Author Archives: Robert Merrill

About Robert Merrill

Robert is a Husband, Dad, Recruitinator, Geek. Mormon. Smart-Alec. See more about him at Google+

Stop Watching Us

By
Pro tip: Hit shift twice on any page to highlight/share! #more info...

Go, now to http://stopwatching.us

Sign a petition to demand the US Congress reveal what is actually happening under the disguise of National Security by the NSA.

cameravideosurveillance20272.png

Dear Members of Congress,

We write to express our concern about recent reports published in the Guardian and the Washington Post, and acknowledged by the Obama Administration, which reveal secret spying by the National Security Agency (NSA) on phone records and Internet activity of people in the United States.

The Washington Post and the Guardian recently published reports based on information provided by an intelligence contractor showing how the NSA and the FBI are gaining broad access to data collected by nine of the leading U.S. Internet companies and sharing this information with foreign governments. As reported, the U.S. government is extracting audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs that enable analysts to track a person’s movements and contacts over time. As a result, the contents of communications of people both abroad and in the U.S. can be swept in without any suspicion of crime or association with a terrorist organization.

Leaked reports also published by the Guardian and confirmed by the Administration reveal that the NSA is also abusing a controversial section of the PATRIOT Act to collect the call records of millions of Verizon customers. The data collected by the NSA includes every call made, the time of the call, the duration of the call, and other “identifying information” for millions of Verizon customers, including entirely domestic calls, regardless of whether those customers have ever been suspected of a crime. The Wall Street Journal has reported that other major carriers, including AT&T and Sprint, are subject to similar secret orders.

This type of blanket data collection by the government strikes at bedrock American values of freedom and privacy. This dragnet surveillance violates the First and Fourth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution, which protect citizens’ right to speak and associate anonymously, guard against unreasonable searches and seizures, and protect their right to privacy.

We are calling on Congress to take immediate action to halt this surveillance and provide a full public accounting of the NSA’s and the FBI’s data collection programs. We call on Congress to immediately and publicly:

- Enact reform this Congress to Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act, the state secrets privilege, and the FISA Amendments Act to make clear that blanket surveillance of the Internet activity and phone records of any person residing in the U.S. is prohibited by law and that violations can be reviewed in adversarial proceedings before a public court;
- Create a special committee to investigate, report, and reveal to the public the extent of this domestic spying. This committee should create specific recommendations for legal and regulatory reform to end unconstitutional surveillance;
- Hold accountable those public officials who are found to be responsible for this unconstitutional surveillance.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Other links: http://www.occupy.com/article/stop-watching-us-new-petition-website-demands-congressional-investigation-nsa-surveillance

This is Water (watch this now)

By
Pro tip: Hit shift twice on any page to highlight/share! #more info...

My friend and colleague recommended this video to me and noted that I needed to watch it.

I am glad I took his advice seriously.

In this season of graduation and commencement, and at my work I have been welcoming intern after intern as well as new college grads into their new life here in the big world, and it crosses my mind that although this speech sounds like it’s about something as mundane and unimportant as water, it is really a commentary about everything that is really, really matters in life.

Watch the video. Does it change anything in you? I’d like to hear your thoughts.

#Given to the 2005 graduating class of Kenyon College by David Foster Wallace. Edited and set to film by Robert Johnstone.

Well Played, Flickr. Well Played

By
Pro tip: Hit shift twice on any page to highlight/share! #more info...

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, it might also be a great way to find programmers.

To catch <strike>un</strike>suspecting programmers in the act of reading Flickr's code for new ideas in design, Flickr inserted this snippet in their code's header for all (geeks) to read.

To catch unsuspecting programmers in the act of reading Flickr’s code for new ideas in design, Flickr inserted this snippet in their code’s header for all (geeks) to read.

Since the web was designed to be open, it is well known by web devs that viewing source code on a nicely designed website is a great way to steal learn new tricks of great web design. If the new Flickr grabs your eye (and you’re geeky enough to want to peek under the hood) this is a great way to incent web-geeks to look closer at just joining them (Yahoo!) rather than trying to proverbially try to beat them at their game.

