Most of us assume we've done enough for our organizations related to putting our talent in a place where it can be successful.  We found the best talent for what we could afford, recruited and signed them, gave them the tools and even did a half-day orientation.  What more could they need to succeed?

Uh... Well, as it turns out, your "on the job training" strategy might leave a little bit to be desired.

More organizations are turning to intense data mining to understand what individuals on their teams make the best decisions, as well as what circumstances need to be in place to enable great performance and solid decision-making.  It'll be awhile before this makes it to you at ACME Inc., but take a look below at the lengths the Houston Rockets will go in order to control Kobe Bryant:

Remember Moneyball? That was about new ways of valuing talent in professional sports and identifying undervalued assets through the "new talent math".  The new Moneyball isn't about acquiring talent, it's about gaining a competitive advantage via data for the talent once it's acquired. 

More on the new form of Moneyball in the NBA from Michael Lewis at the New York Times:

"People often say that Kobe Bryant has no weaknesses to his game, but that's not really  true. Before the game, Shane Battier was given his special package of information. "He's the only player we give it to," Morey says. "We can give him this fire hose of data and let him sift. Most players are like golfers. You don't want them swinging while they're thinking." The data essentially broke down the floor into many discrete zones and calculated the odds of Bryant making shots from different places on the court, under different degrees of defensive pressure, in different relationships to other players - how well he scored off screens, off pick-and-rolls, off catch-and-shoots and so on. Battier learns a lot from studying the data on the superstars he is usually assigned to guard. For instance, the numbers show him that Allen Iverson is one of the most efficient scorers in the N.B.A. when he goes to his right; when he goes to his left he kills his team. The Golden State Warriors forward Stephen Jackson is an even stranger case. "Steve Jackson," Battier says, "is statistically better going to his right, but he loves to go to his left - and goes to his left almost twice as often." The San Antonio Spurs' Manu Ginóbili is a statistical freak: he has no imbalance whatsoever in his game -- there is no one way to play him that is better than another. He is equally efficient both off the dribble and off the pass, going left and right and from any spot on the floor.

Bryant isn't like that. He is better at pretty much everything than everyone else, but there are places on the court, and starting points for his shot, that render him less likely to help his team. When he drives to the basket, he is exactly as likely to go to his left as to his right, but when he goes to his left, he is less effective. When he shoots directly after receiving a pass, he is more efficient than when he shoots after dribbling. He's deadly if he gets into the lane and also if he gets to the baseline; between the two, less so. "The absolute worst thing to do," Battier says, "is to foul him." It isn't that Bryant is an especially good free-throw shooter but that, as Morey puts it, "the foul is the worst result of a defensive play." One way the Rockets can see which teams think about the game as they do is by identifying those that "try dramatically not to foul." The ideal outcome, from the Rockets' statistical point of view, is for Bryant to dribble left and pull up for an 18-foot jump shot; force that to happen often enough and you have to be satisfied with your night. "If he has 40 points on 40 shots, I can live with that," Battier says. "My job is not to keep him from scoring points but to make him as inefficient as possible." The court doesn't have little squares all over it to tell him what percentage Bryant is likely to shoot from any given spot, but it might as well.

The reason the Rockets insist that Battier guard Bryant is his gift for encouraging him into his zones of lowest efficiency. The effect of doing this is astonishing: Bryant doesn't merely help his team less when Battier guards him than when someone else does. When Bryant is in the game and Battier is on him, the Lakers' offense is worse than if the N.B.A.'s best player had taken the night off."

It's pretty impressive, and all done in the name of providing Battier an edge in his head-to-head with Kobe.  Like I said at the jump, it will be awhile before this approach makes it to you and me, but from a development perspective, what data can you provide your talent to make better decisions in head-to-head interaction with competitors, as well as the decisions they make about their own career development?  What about the daily decisions they make in what to work on?

Until you and I have a plan, we're really just doing the workplace equivalent of hoping that Kobe misses a lot of shots on his own - without thinking about what WE can do to influence the performance outcome.

And that's humbling...

