JKMILTON

[jkmilton]

The brightest and best need no carrot nor stick.

Original.

[jkmilton]

Do good just because.

Original.

[jkmilton]

The formula for success always includes a lot of hard work and a little bit of hope. Faith doesn't enter the equation.

Original.

[jkmilton]

Faith is hope with strings attached.

Original

[jkmilton]

Never, ever live in fear.

Original.

[jkmilton]

Introducing: The Referral Graph

Note: Posterous is gone, so this is a re-post. February 7, 2011

Introducing: The Referral Graph

As usual, Glen Cathey has smart things to say about sourcing. This time, he takes issue with the "sourcing snobs" that claim candidates found on LinkedIn or via a social network are somehow "intrinsically" better than candidates found in a job board's resume database. A good candidate is a good candidate. Strong database search competencies will drive good search results across all manner of large resume databases, he argues. I strongly agree.

I've worked for an IT staffing firm, similar to the one Glen works for now, and I wouldn't disagree: The source of a candidate ultimately becomes incidental. The search skills of recruiters are not incidental, however, and some recruiters are simply better than others at mining databases.

If Glen's cause (or perhaps one of them) is to awaken the recruitment profession to the control they have - the control over their own skill level and hence sourcing effectiveness - then perhaps mine is to awaken recruitment leaders to the limitations of viewing sourcing as an individual sport; a sport where every single sourcer (each with a varying level of competency) becomes a potential bottleneck and single point of failure in the process of surfacing good candidates. As I'll explain shortly, it is a mistake to limit sourcing responsibilities to just a handful of professional sourcers. It also turns out to be unnecessary for sourcers to limit their search space to include only the structured information contained within profiles and resumes.

What's missing from the sourcer's search space is tacit knowledge of a prospective candidate's personality, behavior, work ethic, attitudes toward others, etc. I.e., critical human dimensions that determine which of two candidates - both whom look good on paper - will get the job, perform well, and stay a while. This tacit knowledge can only come from two places: The candidate herself, or from someone that knows her.

Enter the Referral Graph

The social graph - the global mapping of everyone and who they know - has become useful to consumers who want to see which products their trusted friends have recommended (or "liked") before trying said products themselves. We've all run into articles that our friends have already read and liked, or an advertisment for an album that our friends have downloaded. What if recruiters could apply the Referral Graph - a global mapping of trusted people linked to others they'd actually refer - as a kind of search filter? When I say actually refer, I mean: actually refer - not just recommend on a LinkedIn profile. (For every 10 people I've recommended on LinkedIn, I'd only refer 3 to actually work at my company. Just being honest.)

With access to a real Referral Graph, we could know that one of our top-performing employees or consultants has pledged to refer a prospective candidate from within our search results, and we could use this information to flag and prioritize outreach to thatprospective candidate. Referral-referee relationships mapped by the Referral Graph will serve as proxies for some positive tacit knowledge held by the referrer. This is powerful stuff. The Referral Graph enables something else just as powerful:

Make Everyone (i.e., all the people we trust) a Sourcer

The fact that all of our top employees, consultants, and corporate alumni have built online networks means that, with the right technology, these folks are only a few clicks away from referring some of their highly talented friends to us as recruiters. This means that, at a very basic level, each one of our employees can become a "Talent Scout." Employees have something that recruiters/sourcers don't have: Pre-built, trusted relationships with the prospective candidates we want to talk to. This trust isn't trivial. Trust means that when our employee sends a note to a friend, she's many times more likely to get a response than a recruiter is. Trust also means that our own employees or consultants, by virtue of working for a firm, can help effectively sell the attractiveness of the firm. We have to admit that recruiters just don't have the same level of credibility.

Opportunity for the Sourcing Profession

The rise of the Referral Graph and the rush toward smarter management of referral channels is already underway. @SelectMinds is one of just a few companies superimposing the Referral Graph on to recruitment challenges. We'll of course still need killer professional sourcers to lead the charge in finding talent and to fill gaps between what we need and what the crowd can source for us. To effectively harness and manage the crowd's help, however, seems to be a key professional opportunity for sourcers looking to add value, distinguish themselves, and benefit from (rather than be left behind by) the technological disruption occurring in the larger recruitment space.

How will you leverage the Referral Graph? Let's discuss. Contact me:[email protected] or follow me/DM me on Twitter @jkmilton

[jkmilton]

Tolerating Moral Variation in a Hyper-Networked World

All moral concepts seem to flow from our subconscious  (and in some cases, conscious?) drives to - 

Reproduce

Avoid pain, and

Fear death

For example, one can seemingly trace things like the "golden rule," protective/altruistic instinct, and faith_in/fear_of_God back to these three drives; drives that strike me as expressions of the selfish gene (at the high level of the organism's psychology). 

In other words, these base drives may engender the range of feelings we have about ethics. And since I'm betting on the above drives being essentially innate (i.e., evolved), I'm wondering if the variance in moral beliefs among people can be attributed in part to some variance in human hard-wiring? Our brains. 

