Staffing Journal

Not at all what is seems

2005-10-07T07:54:00.000-07:00

After only two weeks on the job at Google, I gladly terminated my contract assignment. Like most people, I was drawn to Google by the hype. The never ending saturation in the media, the aggressive approach to recruiting and the "we are the best and brightest" hoopla that permeates from the Mountain View headquarters like Microsoft of old. Walking into the lobby on my first day was akin to boarding the starship Enterprise. My feelings of having joined the hottest company in the world quickly fizzled.

I joined Google to lead staffing programs as part of the Recruiting Recruiters Team. This was a very small group faced with the daunting task of bringing on board every recruiter they could find that had a credit score of 750, an MBA and the intestinal fortitude to be subservient to a process that defies logic. On my first day I was introduced to the team, given my Google bag of goodies, walked to my cube and given the task of reviewing the competitions career pages for ideas. Mindless work, but this gave me the opportunity to settle in and get comfortable with the balls in my cube and the lava lamps.

Around the middle of my first week the Recruiter that had brought me on board approached me to say there was a problem. The background investigation revealed an issue with a title on my resume. Simple enough I explained, my working title was different than the HRIS classification. For the sake of clarity about my role, at said company, I chose to use a working title on my resume. However, I did not give myself a promotion and was not misleading about my responsibilities. The Recruiter confirmed that this was the case as verified by my references. The issue, as the Recruiter described, was that the Team was concerned about the discrepancy. The Team had all reviewed the background check and raised a flag of concern holding the Recruiter accountable to approach me for an explanation. I was stunned at first. I very quickly grew offended and violated. To think that the team of people that I would be working with everyday, leading in some cases, had openly passed around my most personal of information was mind numbing. The Recruiter let me know that this had a dulling effect on my reputation and would be viewed very badly by the senior staffing leadership. That said, I scheduled time to speak with senior leadership and was told that it would not have an effect on potential opportunities for me. I walked away feeling like my days were numbered. In hindsight they were.

Leadership

2004-12-27T14:08:00.000-08:00

There are Two Main Leadership Drives:1. Dominance: Desire to dominate (manage) other people.2. Eminence: Desire to achieve status through competition based on ability.These two drives can be combined in four ways. And each combination creates a different type of leader.
Type:
Dominance Drive------Status Drive
A: Dominant Boss------high--------high
B:Ambitious Professional--------low---------high
C: Informal Influencer-----------high--------low
D: Reluctant Leader-------------low---------low
TYPE A: DOMINANT BOSSES have the desire to dominate plus the desire to achieve status through competitive striving. Included here are political and business leaders like Lee Iacocca, Castro, Jack Welch, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Sam Walton.
TYPE B: AMBITIOUS PROFESSIONALS have little interest in dominance over others. They are leaders because they possess some technical ability.
Examples: Faceless technocrats running investment banks and science-based firms. Or colourful creative people who lead media and arts organizations but have no real interest in managing people.Extreme A's are often followed by B's because B's are not so pushy.
TYPE C: INFLUENCERS don't want to compete because they fear failure. But their high dominance drive makes them want power. So they gravitate to roles in which they have power without responsibility.
They can be cheerleaders for the boss or rebellious dissidents who sit on the sidelines working the crowd against him.They only become leaders if there is little risk attached. (eg. in organizations which are run collectively or where the leadership role merely represents a higher power).TYPE D: RELUCTANT LEADERS prefer a safe, rewarding niche free from competition. They become leaders when no one else is available or when the leader role confers little status or power. They can also come to power via natural succession in a family firm but when they do they are usually awful. Reluctant leadership is also common in bureaucracies in which people automatically inherit the the role via rules of seniority. From Executive Instinct via Canadian Headhunter

Market Your Opportunities with Blogs

2004-12-10T13:01:00.000-08:00

By Christine Hirsch

Blogs have become mainstream in Internet culture and their influence has not escaped tech-savvy recruiters. Today, more and more corporations, from Microsoft to Stonyfield Farms, are using blogs to attract candidates. An innovative way to extend an employment brand, blogs are helping companies better engage candidates in the recruitment process. Full of light, off-beat content, blogs appeal to potential hires with content that frequently involves and entertains prospective hires.
A weblog, or simply a blog, is a frequently updated web site containing informal commentary and links to news, websites, and other blogs. Blog formats vary from personal diaries to subject-based sites and business pages. Some are maintained by a single person and others are updated by a group of people. It is common for visitors to leave comments, creating a community of frequent users. The ability to leave comments creates an ongoing conversation with users, encouraging them to return daily for fresh content.
According to a study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, more than two million Americans are blogging. Eight percent of those surveyed report that they have personally posted material on corporate blogs. These numbers indicate tremendous marketing power is available. Blogs also attract an audience prized by recruiters. A 2003 study conducted by Jupiter Research found that 61% of Internet users who read blogs have an annual household income above $60,000.
Corporate blogs can vary widely in content and format, though they generally work to introduce candidates to a company and its culture. Blogs can host a range of interesting information, such as reports from employee travels, problems surrounding a current project, a play-by-play of the latest company softball game, profiles of employees…you name it. Some companies, such as Microsoft and Sun Microsystems, have set up primary blog sites that link to individual employee blogs. The Stonyfield Farm blog, updated by a single writer, contains a series of online journals categorized by area of interest.
There are certainly things to consider before building a blog community. It's easy to put up a blog, but their appeal lies in fresh content. If information is not updated often and kept interesting, you will quickly lose your readership. If a group of people is responsible for generating content, this may be less of a problem. Also, recruiters need to work with the company's marketing, public relations, and legal departments to determine content parameters. Allowing workers to freely disclose information has its risks. Creating a set of guidelines can protect the company and prevent conflicts before content hits the web.
Today, most online recruiting systems feel highly technical and fail to involve candidates. Blogs represent an opportunity to personalize the hiring process by reintroducing a human face into the hiring process. Thought blogs require dedicated resources to manage, the technology is flexible and interactive and has a growing audience. An investment in blogs can expand your recruiting network while giving your company an edge in the talent market.

