Big firms are trashing their own people assets

Age and experience exposes the naivete of youth Clip courtesy BBC's The Apprentice

By Neil Patrick

Recently I had some bad news from a friend. His wife had been laid off in a corporate restructuring.

This lady had spent over ten years with a global blue chip employer and through professionalism and hard work had risen to the position of Global Marketing Director.

She’d done absolutely nothing to deserve her ejection. On the contrary, she had been diligent and committed. Her results and appraisals had been excellent. Her colleagues thought highly of her.

Yet in an HR spreadsheet exercise, she and several hundred other senior colleagues were terminated. No ifs, buts, or options. Just out.

Age is always side slipped in diversity programmes

The firm’s plan was to cull the most senior and expensive people and hire younger – and of course cheaper people. Doubtless, someone had bandied around the term ‘Digital natives’ in the discussions about this decision.

Perversely, their website talks a lot about creating a more diverse workforce – yet this diversity appears to mean just gender and ethnic diversity. They seem to have forgotten that age is also a diversity issue and a protected characteristic in law (in the UK, under the Equality Act, 2010).

Money talks and…you know the rest

I understand a severance package (doubtless constructed with bullet proof legal advice) is in place. But this is not the point.

The point is that this is no doubt thought of as cutting out the dead wood and saving money in the process.

We need to look at people as part of the balance sheet more than the P&L

The second irony is that her employer is one of the biggest and most prestigious advisory and consulting firms in the world. i.e people you’d expect to understand that assets like people are part of the balance sheet (at least conceptually), not just a cost on the Profit and Loss account.

Older and more expensive people are more valuable than younger and cheaper people. We need them both and we need them to work together respecting and harnessing each other’s unique skills and aptitudes.

After so many years, my friend’s wife is older. She’s more experienced. She’s more valuable than however many cheaper young people they could hire instead. Perhaps not if this was a potato farm. But this is a global leader in knowledge-based advice and solutions for large corporations and organisations. They trade in intellectual capital. And intellectual capital isn't bought, it is grown and nurtured over years.

How many times do we hear CEOs spouting the mantra that ’Our people are our most valuable asset’?

That’s right. They are. And when you have invested a decade in nurturing an asset, surely it’s idiotic to just throw it away for a cheaper and less effective one?

But she’s in marketing; like its cousins, sales and advertising, marketing jobs are notorious for over-valuing one personal characteristic; youth.

Ageism is illegal in the UK. But it is also the last of the ‘isms’ to remain socially acceptable. And since it is so easy to fudge, many employers breach this law routinely.

So her chances of a rapid and smooth transition to a comparable role elsewhere are slim and will become slimmer with each month which passes.

There’s no such thing as a specialism where youth trumps everything else

Most people believe that marketing demands high creativity, high energy, media know-how. Exuberance and slick presentation skills don’t hurt either. These are characteristics which are incorrectly (see my post about this here), believed to be more prevalent amongst the young. The reality is something else. Effective marketing teams are experts at revenue generation; nurturing client relationships; data gathering and interpretation; brand building; managing specialist suppliers.

I work all the time with smart, enthusiastic young people who have marketing roles. They are wonderful. But they are also inexperienced and limited in their understanding of how to build successful businesses. They simply have not had the depth of experience to obtain the perspectives which I learned often painfully through 30 years of hard won experience.

Sure our world is transforming faster than ever before, but this doesn’t mean it is entirely different. The digital revolution doesn’t change the fundamental workings of economics and business, it just changes the ways in which these goals are attained. The Zuckerberg mythology is just that. Facebook is a success not because of Zuckerberg’s youth. It’s a success because he did better than his Silicon Valley peers…who guess what, were also young and inexperienced.

Youth alone is not a panacea for the digital age. The future belongs to those organisations who can figure out how to satisfy the aspirations and nurture the talents of young and old alike. It’s called ‘inclusivity’ guys…

Digital business is not at all beyond the comprehension of older employees. In fact I’d wager they could bring a good deal of common sense to some of the short sighted nonsense I see written about SEO, social media and other preserves of the tyros.

Please, please please, let’s stop believing that somehow culling the most experienced people is a recipe for progress.

It’s not. It’s like setting fire to your best work and flushing the ashes down the toilet…

Cut and paste catastrophes – revisited.

By Neil Patrick

This feels like a topic which is going to run and run. But I couldn’t let today’s latest job description/cut and paste catastrophe that reached my desk pass without comment. It's time for yet more car-crash HR...

We want one of these and we want it cheap.

This latest example is so mind-boggling that I cannot even begin to add my usual line by line commentary. In fact I really don’t need to – anyone who's had a job in business can see that this job description has been written by madmen (or women).

It’s a job for a digital marketing manager allegedly. In reality, it’s a job for a whole department of specialists.

To perform this role effectively, you’ll need to have solid evidence of accomplishments in:

Coding, digital and traditional marketing, media planning and execution, search engine optimisation, market analysis, sales strategy development, marketing planning, data warehousing and analysis, software evaluation, PR, research and testing, creative skills, content writing and proof reading, outsourcing management, oh yes and hands on experience of the legal, property and conveyancing industries.

How anyone at the proposed salary level in this massively under-resourced jobs sector is expected to have acquired all or even the majority of these requirements is quite beyond me.

Whilst doing this, you’ll be held accountable for high quality and high volume results i.e. generating a lot of sales leads, all the while maintaining a cool head (despite your complete mental and physical exhaustion).

Obviously the people responsible for this job posting think such skills are so abundant in the marketplace that there will be an eager queue of qualified candidates, because the salary for this job is…wait for it… £25k-£30k a year – around $32k - $39k.

This is the natural outcome of what some have called the hunt for the purple squirrel. The self-defeating hiring strategy where a job is so massively, intensely and minutely specified that no-one could possibly come close to meeting the requirement – at any salary level.

How could any self-respecting HR or hiring manager sign off this job description? It almost appears as if someone has laid off a whole department and come up with the brilliant idea of replacing everyone with just one polymath (presumably supplied with large quantities of amphetamines) to do everyone’s work.

I really hope no-one I know is ‘lucky’ enough to get hired for this job. Perhaps some of my recruiting and HR friends who read this blog would care to provide your reactions in the comments section below – even if only to confirm I haven’t lost the plot?

Anyway for your delight and entertainment here’s the posting in full:



Digital Marketing Manager

Permanent, full time.



