The Cardboard Chronicles

It’s Friday again and we are back with another installment of the Cardboard Chronicles. Last week we discussed Schelley’s experience with a layoff that occurred within 48 hours of her divorce becoming final. This week, the theme is constructive discharge.

Which, sounds either really gross, or it sounds like that Gwyneth Paltrow “conscious uncoupling” deal. Is this Goop all of a sudden? No. Instead, the idea is a way employers treat employees, especially as things are getting into crisis mode or cost-cutting mode.

This is a conversation between Ted and a woman named Cathrine (yep, that’s the spelling) who has been laid off a couple of times. They discuss “constructive discharge” and The Golden Rule.

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Cardboard Chronicles Episode 4: A layoff and a divorce within 48 hours of each other

Welcome! In the Cardboard Chronicles Episode 4, we continue with an interesting look at humanity. Today we bring you a discussion of layoffs with Schelley, who is a Florida-based technical writer. If you didn’t catch the episode last week, the discussion focus is on ways to know that a layoff might be upcoming. Check it out!

Laid off and divorced

Schelley actually was laid off on the same date, May 16, from two different jobs, one year apart. One layoff occurred within 48 hours of her divorce becoming final. Ouch.

Meanwhile, in one of these layoff situations, her layoff was executed by someone she had never met. Another ouch.

Regardless, she’s got some stories. Let’s hit it.

Tune in!

Have you had a situation like this? Let me know in the comments.

Listening time: 13 minutes.

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The Cardboard Chronicles: How to Know a Layoff Might Be Coming

Happy Friday to you all! It is Friday, right? We have another episode of the Cardboard Chronicles! If you didn’t tune in last week, you can check it out here! In last week’s episode, I interview my friend Adam about his COVID related layoff in Austin.

Listen in and let us know what you think

This week we have a conversation with Brenda, a mid-career professional who has been through about three layoffs in her day.

We talk about signs where you can sense a layoff is probably coming. Toward the end, we talk a little bit about “being called down to the basement,” as well as drinking Diet Coke through a straw, and individual layoff stories we’ve had.

Don’t worry, it will all make sense eventually. Let’s dive in. Leave comments below!

Listening time: 25 minutes

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A COVID-19 Layoff in Austin

We started out the series last week asking if we can contextualize firing as a good thing. If you didn’t tune in, here’s the link!

This week, we’re moving into the interview format.  My friend Adam is based in Austin, where he’s been for six years. He’s had a bunch of different gigs in the recruiting world and the employer branding world. He has touched hospitality, sports writing, and some other cool stuff as well.

On Thursday, March 26th, he got laid off from his current gig because of COVID-19.

Listen in and let us know what you think

A layoff can be an emotional time for people. We’ll discuss how it went down for Adam, and how it could have gone better.  Let’s discuss some effective, empathetic guidelines for layoffs during the pandemic. Here’s some not so breaking news: you need to communicate effectively.

Let’s go get it.

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The Cardboard Chronicles: Can we contextualize firing as a good thing?

An introduction

The Cardboard Chronicles is a show about layoffs and firing, hosted by yours truly, Ted Bauer. I have been a contributor and editor here at Recruiting Daily for some time.

As you all know, we are in a bad situation globally due to the COVID pandemic. My plan for the series is to tackle an element of layoffs in each of the upcoming episodes, often through interviews.

Today’s episode:

I will begin the series, not with an interview, but an introduction to the process and the show. The topic today: Can we contextualize firing as a good thing? The short answer is: Yes we can.

Tune in! Let me know what you think.

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There is a ton — a literal TON — of talk these days about automation. It’s the next great promise. The Fourth Industrial Revolution. All that. The New Yorker actually had an article last year saying automation would be like compressing the Industrial Revolution (the one you learned about in school) into the lifespan of a beagle. Everything is going to change.

This includes sales, marketing, and recruiting too, of course — but is automation going to change everything for the better? That’s not yet fully determined.

[break]

The elephant in the room to acknowledge first

Why are people so excited about automation?

At a company level, you have essentially two buckets:

1. Some companies will understand that automating lower-value, rote, logistical tasks can free up their people to do more valuable activities during the day and contribute to the business.
2. Many companies will just see automation as a cost play to get salaries off the books.

Those are the two buckets you’ll increasingly see as automation gets to scale.

What about sales?

