Archimedes Moves Me

 

 

Here’s the thing: I believe experience can change us. That we’re just lumps of rock, and time is the wind, the water, washing over us. We are eroded as we go. I chose to control my shaping, as much as I could, early in my career. Not the minutia, the fine lines, but the broader strokes. To seize the wind and the water, and point it’s power at sections of me that I wanted to change. If I was shy, stuttered, talked too fast, and had a hard time talking, wrote poetry and read sci-fi? I was going to go into a role with that required me to be chatty, charismatic, etc: recruitment. Full commission. No draw. No food if I failed.

That’s the origin story – there’s tons of stupid detail behind that, and we can talk over beers about it someday, but I want to move forward and justify both my blog title, and my career. Because I stuck with it. I made this happen, and I’m proud of that.

I still talk way too fast. I still love sci fi. I’m still shy (I have managed to mask that last bit beautifully, but know this, when we’re talking, that I’m not 100% sure you give a crap – you’re still the coach, and I’m that kid you just kind hadda deal with). But… I found a lever. And I want to change the world. Because that’s important, in life. I don’t want to die without making change. My legacy will not be “he was that nice, quiet kid who wrote poem, wonder what ever happened to him…” No. Since I’m not a person of faith, my view is that this is my one shot, and I want it to count. To move the world.

Nothing major…

Archimedes once wrote: “give me a lever long enough, and I will move the world”. I can get behind that. I need a lever, before I go.

The economy matters – goods, commerce, food, all of it. It’s the engine. It impacts how we eat, sleep, grow, meet, date, survive. Affect the economy? That’s a lever. But… how?

Recruitment. Mother-effing-recruitment. Think about it: the economy is about money. The transfer of goods, via symbols. The way to collect those symbols is via a job (yes, yes: “welfare, blah blah blah” – fuck you, by the way: study after study shows that most people want to work, it’s just part of our DNA). Jobs bring us money, we spend money, the wheel is lubricated, etc etc. If you can impact the speed at which people get hired, their carer arc, job satisfaction, etc, you are greasing the wheel. And, on the other side of the table, the faster companies can hire the right people (that last bit is huge, and making mistakes there is always why companies fail), the better they can grow, hire more, etc. It’s that whole virtuous circle thing.

Most of the people in my industry are clueless about how important they are in this equation. And, to be fair: a some of them are terrible at it. There’s a whole ‘nother blog post coming on that.

I think I get it – and it’s why, despite my wandering eye for a career as dime-store poet, I stay in the game: I’m holding that lever. What I’m doing effing matters. There are hardly any other careers out there that have this level of impact. Each time I make a positive change to my profession, it means somebody’s job search got better. They found work faster. Their kids are less hungry, they’re less stressed out, they’re reinvesting in the economy via Wegmans, funding the PTA, flying the friendly skies again, etc etc. They’re tickling the economy. And, my work powered that – it mattered. And, at an enterprise level, working with huge brands, it really matters. It scales. By being active in my industry, the blog, my speaking engagements (huge irony there), etc etc, I move my industry. The lever moves, and the world moves with it.

I will always be that kid who didn’t get picked – but screw that: I decided to captain my own fate. I found a lever, and I’m am putting my weight on it. I encourage you to do the same…

Doing What You Love….

You know what I hate? That ^^

You know why? Beyond the fact that Samuel L. Jackson never said it (yes, I checked), and it’s it’s just another sign of how lazy we’ve become, intellectually, as a society? I hate it because it sets people up for misery.

Misery.  

Here’s the brutal, cold truth: odds are, you aren’t doing what you love. Odds are, what you love involves some combination of a recreational activity (ranging from gliding around Gotham on your PS4, to frisbee golf), watching Netflix, beer/ wine/ tipple of your choice, and sleeping. You may also enjoy cooking, needlepoint, etc.

Heck, you probably love yourself some family time, too. One would hope.

So: in order to pay your bills (yes, them), buy food, as well as above-mentioned frisbees, overpriced video games, frisbees, thread, cable, and bedding… You have to have money. And what the quote that set me off early this morning is telling you is…. You are wasting your life if you don’t find some way to frisbee-knit-drink-nap your way to above said bill-paying.

