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There is a major shortage of talent. Critically needed foreign workers cannot make their way here because temporary work visas are snapped up on the first day they become available. If you were thinking this is about high-tech workers, you would be wrong. This is about fashion models.

What few people know (and maybe even fewer care to) is that currently a fashion model coming to America has to compete for the same H1-B visas that every immigrant software engineer and developer does. This is a crisis. Summer is upon us and what are the editors of swimsuit editions supposed to do when visas run out on the first day they are available — take pictures in France and Photoshop in a background from California? Fast action is needed. Disaster looms. The fantasy lives of millions of teenage boys and voyeurs are in jeopardy.

Enter Anthony Weiner. The congressman from New York is riding (or taking the subway) to the rescue. Representative Weiner has sponsored a bill in Congress that would create a separate category of visas for fashion models, the P-4. If passed, the beauties would not be competing with the geeks and we can all breathe a collective sigh of relief. Weiner for President.

Jokes apart, the Weiner bill — HR 4080, does highlight a fundamental problem with U.S. immigration policy. With regards to talent we have no policy. What we do have are immigration laws dating to the 1940s that have been sporadically modified without much of a plan or any broader understanding of the strategic implications. That made little difference in the past with the U.S. being the best and, to some extent the only, destination for skilled talent.

While the U.S. is still a very attractive place, alternatives are emerging. I wrote about this in a recent article on increasing competition for talent from the European Union and other countries. The Blue Card program created by the EU is explicitly targeted at skilled workers, unlike the Green Card, which is predominantly a vehicle for reuniting families. Our immigration policy does little to attract high-caliber talent in fields like technology and sciences and does not differentiate much between categories of talent. There are no strategic underpinnings to support employers in the war for talent.

Take the H-1B program as an example.

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Corporations around the world are missing an opportunity both to help their employees during their economic struggles and to build their employment brand image as an employer that cares. The foundation of this opportunity is the current surge in gas prices and other economic factors that are heavily impacting almost every corporation’s workforce.

It’s almost impossible to pick up a newspaper or magazine and not read about the economic conditions that are putting a strain on almost everyone’s budget and way of life.

Rather than ignoring it or hoping it will go away, look upon it as a chance to “turn lemons into lemonade” and to further strengthen your employment brand image.

It has been common for corporations to offer benefits to their employees to ease their commutes or to help save the environment. However, the recent dramatic rise in gas prices provides corporations with an opportunity to really amp up their offerings, and to demonstrate to those they wish to attract and retain that the organization “cares” about them.

In fact, one study by Dr. Wayne Hochwarter, of Florida State University, found that high gas prices led to more stress on the job, thus impacting employee performance. In his research, Dr. Hochwarter found that one-third of the employees surveyed said they would quit their job for a comparable one closer to home.

Research by outplacement consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas found that 34% of employers had potential candidates who turned down jobs because of long commutes and added nearly 8% of employers report turnover caused by high transportation costs.

Acting now provides an opportunity to build your employment brand because the combined topics of gas prices, food prices, and the mortgage crisis are hot in the media. As a result, any bold action by a corporation is likely not just to be viewed positively by employees and potential applicants but also by those covering consumer confidence and spending in the media.

Efforts by employers to help workers cope with these economic factors will likely be written up in the press and in business publications. Not only would you be helping your workers, but you will also be building employee loyalty while getting free PR to further strengthen your employment brand image. It’s an opportunity that won’t last long, so it shouldn’t be missed.

Many firms have already been recognized for excellence in these areas, including Google, Intel, Oracle, Microsoft, Cisco, Nike, and HP. There are many actions to consider, and I’ve separated the various options into broad categories below.

Promoting Drive-Less Options

The first group of options is relatively cheap, but they can have a significant impact on the amount of money your employees need to pay in commute costs. 12 “drive-less” options include:

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Goodwill Group Inc. announced it would close an unprofitable day labor staffing unit on Wednesday, in an attempt to return the company to profitability, according to reports filed by Reuters and Daily Yomiuri Online.

The move follows a series of scandals at the company including the arrest of three Goodwill employees earlier this month for alleged violations of Japan’s employment security laws. The company’s website confirms the workers were later charged, and sources state that both the company and the employees paid fines totaling more than 1 million yen.

