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Note: I know very well that the word is spelled résumé but for whatever reason my blog won’t display the é character unless I explicitly state it with an HTML entity code . Argh.

I’ve been doing a lot of hiring lately. This time around, I took careful note of the factors I considered as I reviewed resumes, interviewed candidates, and made decisions. If you’ve read the book Blink or had to pore over dozens or hundreds of job applications, you’ll know what I mean when I say that decisions are often made very quickly and sometimes arbitrarily. But it can help to be aware of your process and biases, which is what I’ve documented here.

1. Scan resumes

Look at the overall look and feel of the r̩sum̩. You can often tell where the applicant falls on the designer to programmer spectrum. See what info they put in the headers Рusually name, address, phone, email. If they have a Hotmail email address, go no further. Generally not good: comcast.net, sbcglobal.net. Better: gmail.com, yahoo.com. Best: Your own custom domain name. Why are some email addresses better than others? They tell me whether the candidate fits into the culture. A web candidate with his or her own website and domain name is more credible than one who slapped together a MySpace page and listed a Hotmail address.

2. Resume content

Check out their most recent two or three jobs and see what they’ve done. Look for specific URLs to check out. Scan their education, but I don’t really pay much attention to this. The best have a wider array of experiences with different web technologies and kinds of projects. The current job market is tough, so I don’t put a ton of weight on this. Some great people are jobless or have been working outside the industry and I won’t count it against them. Keeping busy and being involved are good signs of a self-motivated candidate.

3. Portfolio or sample links

This is a major part of how I decide. Quick glance at the sites or pages, and the next step is to View Source and check out the code. It takes five to ten seconds to see whether it’s decent code (semantic, web standards, no tables for layout) or not (tables, software-generated, etc). Show me your best work and I will mentally rank you on a scale from 1 to 100. This is important – I’ve already decided where on that scale I need to hire. If I’m looking for someone with relatively little experience (maybe a 30) and your work suggests that you’re a rising 60, my next thought is whether I can afford you. But that’s a good problem to have.

4. Look for a trail on the web

Do they have a website? LinkedIn? Twitter? If they’re out there, they’ve left a trail. This can be tough if it’s a common name, but this industry involves a good deal of self-promotion and if you can’t be found you’re not doing a very good job. Blogging is hard work, and someone who has invested that time in their professional development is bound to continue it after being hired.

5. What have they done?

If I’m hiring a designer, I look for little signs - good padding, decent typography, etc. Not that I’m skilled at these myself, but I do recognize some good design work when I see it.

For developers, I look for contributions to open source projects and the source of any pages they’ve posted. I tend to be pretty lenient on these.

6. Ask loaded questions.

I’m not psychologist, but it’s worth paying attention to how people answer the questions you ask. For instance, I like to ask about how they would solve a problem they didn’t know the solution to. A good response involves knowing how to find the answer. Self-determination is a good thing.

7. My favorite question: Tell me a joke.

I don’t ask this in every interview, but for some jobs and some candidates it can be a very helpful test. I simply ask the candidate to tell me a joke. The response is very informative. How quickly can the candidates think on their feet? Is the joke appropriate? What’s their personality? What’s their delivery style? Do they have a sense of humor? I don’t count this against people usually, but I certainly give major props to those who can handle it. When I’ve asked this and other people are in the room, they are usually horrified that I would do this to a candidate.

Process

Hiring takes a lot of time. Reviewing resumes, scheduling interviews, conducting phone and in-person interviews, etc. are all time-consuming. I like to try and make a choice as soon as possible, paring down candidates quickly and decisively. 50 resumes might turn into five phone interviews, and that may lead to 2-3 in-person interviews. Or I may have a clear choice after conducting phone interviews, and may only proceed with one candidate.

So how do you get a job on my team? Let your work speak for itself and make sure your resume isn’t the only way I can evaluate your reputation.

If you haven’t checked out the Horizon Report in the past, it’s an annual publication that highlights key technologies expected to affect higher education in the next five years. This year’s report was published on January 14 and has some real gems, as usual.

What’s On the Horizon

The near-term technologies include mobile computing and open content.

The mid-term technologies (oddly noted as the “second adoption horizon”) are electronic books and simple augmented reality.

The far-term horizon includes gesture-based computing and visual data analysis.

Go get the full report >

Why Should You Care?

From a marketing communications perspective, these technologies will affect the future of our industry in a number of ways:

1. They will open and close avenues of communication.

Both mobile and augmented reality have been hot topics in the marketing world for several years. Mobile is already a big deal for many of us, working to provide mobile-friendly tools. What we haven’t necessarily done is find ways to communicate through mobile devices. We are hesitant (and rightfully so) to abuse SMS for marketing purposes. But there are opt-in SMS channels that higher ed has been slow to adopt except for use in crisis communications and in certain classroom applications.

