Is Hiring flawed?

After seeing some of my friends and colleagues struggle during the past year and so months and listening to endless people call for the end of the recession (Really? All I hear is the spark of recovery, it’ll take longer to climb out of recession fully) I’ve been thinking… is everything going wrong at the hiring part of the process?

Those who know me, know that I’ve always had a foot in the creative and the drab technology sectors, it is who I am and it reflect in my work ethos, I can devise and create, be strategic and long term tactical, find quick solutions for problems and slowly rally up teams. And I know this causes more headaches than it should to prospective employers since I’m not really driven by career growth but by creativity and passion (Yes, this has also led me to choose poorly, we’re not immune to screwing up every now and then, in fact, it is a good thing)

I check the resumes of friends and colleagues and pick up great core skills, lots of knowledge and good hard working careers, yet they fail to be hired on a regular basis.

They tend to fall in three distinct groups:

Group 1 is the generalists: People who have had to constantly rise to the challenge, they excel at leading even if they don’t articulate that skill well, they have a depth of experience that most people wish they had.

Group 2 is the situation managers: People who have led teams, projects, even companies with different degrees of success, they are great at managing outcomes and deliver value.

Group 3 is the underqualified overachievers: People who have done much with little in terms of certifications or degrees, experienced but with stunted career paths due to their lack of official qualifications.

And without fail, they are being rejected in the market…

People I know in HR tend to put the blame on them, “They should get qualified, get more hands on experience or become specialists” but it’s hard not to notice that the problem is… HR itself.

If you are hiring an employee (Be it because you created a new role or because someone vacated the role) there’s a profile that HR matches candidates to, the 360 review process that ensues to make sure the candidate fits can be best described as: “4-5 people who only get to know you for 15 minutes making horrible assumptions over you, your experience and your expectations”

Doesn’t sound fair and certainly, doesn’t sound like either party is getting value out of the experience, for the candidate it’s not an particularly enlightening process, there’s no feedback beyond “Sorry, we found someone that fits the profile better” (Understandable, is it too hard to feed back to the candidate his/hers potential shortcomings for the role, after all, he’s invested time and money into meeting with you) and employers usually end up getting the equivalent of a mule in return, capable of carrying the load, very unremarkable and most of the time unable to jump into action without being prodded (Not always of course, but seems to be happening more and more often).

What triggers such levels of corporate fright is beyond me, but the state of the economy, a pervasive short-term mentality about how employees should fit (What the hell happened to developing corporate cultures, has it been relegated to an induction and maybe a document folder?) and a culture of thin value vs. long term sustainable value are definitely to blame.

Experience costs money, but also delivers more value per dollar.

Great people skills cost money, but they deliver a tighter more cohesive team.

The drive to succeed costs money, but they deliver constant inspiration and energy to the company.

I’m not by any means advocating that all hires have to be superstars, the problem I see, is that all companies and recruiters want superstars, end up hiring adequate performers and miss out on increasing value. And if you come to think of it, experienced, high value people will negotiate salary and job title in order to get satisfaction, so shouldn’t you, as a hiring manager evaluate how that satisfaction might benefit your organization?

If you are comparing a potential life-long partner to a list of requirements, chances are, that union won’t last long, people transform through time and not necessarily in the same way we initially envisioned.

By grinding people down to listed qualities, we miss out on the bigger picture, we hire for show, not for effect, we de-humanize the candidates and throw them into a bin, alongside 10 other people who are very different, but just happened to have a common listed criteria.

Recruitment has become a corporate dating site, you ask a lot of questions, put a few scenarios, and then spit out a match rating. Nothing there hints at long term plans or the effect of the past on that person, all domains of someone life are interconnected and it’s presumptuous to believe that we all react the same way to the same problems.

Can it be fixed? I’m absolutely sure of it, companies are reinventing themselves to emerge from this recession stronger, more humane and most importantly better equipped to create value, HR has to reinvent itself to bring in people who can create that value, not bodies to fill an office.

The things that inspire us…

Every time I think life can’t give me any pleasant surprises someone comes and proves me wrong… from a band that I’ve worked with finally getting a break to a very good friend doing something incredible on the other side of the world (And something I don’t think I’d have the balls to do if it was up to me)… inspiration is all around.

So what does it take to move us from being bored and boring into being inspired and inspiring?

