Amitai Givertz’s Recruitomatic Blog

Well, I guess you can’t win them all, can you? After 247.6 hours waiting – excluding weekends, public holidays and some time off to nurse a broken body clock – I learned yesterday that a highly anticipated trophy account would not be seen on my mantle after all.

As is my practice, I spoke to the client to understand where we disconnected. I won’t go into all of the details – the loss of this opportunity is altogether too depressing – but one of the areas of concern to them was the supporting data I provided in the business plan, under the heading of “Executive Salaries and Compensation.” I should mention that the client was emphatic during the intake calls that they wanted to pay the “going rate and some” to attract a top HR thought-leader-come-rain-maker who would not only would bring “gravitas” to the position, but would also put a capital “C” in human capital.

To cut a long story short, the client looked at the copy of Human Resource Executive’s ranking The HR Elite – a shortlist of potential hires I thought, along with the salary indicators – and decided, rather than put the capital “C” in human capital, they would instead put a lower case “f” in Fortune 500.

As I said, you can’t win them all.

If I was a student today – like you are perhaps – I would be pretty ticked off with the quality of online services and resources being provided by my college’s career center. Of course, there are always exceptions and I’m sure that somewhere out there is an unbelievably terrific resource that provides everything that would give me a competitive edge in my job search, but I haven’t seen it yet. What I have seen ranges from what I can only describe as mediocre, a typical offering of generic and conventional blah. Admittedly, my sampling for this missive was random and limited to the relatively few colleges who at least understand that students google. But you know what – this is a rant about shortchanging students working stuff out online and not an article about best practices. If career counselors or recruiters want to argue the toss – and I wish you would – hey, leave a comment.

Here are my top three peeves and some practical suggestions for you to consider:

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Jason Goldberg, Chief Jobster and darling of the online recruiting space, shows the world how business is done around here.

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Well, well, well. What do we have here? Recruiting.com 2.0, eh?

Having a strong sense that recruiting bloggers are unwittingly making Jason Goldberg and Jason Davis fabulously rich simply by thinking about their blogs, I shall start to suppress conscious thought and coherent writing on mine. I have no problem with Jasons Goldberg and Davis becoming fat-wallet media tycoons – I aspire to being one myself – but, if I am going to work hard to create original content, they are going to have to work just as hard to understand it, capitalize on it. Oh, I know, the favors of communal love are reciprocated if I want to attract more readers and/or monetize my driveling blog. But I don’t. It seems the more I want the privacy of my very own weblog the more people want to see what I’m up to. I think it must be the Recruitomatic-Lavatory- Webcam syndrome. For some reason there are people – but not you of course – who want to observe me struggle with a thing, like making sense of what this new-fangled Recruiting.com is really all about. How odd.

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Most people I ask complain that unsolicited email is the most egregious form of advertising. There are many reasons for this, some of which I understand and some of which I don’t. To the extent that the cumulative affect of spam – clogging stuff up – is problematic, and porn and nasty words are offensive to most right-minded people, I get it. I can even see why some people might get annoyed with the same message touting mortgages or member-enhancing herbal concoctions arriving day in and day out can get tiresome. Even the deceptive subject lines. But, to the extent that spam is inherently bad because it is unsolicited, makes no sense to me at all.

With few exceptions advertising is, by its nature, obtrusive and mostly irrelevant to the luckless recipients’ needs, wants and desires. Most advertising is unsolicited, or a trade-off at best. I want televised entertainment and news, so I put up with the ads. Do I want to change my choice of tampon, refinance my house, or sleep with Fabio?  I don’t. Do you?  I listen to the radio, so I accept the ads. Am I suing someone, looking for hurricane shutters, needing a surgical procedure, fixing my credit scores and wishing I had to the fortitude to admit I’m an alcoholic and need help? Not this year. I drive up and down the turnpike but do I want to reconsider my unwanted pregnancy, go to college or tune in to another radio station and get a different demographically targeted set of ads? No more than I want to finish my on-the-road coffee without having to consider the fact that I should have saved a buck and bought a Styrofoam sandwich too.

