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

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For this week's Recruiting.com Blogswap I am pleased to introduce you to Tod Hilton, a developer at Microsoft. Tod says he's neither a recruiter or hiring manager, but that's beside the point because recruiting is the one function in a company in which every person can play an important role. So without further ado, here's Tod:

I was reviewing Colin’s previous posts while preparing to write this one. I have to say that he has some interesting opinions and I enjoyed what I read, but this post in particular, Put Your Kids to Work Day, really rung true for me.

A little history for ya… I grew up in a solid middle class family and we never went without. I was an only child until I turned 11 which means that I got pretty much anything I wanted, within reason of course [no ponies in the backyard for me :-)]. Although they made a good living, my parents still recognized the value of teaching me about responsibility and hard work. I always had chores. I was washing dishes from the time I was old enough to reach the sink, mowing the yard since I was old enough to use the mower, feeding the dogs, cleaning my room, etc. I was lucky enough to receive an allowance when I was younger, but regardless of the money I was simply expected to contribute.

When I reached my teenage years I would spend the summers working for my dad in the furniture moving industry. Let me tell you, the guys and gals that lug furniture around for a living are tried and true blue collar Americans. Good, decent folks who work hard for 8-12 hours and then just want to relax and have a beer at the local pub afterward. During the school year I worked at a restaurant, Kroger’s grocery and a few other odd jobs for spending money and to pay for my truck. Shortly after graduating from high school and starting college, I decided to move out on my own which forced me to work full time while following the ‘7-year program’ versus the standard four. During those years I worked full time at Builder’s Square (a Home Depot knock-off owned by Kmart at the time), JC Penny and Guaranty Federal Bank (a Texas based bank).

Is there a point to this? Well, yes, there actually is. :-) Although I have a college degree and work for Microsoft now, my work experience from a young age is firmly based in the work-your-butt-off-for-low-wages blue collar world. I think there is a lot to be said for those experiences that carries forward and is applicable today…10, 15 and even 25 years later. Colin talks about how we’re training our children to “work smart,” but asks a valid follow-up question…are we also teaching them to “work hard?” With regard to the recruiting environment, he goes on to ask if recruiters are giving “real world” experience the weight it deserves?

That is an excellent question! One that I think more recruiters and interviewers should ask themselves before discounting someone without the industry-specific experience or education that we typically look for. I’ll use myself as an example here… I have a bachelors degree in Accounting, but I now work in the IT field. The fact that I have a degree at all holds weight with some managers, but others might immediately dismiss me because its not a Computer Science degree. Will future hiring managers penalize me because I don’t have a formal education in the C.S. field? Sure, that’s very possible, even likely with some managers. Here is my approach to that position as an interviewer, of course, I’m probably a bit biased. ;-) I don’t look at the area of focus as much as I look at the time they spent in college, did they graduate, talk with them about the college experience and what they gained from it. If they didn’t graduate then I’d ask them why. I know plenty of extremely successful people who never graduated from college...Bill Gates for instance. :-) Whether they graduated isn’t the important part of the puzzle, it’s what they learned during the experience.

Let’s put aside the topic of college and talk about real world experience now. Once again, I’ll use myself as an example. In March of 2005, I had accumulated five years of experience as a systems engineer with none as a developer. I had done some very basic development stuff in my spare time, but nothing even close to what would be required of a full-time developer. I went to my manager [and his manager] and told them I was seriously thinking about switching my career path towards development, but I honestly didn’t know where/how to get started as I had no practical experience. At that point my management made a decision that opened up a whole new world for me.

Based on my previous work ethic and performance as an SE, they gave me the opportunity to become a developer in our group and learn on the job. I had zero experience as a dev! Zero, zip, nada! My managers took a chance on me and bet that I would succeed as a developer based on my previous unrelated experience as an SE. Honestly, I don’t know many managers out there who would do that and I’m very thankful. So what does that have to do with recruiting? Well, I hope that recruiters/interviewers are taking a similar approach with applicants. Did that college applicant work at Home Depot throughout their college years? Don’t discount them because they didn’t work in the college’s computer lab…ask them about the experience and what they learned!

