Retention Doesn’t Work

Why do we have layoffs? One counter-intuitive answer is “because retention programs work.” Layoffs happen because the efforts to keep the workforce trimmed didn’t work. Attrition wasn’t high enough. The right people did not leave of their own accord.

Hiring and Keeping the Best People is a standard goal in most organizations. Identifying key talent and promoting them is such a core part of conventional wisdom that we take it for granted. Most leaders aspire to be surrounded by trusted colleagues who are well seasoned and deeply experienced.

When this idea spreads through an organization, it is called “Retention”. In a harsher light, it is the essence of cronyism and featherbedding.

Is it really a sound business practice?

Good, strategic workforce planning is virtually nonexistent. Instead of accurately knowing and describing the specifics of our workforces, we rely on tired generalizations. We want to manage attrition down and become the “employer of choice”. In other words, our HR Departments lead us down the primrose path and make our organizations home to people who retire in place.

It should be no surprise that we have downturns. Preparing for them, hiring wisely and continually pruning the organization is the right way to approach the problem. Too few hands always leads to greater productivity.

Time and again, our organizations act surprised when the downturn comes. RIFs mean that we “hired too many people”. Said another way, “We didn’t let enough people go when times were good.” Retention and retention programs, therefore, are the primary cause of RIFs.

“Why do we have layoffs?” Because the retention programs work too well. The idea that great people should be retained in their jobs for a long time is the exact opposite of growth and innovation. Retention breeds seniority and bureaucracy. Innovation requires youth and inexperience.

Digging Into RecruitingBlogs.com v2.16 Tweeting Off

Tweeting Off

So, I was at this party a couple of weeks ago. All sorts of twitterati were there. There was even a small shrine for our forbears, Paul DeBettignies and Jim Durbin. The place was throbbing and crowded . If you yelled loud enough, you could hear yourself over the music. Lots of people lined up to yell at each other while pretending to listen.

You know the scene.

Anyhow, I walked over to the bar to get a drink. Along the way, I struck up a conversation with a couple of guys standing at the bar.

Are you here for the ‘tweetup?” I hollered.

“The what?” He replied blankly.

“This is a tweetup,” I said, “You tweet, don’t you?”

He started to edge away from me. “Don’t go. I haven’t asked about your strategy to build followers. How many tweets does it take to get a new friend? What’s your opinion on building a large group of followers indiscriminately?”

He was no longer just edging away. You could see real terror beginning to show in his eyes. He was picking up speed.

The other night night, I did a tweetchat on #talentnet. It was much like the bar scene. Lots of yelling, lots of chaos, not so much beer, no live music (Jerry Albright was working hard to fix the music problem). The tweets flowed like a river of coat hangers. It was as easy to strike up a conversation in the jangle of crossed wires as it was in the bar.

This time, it was everyone else who was leaving. From what I could tell, no one knew that I was talking. But, the one liners flew like knives from the circus knife thrower. It was dazzling and overwhelming.

It also served to underline my emerging view about twitter. While it is a great way to learn things and stay in touch, it’s not a very good way to have a conversation.

Digging Into RecruitingBlogs.com V 2.14 5 Recent Things

Digging Into RecruitingBlogs.com V 2.14 5 Recent Things

I have fun at my job. Recently, I’ve been writing about some things that I think are particularly interesting. The sustained downturn is causing innovation in recruiting to explode. I’ve been looking closely at trends and examples.

I have a weird perspective on the ‘future’. I think it’s already here and we are in the process of trying to uncover it. The best descriptions of what’s actually going on sound like science fiction. Our biggest challenge is always trying to see what is right in front of us.

So, my work involves trying to understand the things we are experiencing in a larger context. Some times I get it really right, sometimes I get it wrong. I get it right more often.

Overall, the idea is to deliver these views to readers who want to have their beliefs challenged. It’s boring stuff for someone who wants a pure tactical input. You’ll hardly ever see me write a piece called “How to…” You can get that other places.

* The Twitter Revolution I, II and III
Twitter isn’t what you think it is. The service lays the groundwork for a semantic search engine. The more stuff that gets input, the greater the demand for intelligent search. The Twitter folks have proven an interesting point: collaboration is best facilitated by less functionality rather than more.
* Just Work
A job is the only asset that doesn’t devalue. There’s an emerging movement that takes a different view of work. Instead of the 00s emphasis on position and title, this view is more 19th century. A good job is worth having, engagement passion or not.
* Job Boards Revisited I, II and III
Rumors of the impending death of the job boards are highly exaggerated. With a small bit of adaptation (see Jobvite), they have 30 or 40 years of good life left in them. In the downturn, the number of job boards continues to grow.
* Consolidate and Fragment
Over the coming months and years, we’re going to see a lot of creative destruction. Tons of social networks will get formed and abandoned. Ning resemble a huge shanty-town from some perspectives. Lots of starts rotting on the vines. The early web was just like this
* Novotus 1 and Novotus 2
Mike Mayeux is doing something different. It’s a little unfair to call his project an RPO but that’s the current nomenclature. The enterprise wraps basic recruiting services into functional modules and then sells with a guarantee. It’s revolutionary like one of those jets that works best at speed.

Digging Into RBC v 2.07

Digging Into RBC v 2.07

(Feb 20, 2009) Last night, I got into a long conversation about the meaning of “media”, how it has evolved and what it means for the HR/HCM/Recruiting Industry. It all spiraled out of a round of appreciation for Rayanne Thorn’s new vehicle, “Bonus Track”. The idea behind “Bonus Track” (graciously sponsored by MaxHire.net) is to provide deeper insight into the business aspects of recruiting from philosophy to time management.

The model is a conversation starter, that might include an interview, coupled with a ripping good discussion on the merits of the topic. This is a form of training that was not possible before the web. This new media, “interactive conversation as courseware” is shifting the power base all over our industry. Recent debates about the value of motivational speakers with no immediate feedback loop are part of the evolution.

It’s worth looking over our shoulders for a moment.

The idea of a “medium” comes from painting. The “medium” is the liquid in which pigment is mixed by a painter.” The medium carries the pigments. Pigments supply the color, the medium supplies properties of adherence and spreadability.

Every definition of medium is a metaphor based on the physical medium used in painting. Media is simply the plural of medium ie, one medium, two media.

Radio is a medium, Radio waves carry sound. Record albums are a medium. Vinyl carries sound. Television is a medium. Radio waves carry video. Cable is a medium. Paper is a very important medium. Cassettes, eight track tapes, posters, PA systems, ink, and CDs are all forms of media. Each form of media has its own characteristics.

They are so unique that Marshall McLuhan is known for saying that “the medium is the message” (Actually, he said “massage”) He meant that the way that information is transmitted profoundly influences its meaning. Take tattoos on your bottom, for example. That’s the evolution of today’s usage of the words media and medium.

A process through which information is transmitted.

Things really changed when media became digital. Up until then, it took a great deal of capital to create content and distribute it. The media was so expensive that only the wealthiest could broadcast, publish, record, write, distribute or recycle. The ownership of media was concentrated in a few hands. In general, they were the very spoiled great grandchildren of really interesting 19th century entrepreneurs.

The personal computer changed all of that in under a generation. What was once the province of the wealthy became everyman’s playground. It’s easy to do things today, like publishing a blog or posting your status on twitter, that were not even possible to imagine 20 years ago. The focus on the technology, however, keeps us from seeing the real revolution. Education, news distribution, creativity, experimentation have all become personal. We each are able to do what could only be done by corporate giants 15 years ago.

It’s easy, fun and profoundly better.

So when Rayanne adds another Bonus Track, she is exercising a pioneering process. She’s homesteading, as we all are, in a great new world. Our forty acres and a mule are blogging tools, netbooks and wireless connections. The amount of opportunity that has been thrust upon us is staggering.

That’s why it galls me to see Recruiters acting like old fashioned media owners, lazy, spoiled and stupid. The new media fosters such quick intimacy; so, sending out mass quantities of bulk email is embarrassing for our profession. Spamming (sending many copies of the same email to a large group) is an ineffective use of the new toolset. It’s a way of repeating the errors that were allowed when media ownership was concentrated.

We could be setting powerful examples of how to make social media really work, we seem to prefer the thoughtless imposition of our sloth on already overburdened potential customers. It’s sad.

The good news is that folks like Rayanne are setting a more positive example.

Digging Into RecruitingBlogs.com v2.05

Unsung Hero Sings

(Jan.30, 2009) Amitai Givertz, Mr. Recruitomatic, works tirelessly to aerate the featured content on RBC. Ami, as he is known to his friends, compiles the daily feature articles and his exhaustive “best of the week” collections. His blog here on RBC is an inventory of the great posts that top the site each day.

Ami is widely known for content density (he’s really smart), link mania (his stuff is heavily annotated with really useful pointers). a dry, self-deprecating sense of humor (bless Mother for that), limitless intensity (at last count, seven observable blogs), passion and dogged persistence. He has been in and around the recruiting industry since before the first sailor was shanghaied. He recently won the Recruiting Animal’s 2008 award for Recruitosphere Excellence. It sits on his trophy shelf alongside his Mikey’s Monkey Award from 2006.

These days, Ami is turning the world upside down with his humbly named Brown Bag Recruiter program. The innocuously titled webinars are the gateway to Recruiting mastery. Like a bottle of Absinthe, the seminars are deliciously mind expanding. Ami has discovered an enormous cache of riches and is busily trying to give them away to any recruiter who wants them.

Ami’s webinars show you how to crack the code. Using Google accounts and Google toolkits, the programs teach recruiters to construct astonishingly rich and complex resume databases. Rather than focusing on hitting a home run like some search seminars, Ami teaches the virtue of looking ahead. Building an arsenal of data that can be reused and renewed is the ultimate object of the class.

Here’s the upcoming schedule. You’ll be glad you made the investment. Each webinar is $45 and lasts a generous hour. The entire series price is $95

* Wednesday, February 4, 2pm EST G-Recruiting: A 60-minute Digest (Register)
* Tuesday, February 10 2PM EST Search Engine Secrets, Part 1: Customized Candidate Search (Register)
* Wednesday, February 11 2PM EST Search Engine Secrets, Part 2: Vertical Search and Sourcing to Profile (Register)
* Thursday, February 12 2pm ESTSearch Engine Secrets, Part 3: Purposeful Sourcing to Drive Meaningful Relationships (Register)
* Tuesday, February 17 2pm EST Search Engine Secrets: A 60-minute Digest (Register)
* Thursday, February 19 2pm EST Search Engine Secrets: A 60-minute Digest (Register)

Digging Into RecruitingBlogs.com v1.25

Thanks, Dave

(Nov 14, 2008) I spent an amazing couple of days with Dave Mendoza, our resident networking genius, sourcer extraordinaire and all around good guy. Dave organized a group of us (including Dan DH Harris and Sean Rehder) to spend a day engaging an amazing organization on the full range of Staffing and Recruiting Issues.

I tackled the big picture and “why” questions of Recruiting Strategy. Dave focused on microsites and the general “How” question. DH dug even further into precise sourcing tactics. Sean gently touched on the “architecture of community”.

It was amazing to be in a place where those ideas resonated. It allowed me to see that a fully implemented Recruiting Strategy has (at least) four main components:

* The Current State of Things (What we have, how we got here, weaknesses and strengths)
* The Strategy (Where we want to be and how we want to get there, the plan for all recruiting, tactical guidelines…sourcing hierarchy.. which too to use first)
* Sourcing (Candidate Acquisition)
- Gathering and Articulating the Current Requirement
- Media Planning and Candidate Acquisition
- The Network Energizing Function (outreach, networking, ongoing value to the community)
- Data Cataloging, Mining and Maintenance (keeping the data live, growing and up to date)
- Detailed Data Acquisition (enthusiastic data acquisition)
- Short List Development
* Hands On Recruiting (Presenting and Closing The Deal, Refining The Requirement)

We were fortunate to be in an environment where everyone clearly understood that transactional reactive recruiting is a great way to make long term mistakes.

It also became clear that the downturn will be a great time for retrenchment and reconsideration of strategy and the architecture used to implement it. I am seeing more and more firms trying to get their arms around the process of identifying all of their potential hires well in advance of the requirement (even years). They are using economic slowness as a way to retool for the future.

Lots of people in our industry are on the receiving end of difficult economic news. While there is general agreement that those who survive the next 18 months will be long term winners, it’s still hard to see who they will be. There are lots of financial pressures on organizations that looked strong yesterday.

The cool thing about Mendoza is his resilient focus on doing things for others. He tends to stay away from the sort of patronizing help that feels like pity. Rather, he thinks long and hard about how to help other people make money.

We talked at length about how Recruiters might productively use the downtime.

Here are some suggestions (blame me for this, Dave just got me thinking):

1. Slow economic cycles are inevitable in recruiting. Success means learning ho to thrive in them.
2. Look at the opportunity and the 18 month horizon line, Failure comes from over focusing on the immediate challenge.
3. Retool. Rethink your strategy. Where do you want to be in five years. Take some time to figure this out and write it down.
4. Spend an hour each week thinking about the ways in which you can be helpful to other people. Do two specific things to make someone else’s business better each week.
5. Read about the changes in the environment. Old industries are dying and new ones are forming. Which category are you in?
6. Take the time and energy to personally and actively reject a candidate. Many of us hide from this human process with form letters, dropped email and unreturned phone calls. Take ownership of the dark side of the work.
7. What is your greatest weakness as a Recruiter? Make a plan to improve in that area.

Are you doing something productive with unplanned free time? Take a moment and let us know.

Digging Into RecruitingBlogs.com v1.24: Stats

It’s Slurpee Day in Europe… 7-11

(Nov 7, 2008) Yesterday, I had a great conversation about the growth of RBC. We looked at the statistics on compete.com.

* Over the course of the past year, the number of unique visitors to the site each month has grown by over 500%.
* The total number of monthly visits has exploded at a rate of nearly 1,000%
* Attention (our percentage share of all time spent on the net) grew at a similar pace.

Things get interesting when you compare RBC with other similar properties. Social media is changing things rapidly in our universe. In the following links, we use ERE and HR.com.

* Compared to the dominant members of the industry, attention paid to RBC is significantly greater. That means that the industry as a whole spends more of its time here than anywhere else, than the other two combined
* The number of unique visitors on RBC is growing so fast that you’d be tempted top predict that we’ll overtake the industry leaders by this time next year
* RBC has more monthly visits than the other two combined

Take some time and explore the resources at compete.com. The more comfortable we all get talking about basic metrics, the better we’ll be at navigating our emerging environment. Knowing the difference between unique visitors, total visitors, attention and other web behavior is essential to the emerging form of 21st Century Recruiting.

Recruiting is going to change much faster than anyone imagines. Probably not so much at the level of the actual physical interaction required to make the deal. But everything that surrounds that basic transaction, the entire context, is up for grabs. What we’re learning here in our little community is exactly how to navigate the changes as they come along.

I’ve been working out the details of how you build a top level Recruiting strategy that includes the tactical use of social networking. It’s a real work in progress and I invite you to think about the subject and join the conversation.

Ultimately, much recruiting will be a game of community development. Searching far and wide all of the time to find people who are available in the spot market is a very reactive approach. The ultimate idea will be to develop relationships with everyone you might hire over the next X years and build relationships with them. In the community, you might (gasp) get them to build relationships with each other.

We’ll all need to know lots of things to make that a reality. Web performance metrics are critical. We’ll have to be good at measuring the performance of work done in and by the community. Watching the compete.com data is one way to stay plugged into the consequences of your involvement here.

Digging Into RecruitingBlogs.com v1.20

Recruitfest: Track Leader Report

(Sep 26, 2008) I had a really good time at Recruitfest. The idea that a professional conference can be fun was a real eye opener. Maybe we should start to expect that networking is a success when it produces really big smiles.

The design of Recruitfest was pretty interesting. Each of four track leaders held court in a breakout room for much of the day. Same general topic, three different sessions. That way, participants had the chance to interact with three of the four.

Jason asked me to cover “the importance of having a big picture”. Over the years, my work has tended to cover the industry from a high level perspective. Jason’s notion was that my sessions should be about why that’s important.

One of the reasons that Jason manages community so well is that he doesn’t get too specific. Once he’s laid out an assignment, he stands back and watches the output. It’s the difference between leadership and management. JD leads.

You can’t get where you’re going unless you know where your going.

That’s why having a big picture is important. Our industry (and much of our work) is fragmented and reactive. It’s really hard to see the big trends. It’s extremely challenging to keep track of where you are and where you are going. Having a big picture is all about navigating.

When Recruitfesters entered the room, the flip chart said “Big Pictures”. In my preparation, it became clearer than ever that everyone has their own big picture. There’s not realy anything like a “right answer”.

So the conversations became about “How do you remember where you are?” or “How do you rediscover your big picture?” or “How do you refresh yourself?”.

I’ve been giving stand up presentations my whole life. I’ve done thousands of them. Being in front of a room delivering information is a comfortable place. So. I decided to sit down and make the sessions into conversations. The idea was to test out a different style of communication.

With a little bit of introduction, each session had more to do with the participants than the way I set the topic. There was a fascinating ebb and flow as each participant shared a story about their approach. Quickly, we all learned that an approach that creats the big picture for one is the same thing that causes another to lose it.

I’d never considered the fact that “one person’s meat is another person’s poison” applies to having a big picture.

In the end, I was surprised about how much I learned from the track I ran at Recruitfest. Really surprised. That’s the spirit of this thing here on RecruitingBlogs.com. If you’ll experiment with a cherished belief or two, the results will astonish you (as they do for me).

John Sumser has been chronicling the Recruiting Industry forever. You can catch his work at JohnSumser.com. He’s the CEO of the Recruiting Roadshow. Join the fun in Silicon Valley (10/23) or Atlanta in early December

Digging Into RecruitingBlogs.com v1.19

RecruitFest Intro

(September 19, 2008) I was sitting in the bar of the Toronto Intercontinental with Claudia Faust. We talked about friendship, community, recruiting and the value of RecruitingBlogs.com. We agreed that ‘following your nose’ is the key to the unfolding of things you don’t understand.

We’re in town for the RecruitFest.

I’m getting to know Claudia (and a host of others) because of my involvement in the universe of people who are the online community of Recruiting. While RecruitingBlogs.com is the current center of that cyclone, the community is spread out across a slightly larger terrain.

Like it is offline, online community is a set of intersections rather than a permanent and exclusive place. We connect in our place. We meet in others. Community is something we’re from, something we have in common.

Claudia, as you might know, has invested her energy and passion into her new business. A seasoned recruiter, she moved from her lifetime home in Seattle to the Ft. Lauderdale area about five years ago. Kids grown, she was ready for new adventures and experiences.

When we talked about the utility of RBC, it turned out that our experience was similar. RBC is a place where we engage colleague on a variety of levels. From professional relationships to deep friendships (and everywhere along that spectrum), the scene provides a platform for connection.

Recruiters network. Networking is not a monolithic approach to friendship. Rather, each of us does it in our own way, in our own rhythm. A community is something that allows the process to unfold.

John Sumser has been chronicling the Recruiting Industry forever. You can catch his work at JohnSumser.com. He’s the CEO of the Recruiting Roadshow. Join the fun in Dallas (9/25), Silicon Valley (10/23) or Atlanta in early December

Digging Into RecruitingBlogs.com v1.16

Manners are everything.

Yesterday, I read the most obnoxious piece of Recruiting propaganda that I’ve ever seen. I’ve been wading through crap for many years. This particular nugget is in a category of its own.

Here’s the offensive nonsense:

What do you do if a candidate starts asking questions?

If you answer politely, you may find that there are follow-up questions and follow-ups to that…and the questions will get increasingly difficult to answer. Before you know it, you are asked a particularly tough question, and there is that sinking feeling once again.

The typical advice is to answer, and take the reins back by asking a question, but that can be problematic. What if the candidate doesn’t give you the chance?

Some won’t. They are professionals and they have questions that they want to have answered, and they’re going to get to all those questions. They also are testing you. They are sparring, but you as a recruiter are at a great disadvantage. They have domain knowledge; you don’t. As soon as you get into that sparring contest, prepare to lose.

Don’t allow the frontal assault. Don’t allow them to take control. Keep them where you need them and keep the focus on them. You are the recruiter and you are the one who asks the questions. They are the one being tested, not you. You already have a job and they are the ones who need to prove themselves to you.(ERE)

Compare that with Wozniak’s recounting of the way Steve Jobs persuaded him to come to work for Apple:

His life’s dream was to work for Hewlett-Packard for life, and he got his start with a job before graduating from the University of California, Berkeley. “I got a job a Hewlett-Packard designing handheld calculators. I was very lucky. Because I could design, they interviewed and hired me. But I didn’t have a degree,” he said.

He offered his computer designs to HP five times, but they never were interested. “I would not sell something for money without my employer getting a cut of it.”

“I was never going to leave HP for life. That’s where I wanted to be forever,” but Apple co-founder Steve Jobs launched a campaign that eventually persuaded Wozniak to strike off on his own. “Steve Jobs got all my friends and relatives to call me.”(CNET)

There’s a question here.

Is recruiting a manipulative sport where human beings are precisely “Capital”? Is the approach I’m criticizing actually right?

or

Is Recruiting a graceful endeavor where team building and consequence matter?

I’m eager to get your perspective.

For me, this approach smacks of old school, high leverage used car sales tactics. It’s very useful if you’ve got bad merchandise you are trying to unload. It’s disastrous if you are trying to build an employment brand to attract A-list players. Strong arm tactics have no place in our business.