I disagree.

I disagree because the argument about content craftsmanship is not a binary equation. We have a spectrum of options between ‘cheap and cheerful’ and ‘Directed by Ridley Scott’ blockbuster. Sure, there’s the occasion when being able to capture content relies on being in the moment, but this shouldn’t dictate your strategy. There’s certainly a difference between shooting like this, or producing something like this.

Life is not a choice between ‘shorts and sneakers’ and ‘tuxedo’. We have different outfits for different purposes, and it’s generally the case that as our intimacy with a group of people increases, our standard of dress relaxes. We cultivate a casual standard through continual exposure to our personality. We don’t begin this way for a reason. Many people still wear suits to job interviews because they acknowledge the statement that wearing a suit makes – we are here for work purposes, I am dressed accordingly. It is a professional standard, one that shows you’ve made an effort. It doesn’t make you any less ‘authentically’ you, it just means you’ve made a conscious choice to present yourself in a way that shows you care about how you’re seen.

The same argument goes for the basics of communication. If you’re not a great speller or a master of the apostrophe, you aren’t suddenly more authentic if you continue to spell things wrong or choose NOT to learn how punctuation works. It doesn’t make you seem more legitimate, or more believable. In fact, it does the opposite. It makes it look like you don’t care enough to proofread. Not edgy, not more real – just lazy.

Creating content should be about combining authenticity with craftsmanship. It should be about finding your narrative and expressing it to the best of your ability. It’s about being prepared to set a standard for your voice, a professional standard that you won’t compromise. If you have a story that’s worth telling, it’s worth telling well. And it’s worth taking the time to make sure it looks official, legitimate and is the best product you can produce in a reasonable time.

Overcooked is a comparative term. Content becomes, in my understanding, overcooked when the message is lost in the polishing. When you create content that’s not compelling or original, but stays firmly on the safe side of the corporate line. But that’s not about the time it takes to create – it’s about making something technically brilliant with no heart and soul. Good content needs emotion, whether it’s a sneezing panda or an Apple keynote or a cat with bacon taped to it. You don’t need to sacrifice quality to create emotion or authenticity, and you certainly don’t deliberately create content whose only merit is that it was ‘quick and dirty’.

It’s one thing to make ‘raw’ content because that’s your only option. However, when it isn’t, why do anything less than your best work?

To watch this as a video, click here.

These days, most of our technology comes in two formats. It is either devices, such as tablets and smartphones, or it is software. While the two often go hand in hand, it is software, and specifically the operating platforms we use therein, that make the most impact to our administrative lives. It’s a growing field in which we can see huge gains made in our processes by adopting newer platforms and versions of existing software, and taking advantage of the automation of some of those tasks.

But there’s a problem. The leap towards software as a saviour has had an unexpected side effect. We seem to have forgotten what it’s for. We’ve made the ability to save time and effort a benefit, instead of looking at what we can turn those savings into.

There’s a saying among the more sartorial; they should never see the outfit, they should just see you. The outfit should be so natural, so tailored and so obviously aligned with what you’re offering that it should become invisible. This is how I feel about the two things that software gives us in the people community; user experience for our passive and active talent, and our internal processes for evaluating, hiring and on-boarding our candidates.

There’s a hierarchy of creating pleasurable interfaces (taken from Stephen P Anderson’s excellent presentation on the same topic) that shows the growth in engagement and emotional payoff for users as we move from ‘functional’ experiences to ‘pleasurable’ ones. As we use our resources to make the experience richer and more natural, we generate confidence and enjoyment among our users, which benefits both their attachment to the brand and their sense of comfort. We build trust by making things fun, simple and streamlined, preferably by attaching the brand values we recognise as our own into the mix.

It’s a big jump. Almost all the software we use to do the function-specific elements of our job was designed to make our lives easier as recruiters. The majority of careers pages are designed as add-ons to existing corporate websites, and are built in rigid structures that have been inherited from a company’s original website. Our media channels (with the exemption of social media) are just as rigid, even down to the way we phrase our job descriptions and role advertising. We are driven to a standard template through a mix of anecdotal experience and system limitations, and even those are linked. When the first pieces of recruitment software were built, we asked that they be able to do what we thought we needed, and so that’s what they do, and nothing more.

