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 building surprising levels of traffic). Here’s 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 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, 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.

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 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 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 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 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.

Todd Raphael v1.26

Two things work really well if you want to develop influence: having a strong opinion and not having a strong opinion. If a booming voice and a belly full of charisma was the only recipe, Todd Raphael would be completely out of luck (SOL). Being a connector is vastly more than good ole boy backslapping. It involves understanding personal value and delivering it in a sustained way.

Raphael, who is ERE’s Editor in Chief, is at the nexus of community and content at the venerable online property. Todd, like Craig Newmark, feels an essential bond to customer service. He’s the voice of the folks who don’t participate publicly. Like Newmark, his ties to the customer service desk are at the heart of his influence in and beyond the community.

When I caught up with him, it was a Monday morning and he was wading through the email. Todd, like Newmark, feels a deep personal responsibility when even one email goes unanswered. “If I haven’t gotten back to you, I’m not doing my job” he says. Raphael is a low key, laid back shepherd. He has lots of really deep relationships with practitioners all over the industry

Todd summarized life before ERE nicely.

“I went to D.C. after college, working mainly for the National Restaurant Association, which lobbied for various restaurant issues. Employer issues, basically. I came out to California and worked on a northern California campaign. I worked a lot, and slept in the office some times. I had enough of politics and spent 7-8 years at Workforce magazine. I had a great experience there, doing a lot of things online that other media companies weren’t doing, and getting some good recognition in the media industry. I was on the management team; learned a little HR; launched some product; and mainly tried to build a sense of community. The company was bought midway through my time there, by a large company called Crain, and I managed to survive the tumultuous times that followed“.

Todd has a clear view on the comings and goings of people in the business. Often, he’s the first voice outside of the company that a new recruiter or (increasingly) HR professional sees or hears. These days, he sees more and more generalists turning to sites like ERE for initial training. The Recruiters are laid off and the generalists are being asked to do their jobs. As a result topics like on boarding and workforce planning are increasingly popular on ERE.

Todd believes that recruiting is becoming more and more like baseball, a game of statistics and accountability. Metrics, quantified performance assessment, scouting, pipelines and an emphasis on measurable quality are the hallmarks of his view of the future.

One of the most interesting things I discovered about Todd is that he is personally excited about the speakers and activities at ERE’s various conferences. Our conversation was peppered with things he learned from this or that speaker. He’s particularly excited about an upcoming presentation at the fall ERE conference that features a stock market analysts like view of recruiting and recruiting futures.

Influence is not all shades of the Godfather. Concern, compassion, personal responsibility and enthusiasm for the market can yield an extraordinary impact over time. Raphael’s gentle and subtle hand can be seen around the industry. He helps people find their voice when it doesn’t seem possible.

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.

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