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Perfecting the Talent Readiness formula for "Right People, Right Place, Right Time" involves many complexities, from shifting global demographics to the role of rapidly-evolving technology. But the business case boils down to the Three Ls – Leadership, Leverage and Legacy.

On behalf of my team at The Newman Group and Futurestep, as well as our colleagues here at HCI, I’d like to welcome you to the talent management technologies reference center.  Over the years, I’ve had the good fortune to experience, first hand, the transformation of HR as a practice to the holistic talent management function found in many organizations today. Technology has played a key role in that transformation.

Do you keep hearing the term sourcer, or sourcing?  More and more, it seems that any time Talent Acquisition or Recruiting is mentioned, sourcing is not far behind in the conversation.  With Sourcecon right around the corner I thought it would be a good time to discuss why organizations, both big and small, should consider bringing on a sourcing resource to some capacity.

I just put down SWAT – Seize the Accomplishment (Amazon affiliate link) by Timothy L. Johnson….and now want to pick it back up and read it again.  It’s that good.

I received the book as a review copy from the author…but don’t let that get in the way of believing me when i say that this business fable is an excellent one.

SWAT is an acronym for “Systems Working All Together”…but it also helps set the stage for the story in the book.

The storyline of this book is a good one and keeps the concepts moving forward quickly. In the story, a team lead has a difficult task to work through and turns to his best friend and cousin…who happens to be a SWAT commander.

The main character, Toby, spends time with his SWAT commander cousin and learns the systems thinking concepts that make SWAT teams successful.

The concepts are described perfectly and in a manner that makes it easy to comprehend and easy to understand how you might apply them to the problems your currently facing.

I’ve read quite a few systems thinking books but nothing as entertaining as this.   While this isn’t nearly as comprehensive as Peter Senge’s The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization, Timothy Johnson’s put together a great little book that can help to introduce the systems thinking concepts quickly and easily.

Grab this book from your favorite bookseller today..Amazon has it for $14.95.

• SWAT. Systems working all together. Timothy L. Johnson. (regnordman.com)

MrTed announced today that users reaction to the newest release of its flagship product has been overwhelmingly favorable, particularly for the way MrTedTalentLink Version 9 – also called the Cloud 9 release - brings consumer-level friendliness to enterprise-level talent acquisition.

“This is an all-new breed of talent acquisition software, and its general release has met with a great response,” said Jerome Ternynck, CEO at MrTed. “Cloud 9 is a very special product. It transforms in the best way imaginable the user experience for an enterprise platform.”

Clients directly benefit of the advantages of the new release, MrTed has upgraded all its clients at the push of a button. Cloud 9 leverages the full potential of cloud computing. It is built on true service-oriented and open architecture, allowing for a world of application modules and an interactive, on-demand graphical user interface (GUI). The result is that Cloud 9 makes it easy for end users to personalize the solution to create the most suitable solution for their business.

“MrTed had said this version of MrTedTalentLink would be user-friendly, and it really is,” said Chris Herrmannsen, Group Managing Director of Ochre House. “It's intuitive and easy to learn. Despite how robust and flexible the new design is, we didn’t need any training to start using the new features. We can already see how this will truly enhance our recruitment service delivery to our end clients and will make the collaboration with our client managers easier’’

The formal release of Cloud 9 follows major recognition of the system in its beta stages by respected industry analysts who specifically cited the new version’s vision and potential.

Leading research and advisory consulting firm Bersin & Associates, in its September 2009 assessment of the state of the talent acquisition market, said MrTedTalentLink Cloud 9 “brings the next generation Talent Acquisition Solution towards the market, (as it) will fully embrace the cloud computing technology and enhance its partnerships.”

In addition to its on-demand user interface, the architecture of MrTedTalentLink Cloud 9 features a configurable candidate database that can easily integrate data from any source, and an independent business logic layer exposed through Web services. This open architecture makes it fast and easy to connect with other talent management and HR applications, empowering users get the full benefit of cloud computing on their desktop.

With MrTedTalentLink Cloud 9, business processes are presented as portable application modules that users can turn on, turn off or customize to create a truly personalized experience. Cloud 9 includes apps for all major business processes, including internal and external recruitment, outplacement, contingent workforce management, vendor management, candidate processing, time sheeting, offer management, on-boarding and more.

Apps are portable and can be used with other systems and interfaces, while external applications developed by other vendors can be integrated inside the Cloud 9 workspace.

Users of MrTedTalentLink 9 are free to configure and rearrange any apps they wish to create a truly personalized workspace and navigation experience. The dynamic interactivity of the user interface means apps can be resized, dragged, dropped and even layered.