Automation is already full ingrained in sales. Many email marketing suites that reps use to blast prospects are essentially automation. They’re not necessarily an advanced form that learns as it goes, no, but they’re an automated tool.

But here’s the problem.

Let’s say a sales development rep (SDR) is given access to an AI-connected sales platform. The AI is supposedly the all-knowing holy grail of this new program the company just bought, so the SDR is probably tempted to do less research.

Now the SDR blasts out 1,000 AI-qualified emails as opposed to 500 personalized cold emails. Because he did twice the work in less time, we’re supposed to see that as a benefit.

But is it?

What if the 1,000 nets 2-3 “leads” or demos, but the 500 would have netted 10-15 because of the research-driven personalized approach?

Quality always beats quantity in email prospecting.

A/B Test Yourself

What if you did 1,000 automation suite emails one week, and then the next week did personalized cold emails?

See which process nets you more interested parties. Apply the right KPIs and sales metrics. Don’t be tempted to measure success on in the number of outbound emails of your SDRs.

This all works with recruiting, too

You can use automation to advance your candidate pipeline/funnel by a factor of 3-5x, honestly. But you need to do it right. Smart. Quality.

The bottom line

The point here is this: automation is great, and will help with the workload and targeting over time. But when you use automation, you can’t subsequently be a robot. You need to still research, find overlapping elements in potential customers/candidates, articulate value, network, define product-market fit, message-persona-fit, and everything else.

My two cents: automate the lowest-value stuff you need to do all week (scheduling, email folder cleanup, finding email-addresses, etc.) The real value-driven stuff around product and people and outreach? Automate the underlying processes but not the actual connective part of it.

Robots may replace some of our functionality in the next 30 years. Why become one now?

The post The Automation Revolution appeared first on RecruitingDaily.

Some Basic Ones

Use sourcing extensions: Easy and free, to boot.

Templatize emails: If a lot of your top-of-funnel work is emailing candidates specific things (interview requests, requests for information, etc.), then create templates for the main emails you send and fire those off when needed.

Spend 20 minutes per day on networking and building relationships: You can find 20 minutes in a day. Watch less Netflix. Whatever works. 20 minutes a day, even on weekends, is 600 minutes per month. That’s 10 hours/month. 120 hours/year. You would be amazed at what you can accomplish in 120 hours/year in terms of building more proactive pipelines.

Get in bed with AI: There are lots of options on the market now (AI has become table stakes in HR technology), and many of them can help you with sourcing.

Learn to use LinkedIn better: It is stunning sometimes how bad some recruiters still are at LinkedIn. Use it for more than InMail. Post stuff. Post relevant stuff. Talk about your life. Talk about the challenges of a tight labor market. Build a community around yourself. It will pop off. It takes time, but it happens.

Learn to use the rest of social media better: Pro tip — > most people under 30 barely know what their LinkedIn password is. It’s not a popular network among the millennial and Gen Z set; they mostly view it as a static resume bank. You want the A-Players in the 24-27 world? Look at other networks (ahem, not Facebook) and figure out how to source and recruit there. It will help you find the true needles in the true haystacks because everyone else is looking through Indeed and LinkedIn resumes.

Some Deeper Dives

Use the 52-17 ratio: 52 minutes of work followed by 17 minutes “off” browsing or whatever. Might seem like you are slacking off. You’re not. You’re actually maximizing your productivity.

55 hours/week max: Hard ceiling on human productivity. Embrace it. A week with 20 open slots to fill? Cool. Spend 54 hours on those 20 slots, and not any more time. Your productivity is essentially the same at 54 as at 80.

Work wherever makes the most sense to you: This could be your couch, an office, a co-work, a coffee shop, or a bar. Productivity is about you, not about being in a specific place. Some bosses are harder to convince of this concept, yes.

Block yourself a Focus Day: Just block out a Wednesday on your calendar. No one will schedule over it, typically. Use that day to hit every conceivable target in sight.

Be smarter about “pocket rockets”: Those are 15 minutes here and there between other meetings, calls, emails, etc. Most people use those 15 mins to look at Facebook. What about being more productive in those pockets? You’d get a hell of a lot of time back across a year doing that.

Turn off mobile at a certain time at night: Reading work-related, candidate-related emails at 11 pm does absolutely nothing for you in any beneficial way. Set a hard out (9 pm is a good one) and don’t touch your mobile email after that. Heck, in France they even have laws about this.

