Talentism

Economics to Identity

Your grandfather probably worked to live. Your mother and father most likely tried to make a living. Your children will be working to define a life.

The inexorable trend of personal economics is from work as a fiscal necessity to work as expression of self, from safety to actualization. Work has always served as a basis for psychological affiliation (i.e. "I am a business person"), but now the expression of the work and the community of people you create with is as much a part of that identity as the role you play. I may be a business person, but I am more likely to describe myself as a over-forty family guy who works in the video games industry.

This means that I will probably search for my next job based on a specification that constrains my search based on those attributes with which I most commonly identify myself. Of course I will still care about company, geography and compensation. But I understand that I will spend more time at work than with my family or friends. And since work will become increasingly important to our identity you will want to make sure that you are spending that time with a group of people with whom you share similar values and principles, in a company that supports the growth and extension of that identity.

That is why I have always been a big fan of SimplyHired’s specialty searches. TechCrunch announced last week that SimplyHired is expanding their growing list of specialty searches to include "age-friendly search" (check it out here).  As with their previous specialty searches SimplyHired turned to a reputable partner to help define the nature of the identity. This continues to be a great business model: technical expertise and reach from SimplyHired, and content and expertise from the specialty partner. Both partners win, and the job seeker who is looking to "make a life" has a new tool in their search for the right fit between their need for connection and the employer's need to recruit more individuals attracted to their specific culture.

John Sumser has an great post today about the new specialty service. As John says "Nice move for both. It's the kind of win-win deal that should be a model for others." I agree, just as I agreed when SimplyHired introduced Dog Friendly search, Eco Friendly Search, Mom Friendly Search and GLBT Friendly Search. It has made great sense each and every time SimplyHired has added a new partner and extended the reach, relevance and power of their search engine.

For individuals who already view work as an exercise in community building, empowerment and actualization, the ability to see what employment opportunities exist across multiple companies that actively support your community and lifestyle choices puts the job seeker further in control of their economic destiny and affiliation. I think it is a good thing for Job Seekers and something that we will see more of in the future.

(Full Disclosure: I am a SimplyHired adviser, shareholder and writer for their blog. I am a completely interested party in their success.)

Maybe I Don't Like Being Jacked After All

After skewering Mr. Sumser last week for going to the dark side, I got a taste of my own medicine today. Apparently I am not as big a fan of midnight gardening comando raids as I originally thought.

Some recruiters inside our organization noticed that some of our jobs weren't being presented correctly on "Getthejob.com." I went to the site and saw that not only are they not presenting our jobs correctly (factually incorrect data) but that they take our material to create follow-on pages that look like hell so that they generate more space inventory.

Compare the experience:

Here is one of the original pages that is getting scraped.

Indeed.com gets it right (thanks Indeed!)

SimplyHired.com gets it right (thanks SimplyHired!)

Jobster.com gets it right (although they are still only scraping our job board listings, not the jobs.ea.com website itself, which is a bit of a bummer, but regardless, thanks Jobster!)

By contrast, Getthejob.com has the wrong data (the jobs they retrieve aren't for our Jamdat Mobile division), take our content (as John would point out, copyrighted content), format it like garbage (check it out here) so that they can sell more ads and then continue to "jack" our jobs by putting a frame on top of the results page when you click "View and apply to this job direct from this employers website" at the bottom of the follow-on display page.  But it gets even better. Click on a link inside the jobs.ea.com page that is so framed and you continue to get the "Getthejob" frameheader. I have heard of bad web etiquette before but this really takes the cake.

As I have said before, I like our job ads being jacked as I think it delivers a lot of value for us as a company (more people find our jobs). But I have also said that I assumed (due to my experiences with SimplyHired, Indeed and Jobster) that the "jacker" would be a good web citizen and work like the major search engines: you put in a query, get a result and are delivered to the originating material when you click on the results link. Unfortunately, companies like Getthejob are proving John's point.

So, Jobster, Indeed and SimplyHired - keep doing what you are doing and thanks for the free service. My lawn looks great. Getthejob - consider yourself shut-off. I leave my lawn to the professionals.

Two Masters

Interesting article by Lou Adler today over at ERE. He says:

• Your technology investment is yielding a negative ROI. While not a public session, someone described to me a meeting they had with a number of recruiting managers evaluating their satisfaction with all of the available recruiting technology. First, every tool was listed by name, including every major applicant-tracking system, every major job board, and all of the major tools. The ranking was limited to either a positive, neutral, or negative. In the summary report, not one technology product or tool received a positive ranking, and most had negatives. The moral is that high-tech will not solve your hiring problems without a lot of high touch.

