Over my gin & java this morning, I've been reflecting on a comment from a VP of Staffing from a huge, publicly traded staffing-firm this last week. In a nutshell, his comment was, to a degree, a defense of the major job boards. He referred to what he believed to be an "even" distribution of talent on job boards (i.e. Monster, CareerBuilder, etc.) Now, forgive me for being a little of a math-head, so I'm going to try to keep this short & simple (as I don't have too much time and there's no point in constructing a dissertation in the blog world.)

Please take a look at the below bell curve (one of the most popular, outside of the ever-controversial IQ curve). It can be found in E.M. Rogers work, "Diffusion of Innovations" and the curve is titled 'Categories of Innovativeness.'

The reason I present this curve is because it's not 'perfect' (read: It does not indicate an even distribution). As you can see, the middle portion of the curve ('Early Majority' and 'Late Majority') accounts for a total 68% of all plots/data. (For an interesting study, ask yourself how many each of the categories listed ('Innovators', 'Early Adopters', etc.) comprised each growth stage of RBC. Also ask yourself which groups post and dialogue the most - my hypothesis is that it's the Innovators and a small portion of the Early Adopters that not just posting, but also conversing.

Ok, back to the point: The bell curve shown above indicates an ineven distribution in each category. Likewise, my hypothesis is that the job boards also behave in this manner. For example, if we were to create a curve like above, however using the following categories: A-talent, B-talent, C-talent, D-talent, F-talent . . . what visual would the curve portray?

The irony here is that we can never truly know the answer to this question, because talent is in the eye of the beholder. A top player for MS may be a 'dog' at Yahoo; some organizations chase the nebulous "fit" more than production probability, etc. However, if I was to take a gander, I'd imagine the bell curve would represent something along the lines of the following:

A-talent: 5%
B-talent: 15%
C-talent: 55%
D-talent: 20%
F- talent: 10%

Now that would be a jacked-up curve, my fine, feathered friends . . . but that's just for me. Relative to your organization's talent evaluation process and needs, how would the curve look for you?