HRM Direct Talent Management Blog (4)

Save a Tree, Buy an ATS

Nov 19, 2007 1:11:00 PM

I had a doctor's appointment this morning and when I went in, his desk was covered in stacks of manila folders. "I see you use the same organizational system I do," I said. As it turned out, a few months ago they decided to convert to all-electronic records, and because they elected to do the data entry themselves, it was taking a lot longer and costing a lot more than they initially expected. The other problem was that since it was a home-grown system built by the hospital's IT department, "everything needs to be done @#$-backwards," as my doctor put it.

This reminded me of how much paper is still involved in the recruiting process for many companies. Next to finance, HR is probably the leading killer of trees in an organization, from application forms, to background checks, and new hire paperwork. While converting to an electronic process can hurt a little at the start, the payoff isn't just greener for the environment, it also leads to easily-quantified cost reductions and efficiency gains.

Online application forms: HRM can turn your paper form into an electronic one, and you'll be able to collect applications online and access all of your candidate records from any PC with a web browser.
Pre-employment screening: Applicants can complete online skill and behavioral tests as they apply, helping you to improve performance and reduce turnover by up to 20% annually.
Compliance: Automatically survey and track a full suite of EEO and OFCCP compliance statistics, and generate reports with a single click.
Permanent candidate database: Next time you hire, start with your own database that costs nothing to search.

These are just a few of the ways that online recruiting can improve your bottom line, and clear off the top of your desk. But the most important feature that we offer is knowledgeable service, which is included in all subscriptions at no additional cost.

In contrast to older ATS vendors accustomed to working with large clients, HRMDirect's account managers spend most of their time with organizations with anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand employees, and are used to the unique challenges companies of this size face in transitioning to a paperless process. To find out more, check our online price sheet or click to talk to our sales team

Let the Good Times Roll

Posted by Colin Kingsbury

Nov 7, 2007 4:52:00 AM

A friend asked the other day why I haven't been blogging much and the simple answer is that we've just been too busy growing here. Last week we signed our 104th client, Quality Bicycle Products in Minneapolis, and we've been busy as all get-up with implementations from a scorching Q3, including a number of clients switching to us from name-brand competitors. Rapid growth can be painful at the best of times, but it's the kind of pain that makes you stronger.

We Hired!
Last week we added another member to the Client Service team here. Stephen Bass, a 2004 BU graduate with a CS degree and a solid support background, applied to a job we had posted on Craigslist, and within 5 days he was hired. Stephen impressed us as someone who could grow with the business and we're very happy to have him. It's a great market but Stephen quickly realized that the opportunity to be part of an organization like ours was special, and we salute his good judgment!

As the hiring manager and recruiter for the position, I have to say that I have no idea how people fill positions without an ATS. Well, I do have an idea, but it's got to be incredibly annoying to have to sit there and manually sort candidates into piles, send individual emails to everybody, and go digging through Outlook or a spreadsheet to look up a phone number. There's a saying that you should eat your own dogfood, and I though it tasted like filet mignon.

This was the second position we filled through Craigslist, and once again the results were great. I've defended Monster against charges of irrelevance more than once (I can see how many jobs our clients fill through them) but in this case I don't know what the extra $400 would have gotten us.

That was fun, let's do it again!
Now we're hiring for a Web Application Architect, and we're really looking for someone who is super-jazzed about the idea of joining a small and very dynamic company like HRMDirect. This is another great opportunity which has every potential to scale with the business.

As an experiment, I decided to post this position on TechCrunch's CrunchBoard. TechCrunch is probably one of the best sites for keeping up on the latest hot and wild startups, and attracts an audience of enthusiastic nerds with a business orientation. I've always been impressed by the level of intelligence in the comments on posts. At $200 it's not cheap, but TC has a very specific audience, and I'm interested to see if it delivers.

With close to three years and over a hundred clients under our belt, we're a long way from the stab-in-the-dark nature of many of the startups featured on TechCrunch, but we're still young, vibrant, and full of spots on the org chart marked TBD. At some point, even working in a sexy consumer-facing company is going to involve its share of ditch-digging, and the more heavily-funded a startup is, the more likely that working there is going to be just like working at a large established company, minus the job security. For a great egghead with entrepreneurial aspirations, this place is like an MBA in Real World Business, with a full-ride scholarship and a great stipend.

