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

Enjoy the blog? Wait until you try our applicant tracking system. Click for your 30-day free trial.

I am getting a kick out of the scrap between Martin Snyder and Bob Nelson, the head dogs of PCRecruiter and CBizOne respectively. It's a perfect illustration of how legitimate technical discussions quickly devolve into pointless posturing that has little practical meaning for buyers.

On the surface they are debating the merits of thick versus thin clients, or, browser-based versus installed applications if you prefer. If you are a software developer or product manager, this is all you talk about these days. But as an ATS buyer, the talking points flying between these two justly-respected industry veterans are not worth the time it takes to read them.

Every point made by both gentlemen strikes me as honest and correct, but utterly irrelevant to a buyer. Every one of them needs to have the phrase "but it will depend on your situation" added at the end. All their points are generally true but ultimately dependent on local conditions.

Look at it this way: an airplane travels much faster than a car, but if you're traveling between Boston and Albany (a little under 200 miles), it may be faster door-to-door to take a car. Comparing "the web platform" to "the installed platform" as Snyder and Nelson are doing is like discussing whether flying or driving will be faster without defining the trip to be taken. Especially if the two parties debating are a limo driver and an airline pilot.

Part of the reason vendors love to talk about platforms is because it means a lot to us. Choosing how to architect your application is perhaps the single most consequential decision a software company will make. Here at HRMDirect we are enthusiastic about the Software-as-a-Service/Web platform because we believe it is the [u]best platform for us.[/u] Ultimately, the benefits get passed on to our customers in terms of better features and lower prices, but that's a different discussion.

For someone buying an applicant tracking system, the choice is not between broad platforms but specific products and vendors. Chances are that if one platform really is much better than the other for your situation, then you will know it pretty early in the process. For instance, large multinationals with highly-integrated ERP systems are going to self-host an application they can integrate into their existing stack, with that requirement driving the rest of the process for better or worse.

As a customer, the only thing that matters to you is the product that is actually staring you back in the face every day. If you are wondering which platform is better, then odds are the answer is "neither." While the self-hosted/thick-client app may run faster, the web-based one may be much more user-friendly. Your IT department may be great at supporting applications, or terrible. So take the car(s) for a test drive, and make your choice accordingly. The rest is just hot air and conjecture, so choose accordingly.

[ 4 comments ] ( 1966 views )   |  [ 1 trackbacks ]
permalink  |   ( 2.9 / 540 ) In my last post I wrote that online dating services would show us where online recruiting was headed. I believe this to be the case because they are both expressions of the same basic problem: how do I find a person who (fill in the blank). While the requirements may change, the processes have significant similarities.

But in this case it is the differences that illuminate. Innovation is a delicate organism that fares poorly in highly-regulated environments. Buyers whose first instinct is to avoid geting sued and fired will choose the tried and mediocre over the new and promising with depressing regularity. Recruiting is among the more closely-watched activities companies engage in, while dating is a veritable Wild West frontier. The bottom line here is that in dating, consumers and vendors can and will try anything to get better results, while in HR, it can takes years for an idea to gain acceptance. That's why I think it makes a practical "crystal ball."

At its heart, "social computing" could be summed up as the idea that the audience adds value to the performance. At one end of the scale, the audience is the performance, as in the case of eBay. One of the most important parts of eBay, arguably its crown jewel, are its member feedback ratings. By measuring and reporting objectively on the honesty
of its members, eBay has successfully convinced me and millions of other people to mail large checks to people we've never met for things we've never seen. This is no small achievement in a world where con artists lurk around every virtual corner.

In online dating, the critical transaction is the first date, after which the "online" aspect ceases to be relevant. As transactions go, it is a signficant one, involving a non-trivial investment of time, money, and personal safety. In other words, much more important than a vintage cocktail shaker. And yet, if you look at Match.com, there is no analog to eBay's member ratings. At first, this seems like a stunning omission: good user feedback scores on members would be hugely valuable to members and by extension to Match, which would obtain a proprietary advantage over other dating sites the same way Amazon's customer ratings give them an advantage over Barnes & Noble.

But the devil in the details is "good user feedback." Upon closer inspection, there are a number of important differences between the eBays and Amazons and the Matches of the world, and they explain why "good feedback" would very likely not be the rule.

Exclusivity: eBay is a "promiscuous" market in the sense that just because you buy a vintage cocktail shaker today, doesn't mean you will be less likely to buy a set of glasses tomorrow. Everyone is always "on the market." But in dating, a successful transaction takes two people off the market.

Easily Defined Criteria for Success: On eBay, there are really only two things for buyer and seller to argue over. Did the buyer pay quickly, and did the item arrive as described? Dating is infinitely more complicated.

Equality of Outcomes: eBay transactions are roughly speaking either good for both parties, or bad for both. Dates are much less uniform. One person may be content if they never see the other again, while the other is hopelessly smitten. Not a situation conducive to dispassionate analysis.

Dating is Recruiting
All of these examples can substitute the words "jobseeker" for "buyer" and "recruiter" for "seller" and the story remains largely the same. This doesn't mean a reputation system for recruiting purposes is impossible, but it does mean that the models we see currently in places like eBay would likely not translate well to recruiting.

[ 3 comments ] ( 831 views )   |  [ 0 trackbacks ]
permalink  |   ( 3 / 508 ) 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.

[ 1 comment ] ( 3258 views )   |  [ 0 trackbacks ]
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.

[ add comment ]   |  [ 0 trackbacks ]
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.

[ 1 comment ] ( 574 views )   |  [ 0 trackbacks ]
permalink  |   ( 2.9 / 462 )
Back Next