director of recruiting

Spamming myself

Spam, spam, spam. My inbox is littered with spam. Spam the food product actually isn't THAT bad - I've actually had a delicious Hawaiian/Asian variation of it with with teriyaki sauce and some Sriracha. Spam the email product is unbelievably annoying and irrelevant (for the last time, I don't want to bulk up on human growth hormone or increase my stamina).

Today I opened my junk mail folder and realized that one of the people identified as a spammer was none other than me! Reminders I had sent myself by email had been delivered straight to my junk email folder.

If you can't trust yourself, who can you trust?

New technology alert: Spot Runner

A few weeks ago, I saw a TV commercial for a staffing firm that caught my eye. The spot was professionally produced and was on a reputable channel during at least what I think was a good show. The surprise for me was the ending - it was a staffing firm that I had never heard of. Unfortunately, I can't remember the name of the firm (repetition is key in advertising and I was on the road, so I never got to see it again).

Recently, I learned about the company that produced the ad, a firm called SpotRunner. Their business model is quite interesting - make thousands of stock spots that are inexpensive to configure for a company and buy less expensive local inventory on TV stations (which can cost as little as $250). In essence, they're trying to be the Google of local TV advertising.

The beauty of their model is that TV spots in local markets really aren't that expensive, it's just been the production of spots that's been cost- and quality-prohibitive. As an example of how inexpensive it can be, I created a sample media plan targeting Seattle East-siders (tech country) for $1,000 with a spot that would run 133 times over 4 weeks on Fox Sports NW (Mariners station), FX, TNT, and the History Channel. There are also 21 canned spots to choose from in the employment category.

There's a good opportunity in there for staffing firms and companies that recruit for high volume and/or field positions - and this could also be a very effective option for job fairs and hiring events. Run and check it out. 

The real war for talent

Today is Memorial Day in the US. Please take a minute to think about the most dangerous (and perhaps most important) job in recruiting today - recruiting for the Iraqi police and military. Recruiting centers have been frequent targets of the insurgents. One could argue that the real war for talent is being fought in Baghdad and its outlying areas between terrorists and the Iraqi police and security forces. Without IP's (Iraqi Police) and local security there is no exit strategy, so let's hope they're successful.

Free market talent

Organizations that believe that they can limit, inhibit or restrict their people from leaving are only fooling themselves.

I heard a story yesterday about a very promising individual I've known for some time. He was all set to take a job with a company in a non-competitive industry that was a director-level, leadership position. This would would have been a huge step in his career, and he would be joining a promising company with a ton of upside. They were all set to give him an offer and were extremely excited to get him on board.

The leadership of the company he's with now, who are going through tough times and are desperate to hold on to the talent they have, sent some threatening notes and used every resource at their disposal to keep this person from taking this job (partners, investors, etc.). In one sense, they succeeded, i.e. they got the company who was about to make the offer to pull back.

In another sense, they totally failed. Smelling a rat, this promising individual decided to leave the company anyways without an offer in hand, which only sends a bad message to the rest of the team and may result in even more turnover. He eventually confirmed his suspicions, and now this company's name is mud in the influential and vital circles this person runs in.

If the Soviet Union taught us anything, it's that trying to control the market by brute force is not the path to success. The same holds true in the talent market. It's a free, highly networked market for people, and any attempt to disrupt or regulate this free market will lead to failure for anyone that tries.

Talent and profits

I posted an article today on ERE - "Talent: The Ultimate Profit Center." I wrote it because I've been talking to more and more talent management and HR directors that are interested in figuring out how to systematically quantify their talent management activities in terms of revenue, profits and returns to the business. It's an interesting challenge no matter what business you're in - some business like professional services or law firms have it easier than others, as almost every employee has a direct line to revenue. In other businesses like software, it can be more difficult but is still possible and worth attempting.

Through the years I've made it a habit to tell people I've hired that, like it or not, everyone is in sales. (One notable exception might be a non-profit like the Peace Corps, but one could even argue that the Peace Corps helps sell America as a destination). Very early in my career, I resisted this - sales wasn't something I wanted to get into when I "grew up." Eventually, I came to realize that everything is related to sales - you're either creating a product that gets sold, supporting a team that sells that product, or actually doing the selling yourself. And if you're not positively impacting these sales, your job might one day be outsourced, be vulnerable to layoffs, or you might wake up one morning and realize that you're on the fast track to nowhere.

Thus, the article today - which will hopefully give people in this industry a reason to reconsider their role as revenue generators (better) vs. cost centers (cheaper, faster). 

Getting with the times

Marketers know that PR is often the best weapon in their arsenals, particularly with members of Gen Y who have grown up being bombarded with marketing messages and tend to seek out their own information in many different ways. The idea behind effective PR is to have someone with credibility say something good about you that seems more authentic and closer to the truth than any marketing fluff you could put on your own website. It's this element of authenticity that is missing from most career websites.

Recently, some companies that were willing to step up and take a risk (in the face of many critics who questioned whether it would yield an ROI before initiatives even launched) were rewarded with some very positive press. Microsoft, T-Mobile, HP and Verizon continue to receive positive mentions as companies that were using new and innovative tactics in the war for talent by participating in a Second Life career event hosted on TMP Island. Traditional media like the Wall Street Journal, the Baltimore Sun (and many others), niche media like techcareers.com and dozens bloggers have jumped on the story, which should help each of these companies in their recruiting efforts and provide a boom to TMP's business as they seek to be positioned as a recruitment ad agency on the leading edge of technology in the wake of their recent spin-off from Monster.

Boeing also received some positive press recently from their earlier foray into Facebook (which they did with the help of their ad agency, JWT). The Boston Herald story about the aerospace's industry sums up the target audience's impression of these types of efforts to meet Gen Y where they are:

"My first impression was that Boeing is getting with the times," said the 21-year-old senior (at MIT, Justin Wong), who will work at Boeing’s satellite division after graduation. "It shows the company is making an effort to talk to us on our level."

For an industry like aerospace, there's a business imperative lurking behind the efforts to reach out in new ways:

It’s no secret the U.S. aerospace industry is rapidly graying: The average age of an aerospace worker was 45 in 2005. By next year, roughly one out of four will be eligible to retire. Faced with a looming brain drain, companies are cooking up creative ways to lure and keep talent from chatting with students online to fast-tracking young workers to be future leaders.

I see dead people... on ZoomInfo

While searching the web for a family member the othe day, I came across a ZoomInfo profile - of my dead great-uncle, Joe Danzansky. It dawned on me just then how difficult it must be to source for candidates when all you keep on finding are corpses.

ZoomInfo is a great tool, one that I recommend to most corporate recruiting departments and search firms because it consolidates information from the open web and press releases in a recruiter-friendly format (bios and profiles with work history and links to online references). Over the last 5 years, they've built a nice business for themselves, and from what I've heard have been profitable.

Yet one of the challenges ZoomInfo and the general population of internet recruiters out there are eventually going to face as the web expands and the population ages is that people who have been referenced in articles and press releases eventually die. The Web is still pretty young, so this hasn't been too much of a problem to date, but I can see it expanding and making online recruiting for passive candidates more difficult over time.

In the end, this is actually an opportunity for a company like Zoom, who could integrate with a source of death records (like Deathrecords.com, not to be confused with Suge Knight's Death Row Records) and again ensure that they're a more useful tool than the open web, Google or eventual upstarts like Spock.

A forgotten part of integration

Hodes recently helped revamp FedEx's career website, which is worth checking out for a few reasons. They've developed the site with a clean and very user-friendly design, used flash in a non-obtrusive way and developed a great unifying theme around employees' talents and how they "deliver" for FedEx.

What's more impressive to me as somewhat of a tech-junkie is the level of integration between front-end technologies (content and display) with the back-end database of jobs. For some examples, take a look at the locations rollovers - when you click through it presents you with jobs in that location. When you research a job category, you're linked into hot job postings for that category. It also allows users to "concept search" for jobs, something I predicted might happen several years ago but has been used by only a few companies and job boards (like CareerBuilder) to date. Notice that job search sits side-by-side with content and graphics. As simple as this all sounds, this isn't something most ATS vendors can handle with their systems architecture, yet it can really enhance the user experience and make the site much easier to navigate.

It makes some degree of sense that the tie-in to the front-end exists in HodesiQ considering that Hodes is an advertising agency that happens to have some some back-end technology components. But what they've done with FedEx's career site is nonetheless impressive. While some of the content areas seem like works-in-progress (phase 2?), overall they've done a nice job on the site and are starting to fulfill some of the potential people imagined when they came out with the HodesiQ system in the first place. 

Strange bedfellows

The NY Times reports that Microsoft is buying a pretty substantial (although still a minority) stake in CareerBuilder. I wonder if the move is a signal that Microsoft won't buy Yahoo (which owns CB competitor Hotjobs) as has been rumored.

What would be really interesting is if Microsoft bought Yahoo and took on CB and the newspaper chains head on as a publishing company and a major job board - which they've kind of tried and given up on in the past (Sidewalk, Slate) but to be fair, they never really fully invested in either and they were very early days on the Internet. I wouldn't be too nervous if I were working at Hotjobs, as having Microsoft's spare Windows capital behind you would be an early Christmas present...

Monster - all grown up?

In the mid-90's, I worked at Monster (well, TMP, which at the time was pretty much Monster) when it broke out of the pack of job boards with their famous "When I grow up" advertising campaign. They actually weren't the only job board to advertise on the Super Bowl that Iyear - Hotjobs was also an advertiser. But Monster clearly took the leadership position because, back then, they recognized that a message that resonated and captured people's attention was just as important as placement. Back then, the site was littered with cute little Monsters everywhere, from Trumpasaurus to Jobba-the-Hunt (that was their job search agent), and their campaigns with sophisticated yet humorous messaging really struck a chord with people.

Today, "Da Monster" (as Jeff Taylor used to call it in the infamous and short-lived infomercial he'd probably like to forget, The Monster Show) has grown up. Their marketing model, calls to action and placement strategies have matured, opting for more efficient local advertising approaches with an occasional big splash and driving as many people as possible to post their resumes.

Yet when you look at their website or see their ads on TV these days, you get the feeling that somewhere on the way to being a $1 billion company, they seem to have lost a bit of their personality and maybe even their soul. You could almost imagine a commercial with a young Taylor or younger Andy McKelvey saying "when Monster grows up, we want to use safe images and conservative blue color schemes." Perhaps they feel they were "out-monkeyed" by CareerBuilder and can't compete on budget or creativity with the deep-pocketed newspaper companies that run CB (I would argue differently). But what exists today is a mish-mash of safe messages, stock-looking photos of every ethnicity and unbelievably boring TV ads.

Perhaps the new leadership at Monster will realize that their soul is what really made Da Monster, and it's what could make it again.