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.

The HR Industry is maturing. Fifteen years ago, the space was a wild west sideshow. As the emergence of software standardized administrative practice, HR became increasingly intelligible.

Although the older institutions have failed to keep pace with reality, that’s hardly a surprise. HR evolved from the payroll department to a digital information infrastructure in a very short time. Lacking the traditional educational pipelines of other industries, the field matured ahead of its vendors and academic institutions.

Part of the problem people have with HR is that generalizations almost always fail to capture the operating reality of a particular company in a particular market. HR is the organizational function that manages Human Capital in much the same way that the Financial Department manages money. Slowly but surely, we are evolving companies that provide tailored offerings across the silos of HR.

Kelly Cartwright is General Manager of /component/option,com_jcalpro/Itemid,28/extmode,day/date,2010-12-15/”>free cialis coupon The Newman Group (TNG). Founded by Ed Newman in 1999, TNG is one of the preeminent companies providing talent acquisition strategy, services and solutions.The company was acquired by Futurestep (part of Korn-Ferry) in 2007. Faced with the always difficult chore of operating a founder’s eponymous company, Kelly is focused on the branding and strategic opportunities for TNG as it completes its integration with Futurestep/Korn-Ferry.

Kelly represents the way that the industry is growing up. In a universe where men lead a predominantly female workforce, she stands with the small group of other women executives. In some ways, the HR industry and its vendor ecosystem offers an amazing opportunity to demonstrate effective management and development. The glass ceiling may be a little thinner in our universe. She’s a peer among pioneers who demonstrate the integration of roles across life aspects.

Kelly’s influence in and on the industry stems from a lifetime of roles around the business. She’s worked on all sides of the staffing equation from ATS providers and pure staffing firms to technology problems solvers like TNG. Along the way, she has worked with a large number of the other influencers in our Top 100 list.

“As TNG emerges from its initial post-acquisition phase, we’re deep in the throes of internal change management. My job is to help unlock the synergies within Futurestep/Korn-Ferry. We’re listening hard to our customers as change seems to be the single consistent thing across the customer base.”

TNG competes with Knowledge Infusion, Deloitte, Towers, Hewitt-Aon and other large providers of strategy and integrated solution. “We help businesses identify problems and then implement affordable solutions” This means that Kelly’s view of Talent Management and Talent Acquisition is extremely pragmatic. “We can’t afford to have brilliant theories that fail in execution.”

Cartwright and I spoke about the things that are changing the face of HR at this moment:

• The way that organizations are tying performance and compensation changes the way that you manage performance. New managerial styles are emerging as our organizations become consumers of Human Capital. The ever moving performance bar ( a management approach introduced by Wal Mart) creates an ever intensifying cycle of performance demands and skill up leveling. Like the river that is never the same twice, hiring for similar positions /component/option,com_jcalpro/Itemid,28/extmode,day/date,2010-12-15/”>free cialis coupon is not the same thing it used to be.
• Technology makes new things happen. Take competencies for example. Now we define them, use them as recruiting benchmarks, measure our results against them and solve for gap analysis.
• Organizations are increasingly putting people with vast experience (but not in HR) into HR slots. This simultaneously makes the function more relevant and condemns us to reinventing the wheel.
• More and more organizations are doing workforce planning.
• Information overload is driving down productivity. More voices is a good thing. Too many more voices is just cacophony.

It’s early in Kelly Cartwright’s career. Expect to see her emerging as a lifetime power player.

For every 250 bloggers talking to an empty virtual room about nothing, there is one voice delivering value and perspective. The democratization of publishing has made it possible for all sorts of voices to be heard. That so little is being said is only troubling if you don’t agree with Einstein, who said, “Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.” In other words, the ability to deliver social media is no guarantee of content quality.

Several factors come in to play when the information quality question involves a profession and its practice. The maturity of the profession itself; the maturity of the author (professionally and personally), the level of understanding of the problem under discussion and the relationship of the author to the audience are each aspects of the way that authors and audiences interact.

