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.

In the final analysis, managers and their direct reports need to pick up the mantle of developing their “human resource.” That’s what I say. Recruiting is no less a management task than planning, budgeting, organizing stuff, and troubleshooting.

If the decision to hire and fire is a managers’ prerogative shouldn’t a manager be capable of taking care of the attraction and screening bits too? One might expect to see improved results across the board if they did.

Imagine, no need for template intake calls or getting chewed-out for presenting literal and proverbial misfits; no more waiting for overdue feedback on interest, availability and offers;  no more having to explain that a credit score of less than 590 doesn’t automatically mean salespeople can’t sell, nurses can’t nurse, programmers can’t code, and engineers can’t build missile-defense systems.

Needless to say, there are exceptions to the “looks like managing” model.

In those instances where the need calls for high-volume hiring the issue is not the caliber of the recruiting personnel per se but the process and underlying technologies that are deployed in the name of cost and time efficiencies. If the economies of scale aren’t there then maybe the path of least resistance is to outsource the problem. Even then, the consumer-manager needs to be intimately involved in every aspect of the process, not just selection. The manager should be held accountable for results post-RPO too, why not?

I was told once by a VP of Legacy Thinking that that it makes no sense to ask a $150-an-hour manager to do $75-an-hour “grunt work.” Therein lies part of the problem, viewing recruiting as piecemeal work instead of quantifying its  intrinsic value to the organization, assigning responsibility for its proper execution to a capable manager.  As a result, despite lauding quality-of-hire metrics — however fuzzy — stakeholders continue to demand time-to-fill, cost-per-hire and money-in-the-bank metrics not knowing how else to measure recruiting value.

That said, “grunt work” like sourcing should be passed off to a $75-an-hour bod, and perhaps other elements of the process could be unbundled too. But, when all is said and done, these things need to be delivered in support of the manager, not a recruiting cohort or talent management overlord.

Faced with the possibility of being held accountable for recruiting outcomes, management surrogates like John Sullivan go on the attack.  For the purposes of throwing recruiting under the bus, “failure metrics” will do. Googling those “facts and numbers” keep us from considering the possibility that, instead of getting the bus from point A to point B, when it comes to taking the talent management lead, most  hiring managers are asleep at the wheel.

In defense of the recruiting professionals who are among the most gifted, and in reply to those whiny people John Sullivan’s quotes as saying, “Selection decisions are often about as accurate as a coin flip,” I say, “Then render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s.” Newsflash! Recruiters don’t make selection decisions, “hiring managers” do.

So, what could a trainer do but compound the problem?

It’s trendy to talk about talent management in the context of strategy and  “best practice.” Invariably we default to transactional recruiting because we are forever driven by short-term imperatives. Maybe a decade of “talent shortages” combined with an institutionalization of JIT and “the arrogance of supply” has deepened the inherent flaws that have doomed modern-day corporate recruiting to the sorry state reported on ERE, not just in John Sullivan’s piece, but repeatedly over the years.

I’m not aware of any new training methods that enable recruiting-centric management thinking over process-driven behaviors, are you? That’s not to suggest training couldn’t enable managers more capable of strategic recruiting. But how do you justify the expense of that when the ROI may be harder to quantify than the number of candidates that over the years never even got an automated reply, let alone a recruiters’ call.

Last, how badly do we want to train our manager-gazumping competition? After all, if we could increase the value of our managers’ contribution by having them grow and develop their people from beginning to end, would we be prepared to pay them what they would then be worth? Probably not.

Consider: If we paid managers a percentage of the their new hires’ first years compensation, and an annual bonus for each one still engaged, managers might spend too much time on end-to-end “talent management.”  Granted, while recruiting may now be at the level John Sullivan imagines is good enough, who will then sign-off on department expenses or decide who gets the cubby-with-a-view when our longest serving team member finally kicks the bucket?

We don’t need better recruiters. Actually, I don’t think we need recruiters at all. We need better support for managers, managers who can grow and develop their teams free from the money- and time-wasting recruiters represent. Those managers who are good at getting the job done, in its entirety, should be rewarded accordingly.

