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

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The Recruiting Animal continues his campaign against Myths of Generation Y over at RecruitingBloggers.com asking whether kids today aren't being raised too soft. The Animal cites a WSJ article which says that today's young workers need constant spoon-feeding of praise for even the smallest achievement lest they "fold up like a cell phone."

One of my more vivid memories growing up involves an annual father-son softball game my elemetary school held around this time of year. This school was definitely "Old School" in the sense that competition was encouraged and part of that was failure, which received as much public attention as success. Keeping in that spirit, the father-son softball game involved, you guessed it, the fathers versus the sons. Bear in mind that this place was grades 5-8, so the competition was hardly fair to begin with.

As I stood at bat, the pitcher lobbed me an absolute meatball right down the line. I am not going to be humble--I crushed that pitch like Alex Rodriguez and it went sailing off towards the trees at the end of the field. The crowd actually gasped in awe, and most of the fathers just stared up at it as it passed far overhead.

All Except one. Mine.

My father, no less a non-athlete than myself, went running off, faster than I've ever seen him run, before or since. As the ball falls back down from the stratosphere, he leaps--leaps, by God--and makes an over-the-shoulder-backwards catch of the sort that thirty years earlier would have gotten him signed to a double-A baseball team. The crowd, gasps in awe again, and then realizes that it wasn't just an impossible hit topped by an impossible catch, it was my dad who made the catch. Even the opposing team's coach slapped me on the back and says "that's the worst robbery I've ever seen."

To be fair, within about five seconds my dad looked like the cat who ate the canary. He'll never forget it, and I'll never forgive him for it, but what was he supposed to do, drop the ball?

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permalink  |   ( 3 / 567 ) Martin Snyder was nice enough to attempt to leave a comment on my previous post about the OFCCP, but for some reason my blog software is eating it, so I'm reposting it here for discussion. Martin writes,

Colin thanks for the review and I'm glad the post got your attention. Your prose is always worth the read whether I agree or not with whatever it is that you are saying.

Yes, I'm quite aware of what befalls Ahab, his ship, and crew. There is indeed a chance that I'll end up entangled on the body of the beast after leading our ship on a fruitless campaign- but somebody has to do it, and since I think we have standing and the least to lose of most who would cross the mighty hunter, it falls to me to voice the case against this governmental overreach.

Might I ask if you are aquatinted with Title IV of SOX, called "Enhanced Financial Disclosures"? or Title XI "Corporate Fraud and Accountability" ? The act is intended to provide better accounting systems- no comedy involved, and your notion about CFO's and their taste for the rule is likely bit obsolete. The Harvard Business Review published an article called "The Unexpected Benefits of Sarbanes-Oxley" noting that:

"The areas of improvement go well beyond technical statutory compliance. They include a strengthened control environment; more reliable documentation; increased audit committee involvement; better, less burdensome compliance with other statutory regimes; more standardized processes for IT and other functions; reduced complexity of organizational processes; better internal controls within partner companies; and more effective use of both automated and manual controls. The result is not only shareholder protection, the official purpose of the act, but also enhanced shareholder value..."

Do you really think anything similar will ever be said about the OFCCP rule, except by hopeful spinners with embedded interests in compliance regimes (especially complex, never-ending and subjective ones)?

Or do you imagine that any inane rule is a good thing, as long as it fosters "process", which apparently can only be a good thing?

To be honest I think there's more here agreeing with my points than not.

Martin may be correct in saying that my understanding of how CFOs and boards feel about SOX is obsolete. Since the law went into effect, there have been tweaks, but nothing wholesale--most of the changes have been in terms of how businesses understand and apply the law. So if CFOs feel different today than they did five years ago, that says more about the CFOs and boards than it does about the law.

Second, while I want to tread carefully lest I put words in Martin's mouth, he seems to continue to operate from the basis that the only goals served by the OFCCP rules are, well, the OFCCP. If you actually look at what the rule ends up requiring contractors to do, what emerges is that you basically need to be able to explain:

1. Who applied to each position
2. If that person met your minimum requirements
3. If so, what happened to them

Really, am I missing something huge here? The search audit requirements are a little kooky, but in practical application I've yet to hear any real horror stories about auditors going on fishing expeditions, least of all in smaller organizations.

