This Week's Articles

Feature: Them Job Changes People change jobs less often than they used to. It’s a trend that’s been maturing for 30 years. Read Now »

Social Recruiting Is Dead “The promise of social recruiting was that it could scale. There’s no evidence that that has happened.” – John Sumser Read Now »

Data is Evidence Legal Editor Heather Bussing catalogs the online sources where lawyers, employers and other agents are tracking your digital footprints. Read Now »

Really, Big Data Isn’t Analytics Before, progress was just a matter of making the line move up and to the right. With big data, what matters is the ability to see patterns in the data. Read Now »

HRExaminer Radio: Episode #18: Chris Havrilla This show features Chris Havrilla who started out in Software Engineering and IT Consulting before finding her passion in Recruiting. Read Now »

Five Links: The New New The NEW New: We’re in another one of those ‘everything you know is wrong’ vortices. Read Now »

Events and More

• HRExaminer Radio : Industry News and Commentary with guests. Fridays at 11am pacific (2pm EDT):
  • Today's Show May 17, 2013: Linda Brenner
• The Frontier Project: Re imagining the Future of HR (Omaha, May 20-21) “Wanted: Innovators, creators, culture hackers, workplace revolutionaries and leaders who can no longer stand idly by as talent is squandered.”
• iRecruit Expo (Amsterdam, June 20-21) The premier European Recruiting event. Sumser session on day two
• Social Recruiting Strategies Conference (Chicago, July 23-25) Sumser Keynote
• The HR Technology Conference (Las Vegas, Oct. 7-9, 2013) The HR Tech Industry’s town hall with Bill Kutik and cohost Steve Boese
• HRTech Europe (Amsterdam, Oct 24-25)

The NEW New: We’re in another one of those ‘everything you know is wrong’ vortices.

In spite of conventional wisdom, people are switching jobs less, being aggressively auctioned while they wait and subjected to media manipulation of the highest order.

• Why aren’t Americans moving anymore? Here’s a new theory.
  In the early 1990s, 3 percent of Americans moved across state lines each year. Today, the rate is half that. The new therory is that Americans are switching jobs less often than they used to. If true, the theory un-does a decade or so of arm waving about shorter work cycles and gen Y behavior. Here’s the Federal Reserve paper that defines the new theory.
• Behind The Banner
  This astonishing litte snippet of video shows what happens in the 125 miliseconds between the time you click on a link and an ad is delivered to you. There’s an entire high speed auction process. Take a moment and watch this.
• Great Expectations: Probability Through Problems
  There’s no question that your workforce needs more statistics education. The University of Cambridge offers these resources for teaching probability. They focus on problems and solutions rather than dry recitations of theory. Someone in your company (hopefully in the L&D group) is wrestling with the notion of making stats more relevant and easier to digest. Send them this link.
• Social Media May Be Finally Dying But the BS Around It Isn’t
  “While it’s true that PSY experienced a tremendous amount of success on YouTube, it is not accurate to depict that success as something that happened organically and can be replicated by you, which is what a lot of the social media marketers remaking themselves into “viral marketing” and “real time marketing” experts claim. “
• How the Voice Manipulates Social Media
  Turns out that social media success is a big company game with something other than organic luck at the heart of it.

Events and More

• HRExaminer Radio : Industry News and Commentary with guests. Fridays at 11am pacific (2pm EDT):
  - May 17: Linda Brenner
• The Frontier Project: Re imagining the Future of HR (Omaha, May 20-21) “Wanted: Innovators, creators, culture hackers, workplace revolutionaries and leaders who can no longer stand idly by as talent is squandered.”
• iRecruit Expo (Amsterdam, June 20-21) The premier European Recruiting event. Sumser session on day two
• Social Recruiting Strategies Conference (Chicago, July 23-25) Sumser Keynote
• The HR Technology Conference (Las Vegas, Oct. 7-9, 2013) The HR Tech Industry’s town hall with Bill Kutik and cohost Steve Boese
• HRTech Europe (Amsterdam, Oct 24-25)

The smoke and mirrors about retention is beginning to lift. A new study provides examples of how new approaches to data and open minds discover hidden, important truths…

It turns out that it’s not true.

Most of us understood (at some level) that the average was really deceptive. As middle skilled jobs have been hollowed out, the workforce  polarized into low skilled and high skilled ghettos. Either a job has generic skills (retail and service) or they are complex (STEM). Average tenure in the high skilled segment is increasing. The service end is stable from a tenure perspective. But the number of service jobs is growing.

Average tenure drops if that scenario is true. But, it means that more people have jobs where tenure is shorter and jobs require lower skill level. The change in the average is caused by the jobs and not the attitudes of the people. The change in average tenure essentially reflects downward mobility. But it doesn’t mean that people are staying in their jobs for less time.

This week, the Federal Reserve published a paper which suggests that the number of times a person changes jobs is declining. The paper, Declining Migration within the US: the Role of the Labour Market, is a complex analysis of a range of scenarios in an effort to understand why US workforce mobility has plummeted.

