One Organic Recruitment concept that I would like to explain is the kezayit. Organic Recruitment is the development of an incentive system for the cross-pollination of ideas across teams and even across organizations. Workplaces in the technology industry have started to provide snack food to employees and visitors, which are the beginnings of such an incentive system. The next step, which I am working on, is creating a ladder for the people who receive this and categories to work toward.
Kezayit literally means “like an olive.” It is a unit of measurement that dates to ancient times, measured as the size of an average olive. In a number of Jewish rituals, people are required to eat certain foods or must thank God (the force behind the universe that holds together reality, including life) for providing them. Judaism provides an alternate set of traditions and paradigms to other peoples’. Part of our mission, which includes mine, is to maintain those traditions and paradigms and find places where they are distinctly relevant. After a lengthy discussion by the Rabbinical authorities, the kezayit was determined to be the quantity representing how much food needed to be consumed for a person to have “eaten” it. More precise measurements of it exist in Rabbinic tradition.
Conventional Human Resources does not address the question of how much of a company’s food must be eaten in order for a non-employee, non-contractor to be requited, rather than unrequited. Employment and formal contracts require a very high intensity of work and a high level of being requited, and what are currently less formal involvements may occur at much lower levels. Organic Recruitment proposes that the results of the Rabbinical discussion are applicable to categorizing lower levels of involvement because they addressed a similar topic. The cutoff of food received, for a worker to be requited, is the kezayit. The period over which the worker could receive the kezayit, in order for that worker to be requited, is a calendar year.
Similar approximate measurements are used outside Jewish tradition, but with far less discussion and precision. For example, in the American holiday of Halloween, people— especially children —go from door to door in costume asking for candy. This is called trick-or-treating. The kezayit approximates the quantity of candy a trick-or-treater might receive at a house.
With work becoming less formal, more continuous measures of engagement are needed to identify micro expertise — smaller areas of talent that can be leveraged. Tree Langdon
