Fistful of Talent

10 Minutes That Mattered in the Founding of SuccessFactors...

Forbes has been running a piece on "10 Minutes that Mattered", where they ask CEOs and other influencers in the business world to recall a situation that taught them a lot about life and shaped who they are in the business world. 

Every once in a while, you have the big moments in life.  You know the ones - maybe your grandfather imparted some wisdom to you or a mentor taught you a lesson.

Or maybe you just jacked some kids in the face

More from a profile as a part of the series at Forbes:

"Lars Dalgaard didn't pull his punches when it came to coming up with his company's catch phrase. For the $112 million (sales) Successfactors ( SFSF - news - people ), it's "No assholes." Dalgaard's referring to the kiss-ups and back-stabbers inside many organizations who get ahead not on merit but on political elbowing. Successfactors' software aims to reward the truly good by measuring performance. As it turns out, Dalgaard adopted this philosophy young in life.

"I was the only foreigner in an English school when I was 13 years old. That experience taught me just how low a tolerance level there is for anyone who's different. They teased me because of my accent. They would call me "bacon" because--and this I can now find funny--England imports the most bacon in the world from Denmark.

Now, I'm normally an anti-violence kind of guy. But I eventually had to punch a couple of kids in the face. It really wasn't my nature. I learned you fight back when you need to. Don't let someone walk all over you. You're a happy dolphin most of the time; then, when someone attacks, you're a shark.

Oh, I give people a chance. Never judge a book by its cover. But fight for your own place."

LOL.  Now, I can understand the story and I get that part.  Playing devil's advocate, if you need to fight for your own place in an organization, doesn't that mean you might be seen as a a****** by those around you?

Has there ever been an environment more full of contradictions than the American workplace?

As American as Apple Pie - Double Time and a Half...

It's the Fourth of July (almost) - which means my yard is dead (I live in the Southeast), we are under a drought warning and I am off work (as are many) for the day.  Time for a listing of things as American as apple pie as a hat tip to Uncle Sam...

Note - This is not a "top" list, just top of mind things with Talent type items mixed in - so don't flame me too hard for the sentimental things I have left off..

Some truly Apple Pie American items:

1.  Double Time and a Half - Have to work today?  Have some of the hourly folks at your company working in a call center, etc.?  If you are a even slightly progressive company, you asked for volunteers to work the limited staffing you needed by offering the normal holiday pay plus OT on top of that, resulting a concoction affectionately known as 2.5 times pay or double time and a half.  Only in America.

2.  Kid Rock in Concert on the Fourth of July - Only in America can a suburban kid from Detroit attack the rock/rap game and emerge as Kid Rock, complete with a height challenged sidekick (he passed away a couple of years back), Harley riding base player and at a minority female drummer.  Diversity at its best.  How can HR people not tip their hat to that?  Plus, the band is great.  Add in some US flags, him doing an unplugged version of our national anthem, and you've got gold.  Comes to mind because I saw him on the 4th of July in Birmingham a few years back...

3.  Baseball and Fireworks - preferably together.

4.  The Cookout - Can you honestly tell me you aren't going to one or having a small one of your own on the fourth?  There's something comforting about being around people (whether you like them or not - I'm lucky since I do) and a grill.

5.  Packaging your day off on the Fourth with a Personal or Vacation Day to make a four-day weekend - Made harder this year by the holiday on Saturday (there should be a law), packing the fourth with other days off to create a mini-vacation is more American than some of the activities listed above.  Enjoy your long weekend, or at the very least if you can't package it all up due to the holiday falling on a Saturday, cue up some Kid Rock at work ....   

Editor's Note: By day, Kris Dunn is the VP of People at DAXKO, a cool software firm dedicated to providing solutions to the best membership-driven organizations in America. At night, he morphs into a blogger at The HR Capitalist and the Founder and Executive Editor of Fistful of Talent. That makes him a career VP of HR, a blogger, a dad and a hoops junkie, the order of which changes based on his mood. Tweet him @kris_dunn...

It's the Fourth of July (almost) - which means my yard is dead (I live in the Southeast), we are under a drought warning and I am off work (as are many) for the day.  Time for a listing of things as American as apple pie as a hat tip to Uncle Sam...

Note - This is not a "top" list, just top of mind things with Talent type items mixed in - so don't flame me too hard for the sentimental things I have left off..