Augmented Reality (AR) is another opportunity for blending communications messaging with real-world experiences. Like most tools in this Cluetrain world, AR will need to provide value and not just be an advertisement. Already, there are excellent ideas being pursued – including a an augmented reality campus tour application for the iPhone.

2. They will change the way we are perceived by our audiences.

The latest and greatest technology is a differentiator for a relatively short period of time, as early adopters get credit for being on the leading edge. These schools get more press and are often perceived as thought-leaders.

Next, there are the second-adopters who improve and perfect the technology. This is harder to do, but it’s potentially safer than trying to dive into every new thing. The iPod wasn’t the first MP3 player, and the iPhone wasn’t the first smart phone – but they certainly did them well enough to win some major market share. After all, there’s no medal for being first to market.

Finally, there are those who fail to keep up at all. This is a far more critical differentiator: not staying current. If students start to expect something, it’s folly to ignore those demands and expect to stay competitive. No school wants its students and parents to think it’s behind the times.

3. The model is changing.

As the report notes, “Open content has now come to the point that it is rapidly driving change in both the materials we use and the process of education.” (p. 13) Where students once paid a hefty price for access to information, free, open content is forcing schools to shift their value proposition toward education and experience. The higher ed business model is changing.

Communications will have a tremendous role in keeping schools in business by recruiting top students, faculty, and staff. They will have to take advantage of every tool in the toolbox.

What’s on your horizon?

Your own school and situation will be unique. Your size, budget, and priorities may direct you in one direction or another. That’s ok. But you should also be drawing up your own horizon report, asking yourself what you’ll be working on in one, three, or five years. Are you prepared?

In software, an API is a way to get data into or out of a system. It stands for “Applicant Programming Interface” and basically allows outsiders to access or manipulate the information in the software.

The Twitter API lets you access tweets, search users, post tweets, and so on. The API enables apps like TweetDeck, Twitterrific, and all those Twitter-related web apps to exist. The Google Maps API is the engine behind thousands of maps mashups.

APIs Everywhere

One of the most frustrating things to a software developer is reinventing the wheel. They even have an acronym – DRY: don’t repeat yourself. So when you’re building software that needs to pull in campus events, you should hit the API for the campus calendar and grab what you need. Want to show YouTube videos in the search results? Use the API.

Just as frustrating is finding the substandard add-ons that often come with large software packages. Just because a web content management system has a CRM (constituent relationship management) doesn’t mean it’s a good CRM. So it sends HTML emails? Is it as good as the standalone systems? You pour all of your wisdom into selecting a great software package and you often end up with poor add-ons that don’t meet your needs.

This is where APIs can come in handy. If you can get the systems to integrate via their respective APIs, you can get the best of both worlds. And if they’re popular systems, they may even build such integrations right in (like LinkedIn showing your latest Slideshare presentations).

Human APIs

Higher education institutions are notorious for being collections of silos. But some brilliant folks recognize the value in networking across their institutions, serving as connectors, and sharing information. These are Human APIs. Sometimes they’re called Connectors or Trust Agents Zero. They build make themselves available, build relationships, and share information freely. In exchange, they are able to create more value through collaborations.

Meetups and User Groups

One way to start is to form a user group of professionals around a particular topic. Our team has spawned several groups, including the South Bend Ruby Group. This group led to new relationships and I eventually hired one of the members to our team.

We’ve also formed a number of internal groups on LinkedIn around various industries and topics. The outreach doesn’t take much, but it’s absolutely worth it for the chance to interface with other teams and departments, share knowledge, and build on each others’ efforts.

Higher ed loves conferences (as do I). My boss has been live-tweeting the AMA Higher Ed Marketing conference for the last day or two. We’ve sent people to eduWEB Conference, South by Southwest Interactive, CASE, EDUCAUSE, RubyConf, RailsConf, and plenty of others.

But these things cost money – travel, registration, food, per diem, etc. And they take time – sometimes you can’t afford a few days away from the office. For that matter, conferences aren’t the only way to learn and develop your skills.

Create a Plan

Seems obvious, but it’s not clear what a professional development plan includes. Doing a search brings up some great resources, including this guide to professional development from EDUCAUSE.

But I’m looking for something simple – something concrete. And I should be able to do this every year. So I’ve worked up a rubric that follows a basic process. I’d love your feedback, as I’m hoping to put this into practice right away.

1. List the skills needed to do the job.

I think these fall into three categories: core requirements, secondary requirements, and professional skills. Core and secondary requirements make up your job description. Professional skills are those abilities that aren’t necessarily part of the tasks you do, but are crucial to your success. They might include public speaking, project management, written communication skills, etc.