Take Jessica Watson, the 16 year old girl that’s sailing solo around the world and getting told: “You’re too young”. “It’s too dangerous” and “are you insane?”… by a bunch of boring and uninspired “journalists” that only care about pushing opinion, the unfortunate prevalent opinion of the past few decades that doing something dangerous is a no-no…

Compare that with the following industries in the past 10 years, Technology, Media and Finance… lots of safe bets, few real risks and a lot of greed and rushing to make a quick buck… a true inability to innovate beyond models set forth 70 years ago… which has led us to the current state of affairs, and the woefully inadequate solutions that have taken personal responsibility and innovation out of the market.

Be inspiring, take a risk, kick ass and take names, whatever you do, don’t let people slow you down with cries of “too hard”, “too risky” or “we do things differently”…

Re-humanizing ourselves…

When was the last time you smiled to a stranger on the bus?

When was the last time you randomly met a new cool stranger that totally rocked your world?

When was the last time you sat down to listen to a CD, read the booklet, admired the art, felt that moment, special as it was?

The answer is probably, a long time ago…

We have all the tools and gadgets available to ease communication, but we are overloaded by it, to the point that we now use all that technology to isolate ourselves from others, to form digital cliques of people who agree with us and shun anybody who thinks differently… welcome to the age of forced uniformity, a mass of homogeneously assembled heterogenous groups of people.

And it’s hurting us a lot, the effects in all industries can be seen, take for example recruiters and employees, no longer seeking top talent with top EQ’s (Emotional Quotients for the acronym-impaired) and rather looking for quick and dirty “fits”… in reality, this dehumanization of the employee, of the lover (Hi, I saw your profile at www.desperatedatingsite.com and you really seem to have my same tastes, wanna hook up?), of the family, of the friend, that lack of acceptance of the different and the benefits of the opposing point of view, that desire that the world be filled with unique individuals, like yourself of course, is causing enormous ripples.

Top talent will never ever be an easy fit, the best lover will never ever be the easy hookup that you dissected online, the best friend will never ever be the faceless wall of text that always agrees with you… the sooner you dispel the notion that things will always be the way you want and focus on the things that really make you happy then you’ll start re-humanizing yourself and and others.

Then you’ll see… the best things in life will come to you…

I’m not the man I used to be…

Yeah, I’m not, sometimes I stop and ponder how things didn’t turn out the way I planned and of course, the answer isn’t surprising, I didn’t make them happen.

I fondly remember my teenage years, full of dreams of making it big with my band (As big as you could in the Metal/Hardcore scenes back then) and starting my own company. I was full of hope, I was full of drive and I was full of dreams.

Of course, things have a way of going off course and one thing leads to another and poof, it’s all gone in a flash… my band disintegrated from the weight of its own talent (And so did band #2 and band #3) while “lesser talented” bands made it big, I turned my back against the dream of making it big as a musician and focused on the dream of being a technologist and eventually own my own company and making it big.

I struggled through college, my teachers all said that I was well above average, a brilliant thinker, but a lousy student that just worked hard enough to get by, you could see my heart wasn’t in it, but I managed to graduate with a decent GPA, but the fact that I wasn’t playing live anymore and I had become estranged from my musician friends wasn’t helping (Yeah, being the musician in college will make you not fit anywhere, and that in turn will make you quite a misanthrope, a very sociable misanthrope though)

So I look back and I see that I achieved neither of my lifelong dreams, despite having done much with my life, traveled, enjoyed the highs of love and the pits of loss, the comfort of family and friends and the thrill of strangers… yet…

It’s fairly simple really, the key to success is squarely in your head, if you’ve got talent and drive alone isn’t enough to guarantee you success, you need to have faith, you need to pick yourself up every time you’re down and you need to take an enormous risk… I know for example my aversion to risk is in fact the main reason why I haven’t achieved the success that I seek (BTW, money/fame are not success, nor even a measure of success, but I don’t want to get dragged down into that argument).

But risk aversion alone is not the answer, then you realize a second element of success, it comes from leading and influencing others. Many times people have written about success, framing it from the angle of the lone man out fighting against the odds, the truth is, successful people build successful networks and from those successful networks find opportunities for success.

So, successful people take risks and build networks… looks like a lot of work right?

