social networking sites most appealing to me have adopted the OpenSocial platform. Facebook does have the Monolithic Microsoft on their side, but unfortunately I am not sure if that is help or hinderance nowadays.
Dan Hall
Seattle’s Social Human Resources Manager
Joseph Smarr from Plaxo does a great job describing out how it all works in one presentation:
You can view the slides used in the presentation here.
The future of the web is social, there will be no differentiation between the web and the social web. Facebook is working on a social web application platform as well in direct competition to Google’s OpenSocial, more on this tomorrow.
Dan Hall
Seattle’s Social Human Resources Manager
I have been thinking of pursuing an Executive MBA ever since I took my position as a Seattle Human Resources Manager at Visible Technologies. Last night, I attended the University of Washington’s Executive MBA program’s summer BBQ and informational session. A couple of things were abundantly obvious to me quickly:
1. I was one of the youngest people in the crowd.
2. Start-ups didn’t seem to be strongly represented (it is a very expensive program).
3. There was not another single other HR professional in the room nor were there any in the class of 2008 at the UW EMBA program.
I had the good fortune of eating dinner with the Admissions Director to the program and I asked if they had a lot of HR professionals. He asked somewhat surprised, “You are in HR?” I replied that I was. He said “No. No, they didn’t receive very many applicants in the HR profession.” I told him I had my own theories on why that might be and left it at that.
Why is it that HR is under represented and not well respected? Below are some stats from some of the leading MBA programs in the county:
University of Pennsylvania (Wharton) EMBA
Students work in these functional categories:
Consulting: 20 %
Finance/Accounting: 32 %
General Management : 13 %
Marketing/Sales: 8 %
Management Information Systems : 9 %
University of Chicago (The Top MBA program according to Business Week)
Graduating students who accepted jobs in the following functional areas:
Consulting: 26 %
Finance/Accounting: 55 %
General Management: 7.5 %
Human Resources: 0.2 %
Marketing/Sales (Public Relations, Product Management, Market Research, Advertising, etc.): 7.5 %
Management Information Systems (MIS): 0 %
Operations/Logistics (Logistics, Purchasing, Engineering, etc.): 1.0 %
Other: 2.6 %
Apparently not many graduates choose the HR field. This is both a challenge and opportunity to the HR field to grow in the eyes of business leaders everywhere. I, for one, am up to the challenge.
Dan Hall
Seattle Human Resources Manager
Why is the prevailing belief with employees and managers that performance reviews = compensation?
A typical response I get is: “The rest of the 1000’s of companies in the world do it. We are the only company not doing it. Whenever I sit down with my employees they immediately ask when we will be talking about Comp. How can I have a performance review without discussing Compensation.”
Crazy as it seems, when I put together a formal performance review process, which is not even the preferred method, I struggled with two issues.
1. Qualitative vs. Quantative review process
2. The goal of the performence review process
We have all worked for large, established companies or know someone who has. Most have a well defined, overly beaucratic, quantative review process. When I say quantitative I mean a numeric or percentile rating system.
When I asked spoke to a friend at Microsoft about, how many hours he spent per annum on the review process at Microsoft. He said it took about 40 hours as an individual contributor.
That is a lot of time to spend on a performance reviews it adds up quickly across an organization reducing the amount of time spend on other areas. It can very much reduce productivity both through the actually process and the ripple effects it has on employees and managers.
Now, depending on the goal of the performance appraisal system and how it actually works is the real question of “Is it all worth it?”
I have found in research and through experience, that most performance appraisal systems create the opposite of what is hoped.
A performance appraisal system should create an environment of continuous performance feedback and improvement through recognition of good performance and the creation of actionable plans addressing areas of improvement in specific and measurable language.
Performance systems directly tied to compensation do not create this type of environment. It creates an environment of anxiety and gaming the system to your achieve your desired outcome. As soon as someone in an employee’s peer group receives a real or imagined ranking that is undeserved whether good or bad, morale starts to be affected. Poor managers who are employee pleasers will give inflated ratings trying to appease their subordinates. Managers who care about their employees but believe in standards will quickly shift their ratings so their top performers won’t be punished, even if it is against the definition of the performance review policy. Then comes the review board, they are forced to be take the brunt of the necessity of parity. The result is managers giving the “I wanted to give you a 4, but They gave you a 3.25, sorry.”
And heaven forbid an employee receives a subpar rating early in the rating period. Performance and morale will suffer, with the poor performer even possibly mentally checking out for the remainder of the rating period awaiting punishment or termination. The goal of performance reviews should be to take a under-performing employee and creating a plan to get them back to adequate performance levels. Doing this well reduces turnover and recruiting costs while retaining key experience and organization knowledge.
