FORTIFY YOUR OASIS

R.I.P.

2009-06-26T08:44:00.001+01:00

RSS Readers may need to click through to the post

Digging up dirt on Job Applicants

2009-06-23T07:30:00.002+01:00

I spotted this on Techdirt ...

The city of Bozeman, Montana is getting serious about digging up potential dirt on its future employees. As part of the application form, you have to sign a waiver allowing city officials to probe into: "background, references, character, past employment, education, credit history, criminal or police records." Okay, nothing particularly unusual there.

But the the form goes on to require you to: "list any and all, current personal or business websites, web pages or memberships on any Internet-based chat rooms, social clubs or forums, to include, but not limited to: Facebook, Google, Yahoo, YouTube.com, MySpace, etc.,"

Oh and did we forget to mention? Also all your login details and passwords. Hmmmmm.

Isn't it almost always government agencies who leave the unencrypted laptop on the bus with all the details anyone would need to pull off a full-scale identity theft on you?

Would you be happy to provide all that access to, say ... your mother?

Now that web users are so interconnected through social networking sites, wouldn't there be a problem in terms of the privacy of all of my contacts? People link with me on Linkedin on the strict understanding that I'm not going to provide their details to anyone else without their explicit permission.

It's hard to use Al Qaeda to justify this kind of intrusiveness and I'd be interested to see an audit that demonstrated that the quality and integrity of government employees went significantly upwards as a result of using hiring methods like these. In the past, I've come across situations where companies used private detectives to probe into senior executives' backgrounds prior to hiring them. I have no idea if that information was then ever used, or distributed, inappropriately. But in the analogue world, it was unlikely that the investigation would extend into gathering private data about those executives' friends and colleagues.

This is a very thin line and I'm not sure where it should be drawn. In Singapore, where there are state-monitored CCTV cameras everywhere, there is little or no crime and the line taken is, "I have nothing to fear because I have nothing to hide." But what if the good Burghers of Bozeman started noticing a trend toward hiring only devout followers of a certain Belief? We might note that the Mayor and the Aldermen [or whatever] were staunch followers of this Belief and appeared to be populating the City Hall with like-minded folk. Would that be okay? Or how about if we noticed that blue-eyed, blonde, caucasian people of a certain minimum height were the only ethnic group ever hired by City Hall? [I love the line in Willy deVille's Southern Politician: "Cos his brother, the sheriff, is head of the Klan ... "]

The reason this kind of thing is not a good idea is that it is simply too open to the operation of unconscious bias. We've all seen the surveys about facial hair, heavyset candidates and Grace Kelly look-alikes. We are human; present us with too little information and we will make bad choices. Present us with too much information, or information that is inappropriate to our decision-making process, and I wonder what kind of choices we'll make?

RSS Readers may need to click through to the post

UPDATE: Mr Murph informs us that the rocket scientists at Bozeman have now backed down on this stipulation; but not before we got a bunch of very thought-provoking and hilarious comments – treat yourself to a little read below.

Father's Day

2009-06-22T08:00:00.002+01:00

It was Father's Day yesterday and I had a lovely fuss made of me by all the women in my life, apart from the dog, who still seems to be convinced that I am going to tear her throat out with my teeth any moment now. Breakfast consisted of Wine Gums and Jaffa Cakes, delivered by Jane, aged 9. Actual breakfast was a big fry-up plus scrambled eggs with lashings of butter made by Lynn, aged 11. Then I was handed another cup of tea and the newspaper and carefully directed to the couch. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop but it never did. A gentle, floating and happy day.

My Pop missed Father's Day by a few weeks in the year that he died and I can't remember the one before that. His birthday was three days before he died and I do remember that, but rather painfully. Sage words of his have come back to me in dribs and drabs over the years since he died:

Measure three times, cut once, you'll probably still get it wrong but at least you will have a good reason to be annoyed.

When in doubt, cut less rather than more – adding timber back on to a plank is a tricky business.

It is perfectly acceptable for a gentleman to shout, "FUUUUUUUUCK!" when he hits his thumb with a hammer, even when ladies are present. [Pop never actually passed this maxim on directly, I picked it up through osmosis and observation].

When you are working at the top of a ladder, bring an extra screw/nail/bolt with you, unless it's a tall ladder, in which case bring two.

Jazz must never be listened to quietly. Speaker drivers can always be replaced.

Do not place loose glazed ornaments on shelves near speakers.

In a garage, never complain to the guy with grease under his fingernails – this is not snobbery, this is simply recognising who has the power to help you.

Always be nice to the guy with grease under his fingernails, along with everyone else you meet. Ask them their names, tell them yours and get to know them over time.

Be a gentleman and a gentle man. [Again, he never said that one out loud, he just demonstrated it every day].

The Peter Principle turns 40

2009-06-15T07:00:00.001+01:00

From the Sunday Times:

BEWARE THE ACCIDENTAL MANAGER

People are still being promoted beyond their abilities, 40 years after a book highlighted the problem, writes John Cradden

It's hard to view the Zune as anything other than a product of Pointy-Haired-Boss thinking.