Advertising – unsolicited, unwanted, and unnecessary – is everywhere! I use Instant Messenger and now have to consider whether I would do a number on Britney Spears or lie alone on a sleep-number bed. Even in the men’s room, as I stand there peeing, I am confronted with even more choices – but then again, what better place to catch my attention as I hold in my hand the very object of most advertisers subtle messaging? Yes, as an advertiser myself, I too find myself thinking on my feet.

The bottom-line? Advertising is the price we pay for free speech, freedom of choice and living in a free society. Whether unsolicited or not, it’s in your face (or in your hands) most of the time. And in the absence of these freedoms, advertising simply becomes repackaged and called propaganda.  Messaging in its multifarious forms is so prevalent because it’s fundamentally human.

Shally “Shallywag” Steckerl recently had a hot thread going on with his post Didn’t like SMS recruiting? Think again! Among the possible objections to text messaging recruitment/candidate communications to cell phones is the concern that this is “spamming”. But just as Yahoo! HotJobs and Monster have mass e-mail options for employers – is that considered spamming – the end may justify the means. Candidates are a de facto – not sacrosanct – audience. What many “Oh-golly-you-spammer-degenerate” critics seemingly forget is that when a candidate posts their resume online they are inviting the attention of recruiters. If those recruiters turn to bulk mail, text messaging or mass e-mail to get their message delivered, then that’s price a candidate must be prepared to pay for advertising themselves. While I concede that the delivery method can negatively impact employer branding and the candidate experience, that’s not the point here. The point is that some people should get over themselves thinking that spam is a) unstoppable and b) the work of Satan.

I don’t choose to hear “f-ing” this and “f-ing” that, but if I’m “out there” I accept there is a possibility I will.  I don’t want to cleanse my bowels or find a job but I’m grateful that there is someone out there who recognizes that one day I might. And, I know our inboxes and cell phones are so personal to us as to be near-holy, but He too moves in mysterious ways. I suggest that anyone who has the problem today we all faced a few years back with unsolicited “junk” should consider that – as with all two way communication – they too have a responsibility to manage their lives. With freedom comes responsibility, no?  I say, if you don’t like it, block it. If you don’t know how to block it, read the manual.  In the meantime, long live advertising – in all its myriad forms!

All this talk of “Talent Wars” has made me feel queasy. Colin Kingsbury posted a rebuttal to my post Rub-A-Dub-Dub with What if they threw a war and nobody came? in which he restates his assertion that talk of an inevitable talent shortage is nonsensical – a position which I questioned, not refuted. But I concede now, not for having been persuaded one way or another, but because Colin Kingsbury has left me with a sharp pain in the back of my head, reaching for an ice pack. I guess some questions are better left unasked, not answered.

Similarly, John Sumser with his posts War I, War II, War III and War IV has led me to wonder if he is in cahoots with Colin Kingsbury, illustrating beautifully that – as Colin Kingsbury commented – “if you torture statistics long enough they will eventually confess to anything.” Unfortunately – as it seems to me – John Sumser has concluded that in establishing “name, rank and serial number” he has uncovered the identity of an enemy within when in reality all it is is census data withstanding the electric cattle prod of John Sumser’s analysis.

Conclusions drawn in conclusion of this thing, for the time being at least:

1. Colin Kingsbury is a wonderfully gifted blogger and salesman too. As a blogger he writes and asserts with a persuasive, authoritative tone that comes with a journalistic temperament and Clintonesque youthfulness. As a salesman, how could you not buy a time-machine from this man, warranted for the next ten years? Colin Kingsbury is an ace.

2. After putting us through the wringer for a whole week with graphs and data and bullet points, John Sumser in now in two minds – two minds and undecided! – about the Talent Wars:

“So, the answer is that there is and isn’t a labor shortage. To the extent that you desire a ready trained and available workforce at your whim, there’s a problem. To the extent that you are willing to articulate your needs clearly and invest in the people you hire, there’s not much of one.”