There are some pretty easy runs to be put on the board by stepping beyond the line in the sand that we drew ourselves. Some companies are already doing it, and I expect we’ll see more. Building gaming and rewards-based interaction into recruitment processes, using rich media content to demonstrate the corporate culture (and not just the video that was made for the shareholders, either) and creating opportunities for interaction over and above what’s required or generated by the system are all good places to start. The technology is good, but it should be used as a tool to connect people with things that are interesting: other people, good stories, immersive brand experiences, even the odd moment of inspiration. We sell the belief in a better tomorrow, but many of the interactions we subject candidates to set a tone of satisfying process, rather than escorting candidates through a learning experience that familiarises them with the brand even as we tick our checklist in the background.

The other benefit of this is that people relax. No one is comfortable using an interface that makes them feel stupid or overly taxed. Giving them a means of communicating and interacting that feels natural and enjoyable creates an atmosphere of comfort, and leads users to be more open, more likely to offer feedback, and more likely to raise issues with the company, not in a social media back channel somewhere. Your point of difference goes from being robust on the process side, to being accessible on the human side. And that’s where all the wins are.

If your point of difference is software, then your point of difference is that you have something that anyone else can have for a price. If your automated process is the crown jewel of your efforts, then you’re replaceable. It isn’t the software that makes you different, or remarkable, or enjoyable to deal with. It’s what you do with the extra time that software gives you, particularly if you invest it in being more creative, more communicative and more approachable.

The problem with this is that we become addicted to novelty. We get addicted to trying to get the new thing up and running. Facebook, Twitter, FourSquare, Tumblr – the list of possible ways to engage talent , particularly passive talent, grows as we spend more time in this world. We have conferences on how social platforms can build brand engagement, on how LinkedIn can find us the names of possible talent, on how metrics and online interaction can create loyalty. It’s a shiny new world, and it gives us all something to talk about. And I have no doubt that there are plenty of strategies that allow companies to use social media to bring passive talent to a greater understanding of what they offer. No doubt at all.

However, this addiction to novelty comes at a price. We have ignored mastery for diversity. We’ve become handymen instead of craftsmen, explorers instead of refiners.  Most of all, we’ve become people who go out and buy bandages instead of going to a doctor. We have diverse and complex systems to manage our active candidates that contain communications templates, can tie in to existing communities and give us a multitude of ways to parse talent. And I believe that, in the majority of cases, our teams of recruiters know enough about this software to get by, and nothing more.

(I’m going to use PageUp as an example here, just because it’s easier to name a system. PageUp isn’t the problem; in fact, it’s an excellent system that almost no one is using to full capacity.)

If you have PageUp, your recruiters most likely get trained in how to do the day to day work in the system, and very little about the advanced areas. They won’t be unilaterally educated about updates or new features. They’ll be technicians, good at using one functional workflow to answer a need – the need to fill a role. They won’t be masters, or gurus, or (insert your term for the PageUp wizard in your business here) – they’ll have a fit-for-purpose understanding. This has been the case everywhere I’ve worked, and from discussions with other people in the game, it is common enough. Common enough, in fact, that organisations with strong social recruiting efforts spend more time refining their social campaigns to attract passive candidates than they do talking to existing, active ones.

If we compare the relationship between candidates and your brand to human relationships, then we are investing in looking good on RSVP instead of learning to be a better spouse. In short, we go speed dating online and never use the phone numbers we collect. We are ignoring those who are already attracted to us in favour of converting the unallied masses to our brand. We are making conversions from brand ambivalence to brand alliance through marketing and online engagement, and then rewarding that conversion with silence and ambivalence of our own. “Treat them mean, keep them keen” doesn’t apply to what we do. We foster discontent with every missed opportunity for better interaction with our existing, active candidates, and often we do it because we’re time-poor. It’s like saying  “When sales pick up, we’ll do some marketing. “ Bad advice. This is the area in which most companies can grow the most, can return the best ROI, and can make the most significant gains in reduced time to fill, cost per hire and recruiter workload in. It’s so simple that’s it’s overlooked by default.

