Editor’s Note: This guest post was provided by Erin Palmer on behalf of Villanova University’s online certificate programs, such as PMP certification prep courses and Business Intelligence training. Enjoy -LH

“When I have the time…”  These words are often spoken wistfully by employees attempting to balance a busy work, family and social life. For displaced workers, it can be disorienting to transition from a schedule jam-packed with meetings, appointments and clients to an unplanned existence of job searches and networking events. Finding a job requires work and creativity. We’ve all heard the old adage, “treat finding a job like it is a job,” but few job seekers develop their job search the way they’ve cultivated their professions.

Don’t rely solely on the Internet

Too often our perception of what a well-rounded job search is begins and ends with the Internet. It’s counter-intuitive that a tool that has brought so much efficiency to our lives can also be the proverbial anchor around the neck of the unemployed. However, think of how many people are currently unemployed. Where do you think most people are looking for jobs? If you are one of thousands of people searching the web for job opportunities, how will you stand out from the rest of the crowd?

To truly capitalize and shorten your time between jobs, get away from the computer. Perusing employment sites can be a part of your job search strategy, but it cannot be the entirety of your job search strategy. Remember that only a fraction of positions are ever advertised. While you’re surfing the Internet, pushing your resume out to every position that’s posted, opportunities might be passing you by. You have to get away from the computer to tap into the jobs that never get advertised online.

Keep your skills fresh

Do you know what potential employers are afraid of when they see an application from a candidate who has been out of work for an extended period of time? They are usually afraid that candidate’s skill set has gone stale. People don’t want to hire someone that they feel has too much catching up to do to be a viable member of the team. Avoid letting your skills go out of date by pursuing volunteer opportunities in your career field or in a field you have been considering transitioning into.

Search sites like volunteermatch.org to find non-profits who need professionals with your qualifications.  Instead of offering to serve food at the local soup kitchen, find out if they need help with accounting, fundraising or project management. You will be able to keep your skills fresh, enhance your resume and may even find some great networking opportunities. Volunteer experience is still experience, and it’s better than sitting in your pajamas all day.

Network, network, network

In addition to keeping your skills current, use your time in between jobs to join professional groups and keep your network current. Networking workshops and events can be found in your local newspaper or business journal. You might be surprised at how many groups are available. Contacts are vital for employment opportunities, so work these events with your long-term future in mind.

Seek out any training that would be marketable to employers in the future, keeping in mind that businesses are looking for employees with more diverse skills than ever. Classes and other training programs can help introduce you to new people in your field. Use these people to find out about job openings.

Time between jobs can be daunting, but it can also be productive. Sitting around and complaining about the job market isn’t going to help. Using this time to grow your skills, strengthen your network and clarify your long-term goals can be time well-spent.

I’ve been thinking more about this post. The one where I wrote about how competencies in specific tools are already starting to go by the wayside (and will only get worse). Then I think about the short term (and terrifying) consequences of becoming an expert in anything fluid like certain social media tools.

Look at an Amazon search for MySpace books. People invested hundreds (if not thousands) of hours into books chasing that tool. And thousands bought them to try to find the answers to their questions about MySpace. They were using tool specific manuals (some of them written as little as two years ago) and now they’re worthless. I take that back. Once winter hits, you can use the pages to help start a nice fire. That’s worth something, right?

Then there is this idea of good enough. It’s the idea that you can build something that is, let’s say, 80-90% there and launch it. After that, you can slowly change or improve it or you can divest yourself eventually without investing a ton of resources in something that may or may not work. In programming, it is a fairly common practice because the good enough features might take 200 hours to program while the one’s that get that last 10-20% might take another 1,000+ hours.

Whenever I’ve taught about specific tools, I’ve always taken a good enough approach to learn them. Twitter is something that I figure I’m good enough on and most people can be good enough on too. Post regularly, share new things that are interesting, retweet things that are interesting, respond to and converse with people, don’t spam and follow those who interest you. That’s probably 90% of the real value of Twitter right there.

Can I tell you when the best time to tweet is? Can I tell you what the best tool is for using Twitter? Can I tell you the top subjects that get retweeted? No.

And why should I? You should tweet when you have something interesting to say, share or converse about. You should try different tools and find out what you like or dislike. You should tweet about things you like, even if only a couple dozen people actually care. That’s a hundred different things to a hundred different people.

