Over the Seas - Part 3

What is a TRU Conference?

September 11, 2011

http://animoto.com/play/hrbW5ilH6XcVVl2l1vRfZQ

SLIDESHOW FROM A RECENT TRU LONDON

Most conference follow a traditional pattern: Keynote talks, general sessions, panels, and break out sessions. There is almost always a vendor section where you can get demonstrations of software products, meet key users and try out the products for yourself.

Nothing wrong with this. I run some of these myself and they are a good way to get the new ideas I mentioned in my previous article across as well as to network and explore best practices. What these sometimes lack is interaction – you receive a lot of information but have only a little opportunity to ask questions or get involved in deep conversation. And, of course, they are highly structured with agendas, timelines, and people focused on shepherding the crowd.

Often this is okay, but sometimes you’d like to spend more time on one thing or less on another and also give your own opinions or hear what the other participants have to say.

And that’s what a new type of conference is offering. Started by Bill Boorman, a recruiting guru from the U.K, they have begun to change the way we think about conferences. His conferences are called TRUs, often labeled as TRU LONDON, or TRU BOSTON or TRU WHATEVER. They are cheap, accessible, and highly interactive. They have only a loose structure and a flexible agenda.

While people, called track leaders, are invited to get a conversation started, they are not allowed to use PowerPoint’s or to engage in monologue. Instead there is an expectation of total inclusion – of everybody adding their opinions, experiences, observations and ideas. There is a lot of give and take, back and forth conversation and often someone proposes a track that wasn’t on the agenda and the leader schedules it in. Attendees can leave any discussion at any time and are encouraged to if it isn’t interesting or meeting their needs. No need to politely sit through a boring discussion. Track leaders soon learn that their egos had better be strong because it’s ideas and the group that lead things.

TRUs are not for everyone. If you are new to a field and want to hear experts, TRUs probably don’t offer you enough structure or learning. They are really best for experts in a field to come together and enlarge their own thinking. They are wonderful places for networking as a lot of the time is spent in getting to know people, having a drink with a new friend or sharing a meal together. If you have strong opinions or ideas or want to test out your hypothesis about something, then TRUs are perfect places. People and ideas that wouldn’t get accepted at a traditional conference now have a place to go.

Costs are also low. Participant fees are typically less than $100. The events are held at corporate facilities or at inexpensive venues. Each person pays for their own hotel and food expenses. Costs are covered by a sponsor or two, but these events are not for making a lot of money. They are for spreading ideas and meeting new people. Nothing really is provided except the venue and a loose agenda. This may sound bad, but it isn’t. It’s actually liberating as you can make lunch arrangements with anyone (or no one) and can eat what you want. It’s also easy to see the value and can be affordable even by the self-employed who are making up a larger segment of our population every year.

Vendors are present at TRUs, but often are on the firing line with people candidly critiquing their product or offering their suggestions for improvement. Once again, a great place for a confident vendor or for a start-up looking for feedback.

TRUs are reflective of the new generation; they are immediate, authentic, inclusive, collaborative, cheap and challenging.

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Thoughts on Conferences: What Makes them Good or Bad?

September 10, 2011

I have been to about a dozen conferences this year in various countries and four continents. I have been part of the organizing group for some of them, a speaker in others. And in fact, conferences have been a core part of my life, education and professional work for more than a decade.
So what makes a good conference?
This is something I ask myself and others all the time and the answers seem to boil down to three things, listed here in order of importance.
1. Networking
By far and away the most important is connecting with old friends and making new ones. Conferences offer a socially acceptable way of approaching strangers, exchanging ideas and building alliances and partnership.
People come from all over a country or region often not to go to any of the sessions but to meet up with friends, swap stories with each other, and enjoy a meal or drink together. Some people find new jobs, others come seeking to find someone for a need they have.
2. Best Practice Sharing
The second reason people come is to pick up on the latest trend, technology or technique. Workshops are often designed to convey the ideas of best practices leaders. Many attendees have the goal of bringing back one or two things that they can implement right away to make money, same money, or ease the workload.
Usually the most popular sessions are the ones where an exemplar demonstrates what they did to achieve some remarkable goal. Question and answer sessions cover a wide range of topics designed to spread good ideas, challenge bad practices and keep uo to date.
3. New ideas
And new ideas are critical to staying on the edge. Keynote speakers and so-called gurus are most likely to be the ones to introduce new concepts or challenge an accepted practice with new data or research. Professions move forward on the basis of this type of data and the opportunity to see what is possible. The early adopters will grab onto the new ideas and try them out. If they are successful they will be presented in following years as best practices.

