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.
Great
article at BusinessWeek
on the number one frustration among jobseekers: the "
resume black hole
:"
I thought I had heard it all, until a friend in Silicon Valley wrote me with her story of having made eight -- eight! -- visits to an employer, to interview with people on the management team. After that many interviews, you would expect a phone call if you hadn't gotten the job, wouldn't you? No such luck -- she got no call, no letter, not even a boilerplate e-mail brush-off. No communication whatsoever, after eight visits during which she had made friends with the receptionist and met half the managers. How could a company rationalize that kind of shoddy treatment?
Hat tip: Jason Goldberg
How the "Mushroom Treatment" Costs You Candidates
Nothing will influence candidates' perceptions of your company as trongly as their interactions with it after sending their resume. If you give them the "mushroom treatment" (kept in the dark and fed a lot of ....), they will begin to think this is how they would be treated as an employee.
Recent research shows that changing jobs is driven more by "impulse" than rational calculation. How many times have you lost a good candidate because someone else made an offer to him or her first? And how often do you think you could have offered a better opportunity?
How Open Could You Be?
Instead of hitting you with more slogans on how to reduce time to hire, I want to take an alternate route: be more open with candidates about your process. Tell them where they stand: are they on the "A" list or the "C" list? How long will it take before the next cut occurs?
When you tell people nothing, they assume the worst. They may like the idea of working for you more than the other guy, but when the other guy is getting to them faster, he's going to beat you. But, give those candidates meaningful information like, "You're very strong and we'll decide by the end of the week who we want to interview," and you may just keep them interested enough to tell your competitor they're not quite ready yet. While software like our
applicant tracking system
can certainly make this a lot easier to do on a day-to-day basis, all you really need to get started is a spreadsheet and an email account.
You Get What You Give
About a month ago, we decided to put the
pricing
for our products right up on our website. Most of our competitors do not, and some will not quote a price until they've played 20 Questions with you first.
We decided to put our pricing up in public as a way to foster trust. By putting a piece of such valuable information out in the open, we demonstrate to customers that we have nothing to hide. We had a lot of debates about this internally and it made many people here uncomfortable, and t he feeling is always that you're "giving something for nothing" at first. But as we go out and talk to future clients, many tell us, "we like that you guys don't play games with this stuff" and you realize that there is a payoff.
Prospects
candidates will recognize and respect it when you share valuable information with them. While some of it will work to their advantage (just as we probably could charge some clients more than the list price), in the long run you will come out ahead as you bring more, better people on board AND make their first impression of the company a strongly positive one.
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This is a followup to
Thursday's post
on how screening questions will prevent top candidates from applying. Today I'm going to describe how they can fail even when applicants fill them out.
Transparency
Probably the most common use for screening questions is to filter out applicants who don't meet the minimum requirements for the position they apply for. A typical example is a Programmer-Analyst position that specifies, say, five years experience with Oracle.
If you add a screening question, "How many years of experience do you have using Oracle," you should be able to easily filter out anyone who says "less than 5," right? The problem in this scenario has nothing to do with the technology, which is stupid simple.
The problem is that no one will answer "less than 5" because the screening process is too transparent. Applicants will rationalize reading a newspaper article about Oracle five years ago into the necessary five years of experience. At best you will filter out the people too lazy to read the job description.
The "Fake Good" Problem
But even this comes at a price, and in this case it can be high. The "Fake Good" problem occurs when your process favors resume-padders over applicants who give honest responses. Let's say 25% of the people with at least 5 years of real experience pad that to the "7-10" category. Your ATS will let you sort the applicants based on their responses, and you will proceed to review them from the top down, thus favoring the fabricators over the honest people with the same experience.
As with resume padding
, jobseekers are going to learn about the mechanics of screening questions and treat them similarly. In the end, even many normally honest people will inflate their accomplishments out of concern that "everybody else is doing it." And if your hiring process--which can have enormous life consequences for the people who go through it--is based in large part on such simple questionnaires, can you really blame them?
Part 3: How and When to Use Screening Questions
: Coming soon.
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Read Part 2 on
Screening for Minimums
.
If you ask a vendor how their ATS improves productivity, one of the most popular responses is "screening questions." In my experience, it's also one of the more popular features among recruiters, albeit one that people buy and fail to use to the extent they expected. Today I want to explore the problems with this approach and how it can hurt an employer's recruiting results.
ATS-driven screening questions are typically presented to the applicant when they want to apply for a job on the employer's website. Before the applicant can submit a resume, he or she is required to fill out a webform which contains the questions. Many recruiters I speak to see this process only in a positive light: as a way to weed out all those plumbers who apply for electrician jobs, or kids one year out of college who think they're ready to be the director of marketing.