Some truly Apple Pie American items:

1.  Double Time and a Half - Have to work today?  Have some of the hourly folks at your company working in a call center, etc.?  If you are a even slightly progressive company, you asked for volunteers to work the limited staffing you needed by offering the normal holiday pay plus OT on top of that, resulting a concoction affectionately known as 2.5 times pay or double time and a half.  Only in America.

2.  Kid Rock in Concert on the Fourth of July - Only in America can a suburban kid from Detroit attack the rock/rap game and emerge as Kid Rock, complete with a height challenged sidekick (he passed away a couple of years back), Harley riding base player and at a minority female drummer.  Diversity at its best.  How can HR people not tip their hat to that?  Plus, the band is great.  Add in some US flags, him doing an unplugged version of our national anthem, and you've got gold.  Comes to mind because I saw him on the 4th of July in Birmingham a few years back...

3.  Baseball and Fireworks - preferably together.

4.  The Cookout - Can you honestly tell me you aren't going to one or having a small one of your own on the fourth?  There's something comforting about being around people (whether you like them or not - I'm lucky since I do) and a grill.

5.  Packaging your day off on the Fourth with a Personal or Vacation Day to make a four-day weekend - Made harder this year by the holiday on Saturday (there should be a law), packing the fourth with other days off to create a mini-vacation is more American than some of the activities listed above.  Enjoy your long weekend, or at the very least if you can't package it all up due to the holiday falling on a Saturday, cue up some Kid Rock at work ....   

Editor's Note: By day, Kris Dunn is the VP of People at DAXKO, a cool software firm dedicated to providing solutions to the best membership-driven organizations in America. At night, he morphs into a blogger at The HR Capitalist and the Founder and Executive Editor of Fistful of Talent. That makes him a career VP of HR, a blogger, a dad and a hoops junkie, the order of which changes based on his mood. Tweet him @kris_dunn...

SHRM09 - Newsflash! Gerry Crispin Knows A Lot More About Recruiting Than You and I...

Hang around the uber recruiter sites like ERE and Recruitingblogs.com, and you'll quickly learn that Gerry Crispin is well regarded in the staffing and recruiting industry.  For those of you that don't know Gerry, he teams with Mark Mehler to form the personality behind CareerXroads and the CareerXroads colloquium.

Mark and Gerry have worked for and with corporations of all sizes in career planning and placement, contract recruiting, executive search, recruitment advertising and human resource management. After years working on the front lines of recruiting, these two saw a new potential in the Internet and in 1994 came together to create CareerXroads.

CareerXroads is a lot of things to a lot of people.  Take a look at the site and see what they're doing - very interesting, part think tank, part interactive focus group, part working club and more - good stuff.  I was lucky enough to take in my first Gerry Crispin presentation at SHRM09. 

I'm glad I did.  Crispin's got so much knowledge, he's no longer trying to prove it, which is the highest complement I can provide.  He's easy like Sunday morning, which is the second highest complement I can provide to a presenter at a conference like SHRM.  That's the package that delivers some of the best information regarding the state of the staffing and recruiting scene that I've heard.

Gerry's a master at giving you glimpses of data, then wrapping it up in a way you can get your head around.  For example, here's one of the key takeaways I got from what what he shared.  Topic is "what candidates want when they come to your recruiting site":

• I (meaning the candidate) recognize people like me..

• I understand why people join your company...

• I got the information I need to make a decision on my career...

• I was treated with respect, regardless of my status....

Damn.  That's pretty good.  It's easy to say that's common sense, but when you hear it with the context of the research and thousands of conversations that have gone into developing that view, you realize you have no shot to have the perspective of Crispin in this area.

Crispin = Depth. Approachability. Authenticity.  Not a bad combo...

So....if you can afford it and can get invited, you join the colloquium. If you can't do that, you figure out where Gerry's going to speak and go see him.

BONUS TRACK - If you've never met Gerry or heard him speak, here's a clip of Gerry addressing the crowd at the SHRM09 tweetup in New Orleans, which he sponsored in part. 

 

Crispin at Tweetup from Fistful of Talent on Vimeo.

A Blogging Panel at SHRM Mean's It's Time for the Jerry Springer Show...

Oh yeah... It's almost time for the blogger's panel at SHRM today (11:30 Central).. Which can only mean one thing:

"Let's get ready to Rumbleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee"!

The session name for our event, officially cleaned up by the SHRM marketing team, is "HR Bloggers:  Who are these people and why should I care?"

It should read: "The HR Bloggers: Damn, There Are a Lot of Type A's on that Stage...Is There Enough Oxygen?"

