HRM Direct Talent Management Blog

Colin Kingsbury

Colin is the President and Co-Founder of ClearCompany. In addition to leading the innovation of the award-winning ClearCompany Talent Management platform, he is also an Alaska-trained seaplane pilot, and writes for several Boston-area publications.

Your Everyday Software Demo

Posted by Colin Kingsbury

Dec 14, 2006 9:58:00 AM

What most enterprise software companies sound like to the average human being...

I'll take ten of them, in purple!

Mr. Recruiter, Tear Down This ATS!

Posted by Colin Kingsbury

Nov 8, 2006 1:27:00 PM

Recruiters are supposed to be in the people business. Why, then, do applicant tracking systems erect so many walls between people, companies, and the people whose job it is to get new people excited about working at them?

Why Applicant Tracking Stinks, Part III
One day you're wrapping up a demo with a customer, and you think to yourself, "my, that WebEx is a tasty and delicious product. I wonder if they might have any openings for a salesperson like me." So, you go to their website, find an opening for a Senior Sales Representative in your area, and click the "Apply" button. At which point, you get something like this, which makes a Form 1040 Schedule D look user-friendly and welcoming by comparison.

You can get someone excited in a chocolate chip cookie if you put it in the right kind of box. But the opposite is just as easily accomplished. Think about the message it sends to a candidate when the first step in the recruiting process is to fill out a stack of forms:

This is a test. If you can put up with this counter-productive and bureaucratic application procedure, you just may be enough of a sheep to tolerate working for a company like us.

Forget about the OFCCP, the piles of junk resumes you get from job boards, and all the other inside baseball only HR departments care about, even if they are important. Candidates don't care, and in the end neither do hiring managers. If the company is really lucky, a good candidate will be so sold on your company that he or she will take David Perry's advice and go over and around the HR department and go straight to the hiring manager, making the recruiter look like a do-nothing bureaucrat. Now I don't think that's what you are, but it's not me you need to convince.

But what if you're lucky, and this great candidate actually goes through your whole process anyway? This is where it gets really ugly.

Assuming someone awesome does apply, how long will it be before you actually read it and realize that you'd be crazy if you didn't call this person right away and beg them to come in for an interview? All too often, the same tool which is designed to hold the mongol horde of unqualified applicants at bay also buries those great applicants beneath a pile of process. The result is that it can take weeks before a recruiter even knows this person applied.

It's not that applicant tracking processes don't serve necessary purposes. At some point the i's and t's need to be dotted and crossed. Systems have by and large been designed to deal with these issues and many of them do a serviceble job of it. But the problem is that most applicant tracking systems are too dumb to know when to get out of the way.

Consider the costs. A great candidate is worth tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands more than an average or mediocre one. A req filled next month costs you thousands in lost productivity versus one filled this month. Most companies spend anywhere from $5,000-$50,000 per year on their ATS. If that tool causes you to miss the boat on even one good candidate, it is blowing you and your ROI right out of the water.

What We're Doing About It
A recent survey of HRMDirect clients showed that it was taking them anywhere from two to six days from the time a resume was received to when it was actually read by a recruiter. That includes weekends, so the actual count is probably a bit lower, and I think that's pretty respectable number compared to averages. I'd attribute this to the fact that our system is easy and intuitive to use so it's not a pain to review candidates manually.

But from my perspective, it still was not good enough. I've always said that if a person who worked at one of our competitors sent us a resume, that I would want to know right away. So we came up with a deceptively simple feature that I expect will quickly become a must-have feature: keyword alerts. You define a list of keywords (like the names of competing companies) and when someone applies with any of those keywords in their resume, our system will automatically send you an email alert containing that candidate's whole resume, within one hour, so you can go straight to the phone and show that person some love. It's like having an assistant to read every resume for you as they arrive and make sure the important ones go straight to you right away.

It's not that we don't think that applicant tracking systems can't make you more productive. But sometimes the most productive thing they can do is to disappear. Does yours know when to get out of your way?

