WEEKLY HOTLIST CURRENT SEPTEMBER 22 2010

Name	Skill	Exp	Location	Relocation	Contact
Majid	Business Analyst	5+	CA	Sacramento Bay Area	916-669-8622
Lalita	QA Analyst	6+	CA	Sacramento Bay Area	916-669-8622
Jorge	QA Analyst	15+	CA	Sacramento Bay Area	916-669-8622
Madhukar	Web Developer/Graphic Designer	19+	CA	Sacramento Bay Area	916-669-8622
Vanitha	QA Analyst	6+	CA	Sacramento Bay Area	916-482-2717
Hina	Business Process Analyst	10+	CA	Sacramento Bay Area	916-482-2717

Available Jobs at Brainware Solutions

tags: IT, information technology, brainware solutions LLC, job, consultant, requirement, placement, make money, resumes

Female Style of Networking - Detrimental to Success?

Editors Notes: Are women better networkers or just different then men? Do men go for the size/volume of business relationships while women build smaller more meaningful relationships? Does this help or hurt women?

Women are born networkers. After all, at its core, networking is about connecting with other people, and that’s something women excel at. Connecting is in our DNA.
Given that we have the social gene, I’ve been surprised in my work as a coach and the research I did for my new book, The Female Brand, that women often don’t have an expansive network – yet men do. We women tend to favor deep relationships with a group of close friends, a preference evolutionary scientists trace back to our roots as family caretakers and home keepers. We also see the preference for close, intense relationships in playground studies. Most girls tend to pair up and play one-on-one or with a small group, while boys are more likely to play with a series of different mates and play with a larger group. Later, when female hormones kick in, the preference for intimate relationships with a small group of friends accelerates.

A small group of deep relationships provides women with a reliable source of support and advice, but in the wider world of careers and brand building, a small though intensely committed group is not as advantageous as a large network of contacts – even if those contacts are superficial. In my coaching of senior executives, I also found that women, unlike men, are less likely to ask for a favor or introduction unless they know someone well. For many women, calling up a virtual stranger is painful. Likewise, women seemed more reluctant to do a favor for someone they didn’t know – say, recommend a friend of a friend for a job – unless they had actual experience working with the person.

Men, on the whole, seem less constrained in networking. Guys understand the mutual advantage of helping one another out. Many men can know someone casually or hardly at all and think it’s no big deal to call him to arrange an informational interview or pitch him for a specific job opportunity. They feel more comfortable pitching a casual friend or a friend of a friend.

That same tendency may be apparent in a recent Harvard Business Publishing study on Twitter usage, based on a random sample of 300,000 Twitter users in May 2009. Though men and women follow a similar number of users, men have 15 percent more followers than women and they have more reciprocated relationships in which two users follow each other, according to the report. The study also pointed out that women seem to be less compelled to have followers or "have more stringent thresholds for reciprocating relationships."

The male networking model is something women need to think about, because in the world of work, the larger your network, the more career capital you will have. Networks are powerful because of their size and range, and the comfort they provide for making and accepting professional contacts.

Here are some thoughts on how to get into the right mindset for networking:

• Run in packs – just like men do. Since women are masters of deep relationships, there’s no reason we can’t expand our relationship model to connect with more people on a less personal and less intense level. Of course, many successful women have, and it’s a smart strategy because the reality is that you can’t do as much on your own with a small network of supporters

• Think of networking as an economy – an economy of favors. Networking involves an economy – an economy of favors. It’s a hidden economy, but a powerful one. The networking trade works like this: I do you a favor, and there is the unspoken understanding that you will return the favor if there is an opportunity. A networking economy only works if there is active trade back and forth. Favor givers are attracted to those who reciprocate, and punish those who take a favor and don’t reciprocate. Believe me, word will get out on what type you are. It’s an economy men know well. Women have all the right skills to be excellent players too.

• Realize that a big network gives you career capital. A large, robust network is career capital that you can practically take to the bank. The bigger your network, the more success you are likely to have, because you will have access to more options. Realize too that an all-female network equals a weak network. After all, there are more men in positions of power, so you’ll want men and women on your networking team. Don’t think they don’t count if they are soft links – people whom you don’t know well. Every job I have gotten was through people I didn’t know well.

• Ask, and you shall receive. One thing we women have to overcome is a reluctance to ask for a favor. We need to drop the soul searching and self-doubt that so many of us go through in asking for something for ourselves. It’s often as simple as asking for a favor. Studies show that if you preface a request with “I’m wondering if you can help me,” and then make a small, specific request, you will be more successful. But most of the time you will need more finesse, especially if you want to seek help for bigger things. Most people will be happy to share their career experience and advice if you ask. For example, “Can I brainstorm with you for 15 minutes over the phone about how to move up from my current job? I’ve admired how you transitioned into various jobs and I’d love to hear about it.”

It’s a big world out there, and you can be a big part of it (with your network cast far and wide).

Source: Catherine Kaputa at www.wowowow.com

10 Job Seeker Steps to LinkedIn-Ability

I had a 45 minute con­ver­sa­tion with “Max”, this evening about his job search. He has a solid work his­tory. He was down­sized from a good posi­tion doing what he is an expert at. Max is not hav­ing luck with his job search.

It’s been a long time since Max had to look for a job. In fact, last time he did, social net­work­ing didn’t yet exist. He is PC savvy and his com­puter use over the years was mainly work related, Inter­net searches for infor­ma­tion, etc. Max heard net­work­ing via LinkedIn could help him so he cre­ated an account a year ago and has con­nected with a dozen or so peo­ple he knows. Max joined a cou­ple of local groups and par­tic­i­pates in some discussions.

It’s not working…

Here are some of the things I sug­gested Max could do to improve his LinkedIn-Ability:

1. Be a com­pleter — if you can’t com­plete your own pro­file how are you going to com­plete work?
2. Let peo­ple know you are a job seeker in the “pro­fes­sion” field –> Admin­is­tra­tive Assis­tant Seek­ing New Opportunity.
3. Sell your­self in your sum­mary — just like employ­ers post job ads you should cre­ate a job search ad there
4. Use Google Pre­sen­ta­tions or Box.net to post your resume, work sam­ples, etc.
5. Join groups, ask and answer ques­tions –> network
6. You can join 50 groups — they’re free — why would you belong to 5? Oh, they all have job boards =)
7. Search com­pa­nies you are inter­ested in and net­work with employees.
8. Net­work with ex-employees — they have noth­ing to lose so they TALK and they stay in touch with friends so they know what’s going on.
9. Write some sin­cere rec­om­men­da­tions and chances are you’ll receive some.
10. Search jobs and see who your con­tacts are that have a rela­tion­ship there.

Are you 10 for 10 in LinkedIn-Ability? Share your tips here so oth­ers can learn from you!

Confessions of a Job Seeker: What I Learned!

For those who don’t know, I was a recent job seeker. Through hard work and perseverance, I found a great position with an innovative company called SmashFly Technologies. Through this recruiting journey, I learned a lot about both sides of the recruiting spectrum. By experiencing the ins and outs of the job search grind on a daily basis and more importantly actively seeking advice from job seekers and recruiters, I was able to garner some key takeaways on how the recruiting process can be better.

In addition, as I talked to both sides, I came to realize the great value that came from these two sides sharing thoughts with one another. To foster this sharing of wisdom, I would like to share my observations from my job seeking process and the many conversations I had with job seekers and recruiters. I hope this article helps you both.

FOR JOB SEEKERS

I’ll start with job seekers. Here are 4 tried and true tips that worked for me in finding the great job I have today:

One Page Resume: Recruiters and HR professionals don’t have the time to read through every line of every candidate’s resume, so make it easy for them. A one page resume forces you to prioritize what experiences are the most important for a crisp, clean submittal. (This may change for candidates with more than 10 years experience.)

Knock Their Socks Off with Your Cover Letter – Your cover letter is a great chance to get noticed by a recruiter (and have them look at your resume). So how do you write one? Ignore the basic cover letter templates you see out there and be yourself. Be enthusiastic and let them know why you’re interested and more importantly qualified for the job. Most importantly, don’t worry about being informal (disrespectful is another issue), as the more your cover letter is different the more you’ll get noticed. (One great cover letter that I wrote provided me with over 6 interviews in less than a month.)

Leverage Your Online Networks – From Twitter to Facebook to LinkedIn, there is a wealth of people that you are connected to, that are more than happy to go out of their way to help you. Identify what you want to do and companies that you’d love to work for and see who in your network has connections in these disciplines or companies. Email them and set up some time to talk and learn about how you can get into the company and ask for other people to talk to. (And who knows they may receive a referral hiring bonus from their company which provides even more incentive.)

Do Your Research – Make sure you do your research for every position you are excited about. Know what the company does, follow them on Twitter and Facebook for company news and look up your interviewers on LinkedIn. There is such a wealth of information out there today, that not doing research for a job is just plain lazy which is not a trait you want to show a recruiter in an interview.

FOR RECRUITERS

As you go through the recruiting process, you notice a lot of things that companies do extremely well from a recruiting perspective. When you notice the good, it becomes eerily evident when a company doesn’t provide these benefits. Here are my 3 biggest pet peeves when it comes to employers:

Provide Opt-In Opportunities - One of the most frustrating parts of job seeking for me was coming across a job I was qualified for but was posted 30 days ago. I finally realized that I could create alerts in Indeed that would allow me to follow new jobs at companies that I wanted to work for. But why make it that hard? A simple opt-in form during the application process would give the applicant the opportunity to get updates on new jobs quickly through email and provide recruiters with a great pool of interested candidates to post new jobs to. It’s a win-win, but something not every company does.

Leverage Your Online Presence – For every job that I applied to, I always made sure to join the social network pages to learn more about the company. What surprised me was that more companies didn’t provide me with a good way to follow them through the application process. Not only would a few links make it easier for candidates to research these companies but it’s a free and easy way for companies to promote their employer brand to a group that is definitely interested in listening.

Repetition for the sake of Repetition – Some companies just seem to go out of their way to make their application process difficult. I understand this helps weed out less motivated candidates but sometimes it can just alienate qualified ones. The one that annoyed me the most was having to type in everything I had on my resume again into their form (seemed pointless). To make it easier for candidates, invest in some parsing technology that pulls info from their resume or use a technology that can give the candidates an option to use their LinkedIn profile in their application. Simple things like this will sky-rocket your application completion rates. Trust me.

Overall, I had some great experiences and some not so good ones. Job seekers and Recruiters alike can find great value in speaking to one another and taking a quick look from the each other’s point of view to make the recruiting process better. So I encourage you to get feedback from the other side and use it to improve your recruiting results!

Source: SmashFly Technologies Blog at blog.smashfly.com

Answering the ‘Tell Me About Yourself’ Question: A Candidate’s Guide to Making a Great First Impression While Interviewing

Let’s face it, interviewing is stressful enough without having to answer stupid interview questions.
But unfortunately, many interviewers, because of habit, lack of preparation time, poor training, or yes, even laziness, often ask stupid questions. Of those, one of the most challenging is the oft used “Tell me about yourself” interview opener.What most candidates ask me about this insipid interview question is: “What do they want to know?”

They want to know about you the candidate as a potential employee. They don’t want to know about your family, your last vacation, your hobbies, your religious beliefs, that you like the Cubs, or that you are a proud member of AA. Yes, I have had candidates give each of those responses to the infamous “Tell me about yourself” question. I don’t recall any of them ever getting hired by the employers who interviewed them.Interviewers also think it is improper, a sign of your lack of preparedness, or even rude, for you to answer their “Tell me about yourself” question with a question of your own like, “What would you like to know?”

If you are prepared, and seriously thinking about making a career change, you will have a prepared and thoughtful answer to this question BEFORE you begin interviewing.Why? I am glad you asked, and I think one example should convince you I am right.Let me share just one story about this opening interview question that cost a candidate a job she REALLY wanted. It is a perfect illustration to make you understand why you must plan a response for this question whether you are asked it or not. The scenario was this: The candidate was a financial services professional, her recruiter had a financial services client that was looking to fill a VP position for a 125k base + 25k bonus. The candidate had an ideal background and skill set, and the client thought she was a perfect fit. The candidate knew the client and was thrilled to interview with her. The client joked that when the candidate came to the interview the recruiter should send the candidate with an invoice for the fee, because they thought they might make her an offer on the spot.You can more or less guess how the story ended. The candidate didn’t get the job, but please pay attention as to why, because that is the part of the story that matters most.

To start the interview the candidate was asked the dreaded “Tell me about yourself” question. Thinking that it was an inconsequential icebreaker question, she retorted, simply intending to cause an opening chuckle, “Well, as you can obviously see, I am 15-20 pounds overweight.”She was only joking!

Yet, due to the impact this answer had on the client, for all practical purposes the interview was over as soon as she said this. That “amusing” answer to what the candidate viewed as a seemingly innocuous question convinced the employer that this $150k VP had an image or low self-esteem problem.

