Talking Talent

I’ve previously examined the importance of employment branding (and how companies like Google have a “sorting” problem rather than attraction problem when it comes to finding the right people).  Philip Tusing, who writes the Destination Talent blog, recently pointed out that 62 million people are logging on to YouTube daily, and asks, “what will visitors see if they keyed in your company name?”  Crazy John’s has developed a video perfect for YouTube which sells their company to Gen Y employees.  Take a look!

Is the next Galileo sitting at home wasting his potential watching DVDs of Star Wars instead of watching the stars themselves?  Is the next Shakespeare tapping out love texts on her mobile phone instead of writing the next Romeo and Juliet?

Luddites and techno-phobes complain that digital technologies are stifling creativity and creating a generation of unmotivated couch potatoes.

Technology has undoubtedly made life much easier for so many - but that doesn’t mean we’ve become lazy.  Instead, technology has further enabled us to expand our infinite creative potential.

The Internet has given people a means to break down barriers that once muffled the flow of information and collaboration.  With people from across the globe now able to access seemingly infinite amounts of information and to be able to collaborate and share ideas, we are entering an exciting new era.

With blogs and wikis, everyone can communicate.  With RSS feeds, everyone can read about it.  MySpace, Ning, Bebo and FaceBook help us to connect with the world. Flickr helps to sort, store and share your snaps, while YouTube let’s you show off your movie making talents.  Tagging sites like Del.ici.ous enable us to share our favourite webpages.  Gliffy provides the tools to draw and share diagrams, Googledocs eliminates the challenges of document version control, while Slideshare hosts and shares presentations.  The list is endless.

And despite what the naysayers say, Internet technologies are not making us lazier, but instead have the capacity to deliver sharp upswings in productivity.

While MySpace might seem like fun and fluff, social networks, teleconferencing, wikis and other technologies that allow interaction on a large scale are changing traditional business models and improving productivity.

Cisco Systems’ Chairman, John Chambers, recently suggested that businesses that embrace collaborative communications models, such as social networking, into their processes could see a return to 3 to 5 percent annual improvements in worker productivity.

By allowing people both in and outside of companies to connect with each other, and share information over the network, the pace of business operations will escalate.  The power of connecting will enable us to do things at a dramatically different speed.

So, in the words of science fiction writer, Robert A Heinlein, “progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things.”

I’ve just finished reading a very interesting article by Steve Hodgkinson, Director of research firm Ovum.  He observes that the tools of information sharing in the past have been poor.  “Most information is, in practice, stored in an ad hoc manner in thousands of computer hard drives and network folders, application databases and content repositories.  Why is it so?  Because we can.  Because we have equipped ourselves with the tools of personal expression.

“Everyone is a writer.  Everyone can create, name and store a document in an instant and send it by email.  It is easier to create afresh than to find and reuse pre-existing content.  The tools have empowered us to create documents with scant regard for the past (has this been done before or is anyone else working on this topic?) or the future (will anyone else need to find or use it tomorrow?). 

Hodgkinson argues that whereas the previous generation of tools were designed to support individual authoring and one-one exchanges such as email, the next generation is emerging to support collaboration. 

“These new tools make it easy and natural to share knowledge,” Hodgkinson says.  “New features, for example, include the ability to create a document in a shared repository, with many authors but only one authoritative version – a ‘Golden copy’ – searchable, secure and archived.  Not in a separate document management system that nobody actually uses… in the tools that all knowledge workers will use every day.”

His punch line is this: one of the key determinants of your ability to hire the best and brightest young employees in the near future may well be the quality of your knowledge worker tools and the culture of collaboration that they engender.

Before you laugh, remember when CVs were once carefully compiled and presented in leather-bound folders? Then we moved on to the electronic resume and the old hard copy CV was left to collect dust on the shelf.

YouTube has become one of the world’s most popular Internet sites, providing young people with a medium to express and demonstrate their creativity - through music, movie making or even fashion design.

According to Wikipedia, in January 2008 alone, nearly 79 million users watched more than 3 billion videos. Google paid a staggering US $1.65 billion for YouTube in 2006. It saw the potential YouTube offered the world.

YouTube is challenging traditional forms of creativity and how it is expressed. Technology is providing avenues to access and promote creative talent faster and simpler than ever before. The Internet is turning us into a world of “content creators” rather than “content consumers”.

The New York Times has reported that major talent agencies are hiring dedicated staff to scour outlets of online creativity such as YouTube to find “the next big thing”.

YouTube is more than just fun. It may represent the future of how we identify and sign up new talent for the future.

Want to know more about how to use Web 2.0 in the workplace? 

Sacha Chua, who calls herself an “enterprise social computing consultant, storyteller, author and geek” has developed a short slide show called the Gen Y guide to Web 2.0 at work.  It only takes a couple of minutes to look at.

Could Web 2.0 help companies to bridge the skills gap?  Chua believes that, due to the ‘cool factor’ of Web 2.0 technologies, companies embracing Web 2.0 “tend to attract sophisticated, high-calibre technical candidates.”