Cross-posted to RecruitingBloggers.com

Read parts I and II of Why Applicant Tracking Stinks

Management, Meritocracy, and the "Talent Tax"

Posted by Colin Kingsbury

Nov 7, 2006 12:49:00 PM

John Sumser starts us off today with a partial riposte to Jeff Hunter's post last week on Talent and Spirituality . Both are very worthy reads, but they also manage to tiptoe around the elephant in the room: rising inequality. While this may seem to be a primarily political issue, inequality today is foremost an economic issue, which means it all starts with the HR department. So in celebration of election day here in the US, I'm going to break a rule and talk some politics, just this once.

In the mid 90s two important and controversial books came out from roughly opposite sides of the political aisle and both came to roughly the same conclusion that the US was becoming a meritocracy, and that barring something unusual, it would become more and more meritocratic with each passing day. For those of us that struggle each day with bumbling management, this does not sound like such a bad thing at first. But writ large, the implications become more ominous.

Read the full post at RecruitingBloggers.com

Stop Metric Madness

Posted by Colin Kingsbury

Nov 2, 2006 12:54:00 PM

Cross-posted to RecruitingBloggers.com

Quidquid latine dictum sit altum viditur.

Why Applicant Tracking Stinks Part II: It's the Process

Posted by Colin Kingsbury

Oct 30, 2006 9:56:00 AM

Cross-posted on RecruitingBloggers.com

In Part I of this series I mentioned that process played a big role in why so many ATS implementations go badly and since Amitai Givertz raised all the right questions in a comment on that post so let's dig in. Amitai writes,

Without a process map that fully documents the internal workings that will be automated how can any solution be "made to fit?" I think the problem with ATS and other recruitment technologies in general is that they are made to automate a process per se and not the organization's process exactly, each organization being somewhat unique culturally, environmentally, operationally and so on.

At risk of putting words in Amitai's mouth, I am going to draw the following conclusions from his comment for the sake of discussion:

Companies have unique processes
These unique processes create unique value
Process automation is a good way to increase productivity
Therefore, it is worth customizing software to automate your unique processes

Unique Processes, Unique Value?
The first point, that companies often have their own particular processes for doing a given activity, is beyond argument. The second point, that these processes produce unique value, is increasingly controversial, and deserves to be viewed with as much skepticism as respect. Companies are like tribes and while tribal customs often started for a good reason, they often survive long past their time by virtue of inertia.

In my professional experience, I've found that the harder a company defends their unique way of doing things, the less they usually have in the way of detailed process metrics on how things actually get done. A great example of this was the recent WSJ article on how Google is slimming down their notoriously drawn-out and capricious hiring process by analyzing which interview questions and screening criteria actually served as good indicators of success. A year ago Google's recruiters and managers would have turned their noses up at anyone who suggested their way of doing things was anything less than brilliant and 100% necessary. In fact, had any ordinary company adopted Google's tactics, they would have led to near-certain disaster.

As for the last two points, the best reference point for these comes from the CRM world, which has far more brains and money behind it, and which solves a similar set of problems. If anything, sales is a good deal more variable, since selling cars is different from selling jet engines or enterprise software packages, so you would expect extensive customization to be the rule of the day. And yet, the largest trend in the past five years has been the move towards smaller, simpler, and more off-the-shelf implementations in all but the very largest companies. The reason at its most simple is that by 2002, CRM had become a byword for â€œbehind schedule, over budget, and no end in sightâ€ among chief executives.

The idea that a system can be tailored to fit your processes to a T is quite lovely. As are the ideas of the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy, both of which are only slightly more unrealistic. The reason is that customization and even â€œconfigurationâ€ as vendors love to call it quickly become exercises in custom software development. Given how bad so much software is, Iâ€™m not surprised how many users think they could do it better themselves. Then again, given how bad so much software is, this isnâ€™t setting a very high standard. The hardest part is not picking platforms or writing code or even drawing pretty icons to put on the pagesâ€”it is getting the process and screen flow of the application right, and there is no way to do this but vast amounts of time and expertise.