Journal: Every day, write down 3 things you did well professionally, 3 things you need to work on, and one “wild card.” Now at the end of a work week, you have 15 wins and 15 areas to improve. Keep focusing on the latter and celebrating yourself for the former. You good now.

Learn: Attend webinars and read things about the recruiting space.  We have a ton of this available.  Look at case studies of how people are slaying. Learning does take time, so it’s not a productivity hack in that sense, but it will make you do things more effectively and take the right “best practices” into account.

Take walks: Easy peazy, and super important for productivity.

What else ya got?

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Bullhorn®, the cloud computing company that helps staffing and recruiting organizations transform their business, has realized its vision to deliver a completely integrated front-to-back solution that combines time and expense, invoicing, gross margin calculation, and billing functionality with its market leading front office into a single cloud-based system. This middle office suite is the culmination of years of experience and development from several Bullhorn teams, including those who joined Bullhorn following its Peoplenet acquisition in November 2017.

As large buyers of labor adopt new workforce management practices, staffing firms are challenged to provide flexible billing and payment practices for clients and workers. Saddled with legacy middle office technology that is difficult to upgrade and manage, many firms are looking to transform their businesses through the use of connected middle office systems that are configurable, adaptable, and scalable – equipping them to be successful and competitive for years into the future. Building middle office capabilities seamlessly into the front office creates a single unified system; every transaction from the initial job order all the way through to the invoice occurs on a single, open, cloud-based platform supported by an enormous ecosystem of solution providers and developers.

With its front and middle office integration, Bullhorn becomes the single source of truth for everyone across an organization and allows staffing firms to innovate to drive efficiency, make better decisions, and create true competitive advantage. This, in turn, empowers these firms to succeed in a new world of work in which available skilled talent is scarce and elusive and large buyers of labor place increasingly complex and restrictive demands on their suppliers. To this end, Bullhorn’s vision is to provide firms with the end-to-end infrastructure needed to transform their businesses.

Previously, enterprises had to choose different systems to get best-in-class performance for front and middle office capabilities. With Bullhorn’s offering, staffing firms do not have to make any sacrifices when choosing an integrated system that marries front and middle office capabilities, as it includes best-in-class capabilities across the entire suite. Bullhorn’s difference is in the combination of its staffing-specific DNA, its depth of R&D resources devoted to actualizing its middle office connected vision, and the fact that it provides, and always has provided, a true cloud-based and intrinsically scalable platform upon which this suite of middle office solutions is built. 

With a best-in-class middle office solution that gives staffing agencies full front-to-back visibility from candidate and order intake all the way through invoicing, customers can now see margin information and profitability in real time to make informed decisions. This helps them to:

• Save millions of dollars on margin-erosive operations and back-office costs through fully automated pay and bill processes, with crystal-clear data visibility between front, middle, and back office systems
• Save significant time and money on contract compliance by automatically enforcing pay/bill terms configured at the client level
• Provide a fully integrated candidate onboarding experience that automates the complexities of putting people to work at multiple companies
• Differentiate their value to talent with a seamless candidate experience in which candidates can manage their profile, complete documents, record time, and see their pay stubs

Additionally, Bullhorn will, over time, leverage its cloud-based platform with more than 600 billion records to provide AI-based capabilities to enhance staff and organizational performance. For instance, staffing firms can leverage predictive intelligence to assess client billing health indicators – such as when client invoices will likely be paid – in real time, and therefore help them prioritize jobs. Additionally, recruiters can assess the likelihood of successfully filling a job based on the available talent pool, and more effectively put the right people to work quickly by leveraging search and match capabilities that take into account time approver-provided candidate scoring data.

Bullhorn’s middle office suite will see its first customer deployments in Q2 2019.

“The excitement from customers around what we have built has been very energizing for the entire organization,” said Ed Holmes, head of Bullhorn’s Workforce and Revenue Cloud business unit, responsible for the development of the company’s middle office suite. “It is clear we’ve built a solution that the market has desperately needed for a long time now, and we’re excited for our customers to experience its benefits.”

“We have chosen Bullhorn as our long-term partner and are excited that we are now going to be able to get a full front-to-back solution from one provider,” said Layne Tharp, SVP of Finance at Signature Consultants. “A fully integrated workflow will certainly strengthen and enhance our partnership with Bullhorn. Front-to-back reporting, from leads to revenue and actual gross margin, is a game changer. The product looks great and the flexibility will allow us to remove manual processes while improving our business processes. A middle office built specifically for staffing is incredibly exciting for us.”

