jessica lee writes.

Smart Job Seeker or Gimmicky?

this is truly a sign of the times. i received a few emails from colleagues this morning telling me that i needed to go check out this "kid" on the corner of 13th and G streets in downtown Washington, D.C. who was standing there in a suit and an orange sign that read "entry level job seeker." of course, i went to go investigate.

his name is Michael Volpe and he's a physics grad from SUNY at Genesco who spent two years in the peace corp working in South Africa as a school and community resource volunteer. his interests lie in the environment, energy, international development and foreign affairs. DC is the right town for him given his interests and peace corp experience - and he's obviously a smart kid as a physics major. for the sheer cajones it takes to stand out on he street like this... i like it and i thought i'd share with you a bit about him. he said he was tired of the internet job search and wanted to stand out in a different way - and it's working. i don't think he's right for my firm - but maybe he's right for you! download his resume here.

White House Easter Egg Roll.

one of the benefits of being in DC? access. to interesting people (politicos), the unique events... i love it. and this past Monday? another unique DC experience - the White House Easter egg roll. cool experience - me, my sister, my nephew, and a family friend's son... just the four of us, and thousands of others running around the White House south lawn. it took tremendous patience getting in - but once inside... it was like a little oasis and the kids went wild rolling around and hopping about the grass. a little photo montage for you below. for some reason, i was obsessed with the kids' shoes that day. such little, cute feet and shoes they have! (click through, RSS/email readers!)

Why I Love DC.

i'm thinking about chronicling reasons why i love DC via Twitter - and you can follow along using the #whyiloveDC hashtag. i've only done a few tweets so far - but there are so many days i wander about and am re-impressed with and re-inspired by my surroundings. check out this picture i snapped last night on my walk home from work. the White House isn't direclty on my route home, but by taking just a three block detour, i am able to see gorgeous tableaus like this. i never get tired of it...

Woah! HR Pros Are Heading for the Hills, Er Capitol Hill!

today, i felt like i had a bit of an ass whooping. i ran a few miles and then 30 minutes on an elliptical machine but that work out was nothing. rather, i felt like i had dropped the ball on all this card-check business because i totally missed that last week, the Secret Ballot Protection Act was introduced by Senators DeMint and Enzi to combat Employee Free Choice Act efforts. oops. where was i on that one?

and then there were also rumors today that the EFCA could be introduced in the House on Monday. eek! i didn't think it would come this quickly. time for me to step up my game and do more outreach and education on the issue. it's interesting timing though if EFCA were to be introduced on monday as... monday also happens to kick off SHRM's 2009 legislative and employment law conference which includes an advocacy day on wednesday (with sessions for attendees on the how-to of lobbying - nice! i'm actually really happy to see this!)... and guess what? i'll be there to cover the conference. (thank you, Fistful of Talent. being editor has its perks. and yes! thanks SHRM for the pass in.) i'll be interested in seeing how much chatter there will be on EFCA and beyond that, if the advocacy day yields anything related to EFCA.

the agenda for the conference is packed with some interesting topics - even for me, the HR gal who doesn't like employment law, compliance and the regulatory junk - including these few:

• sexual orientation, domestic partnerships + gender identity issues in the workplace
• sex offenders, terrorists + video resumes (a facebook and social networking discussion! yay!!)
• how HR tech poses new risks for employers
• genetic nondiscrimination
• increased union activism + labor law developments (assuming this will have a heavy EFCA focus?)

but what do you want to hear about from the conference? i'll blog here and on Fistful of Talent about the juicy bits of employment law that i learn... but are there other things you want reported on? and yes, high on my list of things to do at the conference is that i plan to try to seek out SHRM's new CEO Lon O'Neil. i have a few suggestions for things i think could be done differently... or better. i hope he's ready!

also, be on the lookout for what shenanigans may happen when Punk Rock HR's Laurie Ruettimann, who will also be there, and i come face to face? GASP! can a SHRM conference handle the both of us?!

The Inauguration of Barack Hussein Obama.

totally unreal. i don't know what else to really say about the inauguration - i'm still digesting and taking it all in. getting down to the mall for the inauguration was madness. there were people everywhere.

and it was a slightly strange experience because you knew everyone had the same purpose - to get down to the inauguration. i'm not sure i've ever been in the middle of anything like that, where while in movement, we all had a completely common purpose. nice, yeah? and everyone was definitely in great spirits. it was celebratory.

the walk down to the mall was long; roads were closed. everyone had to funnel onto the National Mall through a single entry point on 18th and Constitution - but once you made it - the sheer mass of people was amazing. people carried forward past the Monument to get closer to the Capitol.



and once things filled up a bit more... the site was even more amazing. it was completely jam packed.