Advanced skills (mastery, if you will) in all the ways you can pipeline talent and use PageUp (or whatever system you’re using) is a less public, less expensive, less marketing intensive way of making gains in the war for talent. It requires harnessing the knowledge of your experts and sharing it so that everyone in your team becomes highly proficient in all the aspects of the system. It provides, in return, more channels and opportunities for measuring ROI, better deployment of resources, faster results, lower time to get new staff up to speed and, above all, thicker and deeper communications channels to the people in your talent pools who really want you.

Social media has pulled our focus, because it’s public and shiny and democratic. It’s visible and engaging and fun. People like using it. And it absolutely has its place in engaging passive talent, in building brand perception, in being a brand authority and in joining the conversation about your employment offering. It’s important, however, to make it a balanced part of a strategy that mixes passive contact with nurturing existing candidates, a strategy that encourages loyalty by rewarding the most loyal, active candidates with the most attention.

And if yours is an organisation that sacrifices good candidate care and dismisses active, motivated jobseekers for trying to hook the passive ones, you run an additional risk. If you sow dissent in those who love you, your social media presences may become the field on which you reap the annoyance, vitriol and disappointment of those hearts you’ve broken or spurned.

And given this is my blog, I have an opinion too. And it’s that ‘communities’ is inaccurate for a completely different reason.

A community is traditionally a collective of people united by a common interest or trait. Seth Godin called them tribes to great effect in his book of the same name. Communities have a social hierarchy as well as a united view, and a universally accepted cultural set of rules. They are driven by passion and the desire to create a universally more rewarding experience for all members. And more often than not, they are anarchic, self-governing collectives. Which is why they aren’t what we’re looking for.

A closer term, in my view, is ‘congregation’. A group of people united by a common desire for information, who come together in a dedicated space to interact laterally and be educated by a pastoral figure. Within the congregation, there are accepted rules of entry that are set by the leader, about participation, protocol and etiquette. There are dedicated channels for interaction and a sense of ‘the one’ (pastor) talking to ‘the many’ (the congregation) for mutual benefit. The pastor offers information, insight and guidance about how their knowledge can improve the lives of the congregation. The congregation interacts both vertically and laterally to create both social and assistive interaction.

The reason that congregation seems a more appropriate word is that communities offer little scope for an externally ordained expertise. In a community, you’re an expert by universal acclaim – people know what you know through ongoing exposure to your viewpoint. As leader of a congregation, your expertise is established first, and you make yourself approachable. You are an authority figure first, separated from the community level of knowledge by virtue of position.

We can’t build talent communities because, as representatives of the company, we cannot be equals with those who are petitioning our employers for jobs. We are authority figures by default, as the gatekeepers of the kingdom they are trying to enter. We cannot participate in anarchic discussion – we can foster it, monitor it, report on it and correct it, but we as company faces cannot join it as equals.  We have something to sell, and communities aren’t about selling – they’re about the free exchange of opinion.

I’m not suggesting we start using ‘talent congregation’ as a term, but I think the difference between a community and a congregative model is important. As recruiters and employment marketers and HR people, we are (to use a quaint model that seems applicable) the priests and nuns and monks of the church of our brand’s religion. We are acolytes that serve a faith, a faith that our employment experience is real, tangible and deliverable. We believe in a vision, and our interaction with a community that wants to be educated in that vision (and how it can make their lives better) is not equal. Our authority exempts us from being included in their curiosity, and we are, as a result, separate.

People are unified by shared interest. And it’s that interest that makes them people we can hire, people we can talk to. However, unless we are personally interested in the same thing, we aren’t part of the community. We’re something else, and we must act accordingly, whatever the name we give them. Knowing this is more important than naming it.

