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HR Influencer: Josh Bersin

Josh Bersin is living proof that you can create influence from whole cloth. In seven and a half years, his eponymous company, Bersin and Associates, has come from nowhere to extraordinary industry prominence. His small team is increasingly responsible for the way that HR sees itself.

In 2001, with 20 years of marketing experience (mostly in high tech), Bersin and a couple of collaborators launched their soon to change the industry analysts shop. Bersin and Associates "provides research and advisory consulting in enterprise learning, talent management, leadership development, and strategic HR. The company focuses on trends, best-practices, benchmarks, and technology solutions which drive strategic business impact."

It's a strange place for a guy with an MBA from Haas, a master's degree in engineering from Stanford and an engineering degree from Cornell to end. That's the profile of a typical Silicon Valley entrepreneur, just not in HR. When you talk with Josh, it's easy to see him in engineering roles.

HR Influencer: Ryan Johnson

One of the most interesting members of the compensation industry is Ryan Johnson, WorldatWork's VP of research and publishing. The high energy content master founded the professional association's blog and continues to expand its presence in social media. For a profession that many would consider dry in the extreme, Ryan Johnson represents the spark of life and innovation that keeps senior professionals motivated and creative.

With a decade of experience in politics and policy on Capitol Hill, Johnson moved into the compensation field by joining the professional association. If you don't know, WordatWork is the preeminent certification entity in the compensation field. When you see all of those letter following the name of a comp person, it means that they mastered the curriculum and passed the test as administered by WorldatWork. Ryan builds the heart of its intellectual war chest.

In our conversations, Ryan and I stumbled into some interesting ground.

It's reasonably clear that organizations are pruning functions and people who can't be tied directly to the organization's core value. One way of describing the process is 'if it's repeatable, it will be outsourced.' Another view suggests that specialty companies can achieve cost effectiveness that is beyond the reach of companies that dabble in a niche. A third view is that global labor rates allow an arbitrage that creates competitive advantage.

HR Influencer: Bruce Steinberg

The staffing industry is not always seen as an integral part of HR. A complex universe of independent search consultants, sourcing professionals, temp agencies, boutique power brokers and contingency firms, the members of the staffing industry often have trouble acknowledging each other. With a host of competing trade groups, the industry is fragmented and regionalized.

By the narrowest definition, staffing is limited to companies that provide temporary help services. About 7,000 firms (21,400 offices) have been in this business a year or more. The American Staffing Association represents 1,700 of those (14,500 offices). The problem with the definition is that any meaningful operation in the space has its fingers in contingency staffing, RPOs and the other forms of employment service.

There's an unstated pecking order based on proximity to power, type of employee and type of service provided. The segregation is so complete that members of one group don't see members of another as a part of a larger whole. It's possible, even likely, that the deep segmentation reflects an underlying structure. The staffing industry (and HR as well) are more consistent by region and industry than as a standalone national entity. That sort of organization does not translate very well into a national trade association.

It's an industry in transition, highly affected by disintermediation and organizational flattening. As project work and easy outsourcing begin to dominate the employment landscape, members of the staffing industry are having to radically rethink their game plan. Increasingly, speed and leverage are replacing the old-boy network that was the industry's meal ticket.

At the heart of this chaotic sprawl, you'll find Bruce Steinberg. The self-effacing statistician monitors the employment situation from the perspective of the staffing universe. A long-standing industry veteran, Steinberg is an independent consultant who simply knows and has worked with everyone in the game.

HR Influencer: Wes Wu

The quintessential Southern Californian, Wes Wu is a key example of how to convert blogging into deep industry influence. The soft spoken Wu is widely understood to be the rational voice of technology issues in the HR Enterprise Software (HRIS / HRIT) universe. Progressively deep experience in enterprise integration gives Wes an authoritative set of experiences. His blog, SystematicHR, provides a constant reinforcing drumbeat of level headed analysis. Recently, Wes joined Knowledge Infusion.

It's not just the blogging and it's not just the career experience that are the foundation of Wes' credibility. The combination of 15 years of hands-on HRIS / HRIT projects and five years of very routing punditry make SystematiHR a must read for the Technologists in HR. Wu works diligently to keep his views balanced and humble.

The people who occupy the heart of the HR technology world are not big picture HR theorists. They are IT specialists and systems designers. Without real clarity and consistency from them, the big picture can never be quite understood.

That's where Wes excels. These days, he's focused on data governance.

Data governance is a critical yet arcane part of making the information collected by your systems intelligible. Carefully naming and describing the value and requirements of each element in a database creates a level of value and trust in the data that is unavailable any other way. Data Governance is an issue whose importance increases with the scale of the operation and its data.

HR Influencer: Brian Schipper

In some companies, HR is a competitive weapon. In others, it's a place where the administrivia is bundled and sorted. There appears to be some correlation with the organization's core role. If the operation makes things, HR tends to be procedural. If the operation makes ideas, it's a strategic tool.

The degree to which it is possible to wield HR as an instrument of strategy is at the heart of this difference. Where the organization's output is less tangible, the contribution of people to the bottom line is higher. Farm workers can make an incremental difference in product quality. Knowledge workers can often cause exponential change.