As is painfluuly clear in politics (regardless of your persuasion), the level of enthusiasm for an idea has painfully little to do with its legitimacy or utility. The factors that seem to drive influence on a national scale involve a race to the lowest common denominator. Intelligence and maturity are not inherent gateways to influence in the industry. There is infinite room in the infinite universe for the infinitely inane. Influence is not different from that.

And, this is an introduction to a guy who I think is really smart.

Jon Ingham is a British HR consultant and author who rose to global visibility throu his blog. Ingham focuses on enterprise issues and the evolution of Strategic HR. He’s definitely one of the smart social media practioners who are being paid attention. At least some of his strength comes from having deep operational experiences outside of HR.

If our profession has a single major weakness, it’s the inherent lack of grounding in the real work of the businesss. HR’s greatest mentors always preach the importannce of delivering the sort of value the organization needs as a part of its mission. Without hands on experience in sales, marketing, engineering, production and/or customer service, the organization’s work remains theoretical.

Jon says, “I help organisations gain competitive advantage through the creation of human and social capital supported by effective leadership, HR and management practices, OD interventions, and the use of web 2.0 / social media tools etc.”

He began his career as a C++ specialist (that’s software) doing user acceptance at Andersen (now Accenture). The key question became, “How do you /component/option,com_jcalpro/Itemid,99999999/extmode,cal/date,2060-03-01/”>cialis cheapest price make internal change happen in an organization?” Simply delivering technical insight was not enough. Ingham knew there was more.

He moved into HR to learn about change management. Since then, he’s worked internationally (Moscow and Egypt among others) and often in key change management roles. He spent a sifnificant chunk of time doing fundamental HR service delivery.

Jon defines HR as ‘managing people to accumulate Human Capital.” His book, Strategic Human Capital Management: Creating Value Through People, Ingham details the processes and procedures requored by a contemporay organization (Google Books has a 50 page preview). His clear eyed view of smart HR was significantly ahead of the rest of the industry making Jon both articulator and visionary.

His influence stems from his audience, a rekentless travel schedule and the depth and clarity of his thought. Ingham travels the entire HCM waterfront and is willing to take us along on the ride with him. For example,

Collective intelligence isn’t about information flows and processes. It’s about people and their connections. Speed and flexibility isn’t about formal planning processes – supported by social tools, it’s about giving people autonomy to make quicker and smarter decisions – supported by social relationships.

We talked about the trends taht are shaping the industry:

• HR continues to get closer to the business. In doing so, we risk losing the very things that make HR valuable. This tension will shape HR organizations /component/option,com_jcalpro/Itemid,99999999/extmode,cal/date,2060-03-01/”>cialis cheapest price for the next several years.
• Measurement is taking root in the culture of Human CApital Management. This is a good thing. But, you can not forecast the future by measuring the past. Measurement should be balanced with creativity and trust. When measurement becomes about performance surveillance, the culture suffers.
• Ironically, HR should be trying to become more relationship focused. Social Media is at its most useful when it is social.
• HRTech offers extraordinary ways for the discipline to add value. The US understands this far more deeply than the rest of the world.

Ingham is still early in his career. It’s not outrageous to imagine him as the next Ullrich. We’re going to keep following him.

There are not very many people who have been researching Human Capital issues as long as Alice /component/page,shop.browse/category_id,6/option,com_virtuemart/Itemid,36/”>cialis buy on line Snell. The Vice President of Taleo Research has been covering the space for 15 years. Widely seen as a voice of reason in a sea of hype, Alice effectively navigates the line that separates corporate advocacy and best practices documentation.

