In conversation, Lars seems to have a built in reminder. Somewhere, in the back of his brain, a little alarm goes off. "Say it now. Say it now." Then, as if you’ve never heard him say it before,

"Never let what might go wrong get in the way of what could go right."

In practice, that means he takes a lot of whacks at the jungle to see if there’s a path. Although Schmidt doesn’t describe himself this way, he is the poster child for a rapid experimentation, rapid fail approach to getting things done. Try it, see if there’s traction. If there isn’t, stop. If there is, do more.

He tells the story of his second or third day at NPR (where he is the Director of Talent Acquisition)."I’d just gotten there. All of a sudden, I was supposed to be co-hosting a hackathon with Google at South by Southwest." As he details the scramble to understand the problem (why co-host a hackathon?) and generate useful collateral while packing, you get a clear picture of Lars in action.

This is a guy who creates a reality distortion field that causes stuff to happen. Somehow, he aligns himself with the fates and good things flow in his direction.

"Never let what might go wrong get in the way of what could go right."

So, why is NPR hosting hackathons?

"We compete for talent in three distinct areas. The thing you’d expect, media and journalism is on the nameplate. That’s a tireless hyper competitive area that is our legacy. In recent years, however, our digital team has come into its own. NPR is really a digital operation. We compete directly with high-tech companies for the best talent in technology and other digital expression. Finally, we compete for business people. That’s where our recruiting has its deepest local orientation."

That’s an impressive span for an operation driven by contributions. In this role, Lars is demonstrating how to make a little budget go a long way.

"Branding is critical for Recruiting", he says. "In the news business, the product is the brand that matters. In Digital, it’s our national employment brand. What matters locally is how we’re perceived as a place to work. These are distinct manageable aspects of Branding. In our industry, we call it Employment Branding. It’s really just a layer of engagement with the overall brand."

We spoke about influence in four different ways.

• Influences on Lars
  One of the great things about most influential people is that they give credit easily. The list of people who influence Lars is long and you’d recognize most of them (They are almost all on this Top 100 List). He tells glowing stories about being welcomed into the social media scene by an army of people who are generous with their time and insight.
• Influence as a trait to hire for
  Both the Media and Digital components of the NPR employment Brand
  are environments where influence and audience reach matter. While there is no current activity to use influence as a hiring criteria, Lars clearly understands its utility.
• Influence as a way of reaching potential employees
  Part of the brilliance of #NPRLife is that it gets its traction from the reach of the people who work for NPR. The initial launch was accelerated by a series of tweets from a well known on-air personality.
  
• The measurement of Influence
  We talked for some time about the idea that influence can be measures. In general, we agreed that
  things are very primitive now but that you have to go through the primitive phase to get to useful tools.

Keep your eyes on LArs Schmidt. His experimental attitude is exactly the way that innovation will percolate into our R&D free environment. In his case, influence is a combination of position, temperament and the willingness to leverage whatever you have.

The Sackett family has been in the HR business from its inception. Generation after generation, the Sacketts have plied their trade. Tim’s great, great, great, great grandfather Yul, was the 18th Century progenitor of the George Clooney character in Up In the Air.

It was London, 1792. The new cotton mill was established as a model for the fair treatment of workers. Its Utopian owner, the son of a wealthy merchant family, understood that the keys to real productivity involved shortening the work day to 14 hours, daily five minute bathroom breaks and the ability to have children chained with their parents at the looms.

Yul, a Scandinavian native, was hired as the mill’s first paymaster. He screened new workers for hygiene and bugs, tallied the deductions for purchases at the company store, delivered the pay envelopes and administered the punishments. Known throughout England as the exemplar of Best Practice, Yul’s counsel was sought at the leading companies of the age.

One day, during a meeting with the mill owner, Yul put forward a radical new idea. “Beating our wayward employees, while personally enjoyable, doesn’t really seem to be doing much for productivity. Why don’t we simply have them removed from the premises and never speak to them again. It would be like putting your problems in a trash sack and having them hauled away.”

“A trash sack,” the owner replied with a glint in his eye. “That’s brilliant. Got a problem, sack it. It’s so simple. I should have thought of it.”

“Oh, it was your idea, sir.” replied Yul in an HR tradition that persists to this day.

As you might imagine, generations of service to organizations as professional paymasters and behavior optimizers guaranteed that the Sackett clan remained on the edge of poverty. In the days of the land rush, the family took a covered wagon and headed west. When the head of the clan saw that they’d reached Wyoming, they parked the wagon a build the homestead. It was then that they discovered that the offer for 40 acres applied to the state of Wyoming, not the town of Wyoming, MI.

As a young man, Tim was constantly confused about the question of whether he was from Wyoming or from Michigan. So, he began his post high-school education at the University of Wyoming. Quickly discovering that the open prairie was a bad place to be in HR (unless you like restaurant chains), young Mr Sackett returned to Michigan.

The rest is, as they say, history. Sackett’s trajectory from confused adolescence to HR Rainmaker took less than a decade once he finally got to work. (He took a six year sabbatical between undergraduate school and grad school to walk back from Wyoming to Michigan.) Now firmly into his 40s, Sackett is starting to imagine changing the face of HR.

With his own personal industry transforming Mr. Potato Head kit (he calls it the Sack-kit), Tim sits in his office envisioning a new nose, different eyes, altered lips and approaches to facial hair for the world of HR. He routinely clarifies his vision of the industry’s new face in his periodic rants at the legendary Tim Sackett Project.

One of the ironic keys to having a broad industry influence is not caring what other people think of you. Tim’s bio on Fistful of Talent makes it abundantly clear that your opinion of him simply doesn’t matter:

Tim Sackett SPHR, is the ultimate Mama’s Boy! After 15+ years of successfully leading HR and Talent Acquisition departments for Fortune 500s and smaller technical firms, Tim took over running the contingent staffing firm HRU Technical Resources in Lansing, MI. Serving as the Executive Vice President, Tim runs the company his mother started over 30 years ago, and don’t tell Mom, but he thinks he does a better job at it than she did!

You can see the signs of Sackett’s influence everywhere you look. That framed and autographed photo behind the local HR Vp’s desk? It’s Sackett. Most intro HR text books are being revised to include the Sackett story. Next year’s SHRM conference will feature a Sackett Pavilion.

It’s rare that I get the opportunity to document the influence of the self proclaimed most powerful man in HR. You really need to keep your eyes on Sackett. One day soon, you’ll be changing all of your documentation to eliminate the phrase Human Resources Department to replace it with Sackett Department.

Chris is responsible for the design, implementation and sustainability of PepsiCo’s global digital and social recruiting strategies inclusive of managing Internet communities, analytics and 3rd party recruitment partnerships. As an industry professional with over 18 years of experience he pushes the boundaries of social and mobile recruiting in big business environments with the help of motivated recruiting teams from around the world. It’s his belief that maintaining an unwavering focus on improving both the candidate experience and job seeker engagement levels has a direct impact on the quality of talent that drives a company’s success.

