Amitai Givertz’s Recruitomatic Blog

Everyone here at Recruitomatic wishes Brad well in his efforts to advance Jobster’s vision for the future of online recruiting. No doubt his recent stint at Vurv Technology (formerly Recruitmax and most recently in bed with Monster) will stand him in good stead. We look forward to reading his blog – and plans for strategic selling – on the Recruitment.com feeds soon.

If one could offer Brad encouraging words of advice, what would they be? Mine would come by way of a sage who imparted much wisdom to me. He said, “Sell today, educate tomorrow”, and “No mutual mystification.” Those two things should serve him well at Jobster I think.

Good luck, Brad. We shall watch your selling with great interest.

As predicted in my recent post Sumser, Davis, Goldberg, Cheesman et al: How Thought Leaders Leave Some of Us All Thunked Out, Jason Goldberg and Jobster has started its subtle colonization of recently acquired Recruiting.com. I was wrong in suggesting that the process would start with innocuous banner ads. The onset of total domination is far more benign than that.

Innocent perhaps, bland certainly, I noticed on the Recruiting.com live feed a one line question under the heading “lunch?” It simply read: “What are lunches like at your company?” To my surprise the link took me to Jobster’s blog and from there to a landing page where I was invited to become another grain of rice on Jason Goldberg’s dinner plate.

While I applaud the use of any means possible to draw attention to one’s fledging online adventures I am bound to ask: why not just put an ad on the sidebar to replace the curiously off-brand cartoon tile-ad? As the publisher presumably Jason Goldberg can run the ad for free. In the trade we call that “fill” or, in VC parlance, a “free lunch”.

I guess all this points to a simple truth: new money has no couth.

Well, Colin Kingsbury says: “Rumors of my blogswap death are greatly exaggerated.” I say: “Let us so live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.”

Great post from Colin for Blog Swap week 3.999. Enjoy!

Bah, humbug!

Being a contrarian has historically been a mixed career move. On one hand, it may get a statue put up in your honor. On the other hand, it will likely be erected on the spot where you were hanged, drawn, and quartered before a cheering crowd of thousands. In business these days the risks are considerably smaller to be sure, but saying I told you so still isn’t likely to earn you an invite to this season’s smart parties. Grinning toady boosterism is still the best way to make friends, though one must be careful to not take it too far lest you be forced to reinvent yourself as a Cautionary Example.

But enough of that – I come not to praise Caesar, but to bury him, or at least ask some pointed questions. Caesar in this case being Generation Y and its accessories like MySpace, which of late have been the obsession of nearly every online recruiting publication. Just today, one well-respected industry luminary wrote,

If you have seen or used MySpace.com or Facebook, you are looking at the type of tools recruiters will be using in just a few months. Do you have a profile on MySpace? Why not?

When I read things like this my mind flips immediately to this. And that brings up a lot of interesting points to consider.

Of course, MySpace is clearly going to own the world. It is already one of the most-visited sites on the ‘Net and it’s rare to find a person not yet old enough to rent a car who doesn’t have a profile. Orkut is as obscure as its name, and Friendster is your father’s social-networking Oldsmobile, so clearly Rupert Murdoch made a wise investment and will shortly own an even larger part of the world than he already does. Of course, back in 1999 people were saying all the same things, and perhaps more, about none other than AOL. While Larry Page and Sergey Brin were still scrubbing the grad-school muck out from under their fingernails, Steve Case was preparing to launch the Titanic of Web 1.0 deals.

Today AOL is almost entirely an object of ridicule whose complete disappearance from the Internet would be celebrated in those few areas where its passing was not entirely unnoticed. The best plan they can come up with seems to be to throw out the one part of the business that makes money in hopes of boosting the future prospects of the parts that don’t. If approved, this will doubtless provide a fitting Viking funeral for a company that has proven that just because you do nothing wrong in your first ten years of business doesn’t mean you won’t screw up every single thing you do in the ten that follow.

One of the most interesting bits of willful blindness in the social-networking space that I see has to do with age. There is no question that MySpace et. al. are a huge presence in youth culture at the moment, and every comment on the subject notes the fact that anyone old enough to rent a car is more or less out of the loop. This is the typical pattern of pop culture sensations going back at least as far as, well, pop culture. I have to wonder, did recruiting experts of the late 1980s suggest that these were the future of corporate personnel planning?