It’s such BS. Utter, utter BS. Some people are fortunate enough to be in roles they love – and, yes, luck is as much about hard work and perspiration, as it is about random chance. So, some people work hard, and have Dame Fortune smile on them. Others – many, many others – work hard, and… work hard. Heck, unlike Mr. Jackson, they work hard for very little. Because that’s how life is, most of the time: real. It’s the rare minority who get to be memed about how great life is, how doing what you love is all that matters, blah blah blah. I mean, if you love painting watercolors of red lobster shacks, and your life involves supporting a family of 4, a mortgage, car payments, etc – unless you’rs some sort of frickin’ genius, there’s no way you can leave that job as an actuarial analyst (and the salary it affords), just so you can go sit on a dock in Rockport, Massachusetts painting Motif No. 1.

This will not pay for 2 college tuitions.

Here’s what I’d like to see – this. (why are there no down arrow symbols on my keyboard?):

Rant, pretty much wrapped up. I’ll leave you with this: your career may not be as bad as you think it is. It may be your boss. It may be your colleagues. Heck, it may well be… you. I’m not saying “be a good little drudge, put you eyes back on the grindstone, or you get the whip”. What I’m saying is, don’t kill yourself because some hack with a Meme Generate account cut and pasted some simple minded advice onto a picture of a smirking celebrity. Life moves quickly (unless you’re at the DMV, where they’ve figured out how to warp time & space), and then it cuts off. Love what you do for love, work so you can afford it, and keep an eye out for chances to make that side stuff pay your bills. It can happen, just don’t get worked up if it doesn’t.

Farewell, Mobiquity

About a year and a half ago, a good friend & colleague in the talent acquisition field connected me with Susan Miele, one of the top human resources pros in the world (as a side-note, if you ever have the chance to work with Susan, jump at it). We hit it off, to say the least. After several hours over coffee, swapping stories, approaches, ideas and ideals, she asked me to come chat with the executive team at a company she had recently joined: Mobiquity.

What sold me (beyond the chance to be mentored by an A+ level boss) was the opportunity to fix a pretty broken talent acquisition department. Over our tenure together, Susan and I have built a team that is second-to-none in terms of quality, camaraderie, and results (also, this team – if you have the chance to work with, for, or hire any of them, don’t lose that opportunity). We get things done, and we do it with a sense of humor. To paraphrase Joel Spolsky, we looked for people who were “Smart, Can Tell a Good Joke, and Get Things Done”. We succeeded beyond our expectations, and the team was able to play a key role in scaling Mobiquity from around 100 employees to close to 450, a small handful of offices in the northeast of the US to 12 offices on 4 continents. Personally, I’ve had the unique opportunity to spend time overseas, working on M&A from an HR perspective, along with traveling domestically helping open offices in key cities across the US.

It’s been a blast. And, now, it’s coming to an end – for me, at least.

I’m not going to say much, yet, about where I’m going, beyond saying that an opportunity arose that became too interesting for me not to pursue. When I was discussing it with a trusted colleague, in a Hamletesque moment of indecision they said: “If you don’t pursue this, I’m going to tell Susan to fire you so you can. You have to do this.”

So… I did. I’m beyond excited for my next step, while, like Janus, looking back with a pretty ridiculous smile at what my team hath wrought.

Here are (a few) of the people I had the absolute pleasure of working with – the Talent Acquisition team: Jeff Newman, Alex Bowler, Michael Fabiano, Melissa Adamo, Becky Bajan. I thank each and every one of them, and I can’t wait to work with them again.

More to come, soon – I promise….

Senior Talent Acquisition Positions – Mobiquity – Boston, New York City

Just to follow up on my previous post, here’s the official job:

Senior Talent Acquisition Specialists – Mobiquity – Boston and NYC Offices

Are you interested in being a key part of a new recruiting department – one that’s focused on 21^st Century recruiting? Inbound-marketing oriented, utilizing the most cutting edge tools available today, a team that will invent practices and approaches that will be emulated by other recruiters?

Want to change the world (of recruiting, at any rate)? Want to have fun while you’re at it, as part of a highly respected team that works for a company that gets how important recruiting is?

Then, what are you waiting for? Seriously: skip reading the rest of this if you understand how unique that all is, and apply. Now. Toot suite, and all of that. And (or), reach out to Martin Burns, Director of Talent Acquisition: www.linkedin.com/in/martinburns/

The idea is: you get it, too. You’re a recruiter, and you think that’s pretty darned cool. You’re proud of what you do. You want to be valued, given lots of room to experiment, and take pride in helping build a company. It’s what you do.

