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