The Role:

To support the Sales and Marketing Director in the delivery of Company marketing strategies; with the main focus on managing online presence and supporting the long-term successful promotion and deployment of marketing initiatives of the businesses.



Responsibilities:

Plan and execute all web, SEO/SEM, marketing database, email, social media and display advert campaigns.

To manage PPC strategy constantly - reviewing performance and return on investment.

To oversee the online reputation management of all companies as required.

Design, build and maintain social media presence.

Measure and report on the performance of all digital marketing campaigns, and assess against goals (ROI and KPIs).

Identify trends and insights, and optimise spend and performance.

Brainstorm new and creative growth strategies.

Plan, execute, and measure experiments and conversion tests.

Collaborate with internal teams to create landing pages and optimise user experience.

Utilise strong analytical ability to evaluate end-to-end customer experience across multiple channels and customer touch points.

Instrument conversion points and optimise user funnels.

Evaluate emerging technologies. Provide thought leadership and perspective for adoption where appropriate.

Arranging the effective distribution of marketing materials.

Maintaining and updating customer databases.

Create, develop and deploy effective marketing plans and strategies.

Monitoring competitor activity.

Managing the production and distribution of marketing materials, including leaflets, posters, flyers, newsletters and e-newsletters.

Writing and proofreading press releases and copy.

Liaising with designers and printers.

Supporting the Sales and Marketing Director wherever needed.

Work closely with PR agencies to build strong relationships with the press and managing all aspects of PR for the business.



Education/Skills/attributes required:


Essential;

Proven working experience in digital and traditional marketing.

Experience leading and managing SEO/SEM, marketing database, email, social media, websites, news feeds and display advertising campaigns.

The ability to produce high quality, high volume results.

Highly creative with experience in identifying target audiences and devising campaigns that engage, inform and motivate.

Experience in optimising landing pages and user funnels.

Experience with A/B and multivariate experiments.

Solid knowledge of website analytic tools (e.g., Google Analytics, NetInsight, Omniture, WebTrends).

Working knowledge of ad serving tools (e.g., DART, Atlas).

Experience in setting up and optimising Google Adwords campaigns.

Working knowledge of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript development and constraints.

Strong analytical skills and data-driven thinking.

Up-to-date with the latest trends and best practices in online marketing and measurement.

Experience in managing the production of marketing materials, including leaflets, posters, flyers, newsletters and e-newsletters.



Desirable;

Experience of the Property/Conveyancing Industry.

Relevant marketing qualification (CIM etc).

Experience handling high volume digital campaigns in the legal sector.



Personal Qualities


Managing Yourself;

Self-motivated and willing to take the lead and be personally accountable.

Copes effectively in demanding circumstances showing confidence in own ability and judgment.

Able to manage priorities and time effectively adopting a flexible approach to work, willing and able to delegate as appropriate.

Demonstrates persistence and commitment to completing tasks and objectives.

Pays attention to detail and quality of work.

Demonstrates a commitment to improving working practices and supports company plans and policies.



Working with People;

Ability to build and maintain excellent working relationships with others.

Confident, logical and articulate in oral and written communication, including giving formal presentations to groups.

Ability to project a dynamic and positive image of themselves and our organisation to those outside the business.

Uses effective skills to present a case clearly and succinctly to achieve a positive outcome.

Operates effectively as part of a team, encouraging others to contribute ideas and seek improvements.

Willing to offer help to all colleagues to ensure company success.



Managing Commercially;

Understands the commercial environment and has a clear vision of where the business needs to be, developing creative and innovative marketing plans to achieve commercial success.

Shows strong focus on satisfying Introducer and Client needs, taking positive action to ensure needs are met.

Understands the importance of business targets and how they impact on their responsibilities.

Makes sound commercial judgments based on issues key to the success of the business.

Knows when to seek guidance or further input from others before taking action.



Salary is £25,000 - £30,000 per annum


My suggestion is that this job description can be streamlined to a much more truthful and effective description:

"Company with poor understanding of marketing operations seeks broadly skilled and energetic marketer with good digital skills. You should be ambitious and resilient and know how to generate a lot of sales leads via online media. Should thrive in a chaotic environment. Salary highly negotiable and will be generous to reflect the scarcity and high value of these skills".

But then HR would never sign this off would they?

The 12 elephants of the jobs apocalypse

From time to time, I am delighted to share the thoughts of others and their views on the future of work. Today I have a new contribution from my friend David Hunt. David's provided me with this widely and independently evidenced commentary on the real nature of recruitment in the US today as experienced by job seekers. 

Something is stirring in the jobs jungle... 

By David Hunt, PE

Photo: Khao Yai News Facebook page

Let’s cut to the chase.

On one hand, companies claim they can’t find skilled people for the positions they have open; they claim there’s a shortage.  Yet I see the same positions open for month after quarter – and in multiple instances still open after a year… an observation seconded by both job seekers and recruiters I know.  

Clearly something is preventing the “pulling of the hiring trigger.”  But the opportunity costs of unfilled positions are the ability to pursue new initiatives, develop new products and services, and handle new and existing customers.  Let us not forget the stress toll on employees working 60+ hours a week for months on end. 

On the other hand, we have – across America – untold millions… record numbers!... un-or-underemployed.  We have a labor force participation rate near record lows.  Networking groups, like local-to-Boston groups Acton Networkers and WIND, are overflowing with skilled, competent, accomplished, and educated people who are perfectly capable of stepping into new roles successfully.  As are, doubtless, such groups across the country. 

Clearly there is an enormous mismatch, a dissonance in the perception of reality between people seeking to fill jobs, and people wanting jobs.  Each side has their own points, but – to cite a Vorlon proverb – “Understanding is a three-edged sword; there’s your side, their side, and the truth.”

We need to talk, the two sides, candidly but without rancor, to burn away the irrelevancies until we are left with a pure product, the Truth.  Only then, when both sides are in agreement about the real nature of the problem, can solutions then be proposed and tried.  But the first step is to admit there is a problem.  And since employers indisputably have the power, let’s talk about them.

Multiple Elephants in the Recruiting Room

Elephant the First: Hiring managers do not believe they need to compromise on what they want from candidates.  Per a DeVry University survey (bolding added):

*Sixty-seven percent of hiring managers don’t feel like they have to settle for a candidate without the perfect qualifications for the job

As one hiring manager told me, “I want what I want, and will wait to get what I want.”  This desire for the fantasy date leads to a huge list of requirements, often impossible requirements, which feeds into:

Elephant the Second: ATS portals reject up to 75% of qualified candidates; e.g., from Applicant tracking systems – the hidden peril for job applicants (bolding in original):

Some sources quote that as many as 75% of applicants are eliminated by ATS systems, as soon as they submit their resume, despite being qualified for the job!