Recruiting for a services company is fascinating: the number of moving parts, dynamic nature of the business, and how important it is to hire the absolute best makes it a unique environment for recruitment. Layer in a start-up, rapidly scaling tech company on the cutting edge of the next wave of technology, and you’ve got a unique challenge. Mobiquity is a professional services firm working with the Global 2000 to create innovative mobile solutions and apps that drive business value.  Combining strategy, user-experience design, app development and backend integration, Mobiquity delivers solutions that span the entire mobile ecosystem, driving business innovation and competitive advantage. The people are key – and, so is recruitment.

Here are some bullets….

Roles & responsibilities

• Be awesome. Funny helps, too.
• Create, and maintain, talent pools of appropriate candidates for a group of roles you’ll own – heavy on the tech side, but likely to include a mix of marketing, sales, G&A, etc
• Treat your candidates like people – because, that’s what they are. Get back to them on time, be honest about their status, don’t overpromise.
• Partner closely with hiring authorities, making sure you understand what they need, and keeping up active communication with them throughout the hiring process.
• Create engaging recruitment-marketing, from job descriptions and live events, to campaigns that drive candidates to the company.
• Research & source from unique corners – you’re not on Monster: you’re on GitHub & Stack Overflow.
• Prescreen candidates: you find it a point of pride that when it’s time to make an offer, you know exactly what it will take to close the A-player you’re looking to bring onboard.
• Gather input from subject matter experts across the company – you’re probably a sponge by nature. You find learning fantastic.
• Set up related campaign workflow, tracking and alerts within the CRM and marketing automation systems
• Track, analyze and communicate to stakeholders about candidates, the hiring market, and what it will take to keep a pipeline of A-level candidates engaged and – ultimately – hired.

Qualifications & experience

• At least 3-5 years of experience in a fast-paced recruitment environment
• Ideally, you’ve worked corporate and agency sides of the business
• Experience working with an ATS – we use JobVite, but that’s not required, everything’s teachable
• You like people – and, they tend to like you…
• Solid writing skills – you have fun creating engaging copy and job descriptions
• Did we mention a sense of humor?
• Organizational skills help – but, not rigidity. You need to be comfortable with a bit of chaos. It’s spicy.

Seeking Extraordinary Talent Acquisition Professionals: Boston, Redwood City, and Beyond

In putting together a job description/ ad for the talent acquisition professionals I’m looking for, I wound up writing a manifesto. Not sure it’s what I’ll run with, but I like it. Kind of a lot – thought it deserved life somewhere, and since I have this handy little platform available to me, I’m going to take advantage. Please, feel free to pass along, dissect, disavow, dissemble, diagnose… just, don’t duplicate (unless you’re willing to pin the blame on me). Never was a fan of copycats.

In any event: I’m building a team. It’s going to be fun. There’s loads of potential, a great platform, some interesting challenges, and support from the executive team. Don’t expect me to breathe down your neck, but do expect me to help you when you need it. I know I need people in Waltham (near Boston), Redwood City (that’d be near San Francisco), and I’ll probably need somebody in Gainesville.

Senior Talent Acquisition Consultant                                                                                                                               

Ever want to be part of building something extraordinary? Now’s your chance.

Why Join Mobiquity? Why Now? Because it’s Your Best Move, and Now is When it’s Available

There’s a reason why thought-leaders like Andrew Hiser, the pioneer of human-centered software design, have joined Mobiquity. It’s because they see the future becoming the present: Mobile changing everything.

It’s the 5^th Wave. The world in your pocket. Applications that tell doctors how well your medication is working as it passes through your body, to ones that alert a restaurant that you’ve pulled into their lot and are ready for you to walk their take-out to them.

Apps that help drug addicts recover, and apps that will help you retire wealthy.

We’re not talking about flinging birds at pigs anymore (fun as that is). We’re talking about changing how people behave, how business gets done, and how we will shape the future.

Mobiquity is at the leading edge of the wave. Positioned to define the future of mobile, a name that will become as familiar to the world as the names of the biggest successes out of the Internet wave.

Talent Acquisition Makes it All Possible

Without solid talent, organizations stagnate and fade away. Without the greatest talent, organizations can’t surge, can’t become the key leaders in their space. Our job is to make sure that happens. We seek real recruiters. Budding talent acquisition thought leaders. We get the big It: that it’s always about the people. That A players hire A players, while B’s hire C’s, C’s hire D’s, and well… then you get to F. Failure.

Our role is to find the A’s, engage with them, excite them, and help them through the hiring process. We’re matchmakers to the Nth degree, but we’re also business people. We use marketing, social media, talent pools, innovative sourcing & research, and a degree of sales skills to attract the very best. We never cut corners, we don’t lie, harass, or avoid hard truths: we are the A-players of recruitment.

