Upper middle-management and out of a job.

Too qualified,

Too set in your ways

Not right for the job

Too old fashion for our hip new company

And too many other things you aren’t allowed to say.

How many really talented people are out there looking (and looking) for work who can’t find a job because the 30 (or 40) something that is in charge of hiring has a pre-conceived notion that the person they are looking for is “younger.” How many automated…

With apologies for my miss-use of the French word form, a lot of the recruiting technology that is out there today really is “Les Misérables”. If Fantine was a recruiter and left alone, unemployed and destitute – I could…

When people talk about HR trends they tend to look at what we do today and discuss ways it can be done better in the future. Applications and tools for recruiting, training, on-boarding, etc. are being developed at dizzying rates. Problem is – these new HR innovations are going to have a short half life.

Another way to look at HR trends is to look at the way business is changing.

The changes in technology, employee motivation, globalism, and resource mobility, just to name a…

After the movie Moneyball came out there were lots of blog posts about how Moneyball had lessons for HR. Essentially this was a Big Data argument. The essence of what the Moneyball process was all about was taking vast amounts of information about your people and your potential recruits and applying data analytics to see that information from new angles. The new angles allowed them to see productivity and efficiency differently than conventional wisdom had always said it should be…

Over the course of several years – be it 10 or 40 – you leave a wake behind you that represents the impact you've made. Recruiters traditionally relied on your resume to tell them about your career arc, but today a lot is being written about how your electronic footprint may be a better, more complete representation of your professional mark.

I have fully embraced social media as a grand, open marketplace of resource communication, coordination and exchange. I saw early on that this…

In several blog posts over the last year or so I have referred to “The New Employee Economy.” So what is it? In a nutshell – it is the future.

Anybody over the age of 35 has grown up in a world where they mostly understand work as a commitment to some organization or company that lasts for 8 to 10 years (maybe more) and you move on one or two more times before you retire. The company takes care of your insurance (increasingly less so) provides you with a career path, some on-the-job…

The Presidential Debates are almost over. I wish they would talk more about how exciting and dynamic the new employee economy can be. I wish they would tell us what they are going to do to make sure we have an economy where individuals can thrive (as opposed to stale old structures). Sure there are jobs be created again in manufacturing - but that is just plugging holes. 

They will talk back and forth about a myriad of ideas. And certainly they will talk about jobs. They will talk…

Stop worrying about a candidate’s career path. For certain types of positions it is all about Skill Path, not Career Path.

What is Skill Path? Skill Path is the development of an increasing set of capabilities and/or a deepening level of expertise: regardless of where you worked. How have you advanced as a software developer, a health care provider, a manager or leader? Are those skills relevant to the challenge your company faces? Skill Path, especially for specialized skill…

Today I have decided to talk about a key part of business and operations: The Mission Statement. For a full definition of what a mission statement is, please refer to Wikipedia or a fantastic book by…

There’s no sense in denying it, these are difficult times economically. Unemployment is stubbornly high, our fractious government can’t seem to agree on how to address our economic troubles, the global economy is in peril, and every day brings more dispiriting news. Some argue that large companies, sitting on huge stockpiles of cash, will be the answer once consumer demand rebounds but how will it rebound with so many people unemployed and with wages for the employed stagnant or receding?…

As recruiters, it's our profession to identify talent in which a company would want to invest (aka: hire, train, develop.) In the search for sound investments, we at PepsiCo try to look at much more than what you'd normally expect to find on a resume or spelled out in cover letters. Skills, experience and references…

The “value added” for most any company, tiny or enormous, comes from the Quality of Experience provided.

-          Tom Peters

I just finished reading The Ten Faces of Innovation by Tom Kelley the general manager of IDEO, the successful design consulting firm in San Francisco. IDEO as you can imagine is all about innovation and applying new and creative approaches not just to product design but to…

“Only companies that can consistently bring imaginative, value-added products, services and value propositions to market will survive and grow in our rapidly-changing economy.”

-          Robert B. Tucker, Driving Growth Through Innovation

The current issue of Fast Company features the world’s 50 most innovative companies along with a Top 10 list of innovative companies in 21 key industries and 4 major emerging markets. The companies listed had all exhibited to some…

Looking at my career I've taken my fair share of risks and have gotten rewarded for some great successes because of those risks. I've also failed after taking on some risky ideas, but in the end learned more from the failure and ended up encouraging me to take on even more risks. Taking my first risk was the hardest risk to take, moving to San Francisco from Chicago…

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