Like Seth Godin’s ‘Tribes’ and ‘Poke The Box’, ‘Evil Plans’ is a guidbook to adventure by shedding an almost surgical light on what’s possible. I can’t recommend it enough, and as a short blast of good sense and inspiring stories, it’s definitely worth a read. However, tied to the theme of this blog, I found amidst the messages a very simple idea that we often ignore. And almost always, ignore at our peril.

Talking to a co-worker after reading this book about employee evaluation and performance management, this book came up. I was talking about the way performance management seems tied to salary review, and can be seen by employees as a justification of denied reward- i.e, a system which identifies reasons to deny pay rises, not reward them. And by different paths, my colleague and I hit upon the same phrase. Employee reviews need to be about helping people achieve their own ‘evil plans’ – about helping them get paid to do something they love doing anyway.

We’ve made a horrible error, somewhere. We’ve made ‘performance review’ into a gauntlet that employees need to run, with the idea that, if they get through relatively unscathed, there’s a slightly larger pot of gold at the end. We’ve let money become the benchmark – it’s universally applicable, so I guess that made sense, once upon a time. Money means a better life, right? More cash, nicer things, bigger holidays. The universal standard for increased happiness – the mild increase in personal freedom that having more money implies. And yet, this isn’t really true at all. And it’s sucking the will to work out of people’s hearts.

Why aren’t we using an employee review differently? Why isn’t it a process of levelling up, RPG style, to the next professional plane? Why isn’t it a chance, not to withhold money, but to map out the next stage of a career? Why are we trading on satisfying  KPIs with minimum numerical value, without giving those numbers meaning by showing where the brackets end? Why is it about your performance instead of your skills? Why is it about what you didn’t do on paper, rather than what you did do in real life? And why is it something that so many employees dread, or loathe, or deride?

The answer to the last one is simple. We haven’t made it fun. We’ve made it mandatory. We’ve made it a ticked-box, a satisfied process, a checklist item on the ‘be a good manager’ sheet that’s overtaken common sense and good education. We’ve made this whole thing about ‘do this and you might not be disciplined/get more cash’ instead of saying ‘Let’s see what we can do to make you better/get you a better job/build your skills.’ We’ve made performance the benchmark, not people. We’ve reviewed outcomes and not progress.

Read ‘Evil Plans’ – I guarantee there’s something in there for you. And when you’re done, ask yourself if your organisation is helping people live their own evil plans. Ask yourself whether you’re building careers and crafting passionate, engaged people. And ask yourself whether your organisation is driven by satisfied targets, or by the ideas, dreams and joie de vivre  of your people. Because if it’s people, then reducing them to a measurable, subjective, minimum-standard performance review is the easiest way to ge them to look for new challenges elsewhere.

1. How would  we change our model if we worked on a donation system where our clients paid what they thought was fair?
2. How could we do this faster than our average turnaround time?
3. How many of our problems are because of our systems?
4. How many of our problems are because of our process?
5. How could we deliver the same results, for the same cost, without using any of our current channels?
6. If we couldn’t compete on price, how else would you add value to our customer offering?
7. Who is our customer?
8. If our organisation was a volunteer/not for profit instead of a company, how would our operational strategy change?
9. What would change if we could never meet candidates, managers or stakeholders  face to face?
10. How would your strategy change if you were never allowed to identify who we are to customers?

It’s fun and relaxing and complex, and it’s taught me a few basic concepts completely outside the game itself.

It’s almost impossible to build a perfect solution.

In Chime, the building blocks are multiples of five units. The smallest possible active module you can build is nine blocks. So unless you manage to get the right sequence of parts and are fast enough to utilise them the right way, it’s almost impossible to build a solution which covers everything without needing to go back and fill in the empty spots later.

Every decision leaves artifacts behind that can hamper you later.

As the building blocks are different shapes, the creation of modules often means that afterwards, there are left-over artifacts from your previous solution. Often, these are either a good place to start making new plans, or something that gets in your way later on. And they often impact future plans in unforeseen ways when you’re building in a different area.

These artifacts become less important over time.