We Are Looking for You

Join us, if you see recruitment as much of a calling as a profession – if it’s your passion, as much as your paycheck. We’re going to blow some things up. You should find that exciting. You should feel process is a tool best used lightly. You should be funny. Funny matters, in this role and in life.

If you’re sitting there, thinking “holy crap – I’ve been looking for this!”, you have the next step in your journey to greatness: Find our Talent Acquisition leader, Martin Burns (you can use your mad Boolean to do that right now, or just scroll down a bit). He’s looking for people want you to share some new skills, try new approaches and make some mistakes along the way, and to grow into leaders in our game-changing, rapidly evolving profession. His goal is to make sure you get the opportunity to do all of that.

Make the Best Move – Join Mobiquity

You can find Martin all sorts of places: mburns@mobiquity.com. 617.851.7277. twitter. linkedin. facebook. etc, etc…. You’re in the game. You get it.

Related articles

• Dr. Changelove: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying, and Went to Mobiquity (recruiter.wordpress.com)

Dr. Changelove: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying, and Went to Mobiquity

Funny, how life goes. A few weeks ago, I was buzzing along, running Talent MatchUp & working with a great client called Magenic. I’d been working onsite with them for a little over two years, and it was great. Smart people to work with, a nifty little model that I think may be a significant part of how we do recruitment in the future, and I’d become friends with many of the people there.

All that said… something was missing.

That’s not unusual, of course. You spend a few years doing the same thing, and you can start to feel a bit stale. The work had become fairly routine, I was in a pattern, and… I hate that. I’m not someone who’s good at rinse-cycle-repeat, and that’s where I’d gotten myself. Not that the work didn’t have its fun challenges, but still. I wanted something harder.

Like many entrepreneurs, I don’t know how to say “ahh, this is good – don’t mess it up.” On the contrary. I honestly think I exist to mess things up. A little bit of chaos, of weird, seems to suit me. It’s probably why the Absurdists have always resonated with me. Why I felt so at home the first time I stepped into the ICA. Why I find comfort in The Fairy Fellers Master Stroke.

Safety isn’t exactly in my power alley.

So. Last Tuesday, like I do from time to time (and, you should, too), I reached out to my network. Said something along the lines of “I’m sure you haven’t, but if you’ve heard of my dream job being open, could you let me know?”

See, here’s the thing: sometimes, when you speak into the Void? The Void also speaks back to you.

In this case, it was my friend Steven. He’d heard of something. Something that was Really Cool. Perfect. Insanely great. So, like I’m always telling people they should do, I took the resume I routinely update (you should, too), and shot it to him. He made an intro to their insanely great Chief People Officer. We had coffee. She’s insanely great.

So’s the team that she lined up to meet me on Monday. They’re really great. Winning dream-time kind of people. A smart idea, and first to market. Profitable in their first year. An inspirational founder who has multiple successes under his belt. Big goals, and smart plans on how to achieve them. I really wanted in.

So… yeah. It happened. The big IT. Susan (the Chief People Officer – did I mention, insanely awesome?) asked me to come onboard, and build their recruiting department. I think I hesitated for…. no. Nope, didn’t hesitate. Couldn’t. Took the job.

So, in my rambling way, I’m very (very) happy to announce that I will be joining Mobiquity later this month, as their Director of Talent Acquisition. I’ll be rolling up Talent MatchUp in the meantime, since Mobiquity is going to be scaling hugely, and will need all of my focus (along with the recruitment team I’ll be building). It also means that Magenic will be looking for an experienced talent acquisition specialist for Waltham (know a good one? send ’em my way, and I’ll treat ’em right).

Mobiquity is going to be big. They’re a year out of the gate, and already a leader in the mobile space – and, with IT directors now saying that mobile spending will be  growing by 50% in 2013, that’s a good place to be. The executive team is impressive. Well planned expansion underway. They’re – wait, _we’re_  going to be hiring. A lot.

If you – or, someone you know – is looking to get in early with a game-changer, this is it. Find me anyway you can, and let me know who you (or they) are.

Short term (ie, yesterday, if possible), I’m looking to hire several experienced Sales Executives for New York and Philadelphia, as well as a Client Partner for New York. I’m going to have a lot more to share, soon (developers, developer, developers….G&A. Marketing. Recruiters…). Stay tuned.

Also: the career site needs some work. Which I find geekily exciting. Just bear with us for a brief bit.