In any case, none of these three things strike me as unreasonable questions for a manager to ask a recruiter. If you're unable to say, "here's everyone who applied for the req," then the OFCCP would seem to be the least of your problems. Circling back to the SOX example, are going to see recruiters in 4-5 years saying, "ya know, that OFCCP wasn't really *that bad* after all..." I think the answer is probably yes.

It is of course entirely possible to make the rules mean a lot more than that, and some companies choose for their own reasons to add eight bullets below each of the above items, while others take the opposite approach. We advise clients to follow the simplest approach that answers the necessary questions as they judge them, because the simplest approach is usually the most reliable. That said, if Martin wishes to excoriate vendors for catering to client whims, he's going to need a lot of harpoons.

Last, I can't shake this sense that Martin thinks that the OFCCP is tilting at non-existent windmills here in terms of systematic discrimination. I think it's understandable that we'd all like to say "yes, that's gone, don't happen 'round here no more," but as the years go by I become less convinced of my own former certainty. A good place to begin is this post at Assymetrical Information, which has some good comments with additional links. The statistics I've seen are neither good enough to prove the case beyond a shadow of a doubt, nor shoddy enough to be dismissed out of hand.

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permalink  |   ( 3 / 654 ) About a month ago I posted why the typical software-vendor ROI story should be filed under "fiction" and signed off by threatening to go after the RFP process next.

Along the way to writing this I experienced one of those moments of clarity where all the complex and overlapping ideas I'd started out with just sort of fell away, leaving behind a single explanation, elegant in its simplicity:

RFPs are like job descriptions, and RFP responses are like resumes

Every day HR departments terminate employees whose resumes met every stated requirement on the job description. In many cases, the job description and the resumes it attracts all deserve to be filed under "Fiction."

As a buyer, the purpose of an RFP process is to allow you to differentiate between a selection of products to solve a particular need. By giving everyone a list of standardized questions, you're able to make decisions on a more objective basis. (If you work for one of our competitors, you can stop laughing now and just email me a copy of your resume--it's ckingsbury@hrmdirect.com.) Problem is, that's just not how it works.

The typical RFP either asks the vendor to respond to a series of "can your product do X" questions, or, in some cases, asks them to rate themselves on a scale of 1-5 or some such. About a year ago in When Bad Features Feel Good I wrote, "Successful vendors are successful because they build products that people buy. That's obvious but what's more often ignored is that people often don't buy the 'best' product objectively speaking." So let's add another item to the list:

Successful vendors are successful because they're better than everyone else at convincing people to buy their product.

Just as a person putting "Java" on their resume serves as no guarantee that they are any good at programming in it, a vendor giving a positive answer on an RFP serves as no assurance that you'll actually like the product. You might think your RFP is so cleverly-written that we'll actually be forced into giving candid, clear responses--but remember, two can play at this game, and vendors get a lot more practice. After all, 80% of people think they're in the top 30% in terms of driving ability.

My advice is to look at the RFP for what it is: a prenuptial agreement that should be taken seriously by no one except the purchasing department. It will not help you to differentiate in terms of vendors' abilities to deliver a satisfactory solution. It will help to differentiate between those vendors who have large sales departments and/or teams of proposal writers to respond to every RFP that hits their inbox and pass that cost along to you. Salesforce.com is illustrative in this regard: their most recent annual report shows that in 2006, they spent 5 times as much on marketing and sales as they did on research and development. This represents an improvement actually, considering that the gap in 2005 was a factor of ten.

Just as requiring a Master's degree for a job which doesn't require one can have an adverse impact on your applicant pool, sending an unqualified, 30-page RFP out to two dozen vendors pretty much ensures that the responses you get will be composed mostly of the costly and the desperate.

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permalink  |   ( 3 / 572 ) Martin Snyder has never made any secret of his distaste for the OFCCP Internet Applicant rules, and in his most recent blog , he lays into a BusinessWeek article which basically says, "Don't hate the OFCCP, hate your lack of process discipline." Martin writes,

I agree, but I remain hopeful that at some point soon, enforcement action will commence and this matter will end up in federal court, where right thinking jurists will see it for what it really is; a constitutional affront, a violation of Executive Order 12866, and a costly mandate that neither meets its goals nor creates better processes.