Paraphrasing Suzanne Lucas, “The Evil HR Lady”, when the impossible is set as the filtering criteria, it shouldn’t surprise that only the impossible – i.e., nothing – comes through.  Reinforcing this is another data point, specifically an interview with Wharton School Professor Peter Cappelli whose research focuses on employment (bolding added):

*One employer told me that 25,000 people had applied for a reasonably standard engineering job in their company and that the hiring systems indicated that none met the requirements.

And a recruiter I know told me that, as a test, a company put together what they considered to be a perfect resume.  Yup.  Didn’t get through the ATS.  As Careerealism’s J.T. O’Donnell observed, ATS portals are where applications go to die.

Elephant the Third: My own experience with trying to network into companies indicates that more and more companies are blocking the networking that hitherto has been one of the best ways of making contacts with decision makers.  For example:

*I … made contact with the hiring manager on LinkedIn. Despite having made contact through a mutual connection and (theoretically) a trusted source, they said they could not communicate directly with me, and that HR would have to pass my resume to them before they could do anything. (Nor could they request my resume even knowing I was in the system.)

Another company I know has, per multiple people I know working there, outright forbidden any networking contacts with hiring managers.  Even current employees can only bid for new positions through the ATS.

Elephant the Fourth: Terrified of making a (cue dramatic music) BAD HIRE, companies have signed up to conduct personality testing to determine fit to some idealized personality profile, despite many potential downsides, e.g., The Problem with Using Personality Tests for Hiring and The Lazlo Emergency Commission Report.  And it’s become a responsibility dodge:

When there's a test to fall back on, managers inevitably step back from responsibility and surrender to the test, instead of asking the tougher questions. Like "the claw" in Toy Story, the test "decides who will stay and who will go."

A personality test will never encourage your managers to have the kinds of flexible thinking you need, because the test makes the ultimate decision. No test will save you from the hard work of developing an intelligent hiring process. It takes effort to distinguish the drivers for performance in a job, and real thought to understand who will fit into your culture.

Elephant the Fifth: There is no pushback on the ability of hiring managers to play Goldilocks to wait forever, and no difficult conversations had with those hiring managers by their superiors about their Quest for the Purple Squirrel.  For example, blogger Aline Kaplan had a critical observation in her blogpost Hiring the Perfect Candidate: The Problem with Finding Goldilocks:

Had I ever taken this long to fill a position … my managerial competence would have come into question. I would have had to provide a very good reason why I could not find one decent candidate among the horde of technology marketing people let go by numerous companies when the Great Recession hit—and beyond.

Hidden in this lack of correction to such levels of indecision is an implicit message from upper management that indecision is tolerated.  That tacit approval of indecision in hiring will leak to other topics also needing decisions.

Elephant the Sixth: Despite the fact that the economy has sucked canal water since 2008, with – as mentioned above – untold millions (by some estimates over 100 million) not counted in the American labor force any more, there is still a perceptual bias against those who are unemployed, especially those who have been out for longer than six months.  Thus, I observe a lack of empathy or “EQ” for such people based on no allowances made for the current economic reality.

Elephant the Seventh: Something like 80% of companies search for candidates on social media and the internet, with no guidelines or standards.  Thus, any post – whether on LinkedIn, Facebook, twitter, or anything found with a google search – can potentially be viewed as disqualifying.  Now, companies are also scouring posts by people with whom you are connected, and searching for your image to see if you are in others’ pictures.  Yet on the flip side, having no social media presence is also seen as disqualifying, thus creating a social media presence is a Catch-22.

Elephant the Eighth: The only shortage is of people willing to take pennies on the dollar (and in parallel, a dearth of training dollars to fill in small gaps).  They keep looking for, quoting J.T. O’Donnell, “Bi-lingual brain surgeons for $10 an hour”.  Ask The Headhunter Nick Corcodilos wrote  – read the whole link, it’s really eye-opening:

"The McQuaig Institute (a developer of talent assessment tools) recently polled over 600 HR professionals. The #1 reason they lose job candidates — reported by 48% of U.S. companies — is because the offers they make are too low.

HR knows where the talent shortage comes from: Lousy job offers."

Elephant the Ninth: A standard complaint by job seekers is the treatment they receive.  This is not the carping of “angry job seekers” but observations by multiple “big names” in hiring and recruiting.  Job seekers talk and share stories, leading to companies getting bad reputations.  (And in parallel, sweatshop 12-plus-hour-days companies gain bad reps.)

Elephant the Tenth: Ageism and the parallel fear of hiring someone who is a threat to the hiring manager’s position.  There are a lot of very experienced, accomplished, and savvy people looking for work.  Given the youth-philia of industry these days, I opine that many younger managers are not just concerned about having to manage someone older than they are, but are worried that those seasoned people might become their replacements, or even superiors.

Elephant the Eleventh: Companies have invested untold millions in ATS software, personality testing, etc.  Nobody wants to report upward that the software they’ve pushed, the policies they recommended, may in fact be creating the very shortage they decry.  Yet… sooner or later, as the inability to fill positions noticeably affects the bottom line, company leaders will turn their eye to the situation.  CYA maneuvering only works for so long, and doesn’t generally end well for those who hid bad news.

Elephant the Dozenth: Interviewers have certain expectations of behaviors and personality types. In Fuzzy Limits, I outlined this situation related by a recruiter:

They described a person they were attempting to place at a company. Their client rejected the candidate, citing that the person came across as "too aggressive". Upon being told that feedback, the candidate altered their presentation to be more low-key… and was rejected at their next interview as "not dynamic enough".

One person's confident is another's arrogant; humble vs. uncertain, low-key vs. disinterested, enthusiastic vs. desperate, delegator vs. slacker? And so on.

For example, I tend to think before I speak. After one interview I got the feedback that they thought my "engaging brain before putting mouth into gear" made me look slow and indecisive. Had I known that, I would have adjusted. But since interviewers don't come with meters above their heads so we can get instant feedback on how our presentation is perceived by a total stranger, applicants are forced to gamble.

All these elephants lead to one inescapable conclusion – echoing a comment you will hear in almost any networking group meeting and often online in comments on LinkedIn essays: “The hiring process is broken”.

