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Ben Hwang - Insight Community Expert

In Search of the Purple Squirrel

Unemployment rate in Europe (UE) and United St...
Image via Wikipedia

It’s interesting that government doesn’t pay attention to the one industry that has the ins and outs on who gets what job.   And that my friend, would be the human resources department.

What’s fascinating about this industry is that while most of the time you think of them as the people that manage your benefits and other miscellaneous employee type thingies, they are also in charge of hiring and letting go of employees.   Yes, this industry is the iron fist of those up top and make the decisions on which individuals are to be chopped due to some bean counter upstairs so that top management can still make their numbers and collect on their bonuses.

What’s also interesting is the fact that while there has been government elation about how there is now job creation and jobs out there, these positions are written in such a way that HR professionals have deemd them purple squirrel positions.

Ah, yes.  So you ask, what is a “purple squirrel”?   This is where the job specifies for a skill set that is so defined and limited, that there is no individual that could possibly fit them and thus as elusive an potential employee as finding a purple squirrel.   And I’m sure you job seekers out there have encountered this insanity time and again.  What’s funny is that government is so baffled when they find that there are jobs out there but the unemployment numbers keep growing that they don’t ask the right questions such as “are these people truly hiring?”

While I’m thankfully employed currently, I myself have had the opportunity of fighting the battle of unemployment.   There were several jobs out there that you couldn’t even land a screening, let alone an interview even if you were over-qualified for the positions.  There were many a position out there that I saw open for over a year and were not filled, even though there were many individuals that could have been put in those positions.  This makes me wonder whether or not corporations truly are in need of people or if they’re just putting those positions up to satisfy some government mandate or to look like they’re actually hiring.   In fact, instead of the statistic of unemployment and positions open, we really should be comparing the rate of hiring via companies to the unemployment rate.   That would probably give a much better ratio on whether or not there is actual hiring or not.

If you do happen to actually get hired into a purple squirrel position, please let me know.   I’m sure there are many unemployed individuals out there that want to know which company is actually not creating some unattainable demi-god positions.

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October 25th, 2010 | Tags: , , , , , , , , , | Category: Business, Human Resources | Leave a comment

Why Quality Control is Important

Chick-fil-A
Image via Wikipedia

I really love Chick-Fil-A.  They not only have a wonderful methodology for customer service, but they often double-up on service when it comes to the drive thru.   If you’ve ever noticed, there is usually one person that handles drinks, one person that hands it to you, and several people in all to complete your transaction.  This isn’t the same at other fast food restaurants where there could be only one person trying to manage every single part of the exchange.  This isn’t even accounting for the food preparation part.

So when they screw up, it’s actually pretty annoying and devastating to their image.   It’s not a huge deal, since their loyalty is much like Toyota’s.  People are still willing to come back after one bad incident, but if it keeps up, the image starts going southwards.

For me, it was through the drive-thru where it just happened that there was a tomato peeking out from the top lid of my sandwich box.   I didn’t really think anything of it, but when I opened the box, there was no top bun.  How the heck do you close the lid of a box without realizing there wasn’t a top bun?   Wow.   And it’s funny that I had just finished telling my wife how their quality control and customer service was above every other fast food place even though they were closed on Sundays and probably lost a lot of money in doing that.

Better training drives revenue.  Anyone that works at Starbucks corporate could tell you that.   Remember when they locked it down for three hours company wide?  That’s how you get things done.

Well perhaps it’s only a single isolated incident.  It wasn’t like it was a misplaced item which happens frequently in fast food and take-out.   It was just part of the food preparation that was missing.  It probably doesn’t help matters with the fact that they do actually care about their customer service and training either.   But this demonstrates why you can never cut corners around quality control.   In fast food, it might generate an annoyed customer.   In civil engineering, it could mean the bolt that holds the roof from collapsing on the people inside.   QC/QA is a part of every business and should be thought about if you care about your corporate reputation.

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October 20th, 2010 | Tags: , , , , | Category: Business, Quality Control | Leave a comment

Marketing to the Right Audience

I’ve found that one of the biggest mistakes of technical marketers is to assume that your audience know what the hell you’re talking about. The latest Microsoft commercial is a great example of terrible marketing. In “To the Cloud”, the lady is going to the cloud to fix her issues of her family not being still and taking a family photo. What’s interesting is that it doesn’t really explain what the cloud has anything to do with this nor why it’s “To the Cloud”.

