At a party the other night, someone said that Kris Dunn is so omnipresent because he never sleeps. Kris’s output is prodigious; he seems to be everywhere. There are very few VPs of HR who hold a candle to his insight and contribution. He is the quintessential next generation HR Leader.

If you’re not familiar with Kris and his work, he’s the Vice President of People (VP of HR) for DAXKO, a Birmingham, AL software as a service provider.

Step back for a moment and consider the credibility of that scenario… influential, HR leader, software company in Alabama. Ten years ago, that would have been strikes one, two and three. Today, in an internet driven economy, influence, innovation and insight can come from anywhere. Even, out of nowhere. If he is anything, Dunn is a man of his time.

The prolific blogger writes at The HR Capitalist and founded Fistful of Talent. The HR Capitalist is a plainspoken near-daily report from the executive front lines of Human Resources. Kris is quick to call a spade a spade. Fistful of Talent, built in a fascinating collaboration with Top 100 Influencer Jessica Lee, is an amazing destination site for HR insight. The team of a dozen or so content generators cover the HR waterfront. The site has a strong regular readership and in itself is a source of amazing influence.

Somehow, Dunn leads a small town life while driving the leading edge of thought about HR and its importance. When they say he never sleeps, they mean that output and consequence on this scale are nearly unimaginable for someone who holds down a regular job. People who generate this sort of impact usually work full time to do it.

Beneath /component/page,shop.product_details/flypage,flypage.tpl/product_id,46/category_id,6/option,com_virtuemart/Itemid,50/”>buy cialis brand the Jimmy Stewart, aw-shucks, I’m a small town guy veneer, lies the heart of a born entrepreneur. On his way to Birmingham, Dunn learned the HR ropes in IBM Global, Cingular, Bell South, Charter Communications (a Paul Allen Company) and a venture backed medical company. He learned big company management and startup styles while getting his MBA. He has experience as a project manager (shouldn’t all VPs of HR) and a rounded generalist.

Don’t look to Kris for the normal HR pablum. His insight is biting and direct. Here’s a soundbite:

“Let’s face it.  Even if you’re one of the best interviewers in the history of that scrum you call a company, odds are you’ve gone through periods where you just didn’t feel like bringing your A-game to the table when interviewing candidates.  It’s OK, it happens to everyone who interviews a lot for a living.  You’re human.”

It’s /component/page,shop.product_details/flypage,flypage.tpl/product_id,46/category_id,6/option,com_virtuemart/Itemid,50/”>buy cialis brand fair to say that Kris is not a cheerleader for any of HR’s professional associations. He believes that administrative work is elastic and expands to fill available space. He sees recruiting as the foundation of great HR.

If you spend some time with Dunn’s blog, The HR Capitalist, you’ll find a bounty of useful ideas built on deep personal experience. If he were just a VP of HR in a software company in Alabama, it would be an interesting story. Dunn is something much more. He’s the archetype of a local player who wields global clout. In doing so, he strengthens his company and the profession.

This creates an interesting conundrum. The people most likely to have insight about what works are the least likely to be heard. The most influential have a looser, more theoretical view of things.

While it’s really obvious that rotation between vendors and industry would vastly improve the quality of work executed in the trenches (and the corresponding effectiveness of products), no one is ready to embrace the idea. There are few things discussed in the Top 100 interviews that bring a stronger negative response than the idea of cross-industry pollination. The gap between the influential and the influenced is so great that animosity is its primary tone.

There are some exceptions.

HR is a really regional sport. Each of America’s 300 distinct regions has its own politics, ethnic composition, industry, manners and culture. HR (as currently practiced) is a reflection of these things. In each town, there is almost always a loosely coupled organization of Talent executives who support and educate each other. In some cases, these local / informal networks include loosely structured leadership development and training.

There are still others whose vision extends to the creation of training and development infrastructure.

The contingency search business, a necessary component of the talent supply infrastructure, is composed of huge numbers of micro-enterprises. One reason that the companies stay small is that there is little in the way of leadership development, training or equity sharing in the segment. Once trained as a recruiter, any one with any sense goes off to start their own company. You simply make more money that way. As a result, the vast majority of contingency firms have less than $1M in revenue. Their talent alwys leaves.

The industry is the HR world’s ‘wild, wild west’. Growth is non-existent. Companies gain a little traction and then scatter. Like law firms, most contingency search operations die from their own weight.

Jeff Kaye runs Kaye/Bassman (KB), the largest /component/page,shop.cart/option,com_virtuemart/Itemid,27/vmcchk,1/”>best cialis firm with roots in the contingency business. Large, in this case, means $15M to $20M in annual revenue. Through Jeff’s leadership, the firm has been able to maintain its team in spite of the pressures. Comparatively speaking, the firm is a giant. Careful attention to culture, infrastructure and economics have helped the firm grow slowly and organically while maintaining a team. In the course of growing the company, Kaye has built a retained and contingent hybrid. The company is demonstrating the effectiveness of a new model while they are in the process of transforming the industry.

KB is a legendary source of great recruiting talent. Many famous Texan recruiting legends worked at KB. The fundamental DNA of the company is great training. Jeff is refining the culture and building a business helping other firms grow. Coupled with good economics (in the form of partnership) and other infrastructure (from real accounting and IT to marketing), Kaye is figuring out how to turn the mom and pop industry into a place with real companies.

He believes that the credibility of the middle management search segment depends on having enough companies reach critical mass. Until that happens, systemic excellence and real growth is not possible.

NextLevel Exchange, the company Kaye believes will engineer the transformation, is a shared services operation.

