Viewing March, 2009 Archive
We ARE the Stimulus Plan
How to simulate the economy seems to be the front and center conversation in the media and in homes across the country. When AIG isn’t dominating the headlines and people are really thinking about solutions, they think of economic stimulus plans. Most agree that creating jobs is task #1 and the thinking goes that if more people are working, more people are positive and therefore more people are spending money. Basically any Government stimulus is simply supposed to spark OUR (the consumer) spending so there is more money in the system and we can return to our times of prosperity.
But wait, taking government stimulus money and repaving roads (like Bev Perdue is doing here in North Carolina) is wasting the taxpayer’s money. It creates short term jobs but not long term employment and confidence.
In essence, the government leadership is probably the least qualified to stimulate our economy and create jobs and confidence in the working population. So who then should take the reigns?
YOU.
You, the American worker. You the American entrepreneur. You the American genius. Why? Because it’s always been YOU that has stimulated this economy, not government programs!
How do we do it? INNOVATE!! Every age of innovation has created more prosperity than any government stimulus plan since the “New Deal” of the 1930’s. Think about it. The last time you were probably feeling flush and having the time of your life was in the 90’s. The technology boom was in full swing and we were all jumping on the World Wide Web. The age of the internet has spawned more innovation than we’ve seen in the last 50 years. So it starts with innovation. I’m watching Steve Wosniak on Dancing With The Stars and although he’s a really bad dancer, the guy is a certified American Genious. He created the Apple Computer and launched the company behind your iPod, iPhone and i-everything.
As innovation spurs new product development, consumers buy and buy and buy. So I’m advoacting a “new” New Deal based on radical innovation. In the last 5 years, there has been little innovation. The IPhone created a stir, Blackberrys get smaller but there has been little to get the consumer inside us all excited and spending money. More than ever, we need to innovate and create some excitement in our world.
But Phil, I’m a Recruiter – what can I do to innovate? Anything you can think of. Remember, part of the New New Deal is that people need to get working. Let your mind go and takes some chances and risks – these are the building blocks of innovation. Start that new recruiting business, moonlight helping unemployed people figure out how to get the jobs that are out there – do that one thing that you’ve been thinking of for years but that little voice in your head always says “no one will buy that”. They will if you take the chance.
This country was built on the risk-taking, innovative backs of the people of the country. We have to stop looking for help from our Government and take control of our own stimulus options.
Frustrated Job Seekers
Here is an interesting article that comments on the frustration most job seekers experience in online recruiting. Speaking of the difficult time job seekers have of actually finding their “dream job” online, Jennifer Hamm says;
Still, trolling job boards remains a very time consuming process, contends Richard H. Beatty, author of “The Ultimate Job Search.” There are over 40,000 career websites, including mega job boards, industry-specific sites and listings on company sites.
“Job seekers are faced with the daunting task of somehow screening through this bewildering array to discover those sites that will prove most productive for them,” Beatty says. “Huge amounts of precious job-search time can be completely wasted.”
Yankees or Oakland A’s?
I recently made my annual pilgrimage to Phoenix for Major League Baseball’s spring training. On the plane, I was reading and a collision of thoughts occurred in my head that would rival that collision at home plate between Pete Rose and Ray Fosse in the 1970 All-Star Game.
For any non baseball fans out there, stick with this blog post as it WILL be brought around to talent acquisition, I promise.
First is an interesting article in last week’s Wall Street Journal. In it, the authors propose that one of the leading causes of our current economic downturn was the profound short term thinking of Chief Executives and Boards of Directors. They assert that the “short term gains at all costs” mentality of corporate America is a huge factor in this unprecedented economic downturn and that the people who run the most powerful companies in our country took their eye off the ball (baseball analogy) of business 101; building solid products, selling them at a reasonable price and supporting what you sell for the long term. Granted that some of this “short timer” disease was driven by shareholder pressure to continue to grow wealth, the feduciary responsibility of Corporate America has to have a longer horizon than quarter over quarter growth according to the authors.
So what does that have to do with baseball and even more unclear, what does any of this have to do with talent accquisition??
Well, in the age of free agency in baseball, the game of building a winning team has become divided into two camps;
CAMP B: buy the talent with the best statistics from last year in the hopes you can win a pennant this year (Yankees) and
CAMP A: bring in not yet great, high trajectory, under the radar players for a fraction of the cost and grow a sustainable winning team over time (Athletics).
There are a lot of arguments on both sides (As always, I met my Father and Brother in Phoenix, both avid Yankee fans and proponents of the “buy and try” mentality of the Steinbrenner family) but I’m making my case for the longer term horizon strategy of the Oakland Athletics. Without going into a huge analysis (this is, afterall, a human capital blog, not one from Sports Illustrated) the Oakland A’s manage to make the playoffs or come within a few games almost every year. They win and are fun to watch. They take calculated risks on young players and grow them in the organization for as many years as they can before the Yankees buy them. (Jason Giambi, Scott Brosius etc.) The fans in Oakland love them, even the years they come up just short of the playoffs. Contrast that with the Yankee strategy where winning this season justifies Wall Street type compensation with short term required payoffs (in 2008, the Yankees spent over $420 Million on CC Sabathia, Mark Teixeira and A.J. Burnett) Their fans demand a pennant every year (just like the shareholders demand strong growth in profits and share value) especially now that they pay $70 for the cheap seats at the new Yankee Stadium. I don’t know a Yankee fan that would be satisfied with a good run at a title this year and welcome back the team from 2009 in 2010 if they didn’t make the playoffs. By the way, in the last 7 years (when the Yankees went really “out there” with the money they pay these guys) the yankees have only been to one World Series (in 2003) and they lost to……The Marlins (another Athletics-minded, lower budget team by the way) proving that chemistry, not just talent, counts.
