Ask yourself “what’s the opposite of HR?”. One answer is Penelope Trunk. Where HR is all about being button-down and resolving conflict, Trunk is an agitator. The Brazen Careerist is busily shattering preconceived notions about propriety, privacy and transparency.

She’s this generation’s Helen Gurley Brown. The Brazen Careerist is an update of Sex and The Single Girl with serious career overtones. Punctuated with sexual episodes, the career content is savvy and useful. Trunk counsels Gen Y workers to be themselves, do what they do, maintain their integrity and expose their vulnerabilities. She leads by example.

The Boston Globe career columnist “writes career advice for a new generation of workers. She explains why old advice – like pay your dues, climb the ladder, and don’t have gaps in your resume – is outdated and irrelevant in today’s workplace. She has a reputation for giving advice that is counterintuitive but effective, like take long lunches, ignore people who steal your ideas, and stop vying for a promotion.”

In a recent blog post, Penelope tells all about her adolescent relationship with /component/page,shop.cart/option,com_virtuemart/Itemid,5/vmcchk,1/”>cialis 5mg side effects a cofounder, the importance of self confidence in sexual posturing, the relationship of happiness to good sibling relationships, investors and self confidence. All the while, there’s a song (with lyrics unfit for most workplaces) running through her head. She wishes she had the self confidence of the singer when she was wearing a bikini for Budweiser.

“Once you climb the ladder, you want other people to climb the ladder.” Except, Generation Y isn’t going to play along. “Just be real. Don’t tell them that your crappy job is not a crappy job. They don’t want to be there from 9 to 5. If you make them be there all day, they’ll just listen to their iPod, IM and piss you off. Instead mentor them and manage for results. Don’t focus on how they work, focus on what they accomplish.”

It’s pure American work ethic with a liberal dose of spice. Trunk covers self-knowledge, goal setting, self promotion, achievement, networking and other topics straight out of Emerson. She is a die hard proponent of authentic /component/page,shop.cart/option,com_virtuemart/Itemid,5/vmcchk,1/”>cialis 5mg side effects living. You can easily imagine her saying “Why in the world would you take a job that you had to lie to get.” She argues routinely for transparency, self-direction, autonomy and personal fulfillment.

All the while, she maintains a posture on her personal life that might as well be from a men’s locker room in the 70s. It’s really infectious. It taps the streams of British Tabloidism, Ayn Rand, Tony Robbins and What Color Is Your Parachute.It will make a great HBO series.

These days, Trunk is busily converting her audience into a social network, The Brazen Careerist is also a career development community. It’s an interesting opportunity to test out some of her ideas. We talked just as the site was launching. She was enthusiastic about the opportunity to substitute online activity for resume data (she calls it an ‘idea resume’). The site has the potential to shift the online job hunting discussion.

Penelope is influential for a couple of reasons. With 200 print outlets publishing her work, her audience is listening and absorbing. Then, they apply for jobs. She’s setting expectations and ideals for job hunters and career minded people. Second, she is shifting the landscape. Penelope is (at the crest of a social wave) changing the boundaries of what’s appropriate in a work conversation. When she calls a crappy job a crappy job, she’s opening the door for a lot of conversation.

In the new workplace, influence is much more important than personal power. Trunk shows her readers how to cut through the egotistical crap that cloaks lots of business dialog. She’s leaving a legacy as she works.

“Besides,” as Penelope says, “no one was ever penalized for believing in herself, even if her raps were not safe for work.”

John Sumser is the founder and CEO of TwoColorHat, a company specializing in market strategy for HR – Recruiting Vendors. You can keep up with his other stuff at johnsumser.com. Follow the rest of the Top 100 Influencers project.

There’s an inverse relationship between the ability to stay on message and the ability to have and use influence. There are any number of executives who, flanked by their handlers, squeeze repeated sound bites from their lips like it was the last splotch of toothpaste in the tube. Being on the receiving end is even worse than watching Vanilla Ice lip synch. At least in a lip synched video, you can still hum the tune.

The folks who find it necessary to stay rigidly on message, who can not actually have a conversation about their product, service or business, stand no chance of being flexible enough to have influence. It’s actually pretty surprising that, in this era of transparency and authenticity, anyone is still allowed to use a script in public. You walk away from these interactions wondering just exactly who is scared of what. If deviating from the party line is so dangerous, why in the world are these folks in their job.

That form of leadership, the old-school, well-handled CEO, is on the wane. The HR-Recruiting Industry is home to fewer and fewer command and control style executives. As organizitions fracture and project teams dominate the landscape, a new style is emerging.

Influence is, in a lot of cases, the accumulated goodwill that comes from doing favors first and never asking for a return. Constantly offering more value than you take in creates a web of appreciation that is self-sustaining. Some people are blessed with the ability to consistently give more than they get. These folks have a natural advantage in the new economy.

Mike Mayeux is from that new leadership class. You are as likely to find Mike at the helm of his barbeque machine as at the helm of his company. The barbeque, which is about the size of a two bedroom fifth wheel, is Mayeux’ trademark. The company, Novotus, is an RPO that appears to be really shaping the future.

In a recent interview, Mike describes Novotus like this:

Novotus /component/page,shop.browse/category_id,7/option,com_virtuemart/Itemid,44/”>cialis for sale is Hire.com with skin on it. We’ve taken those technologies and added highly skilled users and brought together some Web 2.0 technologies to coordinate it all. We have a state of the art environment. We have another company called Reaching Talent that drives traffic to job web sites. We have a group called Nitro which is a research department. Between the three of those groups we’re doing things most other companies have never done. We just celebrated our 5th year anniversary at Novotus.

Hire.com, as you might remember, was the high-flying, ground-breaking Talent Community Management Tool built in Austin and ultimately acquired by Authoria. The system pioneered many recruiting concepts (like pipelining, real time candidate recruiter interactions, in system queuing and process visibility) that are just becoming the standard today. Mayeux was so turbocharged by his experience with the product that he took his severance check and bootstrapped Novotus on the Hire.com platform.

The core pricing model, which looks like $6K per slot on a retainer basis, attacks the prevailing norms. Novotus achieves this sort of cost effectiveness by continuously filling all of the positions in their inventory. While the industry norm is a 15% completion rate, Novotus fills 98% of their searches. The core success rate enables Novotus to price based on a performance guarantee.

In the downturn, huge numbers of recruiters lost their jobs. Part of the reason that attendance is down at industry events is that last year’s attendees /component/page,shop.browse/category_id,7/option,com_virtuemart/Itemid,44/”>cialis for sale no longer work in the business. That sets the stage for fast growth in the RPO sector over the next couple of years. As recruiting needs grow, companies are unlikely to rehire the old works. It will be a long time until permanent hires of recruiting pros is the norm again. In the meanwhile, RPOs, which are now almost a decade old, are going to set the pricing floor.

This will create a good deal of heartburn for the contingency players who remain. Justifying the difference between a 6% floor and conventional pricing will take some doing. The thing is that Novotus is really profitable at the price point.

The efficiency comes from a lot of experimentation and a lot of failure. Reengineering something like recruiting, in order to make a repeatable process at large scale, is a task that takes a lot of data and a lot of brains. At Novotus, they review and re-review every aspect of the business until it’s perfectly in place.

There’s no room for a “party line” in the world of Mike Mayeux. 20 years of industry experience from working a desk to selling software and finally to building an RPO, MAyeux thinks he’s had a string of good fortune. He is profoundly grateful for the opportunities that built the intellectual foundations for the current endeavor.

Mostly, Mayeux is pure good guy. A business type with a minor in Bible Studies, he’s got little time for the unethical and even less time for quick money. He prefers to give.

It’s hard to get him to talk about his accomplishments, but they are many. Notably, he helped found the RPOAssoctiation to help legitimize the business. His barrel chest puffs out when he talks about the fact that 250 people came to last year’s annual meeting.

In Mike’s case, influence is sort of an aura of generosity that spreads through the people he touches.

