Paul Pettengill

What you’re looking at right now on www.paulpettengill.com is a prototype of a foglift profile. We believe interviews were a bad way to hire people, and that really what the job market needs is transparency into the work of the person you’re hiring.  There are tons of great technologies emerging that make it possible for you to show your actual work, Slideshare.net allows uploads of presentations onto the web, youtube can hold video of your talks, and blogs can you give a great sense of how well someone writes.    

Top candidates will want to show potential employers all of these things. Top employers looking for top candidates will want to see all of these things in a consistent format, if today’s word docs are closest to myspace, foglift would be closest to facebook. Add to that some other elements such as a dashboard to see all of your open job opportunities, and what state they are in, and you get the idea. Also on the employer side, they could upload videos of what its like to work for that company in that position.

 

Clay and I belong to an email group known as the Cabinetarians, which we are trying to convince to move over to a public message board. It’s definitely quite the tribe, we were all brought together through some friendships that developed in college and after. We keep in touch over frequent email and an annual trip to a cabin in the midwest. The great thing about this group is that it is filled with intelligent, passionate people from the entire political spectrum. The dialogue is smart and a step up from the blather on CNN, Fox News, NPR and whatnot, with each side bringing new arguments and conceding points. The group was sending emails back and forth about the Obama election, and what it means, and how successful he will or will not be, and by whose measurements.   

 

To that end Clay and I came up with a set of metrics that are results focused, and leading indicators. Metrics such as % Childhood Obesity and # of ER Visits to # of Primary Care Visits ratio for Health, and metrics such as %Worldwide Patents by US educated for Education (as opposed to more arms race type metrics such as %MBA ). We envision a national dashboard that would show a trailing 4 -year Edward Tufte sparkline for each measure and a modified Stephen Few bullet graph exposing historical highs and lows and term highs and lows.

We think that such objective measurement seen in dashboard form would give people a much better idea of how things have changed over a term. Ultimately if we do it right, it should be something a president would want to look at as an executive summary of how the country is doing.