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.
In my last post I wrote that online dating services would show us where online recruiting was headed. I believe this to be the case because they are both expressions of the same basic problem: how do I find a person who (fill in the blank). While the requirements may change, the processes have significant similarities.But in this case it is the differences that illuminate. Innovation is a delicate organism that fares poorly in highly-regulated environments. Buyers whose first instinct is to avoid geting sued and fired will choose the tried and mediocre over the new and promising with depressing regularity. Recruiting is among the more closely-watched activities companies engage in, while dating is a veritable Wild West frontier. The bottom line here is that in dating, consumers and vendors can and will try anything to get better results, while in HR, it can takes years for an idea to gain acceptance. That's why I think it makes a practical "crystal ball."At its heart, "social computing" could be summed up as the idea that the audience adds value to the performance. At one end of the scale, the audience is the performance, as in the case of eBay. One of the most important parts of eBay, arguably its crown jewel, are its member feedback ratings. By measuring and reporting objectively on the honestyof its members, eBay has successfully convinced me and millions of other people to mail large checks to people we've never met for things we've never seen. This is no small achievement in a world where con artists lurk around every virtual corner.In online dating, the critical transaction is the first date, after which the "online" aspect ceases to be relevant. As transactions go, it is a signficant one, involving a non-trivial investment of time, money, and personal safety. In other words, much more important than a vintage cocktail shaker. And yet, if you look at Match.com, there is no analog to eBay's member ratings. At first, this seems like a stunning omission: good user feedback scores on members would be hugely valuable to members and by extension to Match, which would obtain a proprietary advantage over other dating sites the same way Amazon's customer ratings give them an advantage over Barnes & Noble.But the devil in the details is "good user feedback." Upon closer inspection, there are a number of important differences between the eBays and Amazons and the Matches of the world, and they explain why "good feedback" would very likely not be the rule.Exclusivity: eBay is a "promiscuous" market in the sense that just because you buy a vintage cocktail shaker today, doesn't mean you will be less likely to buy a set of glasses tomorrow. Everyone is always "on the market." But in dating, a successful transaction takes two people off the market.Easily Defined Criteria for Success: On eBay, there are really only two things for buyer and seller to argue over. Did the buyer pay quickly, and did the item arrive as described? Dating is infinitely more complicated.Equality of Outcomes: eBay transactions are roughly speaking either good for both parties, or bad for both. Dates are much less uniform. One person may be content if they never see the other again, while the other is hopelessly smitten. Not a situation conducive to dispassionate analysis.Dating is RecruitingAll of these examples can substitute the words "jobseeker" for "buyer" and "recruiter" for "seller" and the story remains largely the same. This doesn't mean a reputation system for recruiting purposes is impossible, but it does mean that the models we see currently in places like eBay would likely not translate well to recruiting.
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The Canadian Headhunter has a
good post
referencing Charlene Li's blog
at Forrester discussing whether Chevy's "Apprentice" SUV ad campaign backfired when anti-SUV activists used the Chevy site to post anti-SUV messages. Charlene Li says it didn't backfire because it allowed the company to engage its critics in their own forum.
Jobster CTO
Phil Bogle adds
that a dose of the same kind of sunlight would be good for the recruiting process as well:
Why can't we introduce openness and authenticity in the conversations between employers and prospective employees? The results may not be as glossy, but I'll take real and meaningful over glossy any day.
The problem here comes with the term
meaningful
. It is surprising how difficult it is to find out what your customers really think of you, whether you have five of them or five million. To the extent that "social computing" techniques help draw authentic and unfiltered customer opinion out, they will help businesses to do better. The problem is that many of the critics you may find yourelf engaging are not really honest brokers.
It's kind of like when James Bond asks Goldfinger, "Do you expect me to talk," and he replies, "No Mr. Bond, I expect you to die!"
Recruiting is going to encounter an especially large challenge here because like dating, it is a process of rejecting people. No matter how nicely you do it, some people are going to take it badly, and a few of them are going to make it their life's mission to cause you as much pain as you caused them. Unfortunately, it's precisely these kinds of critics that take the most time and energy to deal with.
