When Lars Schmidt launched NPRLife, a twitter hashtag that gives an inside look at working at NPR, it was one more in a series of bold, inexpensive moves. Schmidt, who has built Recruiting teams around the media industry, is the prototype of a pioneer.

In conversation, Lars seems to have a built in reminder. Somewhere, in the back of his brain, a little alarm goes off. "Say it now. Say it now." Then, as if you’ve never heard him say it before,

"Never let what might go wrong get in the way of what could go right."

In practice, that means he takes a lot of whacks at the jungle to see if there’s a path. Although Schmidt doesn’t describe himself this way, he is the poster child for a rapid experimentation, rapid fail approach to getting things done. Try it, see if there’s traction. If there isn’t, stop. If there is, do more.

He tells the story of his second or third day at NPR (where he is the Director of Talent Acquisition)."I’d just gotten there. All of a sudden, I was supposed to be co-hosting a hackathon with Google at South by Southwest." As he details the scramble to understand the problem (why co-host a hackathon?) and generate useful collateral while packing, you get a clear picture of Lars in action.

This is a guy who creates a reality distortion field that causes stuff to happen. Somehow, he aligns himself with the fates and good things flow in his direction.

"Never let what might go wrong get in the way of what could go right."

So, why is NPR hosting hackathons?

"We compete for talent in three distinct areas. The thing you’d expect, media and journalism is on the nameplate. That’s a tireless hyper competitive area that is our legacy. In recent years, however, our digital team has come into its own. NPR is really a digital operation. We compete directly with high-tech companies for the best talent in technology and other digital expression. Finally, we compete for business people. That’s where our recruiting has its deepest local orientation."

That’s an impressive span for an operation driven by contributions. In this role, Lars is demonstrating how to make a little budget go a long way.

"Branding is critical for Recruiting", he says. "In the news business, the product is the brand that matters. In Digital, it’s our national employment brand. What matters locally is how we’re perceived as a place to work. These are distinct manageable aspects of Branding. In our industry, we call it Employment Branding. It’s really just a layer of engagement with the overall brand."

We spoke about influence in four different ways.

• Influences on Lars
  One of the great things about most influential people is that they give credit easily. The list of people who influence Lars is long and you’d recognize most of them (They are almost all on this Top 100 List). He tells glowing stories about being welcomed into the social media scene by an army of people who are generous with their time and insight.
• Influence as a trait to hire for
  Both the Media and Digital components of the NPR employment Brand
  are environments where influence and audience reach matter. While there is no current activity to use influence as a hiring criteria, Lars clearly understands its utility.
• Influence as a way of reaching potential employees
  Part of the brilliance of #NPRLife is that it gets its traction from the reach of the people who work for NPR. The initial launch was accelerated by a series of tweets from a well known on-air personality.

• The measurement of Influence
  We talked for some time about the idea that influence can be measures. In general, we agreed that
  things are very primitive now but that you have to go through the primitive phase to get to useful tools.

Keep your eyes on LArs Schmidt. His experimental attitude is exactly the way that innovation will percolate into our R&D free environment. In his case, influence is a combination of position, temperament and the willingness to leverage whatever you have.

There are few people in the HR industry who are as influential as Tim Sackett. The widely respected author of HR’s Guide to White People, Sackett is one of those influence the influencers kind of guys. Belligerent is his disdain for political correctness, Sackett is the epitome of the tough minded HR pro who is still willing to plan the company picnic.

The Sackett family has been in the HR business from its inception. Generation after generation, the Sacketts have plied their trade. Tim’s great, great, great, great grandfather Yul, was the 18th Century progenitor of the George Clooney character in Up In the Air.

It was London, 1792. The new cotton mill was established as a model for the fair treatment of workers. Its Utopian owner, the son of a wealthy merchant family, understood that the keys to real productivity involved shortening the work day to 14 hours, daily five minute bathroom breaks and the ability to have children chained with their parents at the looms.

Yul, a Scandinavian native, was hired as the mill’s first paymaster. He screened new workers for hygiene and bugs, tallied the deductions for purchases at the company store, delivered the pay envelopes and administered the punishments. Known throughout England as the exemplar of Best Practice, Yul’s counsel was sought at the leading companies of the age.

One day, during a meeting with the mill owner, Yul put forward a radical new idea. “Beating our wayward employees, while personally enjoyable, doesn’t really seem to be doing much for productivity. Why don’t we simply have them removed from the premises and never speak to them again. It would be like putting your problems in a trash sack and having them hauled away.”

“A trash sack,” the owner replied with a glint in his eye. “That’s brilliant. Got a problem, sack it. It’s so simple. I should have thought of it.”

“Oh, it was your idea, sir.” replied Yul in an HR tradition that persists to this day.

As you might imagine, generations of service to organizations as professional paymasters and behavior optimizers guaranteed that the Sackett clan remained on the edge of poverty. In the days of the land rush, the family took a covered wagon and headed west. When the head of the clan saw that they’d reached Wyoming, they parked the wagon a build the homestead. It was then that they discovered that the offer for 40 acres applied to the state of Wyoming, not the town of Wyoming, MI.