Classifieds: Not Free, but Cheap

Posted by Colin Kingsbury

Oct 10, 2007 12:32:00 PM

Dave Manaster at ERE blogged yesterday that the tide seems to be turning back from free to paid classifieds:

TheLadders.com is moving from free job postings to subscription fees. HotOrNot just reversed a highly public experiment in which they switched from paid personals to free. Even hippy-dippy Craig's List is steadily abandoning free classifieds in their largest markets, and recently started charging a modest fee in even more cities.

While Dave's examples are interesting, I'm unconvinced that they have any bearing on the larger situation. Even if we do see a large-scale return to a paid model, a situation where "modest fees are a form of quality control" as Dave puts it is very different from one in which high prices (relative to cost) were a primary source of margin for otherwise sketchy businesses.

Publishing classifieds in newspapers never cost much money, but given their relative monopoly position, they were able to get away with charging premium prices. Today, the cost of publishing is close to zero, and getting easier every day, ensuring that competition from free providers will be a permanent feature.

As to quality control, all of the larger job boards have long gotten away with charging newspaper-sized prices while delivering content to users that is only slightly less relevant than an Oscar Mayer bacon billboard next to an orthodox synagogue. Bob Wilson continues to document this failure with mind-numbing consistency. Preventing blatant spam and scams is well and good, but it's hardly a major achievement in terms of the user experience, and price is simply the easiest way to do this.

But price is also an obstacle to adoption, one TheLadders used very effectively to build the very brand and audience that allows them to start charging meaningful prices. Prices are sort of like taxes--they always go up, while the value you get out of them seems to go down. Once you get used to charging $25, it's very easy to get used to charging $50, and before you know it, your customers have a good reason to spend the time looking at free solutions again.

Must Be a Loner

Posted by Colin Kingsbury

Sep 19, 2007 12:29:00 PM

Job descriptions have come in for a lot more criticism lately, and deservedly so. While I'm sympathetic about the legal gobbledygook they contain, what I find amusing are the meaningless ritual incantations that frequently clog up descriptions that are otherwise well-written.

Job descriptions posted externally should exist to serve two functions: to arouse excitement among appropriate candidates, and to strike fear and doubt into the hearts of the unqualified. The ratio between the two should be about 90-10, with the essential function of the latter being to establish a few reasonable criteria of eligibility for compliance purposes.

Here are a few of my favorites that serve neither purpose:

Great communication skills required: If you know of any companies looking for someone who prefers grunting unintelligibly and scowling when asked a question, I know of several excellent candidates who can be had for a great price.

Good multi-tasking ability is essential: Because there are so many jobs out there (outside of an assembly line) that don't require the ability to balance priorities.

Must be a team player: Wait- let me get this straight: all I need to do is put these five words in my job description, and all those whiny, childish, responsibility-evading people will stop applying? Now you tell me!

What I've learned through hiring in a number of different environments is that defensive job descriptions do little to discourage the hopeless. The number one problem that afflicts these applicants is a lack of self-awareness, so nothing you say is likely to discourage them. Defensive job descriptions do, however, serve as excellent sales preventers with exceptional candidates, who can scent mediocrity from a mile away.

How Social Networking Will End

Posted by Colin Kingsbury

Aug 3, 2007 1:27:00 PM

Facebook's decision to ban Harry the Marketing Headhunter Joiner will not, in and of itself, have any noticeable effect on the social media darling's continued rise. It does, however, go a long way to explaining why social networking will--and must--cease to be owned by anyone other than the people who make up the network.

Just to recap, Harry joined Facebook, and attempted to invite his entire list of contacts (all 4600 of them) to join him there. You'd think Facebook would appreciate Harry's enthusiasm for promoting Facebook, but their response was to disable and ban his account for violating ambiguous terms of service related to alleged spamming and use of his account for "advertising purposes."

While many of Facebook's members will applaud the decision to chase this particular money-changer out of the temple (there being no shortage of nuisance recruiters whose spamming is of the egregious kind), it highlights the fact that Facebook can and will ban anyone it chooses for any reason that suits its purposes, and without any practical recourse for the convict.

