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.

David Perry on Leadership Equity

Posted by Colin Kingsbury

Jul 20, 2006 11:35:00 AM

We are exceptionally pleased to have David Perry of Perry-Martel as our Blogswap guest this week. David is a true innovator in the field and has literally written the book on aggressive career development tactics for job hunters. What we love about David is his refusal to accept excuses for the pursuit of mediocrity that characterizes much of recruiting, and his post is true to form.

Leadership Equity by David Perry
They used to say there were just two types of people in the old west - the Quick and the Dead. The Quick knew that it came down to not only talent and ideas, but execution. The Dead thought only talent mattered --- with predictable results.

Increasing the value your company is not just about â€œcollecting talented people.â It's about aligning your people with the company-s overall strategy, getting them to buy-in and to commit to a common vision. More importantly, you need to compel them to work towards the idea not because you told them - but because you gave them impassioned reasons to do it. Only then will employees take responsibility for how their actions affect the business.

Companies today, more than ever need leaders capable of managing a diverse community of people with a common mission who are willing to routinely operate at levels of peak performance. That-s how organizations compete in a knowledge based economy as centres of excellence - without leaving dead bodies at every gun fight. That's how you build Leadership Equity.

Is your company geared to go for the gold?

Eggregious or Eggfective?

Posted by Colin Kingsbury

Jul 18, 2006 3:07:00 PM

Shally Steckerl's blog post on SMS recruiting at ERE made me think about CBS's plan to advertise on eggs this coming fall. CBS knows full well that their advertising will be perceived as both intrusive and in-your-face. Odds are there will be protests at CBS headquarters and affiliates around the country involving groups of people pelting the buildings (and quite possibly network employees) with the CBS-branded eggs. And CBS knows these events will be covered by ABC, NBC, and the local newspaper. It's a classic case of, "I don't care what they write about me so long as they spell my name right."

Shally's post is less of a gift to bored headline writers, but it prompts many of the same questions. In these cases discussion often becomes segmented, like the old sitcom convention, into the angel and the devil that pop up on opposing shoulders. One says we can't do anything that might ever offend anyone, not even once, because that might tarnish our reputation. The other says, "if it feels good, do it!" Shally is happy to be pictured with horns sprouting from his forehead and his point that this technique is being used by NCAA coaches is apposite.

No one is debating whether intrusive marketing is intrusive. The more important question is whether it is effective. CBS will have its name cursed millions of times in America's kitchens this fall. People will debate at length whether anything is sacred anymore, but in the end, the product CBS is selling is scarce: if you like The Amazing Race, you have no choice but to watch it on CBS. At that point the question becomes whether the eggs offend you more than the show entertains you.

With SMS and recruiting, the balance is slightly different. At the early stage of the process, recruiters' solicitations are generally not worth very much: it's just an invitation to a conversation about a job you may not want and probably won't get. So the cost to blackballing that pushy recruiter seems very small, while the satisfaction of showing him who's boss is significant. So I think in this situation the intrusive approach has a real risk of alienating candidates.

But there is a way around this. If your communication offers a product of real value, whether it's a free Starbucks coffee or a guaranteed interview, you will get brushed off less. More importantly, you are going to need to learn how to do this sooner or later because within a year or two, every other recruiter in town will be SMS-spamming candidates. It's like telephone cold-calling: the first guy who did it might not have been objectively good at it, but he probably got great results because no one expected it. Poorly-executed SMS will deliver results today because it is novel, but it likely won't be for long.

Improve Your Hiring Experience

Posted by Colin Kingsbury

Jul 18, 2006 12:50:00 PM

Claudi Faust runs a great blog dedicated to helping companies improve their hiring experience for candidates. My contribution to this week'sRecruiting.com Blogswap talks about how one of our clients, a company of under 200 employees, manages to create a compelling identity and experience without six-figure budgets or Madison Avenue ad agencies.

I think this is one of those subjects that really distinguishes people who "get it" from those who don't. Talk to many line managers, and you will hear them say, "Hiring experience? The bums should be happy we're interviewing them!"

Back in 2001-2004 you could get away with this sort of thing because there was some truth in the statement. For a manager who got his or ehr current job back then, there can easily be some resentment toward candidates who have it much better. This is human, but as a recruiter, the response needs to be simple and clear: Get over it! Times change, and companies need to treat their candidates at least as well as they treat their customers.

