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

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Since today is Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day, Popular Mechanics has a funny and timely post on their blog.

But here at Popular Mechanics, we think there’s something parents can do every day that will help their kids a lot more than parking them in the office conference room once a year: Instead of taking our kids to work, how about putting them to work?

I'm not that old, but I have to wonder how many upper-middle class kids today have the experience of doing real manual labor.

Growing up, I spent summers picking orders in a warehouse, driving a delivery van, and doing general contracting. I helped my father build a large part of the house we lived in from the foundation up. In high school I spent more than the legal number of hours for my age in the kitchen and behind the counter for a local pizzeria. All of this taught me various skills, some useful, others less so. If you want a recipe for 80 pounds of pizza dough, let me know. And even at the boarding school I attended, where many of my classmates were from the truly upper classes, all underclassmen were required to do dishwashing duty in the dining hall every month or so, an assignment hated worse than any test or paper.

We talk a lot today about "working smart," but these jobs taught me about working hard, both mentally and physically. The tasks were often dull, occasionally gross, and rewarded persistence and discipline rather than intellectual cleverness. In short, they were pretty much the opposite of school. I was thinking about this the other day because I got an email from an old high school friend expressing shock and outrage at the fact that students are no longer required to wash dishes, because the school "felt there were other activities of more greater educational value." I suspect that translates into English as, "parents kept asking why they were paying $25,000 a year to have their sons and daughters wash dishes."

Well, I sent them a letter indicating that I could not disagree more. It is wonderful and amazing that those students today have the opportunity to go on field trips to the Amazon River to learn biology or hone their Spanish in Madrid, but looking back I realize that these jobs taught me a lot more about the world and work than an internship in my father's office would have. They also exposed me to a whole range of people who I would otherwise never have interacted with, except perhaps as a customer, and gave me a very serious dose of perspective on how fortunate I was.

What this has to do with recruiting!
It's understandable that someone recruiting college students would favor someone with internship experience in the field over someone who waited tables or did landscaping. But while people have their whole adult lives to learn their profession, these days the high school and college years are the only time they might work outside of their economic and social status. I believe that doing so taught me many rich life lessons about work and people and really expanded my perspective on things in ways that simply can't be bought with any amount of money.

When hiring college graduates, the focus should be on the potential of the person as a whole. If nothing else, seeing a steady history of "real jobs" on a student's resume tells me that this is a person who knows how to drag herself out of bed, show up, and deal with a situation where their needs don't come first. So before you count a 22-year-old out because they didn't do a three-month internship at Big Name Inc., ask them what they learned pushing a mop bucket. The answers may surprise you.

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permalink  |   ( 2.9 / 462 ) As a software buyer, one of the most important things to do is get a sense of the core philosophy of each vendor you're considering. With most applicant tracking systems today being purchased on an ASP or On Demand basis, you're buying into a company's way of doing business more than ever before.

Client references and RFPs are useful, but they are rear-view mirrors, and flawed at that ("objects may be closer than they appear"). As a user, the success of your deployment will be determined as much by the decisions that vendor makes in the future as by the ones they've made in the past. Call it what you prefer: personality, philosophy, core values; the important thing is to try to understand how the vendor will make those future decisions.

To give you an example, one of the things that I am seeing in the market right now is that many ATS vendors are emphasizing integrated product lines rather than their core applicant tracking system. Basically, they're saying, "buy our ATS because it is integrated with a talent management system, performance management system," and so on. This type of pitch tells us two very important things.

1. They're done doing major development to their ATS
2. The business is increasingly focused on upselling existing clients rather than getting new ones

The first item (more mature software) sounds like a good thing but it often isn't. In practice, it means that the application you buy tomorrow is the same exact application you will be using in two years when there are a whole host of new tools you want to use that won't integrate with it. More fundamentally, nearly all mid-market ATSs today are still operating on an ASP, rather than On Demand model. (Why this is a critical difference) In most cases, moving to an On Demand model will require a bottom-up rewrite of the entire software package, something that few companies have the stomach to do in such a competitive market. If they're talking about their other products when you're shopping for an ATS, it's a safe bet they won't be investing in their ATS anytime soon. So you had better be happy with what it is today.

There's a name for this type of software: legacy applications.

