Men: 40, Women: 6.

REEEEAAALLLY?

Because they show “ties” for several of the top 40 listings, there are actually 46 people on Fortune’s 40 Under 40, an annual list of business movers and shakers.  13% Women.  You have to get to #20 (#21 really) to see the first woman.  How very sad.  Fortune has been accused of tilting the list for business and political reasons, but even if they didn’t do that, in 2011, if a premier business magazine can dare to publish a list like this with only 6 women, it says many awful things.

Let’s give Fortune the benefit of the doubt, and say they were honest in their subjective choices.  This almost makes things worse!  If they really could not find more than 6 women out of the top 46 people in the country who are propelling business forward with innovation and leadership, then clearly women don’t have equal opportunity.  There is a glass ceiling.  We know that women have the talent, intelligence, drive and education.  Stats show that there are now more women college students, graduates, graduate students, etc. (than men in each case).  Women are excelling in all fields, but still not being given the money, power or authority in far too many cases.

I recruit executives in Aerospace and Defense, and when we source a candidate pool, we see far too few women in positions of authority and leadership, even though our clients would love to be more diverse in their executive teams.

I’m getting too old to see a list like this.  I thought society fixed this about 45 years ago, when women’s rights advocates finally got a fair hearing, in the industrialized world at least.

We read about the severe oppression of women in underdeveloped countries all the time, and of course that saddens all of us.  To console ourselves, we at least hope to be able to say “That doesn’t happen HERE.”  But this list makes me wonder.

I hope Gen X and Gen Y get this fixed soon!

A few others have written about this, so check out Paddy Hirsch’s article on Public Radio Marketplace, and
Cathy Kuprino in Forbes.

Tags: 40 under 40, fortune, where are the women on fortune's 40 under 40?, women

Passive candidates – the people every employer wants – the ones that are happy, productive, and not looking for a job – are often wary of recruiters.  They know that there is only a slim chance that the opportunity about which the recruiter is calling will be of interest to them.  They know that recruiters “Sell the Sizzle” – give them all the positive hype about the job.  And unfortunately, many of them have been burned by recruiters with questionable skills and/or questionable ethics.

Candidates often respond to this reflexive wariness by being very selective in what they say to the recruiter.  They play poker, and hold their cards close to the vest.  They release information in a protective way.  About their motivations, their compensation, their goals, possible competing opportunities, etc.

As they began to trust us more, they reveal more.  Sometimes this is different info, and it can take the recruiter by surprise.  Incremental truths work both in the positive and negative direction.  You might find out something that makes the candidate better or worse (from the perspective of the employer). The candidate we thought might NOT be a fit because their income is already over the range, suddenly reveals that he/she is making $20K LESS than we thought (they told us their whole package, not their base, when asked for base).  At the lower actual comp, which is new info to us, the candidate is now a better prospect (more likely to accept an offer).   The candidate who originally seemed very interested in our opportunity, suddenly accepts a different position we didn’t know about!  The candidate goes out of the picture.

Often the candidate’s story changes with each conversation, or with increasingly higher level screening.  For example, the first front-line recruiter to talk to the candidate might get one story, and then the partner in charge of the search might get new and different information later on.

Recruiters have to expect this.

What can we do about it?  First and foremost, be straightforward.  Make sure you tell the truth to your candidates.  Be a caring human being.  Let them know you take their candidacy seriously, and will respect their needs.  If you are a successful recruiter, you have good intuition.  Use it to size up the responses you are getting, and probe for hidden details and/or meanings.  Don’t be confrontational.  Be immediately accepting of new info, and thank the candidate for their candor.  Be different. Show the candidate you aren’t just the same as every other recruiter they’ve ever spoken to, and they might just treat you differently too.

I’m not calling all candidates liars – they are just protecting themselves.  But, partial truths, hidden truths and outright lies hurt everyone in the recruitment process.  The candidate loses credibility with the recruiter, now and for the future.  The recruiter and employer lose valuable time and waste effort.  It is on the recruiter to take the initiative in this.  Blame is a lose-lose proposition.  Do whatever it takes to create trust and rapport so that the candidate will be more inclined to tell you the full truth.

Tags: candidates, hidden truth, lies, recruiting, truth

If you are leaving a position voluntarily to take something new, there is a right way and a wrong way to leave your current company.  Here are a few tips:

Resign Classy:  See my earlier blog on How to Resign.  Keep it brief.  Don’t say anything negative, and don’t leave the door open for a counter offer – you’ve made your decision, right?