By contrast, no one can be banned from the web, or email*. If Hotmail doesn't like you they can ban you, but you can just scoot over to Yahoo and resume emailing people. There's a little overhead to moving address books around, but otherwise it's not something you really need to worry about unless you're selling c1allis or the daughter of a deposed Nigerian general.

The reason you can't be banned from email the way you can be banned from Facebook or MySpace is that email is a protocol, not a product. No one "owns email" the way Mark Zuckerburg & co. own Facebook. A published, standardized protocol means anyone can operate an email system that can inter-operate with any other email system.

A social networking system is very different from something like, say, an applicant tracking system , because it has no value on its own. If yours were the only company in the world to have an ATS, it would be just as valuable to you (and perhaps even more so) than if every company in the world had one. Social networking and email, however, are utterly pointless if you're the only one to have an email address or Facebook account. The point is not the product, but the people it facilitates interaction with. Most social networking products are worth nothing despite having a product similar or functionally superior to Facebook's because they have an insufficient number of members.

My fundamental belief is that the features you see in virtually every social networking product constitute a set of fundamental protocols. Friending someone, for instance, is really just like hyperlinking across sites, except that both ends of the "link" agree to it. There is really no grand engineering challenge here. At most, Facebook in the past provided some value by regulating membership, but with them opening the doors to the general public last year, even that part is in fast decline, and as Harry's case shows, may be on its way to becoming anti-value.

The ultimate precedent for this vision is the Internet itself, which despite being referred to and understood as a single entity by laypeople, is in fact just a giant hodgepodge of individual networks which have agreed to carry each others' data through a vast series of peering agreements . As a result, the Internet has given us countless new and novel tools, while the phone system has given us the fax, early versions of which predate the voice telephone itself. Social networking is not a product, it's a protocol, and I fully expect the market ten years from now to be vastly more fragmented than it is today.

* Obviously this excludes state censorship a la China or Iran, which is a whole 'nother category.

The Capriciousness of Crowds

Posted by Colin Kingsbury

Jul 20, 2007 2:24:00 AM

Every so often I hear a song on the radio that catches my ear and off I go to iTunes to look it up. This is dangerous because once there, odds are good I'll spend the next hour clicking related links until I find myself staring with glazed eyes at God only knows what twenty times removed from where I started. What Paulina Rubio has to do with delta blues I'm not quite sure, but that's how it goes.

There's a lot of ongoing talk about the power of social media, but in the case of iTunes, it also reveals some interesting limitations. While Amazon's book and product reviews have generally struck me as very well balanced, even when the subject is controversial, reviews of music on iTunes suffer from more grade inflation than a college quarterback majoring in Phys Ed.

To be fair, it's not exclusive to iTunes--CD reviews on Amazon seem to give the same scores as the albums get on iTunes. Compared to a DVD, hardcover book, or most consumer products sold on Amazon, a CD is less expensive, and books would seem to have many of the same creative and emotional attachment qualities as an album. Maybe I'm the guy in the asylum who just knows he's the only sane one, but the only thing I've found true about iTunes' ratings is that 4/5 stars *might* indicate the album is average. Or it might indicate that the group has a large base of fans who wished they turned out a 4-star effort.

All of this raises interesting questions for those who think social media will somehow improve the job-hunting/recruiting process. Are current employees of a comapny going to give jobseekers objective opinions about what working there is like, or are they going to overlook facts to present views which reinforce their own (positive or negative) biases? Some years ago, I asked my then-boss who we could use for a reference for a particular specialized prospect, and he suggested a client who was on the verge of firing the company. I asked him what he was smoking to make such a suggestion, and he chuckled and said, "never underestimate the unwillingness of a person to admit they made the wrong decision."

Needless to say, it is not clear to me that social media must do anything except amplify the volume of whatever process it is injected into. At the end, the process is still driven by people, and we haven't changed much.

Entrepreneurial vs. Creative

Posted by Colin Kingsbury

Jul 3, 2007 12:26:00 PM

Often I hear recruiters and managers talk about wanting to hire more "entrepreneurial and creative talent," or perhaps how to attract more "creative and entrepreneurial" people. These terms are used together so frequently that they've become somewhat synonymous, but the qualities, and the people that embody them, can actually be quite different.