There were other media reports suggesting that the company may have its license to provide staffing services revoked by Japanese authorities, but those reports remain unconfirmed.

The Goodwill Group Inc. is the largest staffing provider in Japan and a majority owner of U.S. staffing company GW Premier America, which has annual revenues of more than $1 billion and operates under multiple brands in the United States and Canada including: Technical Aid Corporation, Talent Tree, Inc., Willstaff, Inc., and Advantage Human Resourcing Inc.

The Tokyo-based Goodwill Group’s shareholders voted on June 7 to approve a reorganization plan that includes the sale of 15.5 billion yen ($146 million) of preferred shares. Shareholders also approved a preferred stock sale to a fund set up by Morgan Stanley and Cerberus Partners LP; both firms are helping the company with its reorganization efforts.

Ask HR professionals to identify the core of a company’s success and chances are, most will point to the recruiting and selection process. Performed effectively, these two distinct but inseparably connected activities can result in sustainable profit and growth for the organization and all its employees.

I believe a company’s organizational values, its core values, culture, and mutual expectations, are a company’s best recruiting and retention tool.

Mutual Expectations

In relationships of every nature, including partnerships, joint ventures, service contracts and yes, marriage, the incidence of association failure can be traced in large part to the failure of the two parties to clearly understand, appreciate, and agree to mutual expectations upfront.

The employer/employee relationship unquestionably falls into this category. In fact, outside of a family, work relationships represent the greatest number of people involved. Yet few businesses formally establish clearly stated employer/employee mutual expectations!

The key to a company’s success is a reciprocal, balanced level of expectations between the organization and each of its employees.

Time was when the primary social and work contract in this country could be characterized as “show up, be reliable, do your job, and it’s yours until you retire. When that happens, we’ll continue to take care of you.”

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Some news from various sources on employment eligibility, background checks, screening, and more:

New I-9 Form Released…

U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services just released its new version of the I-9 employment verification form, so make sure to update your records. (You can download it here; note that the new expiration date in the right-hand corner reflects 6/30/09.) You can move to an e-file for these forms, and perhaps you should: employeescreenIQ says its data shows that more than 85% of paper I-9 forms are filled out incorrectly. And electronically verifying this step is certainly a “greener” thing to do, and companies like Verified Person, Inc. agree. Its CEO, Jim Davis, says his Verified Person I-9 solution “affirms Verified Person’s belief in promoting an HR process that benefits the environment.”

From Resume Fluffing to Conviction Bluffing…

The folks at employeescreenIQ also say one of the hottest background-screening trends centers around the importance of thorough background checks in a shrinking job market. In fact, considering the state of the economy, “the job market is destined to become even more competitive, which in turn could lead some individuals to stretch the truth in order to secure employment,” according to the company’s new list of 10 background screening trends. Also, employeescreenIQ says conviction rates among job applicants are on the rise, and points to a 56% discrepancy rate between what is reported on a resume and what is found when conducting employment and education verifications.

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As we passed the summer solstice here in the Northern hemisphere a few days ago, we completed our journey through half of 2008. It’s been a year where the economy, political environment, and nature itself have all stressed the rhythm of our daily routines.

Change most often occurs when systems are stressed and have to respond in order to survive. It is at the intersection of pain, technology, and economics that new products and services arise.

At first, these changes are frightening and require both learning and daring to adopt them. But once accepted and woven into the fabric of daily routine, they become indispensible. This was the case with applicant tracking systems and career sites on the Internet. And it is still evolving.

So far this year, I see at least four major trends emerging. There are probably more than four, but these are the ones I can make sense of and that seem big enough to warrant being called trends.

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Raghav had a packed room in San Diego for a presentation on diversity — the overriding theme of which was how to make a business case for diversity. The need for a solid business case for a diversity program appears to be overlooked more often than not. Much of the literature on diversity suggests that the benefits are obvious, though this is contradicted by available evidence from multiple studies. Telling the faithful that they’ve been worshipping a false god never goes over well. As expected, many in the diversity community have attacked the motivations of the researchers or said that the evidence is illogical.

While the reactions are understandable, what’s not is why the advocates of diversity don’t do much to help their cause. Instead of making an effort to demonstrate where diversity can add value, the approach has been to keep insisting that diversity is beneficial for employers in general, without any proof to support the claim. It should be taken on faith that investing in diversity is a good idea and that questioning the value indicates opposition stemming from bigotry or ignorance.