As a young man, Tim was constantly confused about the question of whether he was from Wyoming or from Michigan. So, he began his post high-school education at the University of Wyoming. Quickly discovering that the open prairie was a bad place to be in HR (unless you like restaurant chains), young Mr Sackett returned to Michigan.

The rest is, as they say, history. Sackett’s trajectory from confused adolescence to HR Rainmaker took less than a decade once he finally got to work. (He took a six year sabbatical between undergraduate school and grad school to walk back from Wyoming to Michigan.) Now firmly into his 40s, Sackett is starting to imagine changing the face of HR.

With his own personal industry transforming Mr. Potato Head kit (he calls it the Sack-kit), Tim sits in his office envisioning a new nose, different eyes, altered lips and approaches to facial hair for the world of HR. He routinely clarifies his vision of the industry’s new face in his periodic rants at the legendary Tim Sackett Project.

One of the ironic keys to having a broad industry influence is not caring what other people think of you. Tim’s bio on Fistful of Talent makes it abundantly clear that your opinion of him simply doesn’t matter:

Tim Sackett SPHR, is the ultimate Mama’s Boy! After 15+ years of successfully leading HR and Talent Acquisition departments for Fortune 500s and smaller technical firms, Tim took over running the contingent staffing firm HRU Technical Resources in Lansing, MI. Serving as the Executive Vice President, Tim runs the company his mother started over 30 years ago, and don’t tell Mom, but he thinks he does a better job at it than she did!

You can see the signs of Sackett’s influence everywhere you look. That framed and autographed photo behind the local HR Vp’s desk? It’s Sackett. Most intro HR text books are being revised to include the Sackett story. Next year’s SHRM conference will feature a Sackett Pavilion.

It’s rare that I get the opportunity to document the influence of the self proclaimed most powerful man in HR. You really need to keep your eyes on Sackett. One day soon, you’ll be changing all of your documentation to eliminate the phrase Human Resources Department to replace it with Sackett Department.

Chris Hoyt is easily recognized as the most innovative recruiter in the business today. The past couple of years have seen him host a variety of events while taking charge of his role at Pepsi where

Chris is responsible for the design, implementation and sustainability of PepsiCo’s global digital and social recruiting strategies inclusive of managing Internet communities, analytics and 3rd party recruitment partnerships. As an industry professional with over 18 years of experience he pushes the boundaries of social and mobile recruiting in big business environments with the help of motivated recruiting teams from around the world. It’s his belief that maintaining an unwavering focus on improving both the candidate experience and job seeker engagement levels has a direct impact on the quality of talent that drives a company’s success.

Hoyt is a practical guy who is comfortable in his own skin. He is the personification of sanguine. Cheery, optimistic and ready to get things done. Unassuming and accessible.

Take another look at his job description (above). Hoyt manages Internet communities, analytics and 3rd party recruitment partnerships while being responsible for an employment brand.. Pepsi is one of the few companies capable of understanding and trying to manage these three things as one. Usually, they are separate. Most often they are not really managed. Typically, they are not all housed in the HR Department.

So, regardless of temperament and initiative, Chris has the great fortune to be in the right place. The result of curiosity, work ethic, experience and timing is an explosion of visibility.

Generally, the limelight has corrosive effects on people their first time through the ringer. Chris appears to have weathered the storm and prospered. It’s probably because he’s less interested in the credit than he is in what he can get done. For some, celebrity (even in the minor forms available in a niche like ours) is an end goal. For others, like Chris, it’s a tool for making progress.

Hoyt is in the enviable position of working for a company with solid resources, a desire to lead and a willingness to experiment. That means that Chris has tried and discarded ideas well before they have turned into the bland, me-too ness of best practices. He works at the front end of the process, trying to identify the next trends and navigate his operation to where they’re going to be.

Once, Chris and I were talking about the fact that innovation rarely comes from our industry. Usually, our new ideas are borrowed or stolen from an adjacent industry (something involving publishing or customer service). It was clear, in that conversation, that the place to look was ‘somewhere else’.

Chris immediately began to figure out how to expose his team to ideas beyond the world of Recruiting and HR. The insight hit him and he began to implement. It was so spontaneous that I almost missed it.

One of the things I’ve noticed about people who influence the industry is that they seem to have budgets with which to influence the industry. Although we’ve been looking at practitioner intensely in the past several top 100 pieces, it’s really the marketers, academics and consultants who have the time and energy for the conference and article circuit.

Somehow, Hoyt manages to slice his time so that he gets it all done.

He influences people by being a public trailblazer. Then he smoothes it out with contagious optimism. It’s a delicious formula.

When I asked Fishdogs about influence, he said, “The only place influence matters is within your own network.”

It’s been a long time since someone made me think when I asked the question. At this point, I’ve asked about 1100 people about influence. Fishdogs surprised me. It isn’t the first time.