2004-11-15T09:10:00.000-08:00

From the November 15, 2004 print edition
Nonprofits' finance under Spitzer's watch
Annie Deck-Miller, Business First

If you're an executive or board member of a nonprofit, you may sometimes get the sneaking suspicion that your every move is being observed and judged.
Chances are, that suspicion is not far off the mark.
As accounting and management scandals wend their way through the corporate and nonprofit worlds, ripple-by-regulatory-ripple, charities and their leadership are increasingly expected to account for their activities and finances in careful, controlled, demonstrable ways.
This transparency is demanded both by a public that's grown skeptical and by lawmakers who want nonprofits to follow corporations down the path of fiscal accountability à la Sarbanes-Oxley, the 2002 federal legislation also known as the Public Company Accounting Reform and Investor Protection Act.
New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer was an early proponent of such reform, submitting a proposal to amend the Not-For-Profit Corporation and Religious Corporations laws to the state Legislature in early 2003.
Legislators in both houses agreed to sponsor the bill, which would expand protections against financial fraud or abuse. While it stalled in both the Senate and Assembly, it remains a priority for the Attorney General's Office and will be taken up in the session beginning in January by its sponsors, Sen. Vincent Leibell and Assembly Member Richard Brodsky.
"It's a priority because not-for-profit entities do not pay taxes, and we have to serve as the guardian of the public trust in that regard," said Brad Maione, spokesperson for Spitzer, who was not made available for comment.
The legislation would require the chief executives and chief financial officers of larger nonprofits -- those with gross revenues over $1 million or assets over $3 million -- to not only approve financial statements, but verify the accuracy of their contents. Other provisions encourage larger nonprofits to establish executive and audit committees and lay out new policies and penalties targeting board member conflicts of interest.
Since government, at all levels, awards hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts to nonprofits, Maione said, "We believe it's an obligation to protect those investments by the public, which is taxpayers, to ensure that the funds are spent for their intended purposes."
Cause for concern?
How have area nonprofits reacted to the word that an already highly regulated sector is likely to be subject to yet higher standards?

"They're not obsessing," says Michael de Freitas, an attorney with William C. Moran & Associates PC in Williamsville. "But I think it will also scare a lot of people."

De Freitas, who represents both grant-seeking and grant-making nonprofits, is not convinced that the legislation is necessary.
"Financial transparency has already been improving over the years," he says. "So I think there's a real question how effective these additional procedures would be when balanced with the possibility that you're going to scare away directors from joining boards."
Many nonprofits welcome the changes, and de Freitas says he's not aware of any area organization "with financial practices that are so out of whack that they would be in a risky position if this legislation took effect tomorrow."
"People should be available to get information easily that they believe they need to have in order to make a decision about making a contribution," said Arlene Kaukus, president of the United Way of Buffalo & Erie County.
She said she hopes nonprofits, particularly small- and mid-sized ones, will take advantage of the agency's four-year-old Not For Profit Resource Center.
"We're trying to help agencies fulfill those higher expectations," says Joe Roccisano, who took over two months ago as the center's director. He points to initiatives to recruit corporate professionals as volunteer advisers, assign college interns and facilitate mergers as ways that the Resource Center can help nonprofits to become more efficient and fiscally sound.
De Freitas positions the trend toward greater regulation within a long-term context.
"In the 1980s," he says, "it was sort of 180 degrees different. Then, everyone was concerned that directors were being scared off by the fear of third-party lawsuits.
"Now, the wave has gone the other way."

The Strategic Recruiter

2004-10-25T10:44:00.000-07:00

The Recruiting Profession
Tuesday, October 19, 2004
The Strategic Recruiter

The bulk of recruiting is far more tactical than it is strategic, especially since most of the heavy lifting takes place between recruiter and candidate. Unfortunately, the endless details of dealing with candidates, resumes, interviews, and feedback — while also trying to close the deal — can have you running from pillar to post in a completely reactive style on a daily basis.

This bizarre existence is played out in countless companies across the country, and it is probably the primary reason recruiters lose productivity, become jaded, and burn out. After they snap, corporate America's brilliant response is to replace them, which allows them to burn out new recruiters. As an added bonus, the crowd that's on its way out now has the dubious opportunity to ply their trade at another company and have what usually amounts to same experience. This is one of the reasons why there are very few 100 year-old recruiters around.

Things do not have to be this way. But if recruiters want life to change then they will have to be the ones to drive that change. Change requires power, and power is never granted; power is only taken.

The first step towards empowerment for recruiters is to acknowledge that they are professionals and need to run their job as opposed to having their job running them. Unless you call the shots, you will continue to be hammered by the forces and whims of those dilettantes who believe they know your job better than you do. Your time and energy will continue to be drained by those who are more than happy to burden you with the blame when an offer is turned down, while bestowing you very little credit when it is accepted.

If you have days where you go home exhausted and feel as though you have almost no control over anything, migrating towards a strategic recruiting model might save both your sanity as well as your career.

Strategic recruiting starts with a belief that running around like a kid on too much sugar is no way to live, be productive, or build a company. It is reactive as opposed to proactive, governed by things that are urgent as opposed to things that are important (for those of you familiar with Covey, I am obviously talking about quadrant one versus quadrant two existence).
Interested in getting a bit of control into your function and meaning into your recruiting life?

Consider the following three points:
Stop all activity for a day or two (or three). Find a quiet conference room away from the madness of the phones and email, huddle with your team and do some thinking. An offsite would even be better. This is to be a quiet and reflective time to look at and examine your role, your priorities and how you run your business. If you say that you have no time to stop for a few days then I say you have to follow this advice more than you will ever know. (Charles de Gaulle said "the graveyards are filled with irreplaceable men." Think about it.)

Create a plan with a set of priorities that will govern how you spend your time. Notice I said how "you" spend your time. Not how "others" spend it. You should be the one to determine when you will do interviews, when you will do research, and when you will review resumes. There should be no other modus operandi if you are the one responsible for getting the job done. If you let the organization or politics of the day dictate what you should do, when and how to do it, they probably don't need you in the first place. Personally, I would much rather fail because my plan did not work than fail because someone else's plan did not work.

Armed with priorities and a plan, get your job done more effectively while enjoying a better quality of life in the workplace. For a recruiter, filling a position is no different than building a house is for a developer. Both endeavors require a well thought out plan (think strategy) before the actual work (think tactical) begins. This plan and the ability to stick to it will save both parties' endless time, and the result will be happy customers. Unfortunately, recruiters seldom have the time to really do the kind of planning necessary to prevent them from spinning their wheels on a regular basis. This "no time to think and only time to do" style of living, coupled with a workplace existence that is interrupt driven, makes true growth and a feeling of professional satisfaction hard to achieve. If you believe this type of thinking makes sense, I want to outline just a few things you can do to get back your span of control, sense of well-being, and ability to be productive.

The first and most crucial step is to learn the importance of planning. The second step is to learn the importance of working that plan as close as possible and resisting the endless distractions that are the enemies of real progress. I suggest that you look at planning in the following manner and remember that long-term planning is more strategic while short-term planning is more tactical:

Plan quarterly for long-term conceptual workforce type issues. How many requisitions do you have on your plate, what are the priorities, and how will you manage this workload? Put your plan in writing. Don't worry about it being perfect because that will never happen.

Plan monthly. How are you progressing based upon your workload? What midcourse corrections should be made to have things come together for you to meet your goals?

Plan weekly. Do it every Friday after lunch. Do not wait till 4:00. If you do, there's a good chance you will not be able to get it done and will have to play catch up on Monday, and we all know how happy life can be on Monday.

Plan for tomorrow. This plan should be specific to the next day's activities. Remember to put the most important things at the top of the list. Furthermore, don't schedule every minute of the day; you need time set aside to deal with life's unexpected problems. Empowered with this new and different way of dealing with your work, be aware of the main enemy confronting a person with a plan, the time-waster. It could be anything from useless meetings to nonsensical paperwork to people stopping in your office for the usual five minutes that turn into an hour.
There are many ways to deal with time-wasters.

Here are just three:

Feel free not to answer your phone every time it rings. A ringing phone says, "I want you now." Well, perhaps they want you now but that does not mean they can have you now. Let voicemail handle your calls. Check voicemail at noon and about an hour before you end the day.
Do not check email every four seconds. It causes you to lose focus, increases stress, and reduces productivity. If you do not want to operate in an interruption-driven manner, do not invite interruptions. I can assure you your emails will not disappear, and if someone dies, you will get the word soon enough.

Schedule meetings with hiring managers. Discourage them from popping in on you (when they show up ask them, "What can I do for you?") and do not drop in on them. This demonstrates a respect for their time as well as yours and gets them in the habit of communicating on a regular basis as opposed to hit or miss. By the way, have meetings in other people's offices as opposed to your own. It is relatively easy to get out of their office when you are finished, but far more awkward to throw them out of yours. Buckminster Fuller, the great inventor and architect said, "Our power is in our ability to decide." If you decide to make this change, you are well on your way to seizing all of the power you will need to make this all-important transformation. There really is no other way.

As an aside, I seldom recommend any books I've read, but I do hope that you will read Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America, by Barbara Ehrenreich. It outlines some interesting practices and attitudes in companies you know well and is both informative as well as disturbing.

