The economy sucks and there are about 400 candidates in play for every open position.  Let's face it, you need to pull out all the stops, because AT BEST the company doing the hiring is only going to phone screen somewhere between 5 and 15 candidates for the open position.  That means you have to find a way to cut through the clutter.

Like Public Enemy once said, you need to use ANY MEANS NECESSARY to cut through the clutter.   That includes Googling the person you think can help you (recruiter, HR pro, hiring manager), finding online bio information and comparing and contrasting your background and skills to something that matters to the person in charge.

Want an example?  Here's how a guy leveraged my sizable digital footprint against me this week, evoking the ghost of Sam Bowie vs. Michael Jordan:

September 15, 2009

Dear Mr. Dunn:

Go back 25 years. It's 1984. You have the second overall pick in the NBA draft. Who do you take? Sam Bowie (other candidates) or Michael Jordan (me)? I don't say this to appear arrogant or cocky, but you won't find someone more dedicated to becoming the best trainer for DAXKO anywhere.

I have the sheepskin (bachelor's degree in Communications from Florida State), I have the experience (12 years in the media, one year in corporate communications and two years in customer service) and really enjoy speaking in front of groups. I also delight in seeing people's reactions when something I've taught them clicks. The lightbulb coming on puts a smile on my face.

I'm proficient with multiple operating systems (Windows and OSX) as well as other technologies (social media, video and audio editing software.) I'm not satisfied until I know a technology inside and out. I also delight in sharing my knowledge with those who desire to learn. And I know that SaaS is more than just an attitude.

All I want is a chance. A chance to prove that you're smarter than Stu Inman was in 1984.

That's it. I know you're in Ottawa right now, so I'll end this message here. Thank you for reading. I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Sincerely,  __________

For those of you who don't know, Sam Bowie was a college basketball star at Kentucky whom the Portland Trailblazers drafted in front of Michael Jordan in the 1984 draft.  As it turns out, Bowie never reached the potential everyone thought he had (broken shins have a way of slowing your progress) and Michael Jordan, who was drafted after Bowie - well, he became the best player in the history of the galaxy. Stu Inman was the Blazers executive who made the call.  The results have always been in the back of fans' minds in Portland, even the young ones like this HR blogger you might know.

So the candidate researches me, personalizes the message and guess what?  Regardless of fit on paper, he's going to get face time for no other reason than he cared enough to be creative.  That interests the hell out of me as a fit for my company, and if you're so cynical that you wouldn't interview someone who took the time to research you, then you're a Zombie.

By the way, did anyone see the acceptance speech by Jordan at the Basketball Hall of Fame this week?  He was calling out everyone who ever thought he wasn't good enough to play.  He actually brought the coach who cut him in 9th grade to the Hall of Fame ceremony, and then took the opportunity to tell him "you were wrong".

That's passion probably worth exploring in another post.  For now, learn from the master candidate above.

Personalize the message and get through the clutter.

Stop me when you figure out the pattern in the following names:

• Joe Torre
• Tony Larussa
• Phil Jackson
• Pat Riley

Figured it out yet?  They're all great coaches - you're right.  More importantly, they were all mediocre players, at least on the level in which they ultimately became coaching icons.

Why's this on my mind?  How about the fact that the Minnesota Timberwolves (NBA, pro hoops) are reported to be bringing in Laker legend, Kurt Rambis, as their next head coach.  Need a primer on Rambis? Click here to remember that he was a safety glasses wearing, no jump shot, hustle freak on the great Laker teams that featured Magic Johnson and Kareem.

He wore safety glasses people.  That's all you need to know to love this hire.  Like the Rock once said, he knew his role and shut his mouth.

If you've been in the talent game, you know that the best widget-maker is widely reported to be the best widget-maker manager.  Stars are often thought to have the best skills to become effective managers, so they usually get first dibs on the promotion.  It rarely works out - stars have special skills, and tend to get frustrated when the masses can't do what they did - whether it's make more widgets, close more sales and yes - hit the jumper off the double baseline screen with amazing consistency.

Role players, on the other hand, often make terrific coaches - and managers.  With that in mind, here are 5 reasons why you should hire a role player for your next manager opening (I'll call the role player you seek "Rambis" for the remainder of this post) rather than a star:

1. Rambis knows how hard the game is.  As a result, he's patient with all the circumstances around him.  Don't have money for a new break room?  Rambis is OK - he's not used to the new stuff anyway. 

2. Because he knows how hard the game is, Rambis is a better coach.  He's patient and been humbled before, which means he'll spend more time with the role players on your team and maximize their effort.

3. Rambis will never sell your company out.  You didn't have to give him the shot, but you did.  In return, that spells loyalty from Rambis toward your organization. 

4. You look smart when you win with Rambis.  Others promoted a star to their last manager vacancy and aren't doing any better than you're doing with Rambis.  You look like Bill Belichek as a result - a smart evaluator of talent.