As recruiters and interviewers, I think it’s important for us to remember that all experience counts in life. Household chores as a kid, flipping burgers at McDonalds, cleaning office buildings or changing oil at Jiffy Lube…the work/life lessons to be learned in these jobs could be even more valuable than those from Huge Corporation, Inc.

~tod bio.todhilton.com


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permalink  |   ( 3 / 364 ) I have picked the occasional bone with John Sumser but as I hope I've made clear, I kid out of respect. Which is why I was flattered to receive this response to my recent critique of one of his daily articles. John says,

While that is very entertaining, the point we were making is that Jobby represents a generational difference, not an overnight sensation.

On that I could't agree more. Resumes are problematic to say the least, a "legacy format" if ever there was. But before we get too excited, it's worth considering this excerpt from the original article

The other day we visited a relatively new entrant to the recruiting software space. We tried to get them talking about Jobby. "Hmmm, this is very bad." They said. How do you control it? People could spam the system.

The more I think about this, the more I sympathize with the point of view given by the vendor.

The problem with resumes is that they are an unstructured document containing structured data. Unstructured data is the picture of a couple jogging on the front of the box of low-fat blueberry muffins. Structured data is the label on the back that tells you they replaced the fat with salt and sugar.

Tagging as implemented today is not that much different than the slogan on the front of the muffin box. They're keywords, with a little added salt and sugar. They are better in the one sense that you can search for ".NET programmer" and not have to worry about the hundred different ways those things might appear on a dead-tree resume. I like the way Jobby does search and refinement of results in terms of feel. Feel, as Steve Jobs has taught anyone who pays attention, is hugely important. But let's not get too distracted here. People long ago learned to "game" keywords to the point that they are remain useful only because there isn't anything much better at the moment.

The problem is in many ways precisely the one named by the anonymous vendor: spam. More precisely, it is the ability of the user to add unverified information to the system that defeats the purpose. The power of Wikipedia is not that anyone can write an article, but that anyone can edit it. For every person who wishes to inject junk, there is another who revels in flensing it out. This is the missing link in resumes, tagged or not.

Ultimately what we all want is honest information. The problem is that I don't see how we're going to get it. I've written before about how reputation systems play a critical role in the success of eBay. But eBay also has the benefit of running a dominant closed market where they can get away with forcing everyone to play the game their way. Recruiting currently enjoys nothing like this. Good people may set up profiles that expose them as they are, but mediocre or dishonest ones will probably not. No one with a brain will voluntarily air their dirty laundry. And various layers of government regulation (which are bound to get worse) will likely conspire against the more creative ideas that might force people to do so.

Perhaps pushing the good people up higher will be sufficient. But part of me thinks that would constitute a niche resource rather than a general solution.

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permalink  |   ( 3 / 550 ) B.N. Carvin of Nobscot, a provider of web-based exit interview systems (an idea I love, BTW) has posted my first contribution to the Recruiting.com Blogswap.

Reading that post again I think I may have oversalted the broth a tiny bit. Saying, "because when it comes to understanding the deployment of human capital, most companies are close to clueless," may overstate the case a little much. And there are many good reasons why the approach I suggest might not work. But the debate is a useful one.

If you sat in on our strategy meetings at HRMDirect, you'd often hear one of us say, "now this may be too crazy to consider, but..." and then suggest that the sky is green and the grass is blue. The ideas often are pretty nutty and too far out there to consider. But the exercise is useful because crazy ideas force you to consider the underlying assumptions in the problem at hand. In the end the assumptions often look valid and the men in white coats carry the idea away.

But every so often you find that the crazy idea exposes a blind spot. Sometimes, the sky really is green, and understanding what that means is quite useful.



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permalink  |   ( 3 / 353 ) John Sumser is never one to mince words. Today he writes,

The next time a vendor who you about the Resume glut caused by Monster show them the door and offer to see them after they've looked at the market. That story about a resume glut was true at the bottom of the economic cycle. We're now at the top. No one is complaining about a resume glut anymore.

As the old saying goes, everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts.

I decided to do a little data-mining based on a sample of jobs filled by customers using our applicant tracking system to see if this was true. I came up with a sample of about 750 reqs which were primarily filled by job board posting over the past twelve months. Staffing firms were excluded from the sample.

