New Workforce - The Weblog of New Equities

Removing all doubt

ResumeHell is a blog devoted to "dumb stuff I read on resumes". From the blogger's profile:

Recruiter, somewhere, innappropriately laughing at resumes. Do I make them up ? Why do I need to. C'mon, you know people like this.

Hopefully none of us are memorialized here, as we have had the good sense to avoid groaners like this:

I have a wide variety of skills and experience, some of which I have taken for granted and cannot readily recall. If considered for employment, I believe I will be an asset to your reputable organisation.

Lots of examples much worse (and funnier) on the site, accompanied by amusing commentary.

Mark Twain is famous for saying: "It is often better to keep one's mouth shut and appear stupid than to open it and remove all doubt." Nowhere is this truer than when writing your resume.

Yeah, what he said!

Over at CharlotteRecruiting.com, Jim Durbin says some very nice things about New Equities and this blog (and yes, our ears are burning):

Who is our favorite recruiting blog?  Why, it was and always has been the New Equities Weblog.  While the rest of us were chatting through the Recruiting.com community about theory and practice and goofiness, New Equities was learning how to use their blog to hire people in their local community.

The whole reason I chose Charlotte as one of my local sites (I also write StlRecruiting, KCRecruiting, and SeattleRecruiting) is because of New Equities.

Their model is based on community, the building and sustaining of them as candidate pools for New Equities clients.  In a world where everyone is decrying the lack of quality consultants, New Equities is the only company I've seen take the step to doing so.

Jim was formerly a top recruiter for kforce and now works as a consultant specializing in online media and employment branding, so it's especially high praise coming from him. He has been a reader and fan of New Workforce for some time, in fact in 2005 he nominated us for Recruiting.com's Best Blog Awards (Taleo's blog won in our category, but it was still quite an honor to be in the company of heavy-hitter blogs from Google, Microsoft, SimplyHired and Indeed.com).

Anyway, thanks to Jim for his kind words and enthusiasm for our model. We definitely want "community" to be something more than the buzzword du jour, and that means making connections with our members offline as well as online. If you're a New Equities consultant, or a member of our larger community, let us know how we're doing and (more importantly) what we should be doing.

UPDATE: Another workforce blogger, Jim Kissane, also sends out props: "New Equities is a progressive collection of thinkers that always challenge and inspire me." Again, we're blushing. (But you still included the comment. - Ed.  Well, yeah...)

Sun's Dave Johnson coming to Charlotte

New Equities is pleased to be sponsoring the CharJUG's August meetup, which will be held Monday, August 21st, 6:30 pm at our headquarters in downtown Charlotte. This month's guest speaker will be Dave Johnson from Sun:

Beyond blogging: Atom format and protocol

Like XML-RPC and SOAP before, feeds and publishing protocols were born in the blogopshere and quickly moved beyond blogging. Nowadays, web service providers are using RSS/Atom feeds and REST-based publishing protocols as lightweight alternatives to SOAP. And developers are finding new ways to combine web services from different sites into new applications, known as "mash-ups" in the lingo of Web 2.0. If you'd like to do the same, then attend this talk to learn about the new IETF Atom feed format (RFC-4287) and the soon-to-be-finalized Atom protocol, which together form a strong foundation for REST-based web services development.

More information at the CharJUG Meetup site.

Kawasaki on creating communities

Guy Kawasaki, of Apple Computer fame who (literally) wrote the book on software evangelism and building enthusiastic user followings for great products and services, has a must-read post on "The Art of Creating a Community". His point of departure is software development, but he makes it clear that his principles apply across the board to any product or service. His eight points of light include:

• Assign one person the task of building a community. Sure, many employees would like to build a community, but who wakes up every day with this task at the top of her list of priorities? Another way to look at this is, “Who’s going to get fired if she doesn’t build a community?” A community needs a champion—an identifiable hero and inspiration—from within the company to carry the flag for the community. Therefore, hire one less MBA and allocate this headcount to a community champion. This is a twofer: one less MBA and one great community.
• Welcome criticism. Most companies feel warm and fuzzy towards their communities as long as these communities tow the line by continuing to say nice things, buying their products, and never complaining. The minute that the community says anything negative, however, companies freak out and pull back their community efforts. This is a dumb-ass thing to do. A company cannot control its community. This is a long-term relationship, so the company shouldn’t file for divorce at the first sign of possible infidelity. Indeed, the more a company welcomes—even celebrates criticism—the stronger its bonds to its community.
• Publicize the existence of the community. If you’re going to all the trouble of catalyzing a community, don’t hide it under a bushel. Your community should be an integral part of your sales and marketing efforts. Check out, for instance, this part of the Harley-Davidson web site dedicated to the HOG (Harley Owners Group). If you search for “user group” (with quotes) at Apple’s site, you get 112 matches. (The same search at Microsoft’s site yields 16,925 matches—I’m still pondering what this means!)

This is a very timely article, as Talent Communities are the organizing basis for New Equities. For example, in the Charlotte area we have organized Talent Communities of Business Analysts, Project Managers and Java developers, among others. And we have assigned specific Consultant Agents with the responsibility for the growth and development of each community.

In the New Equities model, each Talent Community is the way we organize our daily activities around consultants who share similar skill sets and professional interests. Through communities, we can more effectively pool knowledge, experience and contacts to support the career goals of our consultants, and keep everyone working. We view the consultant as equal in importance to our clients who hire them (they are, after all, the supply side of the equation) so it's important to spend time with the people we are putting to work and find out what they like and don't like about the assignments and projects we place them on; what they think of working with Analysts International and/or New Equities; and what we can do to support their professional development.

The "Community" meme has some of the flavor of a fad or a cliché. It's one of those things everyone wants to claim they are fostering, but as Kawasaki says, the real test is whether you have people who wake up everyday with that goal at the top of their list. In the New Equities model, it is the job of the Consultant Agent to build talent communities through proactively networking with IT professionals and supporting their career development. It includes developing a relationship up front and pre-qualifying them, so as projects come up, we already know the best people. It's a strategy that moves away from reactive recruiting, focusing instead on building long-term relationships.

As Kawasaki points out, this involves a two-way conversation and a willingness to be real with people and listen to their concerns and criticisms. Having myself addressed user groups, it's a disconcerting experience to get an earful from your most hard-core audience about their likes and dislikes, because you know they really know your product or service. The "PR voice" that many companies affect is counterproductive in this context. People don't expect you to divulge company secrets, but they expect you to be straight with them. We have held roundtables with our consultants and learned a great deal about what they are looking to achieve in their careers, and what they expect from us.

When it comes down to it, creating a community is not just a feel-good exercise or a PR tactic; it's about gathering business requirements, it's about improving product quality and service delivery, and ultimately about earning the loyalty and trust of your people, whether they are end-users, employees, or in our case, both.

(Hat tip: Jim Durbin)

Happy New Year from New Equities!

New Equities wishes all of our readers a happy and prosperous 2006. We hope that the coming year holds new and exciting opportunities for us all.

We'd like to thank the Academy...

OK, that may be just a bit premature. But Jason Davis at Recruiting.com just informed me that we have been nominated for the Recruiting.com Best Blog Awards for 2005, in the category, "Best Third-Party Blogs".

Jobster's Dave Lefkow did the honors (thanks, Dave!) and commented, "What's interesting to note is that they are a staffing firm, and in the future perhaps would be deserving of their own category." Though we don't think of New Equities as a "staffing firm" in the traditional sense, we do like to think we are in a category of our own. (All immodesty aside, any tip of the hat is gratefully acknowledged.)

UPDATE: Taleo's weblog was the winner in our category of third-party blogs - and well-deserved as their blog is very well done. But we'll be back next year! In any event, it was great to see New Workforce among the nominees.

The Dilbert blog

On the heels of my recent post on the perils of working for someone who channels the pointy-haired boss from Dilbert, I have now learned that Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, now has his own blog. It's titled unsurpringly enough, "The Dilbert blog".

Welcome to New Workforce

Analysts International and New Equities are pleased to welcome you to our blog, New Workforce. What is New Equities? We're a division of Analysts International, a global technology services company with over 35 years in the staffing industry. The mission of New Equities is to reinvent the way people go to work. We are doing this by standing the conventional wisdom on its head: instead of finding people to fill jobs, we find jobs for talented people.

Think of how a talent agent works. The agent develops a keen understanding of the special talents of each person he or she represents, and works to identify opportunities well suited to those talents. The agent acts as the advocate for the talent, and even as one project moves ahead, the agent is thinking ahead to the next one, as well as building a relationship with the people who hire the talent.

This is not the way the traditional staffing industry operates. Consultants are often treated as commodities, who are only contacted if they can fill the current set of client needs. A consultant who was key to a customer's mission-critical project last year is off the radar screen this year, and is not easily located by the recruiter when new requirements surface, even if that consultant is the best fit for the job.

New Equities believes this model is outmoded and needs to be rethought to meet the realities of the 21st century workforce. Our answer to this challenge is to approach workforce requirements more like a talent agent than a traditional recruiter. We even have our own consultant agents who are in tune with the skills and career objectives of IT consultants in our talent pool and actively seek out assignments that leverage those talents, with compensation that reflects their value to the customer. It's like providing each consultant who works with us with their own personal "Jerry McGuire". More information on New Equities and our innovative approach to the 21st century workforce can be found at www.newequities.com.

Why publish a blog? Because the changing nature of work is at the center of our business and it's a fascinating topic. Because this particular topic is very wide and very deep, and there are many smart people out there thinking about it. In addition to working consultants (who might have a thing or two to say about it, ya think?), there are forward-looking business managers, workforce analysts and industry pundits like Daniel Pink.

And of course, there's a whole IT industry in ferment. Which new technologies and trends on the horizon will impact your career? What new skills will be in demand in the coming years? Will IT return to the boom days of the roaring '90s or slide back into the doldrums of the post-bubble years? And what does it mean for those of us who work in that industry?

None of this happens in a vacuum. Our day to day work lives are affected by business trends and the policies of movers and shakers like IBM, FedEx and Cisco, companies who are redefining business fundamentals such as supply chain, logistics and manufacturing and human capital management. The change they create sends ripples throughout the entire workforce.

So, there's a lot going on and a great deal to talk about. We're hoping you'll get in on the discussion. We'll be posting on the topics above, pointing out interesting articles and opinion pieces, with some of our own observations (and hopefully yours).

The world around us is changing and the old models will no longer apply. We have some ideas about where this is going. And we expect you do as well. Each post has a comments thread, so let us know what you think, what you're reading, where you think the workforce is headed. Email us with ideas for topics, or suggestions of sites we should be linking to. Tell us what you're seeing out there, and what we should be paying more attention to.