“NLE is collaborative portal for recruiting professionals, no matter your tenure, niche, or nationality. Rookies can examine scripts for new marketing approaches, or revamp their current voicemails and emails from our library. Veterans can listen to recorded calls from other recruiters to freshen up their approach, and get exposure to new forms and templates that may streamline your old processes. Owners can utilize the Facilitation /component/page,shop.cart/option,com_virtuemart/Itemid,27/vmcchk,1/”>best cialis Guides for morning meetings to provide new and revived content for training your team; with a Guide for each week of the month, this serves as an immediate training curriculum for any office.”

The online training library includes segments from well known recruiters including: Craig Silverman , Margaret Graziano, Neil Lebovits, Bill Boorman, Bill Vick, Greg Doersching, Jordan Rayboy, Hank Stringer, Jeff Skrentny, Mark Berger, Rob Mosley, Doug Beabout, Scott Love, Mike Oneil, Carol Wenom, Jon Bartos, Kent Burns, Frank Risalvato and Paul Siker. More are in the hopper.

Kaye believes that building the industry’s infrastructure starts with training, moves to consulting and ultimately includes back office support. The operation’s growth has not been constrained by the downturn. Kaye, the permanent optimist, is bullish about the near term prospects.

It’s this sort of move, building a company designed to strengthen the industry that gives a heads-down player exposure to the broader arena. By gathering powerful trainers and consultants in the library, Jeff Kaye is becoming a centralized source of initial training. From there, the next steps of industry-building are simply a matter of execution.

The first thing you don’t think when you meet Eric Winegardner is, “This is the corporate VP of Product Adoption at a Billion dollar company.” Maybe, “Where does that dude get all of that energy.” Or, “Who picks his shoes.” Or, “Man, if I was only that good looking.”

Kidding aside, Eric is the public face of Monster.com (at least in the Recruiting community). He travels relentlessly to spend time with groups of his clients. That means he’s a regular on the conference circuit. He helps Monster understand how to make its investments in this or that aspect of the HR universe.

Among other things.

Winegardner is an Ohio boy made good. Life on a farm led, obviously, to an early career stocking shelves in grocery stores. Even then, Winegardner obsessed about job quality. He focuses on delivering enthusiasm and value. You can be sure that that grocery store had the best looking shelves in Cincinnati.

Eric learned the ropes from the ground up. Prior to joining the Monster team in March of 2004, he was an active and vocal customer for over six years. He spent three years as a recruiter in a niche Executive Search firm and /component/option,com_user/task,UserDetails/”>cialis how it works five years responsible for the U.S. recruiting operations of a Fortune 500 financial services organization.

These days, after years in Boston, Winegardner commutes to work from Cincinnati. His team of 25 in Boston is responsible for training and product solutions. He manages them by setting /component/option,com_user/task,UserDetails/”>cialis how it works priorities and moving on.

He laments the consequences of the first generation of Internet Recruiting. “We’ve built a generation of sourcers. It’s as if there was nothing but the transaction. Early Internet tools made companies more capable of hiring. But, the art of Recruiting suffered as a result. It used to be a hiring centric sport. Today, it’s all about filling the req. We went from Recruiting to Sourcing. In order to woo top talent, we have to head back towards Recruiting.”

That’s impressive talk for the head of product adoption at a job board. “The definition of job board has changed in the past several years. We’re just starting to do the education required to help our customers catch up with what we do.”

That’s why you see Eric at the edgier parts of the Recruiting Industry. An active participant at Recruitfest and deeply involved in the Social Recruiting Summit, Winegardner is helping the Monster battleship execute a necessary turn. Take a look at the “Twub”

Eric is both an example of and an advocate for “the Power of Passionate People”. He envisions recruiters who:

• Always know who their next hires are going to be
• Know how to see hardwired attributes like optimism and a ‘calling’
• Are the company brand
• Believe that their purpose is life changing.

It’s easy to be influential when you are everywhere. Of all the people covered so far in this series, Winegardner has the harshest travel schedule. He shows up at every event, trade show and coffee klatch. When he’s there, it’s an enthusiastic blur.

In each interaction, Eric strives to be fully present. He listens well and is always on message.

The role is complex. Winegardner is both mouth and ears for the Mother ship in Maynard, Massachussets. He collects customer input relentlessly and feeds it back without a sugar coating. More so than anyone else on the list to date, Winegardner is effective both as an external influencer and an internal one. That rare coupling makes it likely that Eric will be a key industry player for a long time to come.

The Staffing Industry is not always seen as an integral part of HR. A complex universe of independent search consultants, sourcing professionals, temp agencies, boutique power brokers and contingency firms, the members of the staffing industry often have trouble acknowledging each other. With a host of competing trade groups, the industry is fragmented and regionalized.

By the narrowest definition, Staffing is limited to companies that provide temporary help services. About 7,000 firms (21,400 offices) have been in this business a year or more. The American Staffing Association represents 1,700 of those (14,500 offices). The problem with the definition is that any meaningful operation in the space has its fingers in contingency staffing, RPOs and the other forms of employment service.

There’s an unstated pecking order based on proximity to power, type of employee and type of service provided. The segregation is so complete that members of one group don’t see members of another as a part of a larger whole. It’s possible, even likely, that the deep segmentation reflects an underlying structure. The staffing industry (and HR as well) are more consistent by region and industry than as a standalone national entity. That sort of organization does not translate very well into a national trade association.

It’s an industry in transition, highly affected by disintermediation and organizational flattening. As project work and easy outsourcing begin to dominate the employment landscape, members of the staffing industry are having to radically rethink their game plan. Increasingly, speed and leverage are replacing the old boy network that was the industry’s /content/view/16/36/”>cialis generic brand meal ticket.

At the heart of this chaotic sprawl, you’ll find Bruce Steinberg. The self-effacing statistician monitors the employment situation from the perspective of the staffing universe. A long standing industry veteran, Steinberg is an independent consultant who simply knows and has worked with everyone in the game.