To John Sullivan’s attention-grabbing intent, and  John Sumser’s suggestion that we should “line new employees up with the right people,” I hope my contribution here adds some weight to the scales of wishful thinking.

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.

Mr. Perry rather liked the idea of giving comparable Google-powers to job seekers as the ones I have been imagining recruiters might like to have.  If nothing else, something to read while putting their feet up after a long day slogging it out with buxom recruiter-infidels. Gunpowder for the natives, if you will.

Unfortunately, my piece was savagely cut, “For brevity’s sake,” I was told, “nothing to get your knickers in a twist over.” Hmmm, really? I’ll be the judge of that!

For those who want to read the unabridged version of  my chapter I have posted it here: Guerrilla Googling and the Job Hunters’ Dashboard.

For those who prefer a few “choice cuts:”

On “The War for Talent…”

“The things that we do that involve the justifiable and systematic destruction of life and property, the wholesale creation of widows and orphans, and which showcase the ghastly aspects of human ingenuity, make great metaphors for recruiting.”

On recruiter types…

“Whether the mercenary top-guns who have a silver bullet for every tough assignment or the enlisted rank-and-file who are best when shooting at point-blank range, the job seeker is likely to encounter a recruiter who has left many more dead and wounded in their wake than decorated heroes to their credit.”

On sourcing…

“A well-practiced hacker can find a handful of good resumes for Utah-based, bi-lingual, left-handed brain surgeons who specialize in anesthesia-free, pediatric trepanation as easily as a ho-hum hack can  find an endless supply of photocopier salesmen with profiles on LinkedIn, and who have long since been forgotten about.”

On being prepared…

“Remember, the corridors of power are littered with the bodies of well-intentioned job seekers who blew themselves up even before greeting the gatekeeper.  Asymmetrical warfare is not for the fainthearted or weak-willed. And it’s certainly not for the ill-prepared either.”

On calling recruiters at home…

“While you might think it’s reasonable to telephone a recruiter at home…imagine a mother of three trying to separate one of the twins from a choke hold while extricating the third from the jaws of an over playful Chihuahua and it is easy to understand why your unsolicited call may result in your permanent excommunication.”

Mr. Perry has invited me to contribute again for his next book. I can hardly wait. In the meantime, he has a blog, don’t you know: Guerrilla Job Hunting.

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.

I don’t know if “better late than never” applies here as I think the last thing humanity needs at this point in our evolution is another applicant tracking system but the nice people at Zoho have just  announced Zoho Recruit and, if nothing else, I want to acknowledge the quality of personal service Chandru gave me.

As to Zoho’s unremarkable launch, Mr. Ted could teach them a thing or two about clever marketing I think. I do believe they’ll need it…

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.

While technology continues to envision a promising future I wonder how many employers can translate any of it beyond the reordered acronyms of a fancy, near historic sales pitch.

After all, who will the marketers and salespeople target for the progressive solutions like Recruiting.com’s new whiz-bang offering? Why, companies with lousy internal processes, weak management and a decimated recruiting function of course. At best, it’s Methadone for an industry long stupefied by vendors’ peddling the things dreams are made of.

On the bright side, Raghav had no idea that Recruiting.com was a reinvention of  “i-love-me-some-disruptor” Jason Goldberg’s Jobster. The disassociation is a  branding coup for CEO Jeff Seely and his team I think. For those of us who have been around long enough to remember Goldberg’s shenanigans and/or Recruiting.com’s humble beginnings as a trend-setting blog — that is remarkable indeed.

Perhaps Recruiting.com is, as my buddies-in-the-know suggest, deserving of a second look. You decide.

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.

So, how can a process that systematizes something as nuanced, complex and involved  as recruiting passive, semi-passive, semi-active, active, and/or hyper-active candidates — who, I might add, could match any number of psychographic constructs, fit any number of demographic profiles and/or be in any number of geographic areas — be farmed out to an industry that is one slice short of a loaf of bread?

Surely the only RPOs worth looking at are the ones that have a process for identifying the underlying problem that is being outsourced and who recognize the problem could be an issue internally as well as within the clients’ operation.