OK, so I am being a little gratuitous. But I don’t think it’s gratuitous to note that the current excitement over social networking is driven almost entirely by people under a very young age, and we have yet to see how the relationship between this extraordinarily-fickle audience and this extraordinarily-fickle technology changes as this audience grows up. Among other things, the basic patterns of social life change enormously between 25 and 35. These could of course strengthen the presence of tools like MySpace, but they could just as likely mean that these services have a loyal but short-term audience, not unlike Modern Bride magazine. I don’t think it’s the least bit unfair to say that social networking has been underwhelming outside the old-enough-to-drink crowd; despite endless hype, services like Ryze and LinkedIn remain niche tools on the best of days.

Last, let’s talk a little about Generation Y and how it is going to force companies to rethink the nature of work itself and other such grandiosities. Everyone talks about how they are going to change the workplace but no one spends much time thinking about how the workplace will change them. Up until the age of 22 or so, most kids spend most of their time with other kids, in school environments built to cater to them. Not until they enter the workforce are they really required to spend a large chunk of time with people of widely-varying ages and where their success and satisfaction are not the first order of business. This is the root of Mark Twain’s famous quip about leaving home at 18 and returning at 21, amazed to find how much wiser his parents had become in just a few years. Hey, I sympathize: my generation was supposed to be full of nothing but anti-corporate, directionless slackers, but that was before we started founding Internet companies and complaining about Generation Y and the Baby Boomers stealing all the attention.

© Copyright 2006 Colin W. Kingsbury

Timing is everything.

Recruitomatic’s contribution to this week’s Blog Swap appears on Diggings. Diggings is a blog about recruitment advertising, media, publishing and so on. Recruitomatic’s post is about advertisng and media too, and about spamming in particular. That makes two commentaries on the subject this week: I Think, Therefore I Spam on Toby Dayton’s spot and Sex & Spammers: Lightening Strikes & Other Acts of God posted here.

Colin Kingsbury is the man behind the machine that makes the HRMDirect blog click. I am gutted that his guest post on Amitai Givertz’s Recruitmatic Blog has been deferred to later date but, in fairness to Colin who I spoke with at length earlier this week, he is changing the world. Pretty good for a man who reads Maoist tracts and considers himself old at minus-40.

If I could pick a guest post from Colin it would be Eggregious or Eggfective? His post talks about intrusive and in-your-face advertising too and references Shally Sterkerl’s commentary Didn’t like SMS recruiting? Think again! which I also point to in my Diggings’ post. Of course, Colin’s absence here this week is, indeed, eggregious. That makes this a good post for me to pick too.

Stay tuned for week four of the Blog Swap. It promises to be a corker!

My word, how things have changed since I was a boy. I grew up in a world where “gay” meant happy and “queer” meant odd. Sex was something missionaries did and being offensive was a military maneuver. Spamming meant doubling the portion of meat in your sandwich and ranting was something Enoch Powell did. On reflection, I guess I led a rather unremarkable boyhood playing knock-down-ginger and breaking windows along the privet hedged byways of suburban London.

At the time I could hardly appreciate what a spirited woman Mary Whitehouse was or the extent to which she was a champion for my moral wellbeing. Mary Whitehouse campaigned tirelessly to help keep the Britain of my youth decent, a society free from the ravages of television and radio violence, homosexuality, pornography, foul language and avant-garde comedy. Basically, if you produced tasteless rubbish like Top of the Pops or the Naked Civil Servant Mary would haul you off to court and sue the pants off you.

Yesterday I took a call from a rather bemused client. Apparently, as part of a direct sourcing project, one Daniel L. Balsam had received an HTML email telling him that his background and experience matched the profile of my client’s open position. The email explained the opportunity in detail and invited the said Daniel L. Balsam to apply for the job. To all intents and purposes the mailing came from my client, employer-branded and all, although my company created and sent the piece out as part of an integrated sourcing strategy. Rather than apply for the job, this man decided to sue my client for “spamming” him. I told my client that this happening is as rare as being struck by lightening and that I had the data to prove it. I do.

Two points:

1. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: if someone posts their resume on the internet they are advertising themselves and inviting the attention of recruiters. As I explained to my client, this blowhard sounds like a kook to me but I would try and find which board the offending email address was sourced from.

2. As is my habit, I googled first. When I found Mad Dan’s web site I said to myself, “Ah-ha, a kook!” but, you know what? The guy has every right to sue every email marketer under the sun if he feels that strongly about it. Let the courts decide who is right and who is wrong. Abiding by the court’s ruling is a small price to pay for a society where right-minded people can go about their legitimate business.