With roots in Recruiting (she was involved with Kennedy Info as it began its transition into the digital era in the mid 1990s), Alice has been at the epicenter of Recruiting research since she went to work for iLogos. Founded by Yves Lermusi (now CEO, Checkster), iLogos /component/page,shop.browse/category_id,6/option,com_virtuemart/Itemid,36/”>cialis buy on line professionalized recruiting research and was acquired by Recruitsoft in 1999. The avid handicapper of the Human Capital Software Industry will know that Recruitsoft quickly became Taleo.

In other words, Alice has been a part of Taleo since before it was Taleo.

“After I wrote a book for job hunters in 1994, I gave up on print,” says Snell. “It was clear that digital communications were going to turn everything around. As a result, I jumped into technology analysis. I was looking to see the impact of Tech on HR. Let me tell you, it’s been fast and amazing.”

“When I say fast, I mean that many changes take generations. The internet completely disrupted the employment process in under a decade. Job boards and ATS systems totally changed the way that we get work. That change fueled many of the other adaptations in the rest of HR. While some people think HR is a laggard organization, I’m hear to tell you that everything is different a decade later.”

“Today, organizations are looking to comprehensively inventory and optimize their human capital. They are learning to consider job design as a make or buy decision. It’s a whole new world.”

“What’s happening is that organizations are becoming able to use talent pools to acquire talent. Then, they identify gaps and find the best fit for everyone involved. Talent Management is all of the Work That You Do On Your Workforce,” she says.

Alice’s influence and stature are due to a couple of factors. As a representative of a major player in the software business, she reaches and represents the learning of thousands if customers in thousands of organizations. Doing so for ten years has given her an inside look at the real world of Human Capital Practice. She brings wisdom and channels the experience of a very specific crowd.

It’s no accident that some of the most influential players in the industry do not work in it. Like Alice’s view of Talent Management above, they work on the business not in it. A single change in the user interface drives the day to day experience of a huge user base and all of the people who interact with the software as employees or job seekers.

One way of thinking about influence is that it’s the ability to have an impact. Where power is the ability to make specific things happen, influence is the business of increasing the likelihood that something will happen. When Alice delivers a story about best practices, there is every reason to believe that they will be adopted.

All this is not to suggest that Alice only walks in a world where everything is automated “I see a pretty broad spectrum of practice. Some people are doing amazing things with pencils and spreadsheets. But, real results, driven by decision making rooted in data, comes from the companies with high levels of automation in their HR functions.”

Taleo’s mission is to enable Strategic Talent Management in Organizations. Alice’s role in that process involves speaking, consulting, doing primary research and keeping up with the explosion of Human Capital related information. “The hardest part is staying on top of the research tsunami.”

Alice, like many of the players in our industry, sees a transformation happening in leadership. “A recent IBM study shows that engagement is the foundation of great leadership and good employee development.” She is busyily focused on the development of tools to manage critical talent pools. She sees an HR function that has made the change to a productivity focus and increasingly driven by organizational results.

Find some time to talk with Alice if you see her at one of the conferences. She’s an old hand and understandds the evolution of the profession far better than most. Follow Alice at her blog for Taleo Research.

A surprising number of the people who influence the direction of the HR Industry come from Texas. Of course, Austin, with its technology industries (driven by the live music culture) produces a fair share of the ideation. But, Dallas is a major (if not THE major) Recruiting hub. And, all those small towns out in the middle of nowhere seem to produce bright young minds that ache to make a dent in the HR arena.

Apparently, young Texans dream of making music, playing football, drilling for oil, building technology or doing HR. Ask a Texan and they will assure you that it’s in the water, that anything worth doing is worth doing big. From the outside, one wonders if it gets a little boring when ‘the stars at night are big and bright’. Regardless, Alice Texas, somewhere between Laredo and El Paso produced this week’s member of the Top 100 Influencer’s club.

Bret Starr is one of five partners in the nearly legendary HR Marketing firm, Starr-Tincup. William Tincup, the firm’s other named partner, was an early member of the Top 100 group. He has, as they say in Texas, hit the dusty trail. The firm bears both his name, his indelible imprint and a smattering of his DNA..

Of Tincup, Starr says, “I could not imagine a better partner than William Tincup. Our agency is rooted tin the amazing creative work we did together. All I can tell you about William’s future is that it’s going to be fun to watch. The guy can not help but make a lasting impression wherever he goes.

There’s a reason that Starr-Tincup routinely wins honors as a great place to work. Cool policies, great people to work with and interesting stuff to work on. If you haven’t been on the receiving end of their eye opening takes on HR, wander through the website. Starr-Tincup is the freshest view you could imagine. You can get a sense of what they do in Bret’s mantra:

“If your marketing doesn’t make you nervous, it isn’t great marketing.”

The Top 100 interview has several recurring parts. Bio, the current gig, industry trends, technology trends and key industry influencers are the basic topics. Bret wouldn’t be in the information repackaging business if he didn’t have an interesting take on these questions.

On the standard query about the people who influence the industry, Bret said “It’s not a who, it’s a what. Industry media, Vendors, the US Government and the TV show The Office are the key influences in HR today.”

• “About 10% of the people in the business read blogs, go to conferences and, in general, stay up on the trends in the business. The other 90% get their information from this smaller group. Everything you know about best practices and good ideas evolves out of a small universe of people who feed on the industry’s media.”
• “Innovation flows from entrepreneurs to practitioners. Since there is no federal think tank for HR or HRTech, everything that’s interesting emerges from the vendor universe. If you want a fast education about HR and HRTech, meet with one vendor a day for a year.”
• “Tax credits, discrimination laws, disclosure, privacy regulations and a thousand other forms of social and economic manipulation shape the basic HR environment.”
• “The show The Office has made us all ask why we go to work. It’s made the whole culture aware of the results of stupid policies.”

From Bret’s perspective, there are a couple of trends worth really focusing on. He thinks that Rewards and Recognition are the sleeper opportunities in HR. As the economy comes back, focused programs that deliver rewards will be the glue that holds the world together. Employment brands, which have been savaged by the downturn stand little chance of being the backbone of great acquisition programs. /component/page,shop.browse/category_id,7/option,com_virtuemart/Itemid,45/vmcchk,1/”>cialis /component/page,shop.browse/category_id,7/option,com_virtuemart/Itemid,45/vmcchk,1/”>cialis generic price generic price He also sees a huge growth in strategic wellness initiatives as they help companies managing spiraling health care costs.

Bret sees a huge wave of single purpose apps with an intense focus on Usability and a sexy user experience headed our way. “The mid market is going to explode as real value comes packaged in single purpose apps designed to consumer standards.” He believes we live in an app world.

Bret Starr is one of the architects of the messages that drive the ways that our industry sees itself. It’s interesting to note that he didn’t mention marketing firms in his analysis. That’s because he’s happier to see his clients get the attention.

Jason Averbook is the founder and CEO of Knowledge Infusion, the most rapidly growing firm on the HR Consulting front lines. We had been playing a game of meeting phone tag for most of the past 6 months. KI’s rapid growth and Averbook’s legendary focus on customer satisfaction are at the heart of the scheduling conflicts. Finally, early on a Friday morning, we made the connection.

The moment I started the conversation, I knew this was going to be something different. There’s a certain sameness to the group of folks who dominate the movement of ideas in the Human Capital Industry. I had the sense that it was simply pasty-white maleness. I had less than high expectations for my conversation with Jason Averbook.

“We did some really right things last year,” he said. “We stopped being exclusively focused on HR Technology and started being focused on HR Strategy (with a minor in HRTech). What we discovered is that HRTech without a clear strategy is just dumb. In a market where people are not buying so much technology, every purchasing decision has to have a real tie to the overall business.

Now, our whole business is about tying HR to the business. We are focused on Talent Management and Business Alignment. As a result, it looks like we will grow three times our plan this year. And, I am having a ton of fun.”