…but unequivocal in his prognosis:

“If we are really going to continue to grow the economy at 20th century rates, we’ll have to make some changes.”

Brilliant.

3. You can look out ten years or project fifty years out, it hardly matters. Anyone who suggests that hiring talent today is not significantly affected by a shortage of qualified candidates – passive, active or not yet born – and that this situation will continue to be problematic for the predictable future, is living in cloud-cuckoo land. Reflect on your own experience and consider how different things looked in your world, ten, thirty, fifty years ago. Look at the global, economic, social, work/life projections that were made for us back then and look where we are today. Based on those reflections, how certain are you about what your world will look like even tomorrow? Perhaps Colin Kingsbury is right – and he could be – but a good many of us who graduated from the School of Hard Knocks will be dead long before we can wheel John Sumser out in 2050 to pat him on the back for an astute reading of Pakistan’s projected population growth and changing demographics.

4. Did someone miss the fact that in the places where we have economic growth today we are fighting a global war for talent? Thankfully, John Sumser suggests that in his upcoming series of posts he will give us tools to navigate the upcoming labor requirements, reconcile his ambivalence. Let’s hope those tools are more like a pickax than a ice pick. Lord knows, we are going to need more than conjecture and a sharp pain in the back of the head if we are to crack this one.

Leader, luminary, larger-than-life David Maister posts Screening for Character and draws an interesting set of comments from an international audience on the subjects of screening, interviewing and what-have-you. Rather than quote the post and comments at length, I suggest my friends in the Recruitosphere click over and take a long, hard read. These are our clients talking.

Two more suggestions:

1. A few bloggers in the recruiting bubble might want to take the time every now and then to find opportunities like this one to engage, educate and excite people who exist “in the real world,” readers who might just benefit a little more from our blogging, knowledge and resources than we sometimes do from our own self-absorption and pathological introspection.

2. Leave a comment for David Maister and his readers. Who knows – someone outside of our community may bookmark one of us. David Maister may even reference this eclectic group of bloggers blogging in the bubble in one of his articles. That would be nice.

I’m having fun tracking blogs that seem to be talking to me and/or that I would recommend to my clients. I have been following Eric Jackson’s blog Breakout Performance. His post Carly’s Biggest Shortcoming takes an interesting view of Carly Fiorina’s leadership at HP and that company’s recent changing of the guard.

Perhaps Eric will post more often if we tell him we like his blogging. I hope so.

Last Wednesday afternoon, a recruiter I know was suggesting that it is terribly wrong to be deceitful as part of the process of sourcing names and poaching talent. She wagged her finger at me and said, “You scallywag! Suggesting that recruiting and names sourcing is like sales and prospecting is true, but only up to the point that a recruiter would never lie.” Being a salesman before lying my way into the recruiting profession I thought to myself, “You moron”, but in the interests of polite conversation I said, “Well, I guess you’re right, Mavis.”

This recruiter then proceeded to inform me that the whole business of recruiting has become corrupt. Resumes aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on – full of lies, half-truths and misrepresentations. Hiring managers? They are brazen liars too, especially sales managers and particularly those in advertising and media. To illustrate the point about hiring managers, she cited several instances where she was told that a strong candidate didn’t cut the mustard when clearly, if the manager had taken a moment to read the (heavily censored) resume, an interview – a hire even – would most certainly have been the result. No doubt about it.

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Visits to Granddad’s were a treat for me. Hard boiled eggs, sardines and lettuce, borscht and Jacobs Cream Crackers. Yummy, yummy. Granddad had a color telly. I remember watching All Our Yesterdays on it – war footage in black and white. And, as clearly as I remember gagging on Sunday dinner I remember the 1938 footage of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain arriving home from his Munich shindig with Heir Hitler waving a piece of paper in his hand proclaiming “peace in our time.”

As I read John Sumser’s posts War I and War II, and consider Colin Kingsbury’s thoughtful replies to my post Rub-A-Dub-Dub, I am reminded of how things look in black and white and through the eyes of boyish bewilderment. Certainly, I reminded that Granddad took great delight in telling me how he cornered the local black market for tinned sardines from 1943 to the end of the war. Grandma sipped on her borscht and complained about his flights of fancy.