The timing is probably a coincidence, but it's remarkable all the same. Just as we are witnessing the fallout from a prolonged period of disastrous financial management, a ground-breaking business book about incompetence has been republished in a 40th anniversary edition. The Peter Principle, written as a satire by Canadians Laurence Peter and Raymond Hull, argued that in a typical workplace hierarchy, most people will advance to their highest level of competence and then be promoted to and remain at a level at which they are incompetent. The implication of this is that productive work is only ever managed by those who have not yet reached their full potential.

"People have been poking fun at the concept of the worthless boss for a long, long time," said Rowan Manahan, a consultant and founder of career management firm Fortify Services. "I've seen cartoons from the Victorian era in Punch deriding the uselessness of the top-hatted factory manager. Peter's genius was that he took a commonly observed problem, gave it a memorable name, and built a following for the concept on that basis."

Since the book was first published, the corporate world has changed beyond recognition and management structures are far more flexible that the old, rigid hierarchies of the 1960s, but it is widely agreed that the book is actually more relevant today than ever.

... Manahan says the job of management has evolved into a role that also requires leadership, team-building and coaching – skills that are hard to measure. In terms of explaining how financial institutions around the world lost the run of themselves, management experts agree that straightforward incompetence was a factor, but not the only one.

... Manahan says it was likely that many in senior management positions simply did not understand the complex financial instruments that brought about the troubles in the banking sector, but felt under pressure to "join the race" anyway. "The Peter Principle had a role in all this, but greed and fear were probably larger contributor than simple incompetence," he said.

... Manahan says competency-based interviewing techniques can help to weed out unworthy candidates. "Modern behavioural interviewing techniques, particularly when built from the ground up for each defined role, are far better at eliciting a candidate's mindset when it comes to the typical tasks and problems they will face in the new role," he said. "For example, it is amazing how few people provide a good answer to a basic question about how to deal with an underperforming employee."

Although it has stood the test of time over 40 years, The Peter Principle may be in danger of being usurped by The Dilbert Principle, in which cartoonist Scott Adams states that organisations promote their least competent employees into management, "where they can do the least harm."

"I think Adams has taken on Laurence Peter's mantle very comfortably," said Manahan. "He holds up a clear mirror to modern corporate life and I'm sure I could run very effective management seminars using only Dilbert cartoons as my teaching tools." He says the former CEO of General Electric, Jack Welch, seemed to accept The Dilbert Principle because of his 'Rank & Yank' approach to culling middle management. This involved replacing 10% of the employees in an organisation every year as a matter of course. "If those middle managers had been truly competent, GE should have collapsed. Interestingly, it did quite the opposite," said Manahan.

Related Posts:
Impostor Syndrome
Michael Wade on 'should' versus 'reality'
Stress due to promotion

TEDx Dublin Overview and Pics

2009-06-12T23:30:00.005+01:00

So ... I'm a TEDster.

Just back in from TEDx Dublin. I'll provide more detail in a later posting, but here's a quick overview. 100 or so of us in the auditorium in the Science Gallery in Dublin, with an overflow video feed room next door. Three speakers and two video talks for an excellent hour and 40 minutes in all.

TEDx Dublin twittered its way into life as a result of Dr Aaron Quigley from my alma mater sticking a couple of 140 character musings up into the cloud some 18 days ago. Some of the nice folks in the Science Gallery saw his, "Wouldn't it be cool if ...?" tweets and said, "Why, you can do the show right here in the barn!" [pretty nice barn by the way] then TED HQ said, "You've got some peeps? You've got a barn? A speaker or two? Go fer it dude!" [I may be paraphrasing fractionally, but you catch my drift]

Dr Scott Rickard kicked then night off with a jaw-dropping demonstration of his sound separation software, DUET. My takeaways:

Someone putting on a Michael Bolton track in your house is grounds for justifiable homicide.
Subtraction and division are advanced mathematics. Knowing that, I feel so much better about my performance in secondary school.
Scott did a canned demo of the separation on the fly with a John Coltrane track. This was just a piece of a track from a Coltrane CD that he ripped and then did his separation magic on:

Red for sax, yellow for piano, cyan for bass and blue for drums. He then topped that in a big way by getting three TEDsters to babble into a fixed stereo mic in three languages (Spanish, Irish and, unless I am sorely mistaken, Klingon) and then separated out the sources - perfectly! - live and on the spot. I'll never feel safe grousing at a family party again.

First video talk was the demo of the Sixth Sense by Pattie Maes from the Fluid Interfaces Group at MIT Media Lab. A great talk, if you haven't seen it already - link here.

Then our tame Kiwi, Mark Billinghurst from the HIT Lab NZ at the University of Canterbury gave an excellent overview of the background, relevance, and future applicability of Accessible Augmented Reality. "Bringing AR to the Masses" looked at getting over the technology, will and funding hurdles for this world-changing interface. I liked his read on the Gartner Hype Cycle and the trough of disillusionment [isn't that The Dip by a much longer name?] as it applied to his technology:

His video clips were excellent and I look forward to seeing them again when TEDx Dublin is hosted and posted. I loved the fact that all this arose because Mark was disappointed to find that the VR holographic communication from Star Wars did not exist in reality.

