« December 2006 | Main | February 2007 »
From my mom:
the fact that your IQ is higher than mine leaves me puzzled why you can't incorporate this BASIC punctuation rule:
"no, you aren't a fit."
the commas and periods go INSIDE the quotation mark, not outside, as you ALAWYS [sic] write in your blog.
A quick note from the Talent Unconference -- more coming later.
The focus of my group was "Meaningful Connections". We spent a lot of time talking about employment branding and the lack of response from recruiters to candidates.
The question I used to frame my feedback was one I thought of on the plane ride to San Fran -- Why is a job application the only application you'll ever fill out where there is no expectation of a response, either positive or negative?
Think about it. With most job applications, the best you can hope for is an automated acknowledgment that the resume was received. We hear constantly from job seekers that they appreciate being told "no, you aren't a fit". That's amazing. Would you ever fill out an application for a loan and expect to hear nothing? How about a college application?
This recent article on ERE by Lisa Calicchio, director of professional recruiting for Johnson & Johnson, really nails the importance of a feedback loop from job seeker to recruiter and recruiter to job seeker. I'm not sure the link will work, but anyway, here's the nut:
For companies the size of Johnson & Johnson, the potential impact of this network is staggering. Over one million candidates per year apply to our positions. We fill about 12,000 positions globally per year, which means that only 1% of candidates who apply are hired and 99% are not.Do the math: Johnson & Johnson has a potential network of nearly two million candidates who know about us simply through word-of-mouth advertising.
If these individuals have a negative perception of our company because of what they may have heard from others who have been through our recruiting process, the ramifications are astronomical. These individuals are not only potential candidates themselves but perhaps consumers of our products. Think about the impact this could have on our sales, let alone our hiring!
Newsday reporter Patricia Kitchen has a kitchen-sink (sorry) rundown of job sites, including TheLadders.
Heather picks up on my previous post on SmugMug to talk about the recruiting tools that work for her.
And lookie here, one of them is TheLadders. Hey, it's my blog, I can be shamelessly self-promoting.
Here's the highlight:
And I want to justify my avid support of TheLadders by saying that yes, we make lots of hires through them. And I like the way they think and work. And I want to support them because they do good work and they make my job easier. And since I don't pay them for anything, all I can offer is my endorsement.
For those of you scoring at home, Heather's equation (and I suspect a lot of other recruiters) works out like this:
Hires = good.
Hires + great customer service + a willingness to listen = great.
Slick marketing and no results = bad.
Back at the ol' alma mater, my fraternity brother Satoni starred in this spoof trailer for "American Jedi".
He's the guy who's the dead ringer for Jason Biggs.
Thanks to the glory of the Internet and its pipes, you can watch it here:
Courtesy of Jobster.com.
1) Fire all of your outside sales and support team.
2) Slash your prices for your recruiter product to basically free.
3) Re-focus your web site (Jobster.com) on the job seeker/consumer.
4) Offer free job postings.
5) Hire a Director of Online Media Sales for Jobster.com.
Easy enough!
TechCrunch writes of a pretty cool company I'd never heard of -- SmugMug.
It's basically a photo uploading site (like KodakGallery or Flickr) that aims at the professional/serious hobbyist photographer.
And there's no free version.
Writes TechCrunch:
There is no free version of the service. People pay a minimum of $40 per year to upload photos to the site. Pro accounts, which are $150/year, give photographers a number of tools to add watermarks, and sell downloads as well as prints of their work. The higher level accounts also allow customers to use templates, fully customize the look and feel of their albums (or “galleries” as SmugMug calls them), and even use their own domain names.
Does this work? You bet, to the tune of $10 million in revenue a year, 19 employees, and never having raised a cent of outside capital.
I swear, is Marc C., our CEO running SmugMug in his spare time? Marc likes to say that we're not a Web 2.0 company, just like Don MacAskill does repeatedly in this TechCrunch writeup. And like SmugMug, we've created a niche in a sea of free websites (Monster, CareerBuilder, Hotjobs, etc.) that people are paying for. They pay for premium content (hand-filtered $100k+ jobs in our case ) and industry leading customer service (in both cases). Most importantly for SmugMug (and really the growth of any company with an narrowly defined userbase and a company that charges a premium for what others offer for free) is a laser-focus on listening to their customers and creating a community that people come back to time after time.
