Wednesday, November 22, 2006
The secret relationship between charity and enterprise architecture...
It has been a slow weak having only received three calls from recruiters at other enterprises attempting to recruit high quality enterprise architects...
I usually start the conversation by asking how did they learn of me and the most popular answer happens to be LinkedIn where if you search for enterprise architect, I come up first. The main problem with using this approach is that all recruiters happened to have discovered LinkedIn at the same time and therefore aren't learning of candidates other than what is registered.
Reality says that even when recruiters ask folks such as myself if we know of anyone else, we would have already also linked into them and/or have already given out the leads to other recruiters that were faster to the jump than you. Maybe recruiters need to think about the problem space of finding good enterprise architects a little differently.
Lately, I have been asking them if they have attempted to use the blogosphere as a method of finding candidates. Sure, it is a lot more work than simply putting keywords into a search engine. Of course, they can do this and find those who blog on enterprise architect topics and find the likes of Charles Betz, Robert McIlree, Scott Mark, James Tarbell and others but they need to take it even deeper than that.
Imagine if they started to not only follow these folks blogs but also did some research into who left comments in their blogs? One frequent commenter in my blog is James Robertson of Smalltalk fame who tends to take a contrarian position most of the time. The key question is not whether he is currently serving in the role of enterprise architect, but whether he would make a good one and I think the answer is yes in this regard.
Of course, you may also find the likes of David Heinemier Hansson whom likewise loves to throw daggers but otherwise should be avoided as if you read who has linked to me in the past, their thought patterns will become apparent.
Anyway, I would say it is difficult at best to recruit me. In fact, it would be easier to convince Malcolm X to have jungle fever, for George Bush to publicly acknowledge that his Iraqi policies are bad for both Iraq and the United States and even convincing the CIO of a large enterprise whose primary business isn't technology that they should build a mission-critical enterprise application using Ruby on Rails.
I tend to avoid mentioning folks at work by name especially when they are executives but I can say that the absolute number one reason why I cannot be recruited came to me when I walked out of the door and received an email about our upcoming holiday party. Our SVP encouraged folks to bring an unwrapped toy so we can donate to a local charity. While I have been known to use my blog as a bully pulpit to encourage others to think about charity, knowing that our executives are now also carrying the charitable torch brings joy to my heart.
Maybe the action item for recruiters of other enterprises is to teach your executives to not talk in the tone of the your call is important to us, repeat after me, best practices, synergies, etc and to teach them to focus more on being human like the ones I get the privelege of reporting to...
| | View blog reactionsI usually start the conversation by asking how did they learn of me and the most popular answer happens to be LinkedIn where if you search for enterprise architect, I come up first. The main problem with using this approach is that all recruiters happened to have discovered LinkedIn at the same time and therefore aren't learning of candidates other than what is registered.
Reality says that even when recruiters ask folks such as myself if we know of anyone else, we would have already also linked into them and/or have already given out the leads to other recruiters that were faster to the jump than you. Maybe recruiters need to think about the problem space of finding good enterprise architects a little differently.
Lately, I have been asking them if they have attempted to use the blogosphere as a method of finding candidates. Sure, it is a lot more work than simply putting keywords into a search engine. Of course, they can do this and find those who blog on enterprise architect topics and find the likes of Charles Betz, Robert McIlree, Scott Mark, James Tarbell and others but they need to take it even deeper than that.
Imagine if they started to not only follow these folks blogs but also did some research into who left comments in their blogs? One frequent commenter in my blog is James Robertson of Smalltalk fame who tends to take a contrarian position most of the time. The key question is not whether he is currently serving in the role of enterprise architect, but whether he would make a good one and I think the answer is yes in this regard.
Of course, you may also find the likes of David Heinemier Hansson whom likewise loves to throw daggers but otherwise should be avoided as if you read who has linked to me in the past, their thought patterns will become apparent.
Anyway, I would say it is difficult at best to recruit me. In fact, it would be easier to convince Malcolm X to have jungle fever, for George Bush to publicly acknowledge that his Iraqi policies are bad for both Iraq and the United States and even convincing the CIO of a large enterprise whose primary business isn't technology that they should build a mission-critical enterprise application using Ruby on Rails.
I tend to avoid mentioning folks at work by name especially when they are executives but I can say that the absolute number one reason why I cannot be recruited came to me when I walked out of the door and received an email about our upcoming holiday party. Our SVP encouraged folks to bring an unwrapped toy so we can donate to a local charity. While I have been known to use my blog as a bully pulpit to encourage others to think about charity, knowing that our executives are now also carrying the charitable torch brings joy to my heart.
Maybe the action item for recruiters of other enterprises is to teach your executives to not talk in the tone of the your call is important to us, repeat after me, best practices, synergies, etc and to teach them to focus more on being human like the ones I get the privelege of reporting to...