Destroying the Message

Across the board, corporate decision makers ignore the chorus of such observations, and even excoriate and label as “uppity” those who point out these elephants.  I suspect this tendency is an application of The Emperor’s New Clothes.  It’s one thing when a “job search / recruitment expert” points things out.  It’s another when a hoi polloi plebe points these things out – because then the elephants might actually have to be addressed as they’re visible to all. 

But problems don’t get better because they’re ignored.

So What Will We Talk About?

In 2002 my retired Harvard Business School professor father passed away suddenly at age 93.  Needless to say my mother was shattered.  Eventually she climbed out of her hole and resumed life, though not unchanged.  We talked daily; I also was going through multiple and simultaneous life crises.

My mother was the first woman to get – by a few months – a Doctorate of Business Administration from the Harvard Business School.  Incredibly intelligent, highly insightful, and scarily intuitive, she would grill me wanting to know what was going on in the life of her only child in the hopes of guiding me to constructive actions.  I would sometimes be forthcoming but, more often, attempt to evade the conversation through various tactics.  She would have none of it, and would scornfully deride my evasions of serious issues with “So, we’ll just talk about the weather.”

So What Are We?

Let me be absolutely, completely, blunt in asking this – because people interested in solving problems ask penetrating questions and brush aside evasions just like my mother did…

Are we a nation of problem-solvers, rolling up our sleeves and willing to discuss the elephants in the HR lounge candidly?  People are suffering from lack of work, and companies are losing from all the opportunity costs of unfilled openings.

Or… are we a nation of shirkers, avoiding talking about these difficult issues because they make us uncomfortable, are brought up by the “wrong people”, or might necessitate that companies admit “The Shortage” might be because of the decisions and policies and programs they themselves have made and enacted?

(pause)

Sigh.  Yeah, I thought so.

It’s been a surprisingly cool spring and summer here, very possibly because the sun’s gone quiet.  How are things where you are?



David Hunt is a Mechanical Design Engineer in southern New Hampshire looking for his "next opportunity" that allows him to design new products and shepherd them to stable production. His LinkedIn profile is: www.linkedin.com/in/davidhuntmecheng/; he blogs at davidhuntpe.wordpress.com and tweets at @davidhuntpe.

© 2016, David Hunt, PE

The secret to HR success on social media

By Neil Patrick

I spend far too much time highlighting and criticizing the poor treatment of people by businesses and organisations. So for a change I am delighted today to present proof of how actually caring about people delivers the sort of profile and positive attitudes that most marketing and HR teams would kill for.

It's nothing fancy. It's not done by a big and clever marketing company. SYLKA Carpets, in Chelmsford is a 3 year old company making carpets for hotels and large houses.

Right now on LinkedIn, Sylka Carpets are getting HUGE profile simply because they cared enough to give a guy called Frank a job:

This post on Linkedin has received over 16,000 likes and over 1,000 comments every one of which (okay I haven't checked every one, but I'm confident this is so) is praising SYLKA Carpets for doing something decent to help someone out when they lost their job.

You simply cannot buy or make this sort of social media success. Not unless you are willing to behave in a decent way towards people. And next time I am talking to someone about HR and social media, this example of truly best practice will serve me well I think.

Thank you SYLKA Carpets. And good luck Frank!

Don't fear hiring the 'wrong' person; fear not making good people great

By Neil Patrick

Fear is the new greed. And catching a dose of it is more life threatening to more people than any terrorist or viral epidemic.

Tomorrow’s UK referendum about staying in or leaving the EU has been dominating the media now for what seems like forever. Watching media interviews with the public on this topic reminded me of an old truth - many people fear change and the unknown more than anything else. Most people will stick with a terrible spouse, a toxic employer and a collapsing career rather than face up to the unknown. Their default is to stick with what they know, even to the point of it harming them.

Banks know this human failing well and even have a name for it and make a great deal of money from it. They call it customer inertia. It's what stops customers switching to another bank even when they are really unhappy about their current one.

And this fear is becoming the norm for organisational behaviours too. Risk management has become a profession which has expanded its death grip from sensible steps to mitigate calamity to an all-pervasive mind set which hampers any organisation seeking to do the sorts of things they aspire to yet often fail to successfully implement. Risk avoidance has become a surrogate for good practice.

Things like becoming agile. Being flexible and responsive. Being customer centric. The reason these management buzzwords cause me to retch every time I hear them, isn’t because they are unworthy aspirations, it’s because so few people who espouse them actually practice them, or have even figured out a way to make them a reality instead of a pipedream.

And nowhere is this commitment to mediocrity more prevalent than in the decisions around hiring people. The whole sorry process has (not unlike the EU) taken on a life of its own. It has grown from a sensible desire to avoid hiring totally unsuitable people for jobs, into an over-rigid and over-specified set of requirements which mean hardly anyone can meet such demanding criteria.

This is why so many vacancies remain unfilled. It's why employers claim they cannot find the people they seek. HR and hiring managers are so terrified that they might make a bad decision that they make no decision. So the post remains unfilled often for months, because no-one suitable can be found (allegedly). In the meantime, the organisation limps on, other employees carry extra burdens, and the whole environment becomes more toxic, more pressured and less productive.

Yet these thousands of person shaped holes are not because no-one can be found. It’s because the specifications and requirements are so extensive that almost no-one could meet them. In my career I have interviewed and hired hundreds of people and watched their careers develop. The thing I learned from this was that an average person can outperform a superstar every time if they are provided with a good environment. Put a superstar in a poor environment and the reverse happens.

And the responsibility for creating a good environment is down to employers not employees. Some employers know this and work hard at it. Too many abdicate responsibility and pass the buck for their failures to their employees.

Employers want good people. But good people are made not bought. And if your organisation is capable of turning good people onto superstars, you’ll not only have a more loyal and productive workforce, you’ll enjoy the benefits of people staying with you longer and critically, acquire the capability of attracting more good people more easily.

It’s time for organisations to stop talking about talent acquisition and start practicing talent manufacturing.

Beware the killer job description

By Neil Patrick

Sloppy job descriptions are hurting businesses and employees more than you ever thought possible. Here's how...

From time to time, I like to look at job postings. It’s like car crash TV to me.

My earlier post, titled “Why are so many job descriptions cut and paste catastrophes?  ” seemed to resonate with people, so I thought it was time to revisit the subject.