Of course, someone who got rejected for a job at Morgan Stanley has always had the right to carry a sandwich board on the sidewalk in front of the building and hand out leaflets. But this took energy, and reached very few people. With social computing, the gadflies can reach a global audience from the comfort of their sofas.
And contra Ms. Li, I think bringing these sorts of critics into your own forum lends them a credibility they might otherwise lack. Today any crank with an axe to grind can lash out at TGI Fridays on his
blog
and have it come up
page one of a Google search for "work TGI Fridays"
. But, the casual web browser will also play a little game of "consider the source" and perhaps conclude, "this guy is a crank."**
To wit, MySpace and Blogger are like the sidewalk, and you can't legally shut up someone who is determined to make a scene there. But, should you invite them into the lobby and offer them a refreshing beverage? And don't forget, when you ask them to leave, all their friends may show up to join the protest. After all, it's certainly not your best interests they care most about.
If you really want to see where this is headed, I would keep an eye on the dating services. They are well ahead of the recruiting space in terms of sophistication in these areas, and the issues are very similar.
** Disclaimer:
This post does not constitute an opinion for or against TGI Fridays. This was simply the first example grabbed out of the air. I suspect that any business of any kind will have loud detractors, some legitimate, others not. Which is really the point.
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I would like to ask all my blog-friends out there with an interest in the subject or resumes (hint: Blue Sky Resumes
) to please spread the word that resumes formatted as images are not a good thing.
It doesn't happen often, but we see a lot of resumes here, and once out of every thousand or so, we get a resume that looks perfect when you open it up in Word or Acrobat, but doesn't get parsed properly. The reason: the document contains a picture of a resume instead of text. Usually this happens when someone scans a paper resume and forgets to select the "OCR" option, but sometimes it's obvious the jobseeker did it on purpose.
Chances are anyone who is reading this blog knows that all kinds of employers use
applicant tracking
systems like
Resume Direct
to help organize their resume flow.
Resume parsing
and keyword searching are two of the main reasons companies use these tools, and these will only work when the resume is in a text-based format like Word, HTML, PDF, or ASCII. We actually support over 35 formats, so you can use just about anything, except an image of a resume!
Whenever I see people doing things like this, I suspect it's because some self-proclaimed expert told them "it's a good idea because it makes sure companies will see it formatted properly" or something similar. Trust me: proper formatting is nice, but coming up in a keyword search is much more important.
Other systems "prevent" this by forcing candidates to enter resumes as text only, or to fill out multi-part forms to get the data in the format the system wants.
Resume Direct
doesn't do that for the simple reason that we don't want to create barriers to submitting an application. Our
email-based application process
, which is unique in the
applicant tracking
industry, allows recruiters to post jobs anywhere and make applying as easy as possible. Systems which add unnecessary steps to the application process don't just prevent bad data--they also prevent good candidates with better things to do from applying in the first place.
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Since today is Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day, Popular Mechanics has a funny and timely post on their blog.
But here at Popular Mechanics, we think there's something parents can do every day that will help their kids a lot more than parking them in the office conference room once a year: Instead of taking our kids to work, how about putting them to work?