Well, it is, and that’s why talent and drive are also required, but the third missing element is faith, you can have blind faith, that’s never going to be enough, you really need to have your heart into it, love what you do, enjoy the struggle because you love the results. For the past 25 years we haven’t encouraged people to follow their hearts, we have encouraged them to fit in at any costs and we’re paying dearly for it. We’ve encouraged safe careers and copycats, we haven’t encouraged pioneering and risk-taking… our current global financial situation is directly related to not having taken the risks of educating consumers with money, savings and investing but instead building ponzi schemes that were copied over and over the world. No pioneering economics, no pioneering arts, just more and more copying.

So why am I not the man I used to be? Well, for the past 15 years I’ve been doing what I’m good at, not necessarily what I enjoy doing, it has hurt me and those around me, very simple… if you’re not happy, everybody around you won’t have a chance to be truly happy either, this time around I’m chasing my dreams with a ton of knowledge gained from failing to attain them (Or failing to value them when I did attain them), changing my philosophy to bring more success, like exercise, it’s hard work at the beginning, boring and tedious in the middle and very rewarding in the long term, this time around, I have enough faith in myself, a great network of friends, much knowledge gained and the desire to make it happen… and the patience too!

The people who still don’t get it…

The whole debate sparked by Lilly Allen’s stance against people pirating her music has been so far, hilarious…

From some random people posting at the BBC’s website one gets the idea that they believe they are fighting an evil monster called music industry, but their habits speak the actual truth… they just want something for nothing. I wonder if one were to walk to their house and say, take their couch because they have another they’d feel the same way about those “multimillionaire” artists (Where? Or has MTV actually convinced people that the majority of artists have swimming pools filled with money).

I believe the music industry needs reform and a lot of restructuring, I have been affected by the industry downturn directly, no sales equals no funding for engineers and producers, there’s obvious opportunities for improving distribution and compensation, but those aren’t going to exist if music loses its remunerative angle. And yeah, concerts and live shows can make a band a fair amount of money, just not enough to live on it as a single source of income.

So sure, it sounds nice on paper, you get the entitlement, you get the rush and the thrill of fighting the man (And of course argue about it while having coffee at starbucks) but in reality, you’re not going to the shows, you’re not buying merchandise and most importantly, you’re not supporting the artist… proof of that are all the mid-tier independent bands that are struggling nowadays.

Just remember that the next time you jump on your digital high horse to pass judgement on the industry.

Step 1

Since deciding to revive the whole blog business the next step is to integrate it with all the social network tools that I use, should be a cinch right?

It does highlight one major problem with the whole concept of “cloud services”… when you need service A to talk to service B your options are at best spartan and in most cases non-existent or incomplete… forcing you to develop your own integration service.

If the Palm Pré and the recently announced Motorola CLIQ/DEXT are any indication, the next wave of services will center not just around integrating all those sources of information but also processing them down into a pre-digested feed that you can read and interpret more easily.

Information overload is no longer king in the 21st century…

PS: Haven’t spoken about music in a long time… that too is coming…

*crickets*

Anybody still reading this? If not… news you won’t read, I will pick up the blog idea again and see how we go with it… enjoy!

Running out of feet to shoot yourself in

I have always wondered how people (Just like companies) love to repeat the same mistake over and over.

Say, for example… why spend so much money on a device like this? (When you consider the cost of the subscription service and most likely the cost of WiFi service) when something as simple as an FM Radio does the same? (And yes, there’s no subscription cost involved).

Subscription services suck… not the concept. The implementation.

It’s cool to make your own playlists and what not, but it’s even better if you actually own the music, that means you get to control what you listen to and to make your choices (And simplify them as well)

Last.fm radio sort of worked well to suggest a few new artists that I might have missed otherwise, but to get 1 new artist I had to listen to 3 days worth of radio, and I had other things to do.

$144 a year for a subscription service (Even if it allows me to discover new artists better than say magazines, word of mouth or myspace) do, ends up being a lot of money for the pleasure of perhaps 10 new discoveries, which of course I’d like to buy instead of renting.

In this digital music space, it seems to me that companies are struggling to come up with ideas, and instead we get a rehash of the Columbia Publishers Club with the downside that you don’t end up owning the music.

Ain’t progress beautiful?

The quest for convergence

There’s few words less paraded around than convergence these days. Every device, from your cell phone, to your toaster oven seems to be in a hurry to mate and leave mostly deformed offspring along the way.

I do agree that there’s an overabundance of gadgets and a shortage of pockets, shelf space and real state to place them, but to extract from there the notion that I need a fork that can also work as a toothbrush while at the same time be a competent screwdriver is a bit far fetched.