Despite the recruiter’s insistence that it was just a joke, the employer declined to make the candidate an offer. The retort was just a joke! But not really. It was no joke to the candidate who lost the $150k dream job. It was no joke to the recruiter who had invested so much time in finding the employer this ideal candidate. This candidate attempted to humorously break the ice, but the interviewer misinterpreted the response to a stupid question, and became convinced the candidate was not VP material.

This whole fiasco could have been avoided if the candidate had just been taught a very simple formula for answering this question. Sure, we know this question is a stupid and unnecessary one with which to begin an interview. But because interviewers open interviews with this question, candidates need to know how to respond to it intelligently. The formula I’ve learned has worked wonders for hundreds of my candidates, and those of thousands of recruiters I have shared it with over the last half dozen years.Many, in fact a sad majority, of interviewers open with some form of the “Tell me about yourself” question. It would be an easy question to answer if candidates answered with a prepared and well thought-out initial marketing statement of themselves and their skills, which are applicable for the open job. This sounds pretty straightforward, but few of the thousands of candidates I have interviewed in the last 15 years have EVER been able to answer this question in this intelligent manner.

The best candidates typically respond with a narrowing question like: “What would you like to know?” But let’s get one thing straight: It is extremely poor form to answer the opening interview question with another question. Yet, that is how the BEST candidates do typically answer this question, due to its ambiguous nature. Though it seems to be a logical approach, you must prepare to do better.Candidates must teach themselves to answer this question with a three-part, pre-planned marketing statement that can more or less be reused from interview to interview. Part one of that three-part marketing statement is always a one-sentence summary of the candidate’s career history. For example, let me share with you a former candidate’s opening sentence:”I am a five-year veteran of LAN/WAN Admin and Systems Engineering with substantial experience using Novell, NT, Cisco, and Lotus Notes/Domino.”You get the picture; your whole career needs to be condensed into one pithy sentence that encapsulates the most important aspects of your career, the aspects that you want to leverage in order to make your next career step. Few candidates seem to be able to condense a career into one sentence, but it must, and can be, done.

Part two of the pre-planned marketing statement will be a one- maybe two-sentence summary of a single accomplishment that you are proud of that will also capture the potential employer’s attention. It immediately follows your initial career summary sentence from above. This accomplishment should be one that the employer will be interested in hearing, one that is easily explained or illustrated, and one that clearly highlights a bottom line impact. When done correctly this will build interviewer intrigue about the accomplishment so that they inquire further, giving you an opportunity to further discuss a significant career success. The above candidate’s accomplishment statement was:”Recently, as a long-term contract employee at a local regional bank, I learned they were about to install Lotus Notes/Domino and were planning to use outside consultants for the project. I let them know I had done a similar installation at my last assignment, outlined how we could get the job done with in-house staff, and successfully completed the install for $55-65k less than it would have cost with outside consultants.”

Part three, the final piece of the marketing statement, is probably the most fluid piece. It needs to be a one-sentence summary of specifically what you want to do next in your career. The reason this third part is difficult is that it needs to specifically address what you want to do next, AND it needs to change from interview to interview to make sure it matches exactly what the INDIVIDUAL employers will be interviewing you for.

Continuing with the above example of one of my past candidates, two of his final sentences, which were used for two different employers, follow:”For the next step in my career, I would like to move away from contract work and find myself as a direct employee of a large firm where I could join a substantial IT team and be involved with a group that focuses on email and network security applications, while having access to the knowledgebase that would come with a large, diverse IT group.”

But for a second employer, this ending was significantly altered because of the candidate’s multiple interests in differing opportunities, to:”For the next step in my career, I would like to find myself as a direct employee of a small to medium sized firm that was looking to hire an in-house IT generalist so I could continue growing my career by getting exposure to multiple IT areas, such as networking, help desk, security, and application issues for the users of the organization. As the firm’s IT needs grew, I would love to apply my past team project management skills to managing the second or third members of a small but growing IT team.”These were two very different endings that perfectly matched two very different employer needs. Clearly you can see why the first ending wouldn’t have worked for the second employer or vice versa. With some simple revising, the candidate made sure that each employer heard that they were interested in doing exactly what the employer was interested in hiring them for. That revising is what makes the third piece fluid and sometimes challenging, as candidates don’t always see the need for being this specific from job interview to job interview. Most tend to be generalized, hoping that a shotgun approach will work. But it is the rifle sharpshooters, those who get specific in what they want from interview to interview, who get the best results.

With some simple planning BEFORE an interview, you, the candidate, will quickly realize the benefit of a targeted third sentence in these pre-planned opening statements, as employers feel you are perfectly suited to do just the job they are interviewing you for. If you take the time to prepare this way as a candidate, it will be apparent to an interviewer that you are a prepared and serious candidate right at the beginning of the interview when you answer the “Tell me about yourself” question with this memorized, brief marketing statement, which combines a career summary, an exceptional accomplishment, and employer-specific career goal as in this example:”I am a five-year veteran of LAN/WAN Admin and Systems Engineering with substantial experience using Novell, NT, Cisco, and Lotus Notes/Domino. Recently, as a long-term contract employee at a local regional bank, I learned they were about to install Lotus Notes/Domino and were planning to use outside consultants for the project. I let them know I had done a similar installation at my last assignment, outlined how we could get the job done with in-house staff, and successfully completed the install for $55-65k less than it would have cost with outside consultants. For the next step in my career, I would like to move away from contract work and find myself as a direct employee of a large firm where I could join a substantial IT team and be involved with a group that focused on email and network security applications, while having access to the knowledgebase that would come with a large, diverse IT group.”

Clearly you can understand how the candidate who opens with this type of prepared response to the “Tell me about yourself” question will make a significantly better first impression than a candidate who responds by answering, “What would you like to know?” or worse yet, “Well, as you can obviously see, I am 15-20 pounds overweight.”

Plus candidates who prepare in this manner are typically more confident at the interview’s start, make a substantial and positive verbal first impression, give a clear indication of their interest in making a career move, and force the interviewer to get past the icebreaker questions to the parts of the interview that will help both parties begin the process of seriously determining if this is a solid match. As you can see, there is a great deal of bang for your preparation buck.

Clearly these three simple steps summarizing what your experience is as candidate, sharing an impressive career accomplishment, and then summarizing what would be an ideal next career step for you, one that matches what the employer is looking to hire are the keys to beginning your interview with a competitive advantage.

Candidates who take the time to do this significantly improve their initial verbal impression, get their interview off to a confident and focused beginning, and more often than not get called back for second interviews, or better yet, for offers of employment with employers who are impressed.