I look forward to the Virtual IKEA catalogue. Mark finished with some very cool lessons learnt from his time working on this Reality:

Video number two was the infectious and effervescent Robert Full talking about Biomutualism – where evolution can teach engineers and vice versa. A fascinating talk on the adhesive power of the Geckos's foot and the multivarious functionality of its tail and how the engineers learnt so much from the biologists in this mutual exploration.

The final speaker of the night was Blaise Aguera y Arcas [he of the amazing Photosynth demo from TED 2007] talking about recent developments in that space in a talk entitled: Cyberspace arriving - Using computer vision to reconstruct and connect the world.

Blaise gave us some insight into the challenges underlying the Photosynth project. Yes, there are 88,000 images of Piazza Navona available after a simple Bing search [ :) ], but the vast majority of them are below 1 megapixel (way too small) and nearly all of them are taken from the same shooting position (way too lacking in imagination), with the result that you end up with a few major clusters of information, but far too many disconnects to synthesise the pics. He illustrated this problem with some analysis of the pics available for Ta Prohm, one of the lesser-known temples at Angkor Wat:

A couple of nice big detailed clusters (basically the front and back doors) with a little bit of 'connective tissue' between them, but nowhere near enough to make for a comprehensive synth. You simply cannot wander around Angkor Wat using Flickr photos.

Bummer.

However, he noted that the very existence of the PhotoSynth technology and site is causing some photographers to alter their behaviour and showed examples of individuals who had become almost Terminator-like with their grids of shots of major locations – systematically quartering the site from every angle.

An excellent talk, showing us the potential of this exciting new tool. As Blaise put it,

"PhotoSynth can grant us superpowers. Soon, we will be able to teleport anywhere in the world, extending our abilities and our senses, our perceptions and understanding of the world around us."

Roll on TEDx Dublin 2 ...

A stirring tale

2009-06-12T11:00:00.001+01:00

Luke Leslie has just graduated from Film School here in Ireland and his graduate film, King of the Waves, has been accepted for screening at the Galway Film Festival. It's a short about a retired World War 2 submarine commander, Bill King's, participation in The Golden Globe in 1969 – a solo circumnavigation sailing race.

In the southern Indian Ocean, 700km from land, King's boat was holed by a great white shark and Luke's film explores the aftermath of that encounter. Here's the trailer:

RSS Readers may need to click through to the post

Commander King's poem, 'The Wheeling Stars,' really struck a chord with me, despite my avowed landlubber status. I reproduce it here from the production pack of the KOTW film, and Commander King's book, The Wheeling Stars. Enjoy.

The breathless beauty of the wheeling stars.
The flaming glory of the northern lights.
The muted thunder in a doldrum cloud.
Piled up, evolving, undershot by sun.
Sailor give hail, these works are your bounty, and your grail.

Disclosure: Luke is my godson and I am bursting with pride at his achievement in conceiving of, and making, this stunning film. You can read more about Commander King's extraordinary story starting here.

Sucking up (brown-nosing) to your boss

2009-06-11T08:30:00.004+01:00

To suck up or not? What is sucking up? Where is the line between good corporate citizen and unashamed ass-kisser? I had some fun with Tom Dunne [who is forced to share a bed with George the tiger teddy cat] on Newstalk radio on this topic, poring over this subject in our usual high-brow, academically sound way:

RSS Readers may need to click through to the post.

Alternatively, you can try "radical honesty," as per the ever-anxious Eli in Lie To Me:

You're like Gandhi. Except you don't look like a malnourished old man.

(on first meeting a female colleague) I want to seep with you.

You look terrible, awful, like Gene Simmons went really, really humid.

Your office looks like the one of a serial killer.

The Carnival of HR

2009-06-10T12:26:00.008+01:00

23 contributors to the Carny this time around. A varied and eclectic bunch with light, heavy and fully caffeinated posts abounding. Without further ado, enjoy folks ...

Kicking off then with Steve Boese's corporate culture post over at his HR Technology blog. In the good old days of paper memos, the question would be, "I don't care what the memo says, who else has seen this?" Steve looks forward to a day when asking that question will seem ridiculous.

Susan at About HR looking at creative training programmes for tough times – "Challenging organisations to look more broadly at what entails training and development for employees beyond traditional classes and seminars."

Mark Vickers at i4cp asks the question "How do companies treat and retain high-potential employees in these difficult times?"

Pithy thoughts from the Eclectipundit in a love letter (of sorts) from an HR Guy to the General Manager. I liked: "Success is in direct proportion with how one handles failure."

Cathy Martin over at Profitability Through Human Capital says, "Table schmable! Forget about the seat at the supposed table. Just get on with it – shine, don't whine."

I really enjoyed this needed-to-be-said, common sense post from fellow curmudgeon Chris Young over at Maximize Possibility – "Generation Y should not be treated differently than other generation. The same standards apply to all generations in the workplace. Perform first - then get."

Dan McCarthy over at Great Leadership with some stellar leadership advice from some recent commencement speeches and provides an excellent summary of his own.

Nick Jefferson is not a happy puppy – "Why should HR have to defend the indefensible?"