John Sumser is the founder and CEO of TwoColorHat, a company specializing in market strategy for HR – Recruiting Vendors. You can keep up with his other stuff at johnsumser.com. Follow the rest of the Top 100 Influencers project.

Influence encompasses a broad range of behavior and experience. The difference between influence and power is subtle. Power is the direct ability to harness resources to get things done. Influence is like power without the underlying resources. Influence is the ability to cause other people to use their resources in a certain way.

According to the I Ching, China’s legendary Oracle, the difference between seduction and courtship is persistence. That same difference holds true across all forms of influence. Some high-volume direct marketing operations rely on instantaneous buzz and rapid decision making. Longer term influence comes from more modest approaches of greater duration. Both are forms of influence, each has pros and cons.

The point of this Top 100 Influencers series is not to judge right or wrong. The goal is to illuminate patterns of influence so that the reader might better understand the operating context. Some influences are quick burns, others are slow and sustained.

Bill Vick, profiled earlier this week, is one example of a sustained influence. Over the course of decades, Bill’s businesses and practices have enriched and shaped the very meaning of Recruiting for hundreds of thousands of practitioners. Combining information distribution and technological advances, Vick continues to mold the core idea of Recruiting.

Bill Kutik and David Manaster, who both operate at the faster, more seductive end of the business, take great pride in steering the industry towards greater effectiveness over time. The platforms they operate are more seductive but their contributions are sustained. The current rise of social media is  quick and enticing. The presumed experts generally offer little sustained influence but do create quick shifts in market perception.

At the ERE Social Media Summit, we got to see Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn’s CEO, proclaim that LinkedIn profiles were more honest than resumes. The idea rapidly migrated from the Google conference hall to mainstream via the hordes of twittering participants. No facts were ever presented as evidence. This is quick alluring influence. There’s influence in Twitter’s speed of transmission (and fact checking agnosticism), Hoffman’s position at the helm of the next generation job board and LinkedIn’s own provocative sway.

Rob McIntosh (ERE , LinkedIn and RBC) holds the middle ground. The Australian native has been plying his trade in the states for a decade. Currently, Rob is the Senior Vice President of Global /component/option,com_jcalpro/Itemid,28/extmode,view/extid,61/recurdate,1295330400/”>daily cialis dose Talent Acquisition at Avanade. The company, which is a Microsoft – Accenture joint venture has 10,000 employees engaged in various forms of enterprise software solutions using Microsoft products. The company is reaching a stage of maturity where it is wrestling with the apron strings of its parents. It’s financially viable and has a distinct and interesting employment brand.

McIntosh’s work history looks like he was preparing for the job. Time leading various recruiting initiatives at Microsoft and Deloitte are just the pieces required for a company as focused as Avanade. “It’s a very defined recruiting sphere and a focused problem,” says Rob.

For several years, Rob put together the SourceCon Grandmaster challenges. The clever contests were designed to stretch and strengthen the members of the sourcing subset of our industry. McIntosh always creates influence by teaching in this sort of way. At the center of the emergence and professionalization of sourcing, McIntosh insists on an extraordinary level of excellence in the people he leads and mentors. (He was the ‘sourcecon dude.)

The list is extensive. As sourcing emerged into the mainstream, McIntosh’s various ex-employees, team members and colleagues started to occupy central positions throughout the industry.

One of the things that makes McIntosh so profoundly influential is that he seems to always be giving credit. He must have mentioned forty other Recruiting – HR players over the course of our conversation. He’s well versed in industry dynamics and singularly focused on his task.

It’s an interesting problem set. Avanade is uniquely configured to respond to a relationship based recruiting approach. The company hires a very specific kind of person who can only emerge from a narrow range of sources. Where McIntosh was focused on sourcing, /component/option,com_jcalpro/Itemid,28/extmode,view/extid,61/recurdate,1295330400/”>daily cialis dose he now has to consider long term relationships and the implications of experience.

He makes the transition look graceful. What seems to happen when he moves through an arena is that he professionalizes it and moves to the next accomplishment. Rob McIntosh’s deep influence on the HR-Recruiting industry comes from a deep practitioner’s focus on the work at hand, an enormous regard for the power of cost-cutting and a desire to make a real difference.