Fishdogs, a nickname Craig Fisher acquired in college, came in handy a dozen years ago when the craigfisher.com domain was already taken. Originally a site devoted to Craig’s work, his dogs and job postings, Fishdogs has come a long way. He says,

“I live at the intersection of marketing and recruiting. I help people and businesses leverage social media, mobile, and other new communication tools to get matched with the *right* customers, the *right* talent, and the *right* jobs. As VP Sales for Ajax Social Media, I handle sales and training for the 1st Linkedin-Certified training company in North America. I work with sales and recruiting teams around the globe to implement social media and mobile strategies for both business and career development.”

That doesn’t begin to tell you how influential he is. Or why. The bottom line is that he combines a love of the details of recruiting , a ceaseless curiosity about new technologies and a desire to teach.

Craig Fisher works like a dog. That’s probably the origin of the nickname. During college, he held as many as five simultaneous gigs. His favorite was selling ads for the college spoof newspaper (The Greek Inquirer)

He rolled out of school into a stint in the medical device sales world. He was such a hot shot sales guy that the company got him to move into training and developing new sales people. It was a short step to recruiting from there.

Craig did an interesting thing. In order to find the candidates he was looking for, he went to school on the job hunting process. His notion was that finding the right candidates was going to be easier if you understood their experience and psychology. The move paid off in big ways.

He moved quickly into Physician Recruiting with Matrix Resources. That was the start of a 20 year love affair with Recruiting. he spent a solid fifteen years in the trenches and management of a range of staffing and recruiting companies.

As social media, beginning with a very early blog at Fishdogs.com, caught his eye, Craig began his conversion to social media evangelist and experimenter.

These days, Craig has a portfolio of businesses, all interlocking and driving each other. He’s the VP of Ajax Social Media, the first certified LinkedIn training company. He runs the notorious TNL (Talent Net Live), a series of small unconferences focused on Social Media and Recruiting Effectiveness. He’s widely sought as a consultant on employment branding projects.

Mostly, he’s at the heart of the explosion of the next generation of leadership in HR and Recruiting.

There are two kinds of businesses emerging on the scene today. One, blessed with resources from investors, is heavily oriented towards tool creation in social technology. The other, personified by Craig, is being built by people with substantial time in the trenches.

These players (among them Geoff Webb, Jessica Miller Merrell and Bill Boorman) come at social technology with a deep understanding of the problem to be solved. Each of the four come at the problem with a unique perspective and a deep commitment to moving the technology forward. Each, in one form or another offer training and insight as a a part of their work.

The basic freedom from investors approach to business development can be vastly more opportunistic and creates businesses that are less structured that typical MBA driven operations.They win hearts and minds faster than the more well endowed crowd.

Craig sits at the center of a cyclone from which he has a very clear picture of the real practical truths of social recruiting. Be sure to catch him at one of the many places he turns up for a conference or a conversation. He’s changing the world.

 

It takes a while to develop real world influence. While some people will tell you that the best measure of influence is whether or not people will take your call, there are other things that can shape the world we operate in. The depth of one’s influence has something to do with changing the way that things get done.

It’s interesting to note, for example, the Tim Berners-Lee developed the first web server on a NeXt computer designed by Steve Jobs. That foundational technology now inhabits most operating computers in one way or another. Sure, I’d fit him into my schedule. Both Jobs and Berners-Lee transformed the way that we approach the simplest aspects of our lives. Each man influenced the world in dramatic ways.

Within an industry, there are a variety of ways to use influence:

• Some act as information gateways, platforms and bottlenecks (the event and publication executives fit here)
• Vendors shape the industry conversation with volume, innovation and cash
• Still others are the connective tissue that make careers and job opportunities possible (network connectors)
• Academics and analysts shape the language of the conversation. They are clearinghouses for best practice information
• Practitioners, who are in the best position to know what works in their companies, gain hands on wisdom.

As previously noted, it is very difficult to exert influence on an industry from a practitioner’s chair. At best, people working in the trenches get a chance to see the inner workings of five or six operations. Vendors, consultants, analysts, trade show promoters and academics all benefit from being able to see across a range of enterprises. Great practitioners often notice that the table is tilted away from their expertise.

There are several notable exceptions to the general principle that influence is inversely proportional to the amount of time you spend in the trenches. Recently, we’ve profiled several people who have effectively used social media tools to leverage their experience into broad industry influence. Seasoned professionals all, their path to influence included early mastery of a new technology. All of them are long term players in the HR-Recruiting industry.

Arie Ball‘s story is somewhat different.

Arie is a lifetime Sodexo employee who ended up in the HR/Recruiting business because the company’s move to outsource Recruiting fell apart. Seven years ago, Arie took the helm of a project designed to evaluate Sodexo’s options.. Up to that point, she’d worked he way up from dietician to General Manager. She had career stops running a hospital kitchen and various rungs of the Sodexo ladder. Her core expertise were leadership and operations.

When the RPO contract broke, it rapidly became the number one Board issue at the company. Arie was asked to lead a cross-divisional, cross market team. The job was to figure out whether to cancel the contract, modify it, transfer to a new vendor or bring it back in house.