Source: Jeff Skrentny - Certified Personnel Consultant (CPC)/ Certified Temporary Staffing Specialists (CTS) Jefferson Inc. at FordyceLetter.Com

5 steps to success in 2010 for jobseekers and more

5 Steps to Success

A little over 6 months ago I started to blog with the sole intention of motivating job seekers in these challenging times. I came up with 5 tools, one for each day of the “work” week, and I simply post quotes that relate to those tools, and then expound a bit. A funny thing happened. The comments I started to receive on the blog, on my Facebook Fan Page, and on Twitter were more often from small business owners and solopreneurs then they were from job seekers. I realized, quite accidentally, that the exact same 5steps tools I was writing about to help job seekers stay the course, were necessary tools for anyone to succeed in these times. I’d like to share them with you. Understand that these are not “new” tools; their messages will not be astounding. That being said, it seems that we can all use a reminder periodically. As we enter into a New Year (and enter into a new Decade!!), I can’t think of a better time to recount the things that will help us all operate at our absolute best.

Preparation

I believe that one can only do one’s best, when properly prepared. This preparation may include setting up a space to work that is organized, clean and encourages concentration. It may include setting out time for certain tasks and planning your calendar. It may be planning your day down to the last detail. Yet, I think it’s also important to remember that there is only so much we can do to control the outcome of our events. We can plan, prepare, set goals, and even set expectations. We can research, do due diligence, practice, role play, and be as prepared as humanly possible, and while that’s all important, useful and in fact necessary, it doesn’t always help. And, there’s a fine line between being prepared and over-thinking, (a.k.a. over-stressing) about all the possible outcomes and how you can direct them. Sometimes you just have to let things happen and see how they turn out. I don’t prepare for the worst, because I don’t even want to put that out there – but as long as I believe that things happen for a reason, I’m ok. And, while I may never understand what that reason is, I do believe it is always for the best. One of my favorite “preparation” quotes is, “It pays to plan ahead. It wasn’t raining when Noah built the ark.” (Author Unknown) I wish you all the power of a plan.

Focus

So, you’re prepared for anything. Great! You’ve set up your workspace effectively and you’ve minimized the risk for distraction. You’ve planned your schedule for the week. You know what you need to do. Now, you need to focus; stay on track. Razor sharp, laser-like focus is required, especially when you’re down, stressed out, overwhelmed, or otherwise preoccupied. Focus. Focus on one thing at a time. Choose the task; accomplish the task; move on to the next task. Make sure the tasks will help you accomplish your goals and take you to the next level. And follow through. Do what you said you were going to do; be accountable for your actions; be proactive; take control of the conversation. Too many opportunities are lost from a lack of follow-through. Use a calendar; tie a string around your finger; set an alarm or a task reminder; whatever it takes… You can have the best of intentions, be extremely well prepared, and have great focus, but if you don’t follow up, you’ll blow it. A subtle shift in where you put your efforts is sometimes all you need. Focusing on solving problems is still focusing on the problem, so I suggest changing the way you look at this altogether. I prefer to focus on the possibilities. A great quote, “Only one thing has to change for us to know happiness in our lives: where we focus our attention.” (Greg Anderson)

I’d like to add that it also matters HOW we focus our attention. Staying focused on the job hunt (or any work for that matter) amid all the distraction can actually be more difficult than it seems. For example, it often happens that I launch my browser to search for a quote for my blog posts, and I get sucked into Facebook instead… Social Media has changed the way many of us work, communicate, research, and play. It is the blurry line between wasting time and being productive that has caused much ado. But it’s not much ado about nothing. We need to stay focused on the job at hand, set time aside for each task, including the task of applying social media, and stay on track. LinkedIn, Twitter, even Facebook, can all be very useful in our work lives, but we need to use them appropriately. They should be just one tool on your tool belt and not replace face-to-face interaction and networking! But that’s another post…

Positive Attitude

We are in control of how we look at things. My dad frequently reminds me that while we can’t always control our circumstances, we certainly have control over how we think about our circumstances. I love that. The tone for my day used to be “set” when I rolled out of bed in the morning, unless of course, something drastic happened to alter that tone… but it was “set” by external conditions. And it wasn’t always positive. Once I recognized that I could change my attitude, I invented an alter-ego, “the new me”. Now, whenever I wake up cranky, or if something happens during the day that causes me angst, I remind myself to find “the new me”, and “fake it until I make it.” When my day is daunting, and lately that’s been happening a lot, I tend to panic. So, when I saw this quote, I actually printed it out in LARGE letters, and taped it to my computer for a constant reminder. “It is our attitude at the beginning of a difficult task which, more than anything else, will affect its successful outcome.” (William James)

Goal Setting

Goal setting can be overwhelming. Where do you start? Do you have a goal for the day? For the week? For the year? For the next ten years? This topic reminds me of a chapter in “Alice in Wonderland” when Alice is asking the Cheshire Cat for directions…

“Which road do I take?” (Alice)
“Where do you want to go?” (Cat)
“I don’t know,” Alice answered.
“Then, said the cat, it doesn’t matter.”

I believe that goal setting, including setting small, achievable daily goals, helps us to stay on track, and maybe even more importantly, gives us the opportunity to celebrate small successes. Accomplishments feel good, even when they’re small, and we can’t let ourselves get so bogged down that we forget to celebrate them. I often write about creating a journal or scrapbook based on your goals and desires. I believe that being able to visualize the achievement of your goals is half the battle. If you write down what you want, you have the start of your plan, and the basis for your goal-setting. If there are words that inspire you, write them down. If there are affirmations or quotes, or stories, put them in. Make it yours; own it. Then make it real. Stephen Covey said that he is convinced that we can write and live our own scripts more than most people acknowledge. I do believe we create our own destiny, and we have the power to fulfill our dreams.

Motivation

Staying motivated, and letting that motivation carry you, or better yet, propel you forward, is a good thing. Remember those small successes? Celebrating them really helps me stay motivated. Success begets success. Not succeeding, however, can also be a strong motivator. While I firmly believe that I am exactly where I should be today… that does not mean at all that it is where I want to be tomorrow. And, I am responsible for my own future. Hold yourself accountable, or find someone to help hold you accountable, and go after what you want. You can get there if you believe you can get there. As the wise Yoda said, “Do or do not. There is no try.”

Your circumstances don’t define you. Be who you are and believe in who you can become.