2. The employee rates himself/herself.

Next, the employee has a sense of what his/her strengths and weaknesses are. These may only be perceptions – but perceptions have a strong influence over how the work is done. Lack of confidence or over-confidence can lead to poor decisions.

3. The supervisor rates the employee.

The manager must also rate the employee’s skill levels. Sometimes employees do not see opportunities the way the manager does, or are not fully aware of their strengths. Ultimately, the manager is responsible for directing staff to develop in ways that improve performance and serve the department.

4. Prioritize the skills based on the ratings.

If you’re an 8 out of 10 for a core skill, but a 3 out of 10 for a secondary skill, the priority may be to improve the secondary skill because the benefits will be more noticeable. This is subjective, but it is the step that provides focus for where to invest professional development time and money.

5. List specific steps to improve.

Of course there are plenty of conferences, but you should also look to other ways to develop your skills. Depending on how you learn best, you might consider taking classes, reading books/blogs (self-teacher), finding a mentor (a la apprenticing), doing pro bono or test projects (practical application), presenting to someone (learning through teaching), etc. A combination of these is probably best, but it will depend on the skill, the employee, and unfortunately, the budget available.

Collaboration is Key

This isn’t a top-down, manager-drive process to change employees. This is a collaboration between the employee and the supervisor. It should serve the needs of both. By providing professional development, the manager has a more effective, efficient, and generally valuable employee. For the employee it creates new professional opportunities and should translate to merit-based pay increases, promotions, etc. It should be a win-win.

Sample Professional Development Plan

Professional Development Plan Rubric (Excel) or as a Blank (PDF)

So how do you manage your professional development? Any tweaks to this process? Please share in the comments.

This week I presented to our team at AgencyND about Mobile – what’s the deal and what’s coming. I call this the Mobile Horizon, as a nod to the Horizon Report which aims to inform higher education about the future technologies and their implications. Mobile is all the rage, and for good reason. View the presentation to learn why.

If higher education is to avoid a painful death in the coming decades I have a relatively simple plan: create an R&D process.

Add it to the Strategic Plan

Executive leadership, the board, deans, and officers of the University must be aware of this effort. The goal isn’t survival – that’s playing defense and it’s easily compared to a number of industries that resisted change. The goal is to thrive in this shifting environment and create lasting, positive changes to the way your institution will do business in the future.

Form a Center for the Future of Higher Education

A number of Universities have established centers, institutes, or commissions dedicated to studying higher education. This seems like a logical place for the conversation about the future of higher ed to start.

Institutions should create such a center (or direct an existing one) for the purpose of studying how changing cultural forces act on higher education, the implications for the future, and ways to adapt to such change. These centers should aim high, but produce meaningful research to be applied in a real world setting. One excellent example of this is the University of Michigan’s Millenium Project, which states:

“Rather than being simply a think-tank where ideas are generated and studied, the Millennium Project is a do-tank where ideas lead to the actual creation of working models or prototypes to explore possible futures of the university.”

The Center should be staffed or led by visionaries, higher ed leaders, faculty, etc. They should ask questions like “what might higher ed look like in 50 years?” and “what if we weren’t able to charge tuition to attend our school?”

Create a Workshop to Test Prototypes

It doesn’t do you any good to have a theory about how to adapt. Ideas are worthless until they’re put into action. But ideas aren’t guaranteed to pay out – they are far more likely to fail than succeed. This department (or an extension of the center, if you like) must be empowered to develop prototypes based on the work generated by the Center.

Like any good skunkworks operation, the Workshop requires talented and creative people. This also requires funding and the understanding that not all projects will pan out. Fail early and fail often must be an acceptable motto for this crew.

Establish a System of Accountability

On one hand, there’s academic freedom and the usual liberties afforded such pursuits in higher education. On the other, there’s some urgency: we’re facing (if not already in the midst of) a looming crisis. Accountability is important if we’re to benefit from such investments in our future. This means setting reasonable goals and measuring projects (as well as these departments) against them. This might be as simple as setting goals for a project, and pulling the plug if it doesn’t perform within the agreed parameters. I’d expect such a system to include the usual accountability for centers and faculty: publications and grants.

Don’t Be Afraid to Do Something Crazy

Rather than play follow-the-leader and mimic the models of other Universities, challenge the Center and Workshop to explore bold, new approaches. Not many Universities consider mergers and acquisitions, but it’s not unprecedented. How about alternative residential experiences? Or developing more customizable degrees that cross the traditional boundaries of colleges, schools, and departments?