5. Rambis is the underdog.  He'll outwork the others, which goes a loooooong way. Whatever the makeup of your Rambis, you'll smile every time you see his safety glasses, the old car he won't trade in because he's practical, or whatever image reminds you that he's Rambis.

So, the next time you're going to promote someone to a manager spot, don't choose the Magic Johnson of your organization.  Choose your Kurt Rambis...

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...

Last chance for Superbowl predictions.  Who ya got?

My predictions (email subscribers click through for the video):

1.  I predict there will be a meaningful exchange between a Cardinals wide receiver and his agent that will transcend the game.  OK, that's probably not going to happen, but I can't watch the Cardinals without thinking of Rod Tidwell and his struggling agent, Jerry McGuire.  Here are two scenes involving both to get you in the mood to root for the Cardinals on Sunday (go to 3:11 of the second video for the good stuff in that one):

2.  The CareerBuilder ad is going to suck.  Here's one on YouTube reported to be the 2009 ad entry from CareerBuilder.  Note to the marketing guys at CB - get the customer service rep in the speedo MUCH earlier in the spot.

Oh yeah - #3 - Cardinals 34, Steelers 31.  Enjoy the game and the commercials...

Basketball season is almost here, and that means from time to time I'll be riffing on the connection between talent in the workplace and the NBA.  Some of you will love it, some of you will unsubscribe in response to it (don't go! work through it! feel the burn), and at least one guy will comment because of it (Lance from Your HR Guy, a Trailblazers fan..).  I gotta be me, so I'm dancing with the lady that got me this far...

Please stick around.  I promise to always have a talent/HR/workplace connection to my NBA posts.

Today's connection - the "grinders" in your workplace.  The grinders are the folks who, on the surface, aren't as talented, gifted, well-liked, attractive, connected or socially aware as your top talent.  But here's the scoop - they show up every day, work their *** off, and often times, through sheer effort and competitiveness, come close to performing as well as your star, and occasionally outperform the star.

They grind it out.  Mama said knock you out, so they show up with their helmet on, hop in the test crash car you call a company, and take the licking and keep on ticking.

In basketball, the equivalent of a grinder comes in many flavors.  One flavor is the guy/gal who can score, but has to get points from the free throw line because they don't jump well or aren't superquick.  So they drive the ball to the basket, create contact, and go to the free throw line, usually after taking a beating.

In hoops, they call that doing the "Dantley".  That's Adrian Dantley, who knew his role and how to get his.

From the esteemed Basketbawful:

"The Dantley (thuh dant'-lee) noun. Describes those performances in which a player scores a significant number of points and more than half of those points come from the foul line.

Usage example: Kobe Bryant had a Dantley in Game 1 of the Lakers' second round playoff series against the Jazz: 38 points on 8 field goals and 21 (out of 23) freethrows.

Word history: Bob Ryan invented the term (as noted in David Halberstam's Playing for Keeps: Michael Jordan and the World He Made) to describe how Adrian Dantley was able to ignite many of his famous scoring explosions from the foul line. Dantley scored 23177 over his 18-year ABA/NBA career, and 8351 of those points -- roughly 36 percent of them -- came from the charity stripe. He led the NBA in free throws four times (and was the league scoring champion during two of those seasons) and currently ranks sixth all-time in that category. He shares the record (with Wilt Chamberlain) for most free throws made in a regular-season NBA game (28). Dude straight up knew how to draw fouls. It helped that he could bulldoze his way to the basket with his giant ass (see below).

We love to talk about the superstars, the rockstars.  Take the time to say thanks to your grinders this week, and show them some love by dropping the following in a meeting this week - "Ed's doing the Dantley on the Jones account".  Once they figure out the term means that you think they're outworking everyone, they'll wear it like a badge of pride.

So, you're brainstorming what band you can get for the next company celebration/outing/shindig.  Here's what you're looking for - you want them to be:

-Cool

-Buzzworthy among your company employees and customers

-Worthy of a little media coverage

-Consistent with your CEO's image if he/she is going to be on stage

-Capable of "Rocking It" in their own unique way

Here's one thing you may want to add to the list - Have they ever actually seen or used your product/service?  If not, you may want to write a product knowledge session into the contract.  Why's this on my mind?

Def Leppard recently showed up at a Detroit Red Wings preseason function to help get the new hockey season launched in the states.  Makes sense - after all, if the new season is upon us, it must be time to "Pour some Sugar" on somebody, or at the very least "Armageddon It". 

Unfortunately, any rocking that occurred was neutralized by the band's complete lack of understanding of hockey and the Stanley Cup.  From Yahoo Sports:

"The Detroit Red Wings may be feeling a twinge of embarrassment after their 3-2 home-opening loss to the Toronto Maple Leafs on Thursday night, in which the Stanley Cup champions passed the puck like a remedial-level pee-wee team.

That is, until Def Leppard's Joe Elliott redefined the concept of embarrassment during one of their NHL Face-Off Rocks segments at the Fox Theater in Detroit. This is what you get for booking a band from England: Drive on the wrong side of the road, place the holiest of holy hockey grails on a pedestal upside down.

Epic, epic fail. Even Draper's kid had the good sense to poop in the thing right-side up.

This was the proverbial slow-motion car crash; like on "The Price is Right," when a contestant is about to put the $199 price tag on the tube of toothpaste and the crowd simultaneously shrieks "NO! NO!"

Video below, email subscribers click through for the humanity.  Make sure you do the education session with the next band you book.  No sense in getting fired because the boys from Liverpool don't know which way to stand your product up...

Next year, do what any sensible Detroit citizen would do and bring on Kid Rock...

Hey Cubs Fans - How's it going?

By the time you read this, the Cubs are on the ropes - either down 0-2 or tied 1-1 in their series with the Dodgers, headed to LA in a "best of 5" game series.

And Cubs fans across the nation just threw up in their mouth a little bit. 

Take a look at the pictures to the right, and you'll find some of the icons who represent the culture of the Cubs, otherwise known as the CURSE.  Bartman.  The cat at Shea Stadium.  I've taken the liberty of adding one to the mix - Manny Ramirez.  How unfair is it to Cubs fans everywhere that the promise of a championship will, in all likelihood, be ended by a malcontent from Boston that the Red Sox actually paid the Dodgers to take off their hands?

Manny goes yard, Cubs lose.  That's just wrong. 

Seriously, where else in business do you find a franchise that prints money off a culture of being the lovable loser?  Nowhere - because sports is the only place that losing, if sustained long enough, actually becomes a positive part of the brand.  It's been a 100 years (1908, right?) since the Cubs won a championship, and at this time the franchise is currently valued as the 5th most valuable team in baseball, with a sticker price of $642 million.

Only in sports.  Can you imagine the following?

-Southwest Airlines fails to turn around planes on time, has the most expensive tickets in the business, and experiences the most canceled flights due to fleet issues.  Still, because the flight attendants sing (not take me out to the ballgame) and crack jokes, they're still the most profitable airline.

-Traces of acid in Bud Light cans routinely burn the throats of beer drinkers, but since Bud's got great commercials (brand image), they're  successful anyway (note - if your throat is sore Bobby Joe, relax - this is a hypothetical).

Can you imagine either of those scenarios happening?  No, because the market wouldn't allow it. Business is Darwinian, while sports has "history" that builds identity - even if you're losing.   

If you want a workplace that builds culture based on losing, look to the Cubs.  Unfortunately, it looks like the guy who helped rid Boston of the curse will be the same guy to put the dagger in the backs of Cubs fans.

His name's Manny Ramirez, and like a few of your employees, he doesn't care what you think.  Because of that, he also doesn't feel a lot of pressure, which makes him pretty dangerous - whether he's in the lunchroom or batting 3rd in a short series. 

What's the best way to grow talent?  Invest heavily in training?  Go out and acquire the best when you need it?  Cool succession planning software?

Not corporate talent - Olympic Talent....

With the Chinese doing well in the Olympics and our memory of the USSR and East German machines still fresh, many are pointing to the presence of a nationalized sports program as a key to establishing Olympic superiority.  Bela Karolyi came out at the Olympics and pointed to missing teeth among the Chinese gymnasts as proof of a "win at all costs" attitude, as well as the potential superiority of a nationalized sports system, where kids get plucked at a young age and turned into specialists.

As it turns out, medal count almost always comes down to population and GDP, although GDP could be partially replaced by a hat tip to Lenin or Marx.  From the Financial Times in the UK:

"Every country is at it. China has spent a fortune on its quest to win the most gold medals at Beijing. The UK is likely to spend more than $1bn on elite sports in the run-up to the London games in 2012. Just like military planners, Australia’s Olympic Committee, a sporting power, is demanding more money to keep up with emerging threats.

It might be worth it to sustain Aussie sporting pride – if there were any evidence that it is possible to buy Olympic gold medals. In fact, almost all Olympic success can be explained using only five factors: population, gross domestic product per capita, home advantage, the use of an elite sport system to identify talent, and a country’s system of government. Tired of Olympic failure? Install a communist regime.

The first two factors are by far the most important: more people means more exceptional sporting talent; higher national income means leisure time to spend on fencing or handball; and at the Olympics, home advantage allows the hosts to field a larger team.

What nations can do is target sports that no one else plays. South Korea wins a lot of medals for archery, Germany always wins the team dressage, and while US and Russian athletes both win a lot of medals, it is surprisingly rare for them to share an Olympic podium.