In the 90s, 3.5% of the workforce moved for work every year. Today that number is around 1.5%. The number has been declining for 30 years.

The paper presents a painstaking proof of the idea that mobility is in decline because people change jobs much less frequently than they used to. The basic idea is that the wage differentials between states have disappeared and that opportunity is available ‘at home’.

In a longer piece, we’ll tackle the unasked question, is the ‘guild city phenomenon’ at the heart of this issue.

At any rate, the smoke and mirrors about retention is beginning to lift. The study is a clear example of the way that new approaches to data and open minds about questions can discover hidden, important truths.

I wonder how long it will be before the conventional wisdom shifts in this direction. People change jobs less often than they used to. It’s a trend that’s been maturing for 30 years.

Whodathunkit?

“The promise of social recruiting was that it could scale. There’s no evidence that that has happened.” – John Sumser

That’s a drop off in coverage that’s comparable to the disappearance of the Harlem Shake from our consciousness. While google trends show the term ‘social recruiting’ holding relatively steady in search results, the term has been driven by industry hype. When that goes away, the topic dries up.

Part of the problem is that using social media for recruiting purposes is just one arrow in a quivver. The sourcing part, which is one big data grab, is straightforward enough. The practical  business of attracting people into online social relationships for the purpose of recruiting is another thing entirely. It’s always a one off deal.

This problem (the inability to scale actual recruiting) is not new. Recruiting is a bidirectional sales process that must be tailored to the unique characteristics of the potential relationship. While you may be able to to help recruiters increase their productivity with CRM style tools, it’s a linear improvement.

The promise of social recruiting was that it could scale. There’s no evidence that that has happened. None of the tools and processes help recruiters develop their judgment. None of them offer ways to handle higher volumes of relationships. All of them fall short when it comes to the two hard parts: traffic acquisition and relationship development.

Social Recruiting might be best defined as ‘what you do after you’ve acquired the data’. Social sourcing is its precursor. Because there’s a ton of data involved, social sourcing (also not particularly discussed at these innovation forums) isn’t so quick to die.

There are two sorts of social sourcing tools that are rapidly coming to market.

One group, like TalentBin, OpenWeb, Entelo and Gild, are various forms of data aggregation with various levels of smart on the front end. Basically, they each give sourcers faster ways to sift through and discover interesting potential employees. The tools work best in markets where skills measurement is easy. Their deep and most important utility is in technical markets.

The other group, born in the assessment world, attempt to provide ways to improve the odds that a particular relationship will work. The big rumor in this segment is that eHarmony is coming to town. Most of the players in this space have no Recruiting experience and ‘just know’ that they can disrupt the industry. Interestingly, the video interviewing companies are finding their way under this umbrella.

Just to poke at the eHarmony example. Introducing two people to each other is one thing. Introducing one of those people to someone who is acting on behalf of the other potential spouse is another thing entirely. The way that you disrupt a process is by delivering a different level of quality at a lower price/hassle point. Unfortunately, the recruiter is the spender here.

The shift in the landscape, away from tools that help recruiters and towards tools that help sourcers is going to be short term. The question about the future of social recruiting remains open but it will be a rebirth, not an extension of historical trends.

Data is evidence: Legal Editor Heather Bussing catalogs the online sources where lawyers, employers and other agents are tracking your digital footprints.

Here are some places to find digital evidence depending on what you want to know. Some involve a search online. Others require a subpoena.

If you want to know where someone was and when?

Cell phones all have gps tracking, so you can subpoena a person’s cell phone records and learn where they went and when. In fact, a person’s patterns of travel over time can be distinct enough to identify the person by their travel fingerprint. If someone posts a status update on Facebook or other social media sites from a phone, the update often contains location data too.

Foursquare is a mobile app where people check-in at certain places to meet friends, compete with each other to be the “mayor,” and get discounts at bars, restaurants and stores. When someone checks-in and it posts to social media, you can see where they were. A user can also give friends access to all their check-ins.

Photos-You don’t just get the content of the image, there is digital metadata connected to every photograph that shows the date and time it was taken. Photos taken with mobile devices also contain location information. And often, people will tag the photo with the location on social media. The data available depends on whether or not you get the full digital version or download it after some of the meta-data has been stripped. Different websites handle it different ways.

Surveillance cameras are in many places, and are usually time and date stamped. There are no rules about how long this data is kept and many companies discard it after short periods of time. So if you know the date something happened, send a letter right away to ask them to preserve it.

Toll Devices–Fast-track/Fast-pass transponders show where the person (or at least their car/device) went and when. These devices are used for bridges and toll roads, and are starting to be used for airport parking and other public parking.

GPS, Transponder, and Auto Black Boxes are being built into newer cars that can collect data on where people are, how fast they were driving, the routes they took, and minute by minute data on the trip.

If you want to know who someone was with.