Consider the cast:

Laurie Ruettimann -   Former corporate HR, now Punk Rock HR.  Go read the site.  If she decides to bring the "A" game with snark, it could get ugly early.  She can turn on the charm or the punk...  It's the difference between a corporate retreat or the Springer show referenced in the title.

Jessica Lee - Editor of Fistful of Talent, HR practitioner and sole gal at Jessica Lee Writes.  Once made an FOT staffer cry with her quality demands.  "I don't care how you make it happen, just make it brilliant in 600 words or less".  If I've heard that once, I've heard it 1,000 times around the FOT office.  Can turnover problems at Fistful be far behind?  Am I going to have to return to run the show like Steve Jobs?

Lance Haun - He's Your HR Guy, he's my HR guy.  Met him for the first time at the conference, GREAT guy.  I'm thinking he's capable of a brutal sneak attack as a result.  I've got my eye on him for that reason alone... You're not fooling anyone with that, "Hey, I'm a nice guy.. What's the Trailblazers score?" act, Lance....  I'm onto you brother...

Kris Dunn - That's me, KD, in the city surrounded by the sea.  True story, I was out to dinner with some industry friends on Monday and they informed me that the movie that most typified my personality was "Up", which I'm thinking is a kid's movie about hope, imagination, etc.  I thought I was more sinister than that, which means I'm going to have to prove it to the world.  I'll be hyped up like the Eminem wannabe you see on Springer in the sleeveless T with 3 Red Bulls in his system.

So that's your lineup.  What could go wrong?  I'm going to suggest we start the session with a nice game of musical chairs just to get the blood going a bit...

The only thing that will keep this thing between the ditches? The panel will be live-streamed to anyone who wants it and will also be video-archived for the rest of history...

PS - check back here around game time at 11:30 Central today.  I'll have a post up with the live stream...

SHRM09 - Will the Best "About Me" Profile at SHRM Please Stand Up?

Not sure if you saw it yesterday, but William J. Tincup, partner (his name's on it, right?) at human capital marketing firm Starr Tincup, did a vendor floor review for us at SHRM 2009 in a taped interview.  He started cussing like Samuel L. Jackson on "Snakes on a Plane" when describing the 2009 climate.  "I am about ***** **** tired of this **** ****** economy in 2009"....(Note - it was funny, but wasn't that funny - check out the video if you haven't already)

As I mentioned at the end of the vendor floor review with William, I found www.jpie.com shortly after JWT launched JPIE (his blog), and his old "about me" profile at Starr Tincup remains one of the premiere pieces of literature created by an American born in the 20th Century.  Check it out - It was that good.  JWT was kind enough to bring it out of the National Archives for a past celebration of JPIE.  Also check out JWT's mellow new profile here, and browse the Starr Tincup website as well, which proves they drink the Kool-Aid since it's based on the Ning platform.

Just showing the SHRM09 love where it's due.  Even if he tried to wreck my cable access show...

SHRM09 - Vendor Floor Mantra - 2009? Let's Talk About 2010...

Our coverage of SHRM09 wouldn't be complete without a rundown of the vendor floor, so rather than show you ugly footage of people carrying more swag than one human deserves, I thought I'd leave the breakdown to my friend William Tincup of Starr Tincup.  Good that he joined a firm with his name in it...

Starr Tincup is a marketing firm for companies who sell human capital solutions. They offer marketing strategy, marketing execution, media sourcing and staffing services. Unlike general agencies, Starr Tincup is all about human capital— they've worked with hundreds of companies in the space. Check 'em out at http://www.starrtincup.com/.

Check out the video below of my convo with William Tincup about what's going on in the vendor space at SHRM09.  WARNING:  Language not edited.  They like to be edgy at the ST, and that includes their approach to interviewing...

PS - here's WJT's old profile - it's money.....

KD + William Tincup from Fistful of Talent on Vimeo.

SHRM09 - DAXKO (home of the Capitalist) Named As a Top 50 Place to Work...

Cool news from SHRM09 - the company I work for, DAXKO, was recognized as one of the top 50 best small and medium companies to work for in America by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) and the Great Place to Work Institute, Inc. (GPTW). Winners were announced Monday at SHRM’s 61st Annual Conference in New Orleans.

DAXKO ranked 10th in the small employer category, which is great. The commitment that is behind all the good stuff that led to the award is a big reason I chose to join the DAXKO team 3 months ago. I'm a newbie so no credit goes to me, although like any free agent worth their salt, I'm looking forward to helping a clear winner defend its title moving forward.. :)

Jennifer McClure, a part of the Fistful of Talent team, was kind enough to sit down in the video below with Dave Gray, our CEO and cultural architect, and Concetta Lewis, a member of our people team, to talk about what makes DAXKO different and leads to the team recognition.