Job descriptions (JDs) have far reaching consequences. How they are framed dictates who applies, and in this age of numerous unhappy employees and busy recruiters, there’s rarely a shortage of applicants. Unfortunately, this flood of applications deludes employers into thinking their JDs are not a problem.

They are wrong. They are damaging their businesses every day. And in this post I will show you why.

Employers frequently moan not about the quantity but the quality of applications they receive. And I would push this right back at them and say they are largely responsible for this, not the job applicants.

Get the JD wrong, and everything else will go wrong...

JDs are frequently scrabbled together by a junior HR person and/or recruiter in a rush to meet some deadline or other. The hiring manager ‘approves’ it and the die is cast…

But there is a more critical aspect. A JD determines not only who applies, but also after the hiring decision is made, dictates what that person does from day to day. "That’s obvious", I hear you say, but if the way a JD is framed completely misunderstands how the job holder can add value to the business, the foundations are wrong. The daily work and focus is wrong, the job holder fails to achieve expectations, the employer loses out and everyone is disappointed.

And right now, there are few JDs which get this wrong more than digital marketing roles.

So here’s a real JD I took at random this morning for such a role. A few details have been changed to protect the guilty.

Let’s ignore the spelling and grammatical mistakes. Although these are also circumstantial evidence that insufficient care and thought has been applied to this task.

This firm is looking to employ a Digital Marketing Manager. Here’s the summary and the job holder’s responsibilities:

A rapidly expanding business is looking for a top flight Digital Marketing Manager to take on and develop a new role in this ever expanding company. This is a chance for a hands on practitioner to take on a more strategic role and make your mark in a senior management role.

From the off there is a dangerous assumption here. The assumption is that this ‘top flight’ (whatever that means) digital marketer is currently in a more junior role. And the terms ‘strategic… senior management role’ are used to tempt them into believing that this job could be their big career break.

In this case, I believe this is disingenuous as I shall explain if you read on…

Responsibilities:

* Devising strategies to drive online traffic to a portfolio of websites with a B2C, D2C and B2B activity

The first thing said is usually the most important. And unfortunately if this is the job holder’s biggest goal, they will be focused on pushing those numbers up. So what, isn’t that what they are supposed to do? No it’s not.

Effective digital strategies first and foremost are not about traffic numbers. They are about connecting with customers, not chasing clicks. They are about establishing a customer preference for us over our competitors. They are about building goodwill with customers, about understanding them better, about showing we care about them. If we reduce them to clicks that we count, we are travelling in the wrong direction from the get go.

Calling a task a strategy doesn't mean the role is strategic. Moreover, there is nothing in this JD which I would consider to be strategic. So you can see why I think there's something of a ruse going on here.

* Establish and track and optimise conversion rates Developing (sic) and managing digital marketing campaigns

There’s no such thing as optimising a conversion rate. Since most firms regard conversion rate as a quantification of enquiries to sales, these need to be maximised. ‘Optimised’ implies that we can have too much as well as too little. Nonsense. No business I have ever encountered has grumbled about too many sales.

Conversion is a stupid term to apply to digital marketing. ‘Outcomes’ is much better. If the FT shares our content, that’s a great outcome. If a hundred people love our tweet so much they retweet it, that’s also a great outcome. But if we are defining conversion as 'sales', these wonderful successes score zilch.

* Develop and implement strategies utilising a range of techniques including Email, Social Media, SEO, Affiliate and PPC

This is interesting. The firm seeks to leverage every channel available. Nothing wrong with that, but I sense here that this is all about numbers. We can get x clicks from this and y from that. We’ll measure and compare the cost per click and then do more of the cheapest and less of the most expensive. This is putting the cart before the horse. It’s the old throwing mud at the wall game…

* Working in conjunction with the corporate marketing team implement the social media strategy to support existing and new business opportunities

In my experience, most marketing teams have a chronic misunderstanding of the role that digital media should play in the strategy. I cannot prove this is the case here, but my guess is that the corporate marketing people will be expecting the digital marketing manager to be playing second fiddle to their client acquisition goals.

E.g. “Let’s tweet about our latest meeting with XYZ Corp because they are a potential client.”

"Erm…No. Let's not - their reputation is atrocious.”

* Managing online brand and product campaigns to raise brand awareness and increase revenue

A brand campaign functions to raise awareness. Period. It is therefore about growing the firm’s intangible assets. Its part of the balance sheet. Revenues appear on the P&L. The connection is indirect and impossible to connect. Attempting to do this is a waste of everyone’s time.

* Managing the updates of the company websites for Europe

Fair enough. But I wonder if these sites are multilingual? They should be…

* Improving the usability, design, content and conversion of the company website

Once again, here is evidence that the firm’s ideas about digital are all mixed up. Websites exist for a multitude of purposes. It’s sensible to have sales goals for an e-commerce site. It’s idiotic to set this as a goal for a corporate or B2B one…

* Responsibility for planning and budgetary control of all digital marketing

Fair enough, but I would have liked to have seen a specific statement that this job holder could have a voice in deciding exactly what these budgets should be.

* Evaluating customer research, market conditions and competitor data

Good. For once I like this! That said, because this is so important, it is disappointing that it appears so low on the list of tasks.

* Review new technologies and keep the company at the forefront of developments in digital marketing.

This is naïve and unreasonably optimistic. If you truly want to be on the bleeding edge of digital marketing, you’d better be prepared to invest a whole lot of time and money in wasted pursuits and blind alleys. This is counterproductive and a gamble which flies in the face of everything else on this JD.

* Stakeholder management. Both internal and partners

Okay. I know this is a cut and paste on most JDs. But please tell me what it means. Unless you do, I will assume it just means don’t p**s off the bigwigs.

What we have here is a recipe for everyone to be unhappy a few months after this hire is made. The new hire will be full of enthusiasm for their new ‘senior’ and ‘strategic’ job. They will set about driving all those extra clicks with every trick they know. They will probably succeed in pushing these up a bit too.

But the real value will fail to materialise, because they have been hard at work doing the wrong things. Because the JD tells them they must do these things and their appraisal will be measured against them.

They will become disillusioned. The firm will likely think, “We made a bad hire. And this digital stuff isn’t what it’s cracked up to be.”

And so it will all end in tears.

Why your career dream may already be dead

By Neil Patrick


We don’t just have a global jobs crisis, we have a career progression logjam…

Today I woke to a BBC Radio 4 news item which reported that CEOs were complaining (again) about talent shortages and their difficulties with attracting and retaining good people.