Hoyt is a practical guy who is comfortable in his own skin. He is the personification of sanguine. Cheery, optimistic and ready to get things done. Unassuming and accessible.

Take another look at his job description (above). Hoyt manages Internet communities, analytics and 3rd party recruitment partnerships while being responsible for an employment brand.. Pepsi is one of the few companies capable of understanding and trying to manage these three things as one. Usually, they are separate. Most often they are not really managed. Typically, they are not all housed in the HR Department.

So, regardless of temperament and initiative, Chris has the great fortune to be in the right place. The result of curiosity, work ethic, experience and timing is an explosion of visibility.

Generally, the limelight has corrosive effects on people their first time through the ringer. Chris appears to have weathered the storm and prospered. It’s probably because he’s less interested in the credit than he is in what he can get done. For some, celebrity (even in the minor forms available in a niche like ours) is an end goal. For others, like Chris, it’s a tool for making progress.

Hoyt is in the enviable position of working for a company with solid resources, a desire to lead and a willingness to experiment. That means that Chris has tried and discarded ideas well before they have turned into the bland, me-too ness of best practices. He works at the front end of the process, trying to identify the next trends and navigate his operation to where they’re going to be.

Once, Chris and I were talking about the fact that innovation rarely comes from our industry. Usually, our new ideas are borrowed or stolen from an adjacent industry (something involving publishing or customer service). It was clear, in that conversation, that the place to look was ‘somewhere else’.

Chris immediately began to figure out how to expose his team to ideas beyond the world of Recruiting and HR. The insight hit him and he began to implement. It was so spontaneous that I almost missed it.

One of the things I’ve noticed about people who influence the industry is that they seem to have budgets with which to influence the industry. Although we’ve been looking at practitioner intensely in the past several top 100 pieces, it’s really the marketers, academics and consultants who have the time and energy for the conference and article circuit.

Somehow, Hoyt manages to slice his time so that he gets it all done.

He influences people by being a public trailblazer. Then he smoothes it out with contagious optimism. It’s a delicious formula.

It’s been a long time since someone made me think when I asked the question. At this point, I’ve asked about 1100 people about influence. Fishdogs surprised me. It isn’t the first time.

Fishdogs, a nickname Craig Fisher acquired in college, came in handy a dozen years ago when the craigfisher.com domain was already taken. Originally a site devoted to Craig’s work, his dogs and job postings, Fishdogs has come a long way. He says,

“I live at the intersection of marketing and recruiting. I help people and businesses leverage social media, mobile, and other new communication tools to get matched with the *right* customers, the *right* talent, and the *right* jobs. As VP Sales for Ajax Social Media, I handle sales and training for the 1st Linkedin-Certified training company in North America. I work with sales and recruiting teams around the globe to implement social media and mobile strategies for both business and career development.”

That doesn’t begin to tell you how influential he is. Or why. The bottom line is that he combines a love of the details of recruiting , a ceaseless curiosity about new technologies and a desire to teach.

Craig Fisher works like a dog. That’s probably the origin of the nickname. During college, he held as many as five simultaneous gigs. His favorite was selling ads for the college spoof newspaper (The Greek Inquirer)

He rolled out of school into a stint in the medical device sales world. He was such a hot shot sales guy that the company got him to move into training and developing new sales people. It was a short step to recruiting from there.

Craig did an interesting thing. In order to find the candidates he was looking for, he went to school on the job hunting process. His notion was that finding the right candidates was going to be easier if you understood their experience and psychology. The move paid off in big ways.

He moved quickly into Physician Recruiting with Matrix Resources. That was the start of a 20 year love affair with Recruiting. he spent a solid fifteen years in the trenches and management of a range of staffing and recruiting companies.

As social media, beginning with a very early blog at Fishdogs.com, caught his eye, Craig began his conversion to social media evangelist and experimenter.

These days, Craig has a portfolio of businesses, all interlocking and driving each other. He’s the VP of Ajax Social Media, the first certified LinkedIn training company. He runs the notorious TNL (Talent Net Live), a series of small unconferences focused on Social Media and Recruiting Effectiveness. He’s widely sought as a consultant on employment branding projects.

Mostly, he’s at the heart of the explosion of the next generation of leadership in HR and Recruiting.

There are two kinds of businesses emerging on the scene today. One, blessed with resources from investors, is heavily oriented towards tool creation in social technology. The other, personified by Craig, is being built by people with substantial time in the trenches.

These players (among them Geoff Webb, Jessica Miller Merrell and Bill Boorman) come at social technology with a deep understanding of the problem to be solved. Each of the four come at the problem with a unique perspective and a deep commitment to moving the technology forward. Each, in one form or another offer training and insight as a a part of their work.

The basic freedom from investors approach to business development can be vastly more opportunistic and creates businesses that are less structured that typical MBA driven operations.They win hearts and minds faster than the more well endowed crowd.

Craig sits at the center of a cyclone from which he has a very clear picture of the real practical truths of social recruiting. Be sure to catch him at one of the many places he turns up for a conference or a conversation. He’s changing the world.

It’s interesting to note, for example, the Tim Berners-Lee developed the first web server on a NeXt computer designed by Steve Jobs. That foundational technology now inhabits most operating computers in one way or another. Sure, I’d fit him into my schedule. Both Jobs and Berners-Lee transformed the way that we approach the simplest aspects of our lives. Each man influenced the world in dramatic ways.

Within an industry, there are a variety of ways to use influence:

• Some act as information gateways, platforms and bottlenecks (the event and publication executives fit here)
• Vendors shape the industry conversation with volume, innovation and cash
• Still others are the connective tissue that make careers and job opportunities possible (network connectors)
• Academics and analysts shape the language of the conversation. They are clearinghouses for best practice information
• Practitioners, who are in the best position to know what works in their companies, gain hands on wisdom.

As previously noted, it is very difficult to exert influence on an industry from a practitioner’s chair. At best, people working in the trenches get a chance to see the inner workings of five or six operations. Vendors, consultants, analysts, trade show promoters and academics all benefit from being able to see across a range of enterprises. Great practitioners often notice that the table is tilted away from their expertise.

There are several notable exceptions to the general principle that influence is inversely proportional to the amount of time you spend in the trenches. Recently, we’ve profiled several people who have effectively used social media tools to leverage their experience into broad industry influence. Seasoned professionals all, their path to influence included early mastery of a new technology. All of them are long term players in the HR-Recruiting industry.

Arie Ball‘s story is somewhat different.

Arie is a lifetime Sodexo employee who ended up in the HR/Recruiting business because the company’s move to outsource Recruiting fell apart. Seven years ago, Arie took the helm of a project designed to evaluate Sodexo’s options.. Up to that point, she’d worked he way up from dietician to General Manager. She had career stops running a hospital kitchen and various rungs of the Sodexo ladder. Her core expertise were leadership and operations.