A Solution in Search of a Problem

Diversity is EEO plus. Equal employment opportunity alone would ensure that there was diversity in the workforce for most employers. An employer would have to work very hard to reach a state of no diversity among its employees. With women making up 51% of the population, African Americans 13%, Hispanics 15%, and Asians 4%, the employer would need to be actively engaged in discrimination to avoid any diversity. Any employer that does so would not be around for long.

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Peopleclick SVP Ginny Gomez says five clients are testing out the company’s new onboarding product, and it’ll more generally available in Q4. Also, she says, “we’re not really seeing the big downturn” — and that the company’s European business is going strong. …

Personified (the new CareerBuilder subsidiary) has about 110 employees and is charging roughly $120,000 to do employer brand consulting, roughly $50,000 to evaluate a company’s applicant-tracking needs, and roughly $3,000-$10,000 monthly for outsourcing work, such as hiring people to staff a small part of a company. Mary Delaney, the endearing president of Personified (shown), says there’s a “very thick wall” between Personified and CareerBuilder to reduce conflicts-of-interest when companies are looking for sourcing advice and Personified is in the position of recommending and not recommending CareerBuilder. …

From the booth-size battles: Ultimate Software’s booth and People-Trak’s booth are surprisingly similar in size given that the former is a company with somewhere around a billion-dollar market cap. … People-Trak’s Jim Witschger, a former USC baseballer, says “I thought we’d see a lot of the whole gloom and doom thing” at the SHRM conference, but instead he found the opposite — people doing demos at his booth 15 minutes after the close Monday. He said the vibe at the conference was “very encouraging.” …

Enough talk of gloom and doom — onto boom: Jobing (a company we mentioned yesterday) held a blowout party Monday night, complete with fireworks off a barge near Navy Pier. It was a scene right out of … 10 years ago. …

Over at HRworks (profile), president Kurt Ronn says that companies are “falling asleep at the wheel” right now. Instead of using the slower economy as a chance to grab newly available talent they’ll desperately need soon, they’re cutting. Ronn realizes there’s pressure to cut costs and improve short-term earnings, but, he says, “you might as well miss it [earnings] a little bit more and get the talent.” He’s also working on some pilot programs with companies interested in hiring disabled veterans. …

Newlyweds AIRS (profile) and The RightThing (profile) seem to be adjusting to life together quite well. During the SHRM conference, the company closed a 6,000-hires-a-year outsourcing deal, and recruiter training is up about 10% over last year. Says AIRS prez Chris Forman: “Life is good in Internet sourcing.”

Time and again I read recommendations for evaluating quality of hire. Ask the managers, ask the employees, ask an astrologer. None of these things will ever give you more than a subjective opinion about the kind of information you need to improve the quality of hire. Here’s why.

Imagine advertising for superheroes. There are a dozen steroid-pumped, ego-centric applicants sitting in your waiting room wearing masks, capes, and tights. Each hero claims to have saved the world at one time or another. You hire three of them. Six months later, how do you evaluate your quality of hire?

Evaluating quality of hire requires looking at performance in a different way. It requires mentally separating the “how” from “what.” The “how” represents what the superhero says or does and “what” represents the outcome. Here is the hard part to accept: evaluating quality of hire depends almost entirely on evaluating “how” the hero performed the job, not the outcome. Regardless of opinions to the contrary, “how” is the only part of the job under the hero’s control. It is the only thing separating one hero from another.

Here is an example that may explain this idea.

It’s a particularly bad time on earth. Asteroid showers are occurring periodically, keeping the super-heroes busy. When he was on duty, Clock-Man reacted by turning back time. On her shift, Wonder Woman pulled the asteroids into new orbits with her lasso. And when it was his turn, Superman flew faster than a speeding bullet, smashing them into smithereens. The “what” was the same for all three: reversing time. Using lassos and brute force were all examples of “how.”