Source: Jennifer - Talent Acquisition Strategist and Career Coach with Hire Aspirations, the Strategic Partnership Advisor and Networking Leader of Whine and Dine LLC - at www.cruitertalk.com

YES – Twitter Works For Recruiting! (I have proof)

This post is dedicated to all the nay-sayers and people who keep belly-aching “Show me the ROI of Twitter”…. it’s time you stopped asking for proof that recruiting using Twitter works, and actually listen when people share proof with you. I recently used a twitterfantastic resource called HARO (Help A Reporter Out) started by Peter Shankman, @skydiver on Twitter. I wanted to find individuals who have found their current full-time position through communication on Twitter. Take note: this could be via a job posting that was tweeted, an @ message from a company representative, or a DM from a colleague passing along some information about a position. Here are just a few of the responses I received. The results, quite frankly, I think are going to surprise you…

1. Chris Kieff – Director of Marketing at Ripple6, Inc.: Chris lost his job in January of 2008. He did the usual things such as going to job boards and applying for jobs, but he also started increasing his presence on LinkedIn and Facebook, and decided to start his own blog about internet marketing, www.1goodreason.com. He began writing about search engine marketing and internet marketing, and he started connecting with other bloggers through several social media resources and having offline meetings with people to solidify connections (hint). Chris had begun interviewing for various opportunities but as many companies ended up in hiring freezes, he simply wasn’t finding anything. After one such opportunity was lost, he went out to Twitter and tweeted ‘I just lost a job opportunity but I think they want me to be a consultant now…’ An observant employee at Ripple6 who was following him saw his message, said they were looking for a social media person, and he started going through the hiring process. He was eventually hired on full-time as Director of Marketing, based on a Twitter follower directly from Ripple6 who was keeping an eye open.

2. Megan Soto – Account Associate at LaunchSquad: Megan was recruited and eventually hired by her PR firm through Twitter. She was a senior at the University of Oregon and had a couple of internships in the queue for the summer. Megan was active on Twitter and had a class-assigned blog about PR, which was her focus in the Journalism school. She tweeted about one of LaunchSquad’s clients in reaction to a cool New York Times article they’d just secured. While scanning for Twitter activity on the article, Brett Weiner, a partner at LaunchSquad, found her tweet, which led them to her blog and they eventually contacted, interviewed and hired her as a salaried Account Associate.

3. John Robinson, Jr. – Interactive Developer at Balcom Agency: John started at Balcom in April of 2009. He is responsible for coding and helping design numerous websites for businesses and nonprofits using PHP, HTML, CSS and JavaScript. John actually wasn’t looking for a new job when he noticed Balcom Agency’s tweet about a job opening for a developer for its fast-expanding interactive division. Still, he shot a quick direct message back to @Balcomagency to ask about the job, and by the time Balcom’s social media specialist, Kayla Bond, responded he’d already gotten a tweet from Balcom’s interactive account director, Chip Hanna. As webmaster for the Amon Carter Museum for five and a half years, John handled its Twitter account and the Balcom Agency was on the “friend” list.

4. Andrea Slesinski – Media Relations Specialist at MediaSource: Andrea was working at a full-service communications/branding agency and had been hunting for a new job for several months when she saw the post by the media relations director at MediaSource, whom she knew in “real life.” She sent her some correspondence and arranged for interviews via Twitter the entire way through. The only time they communicated outside of Twitter was when Andrea sent her resume and cover letter for the position, which she did via e-mail.

5. Rob Totaro – Account Representative at POTRATZ: Rob just started a job at the end of June 2009 that he found through an update on Twitter. He didn’t know Christy Potratz, one of the owners at Potratz Partners Advertising, but through other people she had begun following me. He followed her back and after a few weeks saw their posting for an Account Rep. He responded and interviewed, and eventually was hired.

6. Lance Hunt – Software Architect/Consultant at Cogent Company: Lance had been on Twitter for a good while before getting laid-off and had around 100 followers at the time. Before the RIF, he already had accumulated a few recruiters as followers as well as many key players/influencers in the .NET Development arena due to a variety of past discussions on technical, social networking, and philosophical topics. The initial announcement about and from Lance and others being caught in the Telligent layoff was a big surprise to many who had been following Telligent over the years, so the overall response from the community was great. It seemed like everyone he had chatted with in the past offered to leverage their contacts and tried to help. At least 75% of Lance’s twitter job prospects were identified indirectly through colleagues in the industry who saw the tweets and gave him a referral or sent his information to someone they knew. The remaining contacts were directly from employers or recruiters who were already active on Twitter and were either interested in topics that he had been discussing and found him through that, or were actively searching on terms around layoffs and job search and found him that way. Lance’s current employer, Cogent Company, was one of those who found him through the former method of searching on topics and following other peoples’ discussions. Marc Hoppers, the owner, had seen Lance’s tweets while researching discussions on social networking topics and contacted him via a DM to see if he would come in for an interview. The rest is history.

7. Tac Anderson – Social Media Director at Waggener Edstrom: Tac’s story is a personal one for me, because it was my direct message to him that alerted him to the position he now has. I had been following Tac’s blog, New Comm Biz, for a little over a year, and we had connected through Twitter and shared a few links and other niceties over time. When the position at Waggener became available, Tac was one of the first folks I reached out to for it. I sent him a direct message and asked if he might be interested. Tac was at a point where he was ready for a new opportunity, so he began the interview process at Waggener and eventually was hired.

8. ME! :) Amybeth Hale – Talent Attraction Manager at AT&T: I was laid off from my job at the end of February. Immediately, I started quietly reaching out to some of my network connections through Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. One of the individuals I reached out to was Chris Hoyt, Associate Director, Talent Attraction with AT&T. Chris and I had been introduced by Jennifer McClure over the fall of 2008, and as we were both bloggers in the recruiting community, we developed a good friendship and respect for each other. When I told Chris what was going on, he set up a time for us to discuss an opening he had on his team, and it was a great fit for both of us. I was hired and started with AT&T at the beginning of April 2009.

I don’t know what additional proof anyone needs that Twitter is a helpful tool for connecting companies who are hiring to candidates who are looking. And for those who say this only works with certain job functions or in certain select industries – take a look at the variety in the stories presented here: we have marketing, PR, advertising, web development, software architecture, and recruiting professionals from companies operating in telecommunications, technology consultancy, interactive design, advertising, multimedia, and public relations. In addition, this worked for people ranging from fresh out of college to senior / director level professionals. So this isn’t limited to just the “social media” people or the “creative” companies.

Another interesting observation I had from reading through these stories is that the majority of the folks mentioned who were monitoring, seeking, and reaching out to these qualified candidates via Twitter were in fact NOT RECRUITERS, but observant employees and either partners or owners in their companies. So… perhaps this is a rude wake-up call to recruiters: the more you resist and poo-poo using tools like Twitter to find, connect with, and develop relationships with people, the more beneficial it will be for the direct hiring authorities, since they’ve already seemed to embrace this method of search.