So, are you feeling lucky?
In my experience you are lucky if you get it right the second time; getting it right the first is almost out of the question. Vendors have in the past obliged this all too willingly, as the endless stream of professional services revenue is almost too good to resist. Switching costs are sufficiently high that a system needs to become truly intolerable before it gets booted, and in practice the last time this happened on a large scale was when web-based systems started replacing client-server tools like Restrac and Resumix in the mid-late 90s. Ironically this approach doesn't work well even for vendors, but that's a story for another time.

Why Applicant Tracking Stinks: Part I

Posted by Colin Kingsbury

Oct 23, 2006 12:47:00 PM

Read Part II of this series

Looking around it is not difficult to find recruiting professionals who consider ATS a four-letter word. In this series, I am going to take a walk around the industry and my experiences as a new entrant over the past two years to explore how we got here and how to get out of the rut.

The first thing that we need to do is to admit there is a problem in the first place. Perhaps the most stinging rebuke to the industry that I've seen lately was this paragraph in one of Lou Adler's articles on the ERExpo about one month ago:

Your technology investment is yielding a negative ROI.While not a public session, someone described to me a meeting they had with a number of recruiting managers evaluating their satisfaction with all of the available recruiting technology. First, every tool was listed by name, including every major applicant-tracking system, every major job board, and all of the major tools. The ranking was limited to either a positive, neutral, or negative. In the summary report, not one technology product or tool received a positive ranking, and most had negatives.(emphasis mine)

This is one of those rare cases when I breathe a sigh of relief that HRMDirect is not yet a "major applicant tracking system." It's also proof-positive that any major vendor who tells you they've got this business figured out is full of it.

But wait, there's more! Here's Microsoft's Heather Leigh (see Item #10 onThe 17 Dumbest Things in Recruiting), Electronic Arts' Jeff Hunter, and Global Learning Resources' Kevin Wheeler ("For most recruiters the ATS is a sinkhole for both money and time.")

Another indicator of the failure of applicant tracking to deliver serious value is the relative absence of it in smaller companies. In enterprise software people often talk about "paving the goat paths" as a way of saying that you can blow invest a lot of money optimizing processes which are collectively inefficient. However, as companies become smaller the process overhead gradually shrinks until you have one recruiter and almost no external process. At this stage, productivity becomes entirely a matter of personal output, and the vast majority of the tools out there just don't deliver much value to the individual user. Process is at the root of all this and I will write more on the subject, but suffice it to say that I approach with certain skepticism the claims of vendors to make 10 or 20 people more efficient when they have a hard time delivering value to one.

Finding and Retaining Innovators: First, Heal Thyself

Posted by Colin Kingsbury

Oct 16, 2006 12:11:00 PM

Over on ERE John Sullivan has a piece talking about ways to find and hire more innovators at your company. This is a topic of personal interest since I have in the past been accused of being an innovator, and I think Dr. Sullivan vastly understates the challenge for companies seeking to improve in this regard.

It's about retention--and not much else
Every great new company out there was started by people who used to work for somebody else. While people in accounting sometimes quit and start clothing stores, the more common path is for people to go into business in the same industry, often becoming a direct competitor to their alma mater.

To be blunt, if your company lacks its own innovators now, the problem is not necessarily one that recruiting can or even should try to solve. While a conservative company in a "dull" industry may not be the natural home for a Steve Jobs-type thinker, creative thinking is found in many people and chances are good that in the past year your culture and bureaucracy have hounded many of those people out the door. Exit interviews will turn lots of rocks over if done properly.

Now, if your way of doing things was backwards enough to chase out such mild-mannered and conservative people, how long do you think a really, truly outside-the-box person will last? And if that person bolts after 3, 6, even 12 months, who will eat the blame? I definitely wouldn't want to be the recruiter who convinced the department head to pay 50% over their average to bring in a really special person only to have them leave in six months.

My advice as someone who has been accused of being an innovator in the past is that companies need to do more to identify and support people who are already inside the machine. There is a great role for HR to play in identifying and helping these people but unfortunately, HR is just as often one of the vital organs of the bureaucracy that drives innovators out of the company in the first place.

Meet an HRMDirect Client

Posted by Colin Kingsbury

Oct 10, 2006 2:19:00 AM

I'm happy to introduce you to Pat Williams, who writes the Guerilla HR blog and is director of global talent management for Factiva, a Dow Jones/Reuters company based in New Jersey. He's also a client and in a recent post talked about how HRMDirect applicant tracking helps Factiva improve their recruiting results. Hint: it's not just about reducing compliance costs.

The best sales calls we have are the ones with people like Pat, because they aren't really sales calls: they're conversations between managers who share a vision of how to solve a problem. Pat had worked with and implemented a variety of applicant tracking systems in previous lives, and learned what every veteran knows: they're too complicated to deliver on their most audacious promises, and too expensive for what they actually do provide.

A key part of our philosophy here at HRMDirect is what we call Focus On What Matters Most. Trying to solve every problem in one fell swoop leads to indecision and delay. This is reflected in Pat's post on achieving work-life balance:

Take a little time to assess just how much time and energy you are expending each day and examine if or how this exertion is helping you meet your goals. If it's not... it's time to make a course correction to a pure focus on YOUR GOALS! I'll bet keeping this focus will help you find the time you need for your family and your sanity.

There's also a great podcast at the Cranky Middle Manager where Pat talks about the real nitty-gritty of talent management for the next decade. It's a great riposte to anyone who says the smart choice for companies is to outsource it to the experts. It may be cheap but it won't help you be great.

Pat says good things about us because we help to make him look good. He rolled out an ATS in a matter of weeks for a great price without the huge process change and user adoption problems all the other vendors force on you. We've given him plenty of follow-up service too, but not any different than what every HRMDirect client gets with their standard subscription. So if you're on the fence about getting an ATS or which one to choose, let us know and we'll show you why one client stopped looking around the minute he saw us.

The Pot Calling the Glass House an Ignorant...

Posted by Colin Kingsbury

Oct 6, 2006 2:55:00 PM

NB about the title: It's an inside joke. Explanation, if you need it.

John Sumser's first and second articles on "Job Jacking" provoked the controversy one would expect. While John's articles as usual raise some interesting ideas, there are some serious deficiencies in the debate as a result of how he framed it.

In his original article, he compares vertical-search job scrapers to a landscaping service which cuts your lawn in the middle of the night unless you take affirmative steps to prevent it. Since we can all agree that would be absurd and wrong, he reasons, why do we tolerate the antics of Indeed.com?

There are a lot of problems with John's example. The first is that an opt-out lawnmowing service would clearly violate the very simple and ancient law of criminal trespass. The law treats information goods differently from physical goods because they are essentially different. If a staffing agency came along and took the Help Wanted sign out of a store's window and hung it in their own, we don't ned to get into (relatively) arcane areas of law like copyright, because what they're doing is stealing, plain and simple.

Now, what if I put up a help-wanted sign and someone comes along and writes that down in a notebook and uses the information to compile a directory of companies looking for employees? They are not denying me the use of my sign or my ability to recruit employees via my own preferred means. Legally, the employer would have to at the very least post a "no copying this sign allowed" notice in the window in order to have any grounds on which to make a claim against the directory publisher.

Even then, they may be on shaky ground because copyright law does not give the producer of the information unlimited rights and control over its usage. You cannot for instance write a blog and say, "No quoting allowed unless you agree with me." This is part of what is referred to as the Fair Use Doctrine and it is an actively-evolving area of the law. Among other things, the US Copyright office writes that:

Copyright protects the particular way an author has expressed himself; it does not extend to any ideas, systems, or factual information conveyed in the work.

While the copy in the job ad may be expression, one could just as soon argue that the core details--the job title, the employer's name, etc., are factual information that may be freely reported on by virtue of the employer making them publicly available.