They decided to build their own department. For the past seven years, Arie has been building a from scratch recruiting operation for a going concern. As such, she is able to utilize new approaches and technologies faster and more fully than someone making change in an ongoing operation. Arie’s industry influence stems from the fact that she runs the best observable “test kitchen”. Her ability to experiment and prosper comes from a long career as a one-company employee.

That’s a pretty potent counterpoint to the fast moving social media jet set who tend to dominate the conversation in the blogosphere. Arie has figured out how to work in that environment as well. The last time I sat down to talk with her, it was just before her first skydive. That trip was organized by a few from the social media scene. Go to a conference and you are liable to find her as she searches for new things to try.

A significant part of Arie’s astonishing ability to set an example comes from he three year planning process. She takes the business of planning Sodexo’s growth as a Recruiting shop very seriously. Each year, the planning process looks at a three year horizon and settle in on a few significant experiments in technology and or process improvement. By establishing a pattern of successes, she’s able to increasingly pull the organization along with her.

At Sodexo, there is a big picture for Recruiting. Arie sees her job as being the end of talent hoarding and the reducer of friction between divisional assignments. She believes that the organization’s success depends on making it easy for people to move around the company.

The company organizes its outreach to candidates along three lines:

• Internal
• External
• Rehire

Each group is offered different access and different routing through job opportunities and Recruiting community/collateral. By customizing the candidate experience in this way, Arie’s team minimizes the effort required to fill a slot.

She continues to cut new paths in the woods; a new mobile app (divided along the three experience lines) with Twitter and Blog access is the next project in the pipe.

Arie demonstrates the kind of leadership you can only learn with an extended stay in a specific company. Groomed by the internal team and buttressed by her successes, she is learning to take influence out of the company and into the industry.

These days, Sodexo Recruiting is evolving to include workforce planning. “We are looking for very long range impact from hiring”, Arie says.”We need to know where we get the talent and how those people will mature with us.”

That notion is backed by a talent community of 250,000 people. Sodexo tailors its interactions with the community members with tactics that range from regular birthday cards to online education. Again, she’s setting an example that others can follow.

The bottom line is that Arie Ball demonstrates that operational excellence can be the heart and soul of influence. Keep your eyes on her. She hasn’t yet finished having an impact on the industry.

Influence is not necessarily a popularity contest. Our culture has its fair share of shallow, well meaning people who are well liked. And, there is little reason to overlook the dramatic impact that charisma, good looks and the spotlight have on decision making. In some ways, popularity matters terribly. In others, it’s an irritant at best.

Power is the ability to make things happen. Influence is not so clear. It is the ability to have an affect on things. Where the use of power means that a thing will happen, the use of influence increases the likelihood that something will happen. Power causes; influence affects.

Imagine that there is a spectrum.

One one end, popularity is the dominant force. This is the arena in which pop stars, television personalities, professional athletes and cinema celebrities operate. They influence culture and decision making that ranges from fashion to politics. Advertisers routinely look to this group as a way of shaping potential customer perceptions. The link between popularity and the decision that wants to be influenced is tenuous. This is a realm in which knowing how to communicate is more important than what is communicated.

At the other end is deep professional competence. In this realm, influence is rooted in subject matter expertise. These are the thinkers and doers who work in or on the arena. They influence the culture by demonstrating what actually works and what doesn’t or by creating the structures through which the world is better understood. The link between the decision under consideration and expertise is a very clear thing. This is the world in which being right can matter more than saying it well.

If influence were only as simple as that spectrum.

Influence always happens in some context. Whether it’s decision making in the organization, electing a government, family politics, determining best practices for an industry or introducing new ideas to any group, influence is a part of the process. Its use can be sophisticated and smooth or amateurish and crude. Generally, the more subtle the influence, the more effective it is.

In the technology arena, where new ideas are the stock and trade, influence takes a variety of shapes. Marketers try to increase visibility and understanding. Technologists often bank on the quality of their insight and execution. Evangelists prod and persuade. Investors work to handicap the game.

Some of the most interesting stories come from practitioners who follow their passion to create technology companies. Fueled by subject matter expertise and that powerful wisdom that comes from knowing what you’re talking about, they pour themselves into tech companies. Along the way, they pick up lessons in software development, marketing, capitalization, cash flow and executive leadership.

Carmen Hudson, this week’s addition to our Top 100 Influencers list is one of those practitioners turned technologists. The founder of TweetAJob, Carmen comes to the tech startup scene with a deep background in Talent Acquisition. Here’s the meat of her bio:

Carmen’s expertise is in helping clients build the right sourcing and recruiting strategies, and implementing them in the real world of limited budgets, competing priorities, and highly competitive recruiting environments. She consults and trains companies to help them leverage high ROI solutions for big sourcing, social media, and technology implementation initiatives.

Carmen is a self-described “recruiting geek” who has spent years learning, creating, and sharing best practices around sourcing. She gets that technology – for all of its hype – is still a means to an end, not an end in itself. Her corporate experience includes Yahoo!, where she was Senior Manager, Talent Acquisition. At Yahoo! she led the strategic sourcing team, revitalizing the employee referral program and Yahoo’s employer brand. The team was awarded a coveted Yahoo! Superstar Award, an ERE Excellence award and various recruiting and advertising industry awards.