Why do we need performance reviews anyway? And what is a qualitative review process? More to come on this next post.
Dan Hall
Seattle Human Resources Manager
A friend of mine who is connected within the Seattle Startup community, sent me this post by Marcelo Calbucci on the Seattle 2.0 blog discussing the frustrations and shortcomings that Startup Managers have of recruiting agencies in general.
I felt compelled to respond, having gone through a similar process, while recruiting for my Company as an internal Seattle HR Manager.
My response is below:
I am the Recruiting and HR Manager for a Social Media startup in Seattle. In the past six months I have personally recruited dozens of employees.
Being in-house, I have a distinct advantage because:
1. I passionately care about the future and well-being of my Company.
2. I recognize that I am the first person a potential candidate hears outlining my Company and our products. I take that responsibility very seriously. If I am not passionate to be here why would a candidate? People want to work at a Company people are passionate about; this gives me a huge advantage over some of those Companies you listed in your post.
3. A lot of candidates don’t use recruiters, nor care to. I work with contingent recruiters and recruiting agencies at times. There are some good recruiting agencies out there but most only try to fill the req and don’t have a large stake in the fit.
4. Recruiting agencies rarely (and I mean rarely) go below 20% placement fee structures. Their candidates better be 20% better than anyone I can source (which is not a normal occurrence - again I know the culture and fit of my Company and evangelize it passionately).
If you plan on hiring more than 5 or 6 employees in a year, do yourself a favor and hire a good fulltime HR and
Recruiting Manager, not only you will get better candidates, but you will also reduce liability (which there is, and don’t kid yourself, a lot from a HR standpoint), and save money.
Plus every candidate who doesn’t get a job, now knows our Company from someone who loves it and they have a positive lasting, impression, which has cascading effects in the long term.
Dan Hall
Seattle Human Resources Manager
After many hours and days of research, discussion, haggling, and even some heated shouting matches, tomorrow is Benefits Day at Visible Technologies.
This means that I have been able to follow through on a theme that is very important to me, add more value and create efficiency while reducing costs.
When I came on to Visible, one key area that is always in the forefront of an HR Manager’s mind is benefits. In my research and discussions, I was convinced we could get a better rate if we shopped our program around, and sure enough we did.
You see health care providers are like any other service industry - they want your business and are willing to cut their prices to get it.
Fortunately, we had a number of factors in our favor, we had surpassed the magic number of 50 employees thereby allowing us to transition from a shared cost plan that lumps small employers together to a stand alone insurance plan tailored to our own company. Tech companies tend to have a low risk profile and therefore are attractive to providers.
We managed to negotiate with a leading national provider to provide similar if not better service while savings the employees and the company over 13% on an annual basis. For those of you not familiar with the costs of health care in America, this is a significant amount of money even in a small to mid sized company.
In reducing costs, I was able to add more value by also adding some low cost, high return programs to our employees with the cost savings realized through the major medical transition including supplemental insurance, flexible savings account, and a commuter benefit program.
So with much fanfare, and the due diligence of meetings with teams and individual employees (medical transitions can cause significant turbulence without proper address, although we minimized this impact through our choice of providers), tomorrow is Benefits Day where we roll out the red carpet and add value our most valuable resource - our Employees.
Dan Hall
Seattle Human Resources Manager
Yesterday was Earth Day and as I sent an email to my company in observation of being environmentally conscious, I was reminded of a topic that is becoming increasing to the forefront of human resources management - Corporate Social Responsibility.
Corporate social responsibility (CSR, also called corporate responsibility, corporate citizenship, and responsible business) is a concept whereby organizations consider the interests of society by taking responsibility for the impact of their activities on customers, suppliers, employees, shareholders, communities and other stakeholders, as well as the environment.
Over a third of US workers would be more inclined to work for companies with strong green credentials, according to a major new survey highlighting the growing influence environmental issues are exerting over staff recruitment and retention policies.
The survey of more than 2,200 adults carried out by market research firm Harris Interactive found that 36 per cent would be more inclined to work for a “green” company, while 59 per cent believe their current employer should be doing more improve its environmental performance.
Tig Gilliam, chief executive at HR consultancy, Adecco Group North America, which commissioned the research, said that the study confirmed that job seekers are increasingly looking into firms’ environmental policies when looking for a job. “Similar to investigating a company’s financial performance and work/life programs, we’re seeing more and more candidates doing their homework and looking closely to determine the reality behind a company’s claims of environmental friendliness,” he said.
