HRMDirect President Colin Kingsbury writes on the latest in recruiting and technology.

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Do not adjust your vertical, do not adjust your horizontal... It's still me, presenting this week's Blogswap posting from Frank Mulligan of Recruit China. Frank picks on some of my earlier criticisms of screening questions and makes some great points about how they can be used well... which is why we added them to our feature list a few months back. We continue to advise our customers to use them thoughtfully, and Frank's post has some excellent suggestions on how to do so.

Disagreeing with Colin
Taking part in the Blogswap has proved to be a job of work for many of us because we have to post on sites that are focused areas other than our own. But the differences have often proved to be the agent of the muse. The results can be better when you have to work at the writing.

And so to Colin Kingsbury's blog. For me it's like looking in a mirror. Where are the differences between us? Few. What can I tap into I ask myself? Not much. What is obviously different is that we are on opposites ends of the world but the nature of the things we do turn out to be much the same. The components of the recruiting process in China is much the same as in the US.

On his blog I find that Colin offers a leading-edge Applicant Tracking System that does away with many of the problems that are inherent in manual systems. We are in agreement 'cause I got one o' those. Colin's blog is on recruitment and technology. My blog is on the nexus (nice word, eh?) of recruitment and technology. Colin spins off into interesting areas that catch his attention and I do the same but probably more often and to less effect. We even read the same books for God's sake!.

Agreement is the death of creation so I searched for something that we disagree on. It took a while and even this starts with an agreement.

Colin agrees with me, or is it me with him, that most ATS offerings are over-featured and as a result don't get used as much as they should, if at all in some cases. That's why HRMDirect built their own offering. But one feature that Colin doesn't very much like is screening questions. I love 'em and I will tell you why.

In my ATS the screening questions are not there to be answered by the candidate during his online application. Instead they are used after his Resume has been evaluated by a real live in-house recruiter. No automated screening for us, thank you very much.

The recruiter starts with the candidate's Resume and makes a judgement that the candidate is worth further effort, or not. If yes he does a Phone Screen. At the Phone Screen he cleans up the candidate's Resume and asks him the screening questions. These questions have been created by the line manager for that specific position. (With standard positions the questions can be previously agreed upon but for most positions they are part of the job set up.)

Since we began using this method we have found that client sendouts ratios, the number of people the recruiter sends the line manager divided by the number of people he hires, has gone down significantly. If you imagine the line manager asking the recruiter why he presented someone who does not even hold a driver's license, or who does not know how to use APQP, you can see how this might be the case.

Line managers are notorious for not telling recruiters these things until after the candidate has been presented. They never tell you enough unless you ask them. So the ATS pushes the recruiter to talk to the line manager and demand the screening questions. There is a little script in the job setup to say that the questions are for screening out and screening in etc., but the rest is impromptu.

The primary benefit is that allowing recruiters have this kind of conversation with line managers greatly improves the knowledge base of recruiters. Fast. They really get to know what the line manager wants, beyond the motherhood statements about '5 years experience, mechanical engineering degree, deep knowledge of product design. If anything, the ATS is set up so that recruiters must have this conversation with line managers.

There. I did it. I disagreed with Colin, sorta.

I feel better now.

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permalink  |   ( 2.8 / 709 ) Why did GM continue to crank out gas-guzzling SUVs throughout 2004 and 2005? Because customers kept on buying them. As I wrote in When Bad Features Feel Good, customers often say they want a bigger salad bar but order the spaghetti carbonara.

Yankee Group analyst Jason Corsello writes about a conversation with a CEO who said, "you aren't a SaaS vendor unless you require zero training." Jason commented that "at least in today's enterprise environment, his statement is more utopia than reality" and went on to say that,

Recruitment-centric (otherwise known as ATS) vendors, in particular, have struggled with this concept in that most of e-recruitment/ATS products today have been over-engineered and continue to struggle with enterprise use and adoption.

This statement is factually correct as far as it goes but it leaves out the primary cause of the problem: customers keep on asking vendors to build SUV-style applications.

When we launched our applicant tracking system in early 2005, it was a model of economy and simplicity. Every feature was right where you'd expect it and training sessions or demos took perhaps 30 minutes if you went into detail. Every screen was bright and beautiful. Everyone commented on how easy the system was to use and how they couldn't imagine needing any sort of training.

But there was trouble in paradise. More often than not, the demo and pitch would go over perfectly, but the prospect would give us the kiss of death in the followup call, saying something like, "You guys have built a really excellent, simplistic system." No one ever argued when we said that we had 80% of what you needed and we did that 80% better and easier than anyone else. They all just said that they absolutely needed some particular feature in that remaining 20% and bought a kitchen sink system from one of the competitors and told us to check back in a year or two. So we learned our lesson.