Interestingly, the decision to file this suit as a small claim appears to be more tactical than practical on the plaintiff’s part – certainly not a venue that draws the kind of attention to put this matter in the court of public opinion – but the convenience of settling out of court would itself be an injustice. So, what to do?

Mary Whitehouse fought tirelessly for the traditional values she honestly believed in. She used the courts to wage war on what she viewed as a degenerating society. Personally, I think she was out of touch with reality, a self-opinionated and romantic fool.  I would not put balsa-head in the same category as Mary Whitehouse though, far from it. While Desperate Dan may be out of touch with reality, Mary Whitehouse never profited from taking the moral high-ground. So, Mary, rest in peace; PayPal-Danny – the hapless marketer – we’ll see you in court.

I was drawn to a recent post The Wobblies (IWW union) at a food co-op? which you can read on George’s Employment Blawg. As usual, George raises some interesting questions for which there are no simple answers. However, his post got me thinking:

1. The Wobblies could never re-emerge as a political or acitivist entity today any more than there is currently a mass market for manure. When the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) was conceived horses were as important to the economy as was the wholesale exploitation of downtrodden workers and the lumpenproletariat. Of course, times change. The Wobblies today represent a romanticism that should not be confused with political activism. No, I’m afraid the 24-year old new-age Wobblies are about as connected to the political past as their Goth cousins are connected to ancient history. I think George should have known that before asking, “Is there something inherently inconsistent about unionizing a co-op?”. With all due respect, George, that is a stupid question. Should all Catholics be priests and nuns?

2. The irrelevancy of the IWW today should not distract us from the legitimate debate regarding human rights in the workplace. Who is going to say there is not a good case to be made for mobilizing in defense of those enslaved around the world – estimated to be around 27 million – or for agitating for improved working conditions for sweat shop workers, exploited children, women forced to work as prostitutes, and so on. As long as economic interests transcend human decency there will always be a need for someone to stand up and say: “This is not a good enough society for me, or you, fellow-citizen, human soul!” I agree it may not be the Wobblies, but who then?

3. I understand famed intellectual and social commentator Noam Chomsky is one of the most celebrated Wobblies in the “movement” today. Anyone who has an interest in digging deeper to better understand the legacy of our sepia-tainted and uniquely American anarcho-syndicalist organizations should read Chomsky’s work and his contribution to modern thinking that argues a case for the evolution – not revolution - of an anarcho-capitalist society.

I know, I know – where’s the relevancy of this for us, today? Where’s the connection here? Well, I submit:

Blogging and the democratization of the web are classic examples of the type libertarian society characterized by anarchist thinkers like Chomsky – a society itself characterized by freedom of association, mutual aid, loose confederation and social networking in the absence of governmental oversight and authoritarian regulation. While silly Wobblies may be all screwed up trying to get food co-ops to spill the beans – ridiculous – perhaps we should start getting passionate about “sticking it to the man” ourselves. Before it’s too late.

U.S. chip-giant Intel Corporation sends a clear message to crazed Hezbollah bomb-throwers from its underground nerve center in Haifa, Israel: Kiss my Katyusha! Life goes on for an employer of choice.

Cheezhead posts an interesting piece united states patent application: 0030229638 – as always, a tantalizing post. Now, you can call me a sucker for punishment, but I tend to respond to Joel’s teasing, so off I go. What I find is an equally intriguing piece of news from Business Week.

For anyone who has been following the recent debate on social networking and the impact for those of us in recruiting, this is an interesting read: Friendster’s Patent Possibilities. For those of you who follow vertical search and all that good stuff, I imagine there will be parallel arguments (no bun intended) with who really invented the best thing since sliced bread. But now you know. It was me.

I grew up watching Bill Cosby. Bill Cosby helped me form positive images of African-Americans different from the stereotypes so often portrayed in the media. He also made me laugh. Similarly, I grew up reading John Sumser. John helped me form a view of online recruiting that was a refreshing alternative to a world where applicant tracking was confused with bar coding resumes. He also made me think.

I’m told being a celebrity is no easy thing to manage. It seems to me celebrity is something you have to work at, especially when the latest trends are moving faster than your comedy, faster than your commentary. Elder status in your community confers certain privileges – things that come with rank and good standing – reverence and patronage being good examples. But, just as many in the African-American community now reject Bill Cosby’s holier-than-thou position on some social issues – even though he may be right – I am coming to wonder if John Sumser is increasingly out of step with the community he helped to foster.