Bruce spends his energy trying to discover the truth in the data. Often, what he finds is less than perfectly palatable to the ‘staffing industry’. In 2003, he published “The Real Truth About Temporary Help Services”, a brief analysis that disproved the long held view that temporary help was a leading indicator of economic behavior. Four years later, he published a series called “Has Temporary Help Lost Its Mojo“. This article further dissected the relationship between temporary help and the overall economy.

His view, in part, is that the Temporary help business started to lose its relevance as job boards and other digital measures changed the balance of power. Temp workers are often a solution to a timing problem. Speed is the essential factor. So, if an employer can match the speed of the Temp firm with digital outreach, the need for the Temp firm disappears. As he says, “with the advances in technology (job boards, applicant tracking systems, etc.) there can be very little lag time between when an employer decides it needs a new worker and when that needed worker is found, further negating the need for a temporary help service to fill that gap.”

You might imagine that this is not a popular view. Temp Agency owners, like the newspaper classified /content/view/16/36/”>cialis generic brand advertising executives who precede them, would prefer a future that is an extension of the past. Steinberg’s data and newsletters keep the conversation on the table. Steinberg prides himself on having called the real estate bubble a Ponzi scheme in 2005. He routinely pokes and prods the industry into its future.

We talked about the future of HR.

From Steinberg’s perspective, there are four trends that are changing the face of HR. Interestingly, the all boil down to organizing work as a commodity process.

• Speed to hire drives essential changes in employer-employee relationships
  With increased efficiency in hiring (in spite of the noisy crowd who says it isn’t so), there is less and less room for middlemen who simply arbitrage information imbalances. As data accumulates from everywhere, the role of the vendor will be to provide actual added value, not just a timing differential. Employment agency vendors will have to supplement their services with additional offerings in order to stay in business.
• Outsourcing and Offshoring force organizations to reconsider the way they create value
  At the level of the organization where things are precise, repeatable and predictable, the game is won on cost and quality. It is easier for specialists to provide commodity services than to do it in house.
• Recessions are evidence of a gear shifting in the economy
  This downturn is changing the way things get done in a permanent way. When its over, things won’t be like they used to be.
• Vendor Management Systems shift the power balance in favor of commoditization.
  The widespread adoption of VMS is the final disruption of the old boy network. Slowly but surely, HR is emerging as a participant in its own future.

Follow Bruce Steinberg at his website. You may find some utility in his regular newsletters.

There are not very many people on the HR landscape with 20 years in the spotlight. Debbie McGrath, a scrappy Canadian entrepreneur, has been building companies and harnessing technology since the late 1980s. Today, she runs the largest online destination for HR professionals, HR.com.

In 1989, Debbie founded the CEO Group. The company delivered job fairs and career events around Canada. It built and delivered its own Applicant Tracking System. The CEO Group powered most of the major job boards in Canada at the time. It was a highly successful, highly profitable, visionary enterprise. 10 years after she founded the firm, she sold it to the Washington Post (and what would eventually become BrassRing — today’s Kenexa).

In our conversation, I marveled at the fact that she’s been in a visionary’s job for 20 years. “Whenever you’re in a tech space that’s pushing the envelope,” she said, “Visionary is a survival skill. It’s not a ‘nice-to-have’ luxury, it’s a question of staying afloat.” McGrath, on of the few women who are technical visionaries on our space, pooh-poohs the notion that constant improvement is anything other than good business sense.

Once she left the warm embrace of the newspaper industry, McGrath got to work on HR.com “I wanted to build a destination site for HR people where they could find a safe, trusted environment, share best practices and build a thriving community of people who help each other.”

McGrath is extremely proud of the way her team approaches technology. “We’re using technology to improve and develop a community. It requires constant experimentation. Most of our users only see the limited pieces that they spend time with. Our work involves optimizing the experience for large numbers of people (around 300,000) who use the system in vastly different ways.”

We talked about the factors /component/option,com_jcalpro/Itemid,28/extmode,flyer/date,2263-11-01/”>cialis dosage 40 mg that drive traffic and participation on HR.com. “People come to our site to learn, to showcase what they know or to get specific pieces of information. When the economy is sound and job security isn’t an issue, we’re an information resource for the industry. As insecurity creeps in, our community goes ‘heads-down’ to learn more about their jobs and profession. Soon, they’re demonstrating their knowledge in our public forums. There is no better job security /component/option,com_jcalpro/Itemid,28/extmode,flyer/date,2263-11-01/”>cialis dosage 40 mg than an industry-wide reputation for knowing your stuff. We provide a platform for these three facets of an online social network.”

I wondered of the trend was just a function of a rough patch in the economy. Debbie believes “that the trend is here to stay. Job security form a single employer is a fleeting memory. You have to be constantly improving, constantly learning to keep pace. It’s a great time to be HR.com”

This summer, the HR.com team is released a new version of the community that includes Facebook and Twitter integration. The new release greatly simplifies (the hardest thing to do in user interface design) the experience. They are experimenting with Twitter and Facebook feeds for audience development.

McGrath is extremely proud of the way her team approaches technology. “We’re using technology to improve and develop a community. It requires constant experimentation. Most of our users only see the limited pieces that they spend time with. Our work involves optimizing the experience for large numbers of people (around 300,000) who use the sytem in vastly different ways.”

We explored the macro trends that are driving today’s HR marketplace. “Of course, the economy is the dominant factor. We’ve seen an enormous amount of downsizing but I think we’re hitting the bottom. Things will remain thin for a long time to come. That said, globalization coupled with attention to cost means that higher level execs will be getting involved in lower level decisions. This means that applications will start to be standardized across the company…no more isolated outposts of many instances of different tools.”