Even though the interface processes large amounts of data, Cloud 9’s asynchronous data retrieval keeps the presentation layer running quickly and smoothly – a truly enjoyable user and time-saving user experience.

At the Imagine Solutions conference, the watchword was change. Whether they wanted to bring down the national debt (like Niall Ferguson), reform Washington (like David Walker), halt global climate change (like Carter Roberts), or reinvent health care (like Patch Adams), everyone agreed that the world needed changing, even if they didn't quite agree on the specifics of what that change should look like.

Yet it became clear as the conference progressed that the speakers also disagreed on how much change was enough. When tackling daunting problems in health care, the environment, politics, or the economy, can incremental adjustments make a real difference? Or is anything less than total transformation not even worth the effort?

For the health speakers, the calls for change were mixed. Some, like Dean Ornish, emphasized that even small personal changes (quitting smoking, walking three hours a week) would have a major impact, while others, like Adams — the clown-doctor portrayed by Robin Williams in the eponymous film — called for a full reinvention of the entire health care delivery system.

For the eco-speakers, however, nothing less than transformative change would do. "We've only got one chance to get this right" was a phrase we heard repeatedly from the likes of Roberts, Carter Bales, Sylvia Earle, and Dave Gallo. Yet even there, they were willing to concede that small actions were better than doing nothing. "At the very least," said Bales, the chairman of NewWorld Capital Group, "I ask you to go home and plant a tree."

The political and economic speakers were the most hard-line, whether they were arguing for aggressive deficit reduction or wholesale congressional reform. If the politicians wouldn't "do the right thing" (whatever the "right thing" was), it was incumbent on the people to "kick 'em out." As these speakers urged the audience to hold political leaders accountable, a meme developed around the first three words of The Constitution: "We the People." Chris Hoenig got it rolling by asking the audience to supply the three most radical words in US History. "We the people," murmured the crowd. And after Hoenig invoked the phrase, the other speakers couldn't lay off it.

But I had assumed he meant three different words from that document. The words I muttered were, "More perfect union."

To me, what's truly radical in the US Constitution is its acceptance of the idea that we'll always be getting more perfect(er), but never quite getting there. Compared to the French, who stopped at no amount of guillotining in their quest for utopia, the American revolutionaries were rather tediously pragmatic, building a system that was admittedly imperfect, but was capable of growing more perfect over the ensuing centuries. A system, in other words, of incremental — rather than transformative — change.

I admit, there may be some problems — like a climate gone haywire — where a little bit of reform isn't going to be noticeably different from none at all. And there may be others — like skyrocketing national debt — where small improvements may seem like an imperceptible drop in a vast bucket. And for leaders trying to reform health care, while small changes may indeed yield big results, pointing proudly to tiny tweaks doesn't generally play well on the campaign trail.

But here I must echo the words of my former boss and forever mentor, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Ellen Goodman. "I have never been especially impressed by the heroics of people who are convinced they are about to change the world," she once wrote. "I am more awed by those who struggle to make one small difference after another." And indeed, the second day of the conference featured some (though in my view, not nearly enough) people who are doing just that: social entrepreneurs who are revitalizing the blighted cities of the Rust Belt, creating better jobs for immigrant women in New York, bringing affordable glasses to rural India, and founding boarding schools for poor kids in Washington, DC.

Sure, it's nice to think that you can get a bunch of smart people in a room and ideate solutions to the world's most intractable problems. But despite the burgeoning popularity of shindigs like TED and Aspen, it's easier to call for sweeping change from a stage than drive small changes on the ground.

Of course, if the conference had been called "Imagine Incremental Improvements" or "Grinding Out Solutions Day After Thankless Day," maybe no one would've come.

I am honored to have been asked to team up with my friend and colleague Ken Lahti of PreVisor to conduct a webcast about innovations in pre-employment assessment.  I encourage anyone who is interested in learning about the newest trends and what they mean for the long-term future of assessment to join for the webcast.

Is HR from Venus and finance from Mars? It surely feels that way to many of us in these departments. CFO Magazine even put out an article last year entitled Memo to CFOs: Don't Trust HR. 

Usually I preview the week ahead on Mondays, but for some TGIF fun and to help you plan all the ways you can engage at HCI next week, here's a look at the coming program in the Talent Acquisition Community.  I'm not being redundant; earlier this week I wrote about the new Computer Engineer Barbie and how she impacts your talent pools.

PCL has just completed a major upgrade to their online assessment system to accommodate the global demand for PROFILE:MATCH® assessments and its other online tools. “We have an ambitious growth strategy for this year, with exciting new assessments in the pipeline. This was the right time to take over the hosting and management of our systems”, says MD Geoff Trickey. “With 24 hour continuous traffic across five continents we have to take security and reliability to the highest possible level”. The next step for PROFILE:MATCH® will be to take this highly innovative technology into China. PCL is currently in discussion with potential partners based in Hong Kong and in Beijing. “PROFILE:MATCH® has achieved a global reputation and there is no shortage of interest in the world’s fastest growing economy” says Geoff, “the Chinese are very keen to take the best that is available and to adapt it to their own cultural requirements”. For more information about PROFILE:MATCH®, please visit www.profilematchassessments.com or contact becky@psychological-consultancy.com.

MrTed Ltd, the global leader of Talent Acquisition Solutions, announced today from Neuilly-sur-Seine, France that they have secured the largest talent acquisition software and services engagement in French Public Sector history. The partnership between the French Social Security and MrTed will provide more than 600 Social Security offices with web-based recruitment and talent acquisition capability. 

“First and foremost, it is a privilege and an honor to serve the French government in such a substantial way, and we are deeply appreciative of the trust and confidence they have placed in our company,” said Jerome Ternynck, CEO and Co-Founder of MrTed. This contract follows a major deal signed earlier with China’s Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security (MOHRSS)  and confirms our growing position as provider of choice in the public sector.

The French Social Security provides citizens a wide range of benefits covering unemployment, healthcare and retirement through a combination of general and special programs.  These programs are administered through a network of local, regional and national institutions. 

The partnership between the French Social Security and MrTed will ensure that hundreds of hiring managers will have the ability to rapidly and easily create, validate and publish open positions across multiple public web sites and government intranets.  MrTed will also provide the organization with a cadre of best-in-class talent acquisition tools that will enhance the hiring process for both hiring managers and job candidates.

"Improving our recruitment tools and processes are major goals for the Social Security in 2010," said the Communications Director for UCANSS (the French Acronym for French Social Security). "MrTed has a robust, flexible and open solution. These are baseline requirements for institutions as complex as government agencies.  Their understanding of our challenges and aspirations along with their proven success implementing large, complex talent acquisition solutions were determining factors in our selection of MrTedTalentLink. " 

More information about MrTed is available on the web at www.mrted.com

Data visualization is cool. It's also becoming ever more useful, as the vibrant online community of data visualizers (programmers, designers, artists, and statisticians — sometimes all in one person) grows and the tools to execute their visions improve.

Jeff Clark is part of this community. He, like many data visualization enthusiasts, fell into it after being inspired by pioneer Martin Wattenberg's landmark treemap that visualized the stock market.

Clark's latest work shows much promise. He's built four engines that visualize that giant pile of data known as Twitter. All four basically search words used in tweets, then look for relationships to other words or to other Tweeters. They function in almost real time.

"Twitter is an obvious data source for lots of text information," says Clark. "It's actually proven to be a great playground for testing out data visualization ideas." Clark readily admits not all the visualizations are the product of his design genius. It's his programming skills that allow him to build engines that drive the visualizations. "I spend a fair amount of time looking at what's out there. I'll take what someone did visually and use a different data source. Twitter Spectrum was based on things people search for on Google. Chris Harrison did interesting work that looks really great and I thought, I can do something like that that's based on live data. So I brought it to Twitter."

His tools are definitely early stages, but even now, it's easy to imagine where they could be taken.

Take TwitterVenn. You enter three search terms and the app returns a venn diagram showing frequency of use of each term and frequency of overlap of the terms in a single tweet. As a bonus, it shows a small word map of the most common terms related to each search term; tweets per day for each term by itself and each combination of terms; and a recent tweet. I entered "apple, google, microsoft." Here's what a got:

Right away I see Apple tweets are dominating, not surprisingly. But notice the high frequency of unexpected words like "win" "free" and "capacitive" used with the term "apple." That suggests marketing (spam?) of apple products via Twitter, i.e. "Win a free iPad...".

I was shocked at the relative infrequency of "google" tweets. In fact there were on average more tweets that included both "microsoft" and "google" than ones that just mentioned "google."

So then I went to Twitter Spectrum, a similar tool that compares two search terms and shows which words are most commonly associated with each term and which words are most commonly used in tweets with both terms. Here's the "google, microsoft" Twitter Spectrum:

I love that the word "ugh" is dead center between Google and Microsoft. But the prominence of social media terms on the blue side versus search terms on the red side is fascinating. It looks like two armies marching at each other ready to fight different wars.

Clark has also created TwitArcs. This one, I feel, is still a work in progress and Clark says "visually I like it but it might be the least useful so far." In this case, you type in a tweeter's handle and it returns a stream of that person's tweets with arcs that link common words between tweets (on the right) and common retweeters (on the left). Rolling your mouse over highlights the last tweet in the arc. Here's a TwitArc of @timoreilly:

Finally, the Stream Graph. Enter a search term and Clark's engine returns the frequency of the most common words found with your search term for the last 1,000 tweets. You see a literal flow of conversation. You can also highlight one term to see how its frequency changed over time and you'll see the most recent tweets that include both your search term and that highlighted term.