Kudos to the SmugMug team!
That's right folks, it's American Idol time!
Be sure to check back once we get down to the final 16 for your weekly handicapping column!
Jeff Hunter, the Director, Talent Strategy & Technology at Electronic Arts, Inc., is hosting the "Talent Unconference" in a few weeks out at EA's global headquarters (Redwood Shores, CA).
Here's the lowdown from Jeff's blog:We all get calls. Lots of calls. Same old products, same old services. And yet somehow every one of these products and services is “innovative” and “serves your unique needs in astounding and special ways.”
We all read articles. Lot of articles. Same old people, same old story. And yet somehow every one of them has “redefined recruiting” or “changed HR” and “is truly leading pioneering work in talent.”
And then we meet people. A lot of people. New and exciting people. They really are innovating. They really are redefining the field of talent. Not the popular kids. These are the people in the chess club instead of the football field. They aren’t using the same old product or service, and they aren’t the same old people. They are tired of the same old ideas being sold as “new and innovative.” They get a thrill out of challenging the status quo. They live to create exciting new ways to transform the field of talent. Many times they aren’t in recruiting or HR but have a real passion around talent because the understand that it really is a game changer. They translate talent innovation into amazing business results.
I think it is time for these new people to teach and learn. It is time for an unconference.
One of the cool things about this conf...err, unconference is that you need to apply to attend. It's not just pay and show up. In other words, you need to add some value. In Jeff's words again:
On January 25 Electronic Arts is going to open its doors to those who can teach and learn about innovations in talent. I am calling this “Talent Unconference” or Taluncon for short. The ground rules are simple but absolutely unbendable. If you would like to show up on January 25 you have to do three things:* Clearly define what you want to learn about how to attract, locate, connect with, work with, leverage the value of, measure the value of and / or reward talent. It has to be something that you have tried to learn somewhere else and weren’t able to because it just isn’t talked about, and it has to be something that has some connection to “business” (P&L).
* Clearly define what you can teach about how to attract, locate, connect with, work with, leverage the value of, measure the value of and / or reward talent. It has to be something that you can’t find a lecture or speech about anywhere else. And it has to be “innovative.” How do you know if it is innovative? Go to the next step.
* Write me an email telling me about those two things (see last line of article for details).
Here's what I wrote for my "application":
We want to both learn and teach about how companies and recruiters value, manage, control, understand the candidate experience from application to offer.At TheLadders, we always say we “work for the job seeker”. We have a team of 20 in-house “Community” (customer-service) members that focus exclusively on the job seeker – responding to emails, answering phone calls, conducting live chats. The most common complaint that we hear from job seekers is that they never hear anything back from recruiters (both corporate and agency). But the most common refrain we hear from our recruiters is that they don’t have time/don’t want to respond to all applicants. What is the cause of this rift and what can be done to bridge the gap?
Given those questions, we want to learn what are companies doing to manage the candidate experience? How much is actually put into practice and how much is just lip service? How do companies manage their employment brand and candidate experience when so much of it is given over to 3rd parties – job boards, 3rd party recruiters, ATS providers, hiring managers? What defines a good candidate experience? What are companies doing after the hire is made to measure the experience? What other stakeholders are involved in defining and shaping candidate experience?
We can teach the same – we have thousands of interactions with job seekers and recruiters every week. The goals are the same – get jobs/make hires. But the methods and messages are different. We bring a unique job-seeker-focused viewpoint that no other vendor in online recruiting is capable of matching. Many companies manage the experience well but most do not. Why is that? By showing the true job seeker experience through our records of emails, phone calls, chat transcripts etc., we hope to engage in an honest dialogue of what is an acceptable candidate experience, how is this reconciled with the demands of the average corporate recruiter, and what standards can we all (vendors, candidates, hiring companies) adopt to bring everyone’s work up to a higher standard.
Hopefully I'll get in. I didn't mention that I want to see how they make Madden and Tiger Woods Golf, but that would be cool too :-).
I'm not much of a network news guy (probably because I haven't been home with any regularity at 6PM since grade school). But Brian Williams always struck me as a pretty swell guy.