So my recommendation to you is this: do what you want, and what you think is right for you. But stop asking for proof that it works, because it’s out there and you’re just not listening. And all those candidates are being grabbed up left and right by others who have chosen to embrace the tools, whether or not you do.

Source: Amybeth Hale - Talent Attraction Manager with AT&T at www.cruitertalk.com

Why Some Hate HR

In a knowledge economy, companies with the best talent win. And finding, nurturing, and developing that talent should be one of the most important tasks in a corporation. So why does human resources do such a bad job -- and how can we fix it?

Well, here's a rockin' party: a gathering of several hundred midlevel human-resources executives in Las Vegas. (Yo, Wayne Newton! How's the 401(k)?) They are here, ensconced for two days at faux-glam Caesars Palace, to confer on "strategic HR leadership," a conceit that sounds, to the lay observer, at once frightening and self-contradictory. If not plain laughable.

Because let's face it: After close to 20 years of hopeful rhetoric about becoming "strategic partners" with a "seat at the table" where the business decisions that matter are made, most human-resources professionals aren't nearly there. They have no seat, and the table is locked inside a conference room to which they have no key. HR people are, for most practical purposes, neither strategic nor leaders.

I don't care for Las Vegas. And if it's not clear already, I don't like HR, either, which is why I'm here. The human-resources trade long ago proved itself, at best, a necessary evil -- and at worst, a dark bureaucratic force that blindly enforces nonsensical rules, resists creativity, and impedes constructive change. HR is the corporate function with the greatest potential -- the key driver, in theory, of business performance -- and also the one that most consistently underdelivers. And I am here to find out why.

Why are annual performance appraisals so time-consuming -- and so routinely useless? Why is HR so often a henchman for the chief financial officer, finding ever-more ingenious ways to cut benefits and hack at payroll? Why do its communications -- when we can understand them at all -- so often flout reality? Why are so many people processes duplicative and wasteful, creating a forest of paperwork for every minor transaction? And why does HR insist on sameness as a proxy for equity?

It's no wonder that we hate HR. In a 2005 survey by consultancy Hay Group, just 40% of employees commended their companies for retaining high-quality workers. Just 41% agreed that performance evaluations were fair. Only 58% rated their job training as favorable. Most said they had few opportunities for advancement -- and that they didn't know, in any case, what was required to move up. Most telling, only about half of workers below the manager level believed their companies took a genuine interest in their well-being.

None of this is explained immediately in Vegas. These HR folks, from employers across the nation, are neither evil courtiers nor thoughtless automatons. They are mostly smart, engaging people who seem genuinely interested in doing their jobs better. They speak convincingly about employee development and cultural transformation. And, over drinks, they spin some pretty funny yarns of employee weirdness. (Like the one about the guy who threatened to sue his wife's company for "enabling" her affair with a coworker. Then there was the mentally disabled worker and the hooker -- well, no, never mind. . . .)

But then the facade cracks. It happens at an afternoon presentation called "From Technicians to Consultants: How to Transform Your HR Staff into Strategic Business Partners." The speaker, Julie Muckler, is senior vice president of human resources at Wells Fargo Home Mortgage. She is an enthusiastic woman with a broad smile and 20 years of experience at companies such as Johnson & Johnson and General Tire. She has degrees in consumer economics and human resources and organizational development.

And I have no idea what she's talking about. There is mention of "internal action learning" and "being more planful in my approach." PowerPoint slides outline Wells Fargo Home Mortgage's initiatives in performance management, organization design, and horizontal-solutions teams. Muckler describes leveraging internal resources and involving external resources -- and she leaves her audience dazed. That evening, even the human-resources pros confide they didn't understand much of it, either.

This, friends, is the trouble with HR. In a knowledge economy, companies that have the best talent win. We all know that. Human resources execs should be making the most of our, well, human resources -- finding the best hires, nurturing the stars, fostering a productive work environment -- just as IT runs the computers and finance minds the capital. HR should be joined to business strategy at the hip.

Instead, most HR organizations have ghettoized themselves literally to the brink of obsolescence. They are competent at the administrivia of pay, benefits, and retirement, but companies increasingly are farming those functions out to contractors who can handle such routine tasks at lower expense. What's left is the more important strategic role of raising the reputational and intellectual capital of the company -- but HR is, it turns out, uniquely unsuited for that.

Here's why.

1. HR people aren't the sharpest tacks in the box. We'll be blunt: If you are an ambitious young thing newly graduated from a top college or B-school with your eye on a rewarding career in business, your first instinct is not to join the human-resources dance. (At the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business, which arguably boasts the nation's top faculty for organizational issues, just 1.2% of 2004 grads did so.) Says a management professor at one leading school: "The best and the brightest don't go into HR."

Who does? Intelligent people, sometimes -- but not businesspeople. "HR doesn't tend to hire a lot of independent thinkers or people who stand up as moral compasses," says Garold L. Markle, a longtime human-resources executive at Exxon and Shell Offshore who now runs his own consultancy. Some are exiles from the corporate mainstream: They've fared poorly in meatier roles -- but not poorly enough to be fired. For them, and for their employers, HR represents a relatively low-risk parking spot.

Others enter the field by choice and with the best of intentions, but for the wrong reasons. They like working with people, and they want to be helpful -- noble motives that thoroughly tick off some HR thinkers. "When people have come to me and said, 'I want to work with people,' I say, 'Good, go be a social worker,' " says Arnold Kanarick, who has headed human resources at the Limited and, until recently, at Bear Stearns. "HR isn't about being a do-gooder. It's about how do you get the best and brightest people and raise the value of the firm."

The really scary news is that the gulf between capabilities and job requirements appears to be widening. As business and legal demands on the function intensify, staffers' educational qualifications haven't kept pace. In fact, according to a survey by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), a considerably smaller proportion of HR professionals today have some education beyond a bachelor's degree than in 1990.

And here's one more slice of telling SHRM data: When HR professionals were asked about the worth of various academic courses toward a "successful career in HR," 83% said that classes in interpersonal communications skills had "extremely high value." Employment law and business ethics followed, at 71% and 66%, respectively. Where was change management? At 35%. Strategic management? 32%. Finance? Um, that was just 2%.

The truth? Most human-resources managers aren't particularly interested in, or equipped for, doing business. And in a business, that's sort of a problem. As guardians of a company's talent, HR has to understand how people serve corporate objectives. Instead, "business acumen is the single biggest factor that HR professionals in the U.S. lack today," says Anthony J. Rucci, executive vice president at Cardinal Health Inc., a big health-care supply distributor.