Most folks agree that in the middle of a recession and with the stinky reputation investment banks have garnered for all-expense junkets lately, incentive trips costing a company hundreds of thousand of dollars are a bad idea.  After all, how could you spend all that money while so many people are hurting in today's economy?

Of course, it's never that simple.  If it were simple, everyone could agree.

For example, here's the toughest question regarding travel rewards from my perspective as a VP of HR.  What do you do with "somewhat extravagant" reward trips for high performers when someone else is paying? (a company whose products you sell and needs access to your sales force, etc.)

Paul Hebert weighs in with his view, and remember, he's a rewards and incentive expert:

"The biggest misconception that is being propagated in the news is that these "junkets" are only for the top executives within a company.  I'm guessing the public has visions of fat, half-naked old men, sitting on pillows with young ladies dropping grapes in their mouths.  Nothing could be further from the truth. 

Most incentive participants are:

• The rank and file sales person whose job depends on ever-increasing levels of performance and contains risk most of us desk-jockeys couldn't imagine.  (Do you want your continued employment predicated on your prospect being in a bad mood after spilling hot coffee on his/her lap in the Starbucks drive-thru?)
• Employees who have exceeded, by a wide margin, the constraints of their job description and have increased the competitiveness of their company
• Members of a company's distribution channel who have stuck with the company to become top producers and advocates for the product, service, brand or company - people the company needs to remain competitive and innovative.
• The spouses, children, significant others, who attend with the person who earned the trip - providing much needed reward for the sacrifices they have made to allow the earner the time and attention being one of the best requires.

Incentive and meeting travel is a critical element in building relationships - especially in this predominately electronically connected world.  These relationships will help companies weather this economic storm, create new business ideas from collaborative conversations, foster innovations that will drive business, and reduce the costs of turnover within organizations.

Do not perpetuate the false information that is filling the airwaves, newsprint and electrons." 

Paul raises some good points related to travel rewards.  Travel rewards most commonly go to PRODUCERS - the sales pros who bring home the bacon, so the company can fry it up in the pan.  And if there's a group out there you want to keep motivated, it's the sales force.

So, why not continue rewards travel for that group, especially if someone else is buying, or the funding comes from the difference in revenue once a sales rep goes over 100% quota against an already aggressive plan?  The counter to this view is the employee relations cost.  After all, the regular folks don't get access to the quota spreadsheet, and they don't know if an affiliate/channel partner is paying for the outing.

They just see the trip, the cost and the brand of the hotel, which decidedly did not find your top sales performers staying at a Holiday Inn Express during the last junket.  With that in mind, my call would be to shelf the extravagant trips for 2009 company-wide, regardless of who pays or how critical the trip is said to be to sales force morale. 

After all, like the saying goes - salespeople can give themselves a raise by selling more.  Most of our employees who see the extravagant trip can't perform their way into being included on the junket, and it stings to see the trip going off as planned when they lost 2 people from their 8 person department last Friday.

Lose the junket for 2009.  I'm betting you won't lose your top sales performers. 

If you get to know me, I'm many things.  Among those things:

--I'm a talent pro who loves finding people who are good at what they do, and passionate about their craft.

--I'm a guy who played a lot of basketball, and like all white guys who played hoops at the college level, I liked rap a lot at one point in my life.  It kind of goes with the territory. 

Those two things make me uniquely qualified to judge Joaquin Phoenix and the stage he's going through.  You didn't hear?  Phoenix is giving up acting, because he's got a bigger mission in life - he wants to become a hip-hop star. 

More on the next Eminem/celebrity train wreck from David Germain of the AP:

"Joaquin Phoenix says there's no hoax about it: He really has given up acting to become a hip-hop musician.

Phoenix has been spending his time laying down tracks for a rap album in the recording studio he built at his home, the two-time Academy Award nominee said Tuesday in an interview to promote what he claims is his final movie, "Two Lovers."

After video hit the Internet last month capturing part of Phoenix's debut rap performance at a Las Vegas club, speculation swirled that he was perpetrating an elaborate practical joke.

"I don't know where that comes from," Phoenix said. "If it comes from people that I've had a falling out with, that are (ticked) off at me?"