If only I knew! Turns out he's a huge fan of the New York Times Sunday Styles Wedding section, just like moi! Oh happy day!
He treats Weddings like dessert though, saying he reads that section (actually a sub-section of Sunday Styles) only after "the A Section, Metro, Week in Review, Business, Book Review, Magazine and Automobiles."
Well Brian, I really suggest you start with Weddings. For me it's like an appetizer, entree, and a big make-your-own sundae bar all rolled into one.
The weekly LinkedIn update on MrShafrir.com brings yet another new release -- LinkedIn Answers.
Before I get to that, let's talk once more about how LinkedIn releases a new offering: they just put it up on your home page. I've seen a few things come and go, but I imagine they get some pretty immediate feedback on user acceptance and adoption. Setting the expectation that things are dynamic on your LinkedIn homepage is also good strategy -- it gives LinkedIn the chance to use their live site as a testing ground. A virtual petri dish, if you will.
So, back to LinkedIn answers. At first glance, it looks similar to something like a Yahoo! Answers. You ask a question, the "community" gets to answer. Your answers, unless you choose to "Answer Privately", are posted for all to see. I don't yet see the capability to reply to a posted answer, making this less conversation/message board/thread focused, and more "I want a big information dump" slanted. Questions are divided into sub-categories like "Finance and Accounting", "Marketing and Sales", and "Hiring and Human Resources".
There is also the chance to become an "expert" in your field by having your answers voted as the best answer. It looks like the more times your answer is voted "best" to a particular question, the higher you move up the "expert" field.
I did see some questions being answered by salespeople looking to pimp their own products. That is to be expected. I'm not necessarily opposed to people adding a link to their own site or their phone number at the bottom of their answer, but, and this is a big "but", the signal-to-noise ratio tends to get wildly out of hand when people start treating these forums as their personal billboards. I also noticed that questions asked and answers given show up the respective LinkedIn profiles for the asker and answerer.
As far as traction, last night there were 5 pages of questions and this morning there were already 29. One question had 13 answers. Of course, this feature is less than 24 hours old, so those stats are pretty useless.
Here's a screenshot of what showed up on my LinkedIn homepage:
There was also a subtle change last night to text ad for Execunet at the top of the page. Whereas before the ad was job seeker focused (encouraging job seekers to look at jobs that paid $150k+), last night (and this morning) the ad now offers a "Complimentary $100k+ job post". Why LinkedIn would cannibalize their own paid job postings is beyond me, but the money must be pretty good. Whatever potentially drives recruiters away from posting jobs on and to Execunet seems like a strategic error when LinkedIn for Jobs is really starting to gain a lot of traction in the online recruiting world (especially when that text link is RIGHT next to an ad encouraging you to "Learn more about recruiting on LinkedIn).
Here's a screen shot of that:
UPDATE: Speaking of biting the hand that feeds you -- I've noticed more than a few recruiters posting job openings (for free) as "Questions" in the Hiring and Human Resources section. Crafty!
Well, the hammer finally fell at Jobster, almost a week after CEO Jason Goldberg (famously?) flew off his blog handle.
His latest post explaining the firing of 60 employees (about 40% of their workforce) doesn't really offer all that much in terms of going-forward strategy except to say that they got rid of their highest priced (and presumably least revenue generating) employees. There's some vague references into turning Jobster.com into a useful, game-changing, consumer/jobseeker-facing site, but as they say in farming, I'm not counting those chickens until they hatch. Jobster will still offer their enterprise-level products, but it looks like they are pursuing a VAR sales channel as opposed to a direct sales/support force. My hunch is that some of what Jobster has offered as part of their enterprise-level offering will be broken into smaller a la carte options to be sold over the phone. No one was ever able to really explain to me what Jobster did/does, so I can't tell what those options might be.
In any case, good luck to the 60 or so newly jobless folks.
UPDATE: OK, so maybe not all 60 employees are so sad about the layoff...that, if anything spells real trouble for Jobster. Blog post here. Really damning quote: "The only tears I saw were shed by employees who weren't laid off". Ouch!
OK, that's it for now -- karma can be a real bitch, so I'll lay low!