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

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I'm happy to introduce you to Pat Williams, who writes the Guerilla HR blog and is director of global talent management for Factiva, a Dow Jones/Reuters company based in New Jersey. He's also a client and in a recent post talked about how HRMDirect applicant trackinghelps Factiva improve their recruiting results. Hint: it's not just about reducing compliance costs.

The best sales calls we have are the ones with people like Pat, because they aren't really sales calls: they're conversations between managers who share a vision of how to solve a problem. Pat had worked with and implemented a variety of applicant tracking systems in previous lives, and learned what every veteran knows: they're too complicated to deliver on their most audacious promises, and too expensive for what they actually do provide.

A key part of our philosophy here at HRMDirect is what we call Focus On What Matters Most. Trying to solve every problem in one fell swoop leads to indecision and delay. This is reflected in Pat's post on achieving work-life balance:

Take a little time to assess just how much time and energy you are expending each day and examine if or how this exertion is helping you meet your goals. If it's not... it's time to make a course correction to a pure focus on YOUR GOALS! I'll bet keeping this focus will help you find the time you need for your family and your sanity.

There's also a great podcast at the Cranky Middle Manager where Pat talks about the real nitty-gritty of talent management for the next decade. It's a great riposte to anyone who says the smart choice for companies is to outsource it to the experts. It may be cheap but it won't help you be great.

Pat says good things about us because we help to make him look good. He rolled out an ATS in a matter of weeks for a great price without the huge process change and user adoption problems all the other vendors force on you. We've given him plenty of follow-up service too, but not any different than what every HRMDirect client gets with their standard subscription. So if you're on the fence about getting an ATS or which one to choose, let us know and we'll show you why one client stopped looking around the minute he saw us.

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permalink  |   ( 3 / 582 ) NB about the title: It's an inside joke. Explanation, if you need it.

John Sumser's first and second articles on "Job Jacking" provoked the controversy one would expect. While John's articles as usual raise some interesting ideas, there are some serious deficiencies in the debate as a result of how he framed it.

In his original article, he compares vertical-search job scrapers to a landscaping service which cuts your lawn in the middle of the night unless you take affirmative steps to prevent it. Since we can all agree that would be absurd and wrong, he reasons, why do we tolerate the antics of Indeed.com?

There are a lot of problems with John's example. The first is that an opt-out lawnmowing service would clearly violate the very simple and ancient law of criminal trespass. The law treats information goods differently from physical goods because they are essentially different. If a staffing agency came along and took the Help Wanted sign out of a store's window and hung it in their own, we don't ned to get into (relatively) arcane areas of law like copyright, because what they're doing is stealing, plain and simple.

Now, what if I put up a help-wanted sign and someone comes along and writes that down in a notebook and uses the information to compile a directory of companies looking for employees? They are not denying me the use of my sign or my ability to recruit employees via my own preferred means. Legally, the employer would have to at the very least post a "no copying this sign allowed" notice in the window in order to have any grounds on which to make a claim against the directory publisher.

Even then, they may be on shaky ground because copyright law does not give the producer of the information unlimited rights and control over its usage. You cannot for instance write a blog and say, "No quoting allowed unless you agree with me." This is part of what is referred to as the Fair Use Doctrine and it is an actively-evolving area of the law. Among other things, the US Copyright office writes that:

Copyright protects the particular way an author has expressed himself; it does not extend to any ideas, systems, or factual information conveyed in the work.

While the copy in the job ad may be expression, one could just as soon argue that the core details--the job title, the employer's name, etc., are factual information that may be freely reported on by virtue of the employer making them publicly available.

If there is any ambiguity in this issue, it has to do with whether obedience to a site's robots.txt file is sufficient to prove compliance with copyright. As it happens, it's not entirely ambiguous as a Nevada state court ruled early this year that it was OK in a case involving Google's caching. While it will take more cases to establish the precedent firmly, it does serve to suggest that the argument is not legally absurd.

Potentially the most interesting aspect of this is whether today's common practice of forbidding the use of automated scraping tools in website TOS will be legally upheld. Traditionally these have been supported on the basis that spiders and robots can create a massive load on the server being scraped. But, if you could prove that the spider was equivalent to a single average visitor, then what grounds would you have to forbid it? My sense is that there are a lot more spiders and robots in our future.

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permalink  |   ( 3 / 389 ) Theme stolen shamelessly from The Recruiting Edge.

Enterprise Software for Dummies

Marketing
You have two cows.
Everyone else in your industry has two cows.
In order to differentiate yourself you launch a campaign focused on "the cow experience" and say nothing about the milk.
When that doesn't work, you suggest dyeing one of the cows purple.