Over the next year, our feature count roughly tripled. From a sales perspective this has been an overwhelming success, as our customer base grew over 100% between March and May of this year, and will likely double again by sometime next month. But it does come at a price: even a 90-minute demo is going to leave out one or more major areas. In terms of training, we are about 1/4 of the way through producing four hours worth of Flash videos in order to reduce the need for in-person training, which is as inconvenient for customers as it is expensive for us.

Customers still compliment the beauty and well-thought-out design of our system. They still say we're the easiest to use system they've looked at. The added complexity is all calculated: simple things are still relatively simple to do, and the system now handles complex tasks it previously did not touch. But simple tasks are generally speaking more difficult than they used to be, because each advanced feature adds a little overhead to other processes. And in the end, 90% of what customers use day-in, day-out is what we launched with a year ago.

In the end, buying an ATS is not unlike buying a car. Sure, you will need to transport six adults and all their skiing gear once or twice a year, but the rest of the time it is going to be you and the groceries. After a year of $3 gas, people are starting to realize it makes more sense to buy a compact car and go to Hertz for those other occasions. Similarly, one of the patterns we've seen is that we do great whenever we talk to a director of recruiting or VP of HR who implemented one of our competitors at a previous employer. They know all the costs that come with the bigger systems and realize that we're still simpler and simpler is definitely better.

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permalink  |   ( 2.9 / 640 ) My contribution to this week's Blogswap is up on David Kippen's excellent blog on branding and recruiting. It's about transparency and how recruiters can use blogs to engage their candidates and clients in more productive dialogues.

We've always believed very strongly in transparency here, which is why we put the pricing for our applicant tracking system right there on our website where anyone can see it. One of these days maybe a law will be passed requiring vendors to put prices on their website so consumers can make a fair and objective comparison. Until then I just have to ask--what does everyone else have to hide?

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permalink  |   ( 3 / 657 ) Our longtime favorite Bob Wilson posts about the ongoing battle for vertical search supremacy and notes this:

Wilson’s 2nd corollary: Winners blog. It’s not ‘cause’ and ‘effect’ – it’s ‘effect’ and ‘effect.’ Proud of what you’re doing? Winners blog.

My first reaction is that this is on the order of the statistically-proven fact that pirates prevent global warming but then again....

Since starting this blog in late 2005, I've put up about 35 posts, and in that same time we've grown at nearly twice the rate we did last year with the same sales team and marketing budget. And some of those clients are companies are excited about too.

We are certainly proud of what we're building here and while we are neither the largest nor oldest provider of applicant tracking systems but that hasn't stopped large, established, and innovative companies from joining our fast-growing family of customers.

If there is one thing I hope our blog here does do, it's to give future customers a good sense of the caliber of people behind the corporate facade and a sense of our dedication to building a truly wonderful ATS. And to that end we have a couple of really exciting things coming online very soon which I am looking forward to sharing with everyone.

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permalink  |   ( 3 / 685 ) Those of you who read my blog regularly have noticed that I try to keep the press-release fluff out of it, but 2006 has been very good to us. So it is time to start thinking bigger, and to that end we are looking for great people in the following categories:

Inside Sales Rockstars
You sell or have sold software to corporate HR managers, and are accustomed to working with minimal direct oversight in a primarily telephone/web-based sales process.

What we are offering:
- Base salary
- Strong commission schedule
- Stock options
- Telecommute from anywhere in the US

Why you want to sell HRMDirect products:
- Unmatched curb appeal
- Shorter sales cycles due to aggressive pricing
- Clientbase growing 10-15% monthly
- Total support from a company committed to new client acquisition

Email me at ckingsbury-at-hrmdirect.com or call 617-938-3801 for a conversation in confidence.

Know someone who fits this profile? Send them our way and we'll pay you $2,000 if they join us.

Web Application Developers
You derive satisfaction from creating beautiful user interfaces and elegance in the code behind them. You are excited about the opportunity to help define the engineering culture of a great product. You agree with Steve Jobs' comment that "Real artists ship." You have solid experience in C# and ASP.NET and MySQL and/or SQL Server.

What we are offering:
- Base salary
- Bonus package
- Stock options
- 100% Telecommuting (Boston-area candidates preferred, though)

Why you want to join our team:
- Developing new products is more fun
- Work daily with a founding team that recognizes the value of good engineering
- Minimal bureaucracy and very few meetings
- We've still got all of the good qualities of a start-up, but our product is established and successful

Email me at ckingsbury-at-hrmdirect.com or call 617-938-3801 for a conversation in confidence.

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