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.

Sense and Sensibility

Posted by Colin Kingsbury

Mar 9, 2006 5:08:00 PM

Wherein I celebrate the opportunity to finally disagree with Jeff Hunter on something...

In case you haven't heard, earlier this week John Sumser, publisher of the Electronic Recruiting News, managed to ignite quite the brushfire with aharrumph of a post concerning Microsoft blogger Heather Leigh's antipathy to metrics in blogging. All of which brings us to Jeff's post from earlier today, which concludes,

Yesterday I got a call from someone who questioned how I could be friends with John Sumser. He is just so obnoxious and mean. Junior High School, man. That's what it is. I was the kid who always liked the geeks and wore funny clothes to school to dare the bullies to do something about it. So, in that spirit, let me say John, you are my friend, what you do is a credit to this industry, and how about we start a business together?

Jeff's larger point seems to be that HR needs to "Cowboy up" and quit being so sensitive:

John Sumser writes an article that is in bad taste and hurts people's feelings. So what? Bill Gates gets called a thousand time worse than a spoiled child in print every day. Does he quit?

I agree with Jeff to a point. Blogging in a business setting has one (potentially) revolutionary characteristic, and that is its personal immediacy. Conventional marketing gives us made-up people, and we now know that; blogging gives us real people, or at least we think it does, and people are wired to connect to people more strongly than to things. Of course, this only works if the blogs are written by and sound like real people, or else they become nothing but a daily stream of press releases. To the extent that John Sumser said exactly what he would say to the boys after a few drinks in the corner bar, yeah, I guess you could call that "good blogging."

But Mr. Hunter needs to be careful what he wishes for. Business today is for the most part conducted in the language of international diplomacy: all parties are addressed as "my esteemed colleague," and even the most outrageous offenses are "disagreements we are in the process of resolving." Even when we say bad things about our competitors, we do so "with the utmost regret," as if we wished they would fix that nasty bug all their users are screaming about.

Want to know what's really "junior high?" Shooting off your mouth without caring what anyone else thinks. The professional world is increasingly the last outpost of civility in a world where "upper class" is defined by Paris Hilton instead of Jackie Onassis. "You are what you blog," is the order of the day here: if you call Bill Gates a coprophagic pederast, I'll take your word that's honestly representative of your feelings, but I'll also back slowly away from you while looking for the exit.

In blogging as in email, I've always taken the attitude of not writing anything I wouldn't say to the subject's face. That doesn't preclude honest debate. In fact, it enriches it by keeping the combatants focused on issues of fact rather than style. To the extent that the business world has not yet caught up with the larger culture in this regard, it is a thing to celebrate.

PS: If this subject is your cup of tea, don't miss this post on SixApart co-founder Mena Trott's on-stage spitball fight at a user conference. Even the comments are really interesting.

How does your candidate service stack up?

Posted by Colin Kingsbury

Mar 1, 2006 1:12:00 AM

Here at HRMDirect we speak to a lot of what other vendors refer to as "small" companies, meaning fewer than 1,000 employees. They often ask us how an ATS will help them, since they think they're doing fine now without one. In many cases the true answer is that what they're doing now isn't good, they just don't know it.

This is especially true with what I call "candidate service," which concerns the interactions your company has with each candidate. To understand why this is important, read this post on the O'Reilly blog network arguing that HR is "Your IT Company's Biggest Enemy."

This isn't to say I agree with the details of that post. Like many of the dozen or so commenters who rose to defend the noble profession of Human Resources, I suspect that the author either had a poor resume, or wasn't a good fit for the positions he applied to. But that's beside the point! This person has now added a dozen companies to his personal enemies list, and may have said unflattering things about them to some of his friends. Multiply this by ten or a thousand applicants and you have a pretty substantial negative word-of-mouth campaign going on.

Put yourself in the candidate's shoes: You've spent 30-45 minutes tweaking your resume and writing a cover letter. You go through the registration process to send in your application, and a week later you hear... nothing. The message is clear: you're worthless to the company, undeserving even of the courtesy of a form letter.

Of course you (the recruiter) are juggling too many tasks to dedicate personal time to each and every applicant. That's where an automation system like an ATS comes in handy. In our product, you can create a list of applicants who were turned down at the screening stage and send a polite thank-you note to them with about 4 mouse clicks. Outlook can do this too, but it's a little confusing and takes a good deal more time, so very few recruiters do it.

