Digging Into RecruitingBlogs.com v1.28

(December 05, 2008) How many times can you say “Please keep the job postings on the job board.” Maybe this would be clearer: “When you put your jobs in the blogs or the forums, you make the place less useful to the people who inhabit it”.

I suppose you could say that “posting jobs anywhere but on the job board is rude and inconsiderate”. You might frame it as “Anyone who doesn’t take the time to understand RBC before posting risks looking like the morons who post their jobs in the blogs and forums”.

How about “Not using the job board for your jobs is like not using the toilet to pee.”

One might opine “The fastest way to ruin your credibility on RBC is by posting jobs in the Forum or Blogs’” You could imagine a geek saying, “You can tell the defectives by the way that they post jobs in the blogs and forums”. (Maybe that means we should have a new membership category:Private Defective”.)

Marketing consultants note: “Want to destroy your personal brand? Post your jobs in the blogs and forums on RBC.” Control freaks and parental types would assert, “Don’t post jobs in the forums and blogs of RBC.”

A small sign reading “Post No Jobs” may communicate the notion more clearly. Or, some high minded citizen could take the time to explain this principle in a variety of ways.

It’s really pretty simple. There’s a job board. That’s where you post “jobs and opportunities”.

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There is “catch 50 50″ where you are caught between a “rock and a high place”.

No one wants RBC to become one of those dysfunctional social settings buried in laminated signs that proclaim “Your mommy doesn’t work here’” or repeated enjoinders to “Flush Twice.” Obsessive labeling of cabinets, walls, doors and other surfaces with harsh directives always shows that an organization is in decline. We really don’t need additional rule makers, and hall monitors in our neighborhood.

Anyone who wants the job of manners police is immediately disqualified.

There’s a bigger question, I think: How do we articulate the RBC norms and customs without seeming preachy or unfriendly. Being inclusive is a great idea, how do you do it when you’re irritated by bad behavior? What do you think is the best way to convey the effective use of our community?

The Sourcing Hierarchy: Rational Recruiting Expenditure

As budgets tighten, companies are beginning to wrestle with standard cost-effectiveness questions. Advertising and advertising-like functions are one of the first places that budget shaving takes root. Since much of Recruiting and Talent acquisition uses an advertising business model (upfront expense, limited quantification of returns), the cost cutter’s eyes are inevitably drawn towards expenses in our operations. 

The partial truth is that “I know I waste 50% of my advertising spend. I just don’t know which 50%”.  Sadly, that sort of 20th Century thinking doesn’t fly well in the face of performance monitoring advertising like Google’s Adsense. So, Recruiting leaders are facing and asdking key questions about the value they receive.

There are many ways of finding, attracting and hiring candidates. None of them work perfectly well. All of them are better at some things than others. What works and doesn’t work is industry, region and company specific.

There is almost no company of any significant complexity (say, over 100 people) that can proceduralize a Recruiting approach across all of the positions that have to be filled. You simply can’t find a CFO the way that you find a technical writer. You can’t find Software design Engineers in Cleveland the same way that you do in Silicon Valley or Seattle. You can’t fill auto industry slots in the South the way that you do in Detroit.

There is no one way that is best.

Instead, each job class in each region in each industry has a set of approaches that are optimal today. Not for always. Just for now. Approaches with longer time horizons tend to have better ROIs. That may not matter if the position is time-critical.

Here are the ways that you can find, attract or develop talent pools. They are organized from cheapest and fastest to slowest and most expensive. The first four, Employment Branding, Talent Pool Development, Employment Site and Job Specific Microsite are the cheapest and fastest after the initial investment in time and money are complete. (If you think I missed something or think the order is wrong, please let me know)

• Employment Branding
• Talent Pool Development
• Company Employment Web Site
• Job Specific Microsite
• Internal HR Databases
• ATS Databases
• Referral Programs
• Proactive Internet Sourcing
• Phone Sourcing
• Free Job Boards
• Major Job Boards
• Specialty Job Boards
• Company SEO/SEM
• Job Specific SEO/SEM
• Temporary Help
• Long Term Contract
• Contingency Placement
• Specialty Search Firm
• Boutique Executive Search Firm

The idea of a sourcing hierarchy is simple. For every class of openings ina company, there is an optimal place to start in the hierarchy. For example, you probably won’t find a CEO in using the first seventeen approaches. That measn that when you are filling the C-level slot, you should jump down the hierarchy to Boutique search Firms.