It's not just that "technology doesn't solve problems" (which I agree with by the way), but that:

• ATS's are designed to solve HR's problems, not fulfill recruiter needs. But recruiters use the system and hate it and complain to HR, who then says the system doesn't work. You can't serve two masters: either hire great recruiters and give them the tools they need to win and then figure out the compliance problems on the back-end, or hire administrative temps who will manage data for compliance and who understand that nobody cares about what they think about the system.
• Job Boards are designed to solve recruiters problems, not candidate's interests. But employment managers pay for the systems and see that they get poor quality and a lot of noise for a pretty steep price. You can't serve two masters: either focus on how to attract the person who is right for your job (and that often won't include putting up a lousy job description on a public billboard) or figure that the money is going towards making recruiters feel better about their work because they plastered the job everywhere.

Some Random Thoughts for the Week

The next installment of “Principles of Talentism” will be out Monday (I had the post ready but decided to rewrite it at 3 in the morning). In the meantime, some quick hits from the week:

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Our global launch of our “Universal Sourcing Platform” (USP) happens next week. Sean Rehder and Kristi Cavanaugh on our team have done an amazing job of getting a worldwide launch of a new system ready in just 2 months. (Some day, when I start writing on TuSK again, I will tell you about Kristi and Sean – they are both incredible).

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Speaking of our USP… part of what we developed was a University Recruiting module to sit on top of Salesforce. Developed by Colleen McCreary (our University Relations director) and Sean (I am going to have to write about Colleen on TuSK too – she is awesome). The thing I am really excited about is that this will be our first instance of putting up something we are working on in the Salesforce AppExchange. This takes us one small step closer to the vision of a community development platform for new apps in our space. Salesforce is reviewing now, so I’ll keep you posted about whether they agree to finalize distribution. And huge kudos to Sean, who, as I like to say, is “The shortest distance between an idea and software.”

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One of amazing things about blogging and the Internet is the speed at which you become a global presence. Last year someone translated one of my posts into Spanish, and this year Frank Mulligan (who runs a great blog that everyone should check out) translated something I wrote into Chinese (click in the upper right hand corner for the English version). Thanks to Frank for the honor. Talentism in three languages… what is the world coming to?

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I really like John Sumser’s writing these days. I have always been a fan of John’s, but there is something about his posts recently that makes me believe that John is enjoying his work again. I heard that he was a hit at the Kennedy Conference, which I was happy to hear as John hasn’t gotten out as much as he should. I was sorry I couldn’t be there, but look forward to the next one.

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Back in September I wrote that “The easy-to-understand benefit of RPO is the "one throat to choke" theory of staff function management.” I got emails and calls asking whether I had some sort of sadistic view of corporate life such that I would use language like that. Today I feel somewhat vindicated with the prestigious McKinsey Quarterly stating the following: “A rising demand for integrated IT and telecom services: CIOs increasingly want just "one throat to choke" when it comes to IT and telecom services. So far, the providers haven't stuck out their necks.” Always nice to be validated by the boys and girls in cashmere.

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One of the hardest things about blogging (in my experience at least) is making the trade-off between keeping a discussions going and starting a new one. Recently I have started a couple of conversations that provoked really fantastic comments from people whom I respect a great deal. Rather than fleshing those conversations out, I have just jumped to the next conversation. But that doesn’t mean that I haven’t been reading and enjoying the comments. Thanks to Colin, Martin and many others (and to Heather, for telling me to get over myself, and to CH, for telling me I was an idiot – I do very much appreciate it). I will point out one comment that came in this morning, as it is connected with a post I wrote some time ago (RPO War) and will therefore probably go unnoticed. I generally don’t publish comments or trackbacks that are product placement editorials, but Jon’s article is worth the read, so I decided to leave in the last sentence where he shills for his company. Definitely not an endorsement on my part – I don’t know Jon nor do I know anything about his company. But if you add value to the site you should get some value in return - and in the spirit of doing so...

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Martin’s contributions are fantastic, so check this out.

Colin writes great stuff, so make sure you check this out.

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While I have not used either of these gentlemen's products, their depth of intelligence and their ongoing commitment to makinig us all better through their contribution means their stuff is worth a look.

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We’ll start back on Monday on the Talentism Principles. Have a great weekend everybody.

Fiddling with the Lights

In the 1920’s a bunch of organizational theorists were trying to figure out how lighting conditions affected worker productivity. So they went to the Western Electric plant in Hawthorne and started messing around with the lights. They increased the light level in the plant and the productivity went up. Then they reduced the light… and productivity went up again. They ended up by putting two workers in a dark closet with the door cracked. You guessed it – productivity was great.

The story is true, and while the conventional wisdom that arose from the study may be apocryphal, the lesson is important: pay attention to the workers and they do better work.

This story is called to mind by a certain ATS vendor’s (oh, sorry, “Talent Management System Application Provider”) recent proclamation that companies using their software are worth more than companies that don’t. The correlation is clear: use their software and you’ll get a better stock price, probably because worker productivity goes up when their software is “deployed properly.” ™

What Do We Want From Our Social Networks?

Social networking is reaching a natural inflection point where we should all start to examine exactly what we are getting out of it and what we really want.

