Talentism

Dub-Dubs and RPO

Great post today by Dub-Dubs. I think we are in violent agreement for the most part. My post was attempting to explain why corporate recruiting professionals are so often surprised and confused when they are told that their group is going to be outsourced. Mr. Dubs has taken that a step further to say that regardless of whether a corporate recruiting department understands its risks or not, RPO is going to be around for a long time. I agree.

Details on P & L Concept

Periodically I like (need) to get off the soapbox and deliver some tactical approaches to the strategic material I discuss. One of the most common questions I get is “What do you mean by recruiting must be a P&L function?” Specifically, how to do you take a corporate function like recruiting (or IT, or facilities, etc.) and operate it like a separate business. So rather than a director of recruiting (or VP of HR) you have a CEO of the corporate recruiting department.

The 7 Wastes

Yesterday I talked about the disconnect between recruiting’s perception of hiring manager satisfaction and the buyer’s perception of success. I thought this was an important note to start with, because the disconnect starts around the concept of quality (the parties are working to different outcome specifications).

Can Client Satisfaction Lead to Outsourcing?

I recently met with an executive from a large HRO firm. We were talking about the outsourcing concept. Our conversation eventually reached the shock that most staffing departments feel when they hear that some or all of their organization is getting outsourced. Almost inevitably they fall back on the “But our hiring manager’s like us!” argument. According to the HRO exec, what most staffing departments fails to realize is that hiring manager satisfaction is not a measure that really matters to the executive who decides to cut costs through outsourcing. But even if they did care, it is obvious that hiring manager feedback is not a reliable measure of customer satisfaction.

Google Base(less)?

Not to rain on anybody’s parade, but a couple of points to consider about Google Base:

• Not going to do anything for the pursuit of Brand Talent.
• Requires a Gmail email address. Most companies block access to external email sites like Gmail.
• Therefore requires employees to sign-up for personal account. If they leave, they still get the contacts from the ad.
• These last two are not  problems that Craig’s List suffers from.

And finally, I don’t see this having any meaningful impact on the Vertical Search players (Indeed, SimplyHired and Jobster) or on the referral / passive tools (like Jobster, H3 and JobThread). As I said here, “if passive candidates use (vertical search), money will flow.” Now that I use the term “Brand Talent” I will change that phrase to “If Brand Talent uses (vertical search), money will flow.” I just don’t see how Google is going to attract Brand Talent to look at their job listings. I think Jason Goldberg is pretty much on the mark. For the problem EA  is trying to solve, getting more people to apply to my ATS doesn’t do me a lot of good. We may still use it, but we are going to be realistic about the problem we are trying to solve and the results we might get.

But I do agree with Joel that this is a good way to extend your brand. A lot of curiosity seekers ou there, and it can't hurt to have your logo linked to a Google search!

No More "Passive"

I am not going to use the term “passive candidates” anymore. I have used it in the past as short-hand for describing a person who won’t ever be coming to your job site to apply for a job.

But the concept of a “passive candidate” appears to be a contradiction in terms. When I have been talking about passive candidates I have been speaking of people who are constantly updating and expanding their networks and finding ways to add value to that network. They work almost as hard as “active” seekers at getting to their next opportunity.

Because they are good at their jobs, and are in demand because of it, they expect you to come looking for them. They definitely won't be looking for you. Even more, they expect that you will have done your research and know what they do, why they are good and who else thinks so. This means they don’t expect to go through lots of interviews or have to prove themselves to potential employers. Their network can verify they are good and their network is trusted by the people who do the hiring.

So I would like to propose the concept of Brand Talent. (It may be that others such as Tom Peters have done this - let me know if you have heard of this before so I can link to their definition.) Brand Talent has the following characteristics:

Right Back Atcha' John

It should be clear to all readers that I think John Sumser is great. I said it here and here and here. I was flattered by John’s article yesterday. As John said, this is an important debate. His article is worthy of reply. So here we go:

$1B of My (and Your) Money Down the Drain

Not to belabor the point, but ERP software is not good software. This example is probably just as much about the lousy methods mpst consultants use for software selection and implementation. But the fact that ERP software is so difficult to link and inter-operate is one of the central points of this failure.

Web 2.0 to the Rescue

Here at Electronic Arts we run a standard ATS. It’s where we manage our job postings, candidate records, etc. Since I run the department that runs the ATS, you would think that it would be easy for me to make changes to the system, get information, run reports. But you would be wrong:

• I can’t get a decent XML feed out of our ATS. So I use SimplyHired instead.

• I can’t get decent analytics about who visits our site, so I use Google Analytics instead.

• I can’t get good reports on who referred who, so I use Jobster.

I get better traffic reports out of my Adwords account than I do out of my ATS. I get better referral reports out of Jobster than I do out of my ATS. It took me about an hour to get an XML feed of jobs from Jobster to my blog. About 15 minutes to get an aggregation of jobs we (unfortunately) post on job boards to feed my blog. And Google Analytics? 10 minutes tops (plus some time to embed the script into our jobs pages). Each of those projects would have taken a minimum of 2 weeks and cost thousands of dollars if I had to depend on my ATS to generate the data / reports.

Anybody with even a passing interest in the future of HR technology should find it compelling that Google, SimplyHired and Jobster can solve my problems faster, better and cheaper than my ATS and its support / maintenance ecosystem.

They Pay Too Little, They Pay Too Much

A pleasant morning sitting in the backyard. Reading the newspaper. My wife notices an article that explains that people are upset because of the large sums paid in compensation to the new dean of a medical school. It’s a public school, so people feel that the person shouldn’t be paid so much.