How do you feel, really? Later in a comment, Martin adds,

This meme that the rule is somehow like SOX is bad spin.

Don't worry about me giving up beating on the rule- its my white whale!

Moby Dick happens to be my favorite book, one of the few I've read repeatedly over the years, and Martin, I hate to break this to you, but the whale wins.

CFOs aren't widely known for their acute sense of wit, but if there was such a thing as the annual CFO comedy awards, Martin's line that the OFCCP regs are not comparable to Sarbanes-Oxley because "SOX is designed to give quantitatively better accounting" would bring the house down. Many would, I suspect, say that SOX served mostly the same purpose as the tails on senators' tuxedo jackets. Martin is welcome and may well be right to say that the OFCCP rules are attacking forms of discrimination which are so imperceptibly small as to effectively not exist, but that's really a different argument altogether.

Chad Sowash of Direct Employers (one of the more important organizations out there today, IMHO), has in my mind a better response in his post, which mostly echoes the central point of the BusinessWeek article: consider the Internet Applicant rules as an opportunity to do a lot of things better.

In my experience, HR and recruiting departments, particularly in smaller companies, are often led by people with good intentions but who are gasping for organizational resources and attention. For many of them, the necessity of the OFCCP rules provide a convenient anvil not just to achieve compliance, but to optimize actual recruiting results.

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permalink  |   ( 2.9 / 640 ) Double Dubs at Systematic HR has post today asking whether Google's much-ballyhooed algorithm for recruitment is really old fish wrapped in new paper. I've studied a lot more statistics than most people, and they've made me more skeptical than anything else of these types of tools.

Statistical analyses are kind of like recipes: the more variables you put in the mix, the more opportunities there are to mess things up. If you show me a regression with more than 2 or 3 variables and can't explain what heteroskedasticity* (for instance) means, I'm going to start getting skeptical about your forecasting technique. Howard's comment on the post linked above with its example of "hundreds of variables" makes me wince. Especially if this was in the 80s, when computing time was much dearer--today you can do in a few minutes what might have taken hours, so you're more likely to try lots of scenarios and models before accepting the conclusions.

The real problem, as always in this game, is the choice of variables. A successful retail cashier, for instance, can probably be defined very well in terms of integrity, accuracy, diligence, and attitude. If you generally show up on time, don't steal, treat customers nicely when you're haing a bad day, and count change carefully, then you're doing great. With a population of hundreds of thousands of workers to survey, a good predictive assessment is very attainable.

As jobs become more specialized in terms of skills and knowledge, it becomes harder to build a representative sample pool from which reliable assumptions can be drawn. While large companies theoretically have an advantage here, my experience has been that organizational opacity increases with size, and determining what and who generates value becomes harder.

Evidence for this comes from the widely-shared sense of futility around the traditional performance review process. Forget about recruiting--many companies still have a very hard time quantifying the value of an employee just crossing her one-year anniversary, and where she will be in 12, 24, or 36 months. Perhaps once a company has that part down reasonably well they can start thinking about predicting success among people they barely know.


* Can't help yourself? Here goes: Heteroskedasticity is actually more complicated to spell than it is to understand at a basic level. A great example is looking at education versus income, as seen on this chart. Going from a HS diploma to a 4-year degree is huge, but the incremental improvement at each step beyond is less obvious (especially relative to the time/money investment). Most notable is that a Ph.D. (which takes 4-8 years) is worth less than a professional degree which requires between 2 and 4.

The reason for this is that as you move farther up the education ladder, the effects on career become more complicated. While a Bachelor's degree opens up a world of opportunities, most of which are better-paying, many of the people earning higher degrees are doing so not to make more money, but in order to access jobs (like a university professorship) which are rewarding in completely different terms, and in many cases actually worse-paying. This is "heteroskedastic error" in a nutshell.

In order to accurately assess the effect of years of education on income, we need to control for this variation either by focusing on one type of job, or by using a more sophisticated modeling approach that controls for this type of variation. As it happens, the solution to this problem earned the economist Robert Engle a Nobel about five years ago.

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