The Future is Wide Open

Nothing I’ve written about here is ground-breaking. But few schools are attempting this. And even fewer are investing appropriately. While a new building may cost $50 million, it has a very specific and limited value to the University. Compare that to the potential cost of being ill-prepared as higher education evolves and shifts. For a school with an operating budget in the hundreds of millions, or even in the billions, the opportunity is worth the investment.

It’s a hot topic. It’s been a hot topic for over a decade now. The dramatic societal and cultural shifts that have come with nearly ubiquitous technology and connectivity have permeated every facet of our lives. We’ve seen how this shift has had dramatic effects numerous industries including music, newspapers, banking, and retail.

The factors that have affected industries don’t simply alter the industries; these factors change the consumers, who then drive the change to industry. With the music industry, increased bandwidth forced the music industry to offer alternatives to buying an entire album for the sake of a single song. Ideally, this would have happened naturally; instead, recording companies had to adapt or watch music piracy continue to grow. The industries shift, and some players are winners and many, many others are losers.

Higher education is at a crossroads; the availability of information and a consumer-centered culture has produced a generation of students who demand more control over their own education.

What Does Traditional Higher Ed Offer?

Is sitting in a classroom for 4 years, listening to lectures, taking tests, reading textbooks, and getting drunk at frat parties the most efficient use of our education dollars? I think not. Dan Croak, A Completely Different Model for Higher Education

What’s the advantage of a traditional undergraduate experience? Is it the campus life? Access to faculty experts or equipment? The strength of a diploma – either the degree or the name on it?

These advantages aren’t so impressive once you throw a hefty price tag on them. The cost of education has outpaced inflation more than 2.5 times and it’s not slowing down. So cost has become a major factor for many students, opening the door to cheaper alternatives and forcing many traditional institutions to compete on financial aid.

Is Traditional Even a Good Education?

The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education. Albert Einstein

How valuable is the education we provide? In industries such as computer science, vocational programs or certifications can be far more valuable in the job market. Occupations are being created faster than colleges can provide majors or even courses. Yet a non-specialized liberal arts degree (e.g., philosophy, literature) can be a very difficult credential when job-seeking.

It’s not that education is all about landing a job – far from it. But many students enter college with the expectation of finding a job. Earlier this year, a recent graduate sued her school because she couldn’t find employment after three months.

With all of the intangibles, how is the quality of an education measured?

Resistance to Change

About eighty-five institutions in the Western world established by 1500 still exist in recognizable forms, with similar functions and with unbroken histories, including the Catholic church, the Parliaments of the Isle of Man, of Iceland, and of Great Britain, several Swiss cantons, and seventy universities. …These seventy universities…are still in the same locations with some of the same buildings, with professors and students doing much the same things, and with governance carried on in much the same ways. Clark Kerr, Postscript 1982, Change, 14(7), 23-31., 1982

What reason is there to change? Top institutions certainly don’t need to compete for applicants. But they must compete for the top students, top faculty, and research dollars. And while these institutions of inertia have survived for hundreds of years, innovative “customer-centric” options arise from the smallest competitors. It may not be immediately obvious, but threats to the status quo are already well-established. They come from empowered consumers who make demands—demands which are being satisfied by non-traditional models.

The Future of Higher Education

James J. Duderstadt, president emeritus of the University of Michigan, heads up the Millennium Project, investigating the future of higher education and developing new models of pedagogy, research, and educational business. He writes:

“…in a single generation following the Civil War, higher education in America changed quite radically: From the colonial colleges to the Humboltdian research university; with the Land Grant Acts creating the great public universities with strong service missions; from enrollments of hundreds to thousands of students; the empowerment of the faculty. Indeed, everything that could change about the university did change during this brief period.”

What form will higher education take in 10, 20, or 50 years? It’s hard to say. Visionaries may paint a picture of decentralization, or of conglomerate collaborations. The residential model may be in jeopardy. A three-year degree may become the norm. Like science fiction, predicting the future is an exercise in imagination; yet many sci-fi authors’ dreams come true.

In 1998, Donald Hanna declared, that “institutions of all types will be more responsive and accessible to their customers, more adaptable in their programs, and more capable of change than they currently are.”

As I wrote in The University of 2030 the solution isn’t to accurately predict the future; the answer is to create a culture of adaptability, innovation, and tolerance for new ideas. So instead of working on what the future might bring, focus on what we can do today. Today, you can work on your culture for the future.

In researching and writing an upcoming post, I came across this prescient quote from the President Emeritus of the University of Michigan, written in 1997:

“Who needs specialists in an age where intelligent software agents may soon be available to roam far and wide through robust networks containing the knowledge of the world, instantly and effortlessly extracting whatever a person wishes to know?” James J. Duderstadt, Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks