Wednesday, September 03, 2008

Hiring people and how communities run

This post by one Seth Godin speaks for itself, and is fascinating. The guy wanted to find out who to hire out of all the "PDFs". So, he put all the internship candidates on a Facebook group, and watched. He quickly saw four types of participants.
  • The game-show contestants, quick on the trigger, who were searching for a quick yes or no. Most of them left.
  • The lurkers. They were there, but we couldn't tell.
  • The followers. They waited for someone to tell them what to do.
  • The leaders. A few started conversations, directed initiatives and got to work.
Having had almost too much experience in getting projects running, making things happen, working to bridge big egos, building communities and forming new trends--or in other words, Herding Cats (TM)--I was hooked. it's not often I find another "campaign manager", and especially not a student of "affecting change".

I kept wishing the guy shared more information and some of his insight. He didn't, but it was still interesting.

Adjacent subjects hinted to in his post such as learning, hiring and mentoring are almost as interesting to me, and in general, I found the subject matter close to heart. The post really "spoke" to me.

The world is full of followers, and this idea will be copied. My fear is that the fakers will become the winners.

In the Israeli military any course you go through--especially officers' course--has occasional Psychometric tests where your friends "rate" you on different attributes. [*opinion* most of] The people who get the high scores are the fakers. That means you get smart people, but also poor actors (not too much acting required).

Looking at the huge industry preparing people for anything from the SATs to professional certifications, I can visualize how this methods could become [as] useless.

On the other hand, human nature has a way of coming through in the end. And, of course, in business--if the fakers "get the results" it doesn't really matter.

Gadi Evron,
ge@linuxbox.org.

Follow me on twitter! http://twitter.com/gadievron

1 comment:

Jonatan Krovitsky said...

Gadi, I agree with one correction.
"one Seth Godin" should read "the Seth Godin. author of "Permission Marketing" and "purple Cow", one of the more famous marketing Gurus".

J.Krovitsky
http://armchairpraxeologist.blogspot.com/