I shall wait to see all of what John Sumser has to say before commenting on his take on the future Talent Wars. I can hardly wait. I also hope Colin Kingsbury will keep us engaged with his modern points of view.

Today, what I will say is this: all this conjecture about future talent supply and demand and demographics and zero population growth – or not as the case may be – is, well, conjecture. What is an irrefutable fact is that today there is not enough talent or skilled labor to provide what we need to sustain our potential growth. Ask anyone who is recruiting nurses, truck drivers, salespeople, scientists, construction superintendents, police officers and what have you. They will tell you if there is a war for talent and what it means to count the dead and bayonet the wounded.

John Sumser forces the dim-witted among us to google the crypto-heading of his article ZPG to find it means “Zero Population Growth.” In his Electronic Recruiting News article, John Sumser bullet points some changes to note as the global talent shortage becomes even more acute. In a rare departure from protocol, he publishes a reply – not to save himself the bother of writing something before taking off a long Labor Day Weekend – but because Colin Kingsbury is one of the very few in the recruiting bubble who John Sumser endorses, and for heaven’s sake, why not?

In ZPG II Colin Kingsbury makes some valid points relative to population growth and reasons that under favorable conditions – George Bush leaving office,  migration to the U.S. of much needed talent, not patronizing younger employees, squeezing round pegs into square holes and so on –  the projected shortfall in talent may be averted. 

I cannot argue that Colin Kingsbury’s point of view is not compelling. It is. I cannot argue that he is wrong. I don’t know. What I can say is this: his hypothesis cannot be tested against alternate points of view or current trends because he offers no data or research to support it. Maybe there isn’t data out there. Who knows?

And, how will Colin Kingsbury’s speculation be put to the test without a debate of the issues? Again, John Sumser leaves the dim-wits hyperventilating for the ability to post a comment and develop the thread to engage his elevated readership – beyond the reach of the recruiting blogosphere – in a more involved process of thought-leadership? Don’t ERN’s readers deserve an answer to the types of question that could be posed to help develop Colin Kingsbury’s optimism and our own understanding of the issues? For example:

1. How are we going to reconcile the increased levels of U.S. xenophobia and racism arising form the threats of “Islamofascism” with the possible migration of teaching, healthcare, technical, scientific and engineering talent from countries like India, Pakistan and the Philippines? Is it as simple as waiting for President Bush to leave office in 2008? Will everyone stop hating Americans then? Will all veiled and bearded olive complexions suddenly morph from potential terrorists to potential hires? Or will their negative image persist, impede progress?

2. As over half of the U.S. government’s civilian workforce and C-level baby boomers are projected to retire in the next five years on their lucrative pensions – perhaps the last generation to have the option of a lifetimes investment in work to draw on – who is going to lead us? If it is the round pegs in the square holes, at what point are we going to address failed succession and workforce planning and social systems – like education – that have in large part contributed to the types of problems we face today? And who is to say employers are ready for a “misfit” workforce that anyway? Not me.

3. The job-hopping trend continues. 74% of workers are not “happy” at work, open to new and “better” opportunities. The trends continue to disadvantage the majority of employers. So, at what point does retention becomes a key issue for an organization’s continued prosperity in the face of ongoing talent shortages? Are we ready as a society to deal with the underlying issues that continue to threaten the U.S. economic engine like our insatiable appetite for everything on-demand including fulfillment at work and for career? How are Colin Kingsbury’s views of the talent shortage positively or negatively impacted by these types of workforce dynamics?

Addressing the issues of talent shortages and zero population growth and potential fixes obviously transcends a couple of posts on a couple of blogs. But I don’t hear the conversation being advanced anywhere else online. Points of view are easy to come by. A debate of the issues is a tougher thing to find, like a good conversation I guess. Another reason, Mr. Sumser, as to why we blog.  And why – long weekends aside – Recruitomatic applauds your posting of Colin Kingsbury’s post.