Howard Adamsky is the founder and president of HR Innovators, Inc. He is a management consultant, author and public speaker. As a consultant, Howard's sole purpose is to improve the condition of his clients' business (he has to or they don't pay him). His presentations, all customized to audience needs, include the importance of ethical and proactive leadership, creating the perfect candidate interviewing experience, and how to turn your company into an effective recruiting machine without really trying. Howard's new book, Hiring and Retaining Top IT Professionals/The Guide for Savvy Hiring Managers and Job Hunters Alike, has been published by McGraw-Hill. He is currently finishing the last edits of his new book on people skills and had just completed development an interviewing program entitled The Other Side of Experience/Six Critical Assessment Tools for Long Term Thinkers.

Balance is Bunk! Continued

2004-10-18T09:45:00.000-07:00

This is an excerpt from "Fast Company Magazine",
From: Issue 87 October 2004, Page 68 By: Keith H. Hammonds

Balance Is for Fat People

Pavan Vishwakarma is a 25-year-old freelance Web and e-commerce software developer. He lives and works in Bhopal, India, but he has done work for companies in Illinois, Nevada, and Canada. And he has, as he advertises, "no working hours limitation. I can work up to any stretch of time."

You want balance? Vishwakarma doesn't, particularly. He wants to work, and he'll work cheap -- a lot cheaper than you will.

The global economy is antibalance. For as much as Accenture and Google say they value an environment that allows workers balance, they're increasingly competing against companies that don't. You're competing against workers with a lot more to gain than you, who will work harder for less money to get the job done. This is the dark side of the "happy workaholic." Someday, all of us will have to become workaholics, happy or not, just to get by.
Tom Patterson has spent the last year setting up a technology operations center in Hyderabad, India, for MarketTools, the Mill Valley, California, marketing-research company where he's senior vice president of technology and operations. And he has been stunned by what he sees there.

"I'm amazed at the work ethic," he says. "People are hungry, entrepreneurial, and willing to do whatever it takes at great sacrifices. These kids are working for a change in economic status. Things that we take for granted like housing, health care, vacations -- this is what they're looking at. And the difference to them between $6,000 a year and $10,000 is huge."
Protest, if you like, against labor exploitation or unfair competition. The reality is, workers in India, China, Brazil, and, inevitably, everywhere else aren't stopping long to worry about it. They make our developed-world notion that workers actually are entitled to balance seem quaintly dated.

For years, work-life advocates have held up as a model the "work to live" ethic of Europeans, who historically have toiled fewer hours than Americans. But those would-be paragons are failing, too. The French government is reconsidering its decision in 2000 to reduce the national workweek to 35 hours. And two of Germany's largest companies, Siemens AG and DaimlerChrysler, have (with popular support) won union concessions that will force longer hours for employees.

If you're competing against Pavan Vishwakarma -- and ultimately, we all are -- you can't have both a big paycheck and reasonable hours. The laws of economics won't allow it. If we want time with our families, time to give back to our communities, time to stay slim, we're going to have to accept a pay cut -- and even then, we'll have to work darned hard. Hungry beats fat, every time.

The Superman Trap

For many, the great fallacy is not that we aspire to accomplishment but that we aspire to everything else, too. Unwilling to prioritize among things that all seem important, we instead invent for ourselves the possibility of having everything.

In part, this is the inevitable result of the rush of women into the workforce and the proliferation of two-income families. Can any couple facing two full-time jobs, kids, aging parents, groceries, the dog, the bills, and telemarketers at dinnertime expect anything but all stress, all the time?

But it's not just demographics; it's also desire. If women's inner voices in 1963 were saying, as feminist writer Betty Friedan surmised then, "I want something more than my husband and my children and my home," then today many (and many men, too) are saying something different: "I want it all."

So it is that Tina Sharkey, AOL's senior vice president of life management and community, finds herself on a plane two or three days a week, taking photos of her meal, the flight attendants, everything, so her two young kids will know what she does.

Sharkey's routine seems, to many who know her, mind-boggling. She and her husband, fully employed entrepreneur Seth Goldstein, live with their kids in New York. But many of her 250 employees are at AOL's Dulles, Virginia, headquarters. So she spends one or two nights a week at a hotel nearby. Even at home, her workday is a whirl; she typically breaks at 6 p.m. to go home but is back online from 10 p.m. to 1 a.m. As "chief everything officer" of her family, as she puts it, Sharkey coordinates the children's care and family meals, and participates in what school functions she can.

She is an extraordinary woman who evinces both intensity and empathy. But her regimen poses a trap for the rest of us. If we work hard enough, we imagine, we can do anything -- and, therefore, everything. "Balance is misleading people," says Laura Nash, who with Howard Stevenson surveyed hundreds of professionals for their new book, Just Enough: Tools for Creating Success in Your Work and Life (John Wiley & Sons, 2004). "The problem is, they're looking for a magic bullet, a one-stop solution." It is a peculiarly American quest for perfection, for "a solution in achievements."

You've seen supermen and superwomen: They're the ones at their kids' baseball games, half-watching while tethered to their cell phones (been there). Or they're on the phone at work, sorting out child-care schedules and meal assignments with their nannies and spouses.
The problem, as Nash points out, is that while success at work is largely rooted in achievement, success outside of work mostly isn't. The things most of us say we value in our nonwork lives -- simply caring and being there for others -- aren't a function of accomplishing anything per se. Contentedness in that realm is less a matter of doing more than of cutting back.
Obvious enough, isn't it? Life is about setting priorities and making trade-offs; that's what grown-ups do. But in our all-or-nothing culture, resorting to those sorts of decisions is too often seen as a kind of failure. Seeking balance, we strive for achievement everywhere, all the time -- and we feel guilty and stressed out when, inevitably, we fall short.

