Amitai Givertz’s Recruitomatic Blog

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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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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John Sumser has taken up bird-spotting. In a pastoral post aptly titled Idealization John shares what he has learned about the fowl and the foul in his circumnavigation of Schollenberger Park.  Not to be outdone I too have been walking off the pounds around the lake where I live, similarly musing on bird life and the nature of recruiting, the idealized and the real.

Bringing a couple of threads together…

It seems to me that the perennial crowing about the so-called War for Talent is starting to wear a little thin.  Perhaps like other well worn marketing glibbery we’ll never quite shake the phrase from our collective consciousness. Among industry old-timers one imagines the phrase will take on the same iconographic status as “go to work on an egg.” Who knows?

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Here are the slides from my presentation for the Human Capital Institute and the first in their Talent Acquisition Learning Track which is sponsored by Trovix.

I am answering some of the questions from attendees here, in the comments. Feel free to chip in.

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Don’t miss Jim Durbin and his webcast Talent Scouting and Social Networking: The New Employee Referral Program on Tuesday, February 19th, also for HCI. Register here…

Read my take for the coming year just published by ZoomInfo…

Amitai offers a different take, predicting that early adopters of social media for recruiting will remain in the minority. Too few frontline recruiters will risk the perils of transparency in corporate environments that need to mitigate risk and innovation and apply bottom-line metrics instead. As the economics of recruiting come under closer scrutiny with a softening economy and an inability to quantify the ROI on social media, there will be a slowdown in the rate of adoption by recruiters.

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I know it seems awfully shallow to say I find Tyra Banks’ breasts attractive, but I do. Clearly, her achievement as a top international model, screen goddess and big-time TV producer makes Tyra Banks a powerful woman in her own right, one of the most influential.

Even so, I find her breasts grab my interest more than her other professional attributes. As I research everything I possibly can about Tyra Banks’ and the origins for my own curiosity – it’s a transparency thing, duh! – I realize that my being distracted by her voluptuousness is perfectly normal for a man of my age and orientation, certainly nothing to be embarrassed about. And, in the musings of an authentic post, I mean no offense to my less worldly or more matronly readers.

More, as I research the psychology of physical attraction and how having a beautifully formed bosom can influence outcomes in the recruiting process – in ways we might otherwise be uncomfortable talking about, screening and assessment, interviewing, salary negotiations and so on – I find Tyra Banks feeds a number of my interests, not shallow at all.

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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.

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.

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.