With 35 Full Time Employees /component/page,shop.cart/option,com_virtuemart/Itemid,38/vmcchk,1/”>non prescription cialis and another 30 Contractors, Knowledge Infusion is in the Inc 5000. They are ranked 34 in the Human Resources Category. They offer strategic advice, readiness assessment and gap analysis and the training required to close the gap.

The Knowledge Infusion CEO says, “I was surprised to discover that HR Tech never changes anything in HR. What changes HR is the people in HR.”

Averbook is a plain spoken man with a gift for profound simplification. He has a level of passion for the Human Capital function that defies easy articulation. Somehow, a conversation with Knowledge Infusion’s leader seems to open up possibilities. It’s a kind of contagious charisma in a sort of insurance executive form.

Jason talks about his roots “It all begins with your parents. My dad, who profoundly impacted me and Knowledge Infusion, was an insurance executive. My mom was a teacher and superintendent of schools. I wanted to work at the intersection of their interests, where business and education meet.”

Prior to co-founding Knowledge Infusion, Jason held senior management positions at PeopleSoft and Ceridian where he built strong relationships with industry-leading companies, and strove to provide the best service to HR organizations around the world.

We talked about the trends that are driving change in HR.

• “The first part of the 2000s was all about brand explosion. Brands became megabrands like Starbucks, Nike, Dell, Four Seasons…But, in the fast growth environment, the left infrastructure waiting. As we navigate the great reset, they are retooling, focusing on infrastructure and laying the groundwork for the next wave of growth.”
• “In that same time, everyone realized that they were global; the HR Issues are global. Up to that point in time, we could see transactional evidence for this big idea but the light bulb hadn’t yet gone off. Today, globalization is something more than having plants scattered around the planet. It’s a way of thinking about governance and employment.”
• “Talent is not what we thought it was. The jobs are not coming back. Instead, we have to focus on ‘the talent management spine’; those people who will take the enterprise into the future. The new rules are all about cultivation and attraction. Talent Management is being applied where it matters.”

In every one of these interviews (I’ve done about 430 so far), I close the conversation by asking who the most influential people are in HR. Averbook was the first person to name classes of people. His picks:

• CEOs who put talent first;
• Social Media pioneers who do something besides throw party and trash talk the profession; and
• Industry vendors who understand that this has little to do with HR and everything to do with real business impact.

Knowledge Infusion has the feel of a company that will become a 21st Century institution. Averbook and his crew are demonstrating a kind of agile consulting that moves with the market while continuing to provide new and innovative value. “The real fun is figuring out what the next brand of product will be. Our future depends on knowledge /component/page,shop.cart/option,com_virtuemart/Itemid,38/vmcchk,1/”>non prescription cialis based products that build in innovation.”

We’re taking a deep look at the world of the industry analyst. Straddling, as they do, the gap between vendors and practitioners, these pathfinders are always at risk of being perceived as biased. Much of the rhetoric you see and /component/page,shop.cart/option,com_virtuemart/Itemid,1/vmcchk,1/”>cialis c10 hear about the various analysts is designed to counteract the perception of bias.

Industry analysts occupy a unique position of trust. They work closely with vendors in order to establish opinions and insight about the companies and their offerings. Rather than deploy a full time team to wade through everything in the technology arena, most companies outsource their research (whether or not they think of it this way) to Industry Analysts. Analysts parse information about features, functionality, trends and products that would overwhelm an individual HR practitioner.

Over the year or so that we’ve been looking at influence, we’ve covered 9 people who fall into the analyst group. Wielding disproportionate influence, this eclectic group drives the HR Industry from a financial perspective. The right word from the right analyst can seed acres of contracts. At the same time, some very high profile awards (like the HR Tech shootouts) generate a good deal of smoke and very little fire.

Before we’re done with the project, about 20% of the top 100 will be analysts.