Sales
The customer asks what makes your cows different.
You tell them that your cows will produce an unlimited supply of milk and beef virtually on demand.
The customer buys the cows.
You leave early to make your 4pm tee-time.

Professional Services
Your customer had two cows.
The salesperson told them that the two cows could produce an unlimited quantity of milk and beef on demand.
The customer now has one cow, some beef, and a really bad temper.
You tell them that if they purchase additional cows, a larger barn, and pay for two consultants to shovel the crap for the next year, then they will get what the salesperson promised them.

Engineering
The CEO wants to know how long it will take to make cows that can produce chocolate and vanilla ice cream.
You explain why that is both ridiculous and impossible.
Then you show him your new cow which can walk on its hind legs and do basic arithmetic.

Product Management
You show the board your new idea for a derivative product called "Ice Cream."
You explain that it can be sold directly to consumers at much higher margin than your cows.
The CFO doesn't understand how it will work because you actually make all your money selling professional services, not cows.
The CEO tells you to go back to the drawing board.

Sales Engineering
You create a demo cow which can produce ice cream. For fun, you dye it purple and teach it to dance the Lindy Hop.
You take great pains to explain to Sales and the CEO that it cannot be used in production.
One day you discover that the head of professional services has a voodoo doll that bears a striking resemblance to you.

Upper Management
You fly first class to Arizona for a meeting with industry analysts.
You show them a purple cow which dances and produces ice cream.
You tell them that when it ships in six months it will also make cheese and shovel its own @#$!.
You doubt anyone will ever look too closely at the dates on those stock options.

Industry Analyst/Consultant
Five years ago you said cows were going out because milk and beef were unhealthy.
Three years ago you said cows were a great business because of the Atkins diet.
This year you're predicting that the market is in for a soft landing.
You're happy because like a TV weatherman, people keep paying you even when the only thing you get right is what you can see out your window at this moment.

Venture Capitalist
You have never seen a cow or drank milk before, but all of a sudden everyone is talking about them.
You invest $10m in a company called Cowster which you proclaim to be the leading provider in the Milk 2.0 space.
You still haven't seen a cow.

Customer Helpdesk
A user calls and tells you they are having huge problems with their milk.
You ask them what color it is, and they tell you that it's white but "it keeps coming out all weird."
You ask them for more details on how they milk the cow.
After ten minutes of going in circles, you ask their name again and look up their customer file.
You realize that the only product they have ever bought from you is a chicken.


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permalink  |   ( 3 / 624 ) Sock puppetry can be loosely defined as whenever someone comments under false pretenses. It is a cardinal sin in a world which defines itself largely by the ideal of the trustworthiness of individual over collective voices. A week or so ago, Monster VP Neil Bruce dismissed the blogosphere as a sideshow for recruiting*, so perhaps it shouldn't come as a suprise that the multi billion-dollar company would get busted trying to anonymously trash a Joel Cheesman.

Snatching Defeat from the Jaws of Victory
The irony of this is that had the Monster person commented openly and nicely suggestd that Joel understood the ad incorrectly, the company would have come out looking far more positive, more so even than if the "sock puppet" hadn't been outed as such. This holds a crucial lesson for PR, marketing, and HR departments.

Teach Your Employees Well
If a reporter from the New York Times called, most employees in your company would likely issue the default "no comment" and direct them to your media relations office. Online however the same people very often feel a false sense of both privacy and anonymity, commenting as though they were talking to a casual acquaintance at the corner bar. In fact, comments posted on blogs and other online forums may as well be painted on billboards considering the number of people they may reach.

I believe companies have much to gain from allowing employees to participate openly on various online venues, especially in terms of recruiting. Hearing and interacting with living, breathing human employees at BigCorp Inc. can go a long way to humanizing large organizations that often appear dismayingly opaque and monolithic to an outsider. However, employers also need to make sure that employees understand that things like sock-puppetry and engaging in drawn-out "flamewars" do not benefit the company and should not be engaged in.

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permalink  |   ( 3 / 618 ) Yesterday's Boston Sunday Globe featured an article on how jobseekers can help ensure that their resumes don't get eaten by an ATS. Yours truly was quoted alongside experts from Monster and ResumePower.com.

One of the sad truths of our industry is that for too many companies, the ATS is a place where good candidates go to disappear. The main reason is that these systems are poorly designed, forcing users to navigate through too many complex screens to find and review new applicants. It's a major reason why we designed our system to work like Outlook, a tool that most recruiters are intimately familiar with.

When you start using our applicant tracking system, you're not re-learning how to do basic tasks like reading resumes. You're doing the things you're familiar with, with a few new tools around to make life a little easier and more efficient.

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