Here’s the real question: what skills will actually stand the test of time? Where are you investing that time?

I spend more time reading and writing long form text than I do consuming and writing social media content. My hope is that I’ll continue to be prepared for what comes next because it will still likely involve written communication (and it still makes me better in how I communicate 140 characters at a time).

Certainly, there will be people who chase those fluid aspects of life and try to become an expert in them (if even for a fleeting moment). I knew a guy who made a bundle designing custom MySpace designs. He chased every last dollar out the door and at the end of the day, he ended up getting another job just like the one he quit years ago.

Even if you decide to chase the next Google Wave book, that doesn’t make you exempt from the fact that you have to develop skills that last much, much longer. Can you leverage that social media book into more writing opportunities? Can you develop skills that will move needle elsewhere? Can it propel you to learn more about what’s coming next or for an exit into a different field?

Good enough is all about intent. It is about how you choose to spend time and what skills and goals you choose to pursue. There is no shame in being good enough in many areas of life. The more important consideration is asking yourself what you do want to develop and become better than good enough.

There has been a lot of industry news in the past few months that I haven’t had time to cover and I’ll start trying to catch up by talking about what has been going on with Xactly.

Xactly just announced that it has expanded its North American operations with new headquarters in San Jose, as well as a regional office in Denver. They added a whooping 80 new customers since the beginning of 2011 (that’s a lot!) and a lot of that growth comes from their Xactly Express solution which recently signed up its 100th customer. Over the last year, Xactly also increased their staff by 54% to support its quick growth.

However, what I’m the most excited about are the enhancements to Xactly Incent Version 7 which launched a few months ago. The new version has several new very important features.

Quota and Rate Table Effective Dating: This enables companies to manage incentive program changes at the time and point of need. This may seem as a not-so-important feature, but from an administration perspective it’s VERY important. It also makes the annual plan updates much more simple to achieve and saves a lot of time on the configuration side. The net effect of this feature is faster end-to-end deployment time, more administration flexibility, and easier/quicker year-end plan updates.

Report Customization:
Reports outside of the analytics module used to be fairly “What you see is what you get”; in other words, not allowing many configuration options. In this new version, there is much more flexibility and reports can be customized to meet specific needs.

Ranking Reports:
New reports are available to provide visibility into individual and team performance.

Xactly Incent 7.1:
Usually Xactly delivers mostly small improvements between minor versions, but version 7.1 added some big features.

Version 7.1 includes the addition of mobile functionalityenabling teams and reps to access reports and performance information through their mobile phone/devices. I personally think that this is a great new feature, particularly for road warriors who don’t have time to access their dashboards. The new release also comes with several improvements to Xactly Territories, eDocs & Approvals. However, Illustrator was a surprise new addition to Incent’s impressive list of recent features:

Illustrator:
Xactly added an Illustrator module to Incent which provides great modeling functionality. Reps can plan measures to forecast associated hypothetical commission. Reports are great, but I always felt that interactive what-if modeling was the best way to drive behavior.

Overall, I am really impressed by the new features released by Xactly in the past few months. Effective dating is something I had been waiting for from them for a long time, and it is what I would qualify as Xactly’s greatest configuration enhancement since the formula copy and paste feature.

Performance
With such an accelerated growth, I was also curious to see if performance would become an issue. I recently had the chance to work with the latest version, and it is still a very responsive SaaS application that can process a fairly large number of transactions quickly.

Conversation with Xactly CEO, Chris Cabrera
I talked with Chris about the future of Xactly, and not surprisingly, he thinks it’s very bright! We talked about many of the features described earlier and also about what the recent growth meant for the company. Chris believes that the trend towards small companies adopting affordable SPM systems such as Xactly Express is only going to accelerate. I initially thought that the Express would only be a “project”, but Chris is optimistic that it could eventually surpass the revenues generated by Xactly Incent. The additional revenues also enabled Xactly to add new members to its executive team, most recently a new VP of marketing and a VP of enterprise sales. Since it is not feasible to contact every small company to sell Xactly Express, a strong marketing strategy is key to its success. Finally, Chris mentioned that in a few years, Xactly would be poised to “go public”, providing additional capital to further accelerate it’s growth and leadership position in its market.

