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

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.

The HR-Recruiting Industry has a huge variety of subcultures and niches. There is no such thing as a standard set of practices in the industry. The regional and tribal nature of our organizations change the face of HR-Recruiting from town to town and industry to industry. You do the whole thing differently if you run a southern heavy manufacturing plant than a (more likely unionized) plant in the north. Neither Northern /component/page,shop.browse/category_id,6/option,com_virtuemart/Itemid,4/”>cialis soft tablets nor Southern heavy manufacturing operations resemble the HR-Recruiting found in high tech in the northwest or chip design operations near Austin.

Even in the same company, HR-Recruiting practice varies widely based on the work done at a particular organization.

In some ways, it’s easier to understand HR-Recruiting as a market than as a profession. With no standards, no serious accreditation processes, no observable Research and Development, no obvious innovation, little in the way of governance and a sea of untested assumption, the industry might be better understood as a frontier in need of some lawmakers. Certainly, there’s an ocean of opportunity awaiting anyone who can solve the professionalization problem.

There is one area of the game that behaves somewhat differently. The ‘enterprise space’, the haunts of the Fortune 2000, consumes a disproportionate share of the goods and services sold to the HR-Recruiting Industry. Enterprise products and tools, like Taleo, Peoplesoft, the emerging Workday and a host of others operate in a unique environment that is unlike the rest of the field.

Great companies aspire to be big. As a result, little companies that hope to become giants emulate the techniques and behavior of their larger brethren. Although giant companies operate in ways that would kill a smaller firm, the brands and logos of the big operations hold sway with ambitious CEOs who don’t want to be considered small. The behavior resembles young boys who are finally growing into the clothes in the Men’s department or kids who are tired of Happy meals and children’s portions.

The Enterprise space has enormous influence in the HR-Recruiting industry. Huge vendors have the booths that dominate the trade show floors. They take the biggest ads. Regardless of merit, they set the de facto standards for many things

Bill Kutik, occupies a key role at the heart of the enterprise space. On one level, he is a monthly columnist for HRExecutive Magazine and the co-host of the annual HRTech Conference. His radio show, which reaches hundreds of listeners a week, is influential beyond its audience.

Kutik knows everybody. Immensely proud of the 75 or so panels he’s put together over the years, Bill is a charismatic salon keeper. He makes connections and shows the limelight to a select audience. Bill’s imprimatur is the key to success for many new entrants to the industry. His annual shootouts always shape the industry’s view of new and improved product offerings. Kutik is the arbiter of what’s important in the enterprise arena.

A Harvard educated reporter, Kutik worked for the New York Times and is said to have covered the Claus von Bulow trial.He’s the consummate New Yorker and knows the nooks and crannies of his home. These days, he operates from a cozy little bungalow in Westport, CT where he shared office space with Paul Newman.

In Kutik’s case, influence is something to wield. From a distance, it seems like he takes an activist role in the industry, intentionally shaping opinion and experience. That’s essentially what a conference co-host does. Kutik simply takes it to a higher and more effective level.

Recruiting looks very different from the Fortune 2000 perspective. While the function must be strategic and hyper competitive, the enterprise audience is particularly risk-averse. From the halls of traditional HR, Recruiting can look really out of control and over-innovative. Part of the reason that Recruiting tools have had some trouble taking hold is that change moves at two distinct paces inside our industry. An approach that keeps up with the evolution of traditional enterprise solutions simply moves too slow for effective Recruiting strategy.

Kutik manages the difference with success. Without his influence, the evolution of HR in the enterprise space would have naturally ground to a halt. Though things move very slowly in that environment, it’s Kutik’s careful prodding that makes innovation move.

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Our industry stretches from recruiting on one side to more traditional HR on the other. One part moves at market speeds; the other runs at a conservative pace. One part is an engine of competitive advantage. The other is the hard work that must be done with precision. Like families during the 60s, we are half conservative and half liberal.

What’s odd is that the conservative function (traditional HR) comes with a relatively liberal perspective. The liberal function (Recruiting) tends to have a more conservative set of politics. To be clearer, traditional HR, the defensive function, often champions liberal views. Recruiting, the offensive operation, often delivers a more ‘business-y’ set of politics.

Obviously, the generalization breaks down in the face of anecdotal specifics. But, one of the reasons that the Recruiting operation influences the strategy of the organization is this relative political alignment. Harsh competitive realities, severe deadlines, impossible goals, aggressive tactics and sales style motivation characterize the great Recruiting functions. The more traditional aspects of HR have softer things at the core of their operations. This is the reason for the historical tension between the two functions. HR leaders who are able to really harness both sides of the business are rare creatures.

The tension is so strong that many people don’t believe the two halves. are parts of the same industry. It’s only recently that ‘Talent Management’ software, which tries to integrate all aspects of the HR Department into a single toolset, came to market. After years of internal squabbling, there is a drive to have a single record for all employees. The typical HR operation has over 200 separate databases and software tools. Enterprise /component/page,shop.browse/category_id,7/option,com_virtuemart/Itemid,37/”>low cost cialis style integration is long overdue. The question is whether a toolset that operates at market speeds can also be precise enough to handle routine operations like payroll, benefits, compensation analysis. Is the level of record keeping (sloppy) that makes Recruiting departments successful going to fit with data where completeness /component/page,shop.browse/category_id,7/option,com_virtuemart/Itemid,37/”>low cost cialis and accuracy are essential?

Imagine that the industry is a matrix with two dimensions. The professional axis includes HR at one end of the spectrum. Recruiting is at the other. The other one includes the vendors, event producers, speakers, academic, consultants and analysts. This is the commercial axis.

The most observable forms of influence in the industry come from commercial forces (including academia). The players on the commercial axis make their living, in one way or another, by trying to change, guide or drive the behavior of the professionals in the business. It’s a complex feed of newsletters, advice, blogs, conferences, podcasts, specification development, standards creation.

One of the most interesting features of the landscape is the class of service providers who deliver recruiting services from outside of the corporate walls. Third party Recruiters (search firms, contingency, staffing agencies, contract recruiters). They act like a hybrid, part vendor, part practitioner.

There’s another emerging class of provider who deliver outsourced services. Built on the Recruiting model, they range in depth from sourcing operations to complete Human Resources Outsourcing. While third party recruiters were the first outsourcing operations, these new providers are developing new approaches to basic tasks. By applying industrial and information era management techniques, they are driving the costs out of service delivery in both Recruiting and traditional HR.

The industry is roomy. With a footprint in every company and a representative in every company with more than 100 people, our industry has nearly 2,000,000 professionals. There are complex layers and niches. The way that people perform basic tasks varies with region, industry and size of the operation.

Influence in the industry comes in a variety of forms …professional practice, software choice and design, fads and fashions in language and issues, purchasing choices, operating concepts. Over the remainder of the Top 100 Influencers project, we’ll be taking a deeper look at each area.

If you enjoyed this conversation, consider joining our community. It’s even better inside.

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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