There are rich variations in the structure and content of HR organizations. Interestingly, there is more variety in the largest companies than there is in mid sized operations. Huge companies (the Fortune 100) have distinct cultures and competitive niches. When HR is exercised as a market discriminator in these entities, the execution of basic policy becomes a reflection of underlying values.

Brian (Skip) Schipper is the CHRO at Cisco. His organization supports Cisco’s workforce of more than 65,000 employees. They develop products and support customers in more than 200 countries, all working to execute the company vision of changing the way the world works, lives, plays, and learns.

HR Influencer: Mike Mayeux

The Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) business is changing the face of the HR landscape. The RPO Association has been growing rapidly since its inception in 2004. It's national conference drew 250 people - that's nearly the same size as the other recruiting conferences.

The RPOA offers a chart that puts the RPO model in context. Outsourcing is a full-service - from attraction to hiring - operation that works in place of the recruiting department. As the economy stabilizes and begins its slow growth back, RPOs will probably occupy an increasing share of the landscape.

Mike Mayeux is a Texas entrepreneur with more than 20 years in various aspects of recruiting. He has worked in executive search, ran an Oracle professional services organization and helped build a recruiting software company. These days, he is eight years into a very interesting experiment at Novutus, the RPO he founded. For a good review of all things RPO, see HRO Today's RPO section.

HR Influencer: David Perry

Peter Drucker famously said that the insides of an institution are cost centers. Results only happen outside the institution. While leaders are responsible for the performance of an organization or an industry, the real results happen outside.

If you search for "Job Hunting" on Amazon.com, the number 1 result is Guerrilla Marketing for Job Hunters: 400 Unconventional Tips, Tricks, and Tactics for Landing Your Dream Job by David Perry. Following in the footsteps of the legendary Richard Bolles, Perry and other writers on job hunting present the public face of HR to the people who encounter it most....job hunters. Where else can you find the HR Department and all of its foibles chronicled?

Career management books, of which there are many, uniformly paint HR-recruiting as obstructionist. Most of the bad reputation comes from these sources.

It's an interesting dichotomy. The public reputation of HR-recruiting is created and delivered by people who are generally telling their readers how to make an end run on the system. No one in the profession is particularly interested in the consumer face of the HR-recruiting brand. The story is told by people whose basic message is that effectiveness is the opposite of what HR-recruiting does.

HR Influencer: Elliot Clark

"The last two weeks have been unbearably busy." says Elliot Clark as we settle into our interview. "We released the results of two pieces of research. The buying community relies heavily on the work and the vendors are anxious to see and debate the results."

Elliot, who was an early member of the company that became Kenexa, is the CEO of Crossing Media. He shapes a part of the industry through the publications in his stable. The components include: HRO Today (for HR outsourcing and RPOs), HROEurope, FAO Today (for accounting and finance outsourcing), CRO (for the corporate responsibility officer) and SharedXpertise (a community for people who transform organizations). Crossing Media delivers information in a variety of formats, from events and training to publications, to people involved in various aspects of outsourcing.

Much of Clark's influence comes from the quantitative lists he puts together. Noting that "it's easier to brag than explain", Clark's company gives awards like The RPO Baker's Dozen, The Winner's Circle and Performance Management Suite Leaders. The award lists always offer a disciplined methodology and quantitative criteria. The results often determine who's on the bidders list for big procurements.

HR Influencer: Shally Steckerl

As the discipline of recruiting pivots during the downturn, sourcing is becoming decidedly more professional. What was once the province of cold calling direct marketers is now the home of seasoned technical workers. The essence of information economy employment, sourcing is the art of finding people.

Recruiting itself is a range of practices and procedures that get tailored to the specifics of a niche, industry, city, division or company. Part rites of passage, part intelligent human matching, part requirements fulfillment and part relationship management, each company creates a nuanced approach to the problem. But, at the root, it's find 'em, attract 'em, hire 'em and train 'em.

Sourcing is the find 'em part. While an army of relationship based telephone sourcers still remains, the craft is rapidly becoming an online research problem. Though only 85 percent of people are discoverable online, that's enough to suit most sourcing needs.

Shally Steckerl is a driving force in the professionalization of sourcing through his training operation, JobMachine, Shally and his crew create training programs. Thousands of Internet Sourcing wizards have been through his programs. His offerings are standard at any recruiting conference.

HR Influencer: Neil McCormick

HR is practiced differently in different places. In the United States, differences in industry and region drive different priorities. The government manages HR with an extremely different emphasis; HR leaders are an inherent part of organizational decision making. Government HR is vastly more operational than its industrial counterparts.

Outside of the United States, the discipline is less about legal defensibility and more about operational impact. Each country's unique view of labor relations and workplace requirements shifts the dialog. There's some reason to believe that the real leadership in HR thinking is located beyond American borders.

Neil McCormick, the intellectual force at Asia-Pac's largest HR consultancy, Talent2, works to accelerate innovation in HR and talent management.

Neil has worked in human resources and consulting services for the past 14 years building a repertoire covering human resource management, recruitment consulting, management consulting, talent management, general management and learning and development. For the last four years, Neil has held a General Manager position at Talent2. A recognized presenter and guest lecturer on the subject, Neil has a detailed understanding of, and passion for, the application of talent management principles and processes for the ongoing success of business.