Likewise, some of our clients actually include their email and phone number with their rejection letters so that candidates who really want to know what happened can talk to them. When a candidate calls, any recruiter can pull up the Notes in our system for that candidate, and quickly explain the decision. It may even "save" a candidate or two who somehow ended up in the wrong bucket. Either way, it shows the candidate respect and professionalism, and will leave a positive impression of the employer.

ATS vs. CRM Part Two: Where CRM Will Fail

Posted by Colin Kingsbury

Feb 28, 2006 12:42:00 PM

In part one I laid out the case against the ATS: too expensive, too much overhead, and too focused on bureaucracy. I've written about this before in my series on how screening questions drain your talent pool. So I understand the appeal. Heck, I started an ATS company precisely becauseI was so unimpressed by what the rest of the market had to offer.

I also understand the appeal of CRM on a conceptual level. The traditional ATS is designed for a market with a few jobs and a lot of jobseekers. It's like the service counter at your local department of motor vehicles. CRM, on the other hand, is built for sales, where leads are immensely valuable and cultivated over long periods of time. And there's no denying that Salesforce delivers a better user experience than most ATSs.

But I come not to praise CRM, but to bury it. Using CRM for recruiting is not a terrible idea. It would probably work well for a small staffing firm which specializes in no more than 4 or 5 defined categories of candidates. It would probably work well in a corporate setting as a sourcing tool, again for a few categories of people. But using it as a full-blown ATS replacement will prove problematic.

It's not set up to manage requisitions properly. "Show me all the candidates in consideration for this opening" is the type of query that CRM will have a hard time providing. In sales, you don't have leads competing to win a deal. Talent scarcity or no, you are still going to be working with pools of applicants and managing interview and evaluation processes. There's still requisition approvals and diversity reports and interview schedules to worry about.

Sourcing the best candidates is important, but it's not the only part of the process any more than finding leads is the only part of selling. Successful sales managers will tell you that they'd take strong salespeople with weak leads over weak salespeople with Glengarry Leads(NB- typical David Mamet "colorful" dialogue) any day of the week. That's why managing the post-sourcing process is so important, and CRM won't do it out of the box.

So you've got a choice: build it all in CRM, or use an ATS as well. Can you customize and tweak a CRM package to deliver all of this? Probably. But don't kid yourself--it may be just a feature or two now, but in the end you're going to catch yourself developing your very own ATS. If you're lucky you'll end up with a good ATS that costs as much as any commercial package and can be supported by any of the 1-5 people who worked on it, and is dependent on an underlying CRM platform that will change over time. That's if you're lucky. As a vendor I regularly talk with customers who tried the DIY route, and most of them are only too happy to kick the habit.

Using two systems is okay at first, but will get messier over time. In the process of sourcing candidates in your CRM, you will build up large amounts of valuable information that may not make it into your ATS. So, you're going to have to check two systems every time you look at somebody. When you bring a new person on they will need to learn two systems which in all likelihood are fairly different from each other. Integration will either be limited or costly, and often both. Then there's the redundant data entry that will probably go on, which is about the most anti-productive thing possible. Invariably what you end up with is one system where everything really gets done, and one system full of incomplete and incoherent information.

Don't blame the entire ATS industry for your current vendor's bad behavior. If you're going to hold CRM up as the ideal, it bears remembering that in 2001, companies were cancelling projects in the millions and tens of millions as abject failures. And yet today the CRM space is stronger than ever. The ATS space has not undergone the kind of shakeout that hit CRM in 2001-2003, but that doesn't mean that there are no vendors who get it. I'd like to leave my readers with just one thought:

Simplify, simplify, simplify!

There's a temptation to always be buying more expensive tools, to always add more functionality (on paper at least), to "increase your holdings" in terms of software. A lot of what's wrong with ATSs today starts with them trying to be all things to too many people. Don't think that because your last system cost $100k to implement that your next one has to as well. Systems which do less can often do more.

ATS vs. CRM: Where the ATS Went Wrong

Posted by Colin Kingsbury

Feb 23, 2006 8:15:00 PM

A comment attached to a recent post on ERExchange finally convinced me to plant my flag on this debate.