Wally Bock spotted a wretched story about Harvard's current crop of MBA grads in the New York Times. Some of them will take an oath at graduation to "serve the greater good" and thus help bring down an "era of immorality." Are you impressed? Mr Bock was not.

There's an old workplace adage that you should be nice to the IT Department, because without a working PC and network access, you are toast. Imagine how scary it must be when you get the HR Department angry with you - they can make you disappear! Mark Stelzner over at Inflexion Point has five suggestions on how you can commit suicide via HR.

Meg Bear from Talented Apps on the subject of managing your energy – "The post talks about how the ebb and flow of our energy can affect our productivity and ways we can purposefully manage our energy to minimise the downtime."

Ann Bares at Compensation Force on the death knell for and old standard – "Arising from discussions at the recent WorldatWork conference – we may be seeing the end of (or at least a move away from) merit increases."

Lisa Rosendahl with a new, measured, look at trust – "It's the little things that can be so significant and trust is something that is earned. Do your homework and own responsibility for your actions."

Jon Ingham over at Strategic HCM on invertebrate HR professionals – "I was feeling rather uncomfortable having just accused some HR people of being paid too much, and felt that I needed to explain my reasoning. I probably didn't help myself by going on to call them spineless as well, but it was too good a title to waste." Priceless!

Frank from Talent in China with a post is based on the idea that teams energise us, but not necessarily always, and not necessarily for the reasons we imagine.

Margaret O'Hanlon has some very interesting thoughts arising from Judge Sotomayor's nomination to the Supreme Court over at the Compensation Cafe. "The posting includes thoughts on tangling with regulations, the importance of employee development and how rich we have all become from the opportunities that we are offered by Human Resources’ work."

Nina Simosko on the power and biology of empathy in the workplace ... "a piece inspired by President Obama's expressed desire for a Supreme Court justice with judicial empathy."

Jessica Lee received a letter of introduction/recommendation from a candidate's boyfriend. I know times are tough but come off it! ...

Michael Moore with an interesting take on reality TV and its implications for Child Labour Laws. Lord, I never thought of it that way before.

A reader had asked The HR Store for their take on a ‘big shoes to fill’ situation. "I understand this is a scenario that doesn’t necessary occur at the management cadre, but across all levels." Interesting stuff!

Jason Pankow with a common dilemma over at Fistful of Talent – the employee who does good work when they are in the office … but they just aren’t in the office with any kind of reliability.

Me here at the Oasis with some thoughts on when we should teach the basics of corporate deportment and survival - pick it up on the job, during orientation (formally by HR) or should these fundamentals be addressed in the education years?

And last, but very much not least Gautam Ghosh on "how managers need to set clear ‘result’ oriented KRAs for employees and not overload the goal sheet with ‘processes’ he/she wants institutionalised."

Presenting - they shouldn't notice your technology

2009-06-09T00:20:00.003+01:00

I loved Laura Bergell's response to the oh-so common request: "Great presentation! Can I have a copy of your slides?" Laura's answer is: "My PowerPoint slides are my props. They're not my presentation."

I get asked for my slides every now and then. Usually the asker says they want to use them to persuade people in their company that there is a way of presenting that doesn't require an endless stream of text. While it's flattering to be asked, I usually gently deflect the request by sending the person to my blog and/or to my public presentations on SlideShare.

On one hand, I echo Laura's sentiment – my presentations usually make no sense at all if you read them as a standalone – but there's more to the question than that. Broadly speaking, I have noticed that I get asked for a copy of my slides by four types of people:

Competitors who are looking for free materials.

Potential clients who are looking for free advice.

Potential clients who want to evangelise in their company using the material.

Techies, who want to play with the toys and who want to see how we have built the presentation.

When any of those groups ask me for a copy of my slides, I usually have a slight pang of disappointment, as I have the feeling that the graphics and technology may have distracted the asker from whatever message I was propounding. *

The technology must never, never, distract from the message. Because the vast majority of PowerPoints are nothing more than an AutoCue for the presenter, if they are heeded at all, they distract by irritating the audience. That's why a graphic-rich presentation still stands out a mile. But it's also why you have to be so careful in building a low-text presentation. We've all seen presenters who are trying, but who don't quite make it:

Distracting or pointless visuals.

Noticeable transitions or animations. [As a rule of thumb, if you ever find yourself wondering "How did s/he do that?" the animation is too obtrusive]

Lack of cohesion in the visuals – a hodge-podge of clipart, stock photos, stick figures and Google Image/Flickr grabs.

Clashing colours.

Inappropriate fonts.

Interesting little clip from MSNBC on a fairly well-known presenter whose use of technology is becoming noticeable and sometimes distracting ...

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

RSS Readers may need to click through to the post

On one hand, Mr Obama's detractors are working very hard to place this he-can't-speak-without-the-Prompter concept into the zeitgeist; presumably in an attempt to distract from the message he is propounding. It's hard to view this as anything but sore-loser, mealy-mouthed talk, especially given that no modern President opens his mouth in front of any audience without prepared remarks sitting in front of him. I would also make the point that any senior executive is wasting time if they are learning off speaking points for minor events – and if The West Wing illustrated anything, it was that the President of the United States spends a whole lot of time speaking to hockey teams and primary school groups – all of which makes using the Prompter the sensible thing to do.

