James Mayes

Last week I wrote about a research project from Autodesk, where the research labs are looking at visualising organisational change. The original post can be seen here, along with the visual version of Autodesk’s own personnel changes. I’m pleased to report the scientist behind the project contacted me in response to the post and has offered to create a similar video for others – an organic organisational chart, if you will.

In his words:

Each day the entire hierarchy of the company is constructed as a tree with each employee represented by a circle, and a line connecting each employee with his or her manager. Larger circles represent managers with more employees working under them. The tree is then laid out using a force-directed layout algorithm. From day to day, there are three types of changes that are possible:

• Employees join the company
• Employees leave the company
• Employees change managers

Instead of recomputing the full layout each day, we animate the transitions from one day to the next.

So why offer to do this for others? Again, Justin explains for me:

I wasn’t sure what to expect, but the biggest revelation for me has been just the total amount of activity going on. You can see the day counter in the top left, and there is stuff going on almost every single day. In your own little corner of the company, you hear about some org changes going on, but typically most people have no idea about the total amount of activity.

It would be really great to compare what we see in the Autodesk example, with what is going on in other companies. Maybe they have more or less activity? Maybe they have a deeper or flatter hierarchy? Maybe other companies have more isolated “activity periods”? I think it could be really interesting.

In order to produce the video, data is obviously required. To make this as easy as possible, what’s needed is simply the manager name / employee name / date stamp.  Privacy is obviously important – so the work can easily be done anonymously using employee/payroll numbers instead of actual names – and nothing at all will be visible on the final video (as the Autodesk example shows).  If this format is a problem, Justin may still be able to do so something – please do step up and ask. The key aspects are when employees join, move or leave – Justin has the ability to do a certain amount of work to reshape data, depending on what you can provide!

Final thoughts from Justin:

There would be no charge for this, but it is part of a research project, so I would ideally like to publicly release the resulting animation. It could be released without disclosing the company name if that made things easier. If releasing the results is really not an option, I might still be interested in creating the visualization for the organization’s internal-only viewing, but that would be less ideal.

If you’re interested in discussing directly with Autodesk, just leave a comment below or contact me by any of these means. I’ll intro you to Justin and leave you to enjoy a visual journey of discovery!

The post Want an Organic Organisational Chart for your firm? appeared first on Musings From Sussex.

Earlier today I was participating in and live tweeting from the Reconverse discussion on Recruitment Technology. A full write-up will appear on the Reconverse site soon, but I wanted to delve deeper into one particular aspect – that of the video interview.

There have been a number of tools coming to market over the last 12-24 months and the availability of such dedicated sites, improvements in performance and indeed ability to operate (at least some of them) on mobile has seen a rapid increase in usage.  Certainly with some roles, I see a video interview as being a complete game-changer from an efficiency perspective. Most Sales Directors will tell you a hire decision is made within the first few minutes of meeting someone – the body language, the way the person carries themselves and so on.  They’ll also tell you they interview around five people per role.  If two or three of those are swiftly identified as inappropriate, but for the sake of courtesy a full interview is run anyway, time is being wasted for all concerned.

The discussion today touched on one of the major concerns firms have in implementing such tools – that of discrimination.  Wherever people are involved, there’s always an opportunity for discrimination to occur and firms must take appropriate measures to manage this.  One attendee today had checks in place to ensure each interview video was watched in full by the recruiter – should a discrimination claim arise in future, it gives them the ability to point to a due and fair process. Maybe not a perfect solution, but certainly good to see the effort being made.

My particular interest lies in how the video interview breaks a key aspect of the hiring process though.  If the interview is being conducted by something like a Skype video call, I have no issue.  However, many of the tools on the market now are approaching from a different angle – allowing employers to pose a number of questions. These are then posted to all potential candidates who get to record video responses in their own time.  Whilst this might be easier for scheduling purposes, it robs the candidate of the ability to ask questions in return.  I’ve always believed that the interview process should be a two-way street. The employer needs to learn about the candidate, but the candidate must be offered the same opportunity to learn about the employer.

It also concerns me that companies implementing processes like this are those most likely to use an online ATS for initial candidate registration – so first you must find the job, then upload a CV, then complete a load of forms… and then go through a video grilling too.  I believe companies taking this approach need to reciprocate to an extent – and if using an asynchronous video interview tool must find another way for a candidate to ask questions and learn about the firm.