If there is any ambiguity in this issue, it has to do with whether obedience to a site's robots.txt file is sufficient to prove compliance with copyright. As it happens, it's not entirely ambiguous as a Nevada state court ruled early this year that it was OK in a case involving Google's caching. While it will take more cases to establish the precedent firmly, it does serve to suggest that the argument is not legally absurd.

Potentially the most interesting aspect of this is whether today's common practice of forbidding the use of automated scraping tools in website TOS will be legally upheld. Traditionally these have been supported on the basis that spiders and robots can create a massive load on the server being scraped. But, if you could prove that the spider was equivalent to a single average visitor, then what grounds would you have to forbid it? My sense is that there are a lot more spiders and robots in our future.

A Tale of Two Cows

Posted by Colin Kingsbury

Oct 4, 2006 11:47:00 AM

Theme stolen shamelessly from The Recruiting Edge.

Enterprise Software for Dummies

Marketing
You have two cows.
Everyone else in your industry has two cows.
In order to differentiate yourself you launch a campaign focused on "the cow experience" and say nothing about the milk.
When that doesn't work, you suggest dyeing one of the cows purple.

Sales
The customer asks what makes your cows different.
You tell them that your cows will produce an unlimited supply of milk and beef virtually on demand.
The customer buys the cows.
You leave early to make your 4pm tee-time.

Professional Services
Your customer had two cows.
The salesperson told them that the two cows could produce an unlimited quantity of milk and beef on demand.
The customer now has one cow, some beef, and a really bad temper.
You tell them that if they purchase additional cows, a larger barn, and pay for two consultants to shovel the crap for the next year, then they will get what the salesperson promised them.

Engineering
The CEO wants to know how long it will take to make cows that can produce chocolate and vanilla ice cream.
You explain why that is both ridiculous and impossible.
Then you show him your new cow which can walk on its hind legs and do basic arithmetic.

Product Management
You show the board your new idea for a derivative product called "Ice Cream."
You explain that it can be sold directly to consumers at much higher margin than your cows.
The CFO doesn't understand how it will work because you actually make all your money selling professional services, not cows.
The CEO tells you to go back to the drawing board.

Sales Engineering
You create a demo cow which can produce ice cream. For fun, you dye it purple and teach it to dance the Lindy Hop.
You take great pains to explain to Sales and the CEO that it cannot be used in production.
One day you discover that the head of professional services has a voodoo doll that bears a striking resemblance to you.

Upper Management
You fly first class to Arizona for a meeting with industry analysts.
You show them a purple cow which dances and produces ice cream.
You tell them that when it ships in six months it will also make cheese and shovel its own @#$!.
You doubt anyone will ever look too closely at the dates on those stock options.

Industry Analyst/Consultant
Five years ago you said cows were going out because milk and beef were unhealthy.
Three years ago you said cows were a great business because of the Atkins diet.
This year you're predicting that the market is in for a soft landing.
You're happy because like a TV weatherman, people keep paying you even when the only thing you get right is what you can see out your window at this moment.

Venture Capitalist
You have never seen a cow or drank milk before, but all of a sudden everyone is talking about them.
You invest $10m in a company called Cowster which you proclaim to be the leading provider in the Milk 2.0 space.
You still haven't seen a cow.

Customer Helpdesk
A user calls and tells you they are having huge problems with their milk.
You ask them what color it is, and they tell you that it's white but "it keeps coming out all weird."
You ask them for more details on how they milk the cow.
After ten minutes of going in circles, you ask their name again and look up their customer file.
You realize that the only product they have ever bought from you is a chicken.

Colin Kingsbury

Recent Posts

Your Everyday Software Demo

Mr. Recruiter, Tear Down This ATS!

Management, Meritocracy, and the "Talent Tax"

Stop Metric Madness

Why Applicant Tracking Stinks Part II: It's the Process

Why Applicant Tracking Stinks: Part I

Finding and Retaining Innovators: First, Heal Thyself

Meet an HRMDirect Client

The Pot Calling the Glass House an Ignorant...

A Tale of Two Cows

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