On the other hand, Mr Obama's detractors have a point – not because he relies heavily on the Prompter, but because he doesn't use it very well and, for his less-than-soaring rhetorical moments, that can distract from his message. I haven't noticed him 'blow it' on the prompter during an important speech, but his ping-pong head movement does become noticeable when I see him doing minor stuff under the 24 hour glare of coverage.

Slot a few hours into the schedule here and there, get a few straight-talking experts to instil improved skills in this area into him, and let's start listening more closely to what the man has to say.

The technology must never distract from the message.

Related Posts:
Prepared remarks - Richard Nixon
Getting distracted by Phil Schiller

* Oh, and my other answer to people looking for my slides? "It's a Keynote file. Do you use Keynote?" That eliminates more than 90% of requests straight off ...

Lying in the job-hunt - a tangled web we weave

2009-06-08T00:30:00.002+01:00

From the Sunday Times:

APPRENTICE'S CV FIBS ARE COMMON IN IRELAND

Recruiter says more than half of all job-seekers embellish skills and fill out career gaps. By Gabrielle Monaghan

Tighe was caught out when grilled on her employment history by Sugar's team.

Lorraine Tighe, the Westmeath-raised mother-of-two who missed out on tonight’s final of The Apprentice when she was fired by Sir Alan Sugar last week, is not alone in overstating her work history on a CV.

New research shows that more than half of Irish CVs contain fibs, with candidates claiming everything from the ability to speak fluent Japanese to spending a year backpacking in Australia when they were in prison. Tighe was accused of overstating her work history by a year. As part of its registration process, Grafton Recruitment interviewed 3,600 job candidates who sent in CVs over a three-month period.

...

Rowan Manahan, a careers consultant who sits on interview panels and checks out CVs for employers, agrees that job applicants are being generous with the truth. He regularly encounters “barefaced lying” on job applications and CVs. The most common lies are candidates turning diplomas into degrees and vamping up job titles to make it seem they had greater responsibility in a previous role.

“The candidates who are two years or so out of college will chance it quite a bit,” said Manahan. “With the degree of CV embellishment in the accountancy and legal professions, you’d think from the experience they put down, that they were running entire departments.”

“Making up a hobby is an invitation to interviewers to suck away at your own credibility. If you say you’re into sailing, rugby or martial arts when you’re not, there’s a good chance someone on the panel will share your interest. If they turn out to be a fanatic about sailing and your knowledge of the subject would fit on the back of a matchbox, you’ll look like a proper eejit.”

Manahan attributes such fabrications to people with a “huge sense of self-entitlement” who are used to being rewarded when they don’t deserve it. He acknowledges that record unemployment has encouraged job-seekers to do anything it takes to land a post. “These embellishments happen in a healthy market too, but it’s happening much more now,” he said. “In straitened times, anxious people will chance their arm more. But my mantra is that if you have to lie to get your foot in the door, it’s not the job for you.”

Full article here.

Here comes the Carny!

2009-06-06T17:00:00.000+01:00

I'm hosting the Carnival of HR here next week. Please submit your entries by close of business on Tuesday June the 9th, along with a short note about your thoughts/reasons for writing the post. I'm waxing my moustache even as I write ...

It does what it says on the tin

2009-06-05T13:00:00.002+01:00

Not always:

I love the expressions on the kids faces in the reality shot [click to enlarge].

Now repeat after me ... #2

2009-06-05T07:30:00.002+01:00

Could of

I see this one all the time. "Could of ... might of ... should of" "I could of been a contender!"

I can only guess that this arises because the ~~writers~~ perpetrators haven't spent much of their lives doing any reading at all. Yes, I realise it sounds like "could of" to your ear, but what it is is an abbreviated form of "could have" – "could've." Now, your curmudgeonly scribe here isn't particularly enamoured with the spoken form of "could've" in the first instance, but trust me when I tell you that the majority of CV readers who are even remotely literate hate this particular error in your writing.

Just look at it for a moment – could of – and explain to me how that combination of words makes any sense at all.

This one also crops up among what I call 'First Drafters' – ~~writers~~ perpetrators who bang down whatever stream of consciousness pops into their head and then hit the 'print' or 'send' button without reading their efforts even once.

To the perpetrators of this particular atrocity, I have a suggestion – stop saying, "could've" in your daily speech. "Could have" is far more aurally pleasing and you will sound better-spoken. What are you saving with that abbreviation, maybe a quarter of a second? Exactly what do you intend doing with that saved time? Discovering a cure for cancer perhaps? Slow down a little and speak properly and then you might start to write properly. If you're not sure about your past usage on this one, do a search within a few of your documents for the word "of" and see what precedes it.

Up with this I will not put!

Vizzini: "He didn't fall? In-con-ceiv-able!"
Inigo: "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

Situation wanted

2009-06-04T23:55:00.003+01:00

Remember that old trick of advertising your availability to the jobs market?

A little different. A lot different. Niiiiiiiice!

H/T: Mr G.