Rucci is consistently mentioned by academics, consultants, and other HR leaders as an executive who actually does know business. At Baxter International, he ran both HR and corporate strategy. Before that, at Sears, he led a study of results at 800 stores over five years to assess the connection between employee commitment, customer loyalty, and profitability.

As far as Rucci is concerned, there are three questions that any decent HR person in the world should be able to answer. First, who is your company's core customer? "Have you talked to one lately? Do you know what challenges they face?" Second, who is the competition? "What do they do well and not well?" And most important, who are we? "What is a realistic assessment of what we do well and not so well vis a vis the customer and the competition?"

Does your HR pro know the answers?

2. HR pursues efficiency in lieu of value. Why? Because it's easier -- and easier to measure. Dave Ulrich, a professor at the University of Michigan, recalls meeting with the chairman and top HR people from a big bank. "The training person said that 80% of employees have done at least 40 hours in classes. The chairman said, 'Congratulations.' I said, 'You're talking about the activities you're doing. The question is, What are you delivering?' "

That sort of stuff drives Ulrich nuts. Over 20 years, he has become the HR trade's best-known guru (see "The Once and Future Consultant," page 48) and a leading proponent of the push to take on more-strategic roles within corporations. But human-resources managers, he acknowledges, typically undermine that effort by investing more importance in activities than in outcomes. "You're only effective if you add value," Ulrich says. "That means you're not measured by what you do but by what you deliver." By that, he refers not just to the value delivered to employees and line managers, but the benefits that accrue to investors and customers, as well.

So here's a true story: A talented young marketing exec accepts a job offer with Time Warner out of business school. She interviews for openings in several departments -- then is told by HR that only one is interested in her. In fact, she learns later, they all had been. She had been railroaded into the job, under the supervision of a widely reviled manager, because no one inside the company would take it.

You make the call: Did HR do its job? On the one hand, it filled the empty slot. "It did what was organizationally expedient," says the woman now. "Getting someone who wouldn't kick and scream about this role probably made sense to them. But I just felt angry." She left Time Warner after just a year. (A Time Warner spokesperson declined to comment on the incident.)

Part of the problem is that Time Warner's metrics likely will never catch the real cost of its HR department's action. Human resources can readily provide the number of people it hired, the percentage of performance evaluations completed, and the extent to which employees are satisfied or not with their benefits. But only rarely does it link any of those metrics to business performance.

John W. Boudreau, a professor at the University of Southern California's Center for Effective Organizations, likens the failing to shortcomings of the finance function before DuPont figured out how to calculate return on investment in 1912. In HR, he says, "we don't have anywhere near that kind of logical sophistication in the way of people or talent. So the decisions that get made about that resource are far less sophisticated, reliable, and consistent."

Cardinal Health's Rucci is trying to fix that. Cardinal regularly asks its employees 12 questions designed to measure engagement. Among them: Do they understand the company's strategy? Do they see the connection between that and their jobs? Are they proud to tell people where they work? Rucci correlates the results to those of a survey of 2,000 customers, as well as monthly sales data and brand-awareness scores.

"So I don't know if our HR processes are having an impact" per se, Rucci says. "But I know absolutely that employee-engagement scores have an impact on our business," accounting for between 1% and 10% of earnings, depending on the business and the employee's role. "Cardinal may not anytime soon get invited by the Conference Board to explain our world-class best practices in any area of HR -- and I couldn't care less. The real question is, Is the business effective and successful?"

3. HR isn't working for you. Want to know why you go through that asinine performance appraisal every year, really? Markle, who admits to having administered countless numbers of them over the years, is pleased to confirm your suspicions. Companies, he says "are doing it to protect themselves against their own employees," he says. "They put a piece of paper between you and employees, so if you ever have a confrontation, you can go to the file and say, 'Here, I've documented this problem.' "

There's a good reason for this defensive stance, of course. In the last two generations, government has created an immense thicket of labor regulations. Equal Employment Opportunity; Fair Labor Standards; Occupational Safety and Health; Family and Medical Leave; and the ever-popular ERISA. These are complex, serious issues requiring technical expertise, and HR has to apply reasonable caution.

But "it's easy to get sucked down into that," says Mark Royal, a senior consultant with Hay Group. "There's a tension created by HR's role as protector of corporate assets -- making sure it doesn't run afoul of the rules. That puts you in the position of saying no a lot, of playing the bad cop. You have to step out of that, see the broad possibilities, and take a more open-minded approach. You need to understand where the exceptions to broad policies can be made."

Typically, HR people can't, or won't. Instead, they pursue standardization and uniformity in the face of a workforce that is heterogeneous and complex. A manager at a large capital leasing company complains that corporate HR is trying to eliminate most vice-president titles there -- even though veeps are a dime a dozen in the finance industry. Why? Because in the company's commercial business, vice president is a rank reserved for the top officers. In its drive for bureaucratic "fairness," HR is actually threatening the reputation, and so the effectiveness, of the company's finance professionals.

The urge for one-size-fits-all, says one professor who studies the field, "is partly about compliance, but mostly because it's just easier." Bureaucrats everywhere abhor exceptions -- not just because they open up the company to charges of bias but because they require more than rote solutions. They're time-consuming and expensive to manage. Make one exception, HR fears, and the floodgates will open.

There's a contradiction here, of course: Making exceptions should be exactly what human resources does, all the time -- not because it's nice for employees, but because it drives the business. Employers keep their best people by acknowledging and rewarding their distinctive performance, not by treating them the same as everyone else. "If I'm running a business, I can tell you who's really helping to drive the business forward," says Dennis Ackley, an employee communication consultant. "HR should have the same view. We should send the message that we value our high-performing employees and we're focused on rewarding and retaining them."

Instead, human-resources departments benchmark salaries, function by function and job by job, against industry standards, keeping pay -- even that of the stars -- within a narrow band determined by competitors. They bounce performance appraisals back to managers who rate their employees too highly, unwilling to acknowledge accomplishments that would merit much more than the 4% company-wide increase.

Human resources, in other words, forfeits long-term value for short-term cost efficiency. A simple test: Who does your company's vice president of human resources report to? If it's the CFO -- and chances are good it is -- then HR is headed in the wrong direction. "That's a model that cannot work," says one top HR exec who has been there. "A financial person is concerned with taking money out of the organization. HR should be concerned with putting investments in."

4. The corner office doesn't get HR (and vice versa). I'm at another rockin' party: a few dozen midlevel human-resources managers at a hotel restaurant in Mahwah, New Jersey. It is not glam in any way. (I've got to get a better travel agent.) But it is telling, in a hopeful way. Hunter Douglas, a $2.1 billion manufacturer of window coverings, has brought its HR staff here from across the United States to celebrate their accomplishments.