The Book of Life

Do we throw up our hands then? We can't do everything, but neither can we retreat from the things that are important. How do we make work and life happen on our terms?
The short answer is, we don't entirely. But there are saner ways to confront the problem. One is rooted in the short term. In their interviews and surveys, Nash and Stevenson learned that successful professionals who were also happy had found ways to "switch and link" -- to switch the focus of their full attention with lightning speed among activities and people in different realms.

David Zelman, a psychotherapist and executive coach, sees this as a crucial skill successful people must learn. "Can you leave the office in the office? Can you give someone outside the office the same attention you gave your CEO? If you can give your children or your spouse 100% of your attention, even for a brief period, it goes way longer than compromising and giving them some time because you think you should."

The other solution is more about structure. It forces us to take a long-term view. Give up on the promise of balance at any point in time. Instead, consider a life and career as a portfolio. In each chapter, we have different responsibilities and priorities: children, home, travel, aging relatives. We face a corresponding variety of roles and opportunities on the job: a big project, moving up the managerial hierarchy, consulting, a startup, a top leadership role.

Balance, for what the word is worth, then becomes a lifelong quest -- balance among chapters rather than within each chapter. "It gets in people's heads that the ultimate goal is a 50-50 split between work and life," says work-life consultant Cali Williams Yost. "But there are times when I've happily devoted 80% of my time to work -- and other times when I couldn't." The tough part is recognizing the chapters for what they are -- just temporary episodes that together make up a coherent and satisfying whole.

"This is just one chapter in my life. I feel I have so much to contribute. I have to leverage myself and contribute in the way I can."

That's why Sharkey finds her current manic lifestyle acceptable -- because, she says, "this is just one chapter in my life." The opportunity to fix and build a business at AOL -- and to create something that brings lasting value to women and families -- is, she believes, worth the frenzy and the compromises. "I feel like I have so much to contribute. I have to leverage myself and contribute in the way I can."

Consider it an exercise in continuous redesign, in adapting to ever-changing circumstances and priorities. For couples, this also requires constant rebalancing of roles and responsibilities: You got the promotion, so I'll telecommute for now -- until my next big opportunity comes up. Those who succeed, says Zelman, are "the people who learn to dance with change, who create and ride the wave." They don't make decisions once or twice, but all the time.

And here's what's crucial: With each decision, these people invest themselves, their passion, and their time in what is most important to them. They also agree to give up something important; a portfolio life doesn't excuse them from the need to make trade-offs. The decision to reject the mirage of balance requires the discipline to continually prioritize and compromise.

Is that balance? Only in the sense that, over time, things more or less balance out. But that doesn't make it perfect, or easy. In some ways, it's counterinstinctual. It forces us to think differently about our careers and about the contributions we make in all realms of our lives. And it gives us a plan that's valid only until the next baby, project deadline, layoff, or illness.

But all things considered, it could prove a lot saner.

Balance is Bunk!

2004-10-15T11:42:00.000-07:00

This is an excerpt of an article in Fast Company Magazine
From: Issue 87 October 2004, Page 68
By: Keith H. Hammonds

It's the central myth of the modern workplace: With a few compromises, you can have it all. But it's all wrong, and it's making us crazy. Here's how to have a life anyway.
It may be that you recently had a week that defied sanity. You faced an impossible deadline at work. You were expected at your daughter's dance recital, at a soccer game, and at a meeting with the kitchen contractor. Then another big project landed in your lap (thanks, boss!). You were exhausted, and your spouse was miffed. And your job? Well, at 11 one night, you finally bailed on that deadline.

And you wondered, What's wrong here? Whatever happened to balance?
The truth is, balance is bunk. It is an unattainable pipe dream, a vain artifice that offers mostly rhetorical solutions to problems of logistics and economics. The quest for balance between work and life, as we've come to think of it, isn't just a losing proposition; it's a hurtful, destructive one.
This is not, of course, what many of us want to believe. In the last generation, balance has won huge cultural resonance. No longer mere cocktail conversation fodder, it has become something like a new inalienable right, creeping into the American ethos if not the Constitution: life, liberty, and the pursuit of balance. Self-actualization and quality time for all!

This hopeful premise, born of the feminist movement, has been promulgated relentlessly since the 1980s by writers like, well, me. (At one point, in the name of balance, I actually diapered my infant daughter on CNN.) The froth fed a sort of industry, as consultants rushed to help businesses help employees balance work and life. That's the point of on-site day care, of breast-feeding rooms, of flextime and telecommuting and take-home dinners from the company cafeteria -- and, more notorious, in days of dotcoms past, of take-your-pet-to-work policies and foosball tables.