The report also found that younger employees are the most likely to want to work for firms with strong green credentials, suggesting that the issue will grow in importance as the baby boomer generation begins to retire. More than two thirds of Generation Y workers, typically characterised as people born after 1980, said they wanted their employer to be environmentally friendly compared to just 52 per cent of baby boomers.
Moreover, firms that adopt strong green policies could find that it saves them money when looking to recruit younger staff.
Almost a third of respondents said that they would be willing to sacrifice a portion of their salary to work for an environmentally friendly firm with Generation Y workers saying they would sacrifice, on average, 6.2 per cent of their wages. In contrast, environmentally conscious baby boomers would be willing to sacrifice just 2.5 per cent.
In light of these statistics and Earth Day here are some tips to be more green:
Start a Writing Pad Program. Drop your one-sided printouts when you are done with them in the box and create notepads from the paper for use in the office.
Buy recycled paper to use for the vast majority of your everyday printing needs.
Carpool as often as possible. Set a goal of commuting with fellow workers in a car pool or using mass transit at least one a week.
Bring lunch in reusable/washable containers. Set a goal of having at least one waste-free lunch.
Drink beverages from a reusable, washable mug or even reuse your plastic bottles. Americans send about 38 billion water bottles a year to landfills. Considering the 1.5 million barrels of oil needed to make those bottles, the environmental impact of plastic bottle waste is truly staggering.
Buy and use products made from recycled materials. Use e-mail instead of paper copies whenever possible. Use double sided photocopying or printing if you can
Participate in your company’s recycling program. If they don’t have one, create one.
Keep track of things you have thrown away at work each day and think of ways to prevent waste.
Use reusable bags whenever you can, neither plastic or paper bags are good choices.
Turn off the lights when you leave!
Being environmentally conscious aids in retention, recruiting, and even brand distinction. In a job market like Seattle, it will be costly not to be socially responsible.
Dan Hall
Seattle Human Resources Manager
In my practice as a Seattle Human Resources Manager, I have run across my own job postings posted by Recruiting Agencies that I didn’t authorize.
Yes, that’s right. Let me say it again, I have run across my own job postings (ones that I have personally created) posted by Recruiting Agencies in the guise of my Company being their client.
Why is this bad and who really suffers?
The job seeker is the one who ultimately suffers because I refuse to do business with an agency that I find doing this. You may be the best candidate for the job but working with an Agency adds another 20% (placement fee) of overhead to the total cost to my company. You better be at least 20% more valuable than the next candidate.
This is not to say that I don’t work with recruiters, there are some added value relationships I have in my hip pocket to call when warranted. Agencies that pretend to represent my company are unethical (and I have a growing list of Agencies I will not work with for this reason).
So, how this works is:
The Unethical Recruiter contacts you either through their own network or in response to your inquiry to their unauthorized, misleading job posting.
Unethical Recruiter: “Hello, I represent a Social Media Web 2.0 Start-Up in Seattle who is looking for X. Are you interested?”
Job Seeker: “Yes, but I am concerned about working with a recruiter. I don’t want to sign an all-encompassing exclusivity clause.”
Unethical Recruiter:”Oh don’t worry, you can just sign a exclusivity clause for this specific position with this specific client of ours.”
Job Seeker:”Ok, that seems to make sense especially considering I wouldn’t find this job another way.” Emails resume to Unethical Recruiter.
In the mean time, being the very diligent Human Resources Manager that I am (I regularly read job postings to see what other companies are posting, so I can ensure we are competitive for both requirements and expectations. I also have a ever growing Social Network that informs me of these things), I stumble across the Unethical Recruiter’s job posting.
Unethical Recruiter calls me:”Hello, My name is XXXX XXXX, I am from Unethical Recruiters ‘R’ Us, and I have the perfect candidate for you.”
Diligent Seattle Human Resources Manager: ”I saw your ad on Craigslist pretending to represent my company, I don’t recall ever signing an agreement with you, am I mistaken?”
Unethical Recruiter:”Umm… Ah… Well, I have this perfect candidate….”
Diligent Seattle Human Resources Manager:”Don’t bother calling me ever again. Goodbye.”
And I go on to successful source and place my own candidate without the additional overhead. My Company still wins. Unethical Recruiter doesn’t care, although they should because word spreads among the Seattle Human Resource Management field and my Social Network. Recruiters routinely include the candidate’s resume in the email, ensuring we can’t place the forwarded candidate without paying a fee. Ultimately the Candidate loses out when it could have been a great match for both parties.
I read a good post by Scott Allen labelled Confessions of an Open Networker that included some musings and thoughts from a self-professed “notorious” Open Networker.
I think it does a good job summarizing the diminishing value that this practice can return while providing some tips on how to maximize the utility of your social network.
Sourcing Seattle