The company's top brass is on hand. Marvin B. Hopkins, president and CEO of North American operations, lays on the praise: "I feel fantastic about your achievements," he says. "Our business is about people. Hiring, training, and empathizing with employees is extremely important. When someone is fired or leaves, we've failed in some way. People have to feel they have a place at the company, a sense of ownership."

So, yeah, it's corporate-speak in a drab exurban office park. But you know what? The human-resources managers from Tupelo and Dallas are totally pumped up. They've been flown into headquarters, they've had their picture taken with the boss, and they're seeing Mamma Mia on Broadway that afternoon on the company's dime.

Can your HR department say it has the ear of top management? Probably not. "Sometimes," says Ulrich, "line managers just have this legacy of HR in their minds, and they can't get rid of it. I felt really badly for one HR guy. The chairman wanted someone to plan company picnics and manage the union, and every time this guy tried to be strategic, he got shot down."

Say what? Execs don't think HR matters? What about all that happy talk about employees being their most important asset? Well, that turns out to have been a small misunderstanding. In the 1990s, a group of British academics examined the relationship between what companies (among them, the UK units of Hewlett-Packard and Citibank) said about their human assets and how they actually behaved. The results were, perhaps, inevitable.

In their rhetoric, human-resources organizations embraced the language of a "soft" approach, speaking of training, development, and commitment. But "the underlying principle was invariably restricted to the improvements of bottom-line performance," the authors wrote in the resulting book, Strategic Human Resource Management (Oxford University Press, 1999). "Even if the rhetoric of HRM is soft, the reality is almost always 'hard,' with the interests of the organization prevailing over those of the individual."

In the best of worlds, says London Business School professor Lynda Gratton, one of the study's authors, "the reality should be some combination of hard and soft." That's what's going on at Hunter Douglas. Human resources can address the needs of employees because it has proven its business mettle -- and vice versa. Betty Lou Smith, the company's vice president of corporate HR, began investigating the connection between employee turnover and product quality. Divisions with the highest turnover rates, she found, were also those with damaged-goods rates of 5% or higher. And extraordinarily, 70% of employees were leaving the company within six months of being hired.

Smith's staffers learned that new employees were leaving for a variety of reasons: They didn't feel respected, they didn't have input in decisions, but mostly, they felt a lack of connection when they were first hired. "We gave them a 10-minute orientation, then they were out on the floor," Smith says. She addressed the weakness by creating a mentoring program that matched new hires with experienced workers. The latter were suspicious at first, but eventually, the mentor positions (with spiffy shirts and caps) came to be seen as prestigious. The six-month turnover rate dropped dramatically, to 16%. Attendance and productivity -- and the damaged-goods rate -- improved.

"We don't wait to hear from top management," Smith says. "You can't just sit in the corner and look at benefits. We have to know what the issues in our business are. HR has to step up and assume responsibility, not wait for management to knock on our door."

But most HR people do.

Hunter Douglas gives us a glimmer of hope -- of the possibility that HR can be done right. And surely, even within ineffective human-resources organizations, there are great individual HR managers -- trustworthy, caring people with their ears to the ground, who are sensitive to cultural nuance yet also understand the business and how people fit in. Professionals who move voluntarily into HR from line positions can prove especially adroit, bringing a profit-and-loss sensibility and strong management skills.

At Yahoo, Libby Sartain, chief people officer, is building a group that may prove to be the truly effective human-resources department that employees and executives imagine. In this, Sartain enjoys two advantages. First, she arrived with a reputation as a creative maverick, won in her 13 years running HR at Southwest Airlines. And second, she had license from the top to do whatever it took to create a world-class organization.

Sartain doesn't just have a "seat at the table" at Yahoo; she actually helped build the table, instituting a weekly operations meeting that she coordinates with COO Dan Rosensweig. Talent is always at the top of the agenda -- and at the end of each meeting, the executive team mulls individual development decisions on key staffers.

That meeting, Sartain says, "sends a strong message to everyone at Yahoo that we can't do anything without HR." It also signals to HR staffers that they're responsible for more than shuffling papers and getting in the way. "We view human resources as the caretaker of the largest investment of the company," Sartain says. "If you're not nurturing that investment and watching it grow, you're not doing your job."

Yahoo, say some experts and peers at other organizations, is among a few companies -- among them Cardinal Health, Procter & Gamble, Pitney Bowes, Goldman Sachs, and General Electric -- that truly are bringing human resources into the realm of business strategy. But they are indeed the few. USC professor Edward E. Lawler III says that last year HR professionals reported spending 23% of their time "being a strategic business partner" -- no more than they reported in 1995. And line managers, he found, said HR is far less involved in strategy than HR thinks it is. "Despite great huffing and puffing about strategy," Lawler says, "there's still a long way to go." (Indeed. When I asked one midlevel HR person exactly how she was involved in business strategy for her division, she excitedly described organizing a monthly lunch for her vice president with employees.)

What's driving the strategy disconnect? London Business School's Gratton spends a lot of time training human-resources professionals to create more impact. She sees two problems: Many HR people, she says, bring strong technical expertise to the party but no "point of view about the future and how organizations are going to change." And second, "it's very difficult to align HR strategy to business strategy, because business strategy changes very fast, and it's hard to fiddle around with a compensation strategy or benefits to keep up." More than simply understanding strategy, Gratton says, truly effective executives "need to be operating out of a set of principles and personal values." And few actually do.

In the meantime, economic natural selection is, in a way, taking care of the problem for us. Some 94% of large employers surveyed this year by Hewitt Associates reported they were outsourcing at least one human-resources activity. By 2008, according to the survey, many plan to expand outsourcing to include activities such as learning and development, payroll, recruiting, health and welfare, and global mobility.

Which is to say, they will farm out pretty much everything HR does. The happy rhetoric from the HR world says this is all for the best: Outsourcing the administrative minutiae, after all, would allow human-resources professionals to focus on more important stuff that's central to the business. You know, being strategic partners.

The problem, if you're an HR person, is this: The tasks companies are outsourcing -- the administrivia -- tend to be what you're good at. And what's left isn't exactly your strong suit. Human resources is crippled by what Jay Jamrog, executive director of the Human Resource Institute, calls "educated incapacity: You're smart, and you know the way you're working today isn't going to hold 10 years from now. But you can't move to that level. You're stuck."

That's where human resources is today. Stuck. "This is a unique organization in the company," says USC's Boudreau. "It discovers things about the business through the lens of people and talent. That's an opportunity for competitive advantage." In most companies, that opportunity is utterly wasted.


Source: Keith H. Hammonds - Deputy Editor, Fast Company