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

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I had a doctor's appointment this morning and when I went in, his desk was covered in stacks of manila folders. "I see you use the same organizational system I do," I said. As it turned out, a few months ago they decided to convert to all-electronic records, and because they elected to do the data entry themselves, it was taking a lot longer and costing a lot more than they initially expected. The other problem was that since it was a home-grown system built by the hospital's IT department, "everything needs to be done @#$-backwards," as my doctor put it.

This reminded me of how much paper is still involved in the recruiting process for many companies. Next to finance, HR is probably the leading killer of trees in an organization, from application forms, to background checks, and new hire paperwork. While converting to an electronic process can hurt a little at the start, the payoff isn't just greener for the environment, it also leads to easily-quantified cost reductions and efficiency gains.

• Online application forms : HRM can turn your paper form into an electronic one, and you'll be able to collect applications online and access all of your candidate records from any PC with a web browser.
• Instant background checks :
Eliminate faxes and follow-up calls by ordering background checks online as soon as candidates are identified. Many checks can be completed online in just a few minutes.
• Pre-employment screening :
Applicants can complete online skill and behavioral tests as they apply, helping you to improve performance and reduce turnover by up to 20% annually.
• Compliance: Automatically survey and track a full suite of EEO and OFCCP compliance statistics, and generate reports with a single click.
• Permanent candidate database: Next time you hire, start with your own database that costs nothing to search.

These are just a few of the ways that online recruiting can improve your bottom line, and clear off the top of your desk. But the most important feature that we offer is knowledgeable service, which is included in all subscriptions at no additional cost.

In contrast to older ATS vendors accustomed to working with large clients, HRMDirect's account managemers spend most of their time with organizations with anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand employees, and is used to the unique challenges companies of this size face in transitioning to a paperless process. To find out more, check our online price sheet or click to talk to our sales team.

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permalink  |   ( 3 / 604 ) A friend asked the other day why I haven't been blogging much and the simple answer is that we've just been too busy growing here. Last week we signed our 104th client, Quality Bicycle Products in Minneapolis, and we've been busy as all get-up with implementations from a scorching Q3, including a number of clients switching to us from name-brand competitors. Rapid growth can be painful at the best of times, but it's the kind of pain that makes you stronger.

We Hired!
Last week we added another member to the Client Service team here. Stephen Bass, a 2004 BU graduate with a CS degree and a solid support background, applied to a job we had posted on Craigslist, and within 5 days he was hired. Stephen impressed us as someone who could grow with the business and we're very happy to have him. It's a great market but Stephen quickly realized that the opportunity to be part of an organization like ours was special, and we salute his good judgment!

As the hiring manager and recruiter for the position, I have to say that I have no idea how people fill positions without an ATS. Well, I do have an idea, but it's got to be incredibly annoying to have to sit there and manually sort candidates into piles, send individual emails to everybody, and go digging through Outlook or a spreadsheet to look up a phone number. There's a saying that you should eat your own dogfood, and I though it tasted like filet mignon.

This was the second position we filled through Craigslist, and once again the results were great. I've defended Monster against charges of irrelevance more than once (I can see how many jobs our clients fill through them) but in this case I don't know what the extra $400 would have gotten us.

That was fun, let's do it again!
Now we're hiring for a Web Application Architect, and we're really looking for someone who is super-jazzed about the idea of joining a small and very dynamic company like HRMDirect. This is another great opportunity which has every potential to scale with the business.

As an experiment, I decided to post this position on TechCrunch's CrunchBoard. TechCrunch is probably one of the best sites for keeping up on the latest hot and wild startups, and attracts an audience of enthusiastic nerds with a business orientation. I've always been impressed by the level of intelligence in the comments on posts. At $200 it's not cheap, but TC has a very specific audience, and I'm interested to see if it delivers.

With close to three years and over a hundred clients under our belt, we're a long way from the stab-in-the-dark nature of many of the startups featured on TechCrunch, but we're still young, vibrant, and full of spots on the org chart marked TBD. At some point, even working in a sexy consumer-facing company is going to involve its share of ditch-digging, and the more heavily-funded a startup is, the more likely that working there is going to be just like working at a large established company, minus the job security. For a great egghead with entrepreneurial aspirations, this place is like an MBA in Real World Business, with a full-ride scholarship and a great stipend.


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permalink  |   ( 3 / 634 ) Dave Manaster at ERE blogged yesterday that the tide seems to be turning back from free to paid classifieds:

TheLadders.com is moving from free job postings to subscription fees. HotOrNot just reversed a highly public experiment in which they switched from paid personals to free. Even hippy-dippy Craig's List is steadily abandoning free classifieds in their largest markets, and recently started charging a modest fee in even more cities.

While Dave's examples are interesting, I'm unconvinced that they have any bearing on the larger situation. Even if we do see a large-scale return to a paid model, a situation where "modest fees are a form of quality control" as Dave puts it is very different from one in which high prices (relative to cost) were a primary source of margin for otherwise sketchy businesses.