The video shows Phoenix, in a long, scraggly beard, rapping nearly inaudibly and ends with him losing his footing and falling off the stage. It was an inauspicious start, but Phoenix was adamant that his hip-hop career is real."

Joaquin... I feel your pain.  At one point, I wanted to be Eric B/Rakim, KRS-One or Jam Master Jay.  I'm now a VP of HR. Of course, I was 20 at the time and you have the decided advantage of unlimited money and time to chase your dream, along with the fact that your celebrity will allow you to be booked for gigs as you work through your own personal "8-mile".

From a talent perspective, it's a train wreck.  Note to those with talent.  Find your niche, nurture it, keep it warm and yield the results of your singular focus in the years to come.  Don't make the mistake of thinking your talents are generalist in nature and transferable to any industry.

I don't want to crush dreams and hard work. Some industries you can transfer your skills to, yes.  But hip-hop?  Please...

Still, love the crazy beard you're sporting, Joaquin.  You look like Ted Kaczynski on the cover of Time or Rick Rubin in the 99 Problems video he did with Jay-Z. 

You'll need all the props you can find in lieu of actual hip-hop talent... Well played...

I know who my best interviewers/hiring managers are.  Or at least I think I do.   But that knowledge is more intuition than science, because I don't measure the success of my hiring managers.  Do you?  Probably not, because you have a million things to do.   But for companies ramping up their hiring efforts, it makes sense to track which hiring managers "get it", and identify those who don't.

How do you measure who makes quality hires?  In a recent BusinessWeek back page column (subscription required), Jack Welch recently laid out this common sense approach called the "Hiring Batting Average":

"HERE'S HOW IT WORKS. Every candidate for a job at your company must be interviewed by at least three people in the organization beyond the hiring manager, and each interviewer must sign off with a "Hire" or "Don't Hire" vote. No maybes allowed. Fast-forward six months. Every new hire gets evaluated by his manager on how he has performed against expectations: below, meets, or exceeds. Soon enough, and with enough critical mass, you can start to compare every interviewer's "Hire" recommendations with actual performance. For instance, say a manager named Emily has approved 10 candidates and, six months out, eight of them are performing at or above expectations. Emily's HBA would be .800. That impressive score lets you know Emily is a first-rate evaluator of talent, and she should be rewarded accordingly. By contrast, say Emily's colleague John has given the nod to 12 hires and, after six months, only four are working out, for an HBA of .333. Keep John in his day job and away from picking people!"

I like the concept, but there are some "must-haves".  To effectively use this type of system, companies have to be OK with using the consensus-building system that Welch describes - 3 to 4 interviewers for each open position, with the hiring manager having final authority, but everyone on the team being forced to say "yes or no".   For some hiring managers, this feels like they are giving up control.  They don't want the feedback, which feels like meddling.   An unwillingness to solicit feedback from others is likely a leading indicator of a low hiring batting average for these types of managers.

Another control issue with this type of metric would be the "gamers" of the system.  It's plausible that these gamers could simply pledge not to vote "yes" for any candidate who wasn't perfect or who wasn't a direct fit for the position in question.  As a result, their batting average might go up, but it would be fairly meaningless since multiple quality candidates might have been missed.  If the hiring manager still decided to hire such a candidate and he/she was successful, maybe you could debit the naysayer and call it a "miss" after the fact.

No system is perfect, and you'd have to fight through these types of issues.  Still, if you are hiring big groups of employees, it might make sense to give it a shot.  Welch also points to the fact that this type of vote might make managers more emotionally invested, which would lead to better employee support and even informal mentoring, which all companies need more of.

Last word - Batting .300 in baseball will make you an All-Star.  In hiring, it makes you unemployed....    

You don't need me to tell you it's hard out there if you're looking for a gig.  But the following stats from the Washington Bureau of the Chicago Tribune are among the most telling I have seen:

"Heidi Shierholz, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington think tank funded by organized labor, examined some new government data on job openings and, not surprisingly, found that the ratio of people looking (sic) job openings versus the number of jobs more than doubled from Dec. 2007 to Dec. 2008.