An Apprentice lying on their CV - again!

2009-06-04T07:45:00.002+01:00

Apprentice wannabe Lorraine Tighe is caught LYING on her CV (The Sun)

What do these people think they are doing? I have long since stopped following The Apprentice in all its forms, because it is as unrealistic, staged and pointless as Big Brother and the candidates are screened to produce good television rather than be any sort of sane or sensible applicant. But then, lo and behold, I came across another one of these dingbats lying on their CV in a newsfeed last night. Whatever about playing the odds in the real world, where overworked HR staff may not have the time to chase down every detail on your CV, what do these clowns think is going to happen when a horde of BBC researchers have pored over every full stop and comma?

The candidate in question, Ms Tighe, had six wins under her belt during the series, but described her CV as being "a bit watery" and "a graveyard of skeletons" to the other candidates in advance of the interviews. Opening statement from one of the interviewers:

"Lorraine, I've read your CV and I've had an opportunity to look at your Personal Statement and I wonder whether you're ... a bit delusional."

And one of the others:

"If intuition is your gift, I wonder why you didn't use it to put your correct dates of employment down on your CV? ... You overstated the duration of your current employment by 12 months."

Now okay, let's be generous and assume that Lorraine is merely very careless indeed, and that the extra 12 months was a big fat typo. The programme is so heavily edited, you can't judge the candidate's body language and reactions to the questions and statements of the interviewers, so I don't know if her bleak, hopeless grin and incessant self-grooming was in response to the interviewers spotting errors/lies on her CV or a lump of the space station falling out of the sky in front of her.

Lorraine's comment to the other candidates after one of the more 'searching' interviews:

"Horrendous. Horrendous! I tell you what – it's really made me think about my CV for anything else in the future."

It's a bit late now! Once more from the top. Ahem, ahem:

IF YOU HAVE TO LIE TO GET YOUR FOOT IN THE DOOR, THIS ISN'T THE JOB FOR YOU. REALLY.
YOUR CV HAS TO SPEAK FOR YOU. IT HAS TO SPEAK TO PEOPLE WHO DON'T GIVE A DAMN WHETHER YOU LIVE OR DIE. THEREFORE IT MUST BE IMPECCABLE AND YOU MUST BE ABLE TO STAND OVER EVERY SYLLABLE AND PUNCTUATION MARK IN IT.
IF YOU ARE NOT WILLING TO PUT THAT LEVEL OF EFFORT INTO YOUR OWN CV, FOR YOUR OWN JOB-HUNT, ON YOUR OWN BEHALF, WHAT CONCLUSION IS THE READER GOING TO COME TO?

The written stage is where most of the horses fall. Often as many as 90 percent. If that is happening to you in applying for jobs that you are suitably qualified and experienced for, start with the assumption that there is something wrong with your CV and FIX it! Note the careful word choice - FIX, in boldface italics; not FUDGE, FIX!

Related Posts:
"I swam Mount Everest - Lying on your CV"
Looking at the implications of lying on your CV
Dealing with gaps on your CV

Hair matters - there should be an elective

2009-06-03T08:00:00.003+01:00

High ponytail or low ponytail? Or are they both too girlish and distracting?

Lots of posts out there at the moment on the subject of looking your best – both for day-to-day work and for job-hunting. It would appear that sartorial matters matter when times are tough. I liked this one from corporette.com, commented on most astutely by Michael over at Work Matters:

Law schools need to teach at least one course on real life. They could fold all of this kind of thing into the course: office politics, the ethics of being an associate, ponytail or no ponytail. Stuff about survival. Maybe call it, thinking as I tap this out, "Survivor." Or law firms should offer a course to new lawyers. People are so afraid to talk about these obvious issues for fear of upsetting someone. Attorneys and would-be lawyers never get a class on what we really need to know.

High ponytail or low ponytail? This stuff matters. Ties – what about arching the necktie? Why does this stuff matter so much? Because language was a very late development in our evolution, whereas sight happened way back when. In reading around the subject of dyslexia, I came across an astounding reference - for every language processing brain cell we have in our head, there are 1.6 billion visual processing cells. Billion with a B. So yes, the visual stuff really, really matters folks.

I have long maintained that there should be a fourth R in education – Reading, Writing, 'Rithmetic and 'Reer Management. A lot of colleges offer outreach lectures in which the staff from the career centre talk about CVs, interviews and the practicalities of job-hunting. Useful and better than nothing, but not nearly enough. I think there should be a series of lectures and discussions on the practicalities of navigating the office minefield built in to your course of study:

Dress sense
Meeting ettiquette
Cogent writing
Communicating politically – when to email, when to phone, and when to do it face to face
Presentation skills
Networking
Dealing with bullying and harassment
And so on ...

I wrote about this some time back – what do you think? What would you include in such a programme for undergraduates and why?

H/T: Execupundit for the ponytail piece and Cultural Offering for the tie piece

Pitching - Dragon's Den

2009-05-29T00:30:00.002+01:00

A great spoof on the BBC's Dragon's Den with our intrepid entrepreneurs making just the slightest of boo-boos in the midst of an otherwise flawless pitch:

RSS Readers may need to click through to the post

I particularly love the profuse sweating. Saddlebags!