Publishing classifieds in newspapers never cost much money, but given their relative monopoly position, they were able to get away with charging premium prices. Today, the cost of publishing is close to zero, and getting easier every day, ensuring that competition from free providers will be a permanent feature.

As to quality control, all of the larger job boards have long gotten away with charging newspaper-sized prices while delivering content to users that is only slightly less relevant than an Oscar Mayer bacon billboard next to an orthodox synagogue. Bob Wilson continues to document this failure with mind-numbing consistency. Preventing blatant spam and scams is well and good, but it's hardly a major achievement in terms of the user experience, and price is simply the easiest way to do this.

But price is also an obstacle to adoption, one TheLadders used very effectively to build the very brand and audience that allows them to start charging meaningful prices. Prices are sort of like taxes--they always go up, while the value you get out of them seems to go down. Once you get used to charging $25, it's very easy to get used to charging $50, and before you know it, your customers have a good reason to spend the time looking at free solutions again.

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permalink  |   ( 3 / 629 ) Job descriptions have come in for a lot more criticism lately, and deservedly so. While I'm sympathetic about the legal gobbledygook they contain, what I find amusing are the meaningless ritual incantations that frequently clog up descriptions that are otherwise well-written.

Job descriptions posted externally should exist to serve two functions: to arouse excitement among appropriate candidates, and to strike fear and doubt into the hearts of the unqualified. The ratio between the two should be about 90-10, with the essential function of the latter being to establish a few reasonable criteria of eligibility for compliance purposes.

Here are a few of my favorites that serve neither purpose:

Great communication skills required: If you know of any companies looking for someone who prefers grunting unintelligibly and scowling when asked a question, I know of several excellent candidates who can be had for a great price.

Good multi-tasking ability is essential: Because there are so many jobs out there (outside of an assembly line) that don't require the ability to balance priorities.

Must be a team player: Wait- let me get this straight: all I need to do is put these five words in my job description, and all those whiny, childish, responsibility-evading people will stop applying? Now you tell me!

What I've learned through hiring in a number of different environments is that defensive job descriptions do little to discourage the hopeless. The number one problem that afflicts these applicants is a lack of self-awareness, so nothing you say is likely to discourage them. Defensive job descriptions do, however, serve as excellent sales preventers with exceptional candidates, who can scent mediocrity from a mile away.

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permalink  |   ( 3 / 505 ) Facebook's decision to ban Harry the Marketing Headhunter Joiner will not, in and of itself, have any noticeable effect on the social media darling's continued rise. It does, however, go a long way to explaining why social networking will--and must--cease to be owned by anyone other than the people who make up the network.

Just to recap, Harry joined Facebook, and attempted to invite his entire list of contacts (all 4600 of them) to join him there. You'd think Facebook would appreciate Harry's enthusiasm for promoting Facebook, but their response was to disable and ban his account for violating ambiguous terms of service related to alleged spamming and use of his account for "advertising purposes."

While many of Facebook's members will applaud the decision to chase this particular money-changer out of the temple (there being no shortage of nuisance recruiters whose spamming is of the egregious kind), it highlights the fact that Facebook can and will ban anyone it chooses for any reason that suits its purposes, and without any practical recourse for the convict.

By contrast, no one can be banned from the web, or email*. If Hotmail doesn't like you they can ban you, but you can just scoot over to Yahoo and resume emailing people. There's a little overhead to moving address books around, but otherwise it's not something you really need to worry about unless you're selling c1allis or the daughter of a deposed Nigerian general.

The reason you can't be banned from email the way you can be banned from Facebook or MySpace is that email is a protocol, not a product. No one "owns email" the way Mark Zuckerburg & co. own Facebook. A published, standardized protocol means anyone can operate an email system that can inter-operate with any other email system.

A social networking system is very different from something like, say, an applicant tracking system, because it has no value on its own. If yours were the only company in the world to have an ATS, it would be just as valuable to you (and perhaps even more so) than if every company in the world had one. Social networking and email, however, are utterly pointless if you're the only one to have an email address or Facebook account. The point is not the product, but the people it facilitates interaction with. Most social networking products are worth nothing despite having a product similar or functionally superior to Facebook's because they have an insufficient number of members.

My fundamental belief is that the features you see in virtually every social networking product constitute a set of fundamental protocols. Friending someone, for instance, is really just like hyperlinking across sites, except that both ends of the "link" agree to it. There is really no grand engineering challenge here. At most, Facebook in the past provided some value by regulating membership, but with them opening the doors to the general public last year, even that part is in fast decline, and as Harry's case shows, may be on its way to becoming anti-value.

The ultimate precedent for this vision is the Internet itself, which despite being referred to and understood as a single entity by laypeople, is in fact just a giant hodgepodge of individual networks which have agreed to carry each others' data through a vast series of peering agreements. As a result, the Internet has given us countless new and novel tools, while the phone system has given us the fax, early versions of which predate the voice telephone itself. Social networking is not a product, it's a protocol, and I fully expect the market ten years from now to be vastly more fragmented than it is today.

* Obviously this excludes state censorship a la China or Iran, which is a whole 'nother category.

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