The Cost of Information
But you can never obtain information without a cost. Online application forms (as opposed to emailing a resume to an address) have a very powerful impact
on the experience of the jobseeker on your website. At worst, the use of such systems will actually
reduce the quality of applicants
because the best people will simply go away.
Think about it: when you go walking through a mall, do stores require you to prove you have sufficient cash or credit to make a purchase before they let you in and take up their precious clerks' time? We may all have stories of scruffy rich uncles who got the cold shoulder at a Mercedes-Benz dealer but the moral of such stories usually turns out to be that the one salesperson who gave the scruffy guy respect got the deal.
The Internet is the world's ultimate shopping mall, and no matter who you are, you're competing with hundreds of other companies for the applicant's attention. You're not just a jewelry store in a mall, you're a jewelry store in a mall with nothing but thousands of jewelry stores.
Customer Service or Customer Deflection?
In many ways, screening questions are like those interactive telephone systems that your credit card company uses to make sure customers never talk to a human. They can get away with systems built for their convenience because you, the customer, have very little choice in the matter. If you could click a few buttons and switch your account to someone who promised a human at the other end of every call, things would be different. And that's just how easy it is for a casual jobseeker to click to another site.
The bottom line is, you can't do customer deflection if your customer has any kind of power. That's why Tiffany's lets hundreds of people in every day who aren't qualified to purchase their products. Implementing a labor-intensive application process will definitely reduce the volume of junk, and recruiters will feel that right away, and perceive it as a success. But what you won't notice, because you never measured it before, is that it will also reduce the number of really awesome applicants who say "@#$! this" and move on.
Read Part 2 on
Screening for Minimums
.
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First off, we're on Joel's side
on this one: pure speculation. But if it did it would be an earthquake, and not just for the job advertising business.
An acquisition is often played up in the press as a "touchdown" for the company doing the buying. The narrative of Smith Widget "gobbling up" Jones Wadget after years of competing is too easy to avoid. And of course that's the story Smith Widget wants to convey: strength, preeminence, market domination.
But it's really a confession. When Oracle bought PeopleSoft and then Siebel it was a confession that they couldn't develop applications on their own. When HP acquired Compaq it was a confession that the PC market was headed downhill. When you can't build products or acquire customers yourself, you buy them. Either way, an acquisition is all too often an admission that you have more money than ideas.
If
Google bought Monster, it would certainly cause some to seriously re-think the "Google world domination" meme that currently underpins their public identity. Their strategy as best as anyone can tell is to penetrate markets from the bottom up via search. This is promising but remains largely unproven. Buying Monster would for many be a very public admission that it won't work where there's a pre-existing market.
It will happen eventually, and the world is moving faster. The Dutch East India Company lasted two centuries.
Ma Bell
made it a little over a century. Microsoft wasn't 25 when Netscape had the Street talking about the end of Bill's Billions. Google turns 8 this year.
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Via the prolific Jobster Blog
comes yet another story on today's talent-shortage-and-this-time-we-mean-it:
check out this quote from randa newsome, head of staffing at defense contractor raytheon, regarding the challenge of finding top talent in today's tightening labor markets: "The biggest human resources, staffing challenge I have ever faced is this one."
Full article here.
Compare and contrast with
this November 16th article
at the
Wall Street Journal
(subscription reqired), titled, "
Behind 'Shortage' of Engineers: Employers Grow More Choosy
":
Consider the case of recruiter Rich Carver. In February, he got a call from the U.S. unit of JSP Corp., a Tokyo plastic-foam maker. The company was looking for an engineer with manufacturing experience to serve as a shift supervisor at its Butler, Pa., plant, which makes automobile-bumper parts.
Within two weeks, Mr. Carver and a colleague at the Hudson Highland Group had collected more than 200 resumes. They immediately eliminated just over 100 people who didn't have the required bachelor of science degree, even though many had the kind of job experience the company wanted. A further 65 or so then fell out of the running. Some were deemed overqualified. Others lacked experience with the proper manufacturing software. JSP brought in a half-dozen candidates for an interview, and by August the company had its woman.
To JSP, taking six months to fill the position confirmed its sense that competition for top engineers is intense. Company officials "struggle to fill" openings, says human-resources manager Vicki Senko.
But for candidates facing 200-to-1 odds of getting the job, the struggle seems all on their side.
"Companies are looking for a five-pound butterfly. Not finding them doesn't mean there's a shortage of butterflies," says Richard Tax, president of the American Engineering Association, which campaigns to prevent losses of engineering jobs.
This made me think of yet another story, this one about how Southwest Airlines has remained profitable because of the
long-term fuel contracts
they signed several years ago.
The better-than-expected profit the Dallas-based carrier reported Thursday morning would have been a loss without the benefit of fuel savings it locked in years ago.