Prior to joining Yahoo!, she was manager, Global Strategic Sourcing for Starbucks Coffee Corporation, where she developed sourcing strategies and recommended resources and tactics to support U.S. retail management hiring. She has also held senior talent acquisition roles at Microsoft, Amazon.com and Capital One.

Anyone who spends time with Carmen knows her as an extrovert with an abiding passion for Talent Acquisition. She has paid her dues mastering the complexities of the profession. Along the way, she’s picked up plenty of awards and public recognition.

Like most of our influencers, Carmen has a crystal focus and executes in a number of settings. While she’s piloting TweetAJob, she’s also consorting with Jason Warner and John Vlastelica at Recruiting Toolbox. This consultancy is one of two or three national organizations with the capacity to really turbocharge corporate recruiting efforts.

Carmen and I talked for a while about the trends shaping HR today. She described the ‘perfect storm’. It’s the combination of

• Economic Disruption
• Extraordinary Productivity
• Technology Advances

In her eyes, these three things conspire to create an employment market in which supply and demand are mismatched. Today, Software literacy is an assumed baseline. The ability to navigate complex, changing concepts is an essential part of workplace participation. Finally, the economic disruption has created a class of people who don’t understand that they’ve become irrelevant and need to acquire new skills.

She tells a persuasive story about the disconnect between job hunters and the companies that want to employ them. The people on the inside have no understanding of the dynamics of the job hunt. The people on the outside do not understand the complexities inside the organization. This is the root of reported bad experiences in the job application process.

As a tech entrepreneur, Carmen is a spotter of new technologies and approaches. She says, "If I was a silicon Valley recruiter, I’d be watching all of the location based check ins on Castro Street". She is certain that the process needs a universal application and that games have a limited future.

One look at Carmen will tell you that, all modesty aside, she is a standout in the field. She’s focused on the development and delivery of excellence in her profession. She influences by doing.

Big accomplishment often catapults the person behind it to a position of influence in the industry. This is true of the high powered HR VPs who have worked over years to achieve industry prominence. It also happens to entrepreneurs who sell their companies.

Susan Strayer, Marriott International’s Senior Director, Global Employer Brand and Marketing, is going places fast because of what she accomplishes. In an extremely short time, Strayer has added dramatic energy to Marriott’s employment branding endeavors. When the company recently launched a game to drive employment branding, Susan was behind it.

While the Military (both ours and theirs) use gaming for recruiting purposes, it’s hardly a conventional approach to employment branding. Susan’s accomplishment suggests an inflection point in corporate recruiting. Whether or not companies choose to ‘game-ify’ their online efforts, the drive to build a loyal cadre of potential employees (by making the relationship fun and educational) is now on in earnest.

(Have you seen the game? Go to the Marriott Careers page and click on the MyMarriottHotel link. If you want more detail, Strayer gives the best orientation.)

Speaking about the game, Susan said,

"It’s not a simulation, test or training, and it’s definitely not meant to be. Further, we’re not looking to immediately correlate hires to game play. What we do want to do though is twofold: first, create brand awareness (in global growth markets where the Marriott name isn’t well-known) and engagement where it is. Second, we want to reinforce the pride our employees have in working for Marriott. Many of them have a deep connection and affiliation with the company and the brand and in combination with the power of employee referrals we see it as a great opportunity."

The most interesting thing about the game is that it serves related but different functions in Marriott’s various global markets. In some countries (China, India) the game is positioned to help potential employees demonstrate the status of work in a hotel. By showing the managerial complexity of the job, prospective team members can garner parental support. In other, more mature markets, the game shows that Marriott has a surprising edge.

Listening to Strayer describe her project, you can’t help admiring the simplicity of the solution. While the market by market requirements are complex, the game functions admirably to deliver a variety of objectives.

Part of the accomplishment involves helping a large conservative company execute nimbly in the fast paced web markets. While Marriott operates one of the top 25 largest ecommerce sites, it’s not a brand that immediately suggests innovation or quick market adaptation. For an HR operation to make a move like this from a platform like that suggests some interesting things.

Strayer is quick to tell you about the support and encouragement she gets from her management structure. It’s a universe that includes a blogging CEO and an array of social media experiments. But, make no mistake, subtlety, finesse and sheer determination play a great part in Susan’s success.

Influence can come from a position, an audience, through sponsorship, because of credibility, a reputation built over time a relationship with a powerful person and a host of other channels. It can be seen in the way that ideas travel, conversation spreads or things get done. In Susan’s case, per stance and vision gave her a shortcut through the noise. Delivering a solution that raises the bar for competitors is hard to do in our industry. The Marriott game definitely raises the bar.

Susan’s story includes time at Home Depot, Arthur Andersen, the Corporate Executive Board, Ritz-Carlton and now, Marriott. Throughout her journey, she’s published (here’s her Amazon page) and built a side business in career coaching/personal branding.

Recently, Susan focused her external projects into a new company, Exaqueo. In Latin, ex +acqueo means something like ‘standing out from the familiar’.

"Each contender has a chance to step above the fray. Stand out. Get picked. Contenders have to show specific strengths, characteristics and qualities. Ones that are remembered. That’s the essence of a brand. Brands thrive on being unique. On getting noticed. In a good way. In a way that connects the brand with the right customer or the perfect opportunity.

The idea of the company is to deliver powerful competitive advantage to people who are willing to invest in their personal brands.

That’s where Susan shines. From innovation in employment branding technique to personal branding, she is laying the path for the emergence of branding as a discipline that is woven throughout HR.

With the release of the employment branding game, she’s earned her place in the larger industry conversation.

 

Influence is not celebrity (although celebrities can be influential). As we’ve seen throughout this long running series, influence is not a Klout score, a stock value on EmpireAvenue or even (gasp) a Traackr score (like we currently use in our automated rankings). Each of these is a useful way to learn about people and their impact.

The rise of social media thrust a bunch of people into the limelight before they had a chance to really develop competency in their professions. They’ve become interestingly influential celebrities in our niche; long on style, short on substance. That’s not all that unusual. It just used to be reserved for popular culture (where style always trumps substance). The early 2000s will be remembered as a time when celebrity was democratized and became a neighborhood phenomenon.

Still, the puzzle of influence remains worth studying. As a tool, no HR professional can get their work done without knowing how to utilize influence. That’s what people in staff positions do. Folks with line responsibilities have power and authority. People on staff have responsibility and influence. (This, more than anything, is at the root of HR’s status in most organizations.)

I took a 90 day break in the flow of people to the Top 100 list. After 18 months of relentless study of the topic (in this project and the related niche algorithms), it was time to absorb some new perspective. Josh LeTourneau has been kind enough to repeatedly insist that I was missing something by not considering Social Network Analysis. He demonstrates one kind of influence that’s hard to measure: annoying persistence rooted in being right. (Don’t you just hate that?)

At any rate, the underlying message in social network analysis is that some people are at the hub of things actually getting done. The key to practical influence (which is the ability to get things done without authority or resources) is to occupy a position in the network that gets the most done with the least effort. Generally, this looks like a small close inner circle composed of people who have broad reach.

It’s no accident that Trisha McFarlane‘s roots are in doing HR in a Public Relations firm. She is the next person on the list (number 77) because she demonstrates an astonishing combination of online networking, good grass roots organizational development, network finesse and working excellence in the profession. Anyone who happens by Trisha is inevitably pulled into her various plans and schemes for world domination.

When you look at her online artifacts (Blog, Twitter, Another Blog, Linkedin), you discover a relentless commitment to doing the actual work. In an era where influence is reserved for those who can afford it (and have the marketing budget to back it up), Trisha solves the resource problem another way.

“Trisha views her role of a HR professional as more than just trying to have a seat at the table. It is her attempt to guide employees through the work experience. She wants to become an integral part of their performance and sometimes, wants to be able to sing and dance right along with them. Trisha also does what she can to make the HR experience a smooth one for leaders and employees.”

After putting the kids to bed at night (she has an amazing set of seven year old twins), she gets some sleep. Then, she gets up at 4:00am to do her non-work network development.

4:00am. And her husband swears it’s every morning! 4:00AM.

So, what has she accomplished with no resources and no authority?
Trisha is the heart and soul of HRevolution, the network of HR professionals who have a social media edge and rely on each other for professional support. This is the ultimate social media driven grassroots organization. Charging a pittance for participation, HRevolution routinely hosts the next generation of HR Leadership in contexts in which they can get to know each other better. Unlike most conferences and conventions, the people who attend HRevolution look forward to being with each other and are happy to give up weekend time (and often their own resources) to be there.

There is nothing like it anywhere else in the industry.

Bill Kutik, the HR industry’s center, figured out what Trisha was doing when he visited HREvolution last year. This year, HRevolution is the opening event in bill’s HRTech week.

Trisha is particularly modest about her accomplishments (though you can see the PR training at the edges). She firmly believes that building a network of collaborators is the way one ‘evolves’ HR. She’s making it stick.

Top 100 Influencers v 1.76 Bob Corlett

Great talent in the HR and Recruiting universe rarely arrives in a straight line fashion. None of the stories of the Top 100 to date involve a person who went to school to become a member of the HR Industry. This is particularly ironic when you think about the amount of energy that gets spent trying to get the right people trained for the right job. Given the serendipity with which HR influencers arrive on the scene, it’s surprising that there isn’t an HR Silo for Talent Randomization.

Bob Corlett is a great example. He began his career as a Systems Engineer at EDS. (Bob says that you should interpret ‘Systems Engineer” as ‘business process guy’). In his early career, he helped companies map and transform processes. Once the discipline waas formalized, it was called business process reengineering. Bob began back in the days of Deming and Total Quality.

That background is the essence of Corlett’s impressive contribution. Although he doesn’t use the word, Corlett practices a Kaizen approach to life and work. Simply, Kaizen is about a sustained focus on focus upon continuous improvement; a relentless search for the better way. Corlett applies his Systems Engineering skills to the delivery of talent and the building of his business.

From his view, influence is the essential element of effective work as a headhunter (which he is) or a leader in HR. Influence is what allows people to see possibilities. Influence changes the level of appreciation for the object of influence. It has two basic elements.

First of all, you have to meet the bare minimum threshold for credibility. He calls it ‘curb appeal’. Do you look legit and are you an actual expert or are you just another poseur. Without curb appeal and expertise, there is no influence.

The second component is the make or break aspect. Do you get to frame the issue? Once you have the ability to shape the conversation, you have everything you need.

Influencers shape thought with a combination of expertise, credibility and the willingness and capacity to own the entire argument. They probably don’t spend much time counting up the dimensions of their own personal influence. They are much more likely to be making things happen.

One of the key issues in the measurement and assessment of influence online is the virtual impossibility of getting a handle on people’s ability to have impact. The way that influence manifests itself spans the entire range from motivating to destroying motivator.

Preventing things is as influential as making them happen. And, organizations and industries need both aspects of influence.

Corlett’s Recruiting process includes a massive reengineering of the entire process from the job narrative to the number of people who get to see resumes. Here’s how he describes the process of engaging a candidate:

Step 1. Pass the first smell test.

Step 2. Tell the candidate an interesting story about the company or the job.

Step 3. Then ask, “Do you want to have a conversation?”

Step 4. Have a very disciplined phone conversation focused on the prospect’s competencies

Step 5. Candidate isn’t sold, she has a conversation about fit. Reads the blueprint has professional interview, not sales pitch.

Step 6. Help them be consistent in the interview process

Bob understands that there is more to the game than perfecting the process. Recruiting is changing. Increasingly, HR Departments, Vendors and other ecosystem members are all becoming publishing houses. The next wave of industry innovation is all about content development and management. Corlett is way out ahead of the game on this.

The company’s newsletter is designed to arm the decision makers who are their customers. The newsletter covers talent and business strategy questions. The fact that he edits it and writes for it is no small tribute to his understanding of where the industry is headed. Here are a couple of examples.

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And, just for emphasis, here’s his current bio:

 

Bob Corlett is the founder and president of Staffing Advisors – a retained search firm in Washington DC.  Despite being half the cost of everyone else in exec search, or perhaps because of it (their fees average  12.5% of annual salary) they have earned the staffing industry’s only award for exceptional client service – Inavero’s 2011 “Best of Staffing” award.

His company is totally focused on serving small to midsize businesses, associations and nonprofits – so you may notice that Bob does not seem to care much about hiring problems outside of that realm, or branching into other services.

As the developer of The Results-Based Hiring Process®, Bob is one of Washington’s better known thought leaders on staffing and recruiting.  You can read his blog posts in The Washington Business Journal, in his email newsletters, on his company blog – The Staffing Advisor, and on Twitter. (Of course there is a separate blog, twitter account and Facebook fan page for job seekers).

Bob volunteers with the RecruitDC unconference crowd and also runs his own a face-to-face networking group for HR and staffing pros, called the Staffing Alliance of Maryland Employers.

Top 100 v 1.75 Bill Boorman

Explosive chaos. That’s what the first days of the universe were like. Explosive chaos with a kajillion undifferentiated moving parts. That’s how the Creative forces of nature work. Never pretty, rarely rational. Science was invented to try to describe creative processes.

They are like the proverbial sausage factory. What goes into sausage making is somewhat less pleasant than the final output.

Hanging out with Bill Boorman is like a visit to the start of the universe or a close inspection of a sausage factory.

I’m reminded of Maria in the Sound of Music.

“How do you solve a problem like Maria?

How do you catch a cloud and pin it down?

How do you keep a wave upon the sand?

How do you hold a moonbeam in your hand?”

Bill is the progenitor of the TRU Conference (The Recruiting Unconference) series and the current Godfather of the global unconference movement in Recruiting. He’s the kind of super connector that you can only meet in the global recruiting marketplace. Bill simply knows everyone. A conversation with Bill is like standing next to a waterfall of information (I’d say Fire hose but the job boards have a trademark on firehouses).

Boorman is a classic example of the way that some kinds of influence work. Some connections are gateways and some are cul de sacs. Some connections are greedy and try to skim something off of each transaction. Some are additive so that each transaction is better for passing through the connector.

Bill is the quintessential value added connector who does huge volume work. The throngs of people at a TRU are the hungriest and most innovative players on the recruiting world stage. Boorman feeds them a steady diet of conversation, status bending interaction and novel solutions to problems.

A TRU Event is an exercise in disruption. While they are not for the faint hearted, the events feature strong dialog, intimate discussion and limitless networking. They are the antithesis of a traditional buttoned down conference.

We talked about influence.

I define real influence and on-line influence as two very different things.

Real influence I see as behavior, action or opinion changing that has a lasting impact. On-line influence has less long term impact. I favour the fast company definition, provoking an action on line. This can include being a trusted source of links, mentions, likes, link backs etc. I think it goes beyond pure follower/fan numbers, but relevant reach is a factor. (The key being relevance of audience.)