Provided an RPO can be that artful, call a spade a spade on economies of scale and demonstrate how they’ve tackled their own “problems” — God knows there are some marginal recruiters, systems and practices out there — then who are we kidding?

I don’t have any firsthand experience of an RPO that is that open to that degree of self-examination and equally transparent about what they find. Do you? Nah, what are we, nuts?

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?

To the cynics who might postulate the alliance between SHRM and JobTarget has more to do with monopolistic price fixing than affinity programming, I say this: Phooey!

And to the preposterous argument that this scheme has more to do with deflationary pricing to offset falling demand and the no-cost alternatives that may be even more effective than traditional job postings — double phooey!

SHRM-sponsored programs like this one have always been about reducing the cost-per-hire and getting the best return on regular HR folk’s advertising dollars. I think its wonderful that the nice people at JobTarget would help out this way.

Every responsible job board owner should be buying into this historic blow-in. And to the blasted cynic who would say that the only thing being cached here are job postings and commission checks — phooey, phooey, phooey!

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?

I am also a shameless marketer looking to make a buck or two while the recruiting industry collapses into a heap of transaction-driven dysfunction, peddling [almost] free stuff thinly veiled as thought leadership-inspired recruiter training. Yes, while the digerati have their heads in the cloud, and ol’-timers have theirs somewhere where the sun don’t shine, this boychick follows the rainbow. What can I tell ya? I dig the cloud.

Next, in the same way that I reject the ambiguity of hijacked metaphors by confused talking heads to promote [or defend] a particular position — making an exception for moi’, of course — I would love it if we could try and get along in time for Christmas.

So, with the strains of Let There Be Peace on Earth in background…

This week I was reminded that small fish rise to small bait. I was not only tickled to see a big-fish from O’Reilly Media sniffing around ERE’s chummed waters but equally amused to see that he sniffed around and left. Well, it amused me.

[Later that day...]

Oh, bugger! Am I the small fry who just got hooked, was that linkbait barbed? Nah, it’s cool. It’s just a fast-talking and link-laden bloggin’ carny-ride. Up, up and away!

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.

Steve Levy recently posted Learn Boolean, Start a Business. In a catholic defense of modern day mediums he says:

In the 10+ years that I’ve been part of the online recruiting community, I’ve never seen a time when it was possible to learn a rudimentary skill and then pawn oneself off as an expert. Shally and G-Man have been internet search wonks for this period and have the experience to bolster their skills teaching with a range of specific examples; El Dave isn’t too far behind…

Alas during the past year, I’ve seen several neophytes learn to write a Boolean – or more precisely, to copy one that the true experts freely share – and suddenly they’re self-appointed experts selling themselves as Internet search gurus.

Oh dearie, dearie me. Let’s apply my befuddled Hebraic interpretation to this one now, shall we?

First, it occurs to me that nothing could be easier than passing oneself off as “an expert” when the skill is “rudimentary.”  I mean, honestly: AND, OR, and NOT — how much simpler could it be?

Next, as one of the neophytes let me clarify a couple of things…

One (NOT first): If the experts “freely share” why can’t I freely copy, share in kind? Of course, “if” covers a multitude of sins, doesn’t it? In reality if most of what is being “freely shared” has been available in the public domain since, well, before googling, who’s copying who; where’s the hanky-panky? Maybe the question here is one of attribution, maybe that’s it.

Two (NEAR:One): “…and then pawn oneself off as an expert” — golly! And, “..suddenly they’re self-appointed experts selling themselves as Internet search gurus” — that’s a bit strong, don’t you think?

I might consider myself a neophyte in the esteemed company of the liturgical high-priests of cybersleuthing — unworthy even — but in the company of lay folk my bible-thumping is enough to save a few sinners with the sacrament of sourcing know-how. Sure, the cacophony of hand-clappin,’ foot-stoppin’ music is a far cry from a reverential Latin Mass but for the recruiting riff-raff it’s an experience worth the price of admission.