Be Discrete:  Don’t tell people too much about the new opportunity right away.  I’d compare this to talking about your next spouse before the ink is dry on the divorce.   You can always update people with more details later on.  It is better form to say less before you are gone.

Don’t Gloat or Complain:  Don’t speak negatively about your current company, or too glowingly about your new company.  Comes across as “sour grapes” either way.

Don’t Burn Bridges:  This is not the time to tell people off, or tell others in excruciating detail everything you hated about your current company.  Actually, it is never the right time to do such things!

Get References:  There may never be a better time to solicit letters of reference from people above you in the organization.  They want to maintain good will too.  Send them a note with “prompts” of what they could write- they are likely to turn your bullet points into their letter.  Be smart and send different bullets to different people, so your reference letters don’t all look the same.

Offer to Help People:  Others may also wish they were leaving.  Solidify your network by sincerely offering to help others down the road.

Years later, when you need your old teammates or superiors for a reference on yet another new job, you will be glad if you leave everyone smiling, on the best possible terms.

In an article today published on ere.net, Dr. John Sullivan and Master Burnett discuss Recruiting’s blunder of epic proportions, not connecting with mobile users. They provide the example of a guy named Joe, who checks all aspects of his life on his smart phone before getting out of bed, continues to do so on the subway, and throughout his day.   Joe has blown off company ABC’s traditional recruitment efforts, including email and In-mail, because he doesn’t know ABC company, and he isn’t looking for a job!  Then Joe’s friend Dave, who used to work for ABC, tweets him about the job, and on his way home he decides to take a look (still on the smart phone), but ABC’s career page isn’t optimized for mobile, and it doesn’t come up right.  He tries the company main page, but, no career link there, so he gives up and goes back to catching up on FB updates.

Sullivan and Burnett go on to describe how corporate America is losing the war for talent with this simple blunder of not reaching the smart phone user.  Only 8 of the Fortune 100 have Mobile career sites, and many others make their career pages hard to find.  They also provide suggestions on how to fix it.  If we want to recruit the passive job seeker, we have to get with it.  More and more young people will be living their lives on smart phones, and we don’t want to miss them!

Many years ago I wrote an article called “Benchmarking the Baldrige Awards” in which I discussed how all companies could act as if they were chasing what was then the gold standard for quality operations, even if they couldn’t meet all the criteria.  Such high aspirations would enable even small companies to create “performance excellence” they found in bigger, more established companies, and thereby, move in that direction themselves.

Recently, I read about this year’s MacArthur Foundation Grants, and thought, companies could emulate this principle with their people.  Each year, the MacArthur Foundation selects between 20-30 recipients for the five-year, $500,000 MacArthur Fellowship.  They award this “to talented individuals who have shown extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction. There are three criteria for selection of Fellows: exceptional creativity, promise for important future advances based on a track record of significant accomplishment, and potential for the fellowship to facilitate subsequent creative work.”

Past recipients have been writers, scientists, artists, social scientists, humanists, teachers, entrepreneurs, farmers, and fishermen, among many others.  They’ve given out 850 Fellowships in the past 30 years.  [The foundation also gives out hundreds of other meaningful grants each year, doing wondrous things in the world.]

I’m not suggesting that companies give their best people $500,000. to go off and do what they want to for five years (although some large companies actually do this with their R&D groups), BUT, couldn’t all companies do this on some scale?  Couldn’t a company say to a really talented, innovative person, “Take the next two months to pursue this idea, fully paid, and with a bonus if you succeed.”?  Or, couldn’t most companies create an award for the most innovative idea of each year coming from their team, one that advances the company’s interests in product, marketing, customer satisfaction, or any key functional discipline?

Many companies stifle creativity by having blinders to their employee’s ideas, and certainly many companies fail to facilitate “subsequent creative work” by making people stay on a rigid agenda.

We’re not all the MacArthur Foundation, but we can all encourage creativity, future-focused thinking, and stimulate the thinking and actions of our most creative people.  Think about how you could do this on a small scale inside your company.

By the way, for a day’s worth of inspiration, please do click on the link to read a few of the stories of this year’s winners.  They are indeed inspiring!

Tags: creativity awards, macarthur fellowship, macarthur foundation