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

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The Canadian Headhunter has a good post referencing Charlene Li's blog at Forrester discussing whether Chevy's "Apprentice" SUV ad campaign backfired when anti-SUV activists used the Chevy site to post anti-SUV messages. Charlene Li says it didn't backfire because it allowed the company to engage its critics in their own forum.

Jobster CTO Phil Bogle adds that a dose of the same kind of sunlight would be good for the recruiting process as well:

Why can't we introduce openness and authenticity in the conversations between employers and prospective employees? The results may not be as glossy, but I'll take real and meaningful over glossy any day.

The problem here comes with the term meaningful. It is surprising how difficult it is to find out what your customers really think of you, whether you have five of them or five million. To the extent that "social computing" techniques help draw authentic and unfiltered customer opinion out, they will help businesses to do better. The problem is that many of the critics you may find yourelf engaging are not really honest brokers.

It's kind of like when James Bond asks Goldfinger, "Do you expect me to talk," and he replies, "No Mr. Bond, I expect you to die!"

Recruiting is going to encounter an especially large challenge here because like dating, it is a process of rejecting people. No matter how nicely you do it, some people are going to take it badly, and a few of them are going to make it their life's mission to cause you as much pain as you caused them. Unfortunately, it's precisely these kinds of critics that take the most time and energy to deal with.

Of course, someone who got rejected for a job at Morgan Stanley has always had the right to carry a sandwich board on the sidewalk in front of the building and hand out leaflets. But this took energy, and reached very few people. With social computing, the gadflies can reach a global audience from the comfort of their sofas.

And contra Ms. Li, I think bringing these sorts of critics into your own forum lends them a credibility they might otherwise lack. Today any crank with an axe to grind can lash out at TGI Fridays on his blog and have it come up page one of a Google search for "work TGI Fridays". But, the casual web browser will also play a little game of "consider the source" and perhaps conclude, "this guy is a crank."**

To wit, MySpace and Blogger are like the sidewalk, and you can't legally shut up someone who is determined to make a scene there. But, should you invite them into the lobby and offer them a refreshing beverage? And don't forget, when you ask them to leave, all their friends may show up to join the protest. After all, it's certainly not your best interests they care most about.

If you really want to see where this is headed, I would keep an eye on the dating services. They are well ahead of the recruiting space in terms of sophistication in these areas, and the issues are very similar.

** Disclaimer: This post does not constitute an opinion for or against TGI Fridays. This was simply the first example grabbed out of the air. I suspect that any business of any kind will have loud detractors, some legitimate, others not. Which is really the point.

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permalink  |   ( 3.2 / 494 ) I would like to ask all my blog-friends out there with an interest in the subject or resumes (hint: Blue Sky Resumes) to please spread the word that resumes formatted as images are not a good thing.

It doesn't happen often, but we see a lot of resumes here, and once out of every thousand or so, we get a resume that looks perfect when you open it up in Word or Acrobat, but doesn't get parsed properly. The reason: the document contains a picture of a resume instead of text. Usually this happens when someone scans a paper resume and forgets to select the "OCR" option, but sometimes it's obvious the jobseeker did it on purpose.

Chances are anyone who is reading this blog knows that all kinds of employers use applicant tracking systems like Resume Direct to help organize their resume flow. Resume parsing and keyword searching are two of the main reasons companies use these tools, and these will only work when the resume is in a text-based format like Word, HTML, PDF, or ASCII. We actually support over 35 formats, so you can use just about anything, except an image of a resume!

Whenever I see people doing things like this, I suspect it's because some self-proclaimed expert told them "it's a good idea because it makes sure companies will see it formatted properly" or something similar. Trust me: proper formatting is nice, but coming up in a keyword search is much more important.

Other systems "prevent" this by forcing candidates to enter resumes as text only, or to fill out multi-part forms to get the data in the format the system wants. Resume Direct doesn't do that for the simple reason that we don't want to create barriers to submitting an application. Our email-based application process, which is unique in the applicant tracking industry, allows recruiters to post jobs anywhere and make applying as easy as possible. Systems which add unnecessary steps to the application process don't just prevent bad data--they also prevent good candidates with better things to do from applying in the first place.

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permalink  |   ( 3.1 / 403 ) 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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