You can match cell phone, four square, social media and photo data between two accounts to find out if two people were at the same place at the same time.

And with 300 million photos being uploaded to Facebook per day, chances are there are photos of them together.

If you want to know more about someone.

Google- if you have a name, start with a google search of the name in quotes. Also do an image search for the same name in quotes to pull up photos that are associated with that name. There is a tremendous amount of information you can learn this way.

Social media accounts. Twitter is public. Facebook is semi-public depending on user settings and how much flack Facebook is getting for messing with user privacy. Linkedin is generally public, with more information available by subscription.

Zoominfo, Pipl, Peoplefinders, Intellius, all have some information that is free with additional information available at nominal charge. The background information often includes who their relatives are, who their neighbors are, past addresses, lawsuits they have been involved in and can include criminal history. All of this information is taken from public records and what is available on the internet.

Google Earth- Once you have an address, you can go back to google maps and zoom in on the address to see the house, cars in the driveway, and sometimes license plates.

Mutual Contacts – See if you have mutual friends or contacts on Linkedin and social media accounts. Then look at your common friend’s accounts for photos or information.

How to Get the Data

Social Media– Twitter is public. Facebook depends on the user’s privacy settings and Facebook changes. Employers can usually access employee use data if the account was used on an employer device, computer or network and often as part of an investigation of employment issues.

Device records– Cell phone records, Fast-track records and surveillance data generally have to be subpoenaed, unless you own the phone/device and the account. This means if you are an employer who provides phones to employees, you have access to the records of everything they do on their phones. If you are an employee, make sure you understand that before you take the phone as a “benefit.” Same with that Fast Track.

Photographs can often be downloaded, but the meta data will differ depending on where it was from and how it was uploaded then downloaded. Ask an expert what you need. If the person emailed a photograph to someone else, you can ask for it from whomever has it. You can also order satellite photos of almost any location and date from providers like Terraserver.

Online information- If it’s online, it’s generally public information. Be sure to keep track of the website you downloaded the information from and take screen shots. Note the date and time.

Further Reading

How Employers Can Still See Employee Social Media Accounts

Employee Privacy – What Can Employers Monitor?

Employee Privacy – Social Media

Before, progress was just a matter of making the line move up and to the right. With big data, what matters is the ability to see patterns in the data.

Big Data Isn’t Analytics

In the 20th Century, progress was driven by the principles of automation. The more you could streamline and control a process, the cheaper you could make it. Repeatability was the key.

Monitoring, in the form of process control charts, spreadsheet generated graphics and staff meeting gotcha reports, was the way an enlightened executive ran his business. Progress was a matter of making the line move up and to the right. Cost cutting involved moving it down and to the right. Statistical process control (SPC) minimized variation.

Here’s a reasonable definition of SPC.

Statistical process control (SPC) is the application of statistical methods to the monitoring and control of a process to ensure that it operates at its full potential to produce conforming product. Under SPC, a process behaves predictably to produce as much conforming product as possible with the least possible waste. While SPC has been applied most frequently to controlling manufacturing lines, it applies equally well to any process with a measurable output.

Key tools in SPC are control charts, a focus on continuous improvement and designed experiments. Much of the power of SPC lies in the ability to examine a process and the sources of variation in that process using tools that give weight to objective analysis over subjective opinions and that allow the strength of each source to be determined numerically. Variations in the process that may affect the quality of the end product or service can be detected and corrected, thus reducing waste as well as the likelihood that problems will be passed on to the customer.

With its emphasis on early detection and prevention of problems, SPC has a distinct advantage over other quality methods, such as inspection, that apply resources to detecting and correcting problems after they have occurred. In addition to reducing waste, SPC can lead to a reduction in the time required to produce the product or service from end to end. This is partially due to a diminished likelihood that the final product will have to be reworked, but it may also result from using SPC data to identify bottlenecks, wait times, and other sources of delays within the process.

Process cycle time reductions coupled with improvements in yield have made SPC a valuable tool from both a cost reduction and a customer satisfaction standpoint.

- Wikipedia

When Gartner tackles big data, they describe it as a three dimensional problem:

• Increasing Volume (amount of data)
  Generally speaking, the first big data problem is dealing with the amount of data. The important point about the volume of data is that it’s bigger than current toolsets can handle
• Velocity (speed of data in/out)
  Historically, data has been processed when possible, not in real time. Companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter (and the rest of the high volume, real time data processors)
  are perfecting the art of handling information as it emerges.
• Variety (range of data types, sources)
  In some ways, this is the biggest piece of the puzzle. Big data is a way to make novel correlations that create insight that wasn’t before possible by integrating disparate (and what used to be seen as unrelated) data sets.

In the end, though, what matters is the ability to see patterns in the data. Big Data is really a way of talking about the challenges and opportunities that emerge from the data that is drowning us all. It’s not about building new and larger process management tools, it’s about mining the insights that can explode productivity in systems that have fewer and fewer repeatable processes.