But the balance movement is fatally flawed. For those of us trying desperately to keep up with everything that needs doing, it poses two mythical ideals. If we work hard enough at it, one goes, we can have everything. Or if we cut back, we can have just enough to be truly content. The first obliges us to accomplish too much, often at too high a price; the second doesn't let us accomplish enough. Either way, balance is a relic, a fleeting phenomenon of a closed, industrial economy that doesn't apply in a global, knowledge-based world.

There's a better way to think about all this, one that requires us to embrace imbalance. Instead of trying to balance all of our commitments and passions at any one time, let's acknowledge that anything important, and anything done well, demands our full investment. At some times, it may be a demanding child or an unhappy spouse, and the office will suffer. At others, it may be winning the McWhorter account, and child and spouse will have to fend for themselves. Only over time can we really balance a portfolio of diverse experiences.

For now, the balance mania persists: Media mentions have soared in the past five years, and executive coaches say their clients are as consumed by the problem as ever. Employers, meanwhile, are trying desperately to say the right things: Accenture, the big professional-services firm, knows "how important it is for our employees to strike a balance between their work and personal lives." Google offers workers a slew of benefits (On-site dental! Dry cleaning!) billed as "balance enhancers."

But this passion and fury is misspent. All our striving for balance is only making us crazy. Here's how to think about living in a postbalance world.

The Happy Workaholic

Sigmund Freud suggested it first: Imbalance is part of the human condition. The father of psychoanalysis observed that anxiety is a crucial "signal" function, a response to danger -- either external physical danger or internal psychological danger.

That is, anxiety is a central part of our existence. It is a source of creativity and drive; it spurs us to accomplishment. Great leaders, serial innovators, even top sales reps may be driven by a kind of inner demon -- the need to prove themselves, to achieve for fear of being worthless (or, as Freud postulated, for fear of castration).

But it's hard to argue with the result: Such people are incredibly productive. They drive change. And that cuts to the problem with a reductionist view of balance. Simply cutting back on work inevitably fails, because in real life, success in work is predicated on achievement. In a competitive business environment -- which is to say, every business environment -- leadership requires commitment, passion, and, to be blunt, a lot of time.

This isn't a cynical argument in favor of clocking the hours -- though let's face it, in some organizations, that pressure is all too real. Rather, building something great, leading change, truly innovating -- "it's like falling in love. You have to abandon yourself to it," says John Wood. "There's the risk of inherent contradiction between wanting to do something entrepreneurial and wanting to have balance."

Wood is 40 years old. He helped build Microsoft's business in Asia until 1998, when, trekking through Nepal on vacation, he saw villages with few schools and bookless libraries. In response, he started Room to Read, a not-for-profit group that builds schools and libraries and provides books and scholarships to Asian children.

Wood isn't married, though he does date. He loves biking, running, and the annual trek that he takes with friends through Southern Asia. Mostly, though, he loves Room to Read. He'll do 11-hour days in his San Francisco office, have a working dinner, then check email late at night. He works seven days a week, year-round.

"I don't look at balance as an ideal. What I look at is, Am I happy? If the answer is yes, then everything else is inconsequential."

But here's how he thinks about it: "I don't look at balance as an ideal. What I look at is, Am I happy? If the answer is yes, then everything else is inconsequential. If you look at the number of hours I work, it's probably extreme. But those hours talking with an adviser over dinner -- is that work? Well, yeah, but it's also stimulating.

"At Microsoft, my definition of balance was getting a decent number of hours outside the office and off email. Now I don't care about that, because the email I check at midnight may come from a person who says he wants to endow a school in Vietnam. So I can't help but read that email, because it's a chance to change a kid's life."

Most achievers don't work hard just at work. They think about their work a lot of the time outside the office. Even if they acknowledge the value of paying attention to their families or their health, they're consumed -- and thrilled -- by the task at hand. Stewart Friedman, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, and Sharon Lobel of Seattle University have a term for such folks: "happy workaholics."

Friedman, who has long encouraged business leaders to pursue "whole" lives, thinks it's possible for leaders to be "poster children for balance," as he says. But he also agrees that conventional arguments for balance devalue the work half of the equation. "Work is an experience through which much of life's rewards and opportunities for service can be realized," he says. "Creating value for the world, for the next generation, all our high-minded ideals -- much of work has the potential for giving voice to that sort of aspiration. And most executives are passionate about what they do.

"So if people are fulfilled through their work, why do we question that?"

Recruiters Use Google to Screen Job Applicants

2004-10-14T14:39:00.000-07:00

By Erin White
From The Wall Street Journal Online

Executive recruiter Peter Bell recently made an unpleasant discovery on the Internet. He was looking for candidates to fill an investor-relations post at a financial-services firm. To research one promising candidate, Mr. Bell's colleague entered the man's name in Google, the popular Internet search tool. But Google unearthed a surprise: It found another version of the candidate's resume, with two jobs that weren't listed on the resume he'd submitted to the recruiter."He just eliminated them and added a little time to the other jobs," Mr. Bell says. Mr. Bell concluded the man had lost the jobs, and tried to cover it up. Mr. Bell didn't submit the man's name for the job.