The scores of associates whose careers are turbo charged as a result of working for and with him are his gift to the profession.

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Influence comes partly from the person and partly from the position.  It’s the intersection of audience and content. More interesting and subtle than sheer power or prestige, influence is measured by its wake.  Celebrity is not enough; in many cases, celebrity actually gets in the way.

While it’s not necessarily a question of how long you’ve been in the game, there’s a degree of accrued wisdom that seems to be a part of the deal.  It’s always coupled with some level of network effect. The combination of knowing what and knowing who gives an influencer /component/option,com_jcalpro/Itemid,28/extmode,cal/date,2106-11-01/”>cheapest cialis prices the ability to shape context and results.

Elaine Orler is a case in point. The Vice-President of Talent Acquisition at Knowledge Infusion combines deep insight and experience in Recruiting with the integration expertise required to architect enterprise level software solutions.

Orler patiently developed her reputation and expertise while meticulously developing a network and reputation. The result is a nearly unrivaled position of influence in the Talent Acquisition market. If you want out of the box software architecture and street fighting tactics, turn to Elaine.

Elaine‘s gift is the ability to see broad solutions in the incremental details of the data.

She began her career making sure that the resumes were scanned properly. She spent a decade of trench level design of strategy and tactics at Qualcomm and Gateway Computers, fighting for scarce high tech resources in the dot com craze. Since then, she’s been spreading her wings as the consultant /component/option,com_jcalpro/Itemid,28/extmode,cal/date,2106-11-01/”>cheapest cialis prices of choice for deep talent acquisition and retention approaches.

Elaine loves to tell stories about the truths that can be discovered in the data.

During one of her early assignments, she was trying to recruit recently graduated engineers to San Diego in quantities. The competition was perk-heavy, options rich Silicon Valley. At the time, not even San Diego’s climate could compete with the sexiness / perceived opportunity of a gig in Silicon Valley. She lost a huge percentage of the deals after the offer was made.

Undeterred, Elaine started betting that the bloom would come off of the dot com rose. Once an engineer landed in the Valley and experienced the realities of high housing costs and commute time, San Diego’s pace and climate would become more appealing.

She began methodically tracking the losses and following up with new offers about a year out from the initial defeat. It was easy pickings. And, the engineers she recruited after a year or so in the Valley stayed longer and were more satisfied.

That’s the essence of Orler’s expertise. Think of her mulling over reams of data looking for trends and opportunities. Focused on the combination of acquisition and retention, she has an engineer’s approach to cultivating and building the talent base of a company.

Because she routinely demonstrates the utility and importance of data driven decision making, Elaine Orler executes a very interesting kind of influence on the industry. Results persuade people more completely than hype. Orler knows how to coax the results out of a system.

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(May 06, 2009) Recently, Neal Bruce (the product development genius at First Advantage) said, “If you want to be an HR thought leader, you should have some thoughts.” (Actually the precise quote was “thoughts are a prerequisite for thought leadership“). Sadly, his tongue was nowhere near his cheek.

Much of what passes for HR thought leadership involves little thought. It’s all smoke and no fire. In fact, if you look at the contents for this video, “How to Establish Yourself as a Human Resources Thought Leader with Your Management Team, Industry and Other Professionals a ReedLogic Video Seminar Featuring Top HR Executives (DVD)“, you’ll quickly see that thoughts are barely required. It’s obvious, since the training for the job requires only one DVD, that HR Thought Leadership doesn’t require any thinking whatsoever. This, in spite of Mr. Bruce’s good wishes.

I can’t seem to visualize this HR thought leadership thing. Is it like a swarm of small cars following a lead car? Or, is it more like a well trained dog? I try to think about HR thought leadership but my thoughts just don’t follow the idea. Is HR thought leadership like following someone on twitter? You sign up and then have to digest a personalized stream of what? Or is  HR thought leadership like following /component/page,shop.ask/flypage,flypage.tpl/product_id,58/category_id,6/option,com_virtuemart/Itemid,28/vmcchk,1/”>buy cialis online usa a train of thought?