Way to go DAXKO!

DAXKO - Great Place to Work from Fistful of Talent on Vimeo.

From the SHRM09 Floor - WARNING: Taking Presentation Advice Literally May Be Hazardous to the Health of Your Talent Career...

One of the nice things about most of the presenters at SHRM is they've got some passion about the topic they're presenting on. They're not HR practitioners in my classic definition of the word, but they've got passion.

Case in point - I took in a solid presentation on Monday from Jeremy Eskenazi on Consultative Staffing and Recruiting Strategies for HR Generalists. Jeremy had some good stuff and it was clear he was passionate about helping recruiters and HR generalists become consultants - check out my twitter stream from Monday for the play by play.

The only issue? If you listen closely to what Jeremy advocates, a less-experienced HR pro might become a lot more formal than the culture they operate in can tolerate - and that might clip a young pro's career at an early stage.. It's all about context and acting like you have more experience than you actually do...

Jessica Lee and I discuss below - also included in the clip is me catching up with Jeremy and asking him how to make a push for Service Level Agreements (known as SLAs to those of you that have been around big company America) in a less formal way that doesn't get you killed/fired.

SHRM09 - On SLAs and Boxing Hiring Manager In... from Fistful of Talent on Vimeo.

SHRM09 - 10 Bitchin' Facts About Jack Welch...

Hey FOT Nation - Jessica Lee, KD and Jennifer McClure are in New Orleans covering the SHRM National Convention for FOT.  Expect the high-speed observations to begin on Monday afternoon and continue through Wednesday. 

For now, I thought I would share these 10 Bitchin' facts about SHRM keynote speaker and former GE uber-CEO, Jack Welch, to get you warmed up:

10.  The only reason you're conscious right now is because Jack Welch doesn't want to carry you.

9.  The SHRM audience asked Jack Welch a lot of questions.  They were advised not to ask Jack Welch what he would do for a Klondike bar.

8. Superman has Jack Welch pajamas.

7. General gunfight rule: shoot first, ask questions later. Welch gunfight rule: shoot first, shoot later, shoot some more, and when everyone's dead, ask a couple o' questions.

6. Jack Welch can eat just one Lay's Potato Chip. Don't tell Jack what he can't ****** do.

5. Taco Bell used to close at midnight, until Jack Welch decided he wanted to have burritos at 2 am.

4. Chuck Norris can drink an entire gallon of milk in thirty-seven seconds. Jack Welch doesn't drink milk. Milk is for sissies.

3. Jack Welch once lost reception on his cell phone. 24 hours later AT&T announced that it would have more bars in more places.

2. Jack Welch's rice crispies don't go snap,crackle and pop,they go "Ssshhh here  comes Jack"...

1.  As a boy, Jack Welch held an Ops Review with his parents on Easter until they revealed the location and contents of each hidden egg.

See you at SHRM.  Long live Jack Welch....

Temp Execs - What Could Go Wrong?

Workforce Recruiting is pitching an article that suggests that temp executives make a lot of sense  I agree - temp execs make a lot of sense IF you're in one of the following situations:

1.  Stuff has got so messed up over the last couple of years that the only chance the board has of figuring out what's wrong is to insert a complete outsider....

2.  The board's thinking about selling the company or division in question, and the mercenary makes sense for that reason alone.  Instead of bringing in a leader, you bring in the corporate equivalent of a guy/gal that does inventory overnight at a retail chain.  They count the assets and do the evaluation thing for the change in control that's ultimately going to happen.

3.  It's time to cut, and you can't afford for the ultimate leader you bring in to have the ugliness/splatter of the multiple downsizings on them.  So you bring in an interim guy that's going to do the dirty work - leaving the ultimate leader you've identified to emerge like a Phoenix from the ashes... Think Al "Chainsaw" Dunlap...

So the temp exec does work, but only if you've got one or more of the needs outlined above.  Of course, you might want to think twice about that plan if you want the following traits in your workforce:

1. Employee Trust

2. Employee Engagement

3. An executive who will own the results of his actions.

The moral?  Temp execs can work, but only in the situations I've outlined above.  If you're not in one of those situations, your temp exec better be "temp to hire" or you're going to have a steamy, problem-riddled morality play on your hands when their 12-18 months of tenure have ran their course.

Bet on that...