In Chime, the beat line of the song chases from left to right across the game arena, and every pass weakens the artifacts of previous modules, until they disappear (and take your multiplier with them), clearing the board. The colour changes as these get weaker as a signifier. Which means that, after a certain point, you stop trying to include the artifacts of past solutions into your new solution, and begin building from scratch. Factoring past consequences of your designs is only good up to a point – there comes a time when the remnants of a previous solution need to be ignored.

There’s a finite amount of time before you have to abandon a larger solution.

As you build modules, each module has a finite amount of time during which you can add to its overall size before it’s deployed. This timer resets whenever you add more volume (another full side) to the module. However, as modules become bigger, it’s harder to add a full side before the timer runs out, because there’s more ground to cover. At some point, you must decide a solution is finished before the effort of trying to add more to it becomes futile, and stops you capitalising elsewhere.

Looking beyond the primary function of a tool can lead to better results.

Most of the shapes seem to have an obvious application, but it’s surprising how many different combinations can be used to create differently-shaped modules. As the game progresses, you are required to adopt different sets of building blocks for differently shaped arenas. There’s a substantial difference in how well the game flows when you begin to look past the obvious application of shapes, and start looking at which gaps need filling, rather than how to combine your tools perfectly.

Repetition breeds unconscious competence.

I haven’t played this game to death, but I have played it a lot. Enough, certainly, to know that I’m faster now because I know how to create success from a score (and coverage) perspective. That didn’t come with study – it came with repetition, the ability to deploy solutions quickly and effectively. There’s an unconscious competence bias to games like this – the less you have to think about which actions are required (press X, move stick, press A, etc) the more you can focus on the big picture, and work faster.

It is either growth or decay – nothing is a constant solution.

In Chime, you’re either building a solution or waiting for one to embed in the background so you can build over it. The game is always a race against time, and your solutions are either in construction or in the background. Artefacts from previous solutions are either employed in a new solution, or they’re becoming obsolete. As soon as a solution is deployed, it becomes part of the established background, and new solutions, new problems need to be tackled to advance.

If you know your playing field well, you can fill in the tough spots first

The five arenas in Chime vary substantially in shape and size – including different corners and void areas. Once you realise that specific solutions are required to cover the trouble spots first, the game becomes a lot easier to plan and manager.

Everyone loves a showman. The two presentations which really stood out for me both came from charismatic, well-spoken presenters who combined data-heavy content with personal anecdotes and humour. In a room of more than 350, being able to make your audience members feel special and engaged remains a rare skill, and a valuable one.

Context is contrast. My favourite old issue. A lot of the information was shared like a chapter from a book – there was no prologue or epilogue, no sense of how this fits into other initiatives or histories. The focus was very operational, on small improvements people have made, without understanding what frameworks make these improvements possible. Case studies are great, but understanding what led to the case being so successful outside of just the data would have been more helpful in stimulating like-for-like comparisons.

Your mistakes can hang around. There were a few examples of people’s bad behaviour from previous conferences tarring them in the crowd. Every event has a back channel of rumour, and this one is no exception. In an industry with 50% annual turnover, I was amazed how many people had heard the same stories about some of the more flamboyant characters.

Alcohol and your personal brand don’t mix well. I’ve heard that alcohol amplifies your natural character, and I agree to an extent. And while I’m as guilty as any of having a few too many, it’s interesting to have seen the next-day repercussions in a room of industry types. Particularly for those who had indulged so heavily that they missed sessions their employers had paid for them to attend.

Negativity is anathema. Predominately, the discussions and questions around speaker topics (social media, testing, positive psychology and more) were positive and progressive. It was interesting to observe that, in a room full of people who were there to learn, just how often attendees would physically shy away from nearby attendees who were asking negative questions.

Social media is still eluding many. The informal discussions around social media continue to suggest that simply being on social media as an earnest participant are enough to guarantee at least a modest success. Which is the equivalent of saying if you turn up to the right clubs and dress nice, you’re bound to have fun. There wasn’t a lot of discussion about how to determine which channels suit your brand’s personality, or how to drive strategic use of these tools and options.