It started when someone posted a message asking for vendors for a "Global ATS," specifically one that could be deployed in China. One person responded with a fairly detailed list of vendors and issues to consider. Jeremy Langhans replied simply:

CRM

Jeremy may not have been the first person to suggest that CRM systems are an alternative to applicant tracking, but he is one of the loudest advocates of this school of thought. Nor is he alone- a month back Jeff Hunter posted a comment on the Human Capitalist blog saying that he was starting to use Salesforce.com as a "sourcing/pre-ATS module."

Jeff and Jeremy are two of the smarter guys in this business so when they're both saying the same thing it's probably worth paying attention to. Jeremy says,

I believe, in our hunt for passive high-end & high-demand Talent, that the ATS is a dead technology. CRM is what will enable us to apply a true sales lifecycle to our acquisition methodology.

The fact that Jeff's company happens to be on Jeremy's client list only strengthens my sense that there's something important going on here.

Considering that I am an ATS vendor you might reasonably expect me to dismiss Jeremy's suggestion with prejudice, or offer an OCD-ish point-by-point rebuttal. In fact, I'm going to agree with them and say that the ATS as we know it is broken .

It's too expensive for what it does. Let's face it: the typical tasks performed by an ATS are not rocket science. It doesn't need to scale to support thousands or millions of users, and it interfaces with one, maybe two other systems. And yet even mid-market tools are often priced at two to five times the cost of upper-tier CRM packages which at first glance offer a lot more features. The productivity gains do not match the price, which explains why even 5-person companies often have CRM systems while 1000-person companies often don't use an ATS.

It's too focused on automating bureaucracy. How often have you been told to do things completely backwards in a software system because "that's the only way it will accept it?" Systems which begin their life as tools to automate bureaucratic processes often end up as enforcers of corporate "blue laws." There is nothing worse than being stuck with a clumsy process because the tool--rather than the business--requires it. A leaner process will beat a bigger filing cabinet every day of the week.

It creates too much overhead for primary users. I'm shocked by the amount of data entry and mouse-clicking most ATSs still require. Quite a few require candidate contact info to be entered manually for every candidate, or charge big bucks to parse this automatically. Similarly, many systems force users through 3-5 interface pages to accomplish everyday tasks. This is not tolerated in the CRM business because managers understand that every minute spent in the software is a minute not spent on the phone making money. This should be just as true for recruiting (which is really a sales function) but since HR's seat is often at the kids' table it gets ignored in favor of policy-following functionality that works against the P&L.

In part 2, I'll explore what this means for the ATS industry, and why CRM isn't a silver bullet.

But I hear their retirement plan stinks...

Posted by Colin Kingsbury

Feb 17, 2006 3:21:00 PM

According to a pair of studies by West Point researchers, Al Qaeda is internally run much like your average corporation, complete with benefits packages:

Indeed, some of the documents used by researchers indicate that al Qaeda has vacation plans -- seven days every three weeks for married members, five days a month for bachelors -- and provides its members with 15 days of sick leave a year.

Lest you think the pressure of competing against the many governments trying to put them out of business might cause them to operate more efficiently, annoying bureaucracy persists:

One document states that al Qaeda operatives must request vacation 10 weeks in advance, and another document outlines the pay scale for members: about $108 a month for married members, less if they're single and more if they have more than one wife.

The Talent War That Wasn't?

Posted by Colin Kingsbury

Feb 13, 2006 11:33:00 AM

Everyone knows that with the Boomers retiring, educational standards going down the drain, populations shrinking, the dawn of a global workforce etc. that we are on the cusp of a "war for talent." I'm not going to bother linking to posts. It's like giving directions to a tourist in Boston who asks where to find an Irish pub: just wander around, they're everywhere.

But what if it wasn't so? There's nothing worse for your business than a universally-held assumption. The assumption here is that in 5, 10, and 15 years it will take us just as many product marketing managers to put a bottle of dishwashing detergent on the shelf as it does today. Bad assumption.

Economics teaches us that there are two means of production: labor and capital. Labor can be deployed quickly and with low upfront cost (compared to capital), but capital can be much cheaper over the long haul. Imagine, if you will, that the government raised the minimum wage to $20 an hour. Dishwashers working in restaurants would be elated, right up to the point that the manager installed a dishwashing machine. As the price of labor rises, so do the incentives to replace it with capital.