We are starting to formalize and systematize what all good business people have known for the past 5,000 years: relationships are at the heart of how work gets done. When we look to formalize and systematize we are really trying to optimize. Optimization is a way to get more output for less input (“pay less, get more”). All things that become optimized are subjected to the same basic process: scoping, then defining, then naming, then atomizing (breaking into discreet parts), then analyzing and finally measurizing (I made the last one up, but it’s the point where we all become concerned about how to measure the discreet parts we just analyzed). The process has one objective: to turn the intangible into the tangible in such a way that we can improve it and communicate it.

SaaS, Salesforce and Our New Central Sourcing Business

There is a great article over at Businessweek titled “Software as a Service Myths.” (Thanks to Yves Lermusiaux at Taleo for pointing the article out .)

We have launched a new Central Sourcing Business (if something is strategic it is a business, not a function – see Draw the Lines), and we are using Salesforce.com as our technology platform of choice. We have developed a “central platform / local service” approach that extends leading-edge sourcing management capabilities to all of our studio sourcers while ensuring that they can maintain local control, support and configuration management.

We looked at a couple of vendors to build this new integrated application set on, and it was a tight race between Microsoft CRM 3.0 and Salesforce, but in the end Salesforce won the initial deal because I didn’t want to have to deal with installing and managing a platform. I sold some of the first ASP solutions in 1996 and I have been a fan of that approach ever since. Now ASP has morphed into SaaS (Software as a Service), but the concept is essentially the same: if you don’t make money by supporting software, give the business to someone who does. EA does not make money by hosting front- or back-office applications, so I wanted to work with someone who does. Salesforce did, Microsoft didn’t.

It was clear that Microsoft wouldn’t be left behind for long, and I think their Live concept will work (and I am really excited to see what Ray does with Groove in the next Office suite). In the meantime, Salesforce was the logical choice. I’ll keep you posted.

Passive Candidate Email Acquisition - Does it Work?

Steven Rothberg of Collegerecruiter.com fame has started an interesting discussion over at ERE.

We use Jobster and are happy with it. As I said here, I don’t think the power of Jobster is the email networking piece. But we use that function, and so I like to keep track of the utility and effectiveness of it.

At this point I can only vouch for my own experience. I get a lot of referral network sourcing requests. I take a quick look at the email: if I know someone that is looking for a job that I care about and their skill set matches the job description, then I forward it on. But if I really have to do passive sourcing (as in, try to go convince someone that this is worth their while), I have to evaluate spending my time helping a recruiter do their job against spending that same time doing my own job. It’s a pretty utilitarian equation – where am I going to get the best return for my time. More often than not, doing my job takes priority over doing someone else’s. I tend to have the same reaction as Steve – the person who is asking for my help is getting something out of it… why shouldn’t I?

It might just turn out that passive candidate acquisition through email has the same exact problem that active candidate acquisition through posting on job boards does: there is an inverse relationship between the quality of the talent pool and the importance of the position. If “good people know good people”, and good people get tired of helping recruiters do their jobs, then you’ll just get referrals from people who aren’t that good (I assume that the counter-point of the “good people” proposition is “disinterested sloths hang out in bars with budding alcoholics who just like to steal paperclips” or something of the sort).

This isn’t true of Employee Referral Campaigns, for the very reason that the true “sourcer” gets paid for their efforts. I think that Jobster is a fantastic tool for ERPs, because the level of tracking and information management exceeds what I can get from other programs I have used. In addition, it cuts down on the work that the employee has to perform to tap into their network, so I am seeing better results than the old disconnected email blast approach.

As I stated in that previous post, I think that there may be a short shelf-life for passive candidate acquisition through email. But I continue to believe in Jobster (for the same reasons that I listed in that post), as well as the ERP management angle, and continue to be a happy customer of theirs. Only time will tell whether there is really an “email” issue, but if there is, I think the team at Jobster can figure it out. Right guys?

10 Rules for Innovators

Everybody has a jones for something. For me it's innovation. I don't know that I have ever been as happy in my business life as when I am shipping a new product that I have designed, or talking about ways to do things that I know are breaking new grounds. Solving problems is just plain cool.  Creating new opportunities  is even better.

When you have had the good fortune to run some companies that other's consider innovative you get asked "How do you do it" a lot. I thought I would throw down some of the loonier concepts I use whenever I am trying to break new ground. BTW - Part of the joy of working with companies like Jobster is that they tend to follow these rules.

Colin's Insights on ATS

It’s easy for me to sit on the outside and cry at the moon. I'm not running a business behind this blog. I try to keep the hypocrisy to a minimum by being my own harshest critic, so I don’t know why I am always so pleasantly surprised when I see this behavior in others. And yet here is Colin Kingsbury, surprising and delighting.

Vertical Search Can Win

Joel Cheesman is at it again, bless ‘im! In response to what he believes is an erroneous prediction by Peter Weddle, Joel loads both barrels and goes for broke.