When the RPO contract broke, it rapidly became the number one Board issue at the company. Arie was asked to lead a cross-divisional, cross market team. The job was to figure out whether to cancel the contract, modify it, transfer to a new vendor or bring it back in house.

They decided to build their own department. For the past seven years, Arie has been building a from scratch recruiting operation for a going concern. As such, she is able to utilize new approaches and technologies faster and more fully than someone making change in an ongoing operation. Arie’s industry influence stems from the fact that she runs the best observable “test kitchen”. Her ability to experiment and prosper comes from a long career as a one-company employee.

That’s a pretty potent counterpoint to the fast moving social media jet set who tend to dominate the conversation in the blogosphere. Arie has figured out how to work in that environment as well. The last time I sat down to talk with her, it was just before her first skydive. That trip was organized by a few from the social media scene. Go to a conference and you are liable to find her as she searches for new things to try.

A significant part of Arie’s astonishing ability to set an example comes from he three year planning process. She takes the business of planning Sodexo’s growth as a Recruiting shop very seriously. Each year, the planning process looks at a three year horizon and settle in on a few significant experiments in technology and or process improvement. By establishing a pattern of successes, she’s able to increasingly pull the organization along with her.

At Sodexo, there is a big picture for Recruiting. Arie sees her job as being the end of talent hoarding and the reducer of friction between divisional assignments. She believes that the organization’s success depends on making it easy for people to move around the company.

The company organizes its outreach to candidates along three lines:

• Internal
• External
• Rehire

Each group is offered different access and different routing through job opportunities and Recruiting community/collateral. By customizing the candidate experience in this way, Arie’s team minimizes the effort required to fill a slot.

She continues to cut new paths in the woods; a new mobile app (divided along the three experience lines) with Twitter and Blog access is the next project in the pipe.

Arie demonstrates the kind of leadership you can only learn with an extended stay in a specific company. Groomed by the internal team and buttressed by her successes, she is learning to take influence out of the company and into the industry.

These days, Sodexo Recruiting is evolving to include workforce planning. “We are looking for very long range impact from hiring”, Arie says.”We need to know where we get the talent and how those people will mature with us.”

That notion is backed by a talent community of 250,000 people. Sodexo tailors its interactions with the community members with tactics that range from regular birthday cards to online education. Again, she’s setting an example that others can follow.

The bottom line is that Arie Ball demonstrates that operational excellence can be the heart and soul of influence. Keep your eyes on her. She hasn’t yet finished having an impact on the industry.

Power is the ability to make things happen. Influence is not so clear. It is the ability to have an affect on things. Where the use of power means that a thing will happen, the use of influence increases the likelihood that something will happen. Power causes; influence affects.

Imagine that there is a spectrum.

One one end, popularity is the dominant force. This is the arena in which pop stars, television personalities, professional athletes and cinema celebrities operate. They influence culture and decision making that ranges from fashion to politics. Advertisers routinely look to this group as a way of shaping potential customer perceptions. The link between popularity and the decision that wants to be influenced is tenuous. This is a realm in which knowing how to communicate is more important than what is communicated.

At the other end is deep professional competence. In this realm, influence is rooted in subject matter expertise. These are the thinkers and doers who work in or on the arena. They influence the culture by demonstrating what actually works and what doesn’t or by creating the structures through which the world is better understood. The link between the decision under consideration and expertise is a very clear thing. This is the world in which being right can matter more than saying it well.

If influence were only as simple as that spectrum.

Influence always happens in some context. Whether it’s decision making in the organization, electing a government, family politics, determining best practices for an industry or introducing new ideas to any group, influence is a part of the process. Its use can be sophisticated and smooth or amateurish and crude. Generally, the more subtle the influence, the more effective it is.

In the technology arena, where new ideas are the stock and trade, influence takes a variety of shapes. Marketers try to increase visibility and understanding. Technologists often bank on the quality of their insight and execution. Evangelists prod and persuade. Investors work to handicap the game.

Some of the most interesting stories come from practitioners who follow their passion to create technology companies. Fueled by subject matter expertise and that powerful wisdom that comes from knowing what you’re talking about, they pour themselves into tech companies. Along the way, they pick up lessons in software development, marketing, capitalization, cash flow and executive leadership.

Carmen Hudson, this week’s addition to our Top 100 Influencers list is one of those practitioners turned technologists. The founder of TweetAJob, Carmen comes to the tech startup scene with a deep background in Talent Acquisition. Here’s the meat of her bio:

Carmen’s expertise is in helping clients build the right sourcing and recruiting strategies, and implementing them in the real world of limited budgets, competing priorities, and highly competitive recruiting environments. She consults and trains companies to help them leverage high ROI solutions for big sourcing, social media, and technology implementation initiatives.

Carmen is a self-described “recruiting geek” who has spent years learning, creating, and sharing best practices around sourcing. She gets that technology – for all of its hype – is still a means to an end, not an end in itself. Her corporate experience includes Yahoo!, where she was Senior Manager, Talent Acquisition. At Yahoo! she led the strategic sourcing team, revitalizing the employee referral program and Yahoo’s employer brand. The team was awarded a coveted Yahoo! Superstar Award, an ERE Excellence award and various recruiting and advertising industry awards.

Prior to joining Yahoo!, she was manager, Global Strategic Sourcing for Starbucks Coffee Corporation, where she developed sourcing strategies and recommended resources and tactics to support U.S. retail management hiring. She has also held senior talent acquisition roles at Microsoft, Amazon.com and Capital One.

Anyone who spends time with Carmen knows her as an extrovert with an abiding passion for Talent Acquisition. She has paid her dues mastering the complexities of the profession. Along the way, she’s picked up plenty of awards and public recognition.

Like most of our influencers, Carmen has a crystal focus and executes in a number of settings. While she’s piloting TweetAJob, she’s also consorting with Jason Warner and John Vlastelica at Recruiting Toolbox. This consultancy is one of two or three national organizations with the capacity to really turbocharge corporate recruiting efforts.

Carmen and I talked for a while about the trends shaping HR today. She described the ‘perfect storm’. It’s the combination of

• Economic Disruption
• Extraordinary Productivity
• Technology Advances

In her eyes, these three things conspire to create an employment market in which supply and demand are mismatched. Today, Software literacy is an assumed baseline. The ability to navigate complex, changing concepts is an essential part of workplace participation. Finally, the economic disruption has created a class of people who don’t understand that they’ve become irrelevant and need to acquire new skills.

She tells a persuasive story about the disconnect between job hunters and the companies that want to employ them. The people on the inside have no understanding of the dynamics of the job hunt. The people on the outside do not understand the complexities inside the organization. This is the root of reported bad experiences in the job application process.