Interesting analysis, and it makes sense for the business world as well.  Looking to develop a new piece of software?  Take this lesson and do it with a technology/geographic center combination that will allow you to get talent.  Nothing worse than chasing a total of five developers, working in a retired technology, in a metro area with 3 million people. 

For the record, I'm saying that the US has three of the five factors in place.  Population, GDP, and an elite sporting system that ID's talent in the USOC.  For the communist players that have been the yin to our yang (USSR, East Germany and now China), they replace the GDP with the system of government, effectively nationalizing the whole operation.

People lose sight of the fact that we have the elite system in place in the USOC, just like the Chinese do with the nationalized system.

The primary difference?  Our government doesn't force the kids into specialized schools away from their families, like the Chinese do.

In the USA - we let the parents do that...  It's all about choice here... :)

Go USA!!

There's always been a school of thought that playing sports as you grow up has value.  Regardless of your skill level, the thinking goes that, via sports, you learn valuable lessons about persistence, competition and how to be a good teammate.  JLee wrote about it over at Fistful of Talent earlier this week.  I agree with those thoughts, but would stop short of saying that sports are the only way to learn those lessons.

Apparently, being active in sports may also be valuable when you're all grown up.  From the Wall Street Journal (hat tip to Capitalist reader Christopher):

"Playing sports at least once a month may have as big an impact on your long-run earnings as an additional year of schooling.

That’s the conclusion of a study published by the Centre for Economic Policy Research that explores the relationship between leisure sports and labor market outcomes. Its author, Michael Lechner of the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland, takes a rigorous look at how the decision to play sports influences one’s wages years down the road.

Using survey data that followed the lives of thousands of Germans from 1984 to 2006, the German Socio-Economic Panel study, Mr. Lechner found that sports-playing adults saw a boost in income of about 1,200 euros per year over 16 years when compared to their less active peers. That translates into a 5-10% rate of return on sports activities, roughly equal to the benefit of an extra year’s worth of education.

It turns out, according to Mr. Lechner’s calculations, that only about one-fifth of that increase comes as a result of better health. Some of that unexplained component could be chalked up to social networking benefits. In fact, the sports-playing men in Mr. Lechner’s study reported a significantly higher level of “social functioning” than did the less active men. The fact that the German survey followed people over time allowed Mr. Lechner to compare people with the same amount of sports activity in their past. So former high school athletes were only compared with others with a similar amount of experience."

Click through for the comments on the original article regarding testing bias, confounding variables, blah, blah, blah.  Interesting to see some science behind this, and more interesting to note it's about participation in sports as an adult, not the lessons learned as a child.  They even control, in the study, to compare adults who had similar activity levels as a child.  So they're comparing the child sports prodigies with each other.   

Me?  I'm still hooping like Jim Carey in Cable Guy.  Making friends and influencing others just like him.  We usually play prison rules over at the Y - you should stop by next week.  Here's some video of what to expect...

Anyone beside me think it was a weak Super Bowl, in terms of the commercials?  It just seemed that the laughs were few, and the quality was poor, with a few exceptions...

My vote for best ad was an easy one.  During the playoffs, the NFL ran a contest where they allowed every player in the league to step in front of the camera and tell a unique story about their life in the league.  The reward for the winner?  To be featured in the NFL Network's 30-second spot during Super Bowl XLII.

The winner was Ephriam Salaam of the Houston Texans, who tells the story of his personal experience, in the form of an "employee referral program."  Here's a rundown of the story from www.houstontexans.com:

"The commercial tells how Salaam, while at San Diego State University, convinced Pitts to try out for the Aztecs football team. Pitts was a student working as a grocery bagger at a local supermarket. He had attended a math and science academy in high school, which had no football team.

But he heeded Salaam’s advice, walked on to the team and, a few years later, had developed so rapidly that he was selected by the Texans in the second round of the 2002 NFL Draft.

Salaam, a seventh-round draft choice by the Atlanta Falcons in 1998, reunited with Pitts in Houston as a free agent signee in 2006. He since has started 30 consecutive games next to his former college teammate on the left side of the offensive line.

“It is a phenomenal story that is true,” Salaam said. “Hollywood couldn’t write a script like this. We’re playing next to each other. How about that? I’m having fun playing next to one of my close friends that I knew before football and that doesn’t happen, ever.”

When I saw the commercial, I immediately thought of how all of us have tried at times to have managers and employees carry referral cards, usually with weak results, because most of the folks we were arming with the cards aren't salespeople.  The last thing they want to do is pitch someone on a job.

Then you see a story like this and remember that the best hires are equal parts chance, fate and awareness.  Makes me want to run out and create this type of commercial in an employment branding campaign.

Enjoy the spot if you didn't see it.  Make sure you think twice about the checkout clerk that gives you great service.  You might be missing an obvious hire...

You Should Play Football - NFL