Amitai Givertz’s Recruitomatic Blog

First bowler-hatted gentleman I can say was worth listening to. Interesting…

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The Future of Work examines the challenges to conventional notions of work and organization brought on by new digital technologies and trends. As the velocity of change increases, institutions and individuals must adapt. Yet many structures, including those in education, government, business and the economy, often remain rooted in the past.

The report captures the insights of the Nineteenth Annual Aspen Institute Roundtable on Information Technology, where business leaders, technologists, international politicians, academics and innovators explored how global structures and institutions are being confronted by the 21st century realities of distributed knowledge, crowdsourcing, open platforms and networked environments.

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I have long maintained RPO should stand for recruitment problem outsourcing and not recruitment process outsourcing, a dopey term if ever I heard one.

I have been involved with RPO companies large and small in various capacities over the years. I can say with the confidence of an insider that in the main, they or no less dysfunctional, inept, devoid of imagination and generally wattless than the clients who they purport to transcend.

No two employers are alike. They are all different by virtue of their size, orientation, positioning, culture, experience, leadership, workforce and yada-yada-yada.

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Posted Are You Getting Paid What you’re Worth for Recruiting Pharmacists and PTs? on Bells & Whistles which details CyberSleuth Shally’s upcoming sourcing clinic for healthcare:

On Thursday, June 7 at 1:30 Eastern Daylight Time you will have a chance to learn exactly how the best retained search specialists find candidates that the rest of us may never know ever existed. Starting on Friday, June 8 you can begin recruiting them.

As you can see…

• Recruiting for Healthcare: An Unconventional Approach

• Nurse Recruiting from Nurses Week to Memorial Day and Beyond, It’s Mind-numbing

…work has kept me focused on healthcare recently.

Following up on John Sumser: A Sheep in Wolf’s Clothing? and Jason Davis: The Recruitosphere’s Darling, Broken Promises posted on Bells & Whistles.

…Birthday Greetings, Bottle of Wine?

It has been a little while since we posted here, hasn’t it? No matter. Those of you who know me well enough to care will also know that I have been somewhat distracted with other projects. Those of you who don’t know me that well, well, don’t care do you?

With the launching of Bells & Whistles: The RCI Recruitment Solutions Blog I find that most of my work here is done. While this blog has been an entirely personal adventure, what I have learned has been most valuable in ways that I could only apply to “work” and other assorted labors of love.

But it is like a bug, you know, having your own little piece of cyberspace to graffiti. So I think I might continue to post from time-to-time, most likely when I feel like talking to myself is the best way to work through a problem, not wanting to upset anyone I might otherwise want to impress. Maybe I’ll post here when I want to write just for the fun of it.

For sure, if this first blog has taught me one thing it is that I do need a personal space for my private public musing. Making connections between work, the business of recruiting, ambition, profit, anticappointment and what-have-you in the context of God, sex, power, bodily functions and boyhood — not to overlook the occasional rude observation about industry luminaries — is hardly appropriate when blogging — as I must now — with the decorum of polite company and paying guests in mind.

So this blog will continue to serve some purpose I guess, even if that purpose becomes increasingly obscured over time, those idiosyncratic connections and contexts never being referenced here again, rather left to the archives for some fool to take issue with.

Who knows?

Maybe I’ll just post links here to other places where I am my contemporary self, diverting one’s attention from my clumsy first kiss with authenticity, my heavy-handed groping with social media. Little, innocuous links giving way to a lighter touch perhaps or just popping in and out when the need to wax lyrical overrides my greater need to cost-justify my time blogging.

Really, darlings, who knows? Who cares?

On the scene for some years now, it has never been easy to recommend FuckedCompany.com as a resource for recruiters even though the daily catalogue of firings, layoffs, furloughs and assorted corporate shenanigans makes it a great resource for identifying potential hires before their resumes hit the streets. For others, FuckedCompany.com has the industry scoops, ahead of the mainstream media.

I know, I know, in the interests of authenticity we can get away with the occasional “f”-this and “f”-that – keeping it real – but really, is it any wonder that otherwise perfectly good sourcing tools never make recruiters’ lists or get cited when they break important news?

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.

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!

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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