Understanding Recruiting Technology

I wrote the following article in October 2003. As I was re-reading it, I was amazed at how much has changed (the tech wreck is gone and the predicted increase in hiring is upon us) in so short a time, but more so at how much is the same. For instance, I still talk with a lot of people who are being pushed by their IT departments to go to a vanilla HCM recruiting solution. And I still believe that a modularized approach to software deployment provides the flexibility needed by the business unit while meeting the cost / risk needs of the IT department.

So I thought I would throw this out there, both because it might be an interesting read to those of you who are more technically inclined, but also because I plan to expand my writting in 2006 and write a lot more about technology. This seemed like a good way to kick that off.

Happy holidays everyone!

Time To Proficiency

(First published March of this year.)

There are two metrics that are at the core of any sales systems success. I have never heard of them measured or discussed. Because our language of technology (at least in the world of recruiting) does not include handy references to these factors, our discussions of technology keep coming up short. And we keep getting low adoption rates for the systems that we install.

Today we talk about the first and most important metric: Time to Proficiency (TTP).

What is a Candidate?

(Warning: Philosophical flight of fancy. Ideas may seem larger than they actually are.)

What is a candidate? A customer? A contractor? An employee? A temp? What is the difference between them? Are we asking how many angels can dance on the head of a pin? And are we hurting our effectiveness by believing that there are fundamental differences between each of these groups?

Each of these descriptors are people. One person may be many of these descriptions, all at the same time. A person can both want to work for you, and buy your products, and buy your stock. There is no contradiction in any of these actions: each is entirely consistent with the other.

Each is consistent in that there is a value-for-value exchange. The candidate gives you their time and attention in return for you providing them with an opportunity: to sell you their talent (or be sold on the opportunity). The customer provides you with their time, attention and capital in order to get a product or service. No opportunity, no product…. No people.

In all cases people make an investment of time, attention and / or capital in order to get a return that is greater than what they gave up. That is, by definition, what capitalism is. And that is why Adam Smith’s “Invisible Hand” is such a great ordering motive in chaotic human systems. We exchange value, each of us believing we got more than we gave.

There have been many attempts to describe candidates as consumers or "internal customers". But those descriptors speak directly or subtly to a belief in the insubstantial and mercurial nature of the transaction. This is not the case. The transaction is substantial. It can end up absorbing most of our life, and much of our time and attention. So the only logical language to describe the value-for-value transaction of two parties in the creative age is that of investment. I will give you something that I find valuable based on the probability that I will get something more substantial and valuable in return. My time, attention and capital are all invested capital at risk to the possibility that your job will be crap, your product will be defective or your company will go bust.

Like any investor I calculate risk based on the information available, my experience and my emotional comfort. You lie to me and you increase the risk of the transaction. You may get my investment today, but that will be the last time. If you want the repeat business (as in: I continue to buy your products or I continue to be interested in your jobs or I continue to show up for work), then you will continue to return more value to me than the investment I made. And since a candidate is a customer is a consumer is a client is a day trader is an employee, you better understand that from the time I first gain consciousness of you, you need to be selling your value to me in way that is credible and verifiable. You best be selling and reducing my risk all the time.

This is more than just idle philosophical musings. The assumption that you, as a consumer or candidate or employer, is captive to me because you need me more than I need you is at the very heart of how we do our business. It is a bankrupt business framework in an era of increased information velocity, corporate transparency and dependence on game-changing talent.

At the simplest level, the "we are all investors" framework shows that most HCM systems just aren’t made to be effective in negotiating, managing and optimizing ongoing investment transactions. Most HCM systems are designed to decrease cost and risk, and you can’t maximize value from an investor by first protecting yourself from them. The possibility of return is directly proportional to the amount of risk you are willing to engage in.

But even more than technology, seeing all nodes in your network as investors in the opportunity of your success (both individually and corporately) leads to a fundamental change in the nature of the relationship between all the parties in the network. Put simply, since most companies still can’t define value clearly, and since most companies can’t define an individual’s contribution of value to the shareholders, it is pretty tough to argue that we can determine who the bad investors are at an early stage of the overall transaction. This puts a special burden on all of us to keep reaching out and figuring out how to utilize every last human capital investor that comes our way.

The risk of missing the opportunity of any particular node is far greater than the risk of spending time and attention on someone that ends up not investing.

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.

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).

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!

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.

Software is Dead! Long Live Software!

John Sumser, my favorite luminary for the past 10 years (hard to believe that John and I have known each other that long), posted a comment to my post titled “Good Training, Bad Software.” John is justifiably famous for making statements which cause spontaneous reflection, even while the statement itself seems crazy at first blush. True to form his comment prompted a strong initial reaction: “This is crazy even for you John!”

My exceptions to John’s comments are several-fold. Saying that ERP software isn’t bad is erroneous by most measures: information architecture, user interface, cost of implementation, cost of maintenance, interruption of business, failure to be able to accurately calculate ROI: you take your pick, ERP software is bad software.