Tarred with the brand brush. In a room full of people who are good at their job, it’s interesting how much weight is lent to speaking for a brand. I found myself listening more intently to speakers once I knew what company they represented – the brand lent gravitas to their arguments. And I wondered how people drew the line between their personal opinions and their professional positions – I know I had trouble!

People make odd decisions. During the conference, someone tweeted that they had gatecrashed the event, and proceeded to dissect a presentation given by a reputable corporate brand in fairly harsh terms on Twitter. From this, I’ve learned three things. Firstly, don’t tweet that you’ve snuck into somewhere without paying (particularly don’t use the event hashtag!). Secondly, bagging out a presentation you haven’t paid to see, in a public forum, visible to your whole industry, isn’t likely to make you a welcome guest. Thirdly, don’t bag out a presenter if you’re already on a schedule to present alongside them at a conference in six months. Because they’ll probably know you did it, and you’re not likely to get the respect you’re looking for.

The industry doesn’t want high performers. Largely, because it makes everyone else’s job hard. No one wants to compete for talent with an organisation that’s doing it better than you – it’s like playing video games with a teenager. While there was a lot of sharing of technical information, there wasn’t a focus on creating game-changing programs or really kicking ass. My personal view is that this is because everyone in the industry knows that their organisation isn’t going to stump up the cash for something incredible when we can all get by doing roughly the same thing. More on this point later, but I felt very keenly that only one presentation was focused on innovation ‘because we can’.

People can be surprisingly awesome in the right setting. I met more than 100 new people in three days. I danced with strangers, drank with suppliers, traded cards and stories and tips with a host of rookies and veterans. I connected IRL with some people I knew online, put faces to usernames and build my network just a little more. I was impressed by the attitude of attendees – that we were united in a journey to make it easier for graduates to find the right job, and to make good choices for their futures. Like the other conferences I’ve been to this year, it was a great way to spend time and see the world from lots of different angles and through a myriad of different lenses. Bring on 2011.

HR In Black And White – Riges Younan from Jared Woods on Vimeo.

What would the world be missing out on?

What would you, as an employee, miss out on?

The answer to the first question is the reason your company exists.

The answer to the second is your employer brand.

The reason any employee works at a company can be seen as an overlap between the company’s ‘generic’ employer brand (ie, the value proposition constructed from the points which the majority of employees agree are part of the employment experience) and the employee’s personal brand affiliation. Let’s call this an overlapping synergy. The larger the synergy, the more likely you’ll be a culture fit, and the more likely you’ll enjoy the role.

Mapped in two dimensions, this is a simple Venn diagram. Larger overlap, more points of common perceived benefit (between you and the ‘brand’ average) means a picture of more engagement. (and as a side note, look at those values and try and construct a person out of them. Even a fictional person makes it very easy to start drawing comparisons. This is what I call a ‘brand mannequin’ – looks like a person but isn’t, but good for measuring people against)

However, the two-dimensional synergy (and indeed the brand mannequin) doesn’t take into account the power of beliefs. Sharp spikes in the strength of those values can create different synergies. That extra dimension makes a substantial shift in the nature of engagement.

For example – Carl works for a company which has ten core values at the heart of the EVP. He doesn’t care about six of them, and two of the remaining four are things he agrees with at a reasonable level. The remaining two are Carl’s defining passions – they drive his career goals and his desires. In a two dimensional argument (yes/no) along the brand agreement, Carl scores 4/10. Not a high score on the employee engagement scale.

However, ask Carl what he’ll miss if he can no longer work for the company, and his answer will probably, amidst the social data, suggest that the company was aligned to his values. Maybe not all of them, but certainly the ones that mattered.

Overlapping synergy between the brand values is the first goal of an EVP – find out what we stand for and why people work here, and align the workforce, through education or ongoing recruitment, to build an overlapping synergy between the company and the individual value positions. Understanding the passions, and how huge a difference they can make to brand loyalty, to engagement and to a personal investment in your own professional development, comes once an organisation’s value proposition becomes part of the performance and career dialogue.

If you had to leave tomorrow, what would you miss? And is that really the reason you go to work every day? And if it is, what are you doing to get more of that, or keep it more secure?