In telecoms, the whole convergence pitch has centered around Triple Play first, 4Play (Really bad choice of term in my opinion) later and when we ran out of technologies to bind the whole “Fixed Mobile Convergence” banner made its triumphal entry into the world of overused acronyms. Here is a case of want but not have, of course I’d love to get TV, Internet and Telephony from one wire (And if I can bind them together using wireless inside the home, the better) the problem is, all I’ll get offered so far is a half-assed approximation of each.

Things haven’t been different in the gadget front, my phone can be my MP3 player, PDA, messaging center and replace countless other items on the road (Including my laptop, unless you actually try to do work from its tiny keyboard on feature-starved office applications).

Then in music, there’s been genre convergence. What once was a death metal band today can be labeled as a technical blackened death band with some industrial overtones, every genre is colliding, mingling and leaving out interesting bands that writers around the world are ready to ruin for you with long, pompous, “genre” descriptions. Thank goodness, this is an example of convergence that I personally find attractive as it allows music to continue evolving.

But where is the problem? If you have read about The Tyranny of Choice (And if you haven’t here it is, good read/food for thought) you realize that there’s way too much choice involved in convergence. Do I take the multifunction device that does some things well and others not so well over the 3 devices it replaces? Or shall I stick to best of breed and proven devices it replaces?

I’ve had that internal debate raging for a while on several fronts, before I got rid of most of my studio to go mobile I was wondering if it was the right thing to do to sell my lovely analog console and AD/DA chain to replace it with a more compact “converged” solution. Also the Apple TV caught my eye, but I still wonder if it’d do a better job than a souped up XBOX 360 or PS3? (Debate still raging, so far I’m holding back on deciding that one)

In the meantime companies are going into some sort of identity crisis as they wake up one day and figure out they’re “Not Convergent” enough. Microsoft seems to have caught the bug harder, as their current schizophrenia doesn’t let them decide if they are a software company, a gadget company, a gaming company, a hardware company, a phone company or a media company. The result is the same, a ton of good intentions and half-assed ideas.

Apple seems to be undertaking it’s convergence transformation a bit better, but it’s too early to say. The iPod has sold well enough to warrant maximum attention, but their computer sales aren’t bad considering. Will the iPhone be one of those devices that aims for the moon and shoots to the ground? Until I hold one, it’s too early to say.

Sony has been an example of the complete opposite, they have thoughts about convergence and media centric devices, but the implementation always leaves a lot to be desired. The PS3 could’ve been a killer if it could simply stream media from nearby PC’s and Macs without requiring you to boot into Linux.

So… the trend will continue, for sure… I just fear for the day my Digidesign converged toaster/audio interface/toilet plunger stops working, forcing me to buy a Jack Daniels convergent whiskey bottle with extra plunging and toasting capabilities (Audio recording optional, requires purchase of Jack Daniels branded cables and will only work with drunk musicians)

How couldn’t one hate Windows?

So yesterday, at the worst possible time my Windows Bootcamp partition decided to go where Windows installations often go, to hell.

It’s funny, I have that partition due to three things:

I haven’t updated my main DAW software because, well, the whole Nuendo 4/Cubase 4 business is still unclear and there’s no Universal Binary for SX 3 or Nuendo 3

There’s a few plugins that only run on Windows (Like some of the Digital Fishphones plugins)

There’s always that application that you desperately need that only runs on Windows or isn’t yet Universal for Mac OS X

The best part is that both Parallels and VMWare Fusion could open it and in fact run Windows without problems, but booting straight to it resulted on a hung machine.

After all these years it still mystifies me that a perfectly good installation can go south without any new software being installed, but you learn to accept that, move on and do something about it (Usually a nice, clean reinstall), so why should it be different with Bootcamp?

At least this gives me incentive to try Bootcamp 1.2 from scratch, and see what improvements were made to the drivers (Asio4All for example ran with all kinds of weird latency issues, yet my m-audio and Line6 drivers ran with no problems) and considering this is my main mobile recording machine the more stable the drivers the happier I’ll be.

We’ll see how it goes, this Windows on a Mac journey hasn’t been half bad all things considered, Parallels with Coherence for example brought back memories of OS/2 Warp running windows apps, except more apps could run (Except of course for most of my audio apps). The only bad point about reinstalling is going through the pain of authorizing my software again, someone needs to come up with better licensing schemes, definitely.

Wish me luck… it’s gonna be one really long day.