kings of companies

In the land (and era) characterized by labor market shortage, the company that retains and engages their talent the best, will prevail.

The original quote — in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king — is credited to Desiderius Erasmus’s Adagia around the year 1500. Half a millennium later, the principle remains underrated.

While all your competitors focus on the ultra-short-term, hiring whoever applies, the companies who have a long-term strategy, will reign supreme. Those companies take bi-directional professional expectations into account to build a career perspective.

All hail to the kings of companies.

human virus

What HR professionals and epidemiologists can learn from one another.

A global pandemic initially starts very small, and one tiny spark in one patient virtually disables the entire planet.

In a company, a minor incident can lead to an enterprise-wide disaster. A vocal employee not being acknowledged for her contributions. A team being mismanaged. Continuously mis-hiring new candidates. The list goes on… Small actions with enormous consequences. So much so that they can fester and create a gigantic negative downward spiral and suck the culture right out of a company.

Epidemiologists could benefit significantly from siding with HR professionals, psychologists, or otherwise human-oriented people to convey their messages better.

HR professionals could benefit from applying an analytical approach, monitoring the numbers closely to make data-driven decisions.

A plea for a more facts-based HR approach and a more human-oriented epidemiological approach.

two types

There are two types of HR professionals.

Those that admit to copy-pasting vacancies for a specific function, only to change the company’s name.

Those that don’t admit they copy-paste vacancies and change the company name.

Everyone is looking for a true team player who wants to perform in a dynamic environment. What does that even mean precisely?

Tailor your job offer to a market of one.

Be specific.

pro pro-activity

You can spend years learning about customer- or talent-centricity, devouring books, courses, and keynotes in the process. In the end, it all boils down to this. Be a pro about pro-activity.

In marketing, anticipating your (potential) customers’ needs and desires is considered standard practice.

In HR, anticipating your customers’ — the people who work with you — needs and desires, is a rather novel idea.

Anticipate your customers’ expectations as well as you can, and cater to them, preferably before they manifest themselves.

the world does not accord with our intuition

The world does not accord with our intuition. A piece of paper, folded forty-two times, reaches the moon. Hard to believe, right?

Imagine for a second that all the (human resources) management styles and procedures you apply, based on intuition, could be totally flawed.

Use data-driven models and analytics to build decision-making frameworks to reduce attribution errors based solely on intuition.

This one minute read is inspired by the writings of Malcolm Gladwell.

they will fluctuate

What do stock markets and wellbeing have in common?

They will fluctuate.

The elder JP Morgan got tired of people asking him what the stock market would do. So he deferred to a standard reply, saying; it would fluctuate.

Food, hormones, sleep… just three out of a gazillion parameters, all influence our wellbeing, whether in our personal or our professional lives. The global economy has likely a comparable amount of affecting parameters.

Just because they will fluctuate doesn’t mean we should undergo it all passively. Control what you can with a strategical approach.

Companies, be smart about employee wellbeing. Gather all the required data you can, and act on it.

generous success

The very successful people I meet are more generous with compliments.

Be like those people.

bad through bad

You probably swore never to apply (some of) the parenting styles your parents used on you with your children, right? Many of us do. When we notice we apply the same parenting styles, it’s not the most pleasant realization.


Why does that happen? We never truly understood what we didn’t like about the parenting style. We’re able to communicate that we didn’t like it, but that’s about it. A thorough comprehension of which specific aspects bugged us, and why, is often lacking.


Bad managers are the by-product of other bad managers.


They want to do a lot better. However, without a thorough understanding of why their managers were once bad managers, working on a solution is practically impossible.

flexible framework

Your HR department likely doesn’t have a solid decision-making framework. Your marketing & finance departments on the other hand, probably do. The marketing department might even have automated decision-making based on the above framework. For instance, if revenue within a week doesn’t reach a particular goal by Wednesday, some more ads could be released programmatically.

HR doesn’t have a framework to base decisions on. Reason why? The intricate complexity is ever-changing. The diversity within people is just tremendous and highly contextual.

Before defining and quantifying the parameters within the framework, HR could benefit from agreeing on the outlines of a decision-making framework.

hire for

What’s the thing that the majority in HR seems to agree on yet the minority is actually doing? Hire for attitude train for skills.

If the majority of employers would indeed hire for attitude, why is everyone copy-pasting the same generic, crappy vacancy descriptions?

Apparently, the whole world needs dynamic team players for every job.

Identify and communicate specific attitudes derived from the actual job. Time for HR to live up to their end of the bargain.