There was much talk about “talent acquisition”, “agile organisations”, “human assets” and a good deal more management psychobabble. But whilst I yawned at the language, there was no doubting the veracity of the message.

In October 2015, PA Consulting issued a report which attributed this problem to poor use of HR data:

“There is a mismatch between chief executives’ desire to get talent management activities right and their investment in technology; only 3.6% of CEOs and HR directors had a coherent approach for analysing talent-related data”.

Report author Jennifer Cable said: “The say-do gap is huge. It seems that talent management is belief led rather than metric led, but you name me another critical area of competitive advantage where activity is not being backed up with concrete data.”

I would go even further. The problem isn’t just about data and beliefs. It’s about culture and action. Or lack of it. 21st century HR leadership is broken. It no longer serves either employers or employees well. I have nothing against HR people. And I would point out that HR is by no means the only function which has failed to transform fast enough to keep pace with what Jeremy Rifkin calls "The Third Industrial Revolution". Marketing, sales, finance, even IT in large organisations are similarly lagging.

Recently, the Pew Research Center reported that the US middle class was now outnumbered by the poor and upper classes. This is another indication that the traditional career ladder structure has bottlenecked in the middle of society.

This strategic failure is also evidenced by my own mailbox. Almost everyday I get emails from professional people who despite having great qualifications and work experience report that they cannot get interviews, let alone get hired.

If we have lots of skilled people looking for jobs, AND organisations frustrated in their search for good people, how come this problem exists at all?

What on earth is going on?

I am not going to fall into the trap of blaming one party or the other. But organisations have to accept that the old model of recruiting and hiring is failing faster than they’d like to admit.

This isn’t news to some I know. It’s the maturation of trends which have been going on for at least a decade.

The root of the problem isn’t useless job applicants or wicked HR people. The root of the problem is how both employers and jobseekers think about jobs. What they are, who does them, how they do them, how they are managed, how they are rewarded.

The current model of recruitment has not suddenly materialised. It has had decades of refinement, all designed to assess, quantify and rank the suitability of individuals for a particular job. Organisations like processes and procedures. They help them feel in control. And able to defend themselves against potentially hostile regulatory or legal threats.

Recruitment and selection processes and procedures have now inevitably become hard coded into IT systems called applicant tracking systems. Large employers have invested millions in their adoption and deployment. I have written about the consequences of these systems here.

HR teams are not to blame either. But they have become servants of the machine. The catchphrase “Computer says ‘No’” could have been written just for them…

The problem is that the whole recruitment industry and HR profession has been getting better and better at doing what can now be seen to be the wrong things.

They have become experts at creating boxes and then matching the boxes with the people that apparently best fit into them. These boxes specify everything, much of which is irrelevant or at least a distraction. Things like:

• Hours of work which reflect traditional norms not operational or employees’ needs
• Cut and paste competencies which are generic and often based on lazy thinking
• “Acceptable” levels of sickness which assume everyone’s health is the same
• Holiday entitlements which reward length of service rather than accomplishments and workload
• Rates of pay pegged to outmoded concepts of seniority and status.

These boxes haven’t really adapted very much to reflect the huge changes which have been going on in the world. They perpetuate some very old ideas about what a job is and how it should be done. These ideas are a legacy of the old command and control structures which originated in business and organisations in the industrial age.

People were increasingly reduced to cogs in a giant machine. This direction of travel has now reached a breaking point where unless an employer is desperate, hardly anyone can match their over-specified expectations.

If we add in instinctive personal biases around gender, age, appearance, race, we start to get a glimpse of just how much the system is broken. Yes, I know such things are illegal, but they are so easily fudged that hardly anyone worries about them.

Meanwhile the very nature of work has massively transformed in many jobs over the last ten years.

Organisations talk a great deal about becoming agile, yet their procedures change really slowly. Many aspire to being disruptive, yet are effectively paralyzed by risk aversion and legacy structures. They seek to be flexible, yet find change difficult. They espouse how they are customer-centric, yet shareholders' interests always trump customers'. They keep on doing the same old thing when it comes to specifying job roles and finding people to put in them.

Jobseekers are rightly and understandably frustrated and incensed by this. The explosion of  digital communication, means anyone who is looking for a new job can find hundreds almost instantly online. The result – organisations are bombarded with on average up to 200 applications per vacancy.

And since humans cannot possibly be expected to accurately assess such a deluge, automation has been adopted to screen, sort and rank resumes and choose candidates. Except these systems are at best only partially effective. In one test carried out by consultants Bersin Associates, a ‘perfect resume’ only scored 43% on the applicant tracking system…

Organisations aspire to respond and adapt to these problems, but very few are making real headway. This is because they are playing around the edges, when what they really need is a complete rethink of how they can reconcile their need for talented people with an admission that the current way of doing things is no longer fit for purpose.

So we see the continuation of cut and paste job descriptions. Of largely discredited psychometric assessments. Of idiotic interview questions and competency ‘tests’. Of overly rigid terms and conditions of employment.

The future won’t be owned by organisations which perpetuate the status quo. It will be owned by those that can grasp the nettle and figure out how they can live by these ideas not merely talk about them.

For millennials, this fragile career environment is one they have grown up with. They’ve never known anything else. For older generations, it’s nothing short of a catastrophe for which few are equipped.

Organisations will eventually transform. They have no choice. The trouble for people seeking jobs and career progression is that this transformation is going to take a very long time. And the trouble for organisations is that this key strategic requirement is so low on their agendas that they are at risk of organisational obsolescence which at best will hamper every aspiration they have, or at worst kill them.

Happy New Year! ;-)

What drives employers’ attitudes to employee age?

By Neil Patrick

Age related behaviours in organisations are not random. They are determined by measureable factors and here’s what they are.

When we are early in our careers, we seek an employer that will support our career progression goals. When we are older, we want our age and experience to be duly valued and utilised. For all of us, knowing which employers have the most enlightened attitudes and policies in relation to their employees’ age is valuable.

The young grumble that employers don’t invest enough in their career development. That they cannot become experienced if they aren’t given opportunities to prove themselves and grow. The old complain their skills and experience are disregarded. That they are overlooked in favour of younger candidates.

Are employers' attitudes to age set in stone?

These are heated debates which often revolve around opinion and anecdote. Neither are very helpful in establishing what’s really going on. So I recently turned to the world of academic research to try and get some hard facts.

I wanted to know what information existed about the behaviour of different employment sectors in this respect. Could these things be measured? And if so, what can we discover about the different behaviours of different employment sectors?

