Amitai Givertz’s Recruitomatic Blog

Thank you Mr. Zappe for pointing to TalentHole in your recent ERE article Have Your Problem Employee Removed and Get a T-Shirt. I share your disappointment that the service is a bait and switch, outplacement not replacement being the cuckoo here.

Back in the early 1980′s I worked for a London-based subsidiary of  NYNEX. The banking system sales were large and complex. There were many people in the prospects’ organization who could scupper a sale and for any number of reasons. We called them Heretics. It was not an uncommon practice when a heretic became a problem that a City-headhunter was called in to hire that person out of the organization, greasing the skids for an easier, highly profitable outcome. As I recall that practice was called, ironically, bait and switch.

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In reply to John Sullivan’s recent come-to-Jesus diatribe, Five Ugly Numbers That You Can’t Ignore – It’s Time to Calculate Hiring Failures on ERE.net, John Sumser now asks on HR Examiner: “Why not give the whole problem over to the training folks?”

For starters, I’m not sure changing scapegoats addresses the underlying problem.  There really is very little difference between abdicating responsibility to trainers for recruiting excellence — or whatever standard we used to aspire to — to  expecting “recruiters” to stop buckling under the weight of a hiring manager’s passed buck.

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Rogue recruiter and sausage salesman David Perry was nice enough to include me as one of the co-authors in his recently published, run-away best-seller, Guerrilla Marketing for Job Seekers 2.0. Yowzer!

If you’re lucky enough you might still pick up a copy on Amazon.com. If you’re really, really lucky you won’t need to.

The chapter I wrote is entitled Guerrilla Googling and the Job Hunters’ Dashboard.

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Before realizing that Google’s products and services can be configured to meet the needs of recruiters like me [see G-Recruiter.com] I spent a good bit of time tinkering with a few “free” applicant tracking systems. Not that there are that many to choose from, Zoho People impressed me the most, not because it was any good — actually, I thought is was a piece of crap — but because their customer service  was absolutely amazing.

During our hours [and hours] trying to fix bugs and get things working one of the support-wallahs told me a new module for recruiters was being released in a “few weeks.”  That was almost a year ago.

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I was speaking the other day with Raghav Singh. Raghav knows about recruiting technology. We were catching up on his visit to HRTech in Chicago. He said one of the most impressive companies on show this year was Recruiting.com. My first reaction was, “Wha-wha?”

I see John Sumser strikes a similar tone to Raghav’s in his post 091018 Recruiting.com. John’s analysis leads me to affirm that while Recruiting.com might make a great case study for a start-up starting over, cool recruiting tools alone rarely, if ever, compensate for lousy internal processes, weak management and a decimated recruiting function.

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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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It seems the politicos at The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) have teamed up with JobTarget marketeers and are set to publish a 2009 Job Board Savings Book.

Apparently, you can use the coupons at over 1,000 niche, diversity and regional job boards that are slashing up to half the price on their job postings, all to help make the world go round. Think of it as cross between an economic stimulus package and a licked-to-go Green Shield Stamps program.

In times of economic collapse it is only natural that the industry’s leadership should bandy together and step up to the plate. Rewarding good behavior [buying postings] and facilitating commerce [direct marketing] is not a bad thing. To the contrary, it is a good thing. And programs like this are quintessentially American, aren’t they?

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Before I go off ranting, in the interests of full disclosure, I have been in cahoots with Net evangelist Michael Marlatt since our first conversations about cahootin’ this year at SourceCon. Our chats since have covered topics as diverse as data portability, gizmos and gadgets and supernumerary nipples.

I am also part of Michael’s reverse brain drain on CloudRecruiting.net and couldn’t be more flattered to have my name in lights with the likes of his other Think Tank members — Amybeth Hale, Dan Harris, Eric Jaquith, Geoff Peterson, Jeremy Langhans, Jim Stroud, Josh Kahn, Leslie O’Connor, Rithesh Nair, Suzy Tonini, and Tim O’Connor. I cannot say how they feel about being similarly associated with me but three out of the eleven follow me on Twitter. That say’s something doesn’t it?

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Some time ago my wife was suffering from a persistent abdominal pain.  A kind neighbor who learned that medical science had failed us for years came over to lay hands on my missus and pray with the family.

Our apostolic neighbor got to work and in no time was possessed. She began uttering some unknown prayer that was only coherent to God and herself.

While it seemed quite possible that everyone else in the room was being transported to a higher place, I found myself being teleported to the Appalachian foothills where one imagines spirits of a different sort give voice to an equally unintelligible, if not distilled, form of incantation.

Somehow, in my befuddled Hebraic interpretation of what was going on I confused the “charismatic church” with the “charismatic me” and foolishly decided to apply the lessons of the day to some healing of my own.

Without going in to the pathetic details of my amorous overtures — or my completely missing the point with the snake metaphor — suffice it to say, getting lickered up, and my own very clumsy “laying on of hands,” resulted in my waking up the next day with a thick head and a lip to match. Go figure.

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I logged on to watch Robert Scoble’s WorkFast TV full of excitement. Joined by social media superstar Shel Israel and modern day Leonardo Mark Bernstein the lineup would have been enough to compel anyone to tune in. But the topic for this premier — technology and the future of work –  that was the clincher.

All the more for being full of anticipation at the beginning, by the end I felt deflated and annoyed.

Particularly disappointing was Scoble’s self-confessed, web-enabled obsessive-compulsiveness and apparent delight at finding new ways to feed it. Rather than seek help for what most would consider a disorder it appears he finds all the solace he needs in a similarly unhealthy physical attachment to his computer. I could be wrong but it just struck me that way, very odd.

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