Rich DeMatteo from Corn on the Job and the team at Brazen Careerist have put together a free ebook titled What I Know About Getting a Job.

The book is a series of short, actionable tips for job seekers. It contains articles by some of my favorite HR bloggers, including Lance Haun of Rehaul, Ben Eubanks of Upstart HR, Kris Dunn from the HR Capitalist, and Laurie Ruettimann from Punk Rock HR.

Oh yea. I’ve got a post in there, too.

It’s free. It’s useful. Check it out.

Download What I Know About Getting a Job

It’s awesome. My good blogger buddy Lance Haun is one of the writers there. Definitely check it out.

Here are two of my recent favorites from the site:

• A Persuasive Argument for Getting Rid of Employee Performance Appraisals
• Three Days for Death (or Why HR Policies Make No Sense)

My only gripe with TLNT? They post a lot. Like, several times a day. My RSS reader is bursting at the seams!

I talk a lot about providing employees with meaningful and engaging work. That said, I think meaning is overrated. Here’s my response:

Interesting ideas. I really like what you said about meaning, but let’s be honest, there’s stuff you have to do in your life that doesn’t have meaning. Laundry. Cleaning the house. Putting gas in the car.

In fact, I think we do ourselves a disservice by seeking meaning in every single minute task in our lives. That’s why I think value is so much more important. There’s no meaning in doing laundry. But there is value.

Does this mean we shouldn’t provide employees with meaningful work? Of course not!

But there are some things, some jobs, that just have to get done. They’re not glamorous. They’re not meaningful. But they are important.

I think as HR pros, it’s important for us to ensure that the jobs that aren’t meaningful are at least valuable. Busy work is a waste of a time – we should always seek to eliminate pointless work.

But if people understand that some work is valuable – even if it’s not meaningful – perhaps they can at least derive some personal satisfaction from it.

What do you think?

I had a really interesting discussion the other day about whether or not work should be fun.

The resounding opinion was that work isn’t fun – it’s satisfying. Doing challenging things. Helping others. Doing work that’s well aligned with someone’s passions and strengths.

Fun, people felt, comes from the relationships with their coworkers. From the work environment. From the culture.

Satisfying work. Fun culture.

What do you think?

A few weeks ago I attended the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston.

One of the standout presentations was by Gentry Underwood of IDEO, a design and innovation consulting firm.

During his presentation, Gentry defined three key principles for creating innovation at an organization. Here’s my take on them.

3 Principles for Creating Innovation

1. Empower people, not ideas. Ideas come and go. They’re cheap. They don’t always fit your organization, your workforce or your current business strategy. The people who generate those ideas, though… they’re priceless.
2. Create a platform that brings people together. Historically, this might have meant things like brainstorming rooms and dedicated “innovation spaces.” In an increasingly global and dispersed workforce, it often means some sort of social media tool.
3. Facilitate and reward participation. More specifically, remove every single microscopic barrier to entry. The biggest problem with creating an innovative culture is adoption, usually because managers don’t support it or it’s integrated into other aspects of a person’s job.

One of the ongoing themes at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference was the power of social media to drive collaboration and community at organizations.

My Take: Social media is just a tool.

It doesn’t create collaboration. It doesn’t create community. It just helps facilitate it.

People create those things. Social media tools simply amplify and enable your culture.

If you want more collaboration and community, social media can definitely help. But you need to make sure you’re creating a culture that supports those things first.

What do you think?

John Sumser wrote an interesting response on his blog, HR Examiner:

What if the goal of the HR operation was to put itself out of business? Not as a way of moving on to a better type of HR but as an end in itself. Why shouldn’t HR be responsible for solving a set of problems and then closing the door?

Part of HR’s Public Relations problem stems from the idea that HR should be a permanent fixture. What if that just doesn’t make any sense at all? Who says that the problems HR addresses can’t be settled, wrapped up and dispensed with? Why shouldn’t having an HR function demonstrate a lack of maturity in an organization.

So what do you think?

Me? I think John makes some good points, but I also believe there will always be a need for leadership readiness, sourcing, strategic compensation, and all the administrative crap that needs to get done. And I don’t believe those are all things organizations can handle internally without an HR department.

But HR as we currently do it? Sure. Let’s put that out of business permanently.

Click here to read the full article

What happens a month after you bring a new hire onboard? What about three months after?

Do you check-in to see how they’re doing? Whether or not the organization is living up to their expectations?

If not, you should be.

Facebook has 500 million people. Twitter has 100 million. LinkedIn has 70 million…

And real life has over 6 billion people.

(via Lance Haun)