One could be forgiven for thinking that these players are really at the heart of industry influence. With real decision making input in the affairs of thousands of vendors and practitioners, industry analysts shape the trends, technologies and innovations that populate HR Departments. Here are the analysts we’ve covered so far.

• Josh Bersin‘s organization delivers massive volumes of research to its 500 subscribing companies.
• Gartner, by far the best known industry analyst firm, serves the HR Departments about 400 companies in the group led by Jim Holincheck.
• Brian Hackett runs one of the dozens of micro-firms offering insight through peer to peer collaboration, solving the same problem.
• Steve Boese, one of the emerging class of new media rooted analysts, does his work in the courses he teaches.
• Bruce Steinberg roots his industry analysis in labor market trends.
• Wes Wu, currently employed by Knowledge Infusion, is the longest running observer of technology trends at enterprise scale.
• Bill Kutik is one of the leading analysts of HR Technology and the father of the HR Tech show.
• Elaine Orler, founder of Talent Function, integrates technology analysis into her practice in a singularly hands-on way.
• The reigning queen of the HR Technology analysts is /component/page,shop.cart/option,com_virtuemart/Itemid,1/vmcchk,1/”>cialis c10 Naomi Bloom whose fingerprints are all over the structure of enterprise offerings.

That’s an awfully long introduction to Kevin Martin. Martin runs a group of Aberdeen’s practices that focus on customer and employee-centric research. He is the principal analyst in Aberdeen’s HCM practice.

Analyst firms have a variety of operating models. They all take funding from both sides of the aisle, so to speak. Many of them bill users and claim to have little or no revenue from vendors. The truth or falsity of this claim merits close inspection.

It is really common to find analysts speaking at vendor conferences. Even if no money is exchanged, the value of the exposure is enormous. The cozy relationships between vendors and analysts bears your attention.

When Martin arrived at Aberdeen, the firm was more or less known as a ‘pay for play’ operation. That is to say that Aberdeen had the reputation for being a place where you could purchase a positive review. Though there is some reason to see this as the pots calling the kettle black, the reputation is long lived.

That was the first question I asked Martin in our interview. He was quick to thank me for getting the tough question out of the way. “That reputation”, he said, “forces us to be ridiculously scrupulous. Everything we publish is based on hard data.. We poll our group of 450 HR leaders every month and spend our energy understanding what they do.”

According to Martin, “HCM is the science of linking human performance to business performance.” He says, “there is a huge disconnect between HR and the rest of the organization. A well run HCM approach can close that gap and give the enterprise a massive competitive edge.” We joked that he should be writing ad copy for Success Factors as they single handedly revise the industry’s self-concept.

Martin measures Aberdeen’s success. The most important piece is end user satisfaction. Martin wants his research to be read and understood (unlike some of the other firms whose data is a way of building a consulting business). Since the research is financed by vendors, he wants to be sure that they are recognized while making it clear that they can not influence the outcome. “We offer branding opportunities, not influence.”

We discussed the future of HR. Martin sees a rapidly growing trend to move Talent Management out of HR and into the rest of the organization. “If you ask the folks in HR ‘who is the most important part of the TM function’, they’ll all say ‘HR’. Everyone else in the organization says ‘it’s the CEO.”

Managing an employee’s experience from cradle to grave is the next major trend Martin sees. “Recruiting may stop but talent acquisition never does.” He imagines a world in which all of HR is CRM-centric. “It’s the relationships over time that energize the workforce.”

Finally, Martin sees agility as the dominant buzzword in the next generation of HR. “HR that works enables the firm to turn on a dime. That is what emerges when you get the data fully integrated and kick the foot draggers out of the process.”

The analysts worlds are cyclical. One year, one of them is the most influential, the next, it’s someone else. Kevin Martin’s star is shining currently because he’s had to work off a tough reputation. Expect to see his fingerprints in a lot of places.