This topic is now important to employers. Not because of a sudden growth in organisational empathy, but for the simple fact that demographic shifts are compelling organisations to recognise and respond to an aging workforce, which risks the loss of key skills and knowledge unless they can adapt to these changes.

But many employers are struggling with this

From an employers’ perspective, it is clear that many are struggling to adopt effective strategies to cope with current demographic shifts. According to Deloitte and the Boston College Center on Aging and Work, almost 6 in 10 businesses report that they have a weakness in creating and managing age diversity programs for their workforces:

“Among global business and HR leaders, 58% reported that their organizations have 'weak' capabilities in 'providing programs for younger, older, and multi-generation workforces’"

Source: Global human capital trends 2014: Engaging the 21st-century workforce. Deloitte University Press.

Do different employment sectors have different attitudes?

Yes and the good news is that age-related behaviours across different sectors can be measured. And when we measure it, we find that different sectors are behaving differently.

In this post I have distilled some of the findings of an academic study titled: “Looking up to regulations, out at peers or down at the bottom line: How institutional logics affect the prevalence of age-related HR practices”.

A couple of weeks ago I was delighted to hook up with one of the authors* of the study, Monique Valcour, Executive Coach, Faculty Affiliate at the Third Path Institute and Professor of Management at EDHEC Business School in Nice.  Monique is also a contributor the Harvard Business Review. She has also been kind enough to review and edit this post with her expert insights. Thank you Monique!

What was the scope of the study?

The paper looked at the aging workforce in the US and which business sectors are doing the most to progress their HR practices to respond to the changing demographics. As the baby boomers steadily exit the workforce, this places an imperative on organisations to respond.

Apart from the demographic shift, the recession has forced many organisations to become ultra-lean versions of their previous selves, making them more vulnerable to the loss of key skills and intellectual capital as the most experienced employees retire from organisations.

The research sampled 420 organisations in the USA with an average of 455 employees.

What factors determine employers’ HR practices related to employees’ age?

The research postulated that employee age-related policies, attitudes, behaviours and HR practices are determined by the presence or absence of three main “organisational logics”. These are the beliefs and assumptions that drive the way an organisation’s leaders interpret information and make decisions related to workforce aging and age diversity. These categories are not mutually exclusive - multiple organisational logics can coexist within a single organisation.

The three organisational logics identified in the study were:

1. A strategic logic exists in organisations that are focused on the financial impact (e.g., ROI, staffing costs) of HR issues and management practices
2. A benchmarking logic exists in organisations that seek to emulate peers in their sector, for example, by benchmarking their competitors’ practices and seeking awards that are recognized within their industry.
3. A compliance logic exists in organisations that are focused on adherence to legal obligations, such as those relating to non-discrimination and to safety.

Takeout: Like people, organisations often behave according to overall sets of assumptions and beliefs that affect what information they pay attention to and how they respond to the information they take in.

What did the research find?

Organisations are more likely to actively assess the age demographics of their workforce when they are focused on benchmarking competitors and/or on regulatory compliance. These two logics also tend to be reflected in HR practices targeted at older workers (like transferring knowledge from older to younger employees and providing options for phased retirement).

Organisations are more likely to use age-neutral HR practices, such as recruiting and promoting employees of diverse ages, when they have a strong strategic and/or benchmarking logic.

Which sectors are most likely to assess age so that they can respond to shifting demographics?

The research found little difference across sectors, except that organisations in the mining and oil and gas sector are more likely to use age-neutral HR practices, while organisations in the arts, entertainment and recreation sector are less likely to actively assess the age demographics of their workforces or to use age-targeted or age-neutral HR practices.

Which sectors are most likely to respond to the practices of their peers in relation to employee age?

The financial and STEM sectors were slightly more likely to adjust their behaviours and decisions with external references to their peers, while the health care and social assistance sectors were slightly less likely to make use of this benchmarking logic.

What this tells us

There are two elements in organisational behaviour required to create an effective response to the ageing workforce. First is the gathering and interpretation of relevant data. Second is the conversion of this data into HR policies, procedures and practices which contribute to addressing the problem.

This research proved that a correlation exists between these three organisational logics and behaviours which contribute to positive practices with regard to employee age. In other words, the greater an employer’s focus on strategy, benchmarking and/or compliance, they more likely they are to measure employee demographics and attempt to respond to the changes with positive practices to protect their future human resource.

The inverse is also implied – if an employer pays scant attention to strategy, benchmarking and/or compliance, they are less likely to have adopted positive practices for managing the demographic aspects of their workforce.

If you are seeking an employer with the most progressive attitudes and positive practices relating to employee age, don’t rely on hearsay or anecdote, but instead consider the presence or absence of these three organisational logics. It’s not a guarantee, but it is a statistically proven indicator.

*The full list of contributing authors was:

Ariane Ollier-Malaterre Rouen Business School, France (now at the Université du Québec à Montréal)

Tay McNamara Sloan Center on Aging & Work, Boston College, USA

Christina Matz-Costa Graduate School of Social Work, Boston College, USA

Marcie Pitt-Catsouphes Graduate School of Social Work, Boston College, USA

Monique Valcour EDHEC Business School, France

Who employs older workers?

By Neil Patrick

There are always plenty of opinions floating around about which types of business employ younger people and whether or not this is fair or even sensible. I have expressed my own views on this often enough on this and other blogs.

Today though I opted for a different tack. I thought I’d run some numbers and see what they revealed.

This was by no means an exhaustive study, but I was amazed by what I found.

I expected there to be few discernible patterns and yet I found quite the opposite. This quick dip into the numbers showed conclusively that there is a huge variation across business sectors when it comes to the age of their staff.

My method was simple enough. I just took the average age of employee as recorded in the Sunday Times top 50 best UK companies to work for as reported for 2014.

To calculate a simple benchmark, assuming a normal distribution curve based on an age range of 18 years to 65 years old, the mean age of employees should be 41 years. Higher than this means the workforce is older; and vice versa.

Now of course this assumes also that the available workers for each age group are the same, which of course, they are not. The baby boomers for example created a significant swelling of their age group as a proportion of the total population. So my purely mathematical average cannot be taken as wholly accurate – just a rough approximation.

Meet the new boss...

I simply wanted to discover which, if any sectors had demonstrably older workers and which ones had younger workers.

Since the average age of employee is not a significant factor in the Sunday times’ ranking, we can take this as a more or less randomised sample of the age profiles of people working in UK businesses today.