For a further treat, you can click on through to this charity special Dragon's Den, in which a Victorian gentleman named Krapper pitches a "home body-waste dispenser," seeking an investment of eight shillings and sixpence ha'penny - well worth your click methinks.

A tale of two projects

2009-05-28T23:00:00.001+01:00

Superb slideshow from Deity level Analyst Declan Chellar, showing the advantage of pausing for a moment to gain clarity and perspective before proceeding with your project. Three very worthwhile minutes of your time.

The money-quote as I imagine it:

"Oh! You want them to be alive when they get to the other side? Pity you never mentioned anything about that in your specs. Oh well ..."

Plus, Declan draws all his own cartoons for his presentations. Clunk-click.

Was it something I said?

2009-05-27T07:40:00.003+01:00

I opened my Blogger dashboard on Sunday night to be confronted with a rather ugly message from those nice folks at Google inquiring as to whether I was a real person because my blog had been flagged as a possible spam blog by their fiendishly clever little bots. So, apologies for the silence for the past few days, but I had to prove to those nice folks [or perhaps to one of their not so nice bots] that I am in fact a sentient, carbon-based, opinionated, life form.

My mother-in-law calls my efforts here at the Oasis my "Blob." She is completely sincere in her inquiries and her interest - "Did you hear? Rowan's blob has been nominated for best business blob again!" but apparently what I do here is blobbing.

Maybe she knows something I don't ... Perhaps the Googlebots know something I don't ... I keep feeling around the base of my skull for a jack socket, but thus far ... nothing. But then again, there wouldn't be, would there ...?

Interviewing off the cuff

2009-05-27T07:00:00.004+01:00

Are you ready to do a job interview? Right now?

Most people answer, “No” to that question, citing the need to conduct research into the organisation and its surrounding sector before being ready to go in and really sell themselves.

Fair enough.

But what would happen if the CEO of a whizz-bang company you’d love to work for sat down next to you at a dinner party? How would you sell yourself then? He or she isn’t going to be impressed by your deep knowledge of the choke-points in the distribution channel or the implications of a new technology launched by a competitor. They’re going to be impressed by a switched-on mind, by a sense that you like to make a real contribution in your work, and by a memorable presence – in short, a person who knows themself, and knows what they can do.

We’re back in Elevator Sales Pitch country here – are you ready to pitch that idea you have for a movie, with no notice at all, when you find yourself standing beside Steven Spielberg for 60 seconds? In the “Please buy me” version of a short-notice interview pitch, it’s more about you and your energy than about any particular idea, but whatever the discussion turns to, it’s all about being ready to be the best version of yourself.

Why is this so difficult? It's difficult because this is alien language – we do not speak these self-promoting words in any setting other than a job interview. As such, the language has to be dredged up, dusted off and practised if you need it to work for you. Most of us can talk with a fair degree of fluency about the tasks and day to day responsibilities of what we do. Where I see candidates falling down most often in interview is in talking about themselves, simply because they do not have vocabulary top-of-mind available to do so.

I advise clients to redress this in two ways:

Pick a handful of companies you would love to work for and start building a dossier on each of them. That way, if you are presented with an opportunity, whether formal or informal, you can have an intelligent and relevant discussion with a Player from any of those companies.

More importantly, start a dossier on yourself. Do a profiling exercise and convert that rather clinical language into good, conversational language. Grab and remember compliments – cluster them under different headings. Track your suggestions, contributions and accomplishments in your current role. Capture the language that people use when they talk about you. This is your script, and by that, I don't mean some lump of text that you slavishly learn off; I mean it should become an embedded, internalised vocabulary that you can call upon with no notice.

Qualifications and relevant experience get your foot in the door, but no-one hires you on that basis. If they did, there would be no need to go beyond the written application stage. You get hired because of the intangibles - presence, style, likeability, potential team fit, manageability. How do you project those? Inevitably the answer to that is going to be subtly different every time you attempt it with a new person; all I will say is that you are unlikely to be consistently successful in those efforts if you are approaching it willy-nilly. You need to know yourself and what's impressive and unimpressive about that self and you need to have fluent, credible vocabulary to talk about that self - and that vocabulary needs to be top-of-mind and tip-of-tongue.

Related Posts:
The elevator sales pitch
Counting down to an interview
Rehearsal and vocabulary

Having an MBA is like having a tattoo ...

2009-05-22T07:30:00.002+01:00

... in certain circles these days.

Scott Adams is so gosh darned mean-spirited about the whole collapsing-the-global-economy thing though. I mean, come on Scott, it's ancient history now dude. Let it go ...

RSS Readers may need to click through to the post

God I love the BBC!

2009-05-22T00:01:00.001+01:00

There are films and there are turkeys and there are movie reviews and there are live, unanaesthesised eviscerations:

RSS Readers may need to click through to the post

That movie reviewer sure do talk purty – and fast! This whole piece reminds me of my beloved Opus, when he was the movie reviewer for the Bloom County Beacon ...