As a tech entrepreneur, Carmen is a spotter of new technologies and approaches. She says, "If I was a silicon Valley recruiter, I’d be watching all of the location based check ins on Castro Street". She is certain that the process needs a universal application and that games have a limited future.

One look at Carmen will tell you that, all modesty aside, she is a standout in the field. She’s focused on the development and delivery of excellence in her profession. She influences by doing.

Susan Strayer, Marriott International’s Senior Director, Global Employer Brand and Marketing, is going places fast because of what she accomplishes. In an extremely short time, Strayer has added dramatic energy to Marriott’s employment branding endeavors. When the company recently launched a game to drive employment branding, Susan was behind it.

While the Military (both ours and theirs) use gaming for recruiting purposes, it’s hardly a conventional approach to employment branding. Susan’s accomplishment suggests an inflection point in corporate recruiting. Whether or not companies choose to ‘game-ify’ their online efforts, the drive to build a loyal cadre of potential employees (by making the relationship fun and educational) is now on in earnest.

(Have you seen the game? Go to the Marriott Careers page and click on the MyMarriottHotel link. If you want more detail, Strayer gives the best orientation.)

Speaking about the game, Susan said,

"It’s not a simulation, test or training, and it’s definitely not meant to be. Further, we’re not looking to immediately correlate hires to game play. What we do want to do though is twofold: first, create brand awareness (in global growth markets where the Marriott name isn’t well-known) and engagement where it is. Second, we want to reinforce the pride our employees have in working for Marriott. Many of them have a deep connection and affiliation with the company and the brand and in combination with the power of employee referrals we see it as a great opportunity."

The most interesting thing about the game is that it serves related but different functions in Marriott’s various global markets. In some countries (China, India) the game is positioned to help potential employees demonstrate the status of work in a hotel. By showing the managerial complexity of the job, prospective team members can garner parental support. In other, more mature markets, the game shows that Marriott has a surprising edge.

Listening to Strayer describe her project, you can’t help admiring the simplicity of the solution. While the market by market requirements are complex, the game functions admirably to deliver a variety of objectives.

Part of the accomplishment involves helping a large conservative company execute nimbly in the fast paced web markets. While Marriott operates one of the top 25 largest ecommerce sites, it’s not a brand that immediately suggests innovation or quick market adaptation. For an HR operation to make a move like this from a platform like that suggests some interesting things.

Strayer is quick to tell you about the support and encouragement she gets from her management structure. It’s a universe that includes a blogging CEO and an array of social media experiments. But, make no mistake, subtlety, finesse and sheer determination play a great part in Susan’s success.

Influence can come from a position, an audience, through sponsorship, because of credibility, a reputation built over time a relationship with a powerful person and a host of other channels. It can be seen in the way that ideas travel, conversation spreads or things get done. In Susan’s case, per stance and vision gave her a shortcut through the noise. Delivering a solution that raises the bar for competitors is hard to do in our industry. The Marriott game definitely raises the bar.

Susan’s story includes time at Home Depot, Arthur Andersen, the Corporate Executive Board, Ritz-Carlton and now, Marriott. Throughout her journey, she’s published (here’s her Amazon page) and built a side business in career coaching/personal branding.

Recently, Susan focused her external projects into a new company, Exaqueo. In Latin, ex +acqueo means something like ‘standing out from the familiar’.

"Each contender has a chance to step above the fray. Stand out. Get picked. Contenders have to show specific strengths, characteristics and qualities. Ones that are remembered. That’s the essence of a brand. Brands thrive on being unique. On getting noticed. In a good way. In a way that connects the brand with the right customer or the perfect opportunity.

The idea of the company is to deliver powerful competitive advantage to people who are willing to invest in their personal brands.

That’s where Susan shines. From innovation in employment branding technique to personal branding, she is laying the path for the emergence of branding as a discipline that is woven throughout HR.

With the release of the employment branding game, she’s earned her place in the larger industry conversation.

The rise of social media thrust a bunch of people into the limelight before they had a chance to really develop competency in their professions. They’ve become interestingly influential celebrities in our niche; long on style, short on substance. That’s not all that unusual. It just used to be reserved for popular culture (where style always trumps substance). The early 2000s will be remembered as a time when celebrity was democratized and became a neighborhood phenomenon.

Still, the puzzle of influence remains worth studying. As a tool, no HR professional can get their work done without knowing how to utilize influence. That’s what people in staff positions do. Folks with line responsibilities have power and authority. People on staff have responsibility and influence. (This, more than anything, is at the root of HR’s status in most organizations.)

I took a 90 day break in the flow of people to the Top 100 list. After 18 months of relentless study of the topic (in this project and the related niche algorithms), it was time to absorb some new perspective. Josh LeTourneau has been kind enough to repeatedly insist that I was missing something by not considering Social Network Analysis. He demonstrates one kind of influence that’s hard to measure: annoying persistence rooted in being right. (Don’t you just hate that?)

At any rate, the underlying message in social network analysis is that some people are at the hub of things actually getting done. The key to practical influence (which is the ability to get things done without authority or resources) is to occupy a position in the network that gets the most done with the least effort. Generally, this looks like a small close inner circle composed of people who have broad reach.

It’s no accident that Trisha McFarlane‘s roots are in doing HR in a Public Relations firm. She is the next person on the list (number 77) because she demonstrates an astonishing combination of online networking, good grass roots organizational development, network finesse and working excellence in the profession. Anyone who happens by Trisha is inevitably pulled into her various plans and schemes for world domination.

When you look at her online artifacts (Blog, Twitter, Another Blog, Linkedin), you discover a relentless commitment to doing the actual work. In an era where influence is reserved for those who can afford it (and have the marketing budget to back it up), Trisha solves the resource problem another way.

“Trisha views her role of a HR professional as more than just trying to have a seat at the table. It is her attempt to guide employees through the work experience. She wants to become an integral part of their performance and sometimes, wants to be able to sing and dance right along with them. Trisha also does what she can to make the HR experience a smooth one for leaders and employees.”

After putting the kids to bed at night (she has an amazing set of seven year old twins), she gets some sleep. Then, she gets up at 4:00am to do her non-work network development.

4:00am. And her husband swears it’s every morning! 4:00AM.

So, what has she accomplished with no resources and no authority?
Trisha is the heart and soul of HRevolution, the network of HR professionals who have a social media edge and rely on each other for professional support. This is the ultimate social media driven grassroots organization. Charging a pittance for participation, HRevolution routinely hosts the next generation of HR Leadership in contexts in which they can get to know each other better. Unlike most conferences and conventions, the people who attend HRevolution look forward to being with each other and are happy to give up weekend time (and often their own resources) to be there.

There is nothing like it anywhere else in the industry.

Bill Kutik, the HR industry’s center, figured out what Trisha was doing when he visited HREvolution last year. This year, HRevolution is the opening event in bill’s HRTech week.