Internet searches have become common practice for hiring managers and recruiters, who say the effort sometimes yields useful information about candidates -- things employers wouldn't have learned from a resume and cover letter alone. "Smart hiring managers will always Google their prospective people," says Allison Hemming, president of the Hired Guns, a New York interim-staffing company. "If you've got a sixth sense about somebody and you're not really sure why you're feeling that way, Googling can really help you out in vetting a candidate."At Chicago-based staffing firm Corporate Project Resources Inc., which places marketing professionals in jobs on an interim basis, "Google is something that we use a lot," says Sheri Karley, recruiting manager. Staffers there often perform an Internet search along with a background check and personality test when they screen candidates, Ms. Karley says. But such searches can be a land mine for job-seekers. There's a bevy of information on the Internet, including things you may not realize are out there. Searches can turn up everything from personal Web sites and blogs to old company newsletters to articles you wrote for your college newspaper. "It's almost like a shadow résumé you haven't exactly made but it's following you around," says Pam Dixon, director of the World Privacy Forum, which studies workplace privacy issues. She says some of the worst problems for job-hunters arise when people fire off angry or vulgar e-mails that find their way onto the Internet. "Most Google damage is self-inflicted," Ms. Dixon says. Sometimes the damaging information comes from former employers. Ms. Dixon says she has been contacted by a teacher who was fired from a prior job whose school board included her firing in online meeting minutes. Making matters worse, she has an unusual name. So when prospective employers Google her, the minutes pop right up. "She literally has not found a job because of that," Ms. Dixon said.

So how can you sidestep these pitfalls? First, career advisers recommend, search the Internet yourself to see what's out there about you. Ms. Dixon suggests searching for your name on its own, and also in quotation marks. If anything comes up that could harm your job search, you have a few potential remedies. You can contact the owner of the site, and ask him to remove the information. You can also try contacting Google. If you can't remove the information, prepare a defense in case it comes up in an interview. Come up with an answer that directly addresses the problem, but then segues to a new subject. For instance, if the information involves opinions you'd rather have kept private, "you can turn it into a positive by stating that this is something you feel very passionate about, and remind the person that this is your personal opinion and won't affect your ability" to do your job, Ms. Hemming suggests. Google says people shouldn't blame it for what users find on the web. "Google is a reflection of what's on the Web so if there's information on the particular Web page that they're not comfortable with, then they should contact the site owner," says spokeswoman Eileen Rodriguez.Being the subject of an Internet search can work in a job-seeker's favor in some cases.

Bruce MacEwen, a New York-based consultant who aspires to get a job as an executive director of a law firm, started writing a blog this year about the business side of law firms. This spring, his blog turned up on a Google search done by William Henderson, an associate professor of law at the Indiana University School of Law-Bloomington. Mr. Henderson was devising a new course on the economics and business of law firms, and decided to see what he could find with Google. "I can't believe I found a blog on point," Mr. Henderson recalls thinking. He contacted Mr. MacEwen. The two are now collaborating on a research project and Mr. MacEwen is set to guest lecture in November. And sometimes, just because you're blindsided by a search doesn't mean your job prospects are doomed. A law-school student recently interviewed for a summer position at a law firm. One of her interviewers Googled her and found her blog, which included some critical sentiments about big law firms in general, although not this particular firm. "My face went beet red and I lost all of my concentration" when asked about her blog, she recalls. "I just sort of chuckled -- 'oh ha, isn't that funny.' "She ended up getting an offer. And she took down the blog.

Direct Placement Comes Alive!

2004-10-14T08:21:00.000-07:00

We at Staffing Journal have noticed a shift in the staffing market from temporary and contract labor services, which has been the trend for the last several years, to a demand from customers for specialized search and direct placement. For the Staffing Industry, this paradigm shift poses new challenges. The candidate pool is getting smaller and Recruiters possessing the competency to proactively source and attract top talent are few and far between.

It is a well known fact that Babyboomers are on the move into retirement which will eventually lead to a huge gap in the labor pool. The GenX population has been bruised and battered over the last few years by the downturn in the economy and the loss of high paying jobs they had come to depend on. Remember, these are the candidates that we were all fighting for on college campuses across the country, offering large salaries and compensation packages like never before. Today, these GenX'ers are concerned about stability and work life balance. The BMW sign-on bonus is less important than vacation time and flexible hours. Enticing candidates to make a move will become more and more difficult over the course of the next few years.

This change in thinking will cause candidates to evaluate opportunities based on stability and balance and will create a demand for Recruiters with very specialized skills. This is different from the ".Com" boom when the life was sucked out of the candidate pool. During the ".Com" boom any candidate that met the top 3 requirements of a job was hired at an outrages salary and entered into indentured servitude. Moving forward, as we have begun to see, client companies will be looking for candidates that are the total package and it will take Recruiters using an Executive Search approach to attract them. In the end, finding Recruiters that buy-in to a well defined skill based recruiting methodology will be the ultimate challenge.

Recruiters, as well as candidates, have enjoyed the ride of years gone by. Recruiters are Salespeople and will need to be great Salespeople to compete in the new market. The key to success is going to be developing very specific recruiting niches. Here is a good analogy; If you are a talent scout for a professional football team, it is your job to know every person that has ever touched a football and their skill level, their motivations and what type of environment and coaching it will take to make them successful. Recruiting within a niche is no different. Recruiters in the new market will need to establish themselves as the expert within their niche and be well networked with the best talent.