i had a hard time taking photographs at the event - i struggled because i'm short, for one (and wasn't wearing heels!). but that aside, the inauguration was a deeply personal and moving experience for so many who made the trek down to the National Mall. i heard and saw the crying - and for some reason, it just felt wrong capturing their moment with my lens. i know that this means so much more to many others than it does for me. i share in the joy. i'm happy and i'm hopeful for what the Obama administration will bring. and still, completely surreal but amazing to me is that we have our first Black President of the United States of America! but this means more to others, so i've gotta respect that, and them.

the images from geoeye-1/google earth show just how many people packed down onto the Mall - and somewhere in the middle of all of this, we were there. and i wouldn't have traded it for anything else. i hope you enjoyed it as well.

Lobbying Is Not a Dirty Word.

really - lobbying isn't a dirty word. congress gets lobbied about education, workers rights, healthcare reform, the environment, you name it! yet lobbying gets such a bad, bad rap. by definition, lobbying is simply the practice of influencing decisions made by government. 

i read a great article in the Washington Post a while back, Mickey Goes to Washington, that shed some little known light into what the world of lobbying in DC is really like. i think it's a good read. and while we're on the topic of lobbying, i guess the little grassroots effort i'm undertaking to get the word out about why the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) is bad news is essentially lobbying. the end goal of this project is not to educate HR pros, folks in the business community, your neighbor and your mom about the EFCA but rather to prompt people to take action after they've been educated by reaching out to their elected official(s) on how they sould vote on the EFCA. 

i had a great brainstorm this morning with some communications folks for the Chamber of Commerce's Workforce Freedom Initiatve. check out the interesting stuff they are doing here. they gave me some new direction and ideas for where to take this little effort of mine. we also brainstormed slogans and logos and messages... and i came up with this mock/draft logo or badge that i might incorporate into the campaign:

whaddya think? i'm going to play with slogans, messages and themes a bit more... but i like this because really, there is no choice involved in the organizing process if the EFCA were to pass and become law. it strips 49% of your workforce of the right the vote about whether to organize, and it also eliminates secret voting. make sense? it becomes easier for your workplace to become unionized - but it strips your employees of the choice! 

while i'm on this topic... i'm trying to figure out where SHRM is in all of this. their labor relations section has some decent stuff on there. their advocacy/government affairs pages have minimal info... but this blog cites that SHRM is against the EFCA. if that's the case though, why aren't they mobilizing their members and lobbying? it's been nothing but crickets, crickets, crickets from them... totally baffling. more on this all later...

15 Unexcused Absences & We'd Show Your the Door. If It's a Student Though... Then What?

sometimes, my friends speculate that i'm a closet bleeding heart liberal. case in point... even without kids of my own, i've become quite interested in the state of public schools and in particular, the state of DC's public schools. i've written about how talent management initiatives have been rocking DC's schools over on Fistful of Talent because of Michelle Rhee... and i continually keep tabs on what's going on with DCPS. for one, if i have children and still live in DC, i may send them to public schools. they need to be fixed - for my future kids, or yours. for two, if successful, Rhee's initiatives make for interesting case studies with themes that resonate with talent management pros who aren't involved in education - pay for performance, motivation, rewards, <insert another trendy talent management term of your choice here>...

thinking more about the parallels between education reform and my world of HR and talent management... the past two mornings, i heard a series on my local NPR station, WAMU, that my ears and made me perk up. (okay, yeah, another reason why you might think i'm a liberal... i really do listen to NPR.) the piece discussed the problem of truancy in DC's public schools - 20% of DC's students have at least 15 unexecused absences per year. that's a problem! i mean step back - and imagine if in the workplace, 1/5 of your employees had 15 unexecused absences per year. without a doubt, you'd show them the door - and you'd do it quickly. yet this is an issue that continues to persists in our schools. you can't boot kids out though and fire them. so then what? 


to motivate students to go to (and do well in) school, you could try to reward them. you could penalize their parents... DCPS and other schools are playing with more/new/different rules to help get kids into school, and stay at school... but are more rules the answer? 


let's take this scenario back into the workplace. if you had an employee who had 15 unexecused absences in a one year period, we could easily say that the root of the problem is a lack of engagement, right? but to get them more engaged, to get them to show up, would more rules and policies be the answer? scare them into showing up for work? i think not. and if you've spent time reading my rants, i'm not one for more rules and policies. if it were an employee we were talking about, i'd get onto my soapbox and start saying that we need to influence behavior through relationships. setting down the law of the land for attendance wouldn't be the answer. but when we're dealing with kids... does the same philosophy apply? can you get kids (back) into gear through influence and relationships? or is it more rules that will do the trick? 


i don't know a lot about kids. i don't know what motivates them... but i'd venture to say the same rules have to apply to a certain extent. get them engaged. motivate them. influence through relationships... and i'm pretty sure the problem of truancy can be partially addressed. you who have kids though, what say you?