Our opinion here at HRMDirect is that recruiting is changing too rapidly to even think about saying there's no room left to innovate in terms of applicant tracking functionality. Many of today's most talked-about tools like Jobster didn't exist until a year or two ago, while people like Joel Cheesman are pointing us towards a future beyond job boards. Anyone who thinks today's ATSs are fully prepared to support this future will likely find him or herself buying a new system in 2-3 years.

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permalink  |   ( 3 / 399 ) John Sumser has lately been adding a welcome dose of sanity to the conversation by emphasizing what the big job boards are good at. In today's column though, he slips in an aside that I have to disagree with:

Many voices, ranging from the industrial psychologists to the search algorithm enthusiasts, suggest that the output of the Job Boards could (and should) be improved by addressing the "fit" question. The hard thing is that the definition of fit is a moving target. Particularly in knowledge work enterprises, the best employee this month may be maladaptive next month....

In other words, "fit" is a red herring on one level.

This isn't wrong per se but I think John is belaboring the point. "Fit" is not a static yes-no question, but a funnel that narrows down as you move from screening resumes to conducting interviews to extending an offer, let alone the promotion/dismissal decisions that take place one or two years later.

Today, the job boards can barely tell me even the most basic things about a candidate:
- How many years of experience do they have in the specified functional area?
- Have they worked at a small (medium/large) company roughly the size of mine before?
- Do they have experience in my industry?
- Do they have experience interfacing with customers?
- Have they worked at a product (service) company before?

None of these questions strike me as beyond the pale in terms of what a search engine ought to be able to generate. It would require integrating third-party data sources and no, but nothing half as complicated as what is standard in other data-driven industries like finance and securities. Referrals are in many senses simply a way to outsource this level of "fit" determination to a cheap third party.

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permalink  |   ( 2.8 / 648 ) My policy has long been that when a certain market segment is full of inferior products, it can largely be blamed on customers. The other day I stumbled across this Malcolm Gladwell article on SUVs and safety that illustrates the point. This passage really caught my eye:

During the design of Chrysler's PT Cruiser, one of the things Rapaille learned was that car buyers felt unsafe when they thought that an outsider could easily see inside their vehicles. So Chrysler made the back window of the PT Cruiser smaller. Of course, making windows smaller—and thereby reducing visibility—makes driving more dangerous, not less so. But that's the puzzle of what has happened to the automobile world: feeling safe has become more important than actually being safe.

Gladwell would answer that puzzle a year later in his book Blink, which argued that people make many of their most important decisions in about two seconds. While many of these snap decisions turn out to be quite good, the PT Cruiser example clearly illustrates how "rapid cognition" as Gladwell calls it can lead to very bad judgments.

What does this have to do with applicant tracking, or recruiting in general? 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. Sometimes, they actually buy based on what I call "anti-features," which are features that do the opposite of what they should--like smaller windows that make you feel safer.

The popular response is to blame the vendors, as if it's entirely Detroit's fault that people flock to dealerships to buy SUVs. To be fair, marketers invest amazing amounts of time and energy in "stimulating demand" for their product in ways that are a little shady. But no amount of legislation or professional "codes of ethics" will ever be as effective as a change in customer opinion, and that's why car dealers are now offering $5000 rebates on full-size SUVs that were selling at retail price a year ago.

This is why I see what we are doing here at HRMDirect as something larger than simply adding another choice to the already crowded ATS market. As a software vendor, the easiest thing to do is to say "yes" and give the customer precisely what they ask for. While our focus is on building a great product, we're also working to change the way people think about buying applicant tracking systems. Of course this benefits us but in the long run the recruiters who choose us see that our approach benefits them as well. Judging by the way most recruiters talk about their ATS, it's pretty clear the traditional model isn't delivering. One recruiter I spoke to recently who was demoing a number of systems said "you would be amazed" at how anti-productive many of our competitors' products really are.

Smaller, simpler, and different: that's our message. It's a message that's still revolutionary in a software market where RFPs are still mostly written as feature wish-lists. As a buyer, it's in your own best interest to think beyond the blink when you choose a system. Be aware that first impressions can sometimes be deeply flawed.

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permalink  |   ( 3 / 497 ) Interesting post from a VC blogger in NYC who noticed a major bump in traffic after he got linked by a prominent site. More interestingly, he includes a graph of his dealflow--the number of inbound "leads" on new business opportunities--which spiked to more than double the usual number for a few days after being linked. Money quote:

It got me wondering - what deals have I missed out on by not being part of the online conversation?

Read the whole thing.

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