And software is clearly not “dead.” John seems to be taking the Nicholas Carr “IT Doesn’t Matter” point of view. That debate continues to rage, and not many minds have been changed. But most people agree that there is a lot of life left in software. John’s assertion that “the ERP’s have discovered the applicability of the limits of automation” is inaccurate. There is still plenty of work to do. Even more, there is plenty of work to do in inputs (including speech and handwriting recognition), outputs (including real-time, real-life voice response) and search. Software is not only alive and kicking, it is still in it infancy.

But as with most John Sumser wisdom, his comment got me to thinking. Assuming that I understand what he is saying, I have to agree with the general thrust of his argument (though not his particulars). The present software model is indeed terminally ill. It may take 30 years to kick the bucket but it is without question that the days of installing large software applications behind the firewall, developing large staff functions to maintain them and running the business by the fiat of whatever package the IT department agrees to fund will be a decreasingly viable model. The Salesforce.com model (which I will be writing about in a future post) is the direction that the software business is headed. The "software as service" model is very dependent on a strong services lead to the services / software mix, with the software forming the foundation of the knowledge capture and development offered by the services.

This doesn’t mean that there isn’t anything left to automate. Far from it: there will be more automated in the future than has been automated in the past. And it certainly doesn’t signify that the concept of software is dead: there will be more software innovation in our future than in our past, and we will be more dependent on software in the future than at anytime in our history. But it is an acknowledgement that the way that business people think about software and its value is changing rapidly. So kudos to John for possibly arriving in the right place for the wrong reasons. Possibly.

As always, comments and questions are welcome.

The Future of Candidate Information Systems

The more valuable the candidate, the more valuable their information. There are three critical pieces of information that a valuable candidate possesses that talent strategists need to know:

• Proof of their ability to create (or execute, which is tougher prove)
• The extent, power and transparency of their network
• Referral proofs about work preferences and behaviors

There will come a day (and it will be soon) when we will realize the value of that information, and we will pay candidates to get access to it. The candidate will create an opt-in market where the candidate decides who they want as their customers. In return for their payment (which may be money, but could also be further connections in a network or information of value to the candidate), the customer will get an RSS feed that provides an ongoing flow of information about what the candidate is creating and who they are talking with.. The candidate will invest in continually updating their information because they receive value in return: an increasingly large market for their information, which means more payments.

CRMs will integrate RSS readers into their platforms, either directly (Microsoft) or through their partner ecosystem (Salesforce). The RSS readers will aggregate the data from the candidates and present the latest and greatest to the customer (often a sourcer). The customer will be able to initiate a follow-up action (“Call Laura on Friday, really liked her latest portfolio addition”) as well as deposit the latest data into the repository of the CRM.

The local CRM repository will become the “Internal Portfolio” of the candidate for the customer’s purpose. Through the CRM it can be shared with hiring managers and constituents, automatically, based on the profiles of interest those hiring managers have set.

Candidates will pay money or provide access to their network in order to have a place to create these portfolios with access control. They will gravitate towards vendors who provide a single-source for networking, communication, portfolio and market management tools.

Who will be the first vendor to figure this out? The vendor will have to be candidate-focused in their business model and creative in their brand.

Good Training, Bad Software

Here’s a good rule of thumb for people thinking about buying a piece of technology: the more training it takes to use it, the worse it is. And by “worse” I mean you will be saying “This stinks!” within a month of implementation.

It’s a handy reference for understanding why some CIO’s seem so disconnected from the world of the average user. The software they install and manage takes a lot of training to use. Ever tried to create a employee record in PeopleSoft? How about a GL entry in Oracle. Not possible to do without a week of training. Its job security for the user and the purchaser.

It’s also the main reason that the large ERP vendors will never, ever be good at recruiting and talent software. Their entire business model is based on the assumption that they can get their customers to spend lots of money to train people to use their software. Good recruiting software only succeeds when any untrained and unenthusiastic user (the Invisible 80) user can get value from it without a lot of training. Ergo, ERP never going to be a player. New ERP may come up and change that (here’s hoping Dave gets it right).

Of course that means that the Innovator’s Dilemma is about to smack most of the big ATS players right in the face: they have been building software for the Power 10, because that’s the best way to close sales in the present software environment. Unfortunately, once the metric becomes usability, most ATS will be DOA.

Here’s a corollary to the rule of thumb listed above: the more disconnected from the problem the user of software is, the more training it will take to use that software. So if a person is experiencing a problem and needs to solve it and uses software to do so, then it will likely be simple. If, on the other hand, the problem is “someone else’s” then the software will be difficult to use.

Which is to say: the more expensive the software, the less valuable. (This is only partially true right now, but will be increasingly so over the next decade.)

The final thing to realize is: if your job is to make sure you have a job, then spending a lot on software is a good way to succeed.

Tech Talk: AJAX and Simplicity

A great piece from John Sumser today. John was the first to talk about AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript and XML), which will change the RMS industry forever within 3 years. While John has been very kind in talking about my tech talk, I believe that John is really the one that consistently uncovers the good stuff.

But my love of John's piece today drives me to quibble with his piece yesterday (and it is just a quibble, because his main point that trust drives community is dead-on). At my old company (Euphorion) we actually created and demonostrated an XML / Javascript platform in 2000. Everyone thought we were nuts. My point is that things never happen as fast as you think they will, and they were never as slow as they appear in hindsight. Kurzweil seems to miss that creativity is not what drives innovation - adoption is. RFID has been around for over 20 years. Looks like a miracle now, in fact just Walmart finally coming around to the obvious. And much as I would like to think that ATS will be a dinosaur in 5 years, I have to deal with the fact that there are still companies that run on old D&B mainframe systems (which should have died out with the advent of client/server in the early 80's).

But there is something really cool that is happening in tech right now, and I believe we will look back at it and see it as a revolution (which may prove Kurweil right after all, come to think of it). Most technology adoption has been driven by companies that are looking to baffle the customer (including Web 1.0). Baffling the customer makes for a good maintenance contracts and lots of annuity revenue. Today's Web 2.0 technology is being driven by people who love the possibility of elegance in technology: simplicity, ingenuity, community. As John has been saying for years, software will increasingly become less valuable due to this. It will just be a platform to incorporate creativity, knowledge and process.

Getting more employees focused on those areas will be the key to competitive advantage. The CIO should start thinking about becoming the CPO (Chief Process Officer).

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11.)     Plan for the Difference Between “Efficiency” and “Effectiveness”

Every requisition is different. One size does not fit all, especially in systems. For each requisition the objective is either to get a person to fill the position as fast as possible, or to get the best possible person for the job. These two objectives are often mutually exclusive, especially if you haven’t invested in sourcing ahead of requirement. While hiring managers often say they need both, they usually need one more than the other. The type of hire should drive the type of system, including the level of process automation. And if you do a lot of both types of hiring, you may need two different systems (although this is changing, which I will address in future posts).

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10.)     Make the Vendors Address IT’s Issues Up Front

Too many IT departments have been burned by bad product selections and failed implementations that have fallen into their laps. Here is the harsh reality: if IT owns the purchase / implementation budget and you don’t speak directly to their cost and risk issues, IT will force you into a solution you don’t want and can’t use.

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9.)        Implement through Alignment

Implementation failure is the single greatest headache you can face in the RMS game. RMS implementations frequently fail (don't meet the expectations of the buyer or gain widespread adoption by intended users).  A primary cause of failure is the lack of alignment on expectations of capital, capability and concept between key constituents involved in the implementation. Since the standard waterfall implementation methodology (document, review, agreement, implementation) doesn’t deal with this issue effectively, you need to rethink how to best get alignment before the implementation even starts.

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8.)        In RMS, Usability Drives ROI

Recruitment Management Systems (RMS) bake-offs almost always follow the same script: a group of “early adopter” recruiters who like technology control the sales process. Employment management sees recruiters at the table actively engaged in providing input to the selection process and believes they have recruiter buy-in. This group of recruiters (the “Power 10” from a previous example) almost always select based on the coolest feature / functions shown in the product demonstrations. Unfortunately these feature / functions rarely drive overall user adoption. In fact, often they work against adoption by the Invisible 80 due to increased system complexity.

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7.)        Don’t Forget the Invisible 80

The most common mistake in any technology selection and implementation process is to forget what I call the “Invisible 80.” Experience shows that in any group of technology users there is a roughly 10-80-10 distribution of recruiter affinity for an implemented solution. In other words, 10% of your users aren’t going to use the technology you implement no matter what you do and 10% are going to love almost whatever you implement (the “Power 10”). That leaves this large mass of users in the middle: the “Invisible 80”. The Invisible 80 will use the solution you chose and implement as long as it doesn’t get in the way of their preferred processes and workflows. They are the ones that make (or break) your system’s success.

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6.)        Don’t Let Technology Make you a Commodity

Employment is sitting on top of a gold mine of information. Employment data is the gateway to most social networks, demographic analysis and competitor intelligence (for the best piece I know of on the topic you should read John Sumser’s “Roses in the Thornbush” white paper). Don’t sell your technology investment to management as “getting people in here cheaper and faster.” This tells senior management that employment is nothing more than a standardized process that can be automated, or worse, outsourced completely. Focus on buying “strategic information capability” and not on “a better electronic filing cabinet.”

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5.)        Once You Are Sold, Keep Selling

Select a solutions partner who will provide you with the tools, knowledge and support needed to keep the internal sales job going. Forget about selling on the standard “Cost per Hire” and “Time to Hire” metrics. These measures focus management on the tactical nature of your work. Instead focus on metrics which differentiate you within the business: return on human capital, top-line growth in supported businesses, and the direct attribution of that success to your insights, analysis and service offering.