I was thinking about this while reading Jason Corsello's recent post on the new challenges Google is facing in attracting and retaining top talent. Jason ends his post saying, "Every company these days seems to want to be like Google. They can start by acting like them..." For many people, "acting like Google" means providing benefits like free meals and laundry service.

While creative people might take a passing interest in a variety of things, my experience is that what they want more than anything is to be left alone to create. While they have the same human appreciation for praise and seeing their work used to successful ends, simply being able to do what they love is enough for them to keep going. While better health insurance might mean something to one creative person, a free onsite laundry service could mean a lot more because it eliminates a constant distraction.

Give the artist a stack of forms to fill out and he might gripe about how these take time away from painting, but so long as the budget requests get approved eventually, it probably won't be a major problem. But give an entrepreneur the same stack of forms, and she'll just as likely carry them to the CEO's office and raise a ruckus about the process itself. The artist is content in his studio, while the entrepreneur sees the whole company as her oyster. Entrepreneurial people often end up working for themselves because they simply can't tolerate the blinding and obstinate stupidity that every established business seems to accumulate.

Do entrepreneurs care about fringe benefits? Yes and no. Given equal opportunities they will have an effect, but the more entrepreneurial a person is, the more focused they will be on the core opportunity. At the margin, people who join very early-stage startups often do so for nothing but equity, and founders will often sink money in for years before seeing a penny, and some lose their shirts in the process.

One of the more interesting examples of the differences between these two types is something I see whenever I talk to old friends from my brief stint as a newspaper reporter. The business is dying and they know it, but at the same time they talk about it as though it were happening to someone else. Their job, as they see it, is to write good news stories, and "the business side of news" is something they see as someone else's problem.

Ultimately I think large companies can process creative employees somewhat more effectively if only because they can be more easily tagged and shelved. The challenge is keeping them fed a steady diet of the work they like. Entrepreneurial employees, on the other hand, are more inclined to challenge things outside their portfolio, and become unhappy when forced to work around what they see as self-inflicted failures.

Branding As We Knew It

Posted by Colin Kingsbury

Jun 15, 2007 2:24:00 AM

John Sumser's post on branding today makes a great point:

What makes Company X the employer of choice for Unix professionals is unlikely to be the dynamic that attracts candidates in accounting. A brand, as it is commonly understood is a good place to start. But, the focus on being a generic "employer of choice" is an inadequate vision for effective long term labor supply management.

A few days ago I came across the Microsoft video below (HT: Tales from the Digital Divide) which reminded me of why the term "branding" makes me feel like a steer about to be nailed with a red-hot iron.

Perfume and Diesel Fuel
To understand what's wrong with the conventional approach to branding, it's fun to look at old advertising posters and see what has and hasn't changed. A 30s cosmetic ad literally asks, "Who wants to look YOUNG?" Yesterday in the paper I saw an ad for something that I think was a skincare product, though it looked more like an industrial abrasive. Next to the jar was a grinning, Santa Claus-like face of Doctor Andrew Weil, saying, "When Matcha tea is prepared mindfully, it promotes an extraordinary sense of balance and well-being." I remembered it because the phrasing and presentation were so strikingly calculated to evoke a certain tone and sensitivity--think of how different it feels if you replace "mindfully" with "carefully" or "properly." This is about emotional manipulation, plain and simple.

The question branding today needs to face up to is whether it's selling a product or an idea of a product. As I mentioned in a previous post, my father worked in the fragrance industry, so I've been an observer of these things for a long time. When I was a kid, I remember my father being thoroughly amused when one of his fishing buddies asked him for some samples of a new men's cologne his company had just launched calledStetson Preferred Stock. This was the late 80s or so, and the venerable Stetson brand had become a little too red-state, so they came up with something a bit more urban in its sensitivity. The fishing buddy asking for the cologne, however, was a cowboy boot-wearing bulldozer operator, so my dad had to ask why he wanted that particular fragrance.

"Because something about it really covers the smell of diesel oil," he said matter-of-factly. Imagine that: perfume that makes you smell good.

The irony of course is that Microsoft, for its part, has some of the consistently worst branding out there. Seven years and a billion-ish dollars went into Windows Vista, and the slogan they come up with is "The Wow Starts Now?" I'd love to have seen the ideas they rejected. Then there's this. Of course, companies usually look like their leaders. In fact, Apple's branding has beaten Microsoft's silly for as long as anyone can remember, which happens to be the history of both companies.

And yet, what did it get them? A great brand does not equal a great strategy.

The Beatings Will Continue Until Morale Improves

Posted by Colin Kingsbury

May 30, 2007 3:57:00 AM

Just when you thought recruiting was safe again, along comes a new (potential) compliance mandate that promises to make the OFCCP rules look like child's play. Whatever your feelings on the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act now working its way through the wheels of Congress, the impact on employers could be dramatic.

I started paying close attention to the debate from the sidelines when the issue of increased standards for employer verification of new hires first entered the picture over a year ago. While it's too soon to know the precise shape the final law might take, Elaine Rigoli's ERE article makes the stakes clear:

The pending immigration legislation would do many things, including the hiring of thousands of additional border patrol agents; instituting the new "Z" worker visa; and adopting new deportation provisions.

Perhaps the most interesting element for the staffing world is Title III, which would create a mandatory employment eligibility verification system to electronically verify the eligibility of every worker in the country.

Title III touches on document verification requirements; records that must be kept by employers; protections against discrimination; ID theft prevention and privacy protections; information sharing; and other miscellaneous policies.

So, in other words, you'll need to keep complete records, but not too detailed, for long enough, but not too long, and you can't share them with anyone except the people who need them, etc. There, is everybody clear now?

Unlike the OFCCP, this law would cover all employers regardless of size, and if you've ever had a new hire walk away because your background check turned up a "red flag" due to a false match on a name or address, you know how any type of verification process can turn into a Kafkaesque nightmare. On the bright side, at least every employer will be in the same boat!

On Helicopter Parents

Posted by Colin Kingsbury

May 9, 2007 11:53:00 AM

In a post today on RecruitingBloggers.com , the Recruiting Animal quotes the Brazen Careerist on the notion that "helicopter parents" are just doing what rich folk have always done to boost their kids' careers. Ryan Healy suggested that having parents pitch in during compensation negotiations was just like a performer or professional athlete being represented by an agent.

Ryan and Penelope are both full of interesting insights, but in this case I think they've got it wrong on both counts, and the differences illuminate why employers are correct to despise this new phenomenon.

Unlike a helicopter parent, a talent agent is representing not just a single individual, but themselves as owners of a brand and portfolio. Much like a recruiter, an agent has an interest in getting the best deal for his or her talent, but also in striking a fair deal for the employer. Over-inflation of skills and abilities or harsh negotiating tactics will exact a price on the agent's ability to do business with other clients in the future.

Likewise, when a wealthy individual pulls strings to get their kid a job, it's not a one-way transaction benefiting only the kid, but an act that maintains a potentially (or actually) lucrative business and social relationship. The wealthy parent is likely to be a source of capital or business connection at some point in the future, or may have been one in the past. Giving their son or daughter a job is in that sense an option premium or perhaps payment for a similar past favored rendered.

Of course, parents just want the best for their kids, and are likely to believe that they're just trying to get them a fair deal. But parents are hardly known for neutral advocacy, not in public anyway, and there's nothing wrong with that.

And lest it go unsaid, having Daddy get you a job is rarely looked on favorably by superiors, and will often earn the resentment of your peers even if you perform on par with everyone else. It's not for nothing that many self-made millionaires and billionaires have made their kids start out in the mail room and eat at least a little @#$! before inheriting the throne. So while you may be able to spin 'copter moms and dads as "no worse than what's always been done," promoting them as a positive fits the definition of chutzpah as "a kid who kills his parents and then begs the judge for leniency because he's an orphan."

All of this aside, hiring of entry-level employees is a lot more volatile with regards to economic conditions, and I suspect that a lot of the silliness we now see will evaporate like the morning fog with the next downturn in the economic cycle.

Save a Tree, Buy an ATS

Let the Good Times Roll

Classifieds: Not Free, but Cheap

Must Be a Loner

How Social Networking Will End

The Capriciousness of Crowds

Entrepreneurial vs. Creative

Branding As We Knew It

The Beatings Will Continue Until Morale Improves

On Helicopter Parents

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