The new market is going to be difficult and exciting. Be smart, be connected and be nimble. Most importantly have fun!

Blog or not to Blog

2004-10-14T08:10:00.000-07:00

Email article from CrossXroads, which is an excellent article for recruiters using or thinking of using Blogs to find candidates.

A syndicated career columnist just asked about what a blog was and how it might be used in staffing- especially by job seekers. We answered: Just when you finally figured out how to post your resume online and search for jobs on multiple-sites. Just when you thought you caught the biggest wave in networking history and could link from one 'friend of a friend' to one of their friends to the company where you really want to work. Just when you were getting comfortable with all those online screening interviews, virtual job fairs, instant background checks, company research sites and web-based career management tips, along comes - 'recruiter blogs'.

Blog. The sounds like an early title for a Sci-Fi movie starring Steve McQueen but it might be better to think of it as a contraction of Web & Log, an Online Diary that comes complete with a selection of 'paper' colors and formats. Anyone who ever enjoyed putting their thoughts down on paper and is still anal enough to keep doing it day after day after day is a sure fire candidate to become a 'blogger'.The reason why blogging isn't quite as analogous to keeping a diary as it should be is that a (paper) diary is typically thought of as private but, online, if you are willing to go to all that trouble of writing on the web, why would you hide it? Let everyone see it - and everyone does. And not only can the world share your thoughts, they can also tell you what they think about them (your thoughts).Every 'posting' you make to your blog is a two-way discussion between you and your fans (they must be fans if they bother to read what you wrote). You might return to your last posting to find (possibly) dozens of comments assuming you want to create an open dialogue with just about everyone. Finally, if you happen to like to read a blog or two yourself, every day but hate the inconvenience of navigating to multiple sites you can download software (RSS, atom) that helps you control, keep track of your favorite blogs, learn when new postings are up and even import them and format them for your own custom news feed. Essentially you can tell your computer "Hey fella, go out on the web and check my favorite diaries and if something new has been added, bring it to me and format it this way."The really nice (but still unappreciated) feature that this 'pull' technology offers is privacy. It means you can monitor information sources without disclosing who you are and without giving your email to someone who might misuse it.

So, how do employers benefit by blogging? Several recruiters at Microsoft are pioneering the answer to this question by creating an open dialogue with potential candidates. Heather Hamilton, a Sr. Microsoft recruiter, and her colleagues Zoe Goldring and Gretchen Ledgard have been sharing what they think it really takes to compete for a position at Microsoft and perform once it has been won with 10s of thousands of 'readers'. Each handles it with a style that is uniquely their own (i.e. that means try not to do what they do). They respond to questions and comments openly and publicly. The bottom-line is they keep the most qualified candidates engaged and interested until the right position comes along. They offer honest feedback and guidance to folks who may never compete effectively for a job at Microsoft. They share personal opinions about their company, their work, the people they meet and the teams they support. Most firms wouldn't tolerate having their recruiters publicly engaging in an 'unfiltered' Q&A with outsiders without having a lawyer present but, Microsoft seems to embrace the notoriety and knows how to hire and retain empowered recruiters. Obviously their leaders trust their judgment and ability to maintain a credible dialogue without putting their firm at risk. This is a brilliant bit of strategy to build a real 'community' among prospective candidates and manage them as a 'pipeline' because the price of entry is too high for most firms to contemplate (unfortunately).This is not your (grand) fathers hiring process.Why we don't think blogs will become the tool of choice anytime soon is that recruiters wasting their time trying to search millions of blogs for the 'right' candidate just isn't how this tool should be used- unless of course the job requires writing blogs. Having found the finalist for a position however, it would be easy (maybe too easy) for a recruiter to research candidates by reading their blogs but, unfortunately, that wouldn't be a good thing either because the typical blog is going to contain a lot of personal information that has no relevance to their ability to perform.I

n an excellent article by, Kris Maher, in his Wall Street Journal column, The Jungle, last Tuesday, he stated that many 'experts' predicted that blogs could become the "next wave in electronic recruiting, following job boards and corporate career sites." We couldn't disagree more. Blogs are too labor intensive and, coupled with the discipline imposed by a 'diary' format, the number of recruiters who can exploit the form credibly are few and far between. The comments we made when Kris interviewed us for the article were that "This is an untapped resource for managing a pipeline of candidates," and "The use of blogs by corporate recruiters is still in its infancy - more companies (will) experiment with the interactive format."We would advise jobseekers to put their blogs on hold while seeking a position (or keep them confidential until they land) and suggest employees to be careful what they say about their firms even if they write their blogs on their own time.For corporate recruiters, the fundamental element to a successful blog is to speak 'honestly' and this will be too risky for most. But, for the willing, a blog offers a critical edge in engaging the most qualified candidates early and managing them in a pipeline for a firm's future openings. For most firms though, their experiment will fail when either a recruiter's poor judgment or the firm's legal beagles shut it down.

Our First Posting

2004-10-13T11:03:00.000-07:00

Welcome to The Staffing Journal,

This blog was created with Recruiters in mind. It is a forum for sharing all of your vast knowledge of Staffing and Human Resources. Please feel free to post Jobs, thoughts and comments you may have related to trends and industry intelligence. Above all else, network and have fun!