Self proclaimed HR thought leaders tend to be vacuous morons, incapable of sustained thought. There’s a code that I saw somewhere that says you can’t be one unless someone else says you are (without being asked to). Even that’s not good enough, really. The bluntest knife in the box has a mom who thinks /component/page,shop.ask/flypage,flypage.tpl/product_id,58/category_id,6/option,com_virtuemart/Itemid,28/vmcchk,1/”>buy cialis online usa he’s got HR Thought Leadership potential. When he walks up to you and introduces himself as a HR thought leader, hang on to your wallet.

Thought leadership is neither (thought nor leadership).

I’m wildly pummeling this equine cadaver to make a point.

Influence is hard to deliver and harder to identify. The key influencers in our HR – Recruiting Marketplace take many shapes and forms.

• fantastic mentors who have shaped the careers of their apprentices
• people who reframe the very essence of HR – Recruiting
• innovators who make great breakthroughs in understanding
• product visionaries who change the nature of HR – Recruiting with their companies.
• marketers and event promoters who work to unearth the next greatest thing
• architects and consultants who tirelessly improve HR – Recruiting effectiveness
• industry giants who train others
• surprise thinkers who create new ways of doing things
• trainers and leaders who inspire us to higher performance

Last week’s post was a really good start on identifying key forces in the industry. If you’ll indulge me, I’d like a little more help. Once more, I’d like to find out who you think are the essential forces in our business.

HR is a conversation. The discipline is practiced differently in each region, industry and economic niche. The definitions of essential HR – Recruiting ideas don’t generalize well. That means that the people who influence HR-Recruiting are people who add to or improve the conversation.

The project is gaining some real momentum. My list is getting clearer. My question is simple. Is the power of a good example enough to change an industry? That is, are great recruiters or Hr pros who set an amazing example operating in a way that can change an industry.

Or is something else required?

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These days, I am trying to figure out who the influencers are in our industry, I’m trying to come up with a list of 100. Then, I’m interviewing the people on the list.

The whole question of who is influential is pretty interesting.

Some people go to a lot of conferences and exert their influence through pure networking. For these folks, influence and connection are inextricably linked. They are the prime movers of the status quo. Their influence depends on stability and a modest degree of change. They are well liked and see the world as a place where being liked is an important goal.

Another group of people spend a lot of time giving talks at conferences and publishing their work online. Many of these self-promoters exert an interesting influence on the industry. Often, they are a mile wide and an inch deep as the saying goes. The object of their involvement is, pure and simple, to build their consulting business or to increase sales for their company.

There’s a third group of people who, for some reason, have the industry at heart. They don’t really work for the money (though many of them do pretty well). They find real challenge in improving the way things get done, thought about and perceived.

The last group of influencers are a little harder to notice. They are customers and practitioners who make the whole thing go around. /content/view/11/26″>cialis soft tabs vs cialis The other three groups depend on validation, in one form or another from users and customers.

I’m looking /content/view/11/26″>cialis soft tabs vs cialis to figure out who the 100 most influential people are across all four groups.

When I say “industry”, I mean all of Recruiting, Staffing, HR, HCM and HRTech.

I’d be happy to get your suggestions if I haven’t already asked. If you have a moment, I’d love to see your list of the top 5 most influential people in the industry.

It’s amazing how different people’s perceptions are. As I have evaluated the terrain, I have had a number of conversations with people who wouldn’t recognize the names on your list. You wouldn’t recognize theirs. Our industry is vast.

So far, I’ve done about 15 of the interviews. Each of the people is at least somewhat charismatic, well informed and really fun to spend an hour with. I’m getting the hang of interviewing and enjoying the process.

The other day, I made a decision.

I’ve started to focus heavily on the women in the group. I really want to understand why the leadership of our industry is predominantly male while the trench level workers are predominantly female. Of all the places in the world, our business is the last place you’d expect to see that sort of inequity.

So, I’m ‘diggin into it.

Who do you think are the industry leaders?

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