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“You cannot not be here,” NuView CEO Shafiq Lokhandwala says, laughing at the double negative, about SHRM. NuView, an HR tech vendor, doesn’t get many leads here, but feels like it’d look bad if it didn’t show. The company is growing by about 70% a year (and may ask for funding in the coming months if it decides to grow even faster); a significant amount of its new business is global work, and it recently signed Hill International. Hill has offices in Iraq, UAE, Saudia Arabia, and elsewhere … About half of NuView’s clients get the recruiting module … The 5,200-square-foot Jobing booth (shown) is reportedly the largest booth in SHRM’s history; Oprah wasn’t in the booth, just the next-best-thing … Says Scot Melland, Dice’s CEO: “I find it amazing when companies spend so much money on a trade show booth” … Melland says 70% of Dice users are employed, a metric he’s convinced compares favorably to Monster and CareerBuilder; Dice “rarely runs into HotJobs” at all, he says … Dice will change its site to a more content-and-community heavy version in about a month (now in beta) … Yahoo HotJobs says its new Smart Ads offering, which delivers targeted job ads to candidates as they surf the web, is achieving 5 to 10 times higher click-throughs than typical post-n’-prays … Todd McCormick, president of CareerBuilder’s Recruiter Business Unit, says Yahoo HotJobs has, in theory, an awesome opportunity to capitalize on its data on consumers (i.e. job candidates), but, he asks, “is that stuff accurate?” … McCormick says users often sign up for Yahoo and give little to no thought when identifying their profession or other demographic data … more on product announcements and on the popular Monster charity promo …

Summize is a free conversation search engine that allows you to scan content posted on Twitter.com.

While many of the “twits” or posts on Twitter offer little clues or meaningful context, it’s possible to extrapolate a few juicy tidbits of information.

One such example is when people use the phrase “I work for” followed by the name of a company. This is a great technique on any search engine, but it’s particularly useful on blog search engines because people love to talk about themselves. With Twitter being a microblog (only 140 characters allowed in a post) the brief comments offer little other information. But this is one of those short phrases where the context tells us much more than the text itself.

For example, a search for “I work for Microsoft” reveals a few people like:

• ThatGuyNamedKen
• Tafelzoetstof
• Rickster_CDN
• rtvenge
• Lindsi
• Vriyait
• ClarkeZone

Among others, of course. Now, that in and of itself is not very revealing. Other than knowing where they work, you can’t really tell what they do…unless, of course, you see their other posts. For example, in one of ThatGuyNamedKen’s posts you find out on April 18 he got a job offer from Microsoft to be a “Support Operations Analyst.”

“Great, Shally, but now where does he live and how do I contact him?”

Well, that’s a bit harder. If you look at his profile, you can tell he lives in Winnipeg (Canada, of course). As for contacting him, though, unless you want to commit to some CyberSleuthing, it’s probably easiest to just “follow” him on Twitter. Then you can send him a private twit by texting 40404 with a message that starts with @thatguynamedken: followed with a short (140 characters or less) message.

With the SHRM show and conference underway in Chicago now, vendors have been busy issuing announcements of product releases, new deals, partnerships and more. Here’s a roundup of items that crossed our desk over the weekend last few days:

• Peopleclick (profile; site) introduced Peopleclick Onboarding as an enhanced component of its talent acquisition suite. It integrates with the Peopleclick Recruitment Management System (RMS) and handles the usual forms and manager checklists. The cool part is that new employees can access the system even before they start to learn about details like parking, lunchrooms, how to find their office and even chat with their new colleagues.

• JobTarget (profile; site) announced service agreements with First Advantage Recruiting Solutions, Bayard Advertising, and Graystone Group Advertising. These recruitment advertising firms outsourced their job posting activity to JobTarget, the company says in a press release today. It’s a relatively new service specifically for agencies.

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Monster has come up with a unique way to attract visitors to its booth at the SHRM conference now underway in Chicago: Give away $1 million.

Monster is distributing donation cards in denominations from $25 to $10,000 that conference-goers then decide which of 23 charities gets it. One charity can get it all or the amount can be divied up.

“We’re really psyched about it,” company spokesman Steve Sylven told us, speaking from the busy show floor at McCormick Place. The usual assortment of pens, glow balls and other tsotchkes “have their place,” says Sylven, to whom we confessed we have a draw full of pens from a dozen shows. The “trumps are very popular,” he adds, referring to Monster’s Trumpasauraus mascot, which we also had until the puppy got at it.

This show, “We decided to do something different.”

The charities fall into several different categories include literacy and education, health, military support, environmental and others. The organizations include Doctors Without Borders, Children’s Defense Fund, the USO and Susan G. Komen for the Cure.

Monster calls the initiative “Doing Well By Doing Good: Put Our Money Where Your Heart is” and pledges to give away all $1 million by the end of the conference Wednesday. Should all the donation cards not be distributed the company will contribute the remainder. Unlikely Sylven thought. At the rate the cards are going, “They’ll all be gone.”

Microsoft has a clever strategy to recruit away Yahoo! employees. For the most part, Microsoft has successfully relied on its strong employment brand and near-boundless opportunities to attract the best and brightest as opposed to seeking them out.

That is, until recently, when Microsoft raised the level of its recruiting aggressiveness to the point where it would have to be rated an “A” on the aggressiveness scale.

The first indication came prior to the initial merger offer to Yahoo, when its central sourcing team directly emailed recruiting messages to Yahoo engineers, playing on their concerns about Yahoo’s future. Just last week, they ran a full-page color ad in the paper announcing in bold type…“Microsoft has search jobs in the valley”.

There is no secret who the ad was intended for, despite daily defections from Yahoo there is still some top-notch talent inside the company that the competition would love to poach. No subtlety here!

Develop Talent, Hire Talent, or Buy the Competition

In nearly every industry, talent is the primary driver of both a firm’s capability and its capacity to perform. For firms that are growing, either holistically or through industry consolidation/expansion, there are really only three options to ensure access to talent.

Some companies opt to build or develop talent; unfortunately, development is often a “slow” option that provides mediocre results in a fast-changing world.

A second option, growth through mergers and acquisitions, allows the firm to increase its capabilities relatively rapidly as a result of “buying” or merging with a major competitor. It is one of the most common and fundamentally sound business strategies available, and one in constant use around the world. However, M&A is expensive, and often leads to defections of the very key talent you have liked to have retained. Mergers and acquisitions can be hostile or tame, something we have witnessed with Microsoft’s attempt to acquire in recent months.

When M&A doesn’t work, companies have yet another option, one that is less complex, less time-consuming, and much less expensive. This option is to poach away most, if not all, of the talent that provides the competition with its capacity to exist, something Microsoft is obviously doing in a very public way.

The “Neutron Bomb” Recruiting Approach as an Alternative to Mergers

The “Plan B” poaching strategy that firms should consider a feasible alternative to mergers and acquisitions focuses on using strong recruiting approaches to directly “poach away” the target firm’s key employees. This effectively gives you access to all of the capability that produced their intellectual capital without the internal drama that led to the competitor’s chaotic state.

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Understanding human behavior can help you recruit more passive candidates.

When filling a job order, most recruiters search through virtual stacks of resumes hoping one stands out, matching most of the skills and experiences listed on the job description. When calling a person, the recruiter attempts to gain this same information by first describing the job and then asking the person to describe his or her background. If there’s a fit, the selling process begins.

If you want to hire more top performers, this is exactly what you shouldn’t be doing.

A little understanding of human nature and solution selling offers some guidance on how to approach passive candidates and quickly get them more interested in what you have to offer. If you follow the instructions closely, you’ll even be able to get two to three great referrals on each call. You’ll want these, especially if you decide you’re not interested in pursuing the candidate.

In the last sentence, pay notice to who decides to move forward or not. It should be the recruiter, not the candidate. If you’re letting your candidates decide if they’re interested in your opportunity, you’re not recruiting, you’re just box-checking and order-taking. Making this decision is the first part of the applicant control process essential to good recruiting.

For the sake of brevity and making a point, let me narrow the passive candidate recruiting process down to two small, but critical, first steps. The first relates to a candidate saying they’re not interested in considering your opportunity, even before you’ve told them anything about it.

The second relates to those who don’t say “no” right away, but instead ask about the comp, title, and location.

I’m sure you would agree that getting past these two pivotal points will dramatically increase the number of top candidates you put into your pipeline.

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Higher gas prices, of course, mean winners and losers in the job market. The winners are likely to include some oil company employers, alternative-energy employers, Houston recruiters, and telecommuters. It’ll be interesting to see whether the increased demand for public transportation will eventually mean more hiring at public transportation agencies.

Here in sprawling Los Angeles, though the Bel Air/Beverly Hills elite continues to incorrectly claim that “no one in LA takes public transportation,” the MTA says that “Metro Rail ridership in May shot up 6 percent over May 2007, one of the highest one-month spikes on record.”

In May, more than 7.6 million passengers boarded the MTA’s two Los Angeles subway lines and three light-rail surface lines. The organization employs about 10,000 people, and is hiring engineers, Oracle programmers, and others.

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Hiring people is rarely based on objective evidence and is, perhaps, the least-objective activity that organizations participate in.

When we see a candidate who meets a large number of our pre-existing conditions for employment (i.e., a candidate who has gone to a school our hiring manager likes; has worked at a couple of well-respected companies; or has written the right key words on his resume), we have already hired him in our minds.

Interviews are examples of how easy it is to abandon the tools of objectivity, the scientific method, logic, and the rules of evidence, for our “gut” or for “chemistry.”

While there is considerable evidence showing that testing candidates is far more likely to predict successful performance, we still rely almost exclusively on interviews. Though numerous researchers have pointed out the need to gather a variety of data about a candidate, we generally settle for an application form and an interview.

Why are we so resistant to testing and other more objective sources of data?

Perhaps it is because our expectations, preconceptions, and prior beliefs pretty much always influence our interpretation of new information. Experiments conducted over and over have shown that we see what we expect to see and conclude what we expect to conclude.

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Expansive hiring demand has largely been the name of the game over the last 10 years in China.

This is no longer the story, and it’s not just because the summer heat has kicked in. All the signs are that employers are cooling to the idea of hiring more staff. This is not a cause for immediate concern for third-party recruitment suppliers, or unrequited joy for HR departments, but there are signs of a general easing of skills demand.

The first source of comfort for HR departments is Hudson’s latest quarterly hiring report, which says professional hiring expectations in China have declined in the second quarter of 2008, after a prolonged and sustained rise.

The fact that Hudson even asked companies what HR policies they would implement in the event of a recession is a sign of the changes to come.

A serious hiring slowdown is unlikely at this stage, but the Hudson report found that 14% of respondents in China expected the country would face a recession in the next six months. This is fewer than in any other Asian country.

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This is the perfect time to capture market share with top talent.

The economy is slow, gas prices are through the roof, and it is causing problems everywhere. Employees are looking for jobs closer to home or something better to offset the recent pillage of their pocketbooks. Employees are looking for ways to cut costs, so help them do it before they look somewhere else.

Brand your business as the best in town and you will really set your brand apart during these tough economic times.

Although the goal of any company right now is to reduce operating costs, all while trying to maintain or increase profit, what if that’s not enough? What if the goal you have in mind right now is really going to hurt you in the long run? Would you be willing to take a risk? Increase while everyone else is decreasing? That is precisely what I am telling you to do.

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–In Illinois, a home healthcare company settles a case regarding an employee allegedly not hired for being black.

–Meanwhile, Disney is sued for allegedly not hiring someone who didn’t have the “Disney look.”

–Who says the newspaper is dead? Well, I do, often. But Brian Hauswirth of the Missouri Department of Corrections tells me the paper’s the main reason why his career fair just surpassed all expectations. “When we ask people, ‘where did you hear about the career fair?’ the no. 1 reason is the newspaper,” he says. About 165 people attended the fair, he says, and about 103 applied for Corrections Officer 1 positions at a new prison. They still need to pass background checks, but Hauswirth says the results are “very promising.” Those with military experience make up about a quarter of corrections officers.

–Cellular South has completed a redesign of its careers site. It’s no EY site, but the company does use video to try to get applicants who fit its culture: fast-paced, challenging, competitive. It had Bernard Hodes (profile; site) help out (after realizing that consumer marketing and employment branding are cousins, not siblings, so Cell South can’t just use its in-house marketing folks), but still uses Sonic (profile; site) to track applicants.

Barb Miller, VP of human resources for the 1,000-employee company, one of the largest privately held wireless companies in the U.S., says the employees you see on the site are indeed employees, not actors, though Hodes and Miller’s team did discuss the idea of using actors (some Cellular South employees underperformed on camera, resulting in an SVP filling in at the end). Cellular South will measure results of the site through the “capture rate” (who leaves the site?); quality of hire (performance reviews, retention); traffic; and productivity (how many customers they can get with a certain number of employees). I asked Miller about the company’s snooze-inducing job descriptions. “You hit on something good,” she says. “That will be the next phase of what we do.”