Today marks the release of The 8 Man Rotation, an ebook focused on the intersection of talent management and sports. Put together by Matthew Stollak with contributions from Steve Boese, Kris Dunn, Tim Sackett and myself along with forwards from Bill Kutik and Laurie Ruettimann, it’s an excellent resource for anyone looking to get some more of the game into your talent management strategy (or just a good reason to read about sports while on the clock). You can read it online or download your own copy.

In the spring of 2006, Greg Oden was preparing to enter Ohio State as one of the top prep prospects in the country. Do you think he had a five year plan? You know, the one HR people ask about in an interview? If he did, I don’t think it would be a stretch if it went something like this:

1. Become one of the top college basketball players
2. Take his team to the national championship
3. Get chosen first in the NBA draft
4. Go to a team with championship contention possibilities
5. Win a championship ring as a key player for the team

That’s a pretty good plan. And in the first year of it, he took a big chunk out of the list. He became a top college basketball player, took his team to the championship game, got chosen first in the 2007 NBA draft and went to a team with a core of players that could go all the way in a few years.

In September of 2007, his plan got derailed. He had to have microfracture surgery on his knee. He was out for the season. And over the next three seasons, he would miss significant playing time and have two more surgeries on his legs. The last time I saw him play was in December of 2009 when he was carried off in a stretcher.

The point isn’t that life comes at you fast and that changes are going to come. You already knew that. In fact, you probably think five year plans are as unrealistic as I do.

The real point is that many people think Oden is a failure because he hasn’t met this plan. I may be the only person who is optimistic about what he does in the future. Getting back into basketball is a possibility near term but even more so, doing something different with his life is a certainty at some point. And that’s exciting for me and it should be for Oden. It is something he hopefully has more control of than the durability of his knees.

When I lost my job in HR and took a job outside of being an HR professional for the first time, I thought I had taken a step back. I was nervous. You can ask the people I asked for advice. I had progressed with my plan up to that point, looking to take an even bigger leap into the next great HR role. Then, I discovered something else I liked, outside of HR.

Yes, it is difficult to describe how I got here.

Yes, it is difficult to say I didn’t accomplish what I wanted in my HR career.

Yes, I haven’t exactly thought through what’s next.

And you know what? That’s fine. I really like where I’m at right now. I (mostly) wake up inspired and ready to take on the day. That linear career path we always hear about? The one we use to plan our next five years? Bupkis. Find things about your career you enjoy and do them. And if you can’t do that, do things with the rest of your life that you enjoy and do that.

Why do large system implementations often fail or get delayed? Depending to whom you ask, you’re likely to get a different answer: the requirements were not understood properly, the data was too complex, processes were not documented, key stakeholders were not involved enough, there’s too much red tape, my team/manager is incompetent, we picked the wrong solution, etc. I’ve observed that the bigger a project or program is, the more likely people are to feel that they can’t affect the outcome. Large project teams seem to have a low internal locus of control.

In 1519, Captain Hernán Cortés and his army set out on one of the greatest conquests in the history of the world. Cortés was going to accomplish his goals no matter the consequences, despite being up against incredible odds. When he arrived near Veracruz with 500 soldiers, a dozen horses and a few cannons, the first thing he did was burn his ships so there could be no retreat. He told his men “You can either fight or you can die”. Returning to Spain was not an option anymore. By burning his ships, he not only cut off his only means of retreat, but also made his soldiers fight harder. They were all fully committed to the cause.

I cannot condone what Cortés later did to the Aztecs, but burning the ships probably played a major role in the outcome.  Most project managers will say that failure is an option and have a “do-or-die” attitude, yet when things start going wrong, the managers usually start looking for excuses. Likewise, when blamed for delays, the project team will often start looking for their own excuses or try to jump back on the ship.

I challenge you to think about your objectives and about at least 5 factors that could make it difficult to reach them. Now, get rid of these excuses.

