A Talentist

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.