Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Category: business advice

  • Recruiting big data

    Recruiting big data

    One of the predictions for 2020 is that decade’s business successes will be those who use big data well.

    A good example of a big data tool is recruitment software Evolv that helps businesses predict not only the best person to hire but also who is likely to leave the organisation.

    For employee retention, Evolv looks at a range of variables which can include anything from gas prices and social media usage to local unemployment rates then pulls these together to predict which staff are most likely to leave.

    “It’s hard to understand why it’s radically predictive, but it’s radically predictive,” Venture Beat quotes Jim Meyerle, Evolv’s cofounder.

    There are some downsides in such software though – as some of the comments to the VentureBeat story point out – a blind faith in an alogrithm can destroy company morale and much more.

    Recruiters as an industry haven’t a good track record in using data well, while they’ve had candidate databases for two decades and stories abound of poor use of keyword searches carried out by lazy or incompetent headhunters. The same is now happening with agencies trawling LinkedIn for candidates.

    Using these tools and data correctly going to separate successful recruitment agencies and HR departments from the also-rans.

    It’s the same in most businesses – the tools are available and knowing them how to use them properly will be a key skill for this decade.

    Job classifieds image courtesy of Markinpool through SXC.HU

    Similar posts:

  • On being a good Internet citizen

    On being a good Internet citizen

    I grabbed a quick coffee with Zendesk founder CEO Mikkel Svane and his Australian manager Michael Hansen in Sydney yesterday where they told me about the company’s story to date.

    While I’ll be writing in the interview up in depth in the next few days one thing that stood out was Mikkel’s comment about Zendesk being a good internet citizen.

    Those traits of being a good online corporate citizen include open APIs, a transparent culture and giving customers full access to their data.

    Online companies have to embrace those principles if they are going to succeed and it’s the key to the fast growth of businesses like Zendesk and other cloud based services.

    These principles have been the underpinning of the success of companies like Twitter, Facebook and Google.

    What’s interesting with those companies is how they’ve moved away from those principles as they’ve grown and the pressures to ‘monetize’ have increased.

    Abandoning those principles opens opportunities for many new players to disrupt the businesses of what have become the market incumbents.

    With the pace of business accelerating, the assumption that companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter will retain their positions might be tested as the market moves to providers they can trust.

    Those principles of being a good internet citizen may prove to be more important to online businesses than many of their managers and investors believe.

    Similar posts:

  • A business lesson from the Catholic Church

    A business lesson from the Catholic Church

    The Catholic church may be a two thousand year old institution with medieval beliefs and beset with scandal, but the clerics know how to handle business succession well.

    Pope Benedict’s resignation was not only unexpected but also almost unprecedented with it being six hundred years since a pontiff quit before dying on the job.

    In many organisations such an unexpected and rare event – dare one use the ‘black swan’ line – would create havoc, or at least paralysis. Instead the clerics handled the process smoothly.

    This contrasts with the succession planning in many companies. In larger business even when the CEOs handover is planned, there’s a period of write downs and blood letting as the new leader stamps their authority.

    Sometimes it gets very ugly indeed, particularly if the former CEO has been kicked upstairs onto the board.

    In smaller businesses, there’s no succession planning at all. Many businesses die when the owner retires if there’s no buyer for the operation.

    That shortage of buyers is a major problem for smaller business owners. Many baby boomers have planned their retirements around getting a good sale price for their businesses.

    If they can’t get the sale price, the boomer small business owners work until they drop.

    Which is what popes usually do.

    It’s often said the Catholic Church is the biggest corporation on the planet. Given how smoothly their bureaucracy deals with succession planning, that’s not surprising.

    Similar posts:

  • Are Small Businesses becoming Digital Roadkill?

    Are Small Businesses becoming Digital Roadkill?

    Technology Spectator today discusses if fast broadband initiatives like the National Broadband Network will be good for all small businesses.

    Andrew Twaites of Melbourne consultancy The Strategy Canvas posits that many businesses aren’t equipped to compete against  global competitors.

    The additional competitive pressures that the NBN rollout is likely place on segments of the small business sector that have to date enjoyed a degree of natural protection as a result of their customers’ inability to access super-fast broadband.

    Once that natural protection falls away, many small businesses will for the first time be exposed to competition from interstate and overseas businesses

    This is a very good point; many small businesses are transaction based service providers who can be easily replaced by lower cost overseas companies, particularly now foreign suppliers are easily accessible through services like O-Desk and Freelancer.com.

    Every time I see Freelancer.com’s CEO Matt Barrie talk to a small business audience, I’m surprised the room doesn’t lynch him as he’s describing how their businesses are threatened species and many are living on borrowed time.

    One of the reasons why small businesses are threatened is because they are under-capitalised, many simply can’t invest in the technology or training they need to compete.

    There’s also a reluctance to embrace technology, that half of all small businesses – in the US, the UK or Australia – don’t have even a basic website.

    On a recent holiday in Northern NSW, I checked dozens of tourism businesses’ online presences. Few had a website and almost none had bothered filling in their Google Places profiles, let alone set up social media presences.

    Yet almost all of their new customers are looking for them on the web, increasingly through mobile devices or social media services where they are invisible.

    Not having a website, local listing or Facebook page are trivial things; but the fact that most businesses haven’t done the basics doesn’t bode well as the speed of commerce accelerates over the rest of this decade.

    That many small businesses will be put out of business by today’s changes isn’t unprecedented – blacksmiths were out of job shortly after the motor car rolled out and whale oil manufacturers by gas and then electric lighting.

    As Andrew points out, we assume ‘creative destruction’ just disrupts big incumbent corporation. In reality it’s the little guys who feel more pain than insulated executives of big business.

    Many of us little guys are going to have to start thinking about adapting to very changed times, the risks of being digital roadkill are real.

    Doll roadkill image courtesy of Pethrus through WikiMedia

    Similar posts:

  • Beer and 3D printing lead a Belgian town into the future

    Beer and 3D printing lead a Belgian town into the future

    While many cities and states are fighting to subsidise declining businesses others are becoming hubs of future industries. The story of Leuven and 3D printing is one of the latter.

    A great article and accompanying presentation from Reuters illustrates some of the possibilities with 3D printing technologies.

    Most of the article revolves around the Belgian company Materialise whose CEO, Wilfried Vancraen, has been a pioneer in 3D printing.

    An interesting upshot of Materialise’s development is how the company’s hometown, Leuven, is promoted by the firm as the ‘world capital of beer and 3D printing.’

    Belgian town Leuven is promoted as the beer and 3D printing capital

    Calling yourself the ‘World Capital of Beer’ is a big – and one suspects risky – call in Belgium so it’s not surprising that the town itself doesn’t use the tagline.

    Being the world capital of 3D printing though does have some allure of Leuven being able to build itself into one of the world’s hub for the new technology.

    Those hubs are a feature of every industrial revolution – whether it’s Silicon Valley and the manufacturing centres of South East China today or the English ironworking and cotton milling hubs of the 18th Century.

    For governments looking at attracting job creating industries, instead of desperately trying to attract the old industries of the 20th Century it might be worthwhile to consider what the community has to offer the business leaders of this millennium.

    Leuven may or may not become one of the world hubs of 3D printing, but at least the city has a chance – those bidding for car factories, movie productions or prisons are destined to decline even if their bids succeed.

    Beer pouring image courtesy of dyet and sxc.hu

    Similar posts: