In her blog, Tara Hunt defines whuffie as:

• The sum of the reputation, influence, bridging capital and bonding capital, access to ideas and talent, access to resources, potential access to further resources, saved up favors, accomplishments (resumes, awards, articles, etc.) and the Whuffie of those who you have relationships with.

According to Hunt the term Whuffie was created by Cory Doctorow in his book, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. Hunt's summary of Doctorow's definition:

Whuffie has replaced money, providing a motivation for people to do useful and creative things. A person’s Whuffie is a general measurement of his or her overall reputation, and Whuffie is lost and gained according to a person’s favorable or unfavorable actions. The question is, who determines which actions are favorable or unfavorable? In Down and Out, the answer is public opinion. Rudely pushing past someone on the sidewalk will definitely lose you points from them (and possibly bystanders who saw you), while composing a much-loved symphony will earn you Whuffie from everyone who enjoyed it.

What does Whuffie mean in terms of how we behave in the here and now?

According to Hunt, it's more important to be nice, notable and networked than ever. Google enables every candidate, potential client, and placement to monitor your status and professional behavior. Facebook, LinkedIn and other social networking sites help all your accumulated communities monitor where you've been, what you're doing and who you are becoming. And, the same is true for everyone that you work with and encounter.

Good impressions are not enough. Reputation management and commmunity currency are everything.

How's your Whuffie ranking? 

Don't even know what to say about this one...

The Huffington Post reports that a woman in Russia had her sexual harassment suit thrown out by a judge who said:

"If we had no sexual harassment, we'd have no children."

Good lord.

More info here:

Just because it's more fun than doing a Cosmo quiz, don't forget to answer our monthly recruiter trends poll. The current poll will close on August 15th. 

Oh, and while we're talking deadlines, the next issue of our HR Newsletter will go out on August 12th. Visit our site and leave your email address to subscribe.

Springtime brought sunshine, flowers and -- in our case -- a new blog. We launched on March 31st with these three posts.

Starting a new venture that can only be successful if people stay indoors to read it, is a pretty tough thing to do when the sun beckons everyone outdoors...especially here in Canada. On the other hand, it also gives us a few months to hone our techniques and find our audience of die-hard fans.

I am now writing our 50th post and wondering what we can do to better inspire discussion and interest in recruiting based on what's been successful so far. According to the number of comments received, these are the four posts you've liked best.

4. Everyone wants to know more about social networking sites. This post on user stats back in April attracted three comments.

3. According to the 5 comments our June Poll, you probably can lose a great candidate over a cup of coffee.

2.With six comments, a study about working 4 ten-hour days instead of 5 eight-hour days has us speculating about making cross-cultural analysis and if it is even possible to do so.

1. Flip-flops aren't just for politicians anymore. Our post on the topic garnered 11 comments and left us wondering if flip-flops are for anyone at all.

And, let's not forget that interactivity isn't just about comments. Our quiz for recruiters has now been taken 26 times.

Working less will probably lead to higher productivity, says a new study at Bringham Young University.

The state government of Utah recently implemented a four day work week and experts believe it will result in higher job satisfaction and lower levels of work-family conflict. The researchers, Rex Facer and Lori Wadsworth of BYU’s Romney Institute of Public Management, believe these benefits will lead to higher productivity.

Most of the state employees in Utah work four 10-hour days a week during the transition period.

According to the researchers, Utah implemented the new schedule to save money on utilities and to give citizens a broader time range to access city hall services. Now they find they have also improved the morale of employees and improved their rate of retention among employees who save on fuel costs by commuting just four, instead of five days a week.

Even though four day work week employees work the same number of hours as their traditional work-week counterparts, they said they were more satisfied with their jobs, compensation, and benefits, and were less likely to look for employment elsewhere in the next year.

“I am hopeful that the state’s move to a four day work week will be a positive one,” said Wadsworth. “There are going to be very real benefits for employees, specifically decreased gas cost, decreased commute time (both because they only have to commute four days, but also because they’ll be commuting during off-peak times, so the commute could potentially be shorter each day), and hopefully, improved work-life balance.”

The study appears in the June issue of Review of Public Personnel Administration.

The other day, a friend of mine started drawing a treasure map that would lead her toward the perfect job for her. It looks a little like something that you might use to create a plot for another Indiana Jones movie. 

Her treasure map is not just another new age exercise in visualizing what she wants. Her treasure map includes barriers that she knows she has to overcome in order to add value to the right company. Let's call it professional adventurism.

She has to do back flips over the dangerous "mommy-track." She knows that flexibility is a two-way street. She combines the occasional need to work late when the company needs her to by setting up a child care cooperative with two other single mothers. They each take the other's child or children on different evenings.

She has to walk through the valley of "NO!" until she learns how to say it. If family and work are her priorities, she says no to other committments that interfere with what is important.

She diffuses boobie traps with foresight, efficiency and careful observation. She is not going to fall into anything she isn't prepared for because she's prepared for everything.

I think she is the kind of candidate who will become an employee who will be truly treasured.

Image credit.

I have a hot question for the heatwave:

Have you ever referred a great candidate to a client and then had them refused as a result of blatant discrimination? How did you handle the client relationship from that point onward?

I know, I know - the last thing any of us need is some new acronym-defined term to describe a phenomenon arising from the way the internet is changing the world.

But the Feiler Faster Thesis (FFT) is one you really should know about, because it defines a concept which will increasingly affect recruiting, especially in countries like Canada where we have some of the highest internet-adoption rates in the world.

FFT is defined (on Wikipedia) as follows:

"The Feiler Faster Thesis (of FFT) is a thesis, or supported argument, in modern journalism that suggests that the increasing pace of society is matched by (and perhaps driven by) journalists' ability to report events and the public's desire for more information."

First used in an article on Slate.com in 2000, FFT is largely used to describe the absorption of large amounts of politics-related information, by large groups of people, in a very short period of time. Thanks to online journalism - including blogs - political candidates can go from 'totally unknown' to 'everyone's talking about them' in as little as 48 hours.

But FFT is applicable far beyond political journalism. Thanks to blogs and sites like Facebook and YouTube, if a Formula 1 car crashes and the driver dies, even people who never watch car racing know about it within hours; if the previously-unknown Miss South Carolina makes a speech in which she says "The Iraq" and refers to South Africa as a continent, millions of people know who she is within 48 hours, and suddenly she's in the top 10 most-Googled names.

So what does this mean for recruiters? Two words: Employment brand.

All information travels faster and farther than it used to, but BAD news travels at the speed of light - and what happens on the internet, stays on the internet. Which means that if your organization has a customer service or employee disaster, it can affect your employment brand broadly and quickly - and it won't go away overnight.

Consider Verizon Math.

In 2006, a guy named George Vaccaro tried to get Verizon to fix his phone bill: Verizon's contracts promised a rate of .002 cents per minute but had been charging .002 dollars.

However, he ended up spending hours and hours with various Verizon customer service people, largely because no one at Verizon understood decimal systems - including their marketing department, who'd created materials using ".002" synonymously with "2 cents".

The whole thing became so hilarious to this guy that he created a whole website about it. He posted all his email communications to and from Verizon, but it wasn't until he posted an mp3 recording of his actual phone calls with Verizon that the internet started to wake up - hearing George try to explain basic mathematics to one customer service person after another (none of whom ever managed to understand it) was hilarious, especially to the computer geek-types who are instrumental in disseminating information of this type.

He posted the recording of the phone call on YouTube. YouTube removed it - but not before it got more than 1,000,000 views in a matter of days. There were t-shirts, video parodies, satiric articles - it was everywhere.

Verizon lawyers came down hard, but the damage was done. Even though all of this happened in 2006, 'Verizon Math' still lives on as a generic term for any company which regularly bilks customers or provides egregiously bad customer service.

What does this have to do with recruiting?

Well, it immediately became more difficult to find candidates for Verizon customer service roles - who wants to work at a company where everyone is stupid? And who wants to tell their friends they've just gotten a new job at Verizon, the laughing stock of the internet?

In the longer-term, Verizon Math is still costing Verizon Wireless serious money: they have to offer $24/hour plus bonuses, benefits and relocation packages in order to get customer service people. (Other US telecom companies pay more like $15/hour, and relocation packages are unheard-of.)

Bottom line? The Feiler Faster Thesis is just another reason why it's imperative for the HR/recruiting function to be cognizant of and connected to the overall business strategy and communications department.

In April, a San Diego CA judge ordered Starbucks to pay more than $100 million to 120,000 baristas in California, to reimburse them for tips (and interest) which were traditionally handed over to shift supervisors.

(If your first reaction was "Tips at Starbucks?  I just had to stand in line for 10 minutes to get a $6 cup of coffee - I'm not tipping anyone!", and your second reaction was "A hundred million dollars in tips?  I've got to get myself a job at Starbucks!", you're not alone.)

This is just one of the recent cases involving tips and gratuities in the US:  American Airlines recently had to pay 12 skycaps $325k, and a Massachusetts restaurant chain settled out of court for an estimated $2.5 million in damages.

What's so interesting about all this?

Most of these lawsuits have been brought about by a lawyer named Shannon Liss-Riordan, who seems to be carving an entire career out of recovering lost tips in class-action lawsuits.

Lawyers' fees for cases like this are generally based on a percentage of the total judgement amount (typically 20-30% of the total), so winning a couple of lawsuits for $100 million comes with a very attractive paycheque.

But it doesn't bode well for the 'little guy' in the long-term.  Most jobs that involve tips and gratuities (such as waitressing, valeting, etc.) are low-paying, and the workers in these roles rely on tips to make ends meet.  If companies start getting too scared of possible tip-related lawsuits later on, their response may be simply to ban tips entirely - leaving these workers with a real gap in their income.

(sigh) 

I just realized that last month's poll is the most-commented on post of the last 30 days on the whole ERE blog network!

I am so flattered that, even though the month is barely half over, I've decided to launch the July poll.