Occasionally, I write about employment here. Like so many things, employment is a two-way street, and finding great people, even in a down economy—maybe especially in a down economy—isn’t easy. We provide great people for clients, by the way, and it’s one of the most Influence-y ways we can help you with your Influency.
The reason finding great people is so hard, available talent pool notwithstanding, is that too often when companies hire people they take a rigid, over-structured approach to the matter. We live in an increasingly unstructured world, with pieces of things flying at us from every direction, and while there’s a need for structure in all complicated tasks, there’s also a need for flexibility.
Last week, the folks at National Public Radio announced their search for a “visual journalist” to work on Planet Money, an audiocast (note I didn’t call it a “radio program” or a “podcast”) about the economy. I was so impressed that—no kidding, NPR—I’d take this job if you offered it to me.
That’s the two-way thing. Even when you’re doing someone ‘the great favor’ of offering them employment, you need to impress them as much as they need to impress you. And NPR gets it.
The best thing about this isn’t that National Public Radio understands the two-way nature of the employer/employee relationship—and that’s a great thing. What’s amazing here is that NPR understands and is implementing change, even in the moribund radio industry. Radio, the earliest of the broadcast media industries, has been dying a slow and painful (to me, anyway, an old radio guy) death, and NPR, rather than advertise a position for a radio producer—or seek one—is looking for someone with experience in multiple facets of communication media. Dare I call that a old-school, forward-looking journalist? It’s exactly what NPR is looking for, and I’ll say it again: I’d love the gig, NPR!
Not the kind of offer I make lightly, and of course, not one I expect to be taken up on. But National Public Radio so clearly has the right view of this stuff that they genuinely excited me. There’s that two-way thing happening in real life. There’s Influency in full force.
In Marketing, Everything effects everything.
Last Year, Tim Ferriss and BitTorrent got together on a project that saw this. That was different. Content differs from news, and that’s different. Design is changing. Even the definition of an antenna is getting different. Everything effects everything. Think you can stop that? Think again. Think you can be Influence-y without adapting? You’d better hope someone less smart than NPR is hiring.