Tod Hilton's Living in the Real World

Posted by Colin Kingsbury

Jul 14, 2006 9:19:00 AM

For this week's Recruiting.com Blogswap I am pleased to introduce you toTod Hilton, a developer at Microsoft. Tod says he's neither a recruiter or hiring manager, but that's beside the point because recruiting is the one function in a company in which every person can play an important role. So without further ado, here's Tod:

I was reviewing Colin's previous posts while preparing to write this one. I have to say that he has some interesting opinions and I enjoyed what I read, but this post in particular, Put Your Kids to Work Day, really rung true for me.

A Good Conversation Indeed

Posted by Colin Kingsbury

Jul 13, 2006 2:10:00 PM

I have picked the occasional bone with John Sumser but as I hope I've made clear, I kid out of respect. Which is why I was flattered to receive this response to my recent critique of one of his daily articles. John says,

While that is very entertaining, the point we were making is that Jobby represents a generational difference, not an overnight sensation.

On that I could't agree more. Resumes are problematic to say the least, a "legacy format" if ever there was. But before we get too excited, it's worth considering this excerpt from the original article

The other day we visited a relatively new entrant to the recruiting software space. We tried to get them talking about Jobby. "Hmmm, this is very bad." They said. How do you control it? People could spam the system.

The more I think about this, the more I sympathize with the point of view given by the vendor.

The problem with resumes is that they are an unstructured document containing structured data. Unstructured data is the picture of a couple jogging on the front of the box of low-fat blueberry muffins. Structured data is the label on the back that tells you they replaced the fat with salt and sugar.

Tagging as implemented today is not that much different than the slogan on the front of the muffin box. They're keywords, with a little added salt and sugar. They are better in the one sense that you can search for ".NET programmer" and not have to worry about the hundred different ways those things might appear on a dead-tree resume. I like the way Jobby does search and refinement of results in terms of feel. Feel, as Steve Jobs has taught anyone who pays attention, is hugely important. But let's not get too distracted here. People long ago learned to "game" keywords to the point that they are remain useful only because there isn't anything much better at the moment.

The problem is in many ways precisely the one named by the anonymous vendor: spam. More precisely, it is the ability of the user to add unverified information to the system that defeats the purpose. The power of Wikipedia is not that anyone can write an article, but that anyone can edit it. For every person who wishes to inject junk, there is another who revels in flensing it out. This is the missing link in resumes, tagged or not.

Ultimately what we all want is honest information. The problem is that I don't see how we're going to get it. I've written before about how reputation systems play a critical role in the success of eBay. But eBay also has the benefit of running a dominant closed market where they can get away with forcing everyone to play the game their way. Recruiting currently enjoys nothing like this. Good people may set up profiles that expose them as they are, but mediocre or dishonest ones will probably not. No one with a brain will voluntarily air their dirty laundry. And various layers of government regulation (which are bound to get worse) will likely conspire against the more creative ideas that might force people to do so.

Perhaps pushing the good people up higher will be sufficient. But part of me thinks that would constitute a niche resource rather than a general solution.

Topics: Applicant Tracking System, Recruiting & Hiring

Crazy Ideas @ Nobscot

Posted by Colin Kingsbury

Jul 12, 2006 12:31:00 PM

B.N. Carvin of Nobscot, a provider of web-based exit interview systems (an idea I love, BTW) has posted my first contribution to the Recruiting.comBlogswap.

Reading that post again I think I may have oversalted the broth a tiny bit. Saying, "because when it comes to understanding the deployment of human capital, most companies are close to clueless," may overstate the case a little much. And there are many good reasons why the approach I suggest might not work. But the debate is a useful one.

If you sat in on our strategy meetings at HRMDirect, you'd often hear one of us say, "now this may be too crazy to consider, but..." and then suggest that the sky is green and the grass is blue. The ideas often are pretty nutty and too far out there to consider. But the exercise is useful because crazy ideas force you to consider the underlying assumptions in the problem at hand. In the end the assumptions often look valid and the men in white coats carry the idea away.

But every so often you find that the crazy idea exposes a blind spot. Sometimes, the sky really is green, and understanding what that means is quite useful.