"But there's no such thing as a product marketing manager machine!

We all understand the capital-labor equation when talking about things like factory robots and dishwashing machines, but we don't need to replace the whole worker specifically to reduce the need for labor generally. It is true that we cannot replace emotion, judgment, feel, creativity, and intuition with software or machines. But how much of our time is spent in these deeply-focused and innately human tasks? How much of our time is spent merely coordinating, aligning calendars, responding to unnecessary emails, and the like?

For many of us, the answer is "far too much." In larger companies, it is not unusual to find people who do little else, and yet they are essential because there is currently no other way. At least no other easy way. But the reward is very clear: if you reduce the unnecessary workload of a group of people by 10%, you will need fewer of them to begin with. No robots, but fewer product marketing managers.

Today, all the talk I hear in HR about dealing with the crunch ahead is focused on the "supply side:" more advertising, more recruiting, higher salaries, turnover reduction, etc. Once again, fine so far as it goes. But these are tactical responses. The strategic response to the talent war is to reduce your company's need for talent in the first place.

Want to know more? Once again, Jeff Hunter hits the nail on the head.

The Coming Google Wars- in PageRank We Trust?

Posted by Colin Kingsbury

Feb 10, 2006 3:02:00 PM

With the bloom coming off the rose, this season's favorite water-cooler game is predicting when and how Google will fall. The big story this past week was the banning and subsequent reinstatement of BMW.de from the Index Almighty for excessively aggressive search optimization techniques.

What appears as a victory for Google up close in fact presages what I believe to be one of their greatest long-term liabilities: the battle for placement. The value of getting your site in the top ten results for relevant keywords is large, and the top one or five, potentially enormous. And yet Google's herd of Ph.D.s goes on its merry way, bouncing sites up and down as they tweak. Companies as large as BMW play it philosophically, accepting PageRank as an impartial judge.

But for how long?

Google creates value by making value statements, by deciding that website A is more valuable than website B. A Google search on "Chevy Malibu," for instance, gives a link to consumer complaints about the car as the 8th result. Read those and tell me if you'd ever think about buying that car. Now tell me that GM will forever treat this as an immutable fact like the weather.

Does Google know that those postings are true? Does it present any context, to indicate whether those 25 complaints represent the average Chevrolet? Of course not, and to the average Internet technologist, the questions themselves probably sound insulting, like a television executive in 1980 asking Steve Jobs why people would spend $3000 on a typewriter hooked up to a black-and-white monitor that doesn't even show reruns of I Love Lucy. But if you're Chevrolet, the economic question is very real, and infinite variations of this issue are played out daily as the GooglePlex spits out results.

That the question hasn't stuck yet is a testament to the goodwill Google enjoys from the public at large, and the ignorance of the true value of placement among interested parties like General Motors. We, including the board of directors of BMW, trust that Google's results are truly the workings of a bunch of utterly disinterested mathematical formulae. But if you look atGoogle News, you'll find plenty of malcontents, including right-wing sites that think Google News favors extreme-left sources because Google employees donated lots of money to Democrats, and academic papers saying Google's algorithms unintentionally favor the right. This is just a foretaste of what's to come.

Simply put, you can't simultaneously be in the business of making value judgments, and at the same time escape the consequences of those judgments.

The Internet has evolved to its present state in a capitalistic Eden largely devoid of regulation and rent-seeking. But all such eras have come to an end one way or another. There is presently a strong move afoot by the cable and telephone companies to create a "tiered" Internet that discriminates between different types of content. Verizon is beginning to realize that people are using their $40 DSL lines to make free voice-over-IP calls to their friends in Europe, and Comcast is starting to notice that people like me are downloading our TV shows from iTunes and not subscribing to Cable TV. And needless to say, they don't like it. It's notable that Google is way out in front opposing this, and I'm glad they are. The question is whether Internet Exceptionalism has enough momentum to convert the rest of the public before the counter-reaction. If not, Google has more to lose than anyone.

When Office Humor Attacks

Posted by Colin Kingsbury

Feb 8, 2006 4:32:00 AM

Recruiting.com links to some funny videos at Despair.com, the same guys who brought you spoofs on office motivational posters with sayings like:

Apathy: If we don't take care of the customer, maybe they'll stop bugging us.