Some might argue the retro look of John Susmer’s web site is analogous to a 60’s Dunkin’ Donuts – nostalgic, warm and cozy. Some would say it represents a lack of attention to keeping up with the times, almost contemptuous of its readers. Some might argue the relevancy of white papers and trend reports from years gone by are as pertinent today as when they were when they were first published. Maybe so for the ill-informed, but for those of us who have read it over and over, the value is purely sentimental.  I – and many other content-hungry consumers – now have choices for where to get our buzz-worthy news from, our industry analysis, our market research and our opinions. It seems to me – and I could be off the mark, so you decide – John’s getting tired. For as much as I respect and admire John Sumser for what he has contributed to my understanding and appreciation of the space I now blog in, I have to ask: “What have you done for me lately?”

What’s the point? Just click-over and move on right? Why be a blowhard? I’ll try and explain why:

The Blog Swap is a great idea. It is an experiment that I am committed to actively participate in. As such, I am obliged to giving it my very best and earnest effort.  It is a way for me to honor my peers, you – my readers, and most certainly, my mentors too. I see the value of this collaboration as being quintessentially communal, worthwhile. But it also has to be authentic too. With that said, it sticks in my craw to read patronizing drivel coming from John Sumser passed off as blog swapping. I quote and comment:

We’ve agreed to help the blogosphere [Well, John, thank you so very, very much. We would have sunk into wasted oblivion without you] by publishing an article from a guest writer each week as a part of the recruiting blogswap. As you know, a number of bloggers have banded together [like gutter-snipes mobilizing to mug the gullible among you] to promote each other [right, each other, but not you. You are too lofty to be banding together with the likes of us lowly pukes, right, John?]. Our part [for which we are eternally grateful, big-white bwana] is to give the whole thing a much wider audience [well I hope you publish this then!]. It’s important that these [lost and lonely] voices get heard [damn right, John – it is important].

Please go to interbiznet to read the rest of the John’s demeaning intro to EXCELER8ion’s “guest” post – if you can find it. For someone who espouses the value of easy web navigation, interbiznet is a cobbler with no shoes.  Julian and Shannon Seery Gude are bloggers who I hardly know but have come to respect and admire through their work. John Sumser is a pseudo-blogger who I once thought I knew and am now happy to forget.

As for running a full thirty two weeks, I can tell you for sure, the Blog Swap will only run for thirty one weeks at best. My puny mind and impudence would obviously leave John Sumser and his reader’s gasping for air. So I shall not bother them further.  Not because my “youthful naiveté” might be so irritating to a fuddy-duddy, but because that is the very thing that affords me the opportunity to point out for you: the emperor has no clothes on. 

As Bill Cosby so aptly put it, “Anyone can dabble, but once you’ve made that commitment, your blood has that particular thing in it, and it’s very hard for people to stop you.” Hey, that’s me. Bill Cosby may be a has-been but I shall continue to watch. John Sumser I shall now switch off. I’ve seen enough of the re-runs.

Here is this week’s guest post by fellow Blog Swap swapper Beth N. Carvin who is the CEO of the Nobscot Corporation. Beth’s company provides a valuable resource for employers who realize they need help with retention and metrics – that’s many of us I guess! Enjoy:

Top Five Things Recruiters Did Pre-Internet

Do you ever find yourself exclaiming, “How did we ever live without email and the Internet?”

I know I do.  And yet thinking back, not only did we live and work without today’s technology, we prospered. Which got me thinking -  Is there anything innovative that we can learn in recruiting today from how we recruited back before we had today’s tools of the trade?

Here’s my list of the Top 5 things that successful recruiters did pre-Internet. Maybe you can find some pearls of wisdom from the past that will help you with your recruiting today.

1. Disciplined System

When you had to recruit without the luxury of the Internet, there were never enough hours in the day to get everything done. If you wanted to reach your billing goals, you absolutely had to stick to a strict work schedule.

The one that I was trained on looked something like this:

8:30a – 9:30a         Morning Meeting

9:30a – 11:00a       Company Calling and Company Visits

11:00a – 12:00p     Interviewing, Matching, Presenting, Prepping

12:00p – 1:00p       Lunch

1:00p – 2:00p         Sourcing

2:00p – 4:00p         Recruiting Calls

4:00p – 5:00p         Interviewing, Matching, Presenting, Prepping

5:00p – 5:30p         Daily Planner for Tomorrow

5:30p – 6:30p        (optional) Interviewing, Matching, Prepping

Sticking to this schedule was in many ways the key to our success. You couldn’t help but getting job orders and sendouts and placements when you worked the system every day without fail.