I talked about SaaS Contract Negotiations before, but I found another great article from ERP Software Advice on this topic here. The author describes 9 points that can be negotiated within a SaaS agreement. Here is a short summary:

1. Pricing and Discounts: Obviously, published pricing can usually be negotiated, and the bigger the deal, the bigger the discount.
2. Additional Costs: Aside from the standard monthly fee, other costs can quickly add up, such as fees for additional users, customizations, integrations, third-party services, training and set-up fees.
3. Term: A longer term can mean a better deal.
4. Service Level Agreements: Make sure that SLAs – the vendor’s commitment to keeping the system up and running – are clearly defined in the contract.
5. Renewals: This process is an opportunity to renegotiate or exit a bad contract. Make sure there you are still in control when it’s renewal time.
6. Scalability Pricing: Find out what pricing options are available to increase the number of users and if there is the possibility to decrease it.
7. Support: The contract should describe the level of support that will be received: is it delivered via the web, email, phone? Is it 24 / 7?
8. Backups and Recovery: The contract should specify how often backups are performed, how long it will be kept, and if it is kept in a separate center in case of disaster.
9. Data Export: Can data be retrieved from the system?

In designing an incentive compensation scheme there is no one perfect design, there are however some common best practice design principles that characterize effective schemes.

Effectively implementing these seven principles will provide immediate value to the sales organization therefore we would recommend that you consider how your organization compares.

1. Clear link to strategy
Plans need to link clearly to company goals, hold participants accountable for the results they control, and pay for results focusing on margin or profit rather than volume.

2. Accurate, Transparent and Consistent
Performance should be accurately measured and a transparent and there should be a consistent link between performance and plan payout. Where possible, this process is automated to ensure effectiveness.

3. Uninterrupted flow of key strategic messages
There is an effective flow of key messages (for example growth, increasing profitability per customer, quality customer retention) from the sales strategy to sales targets to salesperson role to incentive plan measures to payout.

4. Significant on-target opportunity
Plans have an on-target payout which is significant and consistent with company/product status in the market. For example, a new product/service in a new market requires a more highly leveraged plan.

5. Promotes positive behaviors
The plan should influence sales behavior in a way that drives positive selling and which prevents negative selling behaviors.

6. Simple
A plan should be simple, using as few performance measures as possible. If the salesperson can’t explain how it works in under a minute, it’s too complex.

7. Differentiation
Plan payout should differentiate clearly between excellent and average sales performance.

This post was written by Jon Clark at Sean Culligan at OpenSymmetry’s UK office.

Everyone is looking for the edge these days when it comes to interviewing and career growth. I’ve been reading through the 37signals “manifesto” Getting Real recently, and a piece on enthusiasm stuck with me.

Go for happy and average over frustrated and great

Enthusiasm. It’s one attribute you just can’t fake. When it comes time to hire, don’t think you need a guru or a tech-celebrity. Often, they’re just primadonnas anyway. A happy yet average employee is better than a disgruntled expert.

But can it get me a job?

So, can enthusiasm get you hired? Whether you’re a public speaker, recruiter, or garbage collector, it can certainly help.

All else equal, a smile and a positive attitude can work wonders. Some people call it “likeability,” and it’s powerful stuff. According to an article by USA Today, a study done by the Harvard Business Review found that people don’t want to work with someone who is disliked (gasp!), and coworkers are willing to tolerate a very low skill set in exchange for a high likeability factor.

I talk about it often, but companies should hire for attitude. It’s relatively straightforward to teach someone how to build a widget or manage a process. It’s much different to try to teach someone to be energetic, friendly, and likeable.

Devil’s advocate

On the other hand, an enthusiastic dolt with mush for brains isn’t very valuable. You need to look for people who have a track record of learning and growing into new responsibilities. That can help narrow the list to those who are not only willing, but able as well.

Don’t dismiss the importance of being enthusiastic and likeable. I’d like to close out with a final quote from Getting Real:

Find someone who’s enthusiastic. Someone you can trust to get things done when left alone. Someone who’s suffered at a bigger, slower company and longs for a new environment. Someone who’s excited to build what you’re building. Someone who hates the same things you hate. Someone who’s thrilled to climb aboard your train.

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

How much importance does enthusiasm and likeability play in your interviewing process? Do you think you possess the likeability factor? Why or why not?

Ben Eubanks is a blogger and HR professional from Huntsville, Alabama, and enthusiasm was one of the key factors in every job he’s ever been hired for. He is the cofounder of HRevolution, author of an HR blog, and a new dad to some amazing twin girls.

I’m back from my blogging “vacation” and I apologize to all my readers for this long delay. I’ve been extremely busy juggling projects and I started an MBA a few months ago which has been using most of my free time. I will do my best to do a better job at fitting blogging in my schedule.