Why does this matter?

Well: Some people believe that their entire life is defined and meant to be defined by their exercise of moral belief. So morals and moral tensions dominate their behavior and/or thoughts. Also: Many people, including many bright, educated people, cannot conceive of moral paradigms outside of their own. These things together - heavy emphasis on morals as a driver of philosophy, and, passionate, tunnel vision around what is "right" or best - combine to make cooperative problem solving in a connected world extremely difficult. 

If people are willing to accept that there are relevant physical differences in our brains (seems plausible to me) and are enlightened to those differences, it might follow that they'd be more willing to tolerate different moral views, creating more leeway for cooperation. 

Just a thought, or maybe a hope. 

[jkmilton]

Thinking in Systems

I find it helpful to always think in terms of networks, systems, and ecosystems. And to remember that interactions between variables can be tricky.

[jkmilton]

“Humans are divided between those who can still look through the eyes of youth and those who cannot.”

Dave Eggers

[jkmilton]

Think Bottom-Up, Not Top-Down

One of the most general shorthand abstractions that if adopted would improve the cognitive toolkit of humanity is to think bottom up, not top down. Almost everything important that happens in both nature and in society happens from the bottom up, not the top down. Water is a bottom up, self-organized emergent property of hydrogen and oxygen. Life is a bottom up, self-organized emergent property of organic molecules that coalesced into protein chains through nothing more than the input of energy into the system of Earth's early environment. The complex eukaryotic cells of which we are made are themselves the product of much simpler prokaryotic cells that merged together from the bottom up in a process of symbiosis that happens naturally when genomes are merged between two organisms. Evolution itself is a bottom up process of organisms just trying to make a living and get their genes into the next generation; out of that simple process emerges the diverse array of complex life we see today.

Analogously, an economy is a self-organized bottom up emergent process of people just trying to make a living and get their genes into the next generation, and out of that simple process emerges the diverse array of products and services available to us today. Likewise, democracy is a bottom up emergent political system specifically designed to displace top down kingdoms, theocracies, and dictatorships. Economic and political systems are the result of human action, not human design.

Most people, however, see the world from the top down instead of the bottom up. The reason is that our brains evolved to find design in the world, and our experience with designed objects is that they have a designer (us) who we consider to be intelligent. So most people intuitively sense that anything in nature that looks designed must be so from the top down, not the bottom up. Bottom up reasoning is counter intuitive.

[jkmilton]

For Your Cognitive Toolkit: Structured Serendipity

New associations often leap out of the air at me this way; more intriguingly, others seem to form covertly and then to lie in wait for the opportune moment when they can click into place. I do not try to force these associations out into the open; they are like shrinking mimosa plants that crumple if you touch them but bloom if you leave them alone...

In my view, we should each invest a few hours a week in reading research that ostensibly has nothing to do with our day jobs, in a setting that has nothing in common with our regular workspaces. This kind of structured serendipity just might help us become more creative, and I doubt that it can hurt.

[jkmilton]

For Your Cognitive Toolkit: Positive-Sum Games

...people, by neglecting some of the options on the table, may perceive that they are in a zero-sum game when in fact they are in a nonzero-sum game. Moreover, they can change the world to make their interaction nonzero-sum. For these reasons, when people become consciously aware of the game-theoretic structure of their interaction (that is, whether it is positive-, negative-, or zero-sum), they can make choices that bring them valuable outcomes — like safety, harmony, and prosperity — without their having to become more virtuous, noble, or pure.

[jkmilton]

Concepts For Your Cognitive Toolkit: Experimentation

...people who don't see their actions as experiments, and those who don't know how to reason carefully from data, will continue to learn less well from their own experiences than those who do.

Since most of us have learned the word "experiment" in the context of a boring ninth grade science class, most people have long since learned to discount science and experimentation as being relevant to their lives.

[jkmilton]

For the Cognitive Toolkit: Holism

Holism is colloquially summarized as "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts." What is interesting to me, however, are not the artificial instantiations of this principle — when we deliberately form sand into ornate castles or metal into airborne planes or ourselves into corporations — but rather the natural instantiations. The examples are widespread and stunning. Perhaps the most impressive one is that carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, sulfur, phosphorus, iron, and a few other elements, when mixed in just the right way, yield life. And life has emergent properties not present in — nor predictable from — these constituent parts. There is a kind of awesome synergy between the parts.

Hence, I think that the scientific concept that would improve everyone's cognitive toolkit is holism: the abiding recognition that wholes have properties not present in the parts and not reducible to the study of the parts.

[jkmilton]

You are not what you own.

Ian Mackaye

[jkmilton]

Nothing has existence unless you, I, or some living creature perceives it, and how it is perceived further influences that reality. Even time itself is not exempted from biocentrism.

Robert Lanza

[jkmilton]

I think being funny is not anyone's first choice.

Woody Allen