So the conferences that blend all of this together are often the best. In the recruiting and social media arena there are a handful of good conferences, depending on where you live, that provide the broadest base of attendees (for networking and best practice sharing) as well as the “gurus” who bring in the new.

My favorites are ERE EXPOs, TRUs, and the ATCs in Australia. I’ll write more about these conferences and also about think tanks in a future post coming soon.

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The “New” Recruiter

August 8, 2011

Over the past twenty years or so, corporations worldwide have focused on a variety of initiatives. The bulk of these were aimed at improving efficiency, increasing profit, and ensuring quality. They have ranged from business process re-engineering to Six-Sigma quality and have been responsible for the productivity gains world economies have enjoyed, as well as for the lower prices and better quality of most products we use. These initiatives have changed our expectations. We expect everything we buy to work immediately with little to no need for an instruction booklet, and last for a long time without the need for repair. We also expect products to be priced very low relative to how they were priced for our parents. Items such as televisions, cars and computers are incredibly cheap compared to when they first appeared on the market, and prices continue to decline.

All of these changes have come about because of the relentless focus corporations have had on a handful of focused projects based on experimentation and objective measurement.

The focus has now turned to talent. As more organizations realize that it is service, innovation, productivity and relationship that bring profit, the focus moves away from the manufacturing and production side to the people side.

It is now HR’s turn to be in the limelight and ensure the availability of needed talent and the overall quality of talent. Recruiters are central to that effort and many changes are underfoot. Recruiting as a profession is challenged to embrace a broader scope of work and to take responsibility for more sophisticated and complex talent analysis and development.

Here are a few ways that recruiters should start thinking and acting about talent. These mirror the methods used by manufacturing, finance and other corporate functions that have undergone transformations over the past decades.

One: Become a Talent Solutions Provider – not a Recruiter

I am not advocating that you just put a new title on your business card. What I am advocating is a shift in your thinking. You do not fill requisitions, you do not source candidates, and you do not screen and assess. What you do is solve talent problems and make it easier for your organization to achieve its business goals. That may seem like a minor distinction but it carries a depth of meaning. It says that you are strategic and know the business issues and goals of your organization. You can push back on hiring managers that seem to be asking for talent that is not right for the direction the organization is headed. It also says that you have knowledge of the talent market and can intelligently speak about the availability of certain kinds of talent with numbers and facts.

Having the right frame of mind is the most important aspect of change. It will not be easy to begin thinking like a solutions provider rather than a “slot filler”, but as long as that is your goal and you periodically assess whether you are moving in the right direction you will succeed.

Two: Focus on the job requirements and the hiring managers’ needs

To quantitatively improve candidate quality and overall performance, a solutions provider needs to be able to define every position in terms of the experience, knowledge, skills, motivation and cultural fit that have been verified as important to accomplish the goals of that position.

You need to ask hiring managers to define what they need to hire to do, not the degrees and positions they may have held. While degrees and past positions/titles may add depth to the final decision and determine salary to some degree, it is other things that ultimately make the most difference. Skills and abilities are often referred to as competencies and there are standard competency lists available, such as the O-Net list of competencies available from the U.S. Department of Labor. These competency lists mean you don’t have to hire specialists to develop them for you and make it much easier and less expensive to apply them to a variety of positions.

Motivation and cultural fit are just as important. If a candidate is not engaged and does not get along well with the other employees, productivity and retention will be at stake.

Every position requires a blend of experience, fit, skills, and knowledge gained through experience. None of them alone is adequate. And the mix is often unique to a function and hiring manager.

Three: Adopt and start using talent management technology.

Technology ultimately frees you and informs you. It takes away administrative chores and does the routine better than you ever did. But more importantly it gives you the information you need to make decisions. When you have data about sources of hires, time and cost, and when you know who stays and who leaves; you can make much better decisions. You can defend yourself and you can be much surer that you going in the right direction.

The next ten years will be marked by the increasing use of quantitative tools and methods in HR and recruiting. Many of these will be “imported” from other disciplines that have already been shaken to the core, such as manufacturing and finance. This period will be marked with process improvements, measurement, quantification of all HR processes, implementation of Six-Sigma quality standards, and by a rigor of thinking – a challenging of assumption and beliefs – that has not been seen in HR before.

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