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

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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 / 432 ) John Sumser's post on branding today makes a great point:

What makes Company X the employer of choice for Unix professionals is unlikely to be the dynamic that attracts candidates in accounting. A brand, as it is commonly understood is a good place to start. But, the focus on being a generic "employer of choice" is an inadequate vision for effective long term labor supply management.

A few days ago I came across the Microsoft video below (HT: Tales from the Digital Divide) which reminded me of why the term "branding" makes me feel like a steer about to be nailed with a red-hot iron.

Perfume and Diesel Fuel
To understand what's wrong with the conventional approach to branding, it's fun to look at old advertising posters and see what has and hasn't changed. A 30s cosmetic ad literally asks, "Who wants to look YOUNG?" Yesterday in the paper I saw an ad for something that I think was a skincare product, though it looked more like an industrial abrasive. Next to the jar was a grinning, Santa Claus-like face of Doctor Andrew Weil, saying, "When Matcha tea is prepared mindfully, it promotes an extraordinary sense of balance and well-being." I remembered it because the phrasing and presentation were so strikingly calculated to evoke a certain tone and sensitivity--think of how different it feels if you replace "mindfully" with "carefully" or "properly." This is about emotional manipulation, plain and simple.

The question branding today needs to face up to is whether it's selling a product or an idea of a product. As I mentioned in a previous post, my father worked in the fragrance industry, so I've been an observer of these things for a long time. When I was a kid, I remember my father being thoroughly amused when one of his fishing buddies asked him for some samples of a new men's cologne his company had just launched called Stetson Preferred Stock. This was the late 80s or so, and the venerable Stetson brand had become a little too red-state, so they came up with something a bit more urban in its sensitivity. The fishing buddy asking for the cologne, however, was a cowboy boot-wearing bulldozer operator, so my dad had to ask why he wanted that particular fragrance.

"Because something about it really covers the smell of diesel oil," he said matter-of-factly. Imagine that: perfume that makes you smell good.



The irony of course is that Microsoft, for its part, has some of the consistently worst branding out there. Seven years and a billion-ish dollars went into Windows Vista, and the slogan they come up with is "The Wow Starts Now?" I'd love to have seen the ideas they rejected. Then there's this. Of course, companies usually look like their leaders. In fact, Apple's branding has beaten Microsoft's silly for as long as anyone can remember, which happens to be the history of both companies.

And yet, what did it get them? A great brand does not equal a great strategy.

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permalink  |   ( 3 / 544 ) 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 / 436 ) 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 / 428 ) Boy do I hate it when that happens.

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