director of recruiting

New technology alert: video virtual career fairs

Maybe I was wrong about virtual career fairs. Today, collegegrad.com launched video virtual career fairs. It's a pretty scrappy execution - although I must admit that it is fun to play both videos of CollegeGrad president Brian Krueger at once in sort of a surreal, Brady-Bunch-intro-esque feature. But I'm guessing that this is a light first version, and if it's successful, it will be expanded and hopefully polished a bit more.

To get back to my original post, I thought the first iteration of virtual career fairs were not much better than a company's own career website in terms of effectiveness. They were the equivalent of "come to our career fair site, look at the fancy brand our agency produced, and then apply like you normally would with no hope of hearing back from anyone." Not an ideal experience.

But immersive environments like Second Life, where you can interact with your audience in a way, hold potential for the future. Especially if you can get someone to virtually do the job before they actually do it, giving you perhaps the ultimate try-before-you-buy prescreening tool.

A video response to employer submitted questions, as CollegeGrad has launched, isn't such a bad thing either. In effect, it's a digitization of an actual career fair to an expanded audience. For employers, it could broaden the pool of candidates they interact with beyond just local or elite school talent, reduce their travel budgets and ensure that their most important questions get answered before putting someone in front of a hiring manager. For job seekers, it could allow them to express themselves in a more meaningful way than they could on a resume and get considered for opportunities they wouldn't normally be considered for.

Whether CollegeGrad.com will drive this functionality to the finish line remains to be seen, but it could be a great first step in the right direction.

The world's most dangerous recruitment advertisement

Digital billboards are driving people to distraction, quite literally. Just the other day, a woman reading her email in her car on her Treo, hit me from behind while I was stopped on the freeway. The number of distractions to the modern driver are growing fast - from email to iPods to cell phones (now outlawed without an earpiece in many states, which doesn't really solve the spell by name dialing problem on some of these complex little devices and requires an ability to connect a peripheral device and/or turn on a bluetooth-enabled device while driving at high speeds). At this pace, automobiles will resemble home entertainment theaters complete with auditorium seating in the next decade.

Personally, I can't wait for the day until cars drive themselves. But until then, we'll have distracting digital billboards, now with recruitment ads for none other than the Albequerque police department (oh, the irony). Yes, this is the same Albequerque police department with one of the oddest recruitment campaigns ever developed by a police department, the runaway bride campaign (it really did sound like a good idea by the coffee machine, cap'n).

From a write-up in the San Antonio Express-News:

Des Moines, Iowa, placed a moratorium on digital billboards in February to study its potential safety ramifications. The city currently has at least one digital billboard operated by Clear Channel.

"The content is beautiful, but my fear is that it is a distraction," said Tom Vlassis, the Des Moines city councilman who proposed the city's moratorium on the technology.

In Wichita, Kan., where Clear Channel recently announced plans for a digital network, city leaders are debating whether to dim the electronic boards' lights.

Other cities are embracing the digital billboards — at least to some extent.

In Albuquerque, police use the signs for recruiting. Across the country, Amber Alert, weather services and America's Most Wanted use them to display warnings and to post photos of fugitives or missing children.

Still, Scenic America's Fry doesn't think that's enough to make adopting the technology worth it.

"It's not appropriate to create one kind of public safety problem to help another," he said.

Continuous recruiting

I don't usually get engaged in semantic arguments, but one terms that's always bothered me is "internal mobility." To me, the term implies the exact opposite of how a company should think about hiring from their internal talent pool. It says, "if you're interested in finding something else to do, go ahead and find it we won't stop you."

I recently had this conversation with a neighbor of mine who worked for IBM for 10 years. He left to join a startup that recruited him away from IBM because, in his words, "IBM wasn't really as interested in keeping me and advancing me as the startup was in hiring me." How did he come to this conclusion? Because a recruiter at the startup had been calling him relatively frequently over the last 6 months before he left, seeing if there was a way to make a job at that company work for him. During that time period, no one from IBM called and asked him the same questions. It's almost as if they assumed that an employee that worked at the company for 10 years was just as likely to stay for the next 20.

Which is why I like the term and the approach of "continuous recruiting" for your current employees. Because if you're not continually and proactively re-recruiting your own employees, someone else will.

The next wave of job boards - staffing firms?

Ten years ago, you paid by the word for every job ad you placed. Today, you pay per job advertised, whether you get anything for that or not. Online advertising models have shifted to pay-per-value model and it stands to reason that job boards could and should do the same. Maybe this is why some feel like Monster's poised for an acquisition - do they know the next wave is coming? 

The challenge with the "disruptive" models I've seen so far though is that they don't really recognize where the value lives in recruiting. Take pay-per-click as an example (like Indeed) - what does a click represent to a hiring manager or recruiter? Just more applicants, which plays very poorly to enterprise customers but wouldn't be bad for a small or mid-market customer that doesn't get the same amount of unqualified volume. Even for enterprises, though, one could make an argument that at the end of the day, pay-per-click is more cost-effective than pay-per-post for an employer. But it's hard to swallow for an enterprise because it's so counter-intuitive and tough to scale to the real meat of the market (small and medium businesses) without an absolutely gigantic marketing or sales push.

How about "free postings" that lead to another set of business opportunities for the vendor (like Jobster is doing)? I haven't seen one that really has a high likelihood of what I would call "logical conversion" for technology tools. Maybe it's just me, but I just don't see a free job posting leading too often to a customer saying "I want to buy a social networking and CRM tool." Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of getting a customer engaged with something free and building value for them until their needs require a broader service that they're willing to pay for. Salesforce is an excellent example of this. Recently, I had to pick between Salesforce and SugarCRM for my own company's CRM needs. I went with Salesforce. The clincher for me? 1 user is completely free. Now I'll be loading my contacts in there and trying to develop business by engaging them on a more proactive basis, entering notes, creating opportunities, tracking billing and revenue, etc, all tough to migrate to another system. When and if I have more employees, Salesforce now has my business. It's a "logical conversion" for me into a paying customer.

So where's the logical conversion area in recruiting? I actually think that it's in services, not software, which is actually a much, much bigger piece of the pie than job boards ($30 billion for services, $3-5 billion for online plays). Think about it - you're a hiring manager or recruiter at a small employer that is starting to grow fast. You look at the options out there to post your job. One site wants to charge you $300, another $400, and another staffing firm run job board with a similar amount of traffic will charge you nothing in the hopes that you eventually buy some of their staffing services. As we all know, the job board will work SOME of the time. Then  eventually you'll need something more. Where do you go? If the staffing firm has set up their business model effectively to really convert and create barriers to entry, you go to the staffing firm running the job board that was nice enough to give you a free posting. Perhaps the firm has given them an ATS as well to keep track of candidates in. Or possibly something else that would be hard to replace.

I believe that this was the missed opportunity when TMP Worldwide had staffing/executive search firms, Monster, a light ATS and a recruitment advertising agency under one roof. They could never really make all the parts work together, but in the end, they suffered from the innovator's dilemma - why mess up a $1 billion a year cash cow? They talked about Intern-to-CEO as their mantra back then, but really, allowing the parts to work together too well would have been a disruptor to their own business models.

For an enterprising large staffing firm, a really big opportunity is out there. Just waiting. Tick... tick... tick...

New technology alert: podzinger

Just when you thought you'd spend the rest of your life viewing unstructured video resumes, a new company comes out with an application that helps put some much needed structure around them. Podzinger extracts likely keywords from video resumes, sets them up as links and allows you to jump to the exact place in that video - essentially allowing you to search video resumes (or any other video you like).

I tried out the service, and it seems like it's at too early of a stage to be highly useful for recruiting purposes. In a Fast Company article, they claimed 70% accuracy and are working towards 90% accuracy, even with the ability to decipher accents. Wouldn't it be great if one day they could pull the keywords out of a video resume posted on YouTube or other site and actually use the content to build a virtual resume of sorts? That sounds impossible, but it's not and could be done with a little imagination and a combination of some existing technologies. 

If anyone else has any luck finding people through the service (although there are a very limited # of video resumes out there at this point), please let me know. For now, something to keep your eyes on and hope that they realize that recruiters could be a viable target audience for them. If video resumes ever do hit a critical mass, there might be a business model there. 

More video resumes in reverse

Some of us (Cisco) are winners in the age of transparency, and others aren't so lucky... although I do wonder if something is getting lost in translation here. I remember when Seattle-based Airborne Express got acquired by DHL, also a Germany-based company, and every employee of Airborne received a welcome pack with a copy of the company song, which was strikingly similar to this one.

Are company songs are just the thing to do in Deutschland?

Video resumes in reverse

Cisco's been doing some YouTubing, posting a few of their recruitment videos on YouTube (just like Google did some time ago, although I'm not sure which came first). Worth checking out, as it's an example of how a company can now use video to help candidates get a better feel for the company and the culture than they could through a static website.

Here's the first one, very professionally produced:

And the second one, a bit tongue in cheek that they use to help promote career advancement inside Cisco for current employees. The bloopers at the end show the actors/employees saying "Crisco" instead of Cisco... which I've never done, but I will now have a hard time not saying.

New technology alert: the killer app in recruiting?

Check out TechCrunch's post today about Spock, a new entry in the people search space that has yet to launch. You won't be able to view the site yet - they're still in invitation-only beta mode, for which you can request an invitation - but promise to have over 100,000,000 profiles available for search when they launch.

If I'm ZoomInfo, which claims to have 35 million people, or Spoke, which claims roughly the same number (and powers Jobster and AIRS' people search engines), I'm not quite shaking in my boots yet. Both of these applications provide paths (although not always productive ones) to get the contact information on the people you do find as well as consolidated information on the companies they work in. Just getting a name isn't usually enough for recruiters that are very often afraid of picking up the phone and I don't think Spock is really too focused on solving the unique challenges of recruiters or salespeople - YET.

But with a promise of triple the profiles of any of the major recruiting database services, it isn't a stretch to think that they could think about it from a talent mining perspective and add on a couple of features here and there that position them against a ZoomInfo or Spoke, who should be thinking about erecting some serious barriers to entry beyond just company information and, perhaps, re-evaluating their revenue models before they are completely disrupted by what I assume will be an advertising-funded people search engine like Spock.

For now, Spock will likely be a service that competes for recruiters' attention with Google, and if they can provide additional utility beyond the insanely long, complicated search strings that sourcers often need to enter to dig through content sites, multiple social networks, books, lawn furniture, etc. to get to the actual people, then they'll have something potentially very special and useful for recruiters.

Surrounding yourself with great people

Continuing on my Good to Great Staffing and Level 5 leadership track, we reach the most important component: surrounding yourself with great people. In Good to Great, Jim Collins points to Wells Fargo as an example of a company that built an outstanding leadership team. The proof? Many of the executives who came up through the ranks at Wells Fargo became CEO's at other companies.

Likewise in recruiting, one of the key indicators of the level of talent you attract are what happens to your employees after they leave the company. Have you groomed individuals that have become recruiting leaders elsewhere? This sounds like a negative - who wants to hire people that just get stolen away? - but in practice it's a net positive. If your track record demonstrates that you can groom leaders, you can become a magnet for highly ambitious talent who will make a significant impact while working with you (and one day might hire you, the ultimate irony).

I've seen many leaders are threatened, consciously or subconsciously, by people that are smarter than they are. This is tough to get over as many of our natural assumptions about leaders are based on them being the smartest people in the room. I would argue that the best leaders are not necessarily the smartest or most visionary people, but when it comes to inspiring personal loyalty and getting the best work out of their people, they excel.

Here are more characteristics of Level 5 leaders, who typically possess a unique combination of professional will and personal humility:

Professional Will	Personal Humility
Creates superb results, a clear catalyst in the transition from good to great.	Demonstrates a compelling modesty, shunning public adulation; never boastful.
Demonstrates an unwavering resolve to do whatever must be done to produce the best long-term results, no matter how difficult.	Acts with quiet, calm determination; relies principally on inspired standards, not inspiring charisma, to motivate.
Sets the standard of building an enduring great company; will settle for nothing less.	Channels ambition into the company, not the self; sets up successors for even greater success in the next generation.
Looks in the mirror, not out the window, to apportion responsibility for poor results, never blaming other people, external factors, or bad luck.	Looks out the window, not in the mirror, to apportion credit for the success of the company—to other people, external factors, and good luck.

(source: www.JimCollins.com)

Learn more about the concepts of Level 5 leadership and the other principles behind Good to Great on Jim Collins website.

Being a Level 5 Leader

My post yesterday on Level 5 leadership in recruiting was spurred by a conversation I had the other day with a recruiting director who mentioned that she was tired of her boss only paying attention and often, taking credit, when she was working on a high profile project.

It reminded me not only of Good to Great's level 5 leadership concept, but also of a speech that Ken Blanchard gave at a user conference I attended (yes, the same conference where he famously ripped me a new one - still waiting for that lunch, Ken). In the speech, which really was excellent, Blanchard talked about management really be an inverted pyramid where you are at the bottom and your job is really to "support your people." Yes, you need to provide clear boundaries and incentives to do the right things, but the concept of actively working to empower your people (and sharing in the glory) was a powerful image that sticks with me to this day.

If you take the quote from yesterday and insert the word "directors of recruiting," "VP of HR," or "recruiting managers" you start to get a clear picture about what it takes to be a level 5 leader.

While highly ambitious, Level 5 (directors of recruiting/vp's of hr/recruiting managers) sacrifice their own profiles and channel their energies into ambition for their organizations. They blend humility and modesty instead of personal flair, often deflecting any talk of their own responsibility for the company's success and instead pointing to their great teams, market conditions, or even dumb luck.

As such, there is an almost zen-like quality to great recruiting and HR leaders I've met. While the natural inclination early in your career may be to take credit where credit is due in order to "make your mark," there are infinitely more rewards for those that share some of the spotlight with their people. Suggested reading: The Tao of Pooh, which might in fact be the best non-management management book I've read.

When was the last time you held up a member of your team for special credit with the leaders in your organization? There's a cascade of positive effects that happens when you do this. First, everyone loves recognition for a job well done, and often, others on your team see this recognition and begin to act in ways worthy of attaining this same level. Second, the people you report to begin to see you as a much more mature, emotionally intelligent and conscientious individual - while often giving you as much if not more credit than you instinctively might have tried to claim.

Next week I'll explore perhaps the most important component of Level 5 leadership - surrounding yourself with great people.