My concern? How do you know who has applied from reading the code!? I would give viewers a special link that tags the user as coming from the CODE not just the web in general… then you can parse the g33ks from the h@x0rs.

3 Ways to Boost Your LinkedIn Network’s Value

By
Pro tip: Hit shift twice on any page to highlight/share! #more info...

LinkedIn Contacts AppHere’s a super quick pro-tip on how you can get more value from your LinkedIn network in three flavors:

Related: 5 Plugins for Outlook Users with Gmail Envy

Channeling Bob Vila: Great Recruiting Requires Great Recruiters

By
Pro tip: Hit shift twice on any page to highlight/share! #more info...

Robert Joseph "Bob" Vila is an American home improvement television show host known for This Old House, Bob Vila's Home Again, and Bob Vila. ~Wikipedia

Robert Joseph “Bob” Vila is an American home improvement television show host known for This Old House, Bob Vila’s Home Again, and Bob Vila. ~Wikipedia

Bottom Line Up Front: Great recruiting is done by great recruiters, not computers or tools. If you want Bob Villa’s results, hire Bob Villa in the first-place.

An article over at ZDNet by Brian Sommer talks about some great HR technology and how adding some of the right technologies can improve a company’s technical recruiting.

Overall, it’s a good article, and there’s some good points in it, but I have to take Sommer to task on a few points–namely the tenor of the post that dropping in some tech can turn HR folks into great technical recruiters overnight.

The article references startup HireVue. I love HireVue. In fact, their in my backyard so-to-speak, and I have been watching them from their infancy and wish them the greatest success.

But, if an HR leader out there thinks that implementing a tool will suddenly uplevel their technical recruiting prowess, they have another think coming.

That’s like running down to Home Depot and buying a mitre-saw, belt-sander and a great assortment of (salesman recommended!) cutting-edge chisels and bring them home to your demolished kitchen space… mqdefaultlay them out on the sub floor, put on your leather toolbelt and expect the abilities of a master carpenter to suddenly distill on your mind like channeling the life-force of Bob Vila.

Tech recruiting, like excellent sales recruiting or really deep financial recruiting (think Sr Accountant with 8+yrs international tax-code experience, and (of course) big 4 consulting background that lives within 50 miles of Milwaukee) is hard.

The article got this part completely right: “The other part, the really hard part, is sourcing great candidates” and for sourcing great candidates you need three parts:

  1. A top-level recruiter (think “hunter” in salesperson terms) who “gets” the market **AND** knows how to manage all the inflows coming from #2 and #3 (think “farmer” in salesperson terms)
  2. Great employees who are first willing to TALK with trusted colleagues about the jobs available at their company (if they won’t, you have deeper problems. See your HR therapist ASAP, your company culture is dead) and second capable of interviewing very well.
  3. A system to manage the ebb and flow of the interview cycle through seeding, planting, nurturing and harvesting (closing the deal).

Of course, most companies jump to #3 because it’s the easiest thing to apply change to (get a PO, put out an RFP, spend some cash, have some integration consultants camp out in your conference room for two months and *poof* you have a system!).

What they forget is two-fold:

First: Systems do not need to be technical.

In fact, they SHOULDN’T be technical. They need to reflect real, workflow that makes sense for the organization at that time. It can even be (gasp!) paper-based. I know a cool company who recently sold to a very large international software firm whose “recruiting system” was literally a set of three manila folders in the desk of the receptionist. One that said, “new resumes”, another that said, “Interviewed–passed” and another that said, “Interviewed–good”. The HR manager literally reviewed the three folders at the end of each day and made offers (with the managers approvals) to the ones in the “good” folder.

The end result is that, systems are the last thing that you need if you’re trying to improve your technical recruiting. Great recruiting requires great recruiters. You can approximate some of that using technology at times, but if it’s not implemented in a way that makes sense to the organization, and to the candidates, you’re creating more of a mess than you’re solving.