Learn more about Middle Office.

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Everybody loves high-quality candidate lists. Who wants low-quality candidates streaming in by the boatload? That’s not a recipe for growth or success.

But it feels like the white whale of modern recruiting in terms of how you get those high-quality candidates. So, let’s bust it open and offer some hacks.

Build a proactive pipeline:

 This is the No. 1 way, honestly. People are social animals and they want to build relationships with others. Too much of recruiting can feel transactional like you are a sale to the recruiter because of your skill set. While that’s admittedly how the system works, the best recruiters find the best candidates by going out and meeting them: dinner, drinks, coffee, local events, etc. Then they know the “scene” around tech or healthcare or whatever industry they need to know in their region. Once you know “the scene,” you know how and who to place. You’re delivering high-quality more than most.

Leverage LinkedIn:

It’s still a gold standard for recruiting, even if it has flaws. Post interesting stuff. Talk about the flaws of standard recruiting. Engage with people that way.

Use sourcing extensions to work smarter:

Here ya go.

Source outside the norm:

Consider:

• Conference speaker lists are a great place to find talent that’s qualified in different areas.
• App stores are a good place to browse technologies that are similar or related to your own, and if you find something of interest, consider reaching out to the people behind the app.
• Quora showcases great talent who are knowledgeable and passionate about specific topics.
• Amazon book reviews tend to be a great source when looking for commenters who make intelligent remarks about books on your industry or subject matter.

Write job descriptions that actually mean something:

… and you’ll get better people. Maybe speak to where the role could go in 3, 6, 9, and 12 months. Show a growth path.

Use referrals:

Your current A-Players? Go talk to them. Who do they know in the area? Who have they worked with before and been impressed by? Any remote candidates? Know their ecosystems. The best like working with the best.

Mobile-optimize that career site:

A-Players are busy people. They likely check jobs from their phone. If you ain’t mobile-optimized, they’re bouncing. Be mobile-optimized.

Keep the process simple:

No one wants to fill out the 27-screen ATS data points when they’ve already uploaded something. Keep it simple. What do you need? Ask for that. Once you have that, the candidate is good. When you make a smart person do unnecessary things, they get frustrated. A complex process alienates your best possibilities.

Learn from others:

Attend events. Find the best sourcers. Learn what the best tech is. Learn what others have done and wished they hadn’t done. Build a tribe.

Tech tech tech tech:

Get it, use it, embrace it, love it. But make sure whatever you have is working for you.

The post 10 Ways To Recruit Better In 2019 appeared first on RecruitingDaily.

Amy Leschke-Kahle, the VP of Performance Acceleration at The Marcus Buckingham Company (which was acquired by ADP in 2017), gave us some of her precious Milwaukee-area time (Go Bucks! Giannis!) to discuss issues of engagement and data. We wanted to come in hot on this one, so we led with a rather-direct question.

Read More

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Bluevine (think fast funding for your business) and Bullhorn (a leader in staffing and recruiting software) have increased their commitment to fostering the growth of small and medium-sized staffing agencies through an innovative partnership.

Enabling access to invoice factoring and business credit lines provided by BlueVine, Bullhorn’s small and medium-sized staffing firm customers can accelerate their business growth with fast and flexible access to working capital.

Understanding the landscape

When staffing firms place candidates, they are typically required to cover payroll expenses for 30-60 days while awaiting payment against their outstanding invoices. To fund payroll, staffing firms have depended on a combination of banks, factoring companies, and payroll financing providers. Many years of economic expansion have put financial strains on growing staffing firms, especially small and medium-sized firms that can be challenged with access to funding. Amid a fierce competition for talent, staffing firms are flourishing, but many smaller ones do not have access to the right resources to quickly secure financing to help grow their operations.

What we’ve increasingly seen is financial technology companies reinventing financial services for staffing firms. Leveraging deep investment in cutting-edge technology, these companies are redefining cost, speed, flexibility, and ease of use for an industry long accustomed to more offline and manual funding options.