I'm not that old, but I have to wonder how many upper-middle class kids today have the experience of doing real manual labor.Growing up, I spent summers picking orders in a warehouse, driving a delivery van, and doing general contracting. I helped my father build a large part of the house we lived in from the foundation up. In high school I spent more than the legal number of hours for my age in the kitchen and behind the counter for a local pizzeria. All of this taught me various skills, some useful, others less so. If you want a recipe for 80 pounds of pizza dough, let me know. And even at the boarding school I attended, where many of my classmates were from the truly upper classes, all underclassmen were required to do dishwashing duty in the dining hall every month or so, an assignment hated worse than any test or paper. We talk a lot today about "working smart," but these jobs taught me about working hard, both mentally and physically. The tasks were often dull, occasionally gross, and rewarded persistence and discipline rather than intellectual cleverness. In short, they were pretty much the opposite of school. I was thinking about this the other day because I got an email from an old high school friend expressing shock and outrage at the fact that students are no longer required to wash dishes, because the school "felt there were other activities of more greater educational value." I suspect that translates into English as, "parents kept asking why they were paying $25,000 a year to have their sons and daughters wash dishes."Well, I sent them a letter indicating that I could not disagree more. It is wonderful and amazing that those students today have the opportunity to go on field trips to the Amazon River to learn biology or hone their Spanish in Madrid, but looking back I realize that these jobs taught me a lot more about the world and work than an internship in my father's office would have. They also exposed me to a whole range of people who I would otherwise never have interacted with, except perhaps as a customer, and gave me a very serious dose of perspective on how fortunate I was.What this has to do with recruiting!It's understandable that someone recruiting college students would favor someone with internship experience in the field over someone who waited tables or did landscaping. But while people have their whole adult lives to learn their profession, these days the high school and college years are the only time they might work outside of their economic and social status. I believe that doing so taught me many rich life lessons about work and people and really expanded my perspective on things in ways that simply can't be bought with any amount of money.When hiring college graduates, the focus should be on the potential of the person as a whole. If nothing else, seeing a steady history of "real jobs" on a student's resume tells me that this is a person who knows how to drag herself out of bed, show up, and deal with a situation where their needs don't come first. So before you count a 22-year-old out because they didn't do a three-month internship at Big Name Inc., ask them what they learned pushing a mop bucket. The answers may surprise you.
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As a software buyer, one of the most important things to do is get a sense of the core philosophy of each vendor you're considering. With mostapplicant tracking systems today being purchased on an ASP or On Demand basis, you're buying into a company's way of doing business more than ever before.Client references and RFPs are useful, but they are rear-view mirrors, and flawed at that ("objects may be closer than they appear"). As a user, the success of your deployment will be determined as much by the decisions that vendor makes in the future as by the ones they've made in the past. Call it what you prefer: personality, philosophy, core values; the important thing is to try to understand how the vendor will make those future decisions.To give you an example, one of the things that I am seeing in the market right now is that many ATS vendors are emphasizing integrated product lines rather than their core applicant tracking system. Basically, they're saying, "buy our ATS because it is integrated with a talent management system, performance management system," and so on. This type of pitch tells us two very important things.
- They're done doing major development to their ATS
- The business is increasingly focused on upselling existing clients rather than getting new ones
The first item (more mature software) sounds like a good thing but it often isn't. In practice, it means that the application you buy tomorrow is the same exact application you will be using in two years when there are a whole host of new tools you want to use that won't integrate with it. More fundamentally, nearly all mid-market ATSs today are still operating on an ASP, rather than On Demand model. (Why this is a critical difference) In most cases, moving to an On Demand model will require a bottom-up rewrite of the entire software package, something that few companies have the stomach to do in such a competitive market. If they're talking about their other products when you're shopping for an ATS, it's a safe bet they won't be investing in their ATS anytime soon. So you had better be happy with what it is today.There's a name for this type of software: legacy applications.Our opinion here at HRMDirect is that recruiting is changing too rapidly to even think about saying there's no room left to innovate in terms of applicant tracking functionality. Many of today's most talked-about tools like Jobster didn't exist until a year or two ago, while people like Joel Cheesman are pointing us towards a future beyond job boards. Anyone who thinks today's ATSs are fully prepared to support this future will likely find him or herself buying a new system in 2-3 years.
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John Sumser has lately been adding a welcome dose of sanity to the conversation by emphasizing what the big job boards are good at. Intoday's column though, he slips in an aside that I have to disagree with:
Many voices, ranging from the industrial psychologists to the search algorithm enthusiasts, suggest that the output of the Job Boards could (and should) be improved by addressing the "fit" question. The hard thing is that the definition of fit is a moving target. Particularly in knowledge work enterprises, the best employee this month may be maladaptive next month....
In other words, "fit" is a red herring on one level.