For this first new post, I’d like to talk about Merced Systems. I covered Merced’s incentive solution (then called Merced Incentive Management or MIM) about two years ago, soon after it acquired Practique Associates. At that time, the big question was, is Merced going to be successful at integrating the incentive compensation tool to the rest of its products, and will it be able to compete against well established vendors such as Callidus and Varicent in the competitive US market.  Gaining credibility from clients, selling enterprise solutions and going live with them is a long cycle, and finally, after two years, some conclusion can be drawn.

The Company…
First, I’d like to talk about the company itself. Even with the recession, Merced Systems has managed to grow and post profits for 7 consecutive years. I’m pointing this out because in a world where most other SPM companies are relying on investments to develop solutions and gain market share, Merced has actually been making money – and reinvesting it into R&D to improve their product.  It now counts over 225 employees concentrated in its Silicon Valley and London offices, responsible for more than 125 customers deployed in over 20 countries. Merced’s big challenge at the moment is to hire enough smart people to sustain its rapid growth.

The Challenges…
One of the first challenges Merced needed to overcome to be successful in the US market was to develop the ability to implement and support its ICM solution in the United States as well. Now with over two years of ICM experience under its belt, this is no longer a concern.

The other hurdle that Merced needed to overcome was to attract large clients in the United States to show that it could be successful here as well. One of its first projects in the US was Nationwide. The goal was to help agents gain more visibility into their performance, to increase payment accuracy and to reduce calculation time. Merced ICM successfully managed to accomplish these goals, and the phase one of the project was completed in early 2010. Many customers in the United States are finally live or are currently being implemented; these customers include Bank of America, Otsuka and Dell. When I spoke with Mark Selcow, Merced System’s president, he pointed out that not only was Merced successful at gaining traction in the US market, but that it was also keeping its momentum in the European market. Merced recently announced the successful deployment of the ICM Suite at Kia Motors.

The Solution…
Now about the solution itself; as a reminder, in a nutshell, Merced ICM calculates compensation and incentives, and provides meaningful reports and dashboards. Since Merced acquired Practique, Selcow noted that Merced System’s engineers have been working very hard at integrating the incentive solution to the other tools of the Merced Suite comprising Merced Planning (for territory planning, quota planning and goal setting), Merced Intelligence (for sales and compensation analytics) and to the Merced Performance Suite (used for performance scorecards, ranking, and coaching). Selcow believes that scorecarding for seller self-correction and coaching to drive best sales behaviors are emerging trends in Sales Performance Management, and will become an important part of ICM/SPM solutions.

In my opinion, one of the biggest improvements recently brought to the incentive compensation suite is the Workflow Manager module. Workflow Manager allows users to setup various workflow that can range from dispute resolution and payment approval, to requiring approval to submit a manual adjustment, MBOs, or to make any changes to a plan component.

Two years ago I also showed screenshots of some standard reports and dashboards available with this solution. I had a hard time choosing a good adjective to describe them, but the first word that came to mind was “outdated”. Again, thanks to Merced’s competent engineering team, Merced ICM received a face lift with the Merced Analytics suite. Leveraging MicroStrategy Business Intelligence, Merced ICM delivers stunning reports and dashboards.

Significant improvements were also brought to the functionality and features of the application. Some of Merced’s innovations are based on their aggressive roadmap to become the number one sales solution provider (with Merced ICM being a significant part of that objective). However, Selcow also noted that Merced is a very agile company and that many innovations are a result of customer requests.

In Conclusion…
Another aspect that makes Merced different from its competitors is the ability for a client to choose to deploy it on-premise or on-demand and to have the ability to easily switch from one to the other if needs evolve.  With Callidus trying to be a completely recurring revenue business, or Varicent which is mostly on-premise, having the ability to choose between both delivery models can be a huge advantage.

But according to Mark Selcow, even with great technical solutions, what REALLY makes Merced Systems and Merced ICM different from the competition is its relentless focus on its customer’s success during and after an implementation. “We don’t see ourselves as a solution provider” he told me, “we become a true partner”.

This post is to serve as the last post to any of the original WorldatWork blogs for the purposes of informing readers of the change to the single WorldatWork Post, as well as the elimination of the RSS feeds to the original blogs.