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4.)        Technology is Not a Solution

If you are accountable for identifying, buying and / or implementing your organization's next Recruitment Management System (RMS, or ATS if you like), then you need to understand that technology in itself is not a solution to whatever business problem you are trying to solve. Your solution lies in technology and process optimization and strategic alignment and constant feedback loops of relevant information.

Most (though not all) of the really hard RMS technical issues have been solved. So whatever you do, don’t pick an RMS vendor based on their technology. Pick a solutions vendor who can be a trusted advisor to you and your management. You need a solutions partner who can speak directly to the core issue: “How are your technologies and services going to enable me to be strategic partner to my business lines, leverage the information I can capture to add value to the enterprise and help create value in both hiring efficiency and business effectiveness?” Picking a technology vendor because of a technology feature is the same as choosing your surgeon based on how they hold a scalpel.

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3.)        Partner with IT, not Purchasing

At a time when your technology solution vendor selection is ever more critical to your organization’s ability to become a strategic partner to your business lines it would be a big mistake to turn over vendor selection to your purchasing department. Most purchasing departments are designed to evaluate cost and risk. While those are important factors in vendor / partner selection, they are secondary to finding the vendor whose unique mix of technology, services and insight align to your strategic needs. These needs should include developing a roadmap that works backward from your organization’s overall goals (begin with the end in mind), aligning processes to those goals, ensuring that you are capturing the data needed to prove your ability to meet those goals, and then (last of all, and perhaps least), supplying a technology that can support your objectives in all of those areas.

Purchasing is just not set up to evaluate the strategic capability of a vendor. Worse of all, having purchasing running your vendor selection communicates that the vendor is not important and that you are merely buying a commodity. Even if a good vendor wins, they will have fewer resources, time and inclination to make you a success, no matter what their sales people say.

Partner with IT instead. IT is in the same situation you are. They have cost and risk mandates from management at the same time that they are looking for innovative ways to take their key assets (in your case people, in their case technology) to help their business lines get strategic top-line traction. IT is looking for partners within the organization to make a strategic difference with. Recruiting is the right partner.

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2.) Cheaper, Faster AND Better

“Cheap, fast or good…pick any two” used to be a great way to get across an important idea: most projects are constrained by either money (cheap) or time (fast) or money AND time (good). It’s typically the best way project managers have of constraining client expectation while managing resources effectively. But it’s usefulness is decreasing. The recruiting / employment systems of the future must be able to address all three. But whereas most employment systems vendors have made progress in the areas of “cheap and fast” the recruitment technology market must start to focus on the concept of “good.” One way to do this would be to define “good” beyond just the standard metric of “quality of hire” (i.e. “does the system help me hire better people”). This kind of “good” is still broken at the definition level. Quality is defined by variation to specification, not by happy hiring managers. So until such time that people can solve that problem, we should be defining “good” (at least in as applied to recruitment technology) as “which vendor will partner with me to get me the information I need?” Can the vendor develop an end-to-end business process and measurement vehicle that will deliver the kinds of strategic information you need to help your clients accelerate top-line growth? For example: which sources of hire result in better products? Better customer satisfaction ratings? Better on-time project delivery? Which contingency recruiting partners? Which brand messages yield a superior close rate on hires that resulted in a better product? More sales?

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Some pithy, (hopefully) some profound, 11 days and 11 thoughts on recruitment and recruitment technology.

1.)        Recruitment = $ = Core Strategic Asset

Many talent execs speak passionately of their frustration at not being viewed as a strategic player inside the enterprise. The entire business rises and falls with human capital so It seems obvious that the department responsible for human capital acquisition should be a core strategic player at the executive roundtable. We all know this is not often the case.

If business is to continue to develop competitive advantage in world markets U.S. companies will have to acquire, manage and train the world’s best people. Developing and staffing the “right” jobs and the “right” people is more critical than ever.

But "strategic" usually means "revenue." Recruiting's inability to map its ROI to the top-line of the P&L is hurting it's ability to become more strategic. Aligning business strategy, recruiting process, data capture and metrics / analysis to yield data that can speak to how much money recruiting is making for the company is one key. Being able to understand the business well enough to track the effect of talent on their efforts is another. Technology that is enthusiastically adopted by non-specialized users (as in, "not specifically trained to operate a system") is critical to acquiring, developing, maintaining, integrating and analyzing the information needed to make either of these happen. This is the next phase of enterprise software development.