Here's her analysis:

This morning the Bureau of Labor Statistics released the Job Openings and Labor Turnover (JOLTS) data for December of 2008. The data show that there were 2.7 million job openings in December, down 6% from November 2008 and down 32% from the start of the recession in December 2007.

While job openings are becoming more and more scarce, the ranks of the unemployed are growing dramatically - up by 47% in the first year of the recession - such that in December there were 11.1 million unemployed workers.

"This means that there were 4.1 job seekers per available job - more than double the number of job seekers per available job at the beginning of the recession, which stood at 1.9 in December 2007," said EPI economist Heidi Shierholz."

One of the things I love, and hate, about our culture is how the media can pick up on something new and hammer it to death.  The result is good at first - a shared experience and/or vocabulary that rallies a lot of Americans around a cause.  The downside is that the media, and society in general, keep hammering on the topic/vocabulary, and eventually it becomes a cliche' that everyone wishes would just go away.

Those trends resonate nowhere stronger than corporate America.  Here's how it works.  Media picks up a trend, focuses on a certain part of the vocabulary that describes that trend, and hammers away.  Next thing you know, the buzzwords enter corporate America, meeting/board rooms start using the terms, and conferences are created around the buzzword.

Case in point - Presidential branding...

The first days of the Obama campaign were ripe with one powerful word - "transparency".  More on what Obama did in his first day that contributed to the call for increased transparency from the Los Angeles Times:

"In a grinding first full day as president, Barrack (sic) Obama moved decisively to distance himself from the previous administration, pushing top military leaders for a plan to withdraw combat troops from Iraq and issuing a string of orders to make government more open.

Obama used Day One as well to signal his commitment to a central campaign promise: upending the way Washington does business. He announced tough new restrictions on lobbying activity.

"This is big," said Meredith Fuchs, general counsel of the National Security Archive, a nonprofit research institute at George Washington University that has challenged Bush administration policies on the release of information. "No president has done so much on the first day in office to make his administration transparent."

Speaking to his senior staff, Obama said, "However long we are keepers of the public trust, we should never forget that we are here as public servants, and public service is a privilege. It's not about advantaging yourself. It's not about advancing your friends or your corporate clients. It's not about advancing an ideological agenda or the special interests of any organization. Public service is, simply and absolutely, about advancing the interests of Americans."

He also rolled out new rules for his appointees, requiring them to sign a pledge meant to disrupt the "revolving door" by which lobbyists flow seamlessly into government and back into the lobbying business.

His aides are barred from lobbying any executive agency for the life of the Obama administration. That means an appointee who leaves the White House in, say, 2010 would be barred from lobbying the executive branch until 2017 if Obama were to serve two terms."

As many of you know, I'm a moderate Republican.  I loved the lobbying bill, as a first foray for Obama, to give the appearance of a high ethical code and a value of transparency.  Good stuff.

But back to the point of the post.  Somewhere around 2012, I suspect America, especially after the recession is over, is going to care less about transparency, and the Obama folks will need new branding.

Same with corporate America.  Heard the term "transparency" double digit times last week, and used it myself multiple times.  Felt good.  I suspect by 2011, some bosses in the workplace will ban the use of the word "transparency".  Find another word, because the boss is sick of that one.

Case in point - in the post 9/11 world, a hot buzzword in corporate America was "shock and awe".  Don't hear that one much any more.  Also heard "evil-doer" - not so much anymore.  Also, two weeks into the Obama cabinet, and we're already faced with a bunch of folks that made it through the vetting process only to find out they didn't pay their taxes.  That's probably going to hurt the branding of the transparency theme.

Corporate buzzwords - keep them fresh or watch the brand die...

Earlier this week, I blogged a bit about employees who change their status within social media sites to indicate they are "looking for a new job".   In that post, I spun it from the angle of how aware you are as a HR pro about what's going on in your organization.  The bottom line?  You need to be aware, which means you need to be a social media consumer (if not a content producer...)

