Tagging for Talent (eBook)

/tagability/ verb/adjective. the roles, knowledge and behavior strengths we observe in our colleagues and ourselves.

Think of one or two people with whom you work closely. These colleagues don’t necessarily have to be on your team or even in the same city, but you interact enough to know them fairly well. You might see them every day, or only have monthly project meetings via telephone or video conference. If you had to come up with five words to describe what they’re really good at, what would those words be? Would you identify skills related to their job functions? Are they great in marketing, finance or engineering? What about how they perform their work: are they efficient, creative, technical or precise? What about things you’ve learned or noticed about them over time that may seem completely unrelated to the job they do, such as being artistic, articulate, insightful or humorous?

Now for a really important question: Have you ever shared with these people any of the positive things that you’ve noticed? If you have, bravo! Unfortunately, many of us don’t take the time or find enough opportunities to do so. Depending on your cultural or personal background, you might be embarrassed to give a compliment. In fact, you may not even particularly like them other than for the attributes they bring to your projects or daily work requirements, so why bother going out of your way to tell them something good? Now imagine a workplace where your colleagues and peers could identify your talents, maybe even some that you didn’t even realize are valued because they come naturally to you. What impact do you think this would have on your job performance, motivation and future potential? How do you think this might change the course of your day, project and career?

The very nature of the Tagosphere gives us the opportunity to create opportunities for what I call “Tagability,” or the means to identify and be identified for positive attributes, skills, and competencies – some of which are evident and others that are more obscure. Tagability can be nothing short of transformational for a person’s career, as it gives a fuller perspective on any given individual. I’m thinking now of my friend Bruno, who has many obvious talents. His business card notes that he is a Ph.D. and research fellow working for the leading beauty and cosmetics firm L’Oréal with expertise in hair biology – all very impressive. Yet equally impressive are Bruno’s attributes that are not displayed on his business card. He has lived, traveled and worked all over the world. His career spans more than 35 years in many specialized fields, including embryology, glycans biology and functions, skin pathology, retinoids pharmacology, skin, and hair follicle stem cells, and in vitro reconstructed skin. Bruno’s scientific knowledge has made him a recognized international expert in his field and unique in the global cosmetics industry. He has taught at renowned universities around the world and sits on a number of prestigious boards.

But that’s not all! Bruno is proficient at sailing, collects antique cameras, admires modern art and is a fan of aeronautics. When I asked him how these seemingly unrelated talents translate to his work as a scientist, he said this: “In my job it’s important to see the world through different lenses, with the eyes of a biologist and philosopher, and with concepts that can be applied to any organized ‘society’—whether it’s a group of cells or tissues or a team of individuals.

Bruno has even performed a “one man show” at a Paris theater entitled: “The Wisdom of Hair.” Clearly, there’s no way that Bruno’s business card or job title could capture his multifaceted experience (can yours?) but all of this could be brought to light in the Tagosphere.

Tagability is not about our emotional relationship to an individual; rather, it’s a way for us to draw out other people’s observable attributes into bits of information that will help them (and us, as colleagues) have a much more gratifying and productive workplace experience. Before you doubt the power of small pieces of information to affect positive change for the greater good, consider the CAPTCHA technology developed at Carnegie Mellon University. CAPTCHA – an acronym for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart – is the distorted words and numbers that some websites make you retype to verify that you are a real person before you can post a comment, send an email or purchase a ticket. “The little puzzles work because computers are not as good as humans at reading distorted text,” says Luis von Ahn, a CMU professor who was part of the CAPTCHA team. Luis and his colleagues hypothesized that with millions of people already entering words every day to confirm their identity, wouldn’t it be great if they could “capture” some of the data from millions of individuals and apply it to a good cause?

They decided to get the world, literally, to help digitize documents like old paper books and ancient manuscripts through a program cleverly called reCAPTCHA. Here’s how it works: After a computer has finished scanning, digitizing and converting manuscripts into words, there is a natural fall-out of text that the computer hasn’t been able to convert. This is where Von Ahn’s idea comes into play. Today, each time you enter these security verification words, there are now very often two words to enter instead of one. You may get cleared by the security program for only one of the words; the other goes into a gigantic database. After a statistically significant number of people have typed the same thing for these images, the fall-out text is accepted as the most likely interpretation. (Yes, even computers need human beings to finish their work!) So while millions of people around the world are ensuring the security of their credit cards, they are also contributing to the digitalization of ancient manuscripts or classic literature. Now, tagging in the workplace may not result in huge altruistic outcomes for humanity, but it does put into perspective how simple it can be to get employees to identify people’s talents in a global workplace collectively. Why leave it up to one or two managers or a small group of HR professionals to do this massive job for an entire company when the entire company can do it for the good of all?

Tagability in Action: How and What to Tag

Let’s start with you. Do you remember the interview process that you went through to get your current position or one of your past jobs? Even those of us who recruit people every day have, at some point, been on the other side of the desk. There was, of course, your smartly formatted resume neatly listing your previous experiences and accomplishments. Maybe you found your current employer (or they found you) through a headhunter, in which case there were reference checks and maybe even an assessment of some sort. You may have interviewed with several people within a company, answering their questions to satisfy any doubts or ensure that you had the right experience and skills to fill the role. Then one day, you got the call: YOU had been selected for the position and, by the way, were you able to start first thing Monday morning?

In many companies, this is where your past ends. Sure, your work experience might be entered into a database somewhere but, frankly, most employers have just spent so much time and money to find and research everything about you that now they just want you to get to work. So the new hire orientation begins; you know, where organizations do their best to bring you up to speed on the company’s history, or “how we do things here” and other processes that you’ll need to understand in order to have a successful career.

Imagine that you could quickly capture the talents a new hire is bringing and not let them be forgotten the first day of the job. I’m not talking about a self-service competency database or automated resume scanning software. It’s a very simple exercise that employees can enter themselves—not just in their first weeks of the job but anytime going forward.

To do so, you first go into a simple application, either on the company’s Intranet or on your mobile device and select “Tag Me.” Here you have the opportunity to enter keywords that best describe what YOU think you’re good at in three easy categories:

Roles / Jobs

This is where you would tag the various roles or jobs in which you feel that you exhibit particular talents. Try not to think of this just in terms of your job title; you can be a Vice President of Marketing but demonstrate talent as a coach, speaker, teacher, manager, expert or consultant. Remember, tags are simple. The best Tags are one-word descriptors, two maximum. What roles or job tags would you give yourself right now?

Knowledge / Skills / Expertise

Now you have the opportunity to list the skills or knowledge areas in which you feel you excel or have a particular expertise. A complete list of possible attributes would fill up an entire book, so I won’t list them here; however, it’s worth elaborating on a few examples to demonstrate the endless possibilities. Some of your skills could be directly related to your current job. Let’s say you’re a software engineer. You might have certain programming language expertise such as PL/SQL, C-Sharp or HTML. You might indicate innovation is a skill through the patents...