Good News is No News

“Good News is No News; No News is Bad News; Bad News is Good news..” – Jim Morgan, Chairman, Applied Materials

Picture this: You are thinking about purchasing a new Applicant Tracking System (ATS). You are at the “pitch meeting”. The salesperson tells you that their application can slice and dice, never gets dull and comes with a lifetime warranty. You want to jump out of your seat and scream “Yes! I want that! Give me twenty of them!” But before you can even move, you hear the magic words: “Wait, there’s more!” More? More? How can there possibly be more? And then you hear “If you order now you’ll get…”

Technology Ramblings

You hang around HCM technologies as long as I have and you start to get jaded. But occasionally things start happening that gives you hope that real leadership and innovation will come to this critical market. I have already talked about why I am such a Simply Hired fan. Some other technologies and news that are keeping me excited about our space…

Innerworkings – Innerworkings has developed an automated code judging engine for the training and development (learning) marketplace. The technology is truly fantastic. They have spent thousands of hours figuring out what best practice looks like in the .NET (C# and VB specifically) development environment, and then figured out a way to have a system evaluate not just the quality of the code written by a developer but also the effectiveness of the approach the developer took to solve a particular programming problem. While Innerworkings is presently focused on the area of training and development (learning), it doesn’t take a genius to see that this could be the first really effective technical assessment tool in the market place. Here’s hoping they get the customer momentum to move in that direction.

MS CRM / Salesforce.com – The ATS market has been begging for a disruptive technology to justify ongoing investment since 1995. Time and again vendors claim nirvana and deliver nothing. There are a lot of reasons for this, but one of the big ones is that ATS vendors design to win sales, not user acceptance. Over time this model leads to the ridiculous customer turnover that we have all witnessed. But this may finally be changing. With Microsoft’s release of MS CRM 3.0  (full release scheduled for December of this year), their CRM capabilities have been fully woven into the Exchange Server / Office System framework, which is where over 57%   of all corporate recruiters and hiring managers do their work. It has long been known that having to conduct a transaction (i.e. sending a candidate a meeting request) and then having to tell your ATS what you just did (usually by assigning a tracking action) typically ends up with bad data in the ATS. And while MS CRM is not (yet) targeted at the ATS market, the basic ATS functionality is so well defined and so static at this point that it would take an infinitesimal portion of Microsoft’s technological prowess to embed the needed fields, workflows, posting mechanisms and search technology into MS CRM to absolutely crush most of the ATS players out there now.

But MS isn’t getting cocky (much to my surprise). They hear footsteps: the sound of Salesforce’s Appforce platform coming on strong. Appforce shares many of the benefits of MS CRM (its Office integration isn’t as strong, but that is more due to its status as a hosted play than any architectural inability to fulfill that vision), and it is cheaper and easier to deploy and manage. The recruiting team at Salesforce has been using an earlier Salesforce product to run its recruiting operation for the last couple of years. Their results speak for themselves.

Oracle Kills Siebel (for us anyway) – With the sales of Siebel to Oracle, the internal skunk-works project to take Siebel’s CRM platform into true candidate relationship management territory will likely die a quick death. No need to have yet another internal program competing with Oracle’s (formerly PeopleSoft’s) astoundingly bad ATS play. Yet hope springs eternal in the land of enterprise software. SAP seems to be finally focusing its guns on the HCM space (hopefully Mark will do better freed from the shackles of Peoplesoft's "Recruiting isn't HR" arrogance). Who knows.... maybe SAP will get religion and finally buy an ATS firm so that they can get into PeopleSoft accounts through the back door.

Jobster – I am not a Jobster customer, but I hope to be someday. While the market talks ad naseum about Jobster’s slick advertising, great capitalization and killer board of directors, my hope lies with the quality of their leadership. I am a big Dave Lefkow fan, and I have been impressed with my interactions with CEO Jason Goldberg . So why am I not a customer? Mostly because I don’t believe that email job posting and referral chains are the next killer passive sourcing technique. But what the market seems to miss is that Jobster is creating a killer opt-in marketing vehicle. Sure they are replicating functionality that already exists in most email marketing engines, and the WorkZoo acquisition may be distracting in the end, and the email thing will get stale fast (when predictions say that by 2009 80% of all email traffic will likely be spam you have to wonder how many Jobster messages will get filtered out over time). But… who cares? If you take a company that has smart leaders, good positioning and the humility and capital to figure it out, all those negatives will pale in comparison to the positives: a true distributed opt-in marketing network. Put contact management and robust passive candidate profiling tools on that framework and you have something that could really compete against the coming juggernaut from Salesforce and MS. None of the ATS players is prepared to head that off. Only Jobster has hope. And once that hope is fulfilled (and assuming they continue to move to a really rich integration platform a la Niku), then I will be signing up. Of course they are still going to have to deploy that Outlook toolbar….

Recruitforce - And I am the only one who was sad that Recruitforce sold out to Taleo? Matt Robinson may have been the first technologist to really get it in this space.

WetFeet - All eyes on WetFeet. Someone is going to figure out that Gary and Steve are every bit as good as the Taleo team, and that EIS is hands-down the best efficiency engine for high volume hiring in the entire ATS marketplace. Their tech team is top notch, and WetFeet Recruiter is perhaps the best mid-market ATS out there.

A Contrary Point of View on The Vertical Search Market in Employment

Back in the days when I ran my own company I learned a hard lesson. We had some great new technology we had developed. I thought it was going to be really big. Then a bunch of people inside the organization started to give me contrary opinions. Being a concerned boss I listened to the