Maternity - it's not like we have a choice

2009-05-20T08:00:00.000+01:00

Doing what I do for a living, I hear the topic of maternity leave, and the policies and attitudes surrounding it, being discussed all the time. The BBC are currently running an excellent two-parter entitled The Trouble With Working Women which is looking at this in the wider context of being competitive in the workplace.

But in all the discussions I have seen, I have never seen the most fundamental point being addressed: who else can have the babies? [I alluded to the hilarious Monty Python take on this issue here]. Whether you are a hard-core evolutionist or a hard-core creationist, you can agree that human beings seem to be programmed with the 'perpetuate the species' prime directive. And it would appear to me that a significant chunk of our lives as human beings centres around fulfilling that prime directive.

But what happens when prime directive meets profit motive? Knowing what we know about how powerful and effective women are in the knowledge economy, we look at societies which oppress women and shake our heads. "How primitive!" we say. "What an enormous lost opportunity for that society! They're writing off 50% of their talent pool - how can they ever hope to compete with us?" But then I look at the maternity policies of the majority of employers and the attitudes those policies espouse in the organisations' cultures and I think to myself, "At least the Taliban are up-front."

We, as a society, been playing footsie with this issue since 'Equality' legislation hit the statute books; but we've never really had the conversation. In Ireland, in my lifetime, women had to give up their jobs when they got married. That was later relaxed to them having to give up their jobs as soon as they had a child. And then in 1973, the Employment Equality Act became the law of the land, precluding discrimination against an employee under nine headings:

Age
Gender
Marital status
Family status
Sexual orientation
Religious beliefs
Race
Disability
Membership of the Traveller community

Nice theory - as long as you're willing to wreck your career by taking a case against your employer for bugger-all compensation under Irish law. We had a little chat about this on Q102 the other day:

RSS Readers may need to click through to the post

I say again, we need to have this conversation at a national level and define where we stand on this issue as a people. Then we can write legislation reflecting that national consensus and deal with the consequences (if any) to our competitiveness in the global economy on that basis. Until then, we're stuck with this ongoing, mealy-mouthed, pussyfooting, lip-service around the issue.

In Australia, there was legislation that allowed the state to remove Aboriginal children from their families at will - and this legislation was only overturned in the 1960s. In the country that describes itself as having, "The mother of all Parliaments," they used to send small children up chimney pipes as sweeps. You're not supposed to be able to get away with that kind of double standard any more. The world is smaller, we're better-educated and information now moves instantaneously. All this is supposed to close the gap between what we as a society say and what we as a society do.

It's time to have a grown-up conversation.

Related posts:
The glass ceiling
Motherhood and career?
Children - asset or liability?

That moment when you realise the interview is over

2009-05-19T13:00:00.003+01:00

I find that for most interviews or pitches, you can never really tell why you lost out. The competition is always very close, the qualifications and competence of the candidates are virtually indistinguishable; it usually comes down to intangibles and so it can be very difficult to learn from a failure or correct a mistake for the future.

But sometimes you just know when the game is over - sometimes before it even really begins. I had a client going for an management position in education against an 'anointed' candidate. When he mentioned the latest thinking on school culture and disciplinary issues, the Chair of the selection committee leaned back and raised his eyes to heaven. Game over.

Perhaps that's not a fair example because the Anointed One was going to get the job even if my guy started turning base metals into gold during the interview, but it amused him that the Chair dropped his poker face at that precise moment ...

So what should you do if you realise that the interview or pitch is not going your way? I love this example from A. Scott Berg's Goldwyn: [FAIR WARNING - do not imbibe any fluids before reading this]

Billy Wilder went to pitch a story idea to (Samuel) Goldwyn, a movie based on the life of ballet dancer and notorious madman Nijinsky.

"Mr. Goldwyn," Wilder said at the meeting, "why not do a picture about Nijinsky?"

Goldwyn looked puzzled. Wilder explained that Nijinsky was the single most famous ballet dancer in the world, a Russian with a "marvelous, touching story." Wilder proceeded to talk about this peasant with a passion to dance who met Diaghilev, the impresario of the Bolshoi, and of their becoming homosexual lovers.

"Homosexuals! Are you crazy?" Goldwyn interrupted.

But Wilder proceeded, insisting the story got better. He told of Nijinsky's going insane, and that every day, while exercising in a Swiss asylum, he believed he was a horse.

"A homosexual! A horse!" Goldwyn interrupted again, rapidly losing interest. But Wilder plowed through to the end of the story, detailing Nijinsky's marriage to a woman, Diaghilev's revenge, and Nijinsky's neighing for the rest of his life. Goldwyn shooed Wilder from the office, shouting at him for wasting his time on such a miserable story.

On his way out the door, Wilder poked his head in with an afterthought, "Mr. Goldwyn," he said, "you want a happy ending? Not only does Nijinsky think he's a horse. But in the end ... he wins the Kentucky Derby."

Have you ever had a pitch go south on you or pinpointed the moment when the shutters came down? Perhaps a job interview where the recruiter began laughing uncontrollably and pointing at you? What happened and more importantly, how did you handle it? Do share ... do.

Your mother was right

2009-05-18T00:12:00.002+01:00

Chris Brogan on just exactly how much it pays to be polite.