#hrtechchat

This is the most hilariously misguided example of cyberbullying I've ever been exposed to! Have a listen and try not to laugh yourself out of your seat. Matt Murphy is a Partner and Chief Strategist at Ideacage, a Management Consulting practice. He identifies his four key principles as: Independence, Objectivity, Competence and Confidentiality. As you contemplate the irony of a Partnership with only one member (Matt himself), please compare the attached audio with those four key principles and how they reflect in the voice message he sent me this past Friday.

I was a tad curious how someone missing the requisite Bachelor's degree (according to the BLS it is the minimum education requirement for Management Consulting), 455 connections on LinkedIn and 1,400 followers on Twitter (@KataPultMatt) qualified to be a Management Consultant with a specialization in Social Media, but I couldn't find out because the website of his current employer is still under construction. That lead me to investigate the "acquisition" of Matt's previous employer, listed on his LinkedIn profile as "Katapult Consulting (Acquired by Ideacage LLC) Public Company; Myself Only; Management Consulting industry." It appears Matt's "Myself Only public company" was acquired by sole proprietorship Ideacage LLC, a partnership of one lead again by Matt himself, also its CEO. Spellbound I read all 41 tweets and even checked out @ideacage's 13 followers since its beginnings on July 2012. Well, 12 followers if you don't count Matt following himself as @KatapultMatt.

Here's a particularly rich quote from the Katapult Consulting website, full of sweet irony:

"We’re living in an age of connectedness like most of us would not have imagined even five years ago.

As in 2007, four years after LinkedIn's founding, three years after Facebook's launch, and over a year after Twitters tipping point and coming of age at SXSWi...?

We have amazing social networks available to every human and company on the planet. Brands can reach out and talk to consumers like never before. And yet many companies continue to resist this shift in relating, communicating and connecting."

Yup. I am feeling great resistance to the shift towards connecting right now... I wonder why? But reading on...

Innovation and Collaboration go hand in hand, our methodology and digital tools allow us to be postioned...

Postioned? I guess spelling is not a required skill for Social Media Management Consultants who represent your brand?

...to leverage the power of your employees resulting in returns on investment and new customer acquisition that far surpass the usage of just Social Media Marketing.

Right, surpassing "just Social Media Marketing" by re-introducing the honest-to-goodness values of bigotry, violence, intolerance, racism, and discrimination towards weight and national origin. 

Still perplexed, it then hit me, possibly the reason this new company is called Ideacage! My thought was perhaps that is where the company's ideas belong? Of course I can't dare say that in public due to stated threats of violence. Instead I will cower under the intimidating though that my new "friend" will come to my house and fulfill his promise of making me swallow my teeth.

But How Did All This Even Begin?

This all started with my #hrtechchat comment about Applicant Tracking Systems really being about tracking candidates not applicants. What I wrote was:

ATS is only for risk management nothing else. The lie is in the name "Applicant Tracking" - its more like "Req Tracking" #hrtechchat

To which @KatapultMatt replied:

Not sure what there is to prove one person serving one requisition versus an algorithm serving millions of requisitions

Left with something to prove now, I replied rashly and while doing so made the horrible mistake of offending Matt's sensibilities by calling him names. Here's the offensive tweet that landed me in such hot water:

@KatapultMatt sorry #clueless you missed the point, and reinforced my point that "applicant tracking" is tracking reqs not applicants :p