I see this all the time:

  • Company needs people hired ASAP.
  • Internal resources can’t handle the flow.
  • Internal resources say they don’t have enough of the right technology or systems.
  • Company invests money in technology systems to improve recruiting.
  • Company has a great, expensive system, but still seems to not get the hires they need, or worse, uses an expensive system to hire mediocre people.
  • Hiring managers, frustrated with the mediocre people, or lack of hiring, hire agencies to find the people they really need.
  • Agency recruiters, also called head headhunters, completely blow away the internal systems (because they are recruiters not computers) and the company becomes addicted like a heroin drip. At $30,000.00 a hit.
  • Half a million dollars later, the company tries to stop some of the bleeding by hiring a recruiter, but sadly thinks that one or two junior recruiters can compete with the agency experts.
  • Waters: muddy.
  • Rogue managers still hiring agencies as if the internal recruiter(s) don’t exist.
  • CFO of the company institutes moratorium on external recruiting through agencies. Senior recruiters move on if they can’t get internal buy-in (no job is worse to a recruiter than being unable to recruit well. The only thing worse to a recruiter than a hiring freeze is incompatible/uncooperative managers)
  • Junior recruiter(s) can’t handle the flow.
  • Hiring managers either leave or eventually get their way.
  • The system the company invested in early on is scrapped as it was implemented by people other than recruiters.
  • Senior recruiting leadership finally hired. Costs of delaying total more than $1 million.

My advice: technology is great! Last year I hired personally more than 200 engineers and technical people to the company where I work. I could not have done this without great technology, and a great company culture. But all of these things have their place. Technology should be put in place after you have a platform to build on, and platforms are best built by experts in that field.

So, before swiping the corporate AMEX on some great systems and technology, remember this: If you want Bob Villa’s results, hire Bob Villa in the first-place!

Share a Connection, Share a Coke

Don’t Forget: We’re All Human

By
Pro tip: Hit shift twice on any page to highlight/share! #more info...

Coca-Cola has been pressing their “happiness” brand forward lately in some interesting ways.  They want people to associate having a Coke with having a good time or being happy.

One of the interesting ways they are doing this is with vending machines installed in two locations that have live web-cams connecting the two of them in order to connect people who would otherwise likely never meet because of social or political boundaries that are keeping them otherwise disconnected and, more-likely, discontented with the other.

India and Pakistan, for example, have had tense relations over the last several years since becoming simultaneously independent (from Britain) in 1947.

This interesting social experiment brings people from across the Pakistan/Indian border together in a shared experience where they both get to experience something of a new friendship… and a Coke.

The takeaway message for me is that we all need to remember that no matter who that other person is, where they are from, what they look or sound like, they are human and they are part of our family.

There’s a great writeup on the machines at FastCoCreate:

No ordinary vending machines, the Small World Machines, created by Coke and Leo Burnett, were equipped with full-length webcams that allowed participants to see each other and interact in real time. “We used special active-shutter 3-D technology that projected a streaming feed onto glass while filming through that glass at the same time,” explains Leo Burnett Executive Creative Director Jon Wyville. “This allowed people to make direct eye contact and touch hands.” The touch-facilitating machines are the latest creative usage of beverage dispensers engineered by Coke. In the past, the beverage maker has employed them for smaller-scale happiness-inducing gestures, such as delivering unexpected treats to college students.

The high-tech Small World Machines, built by The SuperGroup, a digital agency in Atlanta, were placed in malls–one in Lahore, Pakistan, the other in New Dehli, India–in March. Jackie Jantos Tulloch, Coke’s global creative director, was on the New Dehli side when the machines were activated for the first time. “When the machines came on, there was just this really powerful energy–laughter, smiles, cheers,” Jantos Tulloch says. “People were waving frantically to each other because the idea of this type of seamless, live interaction is so unusual.”

I’ve found that the most intense changes can happen to someone’s perspective on life within five minutes of really, truly connecting with someone from another country, another race, another religion or even another city.

Like Mark Mobius wrote in his wish to 2013 Graduates yesterday on LinkedIn:

The opportunities today for high school graduates are virtually unlimited. The internet brings the world to your doorstep; not only to learn instantaneously about other places and make fast and cheap travel arrangements, but to make connections with people on every continent and in every time zone. But turning those electronic connections into real human connections is truly life-changing.

I agree.