Three (-wise.men) Just to be clear, only a fool would suggest that the 12 Apostles of George: Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, [no, no, no -- that was John The Baptist!] and the rest of them, have not enabled a few scruffy-looking lay-preachers like me to schlep from one congregation to another but, Mr. Levy, gimme a break! Am I the one to be weighed in the balance, found wanting?

This week another hillbilly church has sprung up, this time on the slopes of RecruitingBlogs.com. I wonder if the Apostles will come down to share in a snake-whoopie-woo or two, sip a little poison at the Congregation of Boolean Strings. Whatever…

One of the things that has been interesting to me for some time is the codification of language and the subsequent value placed on its interpretation by a litany of coders and their assigns. Historically, all that has been a source of power so, why not now?

In some convoluted way I think the communication of Boolean syntax for surfacing leads and resumes is like bottling water. We have to contain it, brand it, sell it and defend our share of it to give it value despite the fact that, like water, the means to quench our thirst exists everywhere. Maybe Steve Levy see’s it slightly differently.

Experts, priests, shamans and snake-charmers all hold a special place in our communities because they [purportedly] hold the key to unlocking the knowledge we seek, and it’s practical application for a better life.

Is it any wonder that when the status quo gets “status skewed” those with the most to loose get shirty? Can I get an “Amen!” Brother?

Several days after our neighbors visit and my wife’s miraculous healing her pain returned, this time with a vengeance.  When I tried lightening things up with a drooling “I’ll be darn’d!” she told me to “Put a sock in it!” Hmmm…maybe in our house if we’re not speaking in tongues were talking at cross purposes? Nah, that’s just too obtuse, isn’t it? I don’t know, maybe not…

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.

Among the hints of separation anxiety from his tens of thousands of online followers and signs of creeping inboxaphobia, this one thing stood out in particular: Scoble’s laptop is adorned in much the same way as my 11 year-old daughter has hers plastered with stickers.

More than personalization I think, stickering up your big-boy’s laptop strikes me as another oddball thing for Scoble to do. It’s obvious from some the shabby ones that the wear and tear on the machine has become part of the symbolism, emblematic of time passing and dues paid.

Not wanting to jump to the conclusions of an amateur psych, or to be accused of suffering from my own web-induced flights of fancy, I looked hard for the Pennzoil sticker hoping I could use  the NASCAR defense to explain the sticker thing. But alas, no. No Pennzoil stickers. Not even one from GoDaddy.com.

I guess an ologist of some sort could explain the correlation between the behavior of prepubescent girls, a devotee’s irrational worship of inanimate objects, the eccentricities of industry icons or the foibles of genius. I can’t, can you?

Possibly there is no correlation at all. Perhaps Scoble has simply been exposed to too much social computing over the years. One day, maybe we’ll recognize that a missing DLL where the DNA used to be is an occupational hazard to be expected when one is exposed to years of tinkering around with life-affirming micro-blogging.

Last, and most bothersome of all, was the complete absence of good manners on Scoble’s part. I ask you — to be interviewing the likes of Mark Bernstein, obviously not paying attention and twittering away, how else could that be construed as anything but very, very rude. Watching as Scoble’s eye was drawn to his webcam rather make contact with his subject, I was reminded of Mother who used to say, “New money is so vulgar!”

Ironic then, Shel Israel struggling to have a conversation and Robert Scoble, tethered by a wireless device, hardly able to cope with the contrivance of a TV-show format, itself a product of Fast Company’s magazine-mired thinking.

You might see it altogether differently, who knows? The show has a good premise and perhaps it will improve as Scoble becomes more comfortable with a medium that normally lacks authenticity but, as seen in this episode, can be just as revealing without the required rehearsal.

Well, you can bookmark the site for future programs and decide for yourself. I may be jaded by a touch of anticapointment.

With the company’s likely implosion at hand, better to make hay while the sun shines, don’t ya fink?

But then again, hold on — I’m in stealth mode! Am I really ready to start drawing attention to myself?

And what about my beloved Recruiting.com, Jobster’s love-child? We don’t want to tick off the new sugar-daddy, do we?