The chart to the right shows the results. (click to enlarge) 53% of reqs received 25 or fewer applications. 15% received 26-50. But nearly 20% received 100 or more, and another 15% received 51-100. The positions receiving 100 or more ran the gamut from hourly manufacturing techs to vice presidents, in locations all over the US. Nearly every client had at least a few positions that got positively flooded, many in a matter of days.

John is right to say that the world is shifting. But when he writes,

"All of the new technical tools we see have one underlying thing in common. They are all reflections of a day and age in which paper processes dominated the hiring world... After 25 years of desktop computing (we got ours in 1981), it is nothing short of astonishing that the mental model behind computing is paper.

he reveals that he suffers from the malady common to IT analysts which I call novelty derangement syndrome. This is the situation where one becomes so entranced by the sheer perfection of an idea that they fail to take sufficient account of the challenges to its success. (And, the punch line)

Will the way we recruit change enormously? Yes, no question. But if you are a recruiter making decisions on how to go about getting your job done it is important to focus on the world as it exists today and will continue to exist over the next 2-3 years. You are not a venture capitalist making bets on where the next billion-dollar company will pop up. You are a tactical operator with a dozen or more short-term objectives to accomplish. The more we as individuals enjoy new tools and toys, the more risk we run of losing our focus.

As a vendor, I would disagree with the one quoted in John's article who called Jobby "very bad." I think it's a neat idea and if you're recruiting AJAX/Ruby developers it may become a key resource in the next 12-18 months. But if you're recruiting manufacturing engineers or marketing coordinators it could still be 3-5 years before it's mainstream.

Unless you want to try pulling an Ericsson and getting rid of everyone over 35, you're still going to be sorting through resumes the old-fashioned way for years to come. Buggy whips may be pretty useless today. But in 1910, a bale of hay would probably have gotten you farther than five gallons of gasoline.

* Those of a certain philosophical bent might also characterize this as a form of immanentizing the eschaton.

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permalink  |   ( 3 / 358 ) Harry the Marketing Headhunter is standing firm on his predictionthat Jobster will change its name to Recruiting.com sooner or later. He makes some great arguments but I'm voting with the Recruiting Animal on this one: highly unlikely.

Harry is on strong ground when he says it's all about the PageRank. On the Internet, every business is an island, and Google runs the ferries. The ability of search engines to steer monetizable traffic is nothing short of epochal in its significance.

The problem I see is that re-branding as Recruiting.com purely for the SEO payoff feels like a great checkers move--when Google's playing chess.

First, this assumes that "recruiting" is really the ideal keyword with which to capture leads. I'm not so sure. Over time, Google (and other search engines) are conditioning people to start by being very specific, and then broaden their queries only if they don't get enough results. So my guess is that the first thing someone is going to type into Google isn't "recruiting," but "AJAX programmer." Search advertising is 100% about feeding impulses. When someone searches for an "AJAX programmer" there is a lot of impulse to monetize.

Then again, Joel Cheesman figured out that Jobster will pay $3/click for "recruiting" so they clearly think it's worthwhile. Who am I to argue?

But the second point is that this seems to assume that Google's index weightings won't change much. After all, if Larry and Sergey one day roll out a version of PageRank that ignores domain names, then the domain name ceases to have any secret-sauce value beyond what Jobster, Jobby, or HRMDirect have. As for the likelihood of such a change, I'd consider it pretty much inevitable. When someone types "recruiting" into a search engine, they are looking for sites which will create a large amount of relevant value. Ultimately, how much does a domain name really tell you? Simply that the owner got lucky. That Jason Davis secured the name recruiting.com in 2002 created no value for people searching on the term "recruiting." But by 2006 the community site he cajoled into existence had huge piles of content and discussion of great value to anyone who wanted to learn anything about "recruiting."

So my bet is on the table that over time, domain names will play an shrinking role in determining search results. Over time, recruiting.com will lose its intrinsic value as the Googleplex figures out more precise measures of relevance. It will just be another name.

And a dull one, at that, for a company that has labored greatly to be anything but dull.


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