Sometimes 1,000 tweets with your term may span weeks. For my search term, "Tiger Woods" which I entered yesterday afternoon right after news that he'd speak publicly broke, 1,000 tweets covered about 20 minutes. Here's the "Tiger Woods" stream graph with "silence" highlighted:

It isn't hard to imagine how this may be applicable to business. I can already see eager marketers watching the stream flow by as their commercial debuts during next year's Super Bowl.

Clark, like many data visualizers, believes we're on the front end of a revolution in information presentation. "There's a lot of work done called scientific visualization or business intelligence graphics," he says. "And it's pragmatic, trying to solve practical problem. It's all standard, a bar chart or pie. But those standard ways are not adequate when you're trying to mine a richer data space. The world is full of complex data and we're just starting to get the tools to make sense of it. We're looking for new ways of presenting data."

Every two years my firm, The RBL Group, partners with Hewitt to conduct a study on the Top Companies for Leaders. It highlights those companies that have gone beyond the basics of grooming strong leaders and have come up with new ways to test their employees in the global marketplace. Quality of leadership within a company helps meet the expectations of investors, customers, and employees, and sets the stage for growth, so developing the next generation of effective leaders is perhaps the most important undertaking of a forward-thinking company.

What's most interesting about this study is how similar the majority of companies are in the way they approach development, and what factors differentiate the best. Bob Gandossy, Hewitt's lead partner on the study and I have come up with six components that differentiate the top company approaches versus the less successful companies.

• Centralized efforts. Top companies centralize their management of talent. Top talent is owned by corporate not by a function, business or geography — the term is "corporate property." This simple logic makes a huge difference in the variety of experiences leaders have in top companies because businesses, geographies and functions can't deprive their best talent from moving across boundaries in order to optimize that organization.

• Top executive involvement. If you want to develop leaders, you need to involve leaders. Former P&G CEO and now Chairman A.G. Lafley conducts his own senior leadership development program. Lafley invites each participant to the program personally. Members of P&G senior executive team teach, coach and mentor these leaders every month. In addition, these same senior executives sponsor the recruiting efforts at targeted universities.

• Focus on a few key processes. Top companies for leaders live by the precept of finding and hiring top talent vs. fixing and developing mediocre talent. If you hire great people, you are a lot more likely to find some great leaders. Once you've got the right talent in the door, you need robust performance management with lots of feedback. Finally, you need to expose these people to a variety of development experiences that build knowledge, perspective and skills.

• Make it a strategic focus. Top companies are never laissez faire about leadership development — they see the infusion and growth of talent as crucial to strategic success and they are unrelenting in their approach to building talent. Their leadership development is centralized and intentional about developing a series of experiences that build good functional leaders and general managers.

• Build leaders and leadership. Leadership capability increases as HR systems such as performance management, compensation and job assignments are linked across organization boundaries, and are intentional about building the right kind of leaders. Most companies are primarily focused on building individual leaders through assessment of individual leader competencies and training and development to improve those competencies. Top companies for leaders also build robust leadership capability that supports a culture of integration and opportunity to develop from within.

• Create value for inside and outside stakeholders. Top companies develop leaders who have the desired competencies to deliver on their strategy AND the competencies to ensure customer delight. At a recent senior leadership meeting of one of the top companies, my partner Dave Ulrich asked the executives to watch a series of TV commercials from their company and then to describe the messages their company was promising customers: "Innovation," "No Hassle Service," "Great Prices." Following this, he brought out the existing leadership competency model and asked them to compare the messages in the model to the TV commercials. There was very little if any overlap. This is wrong and it is common practice. Competencies are the means to deliver results and value to stakeholders not the end state of development. Top companies desire to build leaders not to just become better people, but to become better people who know how to provide value to employees, customers, investors and other stakeholders.

Norm Smallwood is co-founder of The RBL Group, a strategic HR and leadership systems advisory firm. He is author, with Dave Ulrich and Kate Sweetman, of the 2009 Harvard Business Press title, The Leadership Code: Five Rules to Lead By and with Dave Ulrich of the 2007 title, Leadership Brand.

I am really excited about the amount of discussion happening in the talent acquisition industry about brand.  For my money, there aren’t too many more effective ways to transform recruitment in an organization than a smart and well-executed employer brand strategy.  But, my fear is that while we are talking about brand a lot more than we used to, we are collectively missing the boat on its true power and potential.