Turndowns and Great Recruiters | Human Capital Institute Good recruiters love the hunt. They love the excitement of identifying a great prospect to pursue. Good recruiters also love the sales pitch. They get a thrill from reeling in that passive prospect and converting them into an active candidate. Good recruiters love the negotiations that lead to closing the deal. It’s exciting to see the deal come together. Everything seemed to be going well. The problem is that for each search, one person gets the job and a whole bunch of other people don’t. What GREAT recruiters know is that it’s just as important how you handle those who don’t get the job as it is how you handle the one that does. Get back to everyone. If you haven’t personally looked for job in a while, it’s hard to remember how much interviewing for a new job disrupts your life. Jason Lauritsen is the Vice President of Human Resources at Union Bank and Trust.

Disintermediation: The disruption to come for Education 2.0 - O'Reilly Radar On the largest of scales, we rarely have the luxury of designing technological systems. Instead, technologies happen to us – our experience of them being ragged, volatile, turbulent and rife with unexpected interactions. Tim’s posts about the emerging internet operating system (here and here) describe a great example of this – the winner of that particular fight being very much TBD and the factors determining victory or defeat being themselves the subject of lively debate. When we talk about Education 2.0, though, we are prone to think that we can design it – that we can consciously and deliberately lay the groundwork for its effective implementation. Our deliberation, though, may be less powerful than the larger forces driving its rapid evolution. One such force will certainly be disintermediation. Disintermediation is a process in which a middle player poised between service or product providers and their consumers is weakened or removed from the value chain.

Universities of the future Guest blog by Robert CosgraveDr. Robert Cosgrave writes on the future of tertiary education at My daughter is 4 years old. The 20th century was good to universities, marching them from an elite fringe to the very heart of the information economy. Four great changes will dominate the development of universities in the century ahead. The first is demographic. The second trend is economic. But concrete does not a university make. The third trend is technological. In the 1950s my parents had a realistic choice of exactly one university. The consequences of this for conventional tertiary institutions, used to steady business from local students, will be devastating. The fourth trend has potentially the greatest consequences in the long term. The historical narrative tells us that workers displaced by new technology riot a little, and then go on to find newer, more fulfilling jobs created by the new wealth. Like this: Like Loading...

What Businesses Can Learn From Nonprofits “If only not-for-profit organizations were run like for-profit companies …”, so goes the common refrain. From my experience, it’s the other way around. For-profit companies have much to learn from the nonprofit sector. This is the topic that Nancy Lublin, nonprofit leader and social marketing consultant to corporations, addresses in an article she wrote for Fast Company Magazine that is adapted from her new book, Zilch: The Power of Zero in Business. She writes: Everyone loves to talk about how not-for-profits need to behave more like businesses. BP, GM, Chrysler, Lehman Brothers, AIG – the list goes on and on. Alice Korngold, writing about Lublin’s book for a Fast Company blog, puts it this way: Think about how the employees of BP feel: Ashamed? Instead, many companies, like BP, employ managers who are driven by the size of their budgets.

Dad, Dad! He's looking up answers on his iPod! | Education IT | ZDNet.com So exclaims my 7-year old, running into the kitchen, eyes bright at the prospect of getting his older brother in trouble. His face fell as I asked why it was a problem for him to be looking up the answers to his history homework on the Internet. As I explained that it was OK to search for answers to questions on the Web, he walked dejectedly back to my laptop and harvested some more crops in Farmville. Clearly, the little guy was missing the point of the World Wide Web. As I went about my business in the kitchen, I couldn't help but feel sad (and completely upset with myself as the technology director of his school district) that somewhere along the way he got the impression that Googling was somehow equivalent to cheating. Same goes for being able to write and communicate effectively. I don't care if my kids don't remember who Zachary Taylor or Stephen Kearny were.

Workscape evolution This morning Jane Hart posted this 5-stage model of the evolution of workplace learning in an organization. I’ve re-worked the model to show: my domain is the workscape (the merger of work and learning, the learning ecosystem)overarching issue is who controls the curriculumlearning is a mix of formal and informal, not one or the other The further you go to the right in these models, the less the support provided by L&D. I advocate filling the gap with support of social and informal learning. LMS have their place: opening up and tracking performance of formal and compliance training. The Science and Art of Giving and Receiving Feedback We cannot underestimate the value of feedback. Feedback is an important aspect of building a constructive relationship - personal and professional. It is an invitation to interact. It can help improve our performance and change our behaviour. Most of us know and understand the importance of feedback. Several articles and books explain the right method and process to give feedback. Giving Feedback- Any time is a good time for giving feedback - Don’t wait for the end of the assignment/project/year to give an important piece of feedback that would have made the difference along the way. - Plan the feedback session – It is not a good idea to give feedback on an ad-hoc basis, in between other meetings, in the hallway, when surrounded by other people etc. - Be prepared – Don’t start or end in an abrupt manner. - Focus on performance not the person – This is by far the most important aspect of giving feedback. Remember, giving feedback is a two-way process.

Enduring Ideas: The strategic control map - McKinsey Quarterly - Strategy - Strategic Thinking The strategic control map uses market capitalization dynamics to help companies identify their biggest opportunities and threats, as well as to boost their odds of hunting for acquisition targets rather than being hunted themselves. Developed in 1996 by McKinsey’s Vijay D’Silva, Bob Fallon, and Asheet Mehta, the framework tracks the relationship between the two dimensions of market capitalization by plotting a company’s size (measured by book value) against its performance for shareholders (measured by market-to-book ratio). Podcast Enduring Ideas: The strategic control map Companies mapped in this way fall into four groups, each with its own challenges and corresponding strategic imperatives. Interactive The enduring power of the framework lies in its ability to visualize how changes in market capitalization affect the market for strategic control.

Intel launches new version of its Classmate PC for kids Intel has launched a new version of its Classmate PC, a learning laptop for kids. The new design is more flexible and durable than past Intel computers that promote electronic learning. Santa Clara, Calif.-based Intel unveiled the design at the Central Park Zoo in New York City. With the Classmate PC, Intel designs the hardware, software and chips for the system and provides a reference design for local computer makers in a variety of countries. The Classmate PC is a clamshell (opens and closes like a clam) and can be converted into a touchscreen tablet computer. “Our ethnographers have spent countless hours understanding how technology can help school age children here in the U.S. and around the world build the skills required for the future,” said Kapil Wadhera, acting general manager of Intel’s Emerging Markets Platform Group, which helped design the computer. The user interface is optimized for e-book applications and has a water-resistant keyboard, touchpad and screen.

For better customer relationships, concentrate first on employees The first priority of every company should be serving customers, right? Wrong, according to a new book from IT services firm CEO Vineet Nayar, called "Employees First, Customers Second: Turning Conventional Management Upside Down." This is the management philosophy that HCL uses to run its business, a philosophy it embraced back in 2005. Why should you listen? For one thing, HCL actually grew during the 2008 to 2009 recession, recording revenue expansion of 23.5 percent last year alone. The issue for Nayar is that managers don't spend enough time concentrating on empowering and "enthusing" the employees that have the most contact with customers. "Perhaps the biggest surprise for readers of my book will be that Western-style companies can achieve even greater success by making their approach to business more democratic. This is not to suggest that you should coddle your employees. But, the problem is that employees today feel undervalued, according to the research.