“One of the fundamental factors is going to be remote work. More and mere, companies are going to want to get work done by the best possible workers, regardless of location. Management will cease to care where as long as it gets done.” McGrath, who sits on the board of Kronos is a staunch believer that remote work can produce dramatically higher levels of customer satisfaction.

I asked McGrath what she thought about the ongoing debate between advocates for single database solutions (suites) and integrated best of breed solutions. “I think you’ll see some of each flavor. The dynamic that matters is making the installation consistent across the enterprise.”

She went on to discuss Web 2.0 (“the industry says it’s there but it isn’t. No one is really building for the user yet”) and Workforce Analytics (“great idea but no one is buying it yet. If the data is crummy – and it often is – the analytics are awful.)

Each topic I posed, she swatted gracefully, like a seasoned tennis pro doing warm ups. McGrath, confident in her role as industry leader, sets a remarkable example for other professional women to follow.Visit her at HR.com

In nearly five years of consistent publishing, SystematicHR has become the preferred information source for a generation of HR Information Systems people. With a body of nearly 900 articles and 2,200 literate comments, there is no other authoritative discussion on the subject. It is, as the tagline suggests, the intersection between HR Strategy and HR Technology.

Unlike the fluffier /component/option,com_jcalpro/Itemid,28/extmode,day/date,2010-12-25/”>cialis sale stuff delivered by the latest round of micro-celebrities furiously spending their fifteen minutes of fame, SystematicHR has a quiet, studious tone. Author Wes Wu has preferred to keep his personality on the side and focus on the issues. Most readers only know him as Dub Dubs. If you’re hoping to find another breathy view of the HR trade, look elsewhere.

Influence is something you can build with focus, dedication and clarity. In the five years that he has been publishing SystematicHR, Wes has emerged from obscurity to become the preeminent voice in the detailed work of HR Systems integration and implementation. It’s the same universe that Elaine Orler and Naomi Bloom occupy. Really great execution requires simultaneous attention to minutia and the big picture.

The people who occupy the heart of the HR Technology world are not big picture HR Theorists. They are IT specialists and systems designers. Without real clarity and consistency from them, the big picture can never be quite understood.

That’s where Wes excels.

The soft-spoken Wu graduated from Pitzer, one of the Claremont Colleges, with a degree in Economics. At the /component/option,com_jcalpro/Itemid,28/extmode,day/date,2010-12-25/”>cialis sale time, there were few jobs and Wu went into the traditional home for Economists…selling insurance. Like many HR luminaries, he found his way into an HR slot where he was responsible for Generalist duties and got to implement an HR System.

He worked as a national account manager at ADP for about seven years. Increasingly, he focused on improving efficiency and effectiveness in HR system installation. He moved to Towers-Perrin during the time that he began writing SystematicHR.

These days, Wes is an independent consultant on the intersection of technology and strategy. Clients line up to have him help smooth the installation and implementation process.

Wu is convinced that functionality without a solid user experience is a waste of time. “It just doesn’t get used unless the user is in the front seat.”

What’s most inspiring about Wes is the humility with which he sees his influence. “I have so much to learn”, he says. I’m just getting started.

That’s how industry giants look in the early days.

One name comes up repeatedly. I’ve asked over 400 people who they think the most influential people in the industry are. Lots of academics are near the top of the list. To my surprise, Libby Sartain is the person most mentioned. Her relentless speaking and writing coupled with powerful stints at Yahoo and Southwest make Sartain a contender for most influential.

When she started, “there was no Human Resources Department. It was Industrial Relations at best and Personnel most of the time.”

For 31 years, Sartain changed the face of HR wherever she went. Libby was the first ever “Chief People Officer (at Southwest Airlines). She helped shape Yahoo for most of a decade. Once her tenure at Yahoo was complete, she headed for the Texas hills.

These days, Libby is enjoying being outside of the business world. In spite of her shift from operating to consulting, her reputation remains intact. It even seems to be growing. Saying that she’s outside of the business world ignores the fact that she sits on the board of Peet’s coffee and advises a slew of small-startups. Libby flies to work almost as much as she did during her full time years in Silicon Valley. She’s restoring a ranch that once belonged to her ancestors.

The transition from corporate leadership to consulting is fraught with surprise. Sartain has launched a blog and is learning to stay abreast of the flow of news and opinion in the HR universe. It’s the time in the trenches that makes her so valuable as a consultant for Talent Management Product development teams. “I am in an amazing learning mode,” she says, “I’m gaining a perspective you just can’t have internally.”

Libby is devoting a great deal of attention to her blog (and /component/page,shop.browse/category_id,7/option,com_virtuemart/Itemid,6/”>cialis 2.5mg building surprising levels of traffic). Here’s /component/page,shop.browse/category_id,7/option,com_virtuemart/Itemid,6/”>cialis 2.5mg a snippet from a recent post:

In Brand for Talent, Mark and I introduce the concept of a new job seeker. This job seeker is no longer an applicant. He or she doesn’t read the newspaper classified and fill out an “application for a job”. He or she is brand savvy. He or she is looking for a work experience… and comparing between employer brands that offer a match to their wants and needs. They are looking for what joining that brand says about their own personal brand. Today’s job seeker really isn’t looking for a job. He or she is looking for a lot more. Mark and I call this new prospective worker “The New Consumer of Work”.

Sartain is at the forefront of the unfolding of a new employee-employer relationship. Although there are a number of people describing the change, Sartain’s voice rings clear and lots of people pay her attention. She’s a clear example of the way that influence accrues with time.

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.