In commodities markets for things like electrical power, there are at least two prices: long-term contract prices, and "spot rates" to buy one unit of whatever, right now.
Companies today, especially in the US, basically buy all of their talent at "spot prices." They'll negotiate multi-year contracts to buy toner and fax paper, but unless they have a C-title, employees are all at-will. When you're looking at positions that are going to be in-demand for years to come does this make a lot of sense?
The bottom line is that this subject is no longer about feel-goodism, social justice, PR value, or anything else "soft and squishy." A company that is able to secure quality talent resources for longer terms at lower costs will deliver superior financial performance to its shareholders.
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Topics:
Recruiting & Hiring
Knowledge Management happens to be one of my extracurricular interests, but, like Artificial Intelligence, it's a field that has over-promised and under-delivered more consistently than the Boston Red Sox, at least prior to 2004. Via Gautam Ghosh's blog comes an interesting post by Tom Davenport on the BabsonKnowledge.org website about knowledge worker productivity, provocatively titled, Was Drucker Wrong?Management theory giant Peter Drucker is widely seen as the father of the concept of "knowledge work" and he said, "making knowledge work productive is the greatest economic challenge of this century." Davenport asks, "If improving knowledge worker productivity is so important, why aren’t more companies doing something about it?" and gives three reasons:
1. It's hard.
2. It takes a fair amount of up-front investment.
3. Knowledge workers, like Greta Garbo, like to be left alone
As a former CTO for a KM vendor I would like to add a fourth reason:
Internal rent-seeking
Rent-seeking is a term economists use to describe the way businesses or individuals seek private advantage through government action. For instance, a real estate developer might campaign to have a parcel of property that is up for sale turned into a park. While parks are nice, this also ensures that the developer's buildings keep their waterfront view and increases the value of his buildings by preventing newer ones from being built in the area.I used to pitch KM to companies with the message that "it will turn workers' private knowledge into a corporate asset," which I think still sums up the value proposition pretty well. It also sums up the key difficulty. It's axiomatic that knowledge is power, and this is certainly true at the corporate level. But it's also true at the individual level. A lot of analysis seems to assume that employees always act in the company's best interests, except when they're being lazy or incompetent. That leaves a lot out.The larger and more complex the organization, the more need there is for good systematic KM practices. The problem is that the larger and more complex the organization, the more room there is for private agendas, cliques, and cabals. Dick doesn't want Jane to know what he knows. It's not because he's too lazy to write it down, it's because his knowledge helps keep Jane from _________ (fill in the blank).I was in a meeting once where an upper-level manager bemoaned the fact that so much company knowledge was tied up in unstructured email messages. They used a centralized email infrastructure, so I suggested it would be pretty easy to run a search engine over the entire email repository and make every message sent or received in the past 2 years searchable, "just like Google."Everybody's eyes lit up for a second as they imagined the possibilities. No more "could you send me that email again" or "I know Rachel solved something like that with her client but I don't know how." Plus, it was stupid-simple and didn't require users to learn a hideously arcane new tool , and would even encompass their old data, again with no "data cleansing" or other costly pre-processing to work.But I think we can all guess how fast that idea was shot down. Such a system would have created total transparency, and a manager threatened with transparency will fight like a cornered mama grizzly protecting her cubs. Knowledge hoarding is a way to maintain power and you will not succeed in getting anyone from the CEO to the janitor to do that without giving each of them something in return, and that's always the fuzzy part.
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Topics:
Employee Engagement
One of my favorite industry bloggers at
Systematic HR
made a comment yesterday that's worth drilling down on. In his
review of a 2006 Tech Outlook piece
in
Benefits and Compensation Solutions
magazine, Dub Dubs writes,
[The author's] observation is right on until you start reading the detail. I'm not sure he knows what web services is. At the very least, it is not dependent on on-demand software.
This is 100% true, but it begs making a larger point about why these things matter to end users.
At their core, both web services and on demand are about shifting power from the aristocrats and clergy (vendors and IT departments) to the people (end users). Jeff Hunter illustrates this in
Web 2.0 to the Rescue
over at his blog
Talentism
:
I can't get a decent XML feed out of our ATS. So I use SimplyHired instead.
Just to recap, Jeff was able to:
1. Set up a new website and content management system (his blog)
2. Create a structured data feed of jobs from EA's website
3. Incorporate a real-time data feed into his website
What is most exciting is that (I'm assuming) Jeff did all this without involving his IT department or playing diplomat between the TypePad and SimplyHired professional services teams. You don't get much more user-driven than that. It's going to take a long time to develop the platforms to accomplish more intricate and valuable tasks (HR-XML
still strikes me as too complicated for instance) and more importantly to educate consumers. But the future clearly belongs to this approach, and On Demand delivery is a critical enabler.
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Topics:
Applicant Tracking System
