Oil Changers and Car Designers

There are some fiery words flying around over on the wonderful new blog Recruitingbloggers.com. Apparently some people find no use for recruiting blogs, saying they are a waste of time and fail to provide any value. The logical challenge posed by people who spend so much time reading recruiting blogs that they can claim with certainty that the blogs are worthless aside (just how bored are you guys anyway?), the diatribes did get me to thinking once again about the value of blogging and the nature of recruiting.

Everyone inhabits the world of vanity press for their own reasons (and we should all be clear – given the nature of blogging, serial commenters are as much “bloggers” as the publishers themselves). When I started I hoped to create a forum for discussing the idea of a Talent-centered economic system, along with the possibility of changing the systems, technologies and concepts we use to identify, locate, connect with, close and utilize talent. I believe that every business, including it’s component functions, must innovate or die. Recruiting is no exception. But of all the many and various corporate departments I have worked with or for, recruiting is by far the most intractable and resistant to change. It appears to be a combination of the arrogance of sales (“I am too busy closing to learn something new!”) and the business ignorance of HR (“You can’t fire me… I’m a people person!”). Recruiting’s bad rep is well known business-wide, and so I walked into blogging with my eyes wide open. It just seemed that the best possible place to affect corporate and economic change was in the “identify, locate, connect with and close” pieces of the puzzle. And so I have maintained consistently that recruiting is a strategic function and that if recruiting really was going to add to the top and bottom-line capability of an organization that it would have to operate a lot differently. In fact, I go one step further: there is no way to sustain comparative advantage without innovating around the concept, systems and technology that affect how you identify, locate, connect with, close and utilize talent. Talentism has been a way for me to explore how best to achieve that objective.

By that measure, this blog has largely been a failure. It’s more than just Mr. Sumser saying “Nobody gets TQM” when we have been putting it into practice for the last two years, and more than some grumpy web denizens saying that blogs don’t have value. It’s this sneaking suspicion that I am tilting at windmills: recruiting is as recruiting does, and by that measure, not much is going to change outside of isolated businesses that get the value of talent and innovate to win.

The variety, depth and passion of the recruiting blogosphere was a valid indication that there were other Quixote's out there. But if even those fine individuals are saying that they are islands in a calm sea of "who gives a damn?" then it is perhaps time to evaluate the reason that sea exists. As I have peeled the onion of my own feelings of despair, I have come to the decision that at its core, I have a frustration with oil changers and car designers.

When the oil light goes on in your car you take it to Jiffy Lube (or your favorite mechanic). You want fast, cheap, reliable service. You don’t have conversations about epistemology or the purpose of oil, or how oil will someday run out and what exactly will that mean for the plastics and organic fertilizer businesses? You just need to know that the person in the coveralls knows how to drain your oil, replace the filter, and fill ‘er up with the right stuff. It’s not rocket science, but if it isn’t done well you are a lot of trouble, so you tend to value people who do it well.

When you are deciding to get into the car business, you go the Art College of Design, or RISD. You talk to people about your envisioned purpose of the car and the possibility of oil cartels gone bad and the nature of design and the meaning of transportation, because all of those things inform the creative process in a deep and meaningful way. You don’t really care whether the person in the funny glasses with the wild hairdo knows anything about 10W-40, or how you have to replace the brass washer on the oil plug because vibration wears it down. You just care that you get the straightest possible line between your vision and the reality of a new car.

Now the simple fact is that you can’t have one without the other. No car designer, no cars. No cars, no oil changes. No oil changes, no cars, No cars, nothing for the designers to design. Like every other complex industrial system, it is a large web of connections and shared dependencies, even though most people who change oil don’t think twice about who designs the cars, and the people who design the cars usually can’t care less about how you change the oil.

Most societies, all modern industries, and increasingly, communities… they all act on this principle: specialization and interconnectedness.

But in recruiting you have this somewhat weird phenomenon: the oil change person not only doesn’t care about the designer, but believes that all designers are grandiose idiots that can go to hell because they don’t know how to change oil. And the designers (the few that there are in recruiting) sit around and say “Hey, if we don’t design you don’t have anything to change the oil on” which leads them (the designers) to think that all the oil change personnel are backwards hicks who have the business sense of your average lemonade stand owner. The fighting and the finger pointing vary in pitch and frequency, but it is always there below the surface.

The recruiting oil changers know that recruiting is just about getting butts in seats, and that any attempt to complicate it beyond that is a fools-errand, a desire to take something beautiful in its simplicity (find, talk, close) and turn it into something that is needlessly complex and almost completely divorced from the reality of most day-to-day recruiters. And you know what? They are right.

The recruiting designers know that all business functions, without exception, exist for the purpose of increasing return on capital above the cost of capital (true profit) and that any process, system or work that isn’t optimized towards a sustainable approach to achieving this objective is the playground of social workers and mechanics who are just one req away from getting outsourced. And you know what? They are right too.

The number of people in the recruiting world who are truly attempting to get those two sides together is unfortunately small. The “thinkers and designers” haven’t spent a whole lot of time running recruiting organizations recently (if at all), so they think that the cretins who man the halyards are the unfortunate individuals that stand in the path between their vision and today’s reality. And many of the “oil changers and mechanics” have little desire to learn new ways and methods of doing their job, and therefore think the prognosticators are a bunch of blowhards that never deliver value. The people in the middle, who both design and change the oil, read what the designers have to say and think “nice theory, but your failure to ever put it into practice means that your theory and two nickels are worth ten cents” and then hear the plaintive cries of the mechanics and say “You know what, you are just teeing your whole profession up to be commoditized and outsourced.”

Maybe it’s just that the middle isn’t for me. I know that EA is doing things that have never been done before, and that we are getting superior results at both the design and mechanic levels. It may be a complete waste of time to be questioning the execution capability of the designers, and I don’t need to be convincing people who leave comments like “blogs have no value” that they are one step away from becoming the butlers of the 21st century.

Comments

[Martin Snyder]

Jeff I'm a serial commenter and cars should have tanks where you pour new oil and drains where you empty it out while getting gas. The vehicle should take care of the rest.

Thus designers can take care of the oil-changers, for good.

[Shally]

I'm with Marin on this, I think designers can affect enough change to get rid of the Jiffy Lube. The problem is at what cost can that be done? For example, if we design a car that requires next to no maintenance then it becomes a very expensice car to build. Once something does need to be repaired, it now requires an engineer and not a mechanic.

Another problem is that all the oil changers would resent this new car since it would mean that to stay in business they have to add value beyond the no longer needed oil change. They must now provide services which would be needed in a low-maintenance car, and partner with the car owner to forsee future needs instead of just waiting for them to come in every 3,000 miles :)

[Jeremy Langhans]

Maybe we can put all those out of work butlers into the low-maintenance car's as the "value add"?

[Critic]

The beauty of designing is that you have an opportunity not only to improve a car's performance, but make it cheaper as well. Unfortunately for corporate America, we seem to be waiting for others to show us a better design, both in the auto industry and in human capital. Most businesses today aren't concerned with proactive redesign of recruiting systems. They just want things to work as they always have. It seems many companies will simply have to feel so much pain that a re-design suddenly makes sense. Despite the no-brainer need to overhaul the talent dimension of business, many don't get it. They'll have to experience real pain before they do. Pain is a very good teacher.

On the other hand, we could just wait for the Japanese to show us the way...again.

[Masoyi]

i design cars for my self which i intend to produce in future. also i want a company to give me a contract on car designs