Moreover, every one of these firms has been assessed to be well liked by their employees, so they also represent some of our best employers.

So based on this data, here is the average age of employee at the top 50’s best UK firms to work for which I have re-ranked by oldest average age of employee to youngest (the original list rank is also shown in the first column):

N.b. I am not suggesting that my re-ranking makes any of these companies more or less ageist. There are plenty of perfectly valid and legitimate reasons why a company might have an older or younger age profile within its workforce.

What I was interested in was to see if there were any patterns when I re-ranked the list - and there certainly are.

The two firms ranking first and second are both from the same sector – contract catering.

Three of my list’s top 10 are from the pharmaceutical/medical sectors.

On the other hand, four of the five firms at the youngest end of this list were from two sectors – recruitment and financial services.

This list reveals other facts too. First the range of average ages 45 at oldest to 21 at youngest, reveals a huge range of age profiles across the sample firms – clearly if you are only in your early forties, you are already well past the average age of the majority of sectors’ employees.

Second, taking the approximate average age we’d expect to see – c.41 years - only 6 firms (12% of the list) had an average age that was older than this.

To sum it up, if you are over 40 and looking for work, contract catering looks like your best bet unless you have experience from the pharmaceutical sector…

How to be perceived as a real leader

By Neil Patrick


Leadership is the number one competency employers seek today – but how can you prove you have it?

I've been investigating the data about the most desirable competencies employers are seeking today. Here is Indeed.com's list of the top 10 professional attributes that employers want to see in their employees, in order of importance:

1. Leadership skills

2. Interpersonal skills

3. Problem-solving skills

4. Self-motivation

5. Efficient

6. Detail-oriented

7. The ability to prioritize

8. Team player

9. Reliable

10. The ability to multitask

The list wasn’t particularly surprising. I suspect most people could second guess most of this even if it might be a little harder to guess the exact priority order the data reveals.

But the question this prompted in my mind was:

“If leadership skills are the most desirable competency, how can an employer discover what an applicant’s true leadership skills are and more importantly, fairly assess and rank competing candidates against this criteria?”

Barack Obama and the Dalai Lama in 2014 by Pete Souza 

Mike Sweeny at MAS Recruiting provides this answer to the question:

Organizations use a variety of assessment tests and/or tools to attempt to determine leadership as well as other personality traits in candidates. Overall, the results are very mixed.

Recruiting is not an exact science. You can't "test" your way to hiring people with strong leadership skills. I advise your hiring team to focus on a candidate's leadership track record. Ask each candidate to relate how they demonstrated leadership in various scenarios during their job history. Prior to the interview, have your team develop specific examples that relate to the job at hand. For example, the position being interviewed for may be a production supervisor in a manufacturing facility that has a poor quality record. During the interview session, have your team probe candidates to discuss their history at solving similar problems.

Past work history, combined with solid reference checking, is the best way to hire people with leadership skills. Assessment test may provide additional data to help in your hiring decision, but they are no substitute for probing past work history.

Fair enough, but this approach has several weaknesses:

1. Only candidates selected for interview are assessed against the number one competency

2. The measures are subjective and not quantifiable

3. References are unlikely to be able or willing to provide a great deal of reliable data on this characteristic, they after all are unlikely to have any data which records, let alone quantifies their employees’ leadership skills.

So job seekers are left with a quandary:

The number one most desirable personal attribute has no independent meaningful measure attached to it. And this means there is little we can do to provide independent verification of our leadership competencies.

To look at this in another way, there is no way currently in which HR and recruiters can reliably measure candidates against their most desired attribute.

This is a catastrophe. Especially when we consider that real leaders are not usually those who shout the loudest about themselves. The greatest leaders influence not by shock and awe tactics, but by a consistent influence, inspiring those around them by their behaviours and attitudes in a humble and collaborative way.

But there’s good news. Things are changing and they are the greatest opportunity yet for employees to demonstrate their leadership in a way that no-one can ignore.

Time and again, it is repeated that job seeking is a sales and marketing job, and the most successful candidates approach it in this way.

The rise and rise of digital and social media and ‘big data’ (I promise that’s the last time I’ll mention that in this post) are at last reshaping how HR and recruiters approach their hiring processes.

This revolution is having profound impacts. And it has given rise to something that it’s of immense value to marketers and job seekers alike.

It’s called social proof.

Businesses now use this all the time to prove their credibility in their online and offline marketing. The types of proof vary according to the nature of the business. And the immense value of social proof is deployed within the marketing tactics of most leading businesses today.

Hotels and restaurants covet their user ratings on online media. Writers seek favorable reviews of their books on Amazon. And at a more personal level, we all wish to achieve and retain a good feedback score from our buyers on Ebay.

The huge value of social proof resides in that it reflects what others think of us, not what we say or think about ourselves.

HR and recruiters are at last waking up to the potential this unlocks for them to get better and more quantifiable insight about candidates.

And it’s not rocket science to work out what this means.

Let’s work through a simple example. Faced with two otherwise identical candidates, which person would you assess as having the greater leadership skills?

Person A

• LinkedIn : 800 connections, 12 recommendations and 250 endorsements

• Twitter : Following 300 people, followed by 1500 people

• Klout score : 60

Person B

• LinkedIn : 200 connections, 1 recommendation and 30 endorsements

• Twitter : Following 750 people, followed by 150

• Klout score : 35

At this point I am sure that some of you will be howling in protest along the lines of, “these measures are unreliable and misleading because…” (place your protest of choice here).

And I would probably agree with your arguments assuming they relate to the facts that these measures are all prone to weakness and exploitation or gaming.

But I’d remind you of my opening point:

Presently there is no measure of leadership that is helping recruiters and employers reliably assess, measure and compare candidates against their expressed number one competency – leadership.

Yes the metrics I have selected are flawed. Yes they can be manipulated – (if you spend a really long time doing so) and yes they don’t tell the whole story.

But in the absence of anything better, what will employers do? My prediction is that these metrics will become more and more important. And therefore we ignore them at our peril.

As I have said repeatedly here and elsewhere, there’s no quick fix. The only way to capitalize on this situation for employees and job seekers is to invest steadily in building your online profile.

And for most of us this means a fundamental reassessment of how we prioritize our daily tasks. Yes it’s another thing to add to your already too long to do list. Yes it won’t deliver instant results. But it’s the only way you’ll become person A instead of person B.

Like it or not, your whole career future may hinge on this.