Similarly, great low level professionals are easily identified and processed using tools that are much faster and cheaper than a retained executive search firm.

It’s the sort of common sense that’s hard to see when you are in the middle of a reactive process.

Recruiting Strategy is the essential element in cost control and containment. As long as Recruiting remains a reactive sport, costs will be controlled by circumstances. A well thought out Recruiting Strategy will provide guidance for where to start on the list for each job class that will be filled. A well defined data collection process will help refine the decision with experience.

080926 Great Job Board 3

(Sep 25, 2008) To wrap this up, let’s explore the idea that a great job board is all in the eye of the beholder. If it gives me more value, of a kind that I want, than I invest, it’s a good thing. If it gives me less value than I invest in it, it’s a waste of my time and energy.

The reality is just that simple. While execution can range in complexity, it all boils down to "do I get back more than I give?" for each and every one of the stake holders.

Hmmm, that looks like a nice dead horse. Let’s beat it a bit more.

Free is not enough (on the candidate side). A job board has to return more than I invest in time AND money. Most of the cost of using a job board is not the expense of paying for an ad. The majority of the cost is my time and my
opportunity costs (the value of the other things I could be doing when I waste my time on your free job board).

There is a non-subtle point here:

What you give away for free has to be worth getting. There is not a shortage of free stuff anymore.

So, free requires the construction of real value. It also requires that you figure out how to develop a constant stream of attention. Over and over, time after time, day after day, the creation of attention is a relentless chore in the evolution of any online enterprise.

In a recent article on the attention economy, Kevin Kelly said:

"this tight coupling between attention  and money is dependable, bankable. Google made its billions because in addition to having a service that people wanted (the assumed minimum) it knew that sooner or later (and probably sooner than later) where attention flowed, money would follow. They won constant attention by providing slightly better performance and vastly better design. In the beginning they did not know exactly how the money would flow, only that it would. Facebook, Myspace, Netflix, Amazon, iTunes, and thousands of other startups are working on the same principle. Right now the attention of readers has shifted from newspapers and magazines to blogs. We can say with certainty that money will follow this shift. Fortunes have already begun to flight from print to the screen, and the world of media will continue to tilt towards the flow of attention."
- Kevin Kelly, The Technium

A great job board (or for that matter, a great anything online) involves a balncing act. Attention and value for both sides of the deal are at the heart of the matter.

080924 Great Job Board 2

(Sep 24, 2008) When I talk to my kids about finding a job, I tell them to avoid using job boards. While job boards can be helpful in a job hunt, it’s easy to fall prey to the belief that they are the only thing you need to do. Being busy doesn’t mean that you’re productive. Looking through job listings and sending resumes is not the same as finding a job.

Finding a really good job requires you to know what you want. That means doing some very hard work and self-assessment. Research into the market and research into yourself are the first steps in a really successful career.

Jobs are transitory steps in a larger context.

When the online job board industry was in its formative stages, the newspapers did a lot of studying. One of the interesting discoveries of that early work was that classified ads have different value to different constituents. HR Departments and Recruiters believed that a significant percentage of their jobs were filled from classified ads. Job hunters, on the other hand, had the opposite belief.

Both things are true. Classified ads (job boards) work for Recruiters. They don’t really work very well for job hunters. If they worked for candidates, we’d be buried in testimonials. Can you recall ever seeing a candidate testimonial?

As a result, money pours into the employer side while the candidate side remains weak.

Craigslist is an interesting case. Since Craigslist insists on direct communication (without resorting to a database or a filter) between buyer and seller, candidates do find work. The anecdotal information is that both sides of the transaction find similar value in the simple Craigslist approach.

Candidates are generally better understood as lifetime customers while employers are transactional. For professional niches, this means that more career information is a good thing. Professional associations are uniquely suited to deliver real value to both sides.

In the long haul, job boards are businesses, not philanthropies. There will always be a strong drift towards the cash (employers) even though the inventory (candidates) are the source of any real wealth.