What Bullhorn and Bluevine (and their customers) are saying 

“After years of time-consuming operational burden from using traditional invoice factoring for my firm, I needed a more streamlined solution to help me reach my business goals,” said Mike Smith, CleverTerra’s chief talent officer. “I turned to BlueVine and quickly secured funds to cover payroll, smooth cash flow, and evolve my practice. BlueVine is a great complement to Bullhorn, which I rely on to effectively manage my day-to-day operations. As a result, the BlueVine-Bullhorn partnership will be very helpful to my firm in achieving our next phase of growth.”

“With BlueVine, firms can receive fast and flexible access to financing that can help them power their next phase of growth,” said Nina Eigerman, Bullhorn’s vice president of alliances and business development. “At Bullhorn, our overwhelming focus is on helping our customers and providing them with an incredible experience as their long-term growth partners. This initiative delivers on that vision.”

BlueVine provides online invoice factoring lines up to $5 million in available funding. Staffing firms can apply online in minutes and receive approvals quickly – typically within 24-48 hours. Once approved, clients are given the flexibility to decide which invoices they fund and when from BlueVine’s online dashboard. With low weekly rates, advances up to 90 percent, and same-day funding options available, BlueVine quickly helps staffing firms receive access to the financing that they need to manage cash flow and grow. There are no sign-up fees, no monthly minimums, and no cancellation fees.

“BlueVine is deeply dedicated to enabling the growth of small and medium-sized staffing agencies by providing working capital financing to business owners looking to simplify their cash flow and grow,” said Eyal Lifshitz, BlueVine’s CEO. “Partnering with Bullhorn furthers this mission. We share the same vision for creating incredible customer experiences by working directly with our customers to help them achieve their business goals. We’re looking forward to helping Bullhorn’s customers explore new options for fueling their growth through payroll financing and access to working capital.”

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This happened about a week ago. 

Previously — November 2017 — you might remember that OutMatch acquired Pomello as well.

They also acquired Assess Systems and Chequed, Inc. along the way.

That’s four total acquisitions. Let’s break them down by what they were focused on pre-acquisition:

• Wepow (the most recent): Video interviewing
• Pomello: Culture fit
• Chequed: Predictive talent selection
• Assess: Talent selection and people development

You can begin to strategically see the suite coming together. OutMatch is defined in the market (by many) as a “predictive talent and culture analytics” company, and uses this on their “About Us” page:

By truly understanding your candidates, your culture, and the underlying behaviors that drive employee success, you can expect to see an average workforce transformed into a high-growth, high-performance company.

The transformation begins by infusing behavioral data and predictive models into your talent strategy. OutMatch’s predictive talent and culture analytics fully equip you to make the best possible decisions about your people, from hiring and development to leadership and culture.

In essence, then, they use science and data to help you hire better.

Why would that kind of company need video interviewing in the suite?

Seems to be about humanizing the hiring process, which is good, because the hiring process is massively inhumane in many organizations.

Here’s what OutMatch can bring together for its client base now:

• Data
• AI stuff (table stakes now in HCM)
• Machine learning
• I/O science
• Video interviews

That’s a powerful suite, right? Let’s turn to the PR side of the world:

“With the added layer of video interviewing, we have the ability to humanize the hiring process in a way that’s never been done through a convergence of unparalleled data, AI and machine learning, IO science, and a more personal touch that matters to people seeking ideal jobs,” said Greg Moran, CEO of OutMatch.

The lists align!

Video interviewing has two major pros within a hiring suite:

• It’s more personal.
• It’s cost-effective when you scale it.

So now we’ve got a mix of this human/personal touch — which is the cornerstone of “candidate experience” when done right — and we’ve got the ability to reduce cost at hiring scale. Nice little 1-2 punch. The acquisition makes a lot of sense at those levels.

Pre-hire to post-hire

There is a metric crap ton of navel-gazing in the industry about whether the term should be “employee engagement” or “employee experience.” In reality, if you treat your employees like humans and genuinely respect them and give them opportunities for growth and not just more task work, it doesn’t matter what term you use. Be a good human being.

But one of the areas where companies deeply struggle is connecting all the dots.

Basically … all the pre-hire work we did … how does that actually tie back to post-hire performance issues?

Probably 92 percent of companies flop at figuring out that connective tissue. It’s one (of many) reasons why work is such a cluster for so many people and hiring managers are allowed to bitch left, right, and center about an imagined skills gap. 