Wishing Doesn't Make It So

Posted by Colin Kingsbury

Jul 11, 2006 1:17:00 PM

John Sumser is never one to mince words. Today he writes,

The next time a vendor who you about the Resume glut caused by Monster show them the door and offer to see them after they've looked at the market. That story about a resume glut was true at the bottom of the economic cycle. We're now at the top. No one is complaining about a resume glut anymore.

As the old saying goes, everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts.

I decided to do a little data-mining based on a sample of jobs filled by customers using our applicant tracking system to see if this was true. I came up with a sample of about 750 reqs which were primarily filled by job board posting over the past twelve months. Staffing firms were excluded from the sample.

The chart to the right shows the results. (click to enlarge)

53% of reqs received 25 or fewer applications. 15% received 26-50. But nearly 20% received 100 or more, and another 15% received 51-100. The positions receiving 100 or more ran the gamut from hourly manufacturing techs to vice presidents, in locations all over the US. Nearly every client had at least a few positions that got positively flooded, many in a matter of days.

John is right to say that the world is shifting. But when he writes,

"All of the new technical tools we see have one underlying thing in common. They are all reflections of a day and age in which paper processes dominated the hiring world... After 25 years of desktop computing (we got ours in 1981), it is nothing short of astonishing that the mental model behind computing is paper.

he reveals that he suffers from the malady common to IT analysts which I call novelty derangement syndrome. This is the situation where one becomes so entranced by the sheer perfection of an idea that they fail to take sufficient account of the challenges to its success. (And, the punch line)

Will the way we recruit change enormously? Yes, no question. But if you are a recruiter making decisions on how to go about getting your job done it is important to focus on the world as it exists today and will continue to exist over the next 2-3 years. You are not a venture capitalist making bets on where the next billion-dollar company will pop up. You are a tactical operator with a dozen or more short-term objectives to accomplish. The more we as individuals enjoy new tools and toys, the more risk we run of losing our focus.

As a vendor, I would disagree with the one quoted in John's article who called Jobby "very bad." I think it's a neat idea and if you're recruiting AJAX/Ruby developers it may become a key resource in the next 12-18 months. But if you're recruiting manufacturing engineers or marketing coordinators it could still be 3-5 years before it's mainstream.

Unless you want to try pulling an Ericsson and getting rid of everyone over 35, you're still going to be sorting through resumes the old-fashioned way for years to come. Buggy whips may be pretty useless today. But in 1910, a bale of hay would probably have gotten you farther than five gallons of gasoline.

* Those of a certain philosophical bent might also characterize this as a form of immanentizing the eschaton.

The Goldberg Variations

Posted by Colin Kingsbury

Jun 12, 2006 11:00:00 PM

Harry the Marketing Headhunter is standing firm on his predictionthat Jobster will change its name to Recruiting.com sooner or later. He makes some great arguments but I'm voting with the Recruiting Animal on this one: highly unlikely.

Harry is on strong ground when he says it's all about the PageRank. On the Internet, every business is an island, and Google runs the ferries. The ability of search engines to steer monetizable traffic is nothing short of epochal in its significance.

The problem I see is that re-branding as Recruiting.com purely for the SEO payoff feels like a great checkers move--when Google's playing chess.

First, this assumes that "recruiting" is really the ideal keyword with which to capture leads. I'm not so sure. Over time, Google (and other search engines) are conditioning people to start by being very specific, and then broaden their queries only if they don't get enough results. So my guess is that the first thing someone is going to type into Google isn't "recruiting," but "AJAX programmer." Search advertising is 100% about feeding impulses. When someone searches for an "AJAX programmer" there is a lot of impulse to monetize.

Then again, Joel Cheesman figured out that Jobster will pay $3/click for "recruiting" so they clearly think it's worthwhile. Who am I to argue?

But the second point is that this seems to assume that Google's index weightings won't change much. After all, if Larry and Sergey one day roll out a version of PageRank that ignores domain names, then the domain name ceases to have any secret-sauce value beyond what Jobster, Jobby, or HRMDirect have. As for the likelihood of such a change, I'd consider it pretty much inevitable. When someone types "recruiting" into a search engine, they are looking for sites which will create a large amount of relevant value. Ultimately, how much does a domain name really tell you? Simply that the owner got lucky. That Jason Davis secured the name recruiting.com in 2002 created no value for people searching on the term "recruiting." But by 2006 the community site he cajoled into existence had huge piles of content and discussion of great value to anyone who wanted to learn anything about "recruiting."