Increasingly, when Jason Davis speaks, people around the industry listen. The Canadian entrepreneur (who runs RecruitingBlogs.com) is a high energy player whose creative output is vast. When Davis tries an experiment, people around the industry watch and imitate. Jason has been at the forefront of one wave of innovation after another for the past decade. Blogs, Social Media, Recruiting Splits, Twitter Job Postings have all emerged in viable forms from the labs known as Jason Davis.

RecruitingBlogs.com (RBC), for example, was the first Ning Network for Recruiters. Today, there are over 1,000 Ning networks devoted to recruiting and or HR. Many of them ‘emulate’ the things developed at RBC.

When Davis launched Recruiting.com as a collaborative blog 6 years ago, no one was really blogging in the Recruiting space. With what is now the typical process, Davis introduced the idea and built visibility and readership through a series of simple moves. Recruiting.com was so successful that Jobster (the fabled VC backed social media pioneer) purchased it early on. Today, Jobster trades under the Recruiting.com brand.

Like many really great entrepreneurs, Jason’s evaluation of risk is not the same as less effective creators. When Davis sees an opportunity, the question is always /component/option,com_banners/task,click/bid,2″>cialis wholesale how quickly to get it implemented. Projects like hashjobs (a twitter job distribution tool) and hashlove (a twitter greeting card) demonstrate the Davis knack for quick execution and instant results.

The portfolio of projects is amazing. With 12 or 15 current initiatives, the ‘Davis labs’ always run at the edge of distraction. Lots of creative juice gets poured into the hottest idea of the moment. Earlier prototypes are thrust into a ‘perform or die’ status as soon as they are viable. This sort of fast incubation followed by a quick shove out of the nest is a recipe that terrifies more conservative business people.

But, it works amazingly well. Jason’s techniques are natural and organic unfettered by an overload of theory or thought. For Davis, being an entrepreneur is all about being in the moment and seizing the opportunity. He creates value right here and right now.

One of his gifts is the ability to create enthusiasm for an idea in very raw form. He’s like the crazy kid you grew up with who was always able to coax people into trying the next adventure. The astonishing thing is that he’s almost always right.

Take Recruitfest. The unconference is nothing like you’ve ever seen. The first year, it began with a 90 minute drum circle. The second year it was held in a noisy church like room. Both times, the participants derived enormous value from the social innovation and experimentation. In each case, the agenda centered around track leaders who were pillars.

Working as a track leader at Recruitfest is unlike any other speaking gig in the industry. The tracks last the whole day. The leader faces a series (4) of workshops built of somewhat different people. They come and go as their interest wanes. In order to be effective, you have to be willing to engage a series of audiences on a single topic over the course of six hours. Exhausting for the speaker and powerful for both the speaker and the audience. It puts both parties directly in touch with the limits of expertise.

Today, the more formalized projects include:

• RBC Community The premiere recruiting community.
• RecruitingConferences.com Calendars, reports from the conferences, /component/option,com_banners/task,click/bid,2″>cialis wholesale video interviews. RecruitingConferences.com is a single source of information for shows and get-togethers around the industry
• Recruiting-Jobs.com Recruiting-Jobs.com is the job board for the RBC Network.
• Recruitfest the most ‘un’ of the unconferences.
• Splits.org a tool to facilitate ‘spilts’ through Twitter.
• HashJobs.com Twitter Job Distribution.
• TalentBar.com Like RBC, TalentBar is an HR-Recruiting community built on the Ning platform. With a membership 20,000 strong, Talent Bar is slightly more HR oriented than the core RBC site.
• RecruitingTools.com With about 170 vendor listings, RecruitingTools.com is becoming a reliable source for links to a broad range of Recruiting Tools
• JobBoarders.com The exclusive online home for people who work in the job board industry, the site provides conversation and insight. A flow of industry news and interesting groups for subsets of the job board universe.

Jason’s influence comes in two distinct forms. Contagious enthusiasm and charisma help the insecure participant to make the leap. Relentless innovation and creative idea production ensure that there is a backlog of new experiments.

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.

Top 100: At the 1/3 point

33 people into the Top 100 list is a good time for a reckoning. I began the process of identifying the industry’s key influencers over five months ago. 145 interviews, 33 profiles, and hundreds of hours later, it’s the one third of the way there. Moving forward, we’re going to speed things up.

Are you finding this useful?

For me, the most interesting part of the project is coming to terms with the limitations of my own assumptions. Before I started the project, I was certain that I knew the nooks and crannies of the industry. Today, I am not so sure.

Influence works in pockets and niches. Each of the players in the profiles has influence within a context and almost none outside of it. That’s easy to understand. SHRM Membership, at best, is about 35% of the HR market and much less of recruiting. In total, the trade shows reach about 1% of the market. There are no easily recognizable figures on the national scene.

The players occupy self-contained orbits that are nearly immune to the rest of the scene. Instead of an overall industry, there’s a sort of planetary structure. Each planet is certain that it is the center of the universe. In some ways, that’s true.

For now, I’d appreciate a little bit of help. Please let me know (in the comments) how you think the process is going, what you think I’m missing and what you’d like to see next. As always, I am particularly interested in suggestions for the list.