These OutMatch acquisitions help to tie the pieces together. That’s why it’s happening. What clients of hiring suites need is:

• Something that works
• Something that gets good people
• Something that’s relatively cost-effective
• Something that’s compliant

You hit all four and that’s the jackpot. OutMatch is moving there.

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Here’s a little intro to the idea of personal branding by way of my Thursday this week. I decided to drive over to a Small Business Expo in Dallas. I’ve been doing this freelance solopreneur deal for about six months now and I’m making money and paying bills, but I figured maybe I could learn something new or innovative about running your own business at this deal. I drive 40-45 minutes and of course, the thing is Massive Up-Sell 2016, with vendor after vendor promising “hundreds of thousands of new leads” or “on-target local SEO.” I wanted to self-immolate, and left in about 1 hour and 20 minutes or so. Maybe the funniest part was that one of the keynote speakers was a “marketing expert,” and when I Googled him on my phone, his website isn’t mobile-friendly. Ha.

I walked through one keynote — by some target-hitter out of Chicago with a personal branding of ‘venture capitalist’ and ‘turnaround specialist’ — and it was one of those up-sell speeches to the max. He opened — literally opened — with “Who here wants to make $10 million in the next three years?” Hands shoot up. “It is possible, and we’re going to walk through how.” Pens scribble. Every sixth sentence, he said “This is important. Write this down.” I audibly laughed at one or two points. Thankfully I didn’t cause a commotion or anything.

This dude was Snake Oil, for sure — as were many of the speakers and vendors. Hence, I left quickly. But it underscores a bigger point about personal branding.

Personal Branding: Everyone’s selling something

I had a phone call a couple of days ago with a coach who wants to build up her business a bit more, and maybe I can help. She was great. One of the best quotes on that call was “Everyone practices something every day, so you might as well be good at what you practice.” Indeed. Drug dealers practice a craft, and so do product marketing managers. Whores do, and so do CFOs. Everyone’s practicing something.

The other side of the deal is that everyone is selling something, give or take — be that a product, a service, or themselves. In the process of that thing being sold, many people do it wrong and come off like stalkers or Snake Oil salesmen.

I can’t tell you how many e-mail campaigns I’ve gotten in the past six months promising me wealth, leads, money, a great attitude, percentage growth of business, or whatever else simply by clicking on a few links within an e-mail. It’s insane. It has to number more than 100-200. Even if you obsessively curate your e-mail marketing opt-ins, you probably get a couple.

So this is my first tier on personal branding: I think it’s important to be authentic, because it can become so much up-selling so quickly if you’re not. For example, I lob a ton of grenades at traditional management structures on this blog. I get shit on all the time by people who read it and say stuff like “You’ll never get a job at Proctor and Gamble now! Oh God!” No, I probably won’t. And I’d probably hate that job if I did, as an aside.

When you use the term ‘personal branding,’ it can sound buzzword-y as hell. It sounds like you’re trying to game the system and turn yourself into a ‘brand,’ as opposed to a person with flaws, which is what we all are inherently. Also, to go back to the Snake Oil and stalking situation — there’s probably 95,481 people online selling ‘personal branding’ programs or ‘personal branding’ solutions or a ‘suite of services related to personal branding.’ Again, it can seem buzzword-y.

But it’s crucial — and here’s why.

Personal Branding and The End of Employment

I think automation is still probably farther off than we think — a robot might not have your job next month, in other words. But employment is definitely shifting. You can call this “The Gig Economy” or “The App Economy” or “The Rise of the Millennials” or whatever else, but basic notions around the future of work and employee loyaltyare shifting and continue to shift.

It starts with this: companies have absolutely no moral imperative to treat their employees well. Companies are supposed to protect their bottom line, their stakeholders, and their executives. That’s basically it.

A couple of years ago at this job I had, I was sitting outside a high-middle manager’s office and he was in a meeting with one of his direct reports. It boggles the mind that he left the door open during this meeting, but I heard everything. The direct report was upset. He had hit all his targets and driven growth for the company — and, no promotion, no raise, and only about a 1.7% salary bump, which is barely ahead of inflation. He was getting pretty livid. I even think he said once, “But I hit all my targets!” The manager couldn’t give two shits. He was throwing buzzwords around like candy talking about mission and values and vision and purpose and whatever else, and barely answering any direct questions. It was a total joke. The direct report walked out nearly in tears with fists of rage.