So my bet is on the table that over time, domain names will play an shrinking role in determining search results. Over time, recruiting.com will lose its intrinsic value as the Googleplex figures out more precise measures of relevance. It will just be another name.

And a dull one, at that, for a company that has labored greatly to be anything but dull.

Platforms Part II: the FUDdie-Duddies

Posted by Colin Kingsbury

May 31, 2006 11:41:00 AM

Martin Snyder has posted a follow-up to the discussion referenced in myprevious post on the Windows-vs-Web platform debate.

The point I wanted to make in that post was that vendors love nothing more than to convince prospects to buy based on abstractions like "platform" rather than the reality of the product they offer today. To be fair to Martin, however, I don't think he ever disagreed:

All the smart observers instantly declare that the platform is not the key element of a decision and that functionality, fit, vendor relationship, etc. are all more important. I agree completely, but thatâ€™s not the premise of this discussion.

The premise is that all non-platform features are cancelled-out, leaving only the platform question. This is not a practical exercise for buying or selection purposes; only a technically oriented, but not technical, exploration of the platforms as they compare to each other.

So far I would score this fight for Martin on points. While Bob makes many valid points in favor of the desktop (which I agree is still alive and well despite what all of us web-guys say) he has over-salted the broth a little in the quest to paint web-based applications as universally inferior.

Having spent most of my career in the start-up side of the technology business, I have developed a well-honed sense of revulsion for FUD tactics. There is nothing more irritating than offering the customer a better product at a better price and losing the deal because company X "was better positioned to be our long-term partner." When you get this all the time it is tempting to try to sling some FUD right back but this is ultimately a zero-sum game.

ATS Platform Posturing

Posted by Colin Kingsbury

May 22, 2006 1:35:00 PM

I am getting a kick out of the scrap between Martin Snyder and Bob Nelson, the head dogs of PCRecruiter and CBizOne respectively. It's a perfect illustration of how legitimate technical discussions quickly devolve into pointless posturing that has little practical meaning for buyers.

On the surface they are debating the merits of thick versus thin clients, or, browser-based versus installed applications if you prefer. If you are a software developer or product manager, this is all you talk about these days. But as an ATS buyer, the talking points flying between these two justly-respected industry veterans are not worth the time it takes to read them.

Every point made by both gentlemen strikes me as honest and correct, but utterly irrelevant to a buyer. Every one of them needs to have the phrase "but it will depend on your situation" added at the end. All their points are generally true but ultimately dependent on local conditions.

Look at it this way: an airplane travels much faster than a car, but if you're traveling between Boston and Albany (a little under 200 miles), it may be faster door-to-door to take a car. Comparing "the web platform" to "the installed platform" as Snyder and Nelson are doing is like discussing whether flying or driving will be faster without defining the trip to be taken. Especially if the two parties debating are a limo driver and an airline pilot.

Part of the reason vendors love to talk about platforms is because it means a lot to us. Choosing how to architect your application is perhaps the single most consequential decision a software company will make. Here at HRMDirect we are enthusiastic about the Software-as-a-Service/Web platform because we believe it is the [u]best platform for us.[/u] Ultimately, the benefits get passed on to our customers in terms of better features and lower prices, but that's a different discussion.

For someone buying an applicant tracking system, the choice is not between broad platforms but specific products and vendors. Chances are that if one platform really is much better than the other for your situation, then you will know it pretty early in the process. For instance, large multinationals with highly-integrated ERP systems are going to self-host an application they can integrate into their existing stack, with that requirement driving the rest of the process for better or worse.

As a customer, the only thing that matters to you is the product that is actually staring you back in the face every day. If you are wondering which platform is better, then odds are the answer is "neither." While the self-hosted/thick-client app may run faster, the web-based one may be much more user-friendly. Your IT department may be great at supporting applications, or terrible. So take the car(s) for a test drive, and make your choice accordingly. The rest is just hot air and conjecture, so choose accordingly.

Colin Kingsbury

Recent Posts

David Perry on Leadership Equity

Eggregious or Eggfective?

Improve Your Hiring Experience

Tod Hilton's Living in the Real World

A Good Conversation Indeed

Crazy Ideas @ Nobscot

Wishing Doesn't Make It So

The Goldberg Variations

Platforms Part II: the FUDdie-Duddies

ATS Platform Posturing

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