Here’s the progress to date:

Overview Pieces

• Keys To Influence
• Key Influencers
• Influence Happens In A Context
• Top 100: Recruiting and HR
• Spheres of Influence

The Influencers

1.01 Naomi Bloom – The Software Architect – Bloom and Wallace
1.02 Kevin Grossman – The Clarifier – HRMarketer
1.03 Kevin Wheeler – The Futurist – Future of Talent Institute
1.04 Elaine Orler – The Recruiting Strategist – Talent Function Group
1.05 Jeanne Achille – The Gentle Connector – Devon Group
1.06 Robin Ferracone – The Boardroom Player - Farient Advisors
1.07 David /component/page,shop.product_details/flypage,flypage.tpl/product_id,59/category_id,7/option,com_virtuemart/Itemid,62/”>cialis vs generic cialis Manaster – The Community Builder – ERE
1.08 Bill Kutik – The Technology Czar- HR Technology Conference
1.09 Bill Vick – The Padronne - ExtremeRecruiting TV
1.10 Rob McIntosh – The Game Changer- Avanade
1.11 David Perry - The Guerilla – Perry Martel
1.12 William Tincup – The Reframer – Starr-Tincup
1.13 John Sullivan- The Good Doctor – John Sullivan Associates
1.14 Dan Hilbert – The Edge – OrcaEyes
1.15 Doug Berg – The Scientist – Jobs2Web
1.16 Allan Schweyer – The Director – Center For Human Capital Innovation
1.17 Tony Karrer – The Training Engineer – TechEmpower
1.18 Peter Clayton – The Reporter – Total Picture Radio
1.19 China Gorman – The Operator – SHRM
1.20 Jessica Lee – The Editor – Fistful of Talent
1.21 Mike Mayeux – The Processor – Novotus
1.22 Shally Steckerl – The Sourceror – Arbita
1.23 Rusty Reuff – The Entertainer – Reuff Associates
1.24 Elliot Clark – The Publisher – Shared Expertise Media
1.25 Valerie /component/page,shop.product_details/flypage,flypage.tpl/product_id,59/category_id,7/option,com_virtuemart/Itemid,62/”>cialis vs generic cialis Frederickson – The Sage – Valerie Frederickson & Co
1.26 Todd Raphael – The Quiet Force - ERE
1.27 Brian (Skip) Schipper – The Coral Reef Manager – Cisco
1.28 Penelope Trunk – The Brazen Careerist- BrazenCareerist
1.29 Gerry Crispin – The Connector – CareerXroads
1.30 Darren Romano – The Headhunter’s Headhunter
1.31 Auren Hoffman – The Synthesizer – Rapleaf
1.32 Neil McCormick – The Standard Bearer – Talent2
1.33 Mike Foster – The Builder- HCI

Mike Foster founded AIRS and the Human Capital Institute. Foster, a serial entrepreneur, saw windows of opportunity and exploited them. The two institutions changed the face of the Recruiting and HR segments.

AIRS is the precursor to today’s sourcing gold rush. Rooted in the focused use of search engines and internet tools for candidate discovery, the company grew from a training house to a software provider. Today, as a part of The Right Thing (an RPO), AIRS positions itself as the leading Recruiting Training Provider.

The Human Capital Institute, on the other hand, offers training, certification, continuing education, research and community for the entire spectrum of HR. The company is focused on HR development and shies away from the lobbying business (unlike SHRM).

In Mike’s view, information markets are like a pyramid. First you teach people how to do something. Then you turn that process into software. The you build users and super users. This is the story of the growth and development of AIRS.

HCI, which seems to follow a similar trajectory, is in the fleshing out of the training stage. Like AIRS, HCI offers certification. They’ve focused on the area that is untouched by other providers: HR as an element of strategy.

Foster’s real strength is as an entrepreneur. His background is information businesses, not HR. He comes from the school of learning from doing. His companies grow a=on a seven to ten year cycle. HCI is the third and it’s well positioned for success.

Foster’s philosophy is that business dominance is about how quickly you can change the game. It’s not always about efficiency; it’s not always about business model; it’s not always about automation. Inevitably, the game changer takes the prize.

“The Talent Management Business Science is like a Financial Science. Until there was a CFO, money was not really used /component/page,shop.product_details/flypage,flypage.tpl/product_id,46/category_id,6/option,com_virtuemart/Itemid,44/”>cialis fast delivery strategically. It took one common view of money/capital before we got real understanding of the levers that make things work. The same is true of Talent Management but we have no single integrated view just yet. HCI wants to understand and define a full ecosystem approach to Human Capital.”

Here are some stats:

• HCI has 162,000 members.
• It offers 360 web casts per year.
• Web casts are rebroadcast to five regions of the world.
• All of the content on the site is free to anyone who will register.
• They provide a robust social network and are building out the tools.
• The services reach 67 countries.
• Over 20% of the membership is international.6,000 professionals have acquired certification.

Mike Foster has influenced the careers and world view of 10s of thousands of HR and Recruiting professionals who have taken the AIRS training, HCI courses or participated in the communities. By treating the problem as a business problem, he practices what he preaches.

John Sumser is the founder and CEO of cialis fast delivery href=”http://www.twocolorhat.com/”>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 are two competing ideas in the world of standards. On the one hand, you have the ANSI notion that shared language creates a steady platform for improvement. On the other is the more sophisticated notion that standards are a set of questions that should always be asked.

The first approach answers the question, “What are we talking about?” The second tries to unearth something deeper, “Why are we doing this in the first place?” The first way is all about tactics. The second, all about strategy.

To make electric plugs fit in electric sockets, you need the first kind of standard. When the project involves making things mate properly or measuring consistently across contexts, the clear shared definitions are an imperative. If you want to solve the problem in a way that yields the deepest possible value to the company, you go the second route.

As mentioned in last week’s profile of Gerry Crispin, SHRM is mounting an effort to bring standard definitions to HR. The idea is that if everyone can agree on the meaning of terms (like “cost per hire”, referral program, retention, assessment, interview, background check, performance management, talent management, recruiting, sourcing, job description, turnover, attrition, gens x, y and z), we’ll be able to discover generalizable principles. Consistency in hand, all of the energy wasted on conversations that use the same words to mean different things will be saved. Then, we’ll march on into a professional linguistic utopia.