2. Meeting Companies

Before technology, the business world was smaller and more localized. Recruiters worked in territories by industry or discipline and location. After receiving a job order, we always set up company visits. This was critical for improving your chance of filling the position. Why? Three reasons:

a. You got a feel for which applicants would fit in best with the company.

b. You had a chance to build rapport with the hiring authority.

c. You had an opportunity to let the company know exactly how you worked. This might include a lesson on why it is important to make offers quickly so as not to lose the best applicants.

3. Meeting Applicants

I’m still horrified at the thought of recruiters sending out applicants that they have never met.  This was drilled into my head very strongly in my early days of recruiting in the mid-1980s. The story was told by the President of my firm about the one and only time he sent an applicant out without meeting him first. The applicant showed up to the interview in cut-off jean shorts and generally made a bad first impression on the company. The President was mortified in front of his client.

Meeting an applicant in person allows you to judge whether or not the applicant will fit in as an employee in your client’s company. How someone acts in email is often very different from how he or she may act in person. It also gives you a great gauge for how much you will need to prep your applicant prior to his or her interview.

4. Prepping the Applicant

Because communication is so quick with technology today, there are fewer and fewer recruiters who prep their applicants before an interview. This was (and still should be) a critical step toward making a placement. There are many applicants who are great employees but lousy interviewees. You owe it to your client companies to make sure they don’t turn down a great employee because of poor interviewing skills.

My favorite prep story is with applicant Wendy the Accountant. Wendy came into my office and slumped down into the chair with about as much energy as a slug on a hot day. But her skills were great, her work history was stable and she had terrific work references. I can remember that my Manager saw me sit Wendy down in the lobby while I set her up for an interview. My manager said, “Beth, where are you sending that applicant?”  I replied, “Company X” My manager looked at me with horror on her face, “Not Company X. That’s our best client!” I said, “Trust me. She is going to do great. I am going to prep her before she goes.”

I set up the interview and spent the next 1/2 hour prepping Wendy for her interview. I let her know how great she was for the job and that she should walk in their with energy and confidence. By the time she left my building, the whole office watched her out the window walking to her car with great speed and enthusiasm. About an hour and 1/2 later I received a call from Company X. Wendy was still there and they were calling to ask my permission to make her a job offer on the spot. True story. The power of the prep.

5. Sales and Psychology Skills

It’s difficult to be a good salesperson over email. Sales is very much about listening and that is difficult to do with technology. One of the things that makes recruiting so challenging (and interesting!) is that you are not selling widgets. Widets would be easy to sell. Widgets don’t have fears of making changes, widgets don’t have husbands, wives and mothers telling them what to do and widgets don’t have to give two weeks notice to a company that doesn’t want to lose them.

It’s the job of the recruiter to be able to help their applicants get the good things that they want. There’s a lot of hand holding that needs to take place in Recruiting. It’s difficult to hold hands through a keyboard.

© Copyright 2006 Beth N. Carvin.

I suspect in the coming weeks we are going to hear a lot more talk about India and the continued outsourcing of U.S. jobs. On the one hand I think the types of position that will be outsourced to India will change – salaries in India are inflating annually at a rate 15% among IT professionals for example, making the lower costs of outsourcing less attractive than they say, two years ago – but the attraction of offshoring jobs will continue, and perhaps for the same old reasons.

My experience with outsourced jobs to India – entirely as a U.S. consumer/customer at this point – has been nothing but positive. I am particularly struck by how in Indian society – so exotic, mystical even – people are called Philip and Peter and Patrick. Just like in Wisconsin, in fact.

So, while some U.S. workers can feel less endangered as the wages gap continues to close, others can only hope that India’s apparent failure to learn from U.S. hiring practices will draw India under the spotlight once again, albeit for altogether different reasons, and give employers pause to think – not whether or not we should be exporting jobs – but how to export best practice recruiting too. We’ll see. I’m sure a background check would reveal many Indian customer service reps are going under assumed names. What next?

Namaste, Baba.

I know it’s fashionable for bloggers in our space to be well-informed subject matter experts. On the other hand, I freely admit to being 36% not-so-clever and 38% quite-possibly-clueless. The other 26% of the blogger in me is mostly interested in debunking what the other 74% of me holds true because so much of that has been shaped by subject matter experts who are more like me than they would care to admit.  So, now that you know the extent to which I am perfectly qualified to comment on the dot jobs (.jobs) debate, here is my take on the year-old top-level domain: what a load of rubbish. There, I said it.

Read the rest here »