I’d like to see more work done on measuring relevant influence based on personal criteria. It would be good to see an app developed where you can measure “influence” in your own area of interest rather than over the internet as a whole. This could be very targeted around a niche, an extension of what you do with Trakkr. Using the term “influence” for on-line activity causes the most controversy or confusion.

I think the term “impact” would be more appropriate. It was interesting to note your comment at #trulondon that on-line influencers are rarely practices in the area, and is more likely to be vendors or consultants who benefit from the exposure on-line activity can bring.

I asked Bill who he thought were the five most influential people in our industry.

1. Arie Ball – VP Talent Attraction – Sodexo.

   Sodexo are one of the few businesses that use social recruiting on scale. The results are astounding in terms of volume of hires, range of hires and cost of hire. The team operates virtually across the states and they do some great work in making this effective. Arie is also humble and very willing to share.

2. Paul Jacobs – NZ

   The graduate recruiting programme for Deloitte in NZ was astounding, operating through a Facebook channel, Paul was one of the first to use live streaming to connect last years intake with potential new recruits. Paul got together a team of bloggers to share their story over their first year creating on-line celebrities. He combined this with a series of barbecues at various campuses across NZ to meet the bloggers. This catapulted Deloitte employer brand to the top of the pile and significantly improved the quality of hire. Paul also runs the Asia-pacific community promoting great work that goes largely un-noticed in this region.

3. Jacco Valkenburg – Recruit2

   Jacco has huge recruiter networks on LinkedIn and Twitter but chooses to stat largely under the radar. Collectively, he probably has the largest recruiter network on the globe but never shows up on any lists. (This is quite a Dutch thing.) He figured out how to monetize LinkedIn before most people. His aggregated blog feed on twitter has 36,500 followers alone. He is constantly growing his networks by being strict over the quality of content and group rules. His LinkedIn books are probably the best around to.

4. Mark Rice – Andsome People.

   A recent one for me. Mark has been running multiple social recruiting campaigns with real results. These are quite different (and I’d say above all simple) in approach. I have only noticed his work over the last 9 months, and he shared real case studies at #trulondon. I think his work rivals most others in this field anywhere.

5. Paul Harrison – Carve Consulting.

   Paul’s work has moved on from social recruiting to Social media in general. He is innovative in his approach and was the first to switch me on to social listening/monitoring, twinterns and a host of other areas. I’m a big fan of Paul’s work.
    

In the UK I would also have to list Peter Gold, Andy Headworth,Matt Alder, Jon Ingham, Steve Evans and Felix Wetzel as people I follow and learn from regularly. Glen Cathey – K – Force and Craig Fisher – Ajax Social Media/TNL are both much cleverer than me when it comes to sourcing and technology. They are also still practitioners in recruiting. Glens blog is like my reference source for sourcing, linked in and similar topics and is probably my number one blog. (Boolean Black Belt.) Craig was the first person I know who built a twitter community on a hashtag with TNL. I’m inspired by a lot of people. The list would probably go close to 50 if there was no limit. I consume information, particularly over what people are actually doing rather than talking about.

Bill talked about the new technologies that are currently catching his eye

• Augmented-reality – layar in particular – t

  T
  his has lots of applications across a wide range of sectors. I’m interested in how this fits in to recruiting and talent acquisition. I can see real benefits for careers fairs, events, on-boarding and retail recruiting. 

   

• Global community networks – Tribepad in particular –

  The platform they have built for G4S is astounding, providing a single portal for applications and a talent community fed by 125 different ATS in multiple languages. There are around 12 different technologies operating within Tribepad. It has been operational for a few months now and the scale of it blows me away. For internal communities, I also love Rypple that provides an internal social-media platform for feedback that users are familiar with. 

   

• Bernard Hodes Social plug in that links candidates profiles with career sites

  They excell at
  making the whole application process much quicker and easier, and the candidate more informed about the network. Similar to the Brave New talent app, I think any tool working across Facebook needs to allow the candidate to control what parts of their profile they give employers access to, with no need to friend, like or allow posting on the wall. With privacy being such a big issue, but FB being the major social platform, the company that cracks it will fly. These 2 are the best I’ve seen yet, along with Work4.

• Bullhorn reach –

  I’ve had the beta with a few clients for a while and I’m impressed. The areas I like about it are the link between the operational back-end and the public social profile. The social profile has a big emphasis on SEO that makes recruiters rank highly in searches, and there’s plans to integrate rankings from candidates and customers, as well as showing current activity. A potential candidate can find the profile and see just what a recruiter is working on now and what success they are having. I’m waiting to see how the automated content collection, posting and sharing pans out. It has potential to really build a social footprint quickly; the risk is that it takes away engagement. That said, there’s lots of aspects about the product that I think will set Bullhorn apart in this area. Art Papas is a real visionary.

Like a whirling dervish, Boorman is a constantly moving target who dispenses nearly mystical benefit to the people in his orbit. His influence comes from a combination of relentless work and astonishing generosity. He’s likely to become an institutional pillar on the Global HR Stage.