With that said, the question still remains - what do you do as a HR pro when someone updates a social media status to indicate they want a new job?  Here's my listing of your choices:

• Confront the employee: This is the obvious instinct whenever you see a current employee with a résumé on a job board. This approach works best with the employee who's reacting about a single issue. The "Reactionary" can be approached directly, but then you’ll need to follow up to resolve the issue in question. Forget confronting the Free Agent (one who's always looking, it's just in their DNA) or the Chronically Disgruntled (never happy), because directness won’t change the approach of either.

• Tell the manager: If you confront an employee, you have to get their manager in the loop. That’s the right thing to do, and it’s a follow-up to confronting the employee. Letting the manager know that the Free Agent is updating his profile every week is not recommended. It’s not personal for the Free Agent, but it will cause trust issues with the manager when none may be warranted. You can also let the manager know that the disgruntled employee is floating his résumé, but there likely won’t be any viable action as a result—unless you can correct the core satisfaction issue.

• Attempt to engage on your own, undercover: Only an option for true HR pros. Rather than talking to either the employee or manager, you find a way to dig into what’s going on in the environment and attempt to engage or fix it. This is a viable option for the Reactionary or Disgruntled employee, although the approach doesn’t work as well for chronic situations as it does for those acute ones. Additionally, this approach doesn’t make sense for the Free Agent, since there’s no identifiable workplace issue to focus on.

• Do nothing and watch the show: Don’t use this approach with the Reactionary. You’ve got to do something to try and fix that one. This approach is best for the Free Agent or the Disgruntled. You can’t stop the Free Agent from being market-oriented, and the Disgruntled may have more issues than you can solve.

Before you act, know the profile and the motivation of the employee in question. At the end of the day, your organization expects you to own the situation. All parties involved are best served by the HR pro examining the situation and making the best call regarding the appropriate response..

Or you could simply post your résumé in response. Does that make you a Free Agent—or a Reactionary?

OK, I'm the first to champion social media as a great source of continuing education, networking and  professional development for HR pros.  It's cool, and it's necessary.  Get into it now if you haven't.  Of course, I'm not really talking to you.  If you're reading a blog, you probably already get it.  It's the other 230,000 members of SHRM we need to convince.

Of course, social media isn't without its drawbacks.  One of the biggest objections I hear about the  importance of social media to HR pros is the following:

"Social Media's cool and all that, but you know, I've dug around for candidates on LinkedIn, twitter and blogs, and I think it's over hyped.  I still get a lot more from the job boards."

Dude, of course you do!  Job boards are a volume generator.  You post it, the hordes of active candidates are trained to put on the feedbag and apply for 50 jobs in one setting, then you get to troll through the 5 out of 100 candidates who matter.  I get it, you get it, and let's face it, for the time period, you need that.

My company still gets around 30% of our hires from job boards.  Good hires, bad hires, etc.  We know we can sign the Monster/CB contract and our cost per hire is pretty measurable.  We get some hires from postings, more from the database, etc.  It ads up to 30% right now.  They're called aggregators.  They're the Golden Corral/Sizzler of the recruiting scene.  You go there when you want volume, not when you want a meal to remember.

The goal for most of us who are curious about social media is to grow our overall % of hires who come from the passive candidates found in social media over time.  Will Monster and CareerBuilder cease to be a factor in our lives?  Maybe, but it will take a while.

Here are a couple of thoughts about the tradeoffs between job boards and recruiting in social media:

1.  If all you are doing is posting to the boards, you're a dinosaur and won't make it another decade.

2.  If all you do is post and you don't use the resume databases of the job boards, I'd reconsider your approach.  The databases are worth more to you over a year than postings, so spend your money accordingly.

3.  If recruiting via Social Media is too much for you to comprehend, go to the Social Media Headhunter and order a recruiting primer on how to use LinkedIn, MySpace and Facebook to hunt talent (twitter coming soon).  I'm the proud owner of the LinkedIn version (straight cash homie, not a comp, so this is not a paid advertisement), and they're strong tutorials, the kind that can get a newbie up and running, but one that can also streamline how a pro uses the tools.

Video killed the radio star.  Social Media hasn't killed the job board - yet.  Don't fool yourself, though.  You need to know the percentage of hires that come from each source, and make sure your "hires via social media" grow year to year.