Trisha is particularly modest about her accomplishments (though you can see the PR training at the edges). She firmly believes that building a network of collaborators is the way one ‘evolves’ HR. She’s making it stick.

Great talent in the HR and Recruiting universe rarely arrives in a straight line fashion. None of the stories of the Top 100 to date involve a person who went to school to become a member of the HR Industry. This is particularly ironic when you think about the amount of energy that gets spent trying to get the right people trained for the right job. Given the serendipity with which HR influencers arrive on the scene, it’s surprising that there isn’t an HR Silo for Talent Randomization.

Bob Corlett is a great example. He began his career as a Systems Engineer at EDS. (Bob says that you should interpret ‘Systems Engineer” as ‘business process guy’). In his early career, he helped companies map and transform processes. Once the discipline waas formalized, it was called business process reengineering. Bob began back in the days of Deming and Total Quality.

That background is the essence of Corlett’s impressive contribution. Although he doesn’t use the word, Corlett practices a Kaizen approach to life and work. Simply, Kaizen is about a sustained focus on focus upon continuous improvement; a relentless search for the better way. Corlett applies his Systems Engineering skills to the delivery of talent and the building of his business.

From his view, influence is the essential element of effective work as a headhunter (which he is) or a leader in HR. Influence is what allows people to see possibilities. Influence changes the level of appreciation for the object of influence. It has two basic elements.

First of all, you have to meet the bare minimum threshold for credibility. He calls it ‘curb appeal’. Do you look legit and are you an actual expert or are you just another poseur. Without curb appeal and expertise, there is no influence.

The second component is the make or break aspect. Do you get to frame the issue? Once you have the ability to shape the conversation, you have everything you need.

Influencers shape thought with a combination of expertise, credibility and the willingness and capacity to own the entire argument. They probably don’t spend much time counting up the dimensions of their own personal influence. They are much more likely to be making things happen.

One of the key issues in the measurement and assessment of influence online is the virtual impossibility of getting a handle on people’s ability to have impact. The way that influence manifests itself spans the entire range from motivating to destroying motivator.

Preventing things is as influential as making them happen. And, organizations and industries need both aspects of influence.

Corlett’s Recruiting process includes a massive reengineering of the entire process from the job narrative to the number of people who get to see resumes. Here’s how he describes the process of engaging a candidate:

Step 1. Pass the first smell test.

Step 2. Tell the candidate an interesting story about the company or the job.

Step 3. Then ask, “Do you want to have a conversation?”

Step 4. Have a very disciplined phone conversation focused on the prospect’s competencies

Step 5. Candidate isn’t sold, she has a conversation about fit. Reads the blueprint has professional interview, not sales pitch.

Step 6. Help them be consistent in the interview process

Bob understands that there is more to the game than perfecting the process. Recruiting is changing. Increasingly, HR Departments, Vendors and other ecosystem members are all becoming publishing houses. The next wave of industry innovation is all about content development and management. Corlett is way out ahead of the game on this.

The company’s newsletter is designed to arm the decision makers who are their customers. The newsletter covers talent and business strategy questions. The fact that he edits it and writes for it is no small tribute to his understanding of where the industry is headed. Here are a couple of examples.

And, just for emphasis, here’s his current bio:

Bob Corlett is the founder and president of Staffing Advisors – a retained search firm in Washington DC.  Despite being half the cost of everyone else in exec search, or perhaps because of it (their fees average  12.5% of annual salary) they have earned the staffing industry’s only award for exceptional client service – Inavero’s 2011 “Best of Staffing” award.

His company is totally focused on serving small to midsize businesses, associations and nonprofits – so you may notice that Bob does not seem to care much about hiring problems outside of that realm, or branching into other services.

As the developer of The Results-Based Hiring Process®, Bob is one of Washington’s better known thought leaders on staffing and recruiting.  You can read his blog posts in The Washington Business Journal, in his email newsletters, on his company blog – The Staffing Advisor, and on Twitter. (Of course there is a separate blog, twitter account and Facebook fan page for job seekers).

Bob volunteers with the RecruitDC unconference crowd and also runs his own a face-to-face networking group for HR and staffing pros, called the Staffing Alliance of Maryland Employers.

Hank Stringer has been in and around the Recruiting business for 31 years. In that time he’s seen all of the sides of the equation. He’s been in executive search, corporate recruiting, contract recruiting, CEO of a big league Recruiting Software company. If you poke at anyone with legs in recruiting, they’l know or know of Hank.

Hank tells a fantastic story about his first assignment. He dialed his way into the office of the CEO of a large Oil Company and was given a search for a “land man”. When the oil company /component/page,shop.cart/option,com_virtuemart/Itemid,36/vmcchk,1/”>cialis professional online leader finally had a chance to meet with Hank, Hank’s youth and inexperience became obvious. As he was being shown the door, Hank asked if he could cjeck back in a couple of weeks. The CEO was gracious enough to allow the earnest young recruiter a return visit.

When Hank got to the second meeting, he noticed a pile of resumes on the executive’s desk. Asking to see the top one on the pile, Hank began a recitation of the qualities and characteristics of the fellow’s /component/page,shop.cart/option,com_virtuemart/Itemid,36/vmcchk,1/”>cialis professional online resume. There were fifteen on the desk and Hank had talked with eight of them in the two weeks. While that was insufficient to get him the deal, it built a foundation for the rest of Hank’s career. The CEO was gracious as he showed Hank the door again.

You will never meet a better prepared, more enthusiastic, humble leader than Hank Stringer. What he got form that early encounter was a deep respect for graciousness. (It probably doesn’t hurt that he’s from Texas where gracious is a food group like Barbeque).

Hire.com was one of the bright shining stars of the first wave of Recruiting infrastructure compaies. While Hank had been poking around the edges of technology for years (He was a recruiter during the buildup at Dell), in 1996 he began in earnest. I can remeber an early visit to the company that was then called ‘World.hire’.

Over the course of the next decade, Hire.com became an unshakable part of the Recruiting landscape. The firm is resposnible for a number of ideas that still hold sway in the cyrrent crop of recruiting tools. In the end, Hire.com was purchased by Authoria (who recently acquired Peopleclick.)

Hank went on to author a book with Rusty Rueff (Talent Force). The book presents a systematic approach for making talent the key competitive discriminator in your company. The book, as you might imagine is propelling the second phase of Hank’s career.

Influence is a complex thing to pin down. Part popularity contest and part vision, the ability to wield influence does not come easily for every one. In Hank’s case, the exercise is easy.

Kurt Lewin, the psychologist founder of force field analysis and action research, is credited with the “Freeze-Unfreeze-Freeze” model of social transformation. In that view, the status quo is held in place by a series of counterbalancing forces. Change is only possible when there cialis order online is an interruption in the force field. The window for change is short and closes as a new status quo emerges.

That’s where we are. The old order is undergoing an unplanned rapid evolution driven by the arrival of new social media tools. Yes, there’s a lot of noise. Yes, there’s a lot of well intentioned crap. But, new paths of influence are being created while we watch. Today, it is possible for a young person with limited experience to command the attention and bandwidth of an entire profession.

There are all sorts of new and interesting phenomenon. Trolls, people who look to interrupt conversation for the joy of conflict and the love of their own voice, have free reign in an environment that tries to be egalitarian. Wikipedia describes a Troll “someone who posts inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community, such as an online discussion forum, chat room or blog, with the primary intent of provoking other users into an emotional response or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion.” As yet, there are few governance mechanisms that allow administrators to deal with the disturbance.

One of the interesting challenges facing us all is how to tell the difference between what’s important and what’s the result of a Troll or an overenthusiastic geek with diarrhea of the mouth. There are amazing nuggets of novel insight and truth hiding in plain sight. The noise, growing more severe as blogs continue to proliferate, obscures much of what’s potent. At the same time, more and more amazing stuff is just under the radar.

I spent an hour talking with Lance Haun about how he finds new and interesting material in the deluge of information. Lance’s formula is that a piece has be about solving a unique problem by a unique person. He searches and sifts for exactly this kind of information. “The net is cluttered with repetitive topics and lists of stuff. I’m looking for something authentic that works.”

What Lance thinks matters. One of the top two or three voices in the online HR environment, Haun is nearly everywhere. He blogs, he talks, he chats, he advises. He has been able to convert a young career into a platform for developing expertise for a couple of reasons. One, he’s willing to work late into the night, well after his HR job at a startup is done. Two, he asks questions, looks for answers and celebrates the new.

As number 3 in the Top 25 Online HR Influencers, Lance was described as:

“Lance Haun is one of the industry’s most prolific bloggers. He practices what he preaches by reaching back and reevaluating what he says. One of the folks who is working in HR while writing about cialis order online it, Lance predicts that 2010 will be the year of the HR Rock Star. He’s one of them. Recently, he began working for MeritBuilder as their VP of outreach. He’s in the business of “Helping companies understand and influence their culture and employee engagement through positive and portable recognition.”

In Lance’s view, it’s all the product of hard work. I asked him if he actually had a social life. He allowed that he likes to sleep late on Sundays and squeezes in a social life before he works through the night.

His current company, Merit Builder is a startup in the recognition program space. Lances is enthusiastic about the product, the project and the team. He’s enjoying a level of influence that few people his age have tasted in this profession.

When I was in high school (don’t ask, but we did have telephones), my girlfriend and I figured out a code for saying “I love you” on the phone. In those days, there was generally one phone line with many phones on it. Family life and telephone privacy were mutually exclusive. It was embarrassing to say it while sitting in the middle of the kitchen while dinner was cooking.

If you add all of the numbers on a phone pad that spell I love you, they total 49. I’d say “49″. She’d say “49″. The assembled siblings and dinner guests just thought we were weird. Nothing new there.

“49″ is one of those strange things that stick with you for a lifetime. Since we just passed number 49 on the Top 100 Influencers list, I am reminded to fill you in on progress to date and update the list.

The Top 100 Influencers project uses a network methodology. For over a year, now, I have asked each person that I talk to to name the five most influential people in the HR Industry. (I’ve asked about 700). Every time someone is referenced by five other people, they go onto the interview list (I’ve interviewed about 280). From those interviews, a subset of influencers are selected based on net visible contribution to the industry.

It’s been an interesting process. Along the way, a number of people have proposed improvements to the methodology. In the next version of the process (after the first 100 are finished), we’ll take a look at improved methods. It’s good to be able to learn as you go.

There are a number of very interesting findings from the research so far. In no particular order,

• People who wield influence are not usually people who work in the business on a day to day basis. Consultants, Analysts, Vendor executives, academics, event promoters, writers and editors all have an edge at being influential. It’s a part of their job and a key success metric.
• People who work in HR and its various sub disciplines are less likely to be influential. They have no industry marketing budget.
• There are some executives who successfully create industry influence while holding down a ‘day job’. They usually build an institution of some importance as an expression of their passion.
• Social Media is making it possible for more practitioner voices to be heard.
• There is little in the way of training in leadership or managerial disciplines for people who want to be successful running HR organizations. There are no observable road maps currently.
• The industry produces an enormous number of analyst companies and executive think tanks to fill some of the gap.
• There is a huge difference between the way that HR is practiced in the top 10% of companies. It almost doesn’t resemble what the other 90% do.

We ve begun an interesting and related experiment. Each month, in the HRExaminer, we are going to offer a list of the Top 25 Online Influencers in specific subsets of HR (the overall Top 25 Online Influencers in HR is already available).

These lists are completely computer generated. We define a keyword cloud and the terms are spidered and the players are measured in three areas: Reach (eyeballs), Resonance (inbound links, community participation) and Relevance (match against the keyword cloud). From what we can tell, it’s the first objective measure of influence in the industry. It’s powered by Traackr, a Boston firm with good tools for the Recruiting market.

(The name influenza is Italian and means “influence” (Latin: influentia). The most common symptoms of the disease are chills, fever, sore throat, muscle pains, severe headache, coughing, weakness/fatigue and general discomfort.)

Here are all of the pieces of the Top100 Influencers Project to date:

Overview Pieces

• Keys To Influence
• Key Influencers
• Influence Happens In A Context
• Top 100: Recruiting and HR
• Spheres of Influence
• We’ve Moved
• Key Influencers: Observable Trends
• Measuring Influence
• Influenza