Not doing this damages the two-way street and must certainly increase the risk of candidate drop-outs later in the process when they DO finally have an opportunity to learn more about the employer?

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LinkedIn endorsements have been around a while now. The little box asking whether someone has certain skills has become familiar and there’s been much debate about whether they add value. There are also aspects of interpretation which need to be considered. First up though, my thoughts having seen them settle in a little:

• I think they can be a useful indicator, but only a very small part of the total picture.
• They’re certainly smart from LinkedIn’s perspective, as they allow LinkedIn to gather searchable data which the user themselves did not necessarily contribute
• They’re very easily gamed, which is why I’d suggest use as an indicator and no more.
• They’re open to some fun (and therefore probably abuse). A friend of mine has been on the receiving end of a harmless practical joke and found himself with several endorsements for his ability to give endorsements!

Today though, I poked around endorsements from another angle.  Take a look at this:

Racketeering professionals include a Deputy Attorney General!  Whilst initially entertaining, it’s simple to realise that yes, she’s genuinely an expert on the topic having probably put a large number of racketeers behind bars.  The question then, is this:

What steps are taken when such an endorsement is made on an inappropriate profile?

I have a pile of endorsements, as I think many people do now – and no, I don’t review each of them carefully. I therefore get the impression it would be remarkably simple to target someone person and pretty quickly have racketeering (or some other such skill) rise to a prominent position on his/her profile. Would this be entertaining? Or career damaging? At what point defamation?

Anyone seen this happen yet?

The post When LinkedIn Endorsements go wrong appeared first on Musings From Sussex.

I was lucky enough to attend the Chinwag Psych event last week – a new event bringing together psychology, neuroscience, web usability, big data and much else besides. I can’t recommend it highly enough and I’ll no doubt be writing up more of my thoughts in the near future. For now though, I wanted to share this video from the day.  It’s a piece of  work from the research labs at Autodesk. This is what happens if you take your organisational chart and bring it to life.

Autodesk call it the Organic Organization Chart – to me, it feels like the combination of company data and time-lapse photography. However you describe it, it seems both beautiful and full of insight – a new, more realistic view of organisational structure. It prompts me to ask questions about the organisation, offers pointers I might otherwise not have noticed.  How does the influence move around the organisation?  Why is a particular team so cut off? How did that acquisition become so quickly integrated?  I wonder how many other organisations have the ability to produce something like this – and if they could, whether they’d share?

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I’ve argued for a long time that unique content is highly valuable. It’s why many companies now run blogs.  I’ve also argued on many occasions that the context in which that information is delivered is just as important, if not more so.   I believe both of these things have huge value in the digitally connected world we now inhabit and have a significant impact on how SEO is changing.  Some would argue SEO is dying out, with search to be  replaced by following peer recommendation and influencers. I’ve taken that position myself once or twice…

I don’t believe that now. Social media certainly exploded onto the scene and had a significant impact on the way web traffic moved – however, it did not kill SEO, it merely impacted it’s evolution.  The old habits of link building and comment spam still exist, but content is much more highly valued than ever. Partly because it DOES travel well across social sites, but also because people DO still search for information.  The newer breed of SEO experts will tip a hat towards link building and keywords, but will also take into account community building, site engagement, mobile traffic and more.

I’ve been wanting to structure a post around this for a while now, but I’ve just found a video from SEOmoz that covers it far better than I can, in just five minutes.  I’ve included the graphic summary here – and I strongly suggest you go watch the video.

The post SEO – What is was, and what it’s become appeared first on Musings From Sussex.

You may have noticed the little smiley icons popping up on Facebook recently (Facebook emoticons)…. Well there’s more of them than I thought!  Stumbled across a decent guide and figured it’d be the perfect Friday share!

Enjoy!

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I wrote previously about my move to a self-hosted blog – which means I’ve been tinkering much more with the guts of WordPress, the theme, the plug-ins etc. While solving a few issues, I’ve needed to find out which browser I’m using, which version, whether JavaScript is running, etc. If you run a self-host blog, you’ve probably had the same. Even more so, if you build or support websites, you’ll have had questions from users when something breaks and been wanting to find that information.  Average users don’t necessarily have swift access to that, but there’s a site which’ll solve the problem for both of you in seconds.

Support Details is a free service which immediately pulls that information and much more, straight out.  Better still, if you need that information from a user who’s not so tech-savvy, they can go straight to the page themselves. It’ll immediately show them the required details AND give them the option to email that report from within the page straight to you. It also offers the ability to download the info as a CSV or PDF file. If that weren’t enough…. the service works just as well from smartphones, tablets etc.

The only problem I’ve noticed with it so far is regards the actual operating system. It reports Windows7 in my test shot above, but I’m running Windows8 on this machine.  However, I pinged them on Twitter and got a response pretty quickly:

Immediately after seeing the tweet, I checked the service again. It’s now correctly reporting Windows 8.

• It’s free
• It saves me a whole bunch of time
• The support team acknowledge my query within a few hours
• They applied a fix in a matter of minutes

Brilliant!! Love these guys…. go check it out here!

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Things change in the social world. Connections can be broken, photos deleted, tweets taken down and so on. I blogged recently about Twitter’s new service allowing you to download your entire archive – but it pulls tweets only, and there’s more to your activity than that. I wondered if there was a better way of doing this – then got an invite to Frostbox. Looking at the Twitter aspect, it pulls retweets, followers and so on. However, Frostbox also allows you to backup your social media in other places too…

As with Twitter, it offers more than a simple grab of the main data. For example, with Facebook, it not only grabs your photos for backup, but also those from other people’s albums where you’ve been tagged. It also makes visible data I hadn’t previously seen – I tested a FourSquare backup and got the full dataset for each checkin. Not sure what I’ll do with that yet, but exposing data usually gives me ideas to mull over!

As a final thought – social media accounts can be hacked like anything else. If you rely on them for business, a service like this may be even more relevant. After all, when it goes bad, the providers might not respond that quickly, as Bill found out last year.

If you want to go play, sign up here (yep, that’s an affiliate link – it’ll give me a little extra free space to play with, but that’s it!)

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I wrote a post over the weekend looking at the difference between share options in the UK and the US. Judging by the comments, I wasn’t too far off the mark. One comment also included a video link sharing research done in the US and India as to what motivates – and how financial incentives impact the ability to undertake complex cognitive tasks.

Simply, it’s too good not to share.

If you work in compensation and benefits, rewards, employee motivation, talent attraction, or frankly, any role where you need to get the best out of others…. take the ten minutes to watch this!

Massive thanks to Martin Eriksson for putting me on to this.

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Something I heard last week has really stuck with me. It concerns the motivation and rewarding of staff via share options. The stated view was that this mechanism was far more effective for Talent Acquisition in the US than in the UK – the view coming from the Founder and CEO of a very successful web startup with teams growing and revenues rising on both sides of the Atlantic.

I hear the view occasionally that Brits can be embarrassed by money, that it’s gauche to be too rich. I don’t see that though – every recruiter I’ve ever spoken to talks of the time invested in salary and package negotiations – so I don’t believe candidates are afraid to ask, or shy.

Is it lack of understanding?  Possibly – but a quick web search on share options yields a wealth of sites, blog posts and other information, suggesting that any candidate interested in a role and hearing mention of share options for the first time should be able to get up to speed quickly.

So why is it?  What makes them less attractive in the UK?  Personally, I think it’s track record.  In the UK (and indeed, wider European) market, there have been precious few big exits.  That’s not to say they don’t exist – but based against the strength of exits achieved in the US, the possibility of participating in such wealth creation there is so much more enticing. Whilst the chances of a successful exit (whether trade sale or IPO) remain slim on both sides of pond, that fact that is has happened so much more often in the US makes it seem more of a realistic possibility. Indeed, tweeting whilst contemplating garnered this response almost immediately:

I guess the data I’d really like to see to explore further on this is something reporting the following US vs UK comparison, maybe year on year for the last ten years:

• Total number of employees 
• Number of employees granted share options
• Number of employees achieving millionaire status as a result of options

Maybe that’s too simplistic – but my thinking it that with a significantly smaller working population in the UK, I’d expect, proportionally, less success stories to be evident. However, if the percentage chances of a payout are actually higher in the UK than in the US, this is a story UK firms should be telling in order to compete for the best talent globally.

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