Conversations like that happen at jobs all the time. Organizations aren’t designed to protect ‘the little guy.’ They’re barely designed to protect big wigs, honestly — if your revenue takes a hit or there’s a PR scandal, a CEO can be out the door too.

As Liz Ryan writes: 

The old notion of employment has devolved into short-term project work. It doesn’t matter whether you get paid a salary,  hourly wages or a consulting fee. Consultants and contractors have more job security than traditionally-employed people do now, because traditional employment comes with no guarantee of job security whatsoever.

Some people call this “Team of Teams” or whatever. Phrased another way: round up all the middle managers and put ’em out to pasture.

This is all a long way of getting back to personal branding. See …

• If employment as we’ve traditionally viewed it is ending/declining …
• … and you’re going to be hopping from place to place and team to team hitting targets and projects, then …
• … all you really have is your personal branding

If you get axed from a gig or want to hop on a different project or drive an Uber or whatever, where is someone going to go for information about you? Google. LinkedIn. Twitter. Facebook. Your references, which is an aspect of reputation/trust. It’s all a complicated series of ecosystems and referrals and information-seeking.

And it all points back to your personal branding.

So yes, it sounds like a buzzword. And yes, there are target-chasers the world over asking if you want to make $10M in the next three years through some combo of personal branding and aggressive e-mail list growth. And of course, people are selling snake oil and following you around the Internet like a dog (“re-marketing”). All this stuff happens and exists and it’s hard to hide/run from.

But as the way we work and conceptualize work shifts more and more, we’re all kind of lone wolves in a way. We have friends and trusted professional colleagues, sure — and spouses and kids and pets and all that. But at the end of the day as someone is trying to gather intel on you for a new team or project or opportunity, there’s dozens of ways for them to do it now. And it’s all about your personal branding.

It matters tremendously — and certainly moreso than the bold company name on your resume. That could change tomorrow.

Your take on personal branding?

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I feel like this is a pertinent question of the modern age: can you be a good leader, i.e. possess leadership competencies and drive growth/revenue, without being an asshole? I'm honestly not that sure.

We can run down the major examples. Steve Jobs was an unbelievable jerk. He made a ton of people rich, disrupted multiple industries, and built the No. 1 company in the world. (Although that's shifting.) Jeff Bezos, who ostensibly changed commerce, is purportedly a jerk. Amazon's work culture is notoriously pretty awful. Wal-Mart has long been near the top of the Fortune 500; most people that have come to run it are authoritarian jerks in their own right. That's three examples, which is the journalistic gold standard for "a trend," but I'll do one more. It's nearly impossible to read anything about Travis Kalanick (Uber CEO) and not view him as an asshole. His Vanity Fair profile from a few years ago is one of the worst things you'll ever cringe through.

Now, look, there are counter-examples. Google (Alphabet?) makes a bunch of money, and it mostly seems like a good culture -- and guys like Page and Brin seem OK. (Well, OK, maybe Brin has some issues.) Berkshire Hathaway makes a ton of money, and Warren Buffett is America's fiscally-aware grandfather. So you can be a good CEO, and possess leadership competencies, without being an asshole. But that's the exception and not the rule. Why is this, though?

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1. The hiring manager probably doesn’t respect the recruiter inherently, because the recruiter is probably based in HR — that’s a department that does not face revenue — and the hiring manager probably does face at least a slice of revenue, and may even own P&L.
2. The recruiter probably has no idea of what the hiring manager does and why his/her silo is so important (in their eyes).
3. They are speaking different languages, essentially.
4. The hiring manager thinks of hiring as “another thing to manage” and just wants 3-4 highly-qualified people placed in front of him yesterday. 
5. The hiring manager has been burned by lack of recruiter knowledge about his/her space before and has guard up.
6. We supposedly live in this data-driven time and that’s what hiring managers are being told to focus on and report up the chain, but the recruitment process seems to remain as highly-subjective bullshit.
7. The recruiter supposedly has “the functional knowledge” and the hiring manager cannot be bothered.
8. There’s a brawl about “the skills gap.” The hiring manager thinks the recruiter isn’t doing his job, and/or the market is weak. The recruiter thinks, “Uh, can’t we raise the salary for this role?”
9. They only meet in rushed, disjointed 15-minute increments where nothing really seems to get done.
10. The hiring manager is really thinking more about how to automate some of these roles.

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