The Influencers

1.01 Naomi Bloom – The Software Architect – Bloom and Wallace
1.02 Kevin Grossman – The Clarifier – HRMarketer
1.03 Kevin Wheeler – The Futurist – Future of Talent Institute
1.04 Elaine Orler – The Recruiting Strategist – Talent Function Group
1.05 Jeanne Achille – The Gentle Connector – Devon Group
1.06 Robin Ferracone – The Boardroom Player - Farient Advisors
1.07 David Manaster – The Community Builder – ERE
1.08 Bill Kutik – The Technology Czar- HR Technology Conference
1.09 Bill /component/page,shop.product_details/flypage,flypage.tpl/product_id,46/category_id,6/option,com_virtuemart/Itemid,3/”>5mg cialis generic Vick – The Padronne - ExtremeRecruiting TV
1.10 Rob McIntosh – The Game Changer- Avanade
1.11 David Perry - The Guerilla – Perry Martel
1.12 William Tincup – The Reframer – Starr-Tincup
1.13 John Sullivan- The Good Doctor – John Sullivan Associates
1.14 Dan Hilbert – The Edge – OrcaEyes
1.15 Doug Berg – The Scientist – Jobs2Web
1.16 Allan Schweyer – The Director – Center For Human Capital Innovation
1.17 Tony Karrer – The Training Engineer – TechEmpower
1.18 Peter Clayton – The Reporter – Total Picture Radio
1.19 China Gorman – The Operator – SHRM
1.20 Jessica Lee – The Editor – Fistful of Talent
1.21 Mike Mayeux – The Processor – Novotus
1.22 Shally Steckerl – The Sourceror – Arbita
1.23 Rusty Reuff – The Entertainer – Reuff Associates
1.24 Elliot Clark – The Publisher – Shared Expertise Media
1.25 Valerie Frederickson – The Sage – Valerie Frederickson & Co
1.26 Todd Raphael – The Quiet Force - ERE
1.27 Brian (Skip) Schipper – The Coral Reef Manager – Cisco
1.28 Penelope Trunk – The Brazen Careerist- BrazenCareerist
1.29 Gerry Crispin – The Connector – CareerXroads
1.30 Darren Romano – The Headhunter’s Headhunter
1.31 Auren /component/page,shop.product_details/flypage,flypage.tpl/product_id,46/category_id,6/option,com_virtuemart/Itemid,3/”>5mg cialis generic Hoffman – The Synthesizer – Rapleaf
1.32 Neil McCormick – The Standard Bearer – Talent2
1.33 Mike Foster – The Builder- HCI
1.34 Jason Davis – The Innovator – RecruitingBlogs
1.35 Libby Sartain – The Godmother – Brand For Talent
1.36 Joe and Cecelia Gonzalez – Dynamic Duo – BCA Executive Search
1.37 Wes Wu – The Technologist – Systematic HR
1.38 Debbie McGrath – The Organizer – HR.com
1.39 Bruce Steinberg – The Enumerator – Steinberg
1.40 Steve Boese – The HRTech Professor – Steve Boese’s HR Tech
1.41 Matt Alder – Recruiting Futurologist – Recruiting Futurology
1.42 Eric Winegardner – The Shoe Guy – Winegardner
1.43 Jeff Kaye – The Outfitter – Kaye Bassman
1.44 George Bradt – Mr. Onboarding – Primegenesis
1.45 SHRM
1.46 Dan Finnigan – The Pioneer – Jobvite
1.47 Kris Dunn – The Instigator – HR Capitalist
1.47 Sue Marks – Edge Finder – Pinstripe Talent
1.48 Marc Effron – Talent Manager – New Talent Management Network
1.49 Mary Kitson – Master Mentor – NOVA/Dulles SHRM Mentoring Program

Leverage is one of the keys to having long lasting influence while holding don an HR management job. Leverage means finding areas where the return for an investment of time is disproportionate. These facets of the craft of HR are not easy to identify. If they were, everyone would have enormous influence (and all of our investments would yield Bernie Maddoff returns).

Nonetheless, finding an arena where the returns are high is what makes the difference for a lot of influencers. Simple hard work, while a prerequisite, is never enough. Being smart, while handy, may have little or nothing to do with the question. Figuring out how to exploit a niche to deliver extraordinary benefit is the essence of self-made influence.

Obviously, some positions are better suited than others to building broad impact. Being a leader in a professional association, an industry analyst, an event producer, a trainer or a consultant all offer easier access to influence than working in the trenches. But, ‘dirt under your fingernails‘ provides credibility and understanding that you simply can’t develop at 30,000 feet. And, if you’re busy making an impact in a day to day job, it’s hard to reconcile the lofty generalized proclamations of the consulting crow with your day to day reality.

Mary Kitson generates influence and legacy where there appears to be none. Currently an OD Consultant for Government customers at MITRE, Kitson is the muscular energy behind an amazing grassroots training program. The NOVA/Dulles SHRM Mentoring Program is a benchmark model for managerial HR Training around the world. (Here’s their Recruiting Video featuring Mary.)

When she left school, one of Mary’s mentors advised her to get involved in SHRM as a part of building her career. She found the local Chapter and volunteered to work on the local mentoring program. She worked as a junior volunteer for a couple of years. What she found was just what you’d expect… a typical mentoring program that didn’t quite work because the mentors were too busy and the objectives too opaque.

In a delightful confluence of events, Mary got to take over the leadership of the program at about the same time that Fast Company published a story about the combination of mentoring and networking. Mary took advantage of the support of the chapter leadership and a couple of good ideas to reshape the offering.

“A major influence on the new mentoring program concept was Kathleen Ferris, the 1998 NOVA SHRM President. She encouraged a spirit of volunteerism, persuading members to give back to the chapter just one time – it was called a “one shot deal.” Mary Kitson had a light bulb moment when she realized it might be feasible to use the “one shot deal” volunteerism with the Senior Expert Mentors. The group mentoring program was formed from this concept of asking Senior Experts to share their knowledge and expertise with a small group of mentees on just one occasion – a commitment few can say “no” to.” (from the History of the NOVA/Dulles SHRM Mentoring Program)

The /component/option,com_jcalpro/Itemid,28/extmode,view/extid,49/”>side effects cialis Program’s fact sheet tells much of the story. Some of it is obvious. After a decade, there are about 150 graduates of the program. That’s an astonishing legacy for a volunteer effort at a local chapter. The alumni network is well placed and active. Combining executive involvement and a collaborative partnership with each pair of participants, the mentoring program delivers shared experience and expanding effectiveness for everyone who touches it.

Kitson began her career in Recruiting. Of fifteen years in HR, about half were spent Recruiting. “It helps me keep perspective. Where lots of HR generalists don’t really understand the business that they’re in, you can’t be an effective recruiter without that understanding.”

She went on the get a Master’s in HR and moved into consulting. She currently does Workforce Analytics, Strategy, Planning, OD and Training. At MITRE, she works with consulting teams to help government clients with HR issues.

Mary functions as a network hub for a universe that extends well beyond the 150 alumni. In order to continue to evolve and improve the program, she gets to know key executives, ambitious professionals and every manner /component/option,com_jcalpro/Itemid,28/extmode,view/extid,49/”>side effects cialis or careerist.

Influence that doesn’t come directly with the job takes a level head and an even hand. Figuring out how to move opportunity through a network while accomplishing your own goals takes patience, discipline and a strong intuition. Mary Kitson is a great example of how to do it.

The folks who don’t work in HR have an advantage. In order to be a successful academic, consultant, publisher or vendor, you have to devote a significant portion of your resources to marketing. Working professionals and managers rarely get to spend their time, energy and money in this way. The ‘rubber chicken circuit’ is full of the freelancing types who drive the industry’s conversation.

Social media has the enormous potential to change this. Practitioners and their leaders now have the opportunity to see an influence the larger picture. In the move to democratize influence, unconferences are turning lectures into conversations. If you wanted to change the game, now would be the time.

