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

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Over the weekend we released Resume Direct 2.1 as a way of celebrating two years (to the day) since launching the beta. We've added over 70 clients since then (60 of them in 2006 alone) and the functionality we offer has grown far and wide with them.

Aside from some great new features like custom fields, the largest part of this release was dedicated to an "Extreme Makeover" of the requisition UI screens. The requisition pages have probably undergone more changes in the past two years than any other single part of the system. In 2005 it was little more than title, department, and location. Now there are roughly two dozen standard options, and with custom fields, clients can take that number as high as they want it.

Starting around six months ago we began noticing that in both demos and new client training sessions, an inordinate amount of time was being spent on screens that represented less than a quarter of the overall functionality we offered. No one (either prospects or clients) was complaining that it was too complicated, but the internal feedback loop between our support and training staff and the product development team kept coming back and saying "we need to do better."

Design-centric thinking may be newly in vogue in the software industry but for me personally it is old hat. Both of my parents were working artists, my father the head of creative services for nearly thirty years at the fragrance company Coty. Along the way he got to work with Sophia Lauren (who once baked him banana bread in her hotel suite) and threw away a bunch of original sketches by Andy Warhol, then just another mediocre freelancer looking to make a few extra bucks.

One of his greatest successes was the launch of Exclamation! in the late 80s. Perhaps his proudest achievement was to see the bottle exhibited at the MoMA, which had been his favorite museum since he was in art school. It's not an exaggeration to say that bottle helped put me through college. What is perhaps the most fascinating thing is that when I mention it to people, the first thing they remember isn't what the fragrance smelled like, but what it looked like.

For HRMDirect, the benefits of good design are no less acute:

- Reduced training cost
- Reduced support cost
- Increased adoption by end-users (especially hiring managers)

Most software vendors only care peripherally about these issues because:

a) they make money charging extra for training
b) they make money charging extra for enhanced support
c) the licenses were sold up front, so it's out of their hands

Why does HRMDirect care? As a software-as-a-service provider we are set up entirely differently.

1. We include training in our base prices, so the less training clients require to become effective, the better we do

2. We include full support in our base prices, so the more support clients require, the less money we make

3. Our licenses are sold annually, so we need clients to renew and hopefully increase the number of licenses each year to succeed.

In a SaaS world, we succeed the more closely we align with client needs, and good design, an afterthought in virtually every system out there, takes pride of place for us. While I don't know that I'll ever see screenshots of our new requisition UIs in a museum, and I'm quite sure that Scarlett Johanssen will never bake me banana bread, good design sensibility is in my genes and permeates everything we do here at HRM.

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permalink  |   ( 2.9 / 676 ) Boy do I hate it when that happens.

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permalink  |   ( 3 / 612 ) Jason Corsello posted last week about how some Software-as-a-Service vendors' pricing is starting to look more and more like the "bad old days," and includes an example to illustrate his argument. One of the commenters responds, saying "It's simple - the pricing models you refer to are just not SaaS."

All of this hearkens back to Thomas Otter's brilliantly-titled "Nobody Expects the SaaSquisition" post, where he wrote,

For ages I have been trying to figure out what SaaS is. I’m still no clearer, and I have read masses of posts, analyst reports, marketing materials and irregulars emails. It seems there are different forms of SaaS, including the highest forms of SaaSdom, "pure" and "true" SaaS.

The one and perhaps only thing I think every SaaS vendor can agree upon is that their own pricing model is "true SaaS" while their most-reviled competitor's is not.

The problem is that while customers often say they want service-based pricing, the way they sign contracts often says differently. If we look at three common utilities we can see three different approaches to the service pricing conundrum:

- Gas and electricity are typically purchased on a pure usage basis. Last year my gas bill ranged from just under $20 in the summer to nearly $200 in January. Prices vary with both usage and commodity price, and there is no choice--everyone gets the same "product."

- Cable TV offers a variety of features (channels and add-ons like a DVR), but all based on a flat monthly rate regardless of the number of hours you watch. You also pay based on the number of TV sets in the house.

- Mobile phones are priced by the minute like gas or electricity, but most customers opt to buy a fixed monthly minimum amount at a discounted rate.

It is interesting to note that the only markets in which pricing is based purely on effective usage are those which are effective monopolies, and long-standing ones at that. Mobile phones, which are the newest and least monopolistic of these markets, exhibit a pricing model closer to the airlines, where the guy sitting in the next seat could easily be paying twice or half as much as you. Frankly, compared to Verizon, Jason's pricing examples don't look half bad.

A 100% usage-based pricing model for SaaS, which is more comparable to mobile phones than electricity or cable TV, would likely exhibit similar complexity. The fact that it is still by and large less complicated is a testimony mainly to the low cost of infrastructure and the high degree of competition which persists.

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permalink  |   ( 2.9 / 684 ) I'm settling back into the daily grind after attending last week's Talent Unconference, the brainchild of Jeff Hunter and graciously underwritten by his employer, Electronic Arts.

Jeff was kind enough to ask me to co-host the Future Tech track with Sean Rehder of Talent Logistics, which unfortunately meant I couldn't attend any of the other excellent tracks. This was however mitigated by the great people who joined our sessions, including Yves Lermusiaux of Checkster, Hans Gieskes of H3, Neal Bruce of Monster, Wesley Wu of Towers Perrin, Gerry Crispin, Brad Kendall, and many others.


I will be posting more about the conference over at the TalUnCon Blog throughout the week. Because it's an "unconference," all the video, presentations, and other content generated will be published in the open for everyone to enjoy.

Jeff Hunter has been unrelenting in his drive to change the way we talk and think about talent, and he is one of a very few people who could have pulled this event off so well. The attendee list was a stellar group of industry thought leaders and I look forward to all of us being able, ten or twenty years hence, to brag about being there at the beginning.

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permalink  |   ( 2.9 / 694 ) Cross-posted on RecruitingBloggers.com

John Sumser gives a big thumbs-up to the concept of Recruitment Process Outsourcing in today's post. It's an idea I've flirted with before but in the end I don't believe it's likely to amount to anything close to the promises being made.

The first problem is that recruiting is a viciously cyclical business, as the stock price of Korn Ferry illustrates well. When things get tight companies freeze hiring, and the contractions can hit hard and fast. The vast rabble of 1-5 person staffing firms that blink in and out of business like fireflies on a summer night is arguably the perfect evolutionary response to such a market. They make hay while the sun shines and go into low-cost hibernation during the famines.

The second problem is that of regressing to the mean. In order to deliver scale, you need to enforce standardization. Payroll outsourcing can deliver services both better and cheaper because doing payroll for me and payroll for the guy next door is pretty much the same job. Staffing services like Manpower and the many mom-and-pops have long provided RPO to the segments of the market in which people are as interchangeable as payroll forms. I'm open but yet to be convinced that the same can be said for recruiting in general, and high-value recruiting in particular.

Of course, no one thought you could build a business delivering packages around the country overnight at a fraction of the cost of courier services until FedEx figured out how to do just that. There is an equally large prize awaiting for anyone who cracks the RPO code.


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