I'll confess that I'm a longtime Dilbert fan, and I consider Office Space to be the one of the five best comedy flicks of all time.

But there's a bitter edge to this. In my own life, I found that my enthusiasm for corporate cynical comedy waxes and wanes in direct proportion to how happy I am about what I'm doing at the office. As a result, I've always suspected that a company could probably chart the number of daily visits to sites like these and correlate it with employee morale on both a corporate and individual level.

Of course, even the best company will generate occasions for Bill Lumbergh references (NB- a little blue language) on a regular basis, and humor is one of humanity's most powerful coping mechanisms. The fact that Jane Doe forwards a website with some funny posters to her cube neighbors doesn't on its own indicate anything.

But when it starts becoming pervasive, something is going on. These gags are squarely in the tradition of the Theater of the Absurd. While Absurdism could be found everywhere, it flourished especially behind the Iron Curtain in the hands of playwrights like Vaclav Havel. The central point of Absurdism could be summed up as "No matter what you do, you're screwed." This resonated with people who lived in countries where the government said the economy doubled in the last year, while meat deliveries got cut in half. If your workforce is passing these jokes around constantly, they're telling you that working at your company is a pointless exercise whose only hope lies in escape.

Does this mean companies should ban dilbert.com and discipline anyone who makes a crack about "Hawaiian Shirt Fridays?" No, entirely the opposite, in my opinion. I think smart companies will use information like this to understand what's going on in the trenches.

Judging real morale is tough, and the larger a company gets the more opaque the situation becomes. Nobody likes a complainer, least of all when he's telling the truth, so the good people whose morale you really care about will in many cases smile and lie to your face about how they feel right up until the morning they hand over a resignation letter.

Worse Than a Wacky Email Address

Posted by Colin Kingsbury

Feb 1, 2006 5:10:00 AM

Everybody (almost) realizes that having an email address like "SpringBreak2005@hotmail.com" or "john.smith@beer.com" on your resume isn't the smartest idea.

Well, here's an even dumber one: an address that doesn't work.

Sound crazy? We were doing some data mining the other day and found that a surprisingly large percentage of applicants that come in through our clients' systems have an email address that bounces. Hopefully they managed to put down a working phone number at least.

Referral Programs in the Compliance Era

Posted by Colin Kingsbury

Jan 26, 2006 3:10:00 PM

Employee referral programs (and products to drive them) continue to have no end of ink spilled on them as we open 2006. Which is why I really enjoyed Anthony Meaney's contrarian take over at recruiting.com:

Why are referrals touted so highly? Are they really that effective? No they just make our lives easier. Look if I have a choice between hiring someone that is recommended by an employee or going through the whole rigamarole of advertising, reading tons or resumes, spending money on recruiters etc., of course I am going to choose the referral. It is a lot less work.

But is it more effective? Doubtful.

Read the whole thing.

If Anthony is right, the implications of this are significant for companies covered by the OFCCP's recently-adopted rule on handling of "Internet Applicants," which to judge by some commentary, threatens to be the Sarbanes-Oxley of the recruiting world.

Like the best-selling book Freakonomics, Anthony is flipping a rock over and asking us if things are as they seem. My belief is that referrals suffer from decreasing returns to scale, as employees move from referring the one or two truly awesome people they know, then to their cousin Jim who they see every year at Thanksgiving and Christmas, and finally to some guy they met in the bar after golf last weekend.

The new OFCCP rule complicates this by essentially requiring companies to start the process by giving everyone who sends you a resume fair consideration. At the very least you'll need to entertain those other applicants before hiring cousin Jim, and if Anthony's right, that might eliminate much of the benefit of the referral in the first place.

Colin Kingsbury

Recent Posts

Sense and Sensibility

How does your candidate service stack up?

ATS vs. CRM Part Two: Where CRM Will Fail

ATS vs. CRM: Where the ATS Went Wrong

But I hear their retirement plan stinks...

The Talent War That Wasn't?

The Coming Google Wars- in PageRank We Trust?

When Office Humor Attacks

Worse Than a Wacky Email Address

Referral Programs in the Compliance Era

Subscribe to Email Updates

Recent Posts

Posts by Topic