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as a PS, the morning after writing this posting, i heard part-three to the WAMU series on truancy in DC public schools. much to my delight, the focus of part-three was solutions - and many of the solutions were relational rather than being rule driven or enforcement related. listen to the rest of that series here. good stuff.

Box. Cube. Empty. Clear. Glass.

interesting display that i saw when at the Hirshhorn the other day which by the way, is totally my favorite museum in DC. these five cubes were about 3 feet wide/tall/deep.

It.

i went to the Hirshhorn Museum over the weekend. one of the exhibits i particularly liked was this old-school slideshow (think... biology, junior high school...) called, "It..." here are some of the slides i snapped pics of. what "It.." exactly is... hard to say. sappy me thinks the "It..." being referenced is love. you decide for yourself.

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own.

Wanna Work for Obama? Part II.

going back to wanting to work for obama... hitting the stands is The Plum Book. for folks outside of DC, this is the politico's every-four-years-job-seeker's bible. it is a 200+ page bitty that lists all the jobs that will become available with each new administration. as i mentioned previously, there are thousands of roles that will be filled by political appointment... and then there are others. all told, the book has some 8000 opportunities listed. nuts? yeah, but there's a market for this book. the cool thing is that the book also lists the levels/paygrades of the folks holding the listed roles... so it's like a DC-ist's version of vault or glassdoor. you can take a gander o the book online here.

for recruiters in the DC area who hire politicos... it's a cold-calling dream. all these folks are likely on the market now, or are going to be soon once the transition wraps up. if you're networked in DC, you likely already know many of these playres. it's still a good resource though. does that mean it's easy to navigate through the book? not so much... it is afterall, a government publication... so if you can understand what the heck to do with it, see the snapshot below, more power to you. but maybe with obama as president, he'll help automate some of this and use web 2.0 in this venture four years from now... i'd love to see that happen!

Recruiting in DC Post-Election. It's All Politics.

back in june, the justice department had come under fire for "illegal hiring." recaps of the issue can be found here or here. essentially, the gist was that folks at the JOD had illegally used “political or ideological” factors to hire new staff using methods including tapping law schools with conservative leanings, or weeding out individuals whose resumes demonstrated a liberal bent.

maybe being in DC has jaded me a bit when it comes to politics... but i was surprised that this was such big news to anyone. and maybe i thought this was just always an unspoken thing we all knew, but DC is a political machine and whoever occupies the oval office, i figure there's a natural trickle down to all agencies. not to say that it's right that agencies and departments would overtly weed out people of the opposite political party or with conflicting values and beliefs... but people gravitate towards like-minded or similar people. if you have two individuals who are equally qualified to do a job, chances are you'll hire the one who is more like you because you like them better and it's a better fit. then there's the issue of referrals... let's say someone is a political appointee... you have 1600+ individuals in the federal government appointed into roles who forgo senate confirmation or a traditional federal hiring process - and these are all high-level folks who will inevitably have staff of their own they want to bring in or will need to hire with deep networks and plenty of candidate referrals to make... the trickle down effect is large. i think people in DC know the drill and it's also why there are suddenly a lot of republicans on the job market.

my firm happens to do a fair amount of political work so we get a decent amount of traffic from politicos who are looking for new gigs. we also had plenty of folks sent our way when primary campaigns were winding down. the NY Times shifting careers blog did a good job a week ago of outlining how a politico transitions out... and i thought i'd add a bit on why hiring politicos who are coming off a campaign or coming out of the government is a great idea:

• campaign life is fast paced and frenzied. it takes a lot of blood, sweat, tears and flexibility to work a campaign. you also have to be committed and dedicated. the media machine is 24/7, and you are essentially a slave to that. the travel schedule is frenetic and demanding. you are constantly on the go, you sleep little... but you learn a whole helluva lot about yourself and your (never ending) limits.
• campaigns pay dirt, or nothing, and candidates generally expect less coming in the door. of course, pay them what they deserve and should earn, but expectations are generally easier to deal with.
• politicos are well connected. they come with amazing networks of smart, politically savvy contacts.

it's an interesting time to be in DC right now as a recruiter. you've got a relatively massive, shifting workforce of talented individuals... which has got me thinking that someone should start a makeshift recruiting agency to farm out some of this awesome talent that is hitting the market right now. it would be an once-every-four-years shop that set up and shut down depending on what happens during presidential elections... but it would seem like there's a market for that business model, no? not that i have any plans to enter the 3rd party recruiting world of course...