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

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Every so often I hear a song on the radio that catches my ear and off I go to iTunes to look it up. This is dangerous because once there, odds are good I'll spend the next hour clicking related links until I find myself staring with glazed eyes at God only knows what twenty times removed from where I started. What Paulina Rubio has to do with delta blues I'm not quite sure, but that's how it goes.

There's a lot of ongoing talk about the power of social media, but in the case of iTunes, it also reveals some interesting limitations. While Amazon's book and product reviews have generally struck me as very well balanced, even when the subject is controversial, reviews of music on iTunes suffer from more grade inflation than a college quarterback majoring in Phys Ed.

To be fair, it's not exclusive to iTunes--CD reviews on Amazon seem to give the same scores as the albums get on iTunes. Compared to a DVD, hardcover book, or most consumer products sold on Amazon, a CD is less expensive, and books would seem to have many of the same creative and emotional attachment qualities as an album. Maybe I'm the guy in the asylum who just knows he's the only sane one, but the only thing I've found true about iTunes' ratings is that 4/5 stars *might* indicate the album is average. Or it might indicate that the group has a large base of fans who wished they turned out a 4-star effort.

All of this raises interesting questions for those who think social media will somehow improve the job-hunting/recruiting process. Are current employees of a comapny going to give jobseekers objective opinions about what working there is like, or are they going to overlook facts to present views which reinforce their own (positive or negative) biases? Some years ago, I asked my then-boss who we could use for a reference for a particular specialized prospect, and he suggested a client who was on the verge of firing the company. I asked him what he was smoking to make such a suggestion, and he chuckled and said, "never underestimate the unwillingness of a person to admit they made the wrong decision."

Needless to say, it is not clear to me that social media must do anything except amplify the volume of whatever process it is injected into. At the end, the process is still driven by people, and we haven't changed much.

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permalink  |   ( 3 / 521 ) Often I hear recruiters and managers talk about wanting to hire more "entrepreneurial and creative talent," or perhaps how to attract more "creative and entrepreneurial" people. These terms are used together so frequently that they've become somewhat synonymous, but the qualities, and the people that embody them, can actually be quite different.

I was thinking about this while reading Jason Corsello's recent post on the new challenges Google is facing in attracting and retaining top talent. Jason ends his post saying, "Every company these days seems to want to be like Google. They can start by acting like them..." For many people, "acting like Google" means providing benefits like free meals and laundry service.

While creative people might take a passing interest in a variety of things, my experience is that what they want more than anything is to be left alone to create. While they have the same human appreciation for praise and seeing their work used to successful ends, simply being able to do what they love is enough for them to keep going. While better health insurance might mean something to one creative person, a free onsite laundry service could mean a lot more because it eliminates a constant distraction.

Give the artist a stack of forms to fill out and he might gripe about how these take time away from painting, but so long as the budget requests get approved eventually, it probably won't be a major problem. But give an entrepreneur the same stack of forms, and she'll just as likely carry them to the CEO's office and raise a ruckus about the process itself. The artist is content in his studio, while the entrepreneur sees the whole company as her oyster. Entrepreneurial people often end up working for themselves because they simply can't tolerate the blinding and obstinate stupidity that every established business seems to accumulate.

Do entrepreneurs care about fringe benefits? Yes and no. Given equal opportunities they will have an effect, but the more entrepreneurial a person is, the more focused they will be on the core opportunity. At the margin, people who join very early-stage startups often do so for nothing but equity, and founders will often sink money in for years before seeing a penny, and some lose their shirts in the process.

One of the more interesting examples of the differences between these two types is something I see whenever I talk to old friends from my brief stint as a newspaper reporter. The business is dying and they know it, but at the same time they talk about it as though it were happening to someone else. Their job, as they see it, is to write good news stories, and "the business side of news" is something they see as someone else's problem.

Ultimately I think large companies can process creative employees somewhat more effectively if only because they can be more easily tagged and shelved. The challenge is keeping them fed a steady diet of the work they like. Entrepreneurial employees, on the other hand, are more inclined to challenge things outside their portfolio, and become unhappy when forced to work around what they see as self-inflicted failures.

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permalink  |   ( 3 / 446 ) 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 ) Just when you thought recruiting was safe again, along comes a new (potential) compliance mandate that promises to make the OFCCP rules look like child's play. Whatever your feelings on the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act now working its way through the wheels of Congress, the impact on employers could be dramatic.

I started paying close attention to the debate from the sidelines when the issue of increased standards for employer verification of new hires first entered the picture over a year ago. While it's too soon to know the precise shape the final law might take, Elaine Rigoli's ERE article makes the stakes clear:

The pending immigration legislation would do many things, including the hiring of thousands of additional border patrol agents; instituting the new "Z" worker visa; and adopting new deportation provisions.

Perhaps the most interesting element for the staffing world is Title III, which would create a mandatory employment eligibility verification system to electronically verify the eligibility of every worker in the country.

Title III touches on document verification requirements; records that must be kept by employers; protections against discrimination; ID theft prevention and privacy protections; information sharing; and other miscellaneous policies.

So, in other words, you'll need to keep complete records, but not too detailed, for long enough, but not too long, and you can't share them with anyone except the people who need them, etc. There, is everybody clear now?

Unlike the OFCCP, this law would cover all employers regardless of size, and if you've ever had a new hire walk away because your background check turned up a "red flag" due to a false match on a name or address, you know how any type of verification process can turn into a Kafkaesque nightmare. On the bright side, at least every employer will be in the same boat!

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permalink  |   ( 3 / 502 ) In a post today on RecruitingBloggers.com, the Recruiting Animal quotes the Brazen Careerist on the notion that "helicopter parents" are just doing what rich folk have always done to boost their kids' careers. Ryan Healy suggested that having parents pitch in during compensation negotiations was just like a performer or professional athlete being represented by an agent.

Ryan and Penelope are both full of interesting insights, but in this case I think they've got it wrong on both counts, and the differences illuminate why employers are correct to despise this new phenomenon.

Unlike a helicopter parent, a talent agent is representing not just a single individual, but themselves as owners of a brand and portfolio. Much like a recruiter, an agent has an interest in getting the best deal for his or her talent, but also in striking a fair deal for the employer. Over-inflation of skills and abilities or harsh negotiating tactics will exact a price on the agent's ability to do business with other clients in the future.

Likewise, when a wealthy individual pulls strings to get their kid a job, it's not a one-way transaction benefiting only the kid, but an act that maintains a potentially (or actually) lucrative business and social relationship. The wealthy parent is likely to be a source of capital or business connection at some point in the future, or may have been one in the past. Giving their son or daughter a job is in that sense an option premium or perhaps payment for a similar past favored rendered.

Of course, parents just want the best for their kids, and are likely to believe that they're just trying to get them a fair deal. But parents are hardly known for neutral advocacy, not in public anyway, and there's nothing wrong with that.

And lest it go unsaid, having Daddy get you a job is rarely looked on favorably by superiors, and will often earn the resentment of your peers even if you perform on par with everyone else. It's not for nothing that many self-made millionaires and billionaires have made their kids start out in the mail room and eat at least a little @#$! before inheriting the throne. So while you may be able to spin 'copter moms and dads as "no worse than what's always been done," promoting them as a positive fits the definition of chutzpah as "a kid who kills his parents and then begs the judge for leniency because he's an orphan."

All of this aside, hiring of entry-level employees is a lot more volatile with regards to economic conditions, and I suspect that a lot of the silliness we now see will evaporate like the morning fog with the next downturn in the economic cycle.

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