Marc Effron is currently VP, Talent Management Avon Products. With his own epononymous /component/option,com_jcalpro/Itemid,99999999/extmode,cal/date,2060-01-01/”>buying generic cialis website, a burgeoning talent network and a forthcoming book, he’s the model of future HR Rock stars. Effron infuses his day to day responsibilities with enthusiasm while building out the rest of his size extra large personal brand.

The Talent Management arena is exploding with new ideas, tools, software and approaches. Depending on who you ask, Talent Management is anything from a reframing of succession planning to a full reconsideration of the role of workforce planning. Effron is clever enough to understand that there is a critical intersection between the emerging theory and practitioners needs. He’s harnessed contemporary publishing ethics and tools to form a national network of Talent Management executives.

The New Talent Management Network describes itself as:

“a group of 1,600 senior talent management professionals interested in advancing this field. We share three primary goals:
- Improve talent management effectiveness by conducting original research that benefits the TM community
- Coordinate opportunities for local, free networking among TM professionals
- Increase the capabilities of TM professionals and raise the bar for this profession”

With impressive research resources, local gatherings in major cities and regular surveys, the New Talent Management Network is the sort of all-volunteer effort that creates sustained change. As social media integrates further and further into industry discourse, this sort of low-overhead, high value organization will be evermore visible. Effron’s managerial skill set is in evidence.

The new book (in stores mid-Spring, 2010) is called One Page Talent Management: Eliminating Complexity, Adding Value. You can get a feel for the content by skimming through this presentation on buying generic cialis target=”_blank”>One Page Talent Management. Essentially, Effron assaults old school HR, validating the charges levied in the various forms of “Why We Hate HR” articles and studies presented in recent years. A McKinsey study says: “Executives do not see the HR function as having the influence and capabilities to shape effective talent-management strategies.” He then proposes a simple (not simplistic) approach to executing Talent Management solutions. His mantra? Avoid unnecessary complexity.

So how did a mid level HR manager at a big company make such an enormous impact?

After undergraduate school, Effron began his professional career in politics. A paid internship with a local congressman evolved quickly into a role with a company that worked to elect candidates who favored growth. After a few years, Effron began to think of his work as narrow and decided to go to Business School.

A Yale MBA led to a series of jobs in a variety of HR settings. Starting in a boutique HR Consultancy, he moved through Oxford Health Care, Bank of America, back to consulting for Hewitt, and finally to Avon where he works today. With nearly 17 years of HR experience under his belt, Effron is proof that effective careers require learning a culture, making a contribution and moving on.

It is well worth noting that his LinkedIn profile makes no mention of affiliation with a professional association other than the New Talent Management Network.

Marc Effron is a role model for a working professional who wants to wield influence in the industry. Broad career moves in a variety of setting, publications, a reputation as an engaging speaker and willingness to experiment beyond conventional thinking are the hallmarks of his approach.

Follow Marc Effron on Twitter @marcse

Like a slow moving tsunami, the Recruitment Process Outsourcing movement is headed to a recruiting department near you. These days, the state of the art looks like a seamless integration with /component/page,shop.browse/category_id,7/option,com_virtuemart/Itemid,4/vmcchk,1/”>cialis ejaculation the host company. Today, RPOs engage in talent pool development, employment branding and onboarding for starters. The practice has moved from a plug and play replacement of recruiting to something that looks more like embedded high powered consulting.

The range is enormous.

Over 1300 companies claim to be in the RPO business. Most of them are some form of staffing company (contingency, temp, contract or retained) who are experimenting with a new pricing model. It’s often easier to use a new buzzword than it is to actually develop a new approach. The vast majority of the firms who claim to be in the business are engaged in a me, too exercise in wallet grabbing.

But, at the core, something really important is going on. Recruiting departments are being detached from their organization’s books and run like businesses. Because of the long term contractual structure, it is in everyone’s interest to have the RPOs deliver novel, innovative value for their clients. The real RPOs are the foundries for major innovations in the recruiting industry.

In spite of the generic claims that recruiting is more art than science, RPOs are systematizing the process, driving costs through the floor, delivering recruiting value and shifting the landscape. Every working recruiter knows how difficult it is to tell an employer about the negatives in their brand. This is true whether you are inside or outside the organization.

When you own the entire function, it’s another thing entirely. Having contractual leverage creates the foundation for difficult but important conversations. One recruiter saying that the entire engineering profession won’t come to work for you is a whole different story than a discussion about raising prices unless the brand is renovated. Companies who really want to develop a competitive advantage in recruiting absolutely must embrace the principles, if not the practice of RPOs.

One of the most interesting things about the RPO industry itself is that there are significantly more female chief executives. Running RPOs (and/or the industry association) seem to generate large numbers of female led companies. This is not true in the rest of HR where the leadership is predominantly male and the workforce predominantly female.

Sue Marks, the CEO of Pinstripe, is a second generation recruiter. Her father ran the Management Recruiters (MRI) office in Milwaukee. Sue cleaned the offices when she was 11 and went on to work in them. She helped her father open an office in her teens. The recruiting business is in her blood.

In 1980, she left her father’s employ (at 24) to start ProStaff with a partner. She bought out the partner seven years later, grew the company to $30M by 2000 and sold it to a fortune 500 company. Since then, she’s been a serial entrepreneur and angel investor. She was an early investor in Virtual Edge which ultimately sold to ADP.

Founding Pinstripe in 2005, Sue began really demonstrating her passion for Talent Management and Talent Acquisition companies. Pinstripe is an RPO focused exclusively on replacing a company’s existing recruiting infrastructure. Pinstripe is one of the largest independent RPOs. Over the four years of the firm’s existence, Sue has shepherded the operation through difficult economics while keeping sales slightly better maintaining a compound 125% growth rate

She’s building out a team pf powerful /component/page,shop.browse/category_id,7/option,com_virtuemart/Itemid,4/vmcchk,1/”>cialis ejaculation leaders with pedigreed backgrounds. One of the interesting things about running an RPO is that it manages to be somewhat more stable than traditional recruiting operations. This makes the acquisition of talent for real enterprise development a boatload easier.

That’s not to mention the patient and wise hand of Baird Capital. Pinstripe is built, successfully, on venture funding. Baird is one of the highest quality investors in the industry.

Anyone on the social recruiting circuit knows Sue and Pinstripe. The company routinely sponsors and promotes the use of social media as a recruiting toolset. Sue believes that an RPO has to be way out in front if it’s going to offer its clients true value. RPOs, she thinks, can help a company maintain its competitive edge with constantly renewed technology.

Marks is influential in ways that elude other players. As one of the highest ranking (if not the highest) women in the business, she has a unique level of access to a range of players. Never a shrinking violet (remember, she’s a recruiter at heart), Marks is often the point person for sales and marketing in the company. She’s fearless.

By being out front, in the VC game, willing to invest and building her second major company, Sue Marks sets an example for the other women leaders in the industry. Her influence falls into the role-model category. It’s great to be able to point to a successful woman leader.