This isn't wrong per se but I think John is belaboring the point. "Fit" is not a static yes-no question, but a funnel that narrows down as you move from screening resumes to conducting interviews to extending an offer, let alone the promotion/dismissal decisions that take place one or two years later.Today, the job boards can barely tell me even the most basic things about a candidate:- How many years of experience do they have in the specified functional area?- Have they worked at a small (medium/large) company roughly the size of mine before?- Do they have experience in my industry?- Do they have experience interfacing with customers?- Have they worked at a product (service) company before?None of these questions strike me as beyond the pale in terms of what a search engine ought to be able to generate. It would require integrating third-party data sources and no, but nothing half as complicated as what is standard in other data-driven industries like finance and securities. Referrals are in many senses simply a way to outsource this level of "fit" determination to a cheap third party.
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My policy has long been that when a certain market segment is full of inferior products, it can largely be blamed on customers. The other day I stumbled across this Malcolm Gladwell article
on SUVs and safety that illustrates the point. This passage really caught my eye:
During the design of Chrysler's PT Cruiser, one of the things Rapaille learned was that car buyers felt unsafe when they thought that an outsider could easily see inside their vehicles. So Chrysler made the back window of the PT Cruiser smaller. Of course, making windows smaller—and thereby reducing visibility—makes driving more dangerous, not less so. But that's the puzzle of what has happened to the automobile world: feeling safe has become more important than actually being safe.
Gladwell would answer that puzzle a year later in his book
Blink
, which argued that people make many of their most important decisions in about two seconds. While many of these snap decisions turn out to be quite good, the PT Cruiser example clearly illustrates how "rapid cognition" as Gladwell calls it can lead to very bad judgments.
What does this have to do with
applicant tracking
, or recruiting in general?
Successful vendors are successful because they build products that people buy.
That's obvious, but what's more often ignored is that people often don't buy the "best" product objectively speaking. Sometimes, they actually buy based on what I call "anti-features," which are features that do the opposite of what they should--like smaller windows that make you feel safer.
The popular response is to blame the vendors, as if it's entirely Detroit's fault that people flock to dealerships to buy SUVs. To be fair, marketers invest amazing amounts of time and energy in "stimulating demand" for their product in ways that are a little shady. But no amount of legislation or professional "codes of ethics" will ever be as effective as a change in customer opinion, and that's why car dealers are now offering $5000 rebates on full-size SUVs that were selling at retail price a year ago.
This is why I see what we are doing here at HRMDirect as something larger than simply adding another choice to the already crowded ATS market. As a software vendor, the easiest thing to do is to say "yes" and give the customer precisely what they ask for. While our focus is on building a great product, we're also working to change the way people think about buying applicant tracking systems. Of course this benefits us but in the long run the recruiters who choose us see that our approach benefits them as well. Judging by the way most recruiters talk about their ATS, it's pretty clear the traditional model isn't delivering. One recruiter I spoke to recently who was demoing a number of systems said "you would be amazed" at how anti-productive many of our competitors' products really are.
Smaller, simpler, and different: that's our message.
It's a message that's still revolutionary in a software market where RFPs are still mostly written as feature wish-lists. As a buyer, it's in your own best interest to
think beyond the blink
when you choose a system. Be aware that first impressions can sometimes be deeply flawed.
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Interesting post from a VC blogger in NYC who noticed a major bump in traffic after he got linked by a prominent site. More interestingly, he includes a graph of his dealflow--the number of inbound "leads" on new business opportunities--which spiked to more than double the usual number for a few days after being linked. Money quote:
It got me wondering - what deals have I missed out on by not being part of the online conversation?
Read the whole thing.
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The New York Times ran a story yesterday on the relative shortage of female partners in law firms, which compare unfavorably to accounting firms. What caught my eye was this quote from a Deloitte executive, explaining why the firm was offering such a wide range of benefits including long-term sabbaticals and flexible schedules:
"The cost of women leaving and the cost of turnover was so high and the fact that the majority of accounting graduates were women were strong drivers of our initiatives," said Wendy C. Schmidt, a Deloitte principal in New York.
While legislation and PR will compel many companies to provide minimum lip-service to things like policies that support working mothers, nothing beats the bottom line. To the extent that benefits like these make the world a better place, the talent shortage will do more than any legislation ever could to compel companies to provide them.