Obviously, for those in the know-how and geekdom, this is a pretty simple task of dissection. But this isn’t like an IBM commercial where it’s targeted at business people. No, this is something targeted at your normal everyday Joe Schmoe that doesn’t really care one way or another if your application is in the “cloud” or not. I mean, in all honesty, you just want things to work, and work well. Do you care whether or not it works in the cloud? Of course not. It’s like me trying to explain the differences between CDMA and GSM and the difference in call quality based on technological differences to my mother. If she’s going to buy a cell phone, she cares about the way it looks and how cool it is instead of what the infrastructure it sits on.

Same thing here. Thus, that Microsoft ad turns out to be a total cheese to those that know, and totally misses the ball with those that don’t. Always make sure that you understand your audience before you play technical keywords at them.

October 17th, 2010 | Tags: , , , , , | Category: Business, Marketing | Leave a comment

Use Correct Domain Registration Methods

One of the worst things you can do as a business that no one has ever heard of is to register your domain name incorrectly. Here’s a great example. One of the first things I do when I do business with someone new is look at their website. If it’s shoddy, then I probably am very hesitant to even begin to do business with those individuals. The second is I check the whois records.

There’s a lot of information that you can gather the analysis of both the website and the whois records. The first can tell you if it’s been thrown up in a hurry and if it’s a template site. If it is, no worries, but if both the former (shoddy website) and latter (domain registration) don’t jive, that’s a sign to run very far away before you get taken for a spin.

The whois record shows the registration of the domain and whom is in charge of the business itself from billing to technical to administration. Every major corporation will have their own IT departments in charge of these records and thus the emails will always be from a corporate domain. For example, ibm.com is registered to the corporation and the emails all have ibm.com on the end.


Registrant:
International Business Machines Corporation
New Orchard Road
Armonk, NY 10504
US

Domain Name: IBM.COM

Administrative Contact:
IBM DNS Admin [email protected]
IBM Corporation
New Orchard Road
Armonk, NY 10504
US
+1.9147654227 fax: +1.9147654370

Technical Contact:
IBM Corporation [email protected]
New Orchard Road
Armonk, NY 10504
US
+1.9192544441 fax: +1.9147654370

Record expires on 20-Mar-2018.
Record created on 19-Mar-1986.

Domain servers in listed order:

INTERNET-SERVER.ZURICH.IBM.COM 195.176.20.204
NS.WATSON.IBM.COM 129.34.20.80
NS.ALMADEN.IBM.COM 198.4.83.35
NS.AUSTIN.IBM.COM 192.35.232.34

That is a huge tell-tale sign that says that someone is a legit owner and knows what they’re doing. If not, then whether or not you’re a legitimate business, you could be stereotyped into the bucket of “scammers and fraud” even before you start your wheeling and dealing. And is that something you really want to do to yourself if you’re trying to create partnerships and sales? Definitely not.

So do the right thing. Register your domains in the right method and keep yourself from having a lot of headache explanations in the future.

August 18th, 2010 | Tags: , , , , , , , | Category: Branding, Business, Marketing | One comment

How Good Project Management Would Make Everyone’s Life Easier

Project Management Lifecycle
Image by Ivan Walsh via Flickr

There are certain things I believe in business.   One is that you need to know when to choose your battles.   The other is that you have to disseminate relevant information so that people know why they have to do something that is pretty self explanatory to you because of what you know.

Perfect example:  At another position in my career, we were told to put our time in as salary employees into Niku, then Clarity.   You would have to go through training to use these tools and from an engineers perspective it was a complete waste of time since most of our project schedules should have been self explanatory.   We were never told what the big picture was and why these tools were being used to track the time.   Looking back from the eyes of a project manager, whomever was tracking the time and cost and earned value should have explained what the point of this tool was for, but they just figured everyone should be using it.

One thing about technical people?  No one likes to do things that there’s no “reason” for and if you don’t provide a reason for it, then it’s not good enough.  And the PM should have said that it was to track the amount of money we were spending against what we were making.  It was that simple, but yet no one ever bothered with the disconnect.

I believe that this is the duty of a good project manager.   An instructor of mine once told me that a PM’s position is communicating ninety percent of the time.  I’d like to go one step further, and say that the PM’s position is also communicating the right information ninety percent of the time.

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August 2nd, 2010 | Tags: , | Category: Project Management | Leave a comment
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