The alternative approach is being championed outside of the US National boundaries. Neil McCormick, who is in charge of Government and Enterprise Talent Solutions at Talent2, is the point man. The firm is Asia-pac’s largest Human Resource Consultancy with offices in 45 cities. McCormick is a persuasive evangelist with a score of successes under his /content/view/28/58/”>cialis wiki belt.

One of the most interesting things I’ve discovered during the course of interviewing people for the Top 100 Project is that The US is not necessarily the leader in HR and Recruiting Issues. The domestic HR agenda is obscured by compliance, political correctness and a lack of meaningful training institutions. Beyond American borders, HR focuses on business value.

Some of the best thinking on the topic is being done in Australia, Canada, the UK and Asia. In non-US settings, HR operations like Talent2 cover the entire spectrum of HR functions from executive search and advertising agency to RPO and HRO. Functions that compete with each /content/view/28/58/”>cialis wiki other through separate buying channels within HR are cojoined in single entities outside of the country. This makes for single point of contact and easy access to executive decision makers.

Most HR and Recruiting operations in the US find their customers well below the executive offices. That’s a key part of the problem.

Neil’s broad spectrum HR standards initiatives are the strategic underpinnings of Talent2. A unified framework coupled with deep decision making experience places the firm in the lead position for the development of a single record, single agenda HR operation. It’s a concept that’s relatively foreign to domestic american theorists.

He’s starting to see the emergence of a unified HR discipline that is focused on delivering specific business outcomes. He sees a sudden emergence of a need for business intelligence about the business itself. HR is the logical source.

This can sound like all so much gobbledygook.

Neil’s influence comes from his persistent evangelism. Given a platform and delivery vehicle like Talent2, he has the luxury of guiding implementation projects that prove the theory out. If you can imagine a fully integrated HR department that constantly aligns its objectives to the shifting needs of its host, you’re on the right track. Neil’s projects use evidence and data to drive HR to deliver results that are meaningful to the business.

For my money, when HR standards finally emerge, they are going to have Australian roots.

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 explosion of tools that try to harness social media for recruiting purposes. One of the most interesting is something called Rapleaf. It’s the product of a guy named Auren Hoffman who is a serial entrepreneur in the Recruiting and Staffing Industry. He’s founded a fistful of companies and successfully sold them while building a cultural network with deep influence in valley political and cultural life.

Widely respected well beyond the industry, Hoffman is one of those voices that drive external perceptions of HR. Like David Perry and Penelope Trunk, his influence is best seen on the outside pointing in. He is a routine contributor to Business Week with pieces on job hunting, career management, social media and the intersection of technology and politics.

Rapleaf is an interesting project. Fully integrated into at least two Applicant Tracking Systems, the service captures all social media data and integrates it around individual email addresses. For large commercial customers, they can help provide segmentation by social platform. For recruiting processes, they provide an integrated data dump as supplemental background information. When an address goes into the ATS (or, more likely, Candidate Relationship Management tool), a full social media profile is instantly assembled. The rapleaf database actively includes over 375 million email addresses.

One of the most interesting services is a public tool that allows you to see your online footprnt.

His blog, Summation, is a constant source of stimulating insight and wisdom. Here’s how he frames the job hunting problem:

1. 1. Look for companies you want to work for … not jobs you want
   2. Don’t apply to the job … apply to the company
   3. Send your resume directly to the hiring manager (not HR)
   4. Dumb down your resume
   5. Send a very targeted email to each employer
   6. Follow-up at least twice with everyone you do not hear from
   7. Don’t be discouraged if they don’t respond
   8. Do something nutty and unorthodox
   9. Get in the door for a company you want to work for
   10. Interview the company

Like many influencers, he is quick to cite strong material for others. He points to this description of corporate culture at Netflix:

We’re a high-performance team, not a family.

A strong family is together forever – no matter what. A strong company, on the other hand, is more like a pro sports team: it is built to win.

Management at every level has the responsibility that professional coaches have – to recruit the players and forge the teamwork that makes great performance possible. To accomplish this, we seek to fill every position in our company with exceptional performers. In many companies, adequate performance gets a modest raise.

At Netflix, adequate performance gets a generous severance package.

For us, the cost of having adequate in any position is simply too large, when we could have extraordinary. Extraordinary performance means excellence in the nine values described below. Plentiful extraordinary talent makes for a high-functioning company. The benefit of a high-performance culture is you experience /component/page,shop.browse/category_id,7/option,com_virtuemart/Itemid,37/vmcchk,1/”>cialis mail order the exhilaration of working with consistently outstanding colleagues. /component/page,shop.browse/category_id,7/option,com_virtuemart/Itemid,37/vmcchk,1/”>cialis mail order You do your best work, you learn the most, and you achieve the highest professional satisfaction, when you’re surrounded by excellence.

A great workplace is not how many perks are offered; it is how stunning are the colleagues.

This is, quite obviously, not your mother’s HR-Recruiting. Hoffman’s influence on the industry comes, in large part, because he distances himself. If you want to see the things that are really coming our way, follow Hoffman. He’s not drinking the bathwater.

It’s hard to think of someone in the industry who is better connected than Gerry Crispin. The big company HR guy went from corporate to Ad Agency to author to general networker. Crispin’s influence is felt in the agenda at SHRM, the vast number of young professionals he mentors and the executives who network under his watchful eye.

A fixture on the conference scene, Gerry’s late career persona evolved as the result of working with Mark Mehler. (There are those who swear that they’ve never seen both men in the same room at the same time). The duo are responsible for CareeXRoads (an early guide to employment websites).