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Finally a great conversation is taking shape on the role of metrics in blogging. From the beginning I've agreed with John Sumser and Jeff Hunter that the use of metrics is essential. In this post I'd like to flesh out how I and my colleagues at HRMDirect approach them.Entrepreneurial vs. Mature BusinessesBlogging as a form of communication is fairly new and the use of blogging as a business tool even more so. In a mature business (e.g. direct mail) you don't spend much time arguing over whether something like response rate is a meaningful benchmark of success. Planning and forecasting are statistically-based and fairly accurate. Failure to meet or exceed forecasts is a reliable indicator of execution failure. Pretty dull, huh?An entrepreneurial venture can be completely different. We are working with a company right now that over the next twelve months will do anywhere between a hundred thousand and thirty million dollars in revenue. The higher number is not realistic, and yet to do even a million could be reasonably regarded as successful. That's quite a scale.Where the long-term business model is uncertain and often unknown, simple metrics are elusive and forecasts can be little more than horoscopes with numbers attached. An incorrect plan can deliver poor results while being executed perfectly. Success can come from being very lucky and finding the right path the first time, or from stumbling down enough wrong ones fast enough to find the right one before running out of time.In an entrepreneurial venture the question of utmost strategic importance is not "are we executing the plan well," but, "is this the right plan to be executing?" In the short term, that question will often be answered by soft rather than hard metrics: by positive customer feedback rather than increased win rates, for instance. Leadership is a matter of vision rather than bookkeeping. If you want to see an awkward conversation, put an early-stage entrepreneur together with an I-banker from a major Wall Street firm. Both will leave irritated and more convinced than ever of their own intelligence and the world's foolishness.Is The Plan Right?At the tactical level the picture changes completely. It is fine for the founders and investors to discuss whether we should take Strategy A or Strategy Anti-A, but once that decision has been made we must implement it as if were brought down from a mountain written on stone tablets. It's like going on a fad diet: it may be that eating nothing but steak will work better tha eating nothing but grapefruit, but eating a diet of half steak and half grapefruit will prove nothing. In the short term the plan is not open for discussion, at least on a day-to-day basis.Metrics in the Time of AmbiguityLikewise, in the short term metrics are not just helpful, they are pretty much all we have. They may be very fuzzy, and we may feel conflicted about them, but unless we plant a stake in the ground somewhere we will have no way of knowing if we have moved at all, let alone in which direction.In business blogging today it is probably impossible to judge the net present value of a link from Talentism or Recruiting.com to this site. But we can reasonably theorize that they have value, and therefore set inbound links from certain sites as an indicator of some kind of success. Likewise, pageviews tell us an incomplete picture, but what they tell us is not meaningless. If relatively few people visit a blog, and those few rarely return, it is more likely that the blog is failing to engage any audience than that it is successfully reaching a super-select and influential few.Because only one thing counts in this life: get them to sign on the line which is dotted.I know that we're living in a new world where networks matter more than individuals and collaboration will produce more returns than competition and zzzz....The bottom line is that business is ultimately about closing deals. Some people are closer to the blood and guts side of that than others but in the end we're all either adding to the value chain or taking up space. It's not just a question of whether blogging has a positive impact, it's a question of whether that blogging is the best possible use of company resources.Part of the problem with blogging is that it's fun, and this will lead to people finding justifications for doing it in a work context. Hey, I think it's great, and people should try to find work that they enjoy (because they'll b more productive) but we would't be having this conversation if the activity in question was "making cold calls" instead of blogging.Think of it as a question of self-preservation. Right now, a good talker could probably sell his or her management on a company blog and evade the question of return on investment and measurement thereof. But there's an old saying on Wall Street that person would do well to heed:
Pigs get fat, but hogs get slaughtered.
It may take some of the fun out of running your own e-magazine to build a business case based around measurable standards of performance, but doing so will radically increase the odds that:1. You will get rewarded proportionally to the value of your contribution.2. You will be permitted to continue blogging as part of your job description.3. You will not get fired when a new manager comes in who doesn't get it.Someday in the future, I'll talk more about how we got the HRMDirect blog off the ground and the indicators we used to judge its success. But I will say that the experience has convinced us that blogging does have a place as part of an integrated communications strategy.
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