080923 A Great Job Board?

(Sep 23, 2008) Jason Davis started a great conversation over on RecruitingBlogs.com. Take a look at "Building a successful Job Board". Like most discussions that try to generalize about a big idea, you run into trouble quickly on this topic.

Success is one of those ideas that is entirely in the eye of the beholder. Often, my definition of success is your definition of failure. Here are some examples of the question that get closer to the heart of the matter:

• What’s the easiest way to make $100,000/year in the job board business? (a geographic niche)
• What’s involved in building an enduring institution in the job board space (hint: see TaxTalent.com)
• Can I build real wealth in the niche job board business? (hint: see RetirementJobs.com)
• How many viable job boards will there be? (a million? more?)
• What’s the best way to make a small fortune in the job board business? (Start with a large one.)
• Will there always be room for a craigslist in the market? (probably, they’re not really international yet)
• What is the role of technology ion a job board? (Sucking up the entrepreneur’s money)
• Build or Buy? (Buy)
• Won’t assessment change everything and make job boards like eHarmony? (sure. They’ll feature competitive videos of candidates singing "Kumbaya")

There are huge fortunes yet to be made in the job board business. Really.

Expect to see Jobing.com become the role model for the next wave of entrepreneurs. Although their technology is passable, the meaty difference is organizational design and market strategy. With a clear and sustained focus n the local market, Jobing sets a standard for giving both sides of the Recruiting Equation (employers and candidates) more value than they should expect.

With increasing regularity, job boards will be tied to the shared interests and communication styles of specific subsets of the market. Local areas are a smart target, There’s a ton of room for professional job boards in specific regional niches.

It’s somewhat surprising that there aren’t big job boards for Parrot Heads or Dead Heads. The non profit sector is exploding and no entrepreneur has really figured the area out (Jobing does interesting stuff with local non-profits in the cities they serve.)

Expect the job board conundrum to continue. Theorists will argue that the model is broken. Entrepreneurs will then continue to make money in spite of the theory.

080918 Daily Links (Sep 18, 2008)

• Thought For The Day: We are in this position as the result of the unintended consequences of some very good intentions.
• Hcareers Launches Exclusive Partnership With CorVirtus
  Another job board/assessment technology arrangement. Assessment is voodoo and doesn’t really work very well without a deep investigation of the actual culture of the company. The market is grasping at straws as many tiny competitors try to differentiate their services.
• Diverse Careers, Inc. Announces San Diego Career Fair
  The big question is why career fairs are blossoming as the economy stutters. Shouldn’t it work the other way? Or, is it that career fairs sell candidates and there is more inventory in a down cycle?
• Frameboxx Partners CreativeHeads
  CreativeHeads positions itself as "conduit that will facilitate communication and the rapid exchange of information between Employers and Jobseekers." Focused on the creative disciplines (art, animation, graphics, game design and so on), the operation includes a network of 28 job boards! This partnership introduces the service to an Indian educational institution that is training animation workers for slots in Asia.
• RiseSmart CEO Sanjay Sathe Offers Eight Tips to Raise Your $100K+ Job Search from the Dead
  "RiseSmart is a human-powered job-search site that prescreens online search results for time-starved managers and executives seeking $100K+ jobs. The RiseSmart Concierge team matches opportunities with jobseekers based on each member’s unique profile, freeing senior-level professionals to focus on networking or the demands of their current jobs."
• 9 Sites for Successful Job Interviews
   

Networking Works Better, Marty

In this article (Why Networking is Overrated), Marty Nemko advises job hunters to focus on creating a winning “application” rather than networking for a gig.

“If you don’t have a great network and dislike schmoozing, you’ll land a job faster if you devote most of your job search time to writing top-of-the-pile applications for well-suited job openings.” (Kiplinger)

It’s as if he had never heard of Applicant Tracking Systems (which tend to strip out cover letters) or EEO Regulations. Nemko advises the development of a cover letter. The idea is nice but ineffective in today’s market.

Then, he suggests:

“If you make a good first impression and can think on your feet, in addition to answering ads, contact employers who are not advertising a job opening. Make a list of 25 employers you’d like to work for, and phone or send each an email…” (Kiplingers)

Or, what we commonly think of as , um, networking.

Job hunters are routinely fed a constant stream of this sort of contradictory crap. Imagine…an article called “Why Networking Is Overrated” that recommends a half-a$$ed form of networking.