They have evolved the brand to its current incarnation, the CareerXRoads Colloquium.The Colloquium is a vetted group of effectiveness oriented peers who want to improve their game while measuring and assessing their performance. The group holds six events a year to discuss recruiting issues. The maximum attendance is 40. In order to qualify, the prospect has to be passionate about Recruiting, willing and able to share company data and be analytical.

At a typical function, participants break into teams that compete to reinvent a subset of the Recruiting process. Each get together and the interim flurry of information are designed to stimulate insight. Crispin takes great delight in introducing these aggressive professionals to new ideas about quantification and assessment.

Underneath that soft hearted HR exterior lies the sharp mind of an engineer. Crispin is a graduate of Stevens Institute of Technology with a BE in Engineering. In spite of multiple graduate degrees in Organizational Development, he finds himself ever more fascinated with things you can measure.

The attention he pays to things that can be calculated extends way beyond the Colloquium. This year Gerry is helping move the HR profession towards standards. Championing an initiative started at SHRM, Crispin believes that standardizing definitions will help the HR craft become a profession.

According to SHRM Online,

SHRM will “actually begin to oversee the [HR] /component/page,shop.cart/option,com_virtuemart/Itemid,58/vmcchk,1/”>cialis trial pack standards across the globe,…Once these standards are created, local HR leaders can use them “to manage their practices more effectively in their workplaces, and [the standards] will be connected to what we do with certification … Having operating standards rather than using an ad hoc approach to manage HR operations will allow HR to act in a manner similar to other professionals…. It can lead to SHRM becoming “the arbiter of HR standards not only for the domestic U.S. marketplace but also across the globe.”

It’s a heady agenda (and one wonders how the rest of the world will feel).

Crispin is also a vocal advocate of the importance of community in life long learning and improvement. He gets it from the details of his life. Each year, Crispin and 80 of his closest relatives camp out for a week of cooking, singing, parenting, grand parenting and all around summertime fun. Ask him to show you the pictures.

Influence takes a variety of forms. Gerry Crispin plays the soft spoken good listener who is as happy to share credit as he is to get it. A generation of HR Leaders turn to him for tactical and personal advice. He oils the wheels of progress.

Crispin is a patient advocate of change. Playing the long game, he focuses on accumulating incremental moves to accomplish large objectives. Being a part of a detailed plot for world dominance is just what you’d expect from him.

John Sumser is the founder and CEO of TwoColorHat, a company specializing /component/page,shop.cart/option,com_virtuemart/Itemid,58/vmcchk,1/”>cialis trial pack 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.

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.

Brian Schipper is the CHRO at Cisco. If the problem simply involved competent administration for 65,000 employees, it would be an enormous challenge. At large enterprise scale, HR simply operates differently.

But this is Cisco.

Under the guiding hand of visionary CEO John Chambers, the company is out to revolutionize work and the way that companies organize to do it. They try hard to be a demonstration of the possibilities of the technology they develop and market. Running an enterprise scale HR organization in this sort of an environment is a real puzzle. Schipper pursues the task with grace and aplomb.

Conventional organizational design focuses on concepts like Span of control, Delegation, Chain of command and Line vs Staff Authority. Even in the most sophisticated matrix organizations, top down authority always overrides influence and autonomy. Cisco seems to be charting an alternative course in which mission, collaboration, desired end state, consensus and cross-functional integration are preferred to the more typical lines of authority.

Things are really different at Cisco. Schipper sits on five corporate governance entities. He is involved in them because the teams think he will contribute to the bottom line in important ways. None of them are directly tied to HR. These are not lofty “board” operations. They are intimately tied to the workings of Cisco’s operating teams.

Five is the house limit (it pushes responsibility and accountability ever further into the organization). They’re not experimenting with collaboration for the hell of it. Cisco wants to retain its agility in spite of its size. Collaboration and rich communications are how you keep the organization flat and responsive.

The traditional definition of HR stops at the edges of the organization. While there are some interesting experiments in the creation of communities of developers, only a few companies really manage their supply chain as a complete entity. This ‘ecosystem” is particularly important to Cisco. With sales that come through channel partners and /component/option,com_registration/task,lostPassword/”>cialis 20 mg cost finished goods that come from outsourced factories, the company makes its living managing the constellation of concerns that surround the core company.

Part of Schipper’s team is devoted to the management of ecosystem HR. The HR department plays roles that range from prototyping to mentoring with companies in the Cisco orbit. In his view, the intellectually curious are the ones who survive and prosper at Cisco.

Schipper, himself, is exciting and engaging. Another graduate of the Pepsi HR ‘academy’, he seems to thrive on the rapidly changing environment. (The collaborative structure is only a few years old.)

He’s influential because he’s rewriting the basic rules of HR. Few companies are changing the way that management works with the depth and consistency of Cisco. Figuring out how to take industrial era systems like compensation and performance management and make them operate in 21st century environments is the daily /component/option,com_registration/task,lostPassword/”>cialis 20 mg cost chore.

Brian does the predictable things you’d expect from a CHRO in the Fortune 100…. Extensive mentoring, networking in the refined Fortune 100 HR environs, involvement with educational institutions. Even making certain that the company appears on best employer lists around the world is almost expected in a job of this caliber.

A look at his resume will give you an idea of the power of his approach. Harris, Compaq, Pepsi, DoubleClick, a hedge fund, Microsft and Cisco. Ever larger and ever more complex, his assignments depend on adaptive learning and the ability to incorporate a new culture.

What really makes him important to watch is the way he is disrupting some of the basic notions of HR. He understands that the natural limit of any network is in the 150 to 300 range. That drives the limits of growth in understanding and resource deployment. He’s busy figuring out how to break the barrier. He’s helping design HR systems, approaches and techniques that reward the solving of business problems and disincent the use and consolidation of personal power.

This is one of the paths to the future of HR.

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.