People rarely get jobs from job boards. A job board is a lead generation engine for job hunters, not a magic slot machine. Information submitted to a job board ends up in Resume Databases around the globe. The decision to investigate a resume is made after there are enough responses to ensure apples to apples comparisons.

The best strategy for finding a job is:

1. Figure out what you want to do
2. Figure out where you want to work
3. Find out who works there
4. Figure out how to get to know them
5. Get to know them
6. Understand what will make them successful
7. Propose things to help them be successful

Great Job Posting

In the transition, I’ve gotten all sorts of new accounts. Johnsumser.com is hosted by a company called DreamHosts, these days. I haven’t been a customer long enough to decide whether or not I like them. But, they do know how to write a job ad.

Item #3 in their current newsletter (sent to customers, exclusively) is the following gem:

Have you always dreamed of a career in groveling and prostrating oneself before the almighty customer? Do you love offering your bare soul up to the masses for piercing scrutiny and painful mockery? Are you a natural-  born apologizer like me?

Then a career at DreamHost could be the job for you! We’re now taking applications for our (paid) “Summer” internships, which are actually for whenever and for as long as forever:

   http://blog.dreamhost.com/2008/03/15/friendless-summer/

And, we’re always hiring people for regular jobs too… see:

   http://www.dreamhost.com/jobs.html

If you’ve already got a great job with great people and great apologies, then I hope you’ll accept my sincerest regrets at wasting your time with this section.

It’s funny, specific, targeted gives a flavor of the culture and very, very authentic. By putting it in the newsletter, DreamHost acknowledges what most companies know….great customers make great employees.

Blue Chip

I’ve now received 15 referrals to a “premier talent website” called Blue Chip Expert. The idea is a multi-level-marketing spin on referrals. The operation appears to pander to consultants, Executive search people and hiring managers. Each of the notes I got inferred that I somehow knew the sender.

One of the frustrating things about the latest trends in social networking software tools is that they skirt the edges of good manners. Broad networking with lots of anonymous partners is how epidemics of social diseases get started. The experimentation is worthwhile.

I just hate to be on the receiving end of spam. Particularly spam from operations that serve recruiters.

I’m learning about targeted bulk email. That’s how we reach out to recruiters to fill the Recruiting Roadshow. It’s delicious, value laden content designed to tell potential participants about this wonderful free opportunity.

Of course, my value laden precision targeted bulk email would never be spam, right?

I’ve tried really hard to work up a lather about the somewhat infuriating technique of pretending to be my friend and then sending me spam. I think, though, that we’re all trying to figure out something new. We need to give each other lots of room to make mistakes. We’re just about to learn something.

These days, the best advice seems to be “Steer clear of people with really simple answers.”

John Sumser  ©2008, Two Color Hat, Inc. Santa Rosa, CA

Inflection 8

The Generational Power Shift In The Industry (and In the Workplace)

The day to day leadership of our industry (and most industries for that matter) rests in the hands of people in their forties. The greybeards look, well, a little old. Changes through merger, acquisition, failure and astonishing growth are the way that the new leaders have emerged.

While the industry’s self concept still includes the top 3 job boards (Monster, CareerBuilder and Yahoo HotJobs), the real action is happening in regional competition. The most notable form of the game is being played out in the Jobing – JobDig competition for the heart of the United States.

Each firm has operations in 10 States, Wisconsin is the only place where they have a head to head competition. Jobing appears to use an opportunistic formula for market expansion while JobDig is lacing together contiguous operations. You have probably heard of Jobing; you may not have heard about JobDig just yet.

Both firms are headed by success focused men who don’t care if you have heard of them unless you are in one of their markets.

This is the new school. Markets are multiple and a part of a kaleidoscopic view of the business development plan. Tweaking their models to the specifics of a locale is the heart of the game. It is very difficult to play if you were raised on only three channels (the “one America view”). It’s easier when you’ve been raised on cable and the internet.

Aaron Matos and Toby Dayton are strong examples of the new leadership in the industry. They customize their models to suit locales rrather than forcing a template the way their predecessors did. It’s the difference between hierarchical management and horizontal management.

There are many other obvious examples.

Similar dynamics are unfolding in the workplace, just out of the sight of the baby-boomers who believe they are still in charge.