Ok, so now you see the paralells; Yankees/corporate governance of the 21st century and Atheletics/desired corporate governance post economic recovery.
Now to wrap it up with the final parallel: the mentality of most companies in hiring and building teams. “Shadow of the leader” as one of my past managers put it, dictates that the behavior modelled by the leader is what the teams beneath them see as the behavior that is desired, even when it might be the wrong behavior. Just look at the Stamford Bank executive now under indigtment for misleading athorities in their investigation of her crooked boss! So if the CEO’s lead by “short term gains at all costs” mentality, then it follows that this trickles down to every level of the organization. Hiring Managers demand “no assembly required” candidates from Recruiters and many “not yet great, high trajectory, under the radar players” go unnoticed and unhired by the company. Is your company the Yankees or the Athletics?
I’m not saying that Recruiters can fix the economy or baseball but I do believe they can take the lead in fixing the “no assembly required” hiring mentality of their hiring managers. For a step by step “how to” guide on doing this, read Billy Ball – the story of Billy Bean, the guy who changed the mentality of the Oakland A’s hiring model.
It’s going to be a long season and the environment is ripe for a change of strategy. Pick up some high level prospects from the waiver wire and be prepared for a champagne shower in 2011 when your “unknowns” of 2009 turn into hall of famers!
Open Letter to Job Seekers
After a comment on my blog (yes, some people read it!) asking “what is an exact fit?” and the general exacerbation that the job seeking process causes most job seekers, I thought I’d write an open letter to all job seekers, allowing them a peek into the recruiting process:
Dear Job Seeker,
We know you are frustrated with the job search process. We understand that you apply and apply and are rarely granted an interview or even an email communication telling you why you were not selected. We also understand that even when you get a phone call or email telling you that you were not selected, you would like details on why. Here is a glimpse into the world of recruiting and HR so perhaps you will understand the method to the madness.
- Our lawyers prohibit us from giving you detailed feedback on why you were not selected for an interview. We can give you a broad category of why but not specifics. Why? Because you sue us. If the company gives you feedback that you misinterpret as discrimination or bias, we get sued. We mitigate our risk by being vague.
- We have a timer on positions and have to get them filled. Even in this economy, most positions have a cost of vacancy associated with them. As such, we have to fill our roles in a timely fashion. Sometimes, this means that the best candidate for the job is not considered because they applied late to the opening. This TIMING element of filling jobs is the most misunderstood by job seekers. We hire the best candidate in a given timeframe otherwise we’d never fill our jobs because we’d always be waiting for YOU to apply!
- You apply to the wrong job a lot. Sometimes it’s because you think by applying to every job we have posted, you’ll get noticed. You do, but not in a good way. Most of the time it’s because we’ve posted a vague, laundry list of requirements that could be you but is probably not. We need to do better and really put a great job description up. A video of the hiring manager telling you what she needs in the ideal candidate would be best. We’re working on it.
- We have less jobs to fill (75% less in some cases) but we get between 100 – 300+ applications for every job we have posted. Most recruiters carry between 20 – 25 openings. Do the math. To require that we personally contact each person and give them feedback and advice is simply not reasonable. We are trying to let you know your status. If you get an email from us we really ARE doing our job.
- Interviewing and hiring are human processes and as such, are inherently flawed. Recruiters make suggestions on who to interview – sometimes geting it wrong but mostly getting it right (meaning the people who are interviewed are good candidates). Hiring Managers make hiring decisions – sometimes getting it wrong but mostly getting it right (meaning the person they hire is usually a good hire for the job).
We empathize with your frustration (there are a lot of us out of work today too) and just want to tell you that we are doing the best we can and are constantly looking for ways to get better. One way we’ve found is AllianceQ – where at least we can offer you the option of continuing your job search with our fellow Member companies and 3000 small and medium sized businesses.
Good luck with your job search
Sincerely,
Corporate Recruiting
Revolutions are Uncomfortable Things
After hearing that the Seattle Post-Intelligencer ceased operations yesterday to become the 12th major newspaper to shutter its doors I began looking into this momentous change we are experiencing.
On the website “Newspaper Death Watch” (http://www.newspaperdeathwatch.com/) (yes, I don’t like the name either) an article sums up the situation for newspapers:
The game is over for newspapers. Nothing can save the business, so it’s pointless to try. We’re in the middle of a revolution and revolutions are uncomfortable things because “The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place.”
The newspaper industry, like the automotive industry and the financial industry, is an institution in the United States. Even 5 years ago no one would have imagined that we could be facing a time when major cities were “newspaperless”. So what is happening?
Web sites like Craigslist have been to classified ads what the internal combustion engine was to horse-drawn buggies. The stock prices of most newspaper publishers have dropped more than 90 percent from their peaks. Couple this with an amazing amount of debt taken on in the last 10 years as major publishers bought up smaller competitors and viola’ – the death of an industry. Maybe.
Monster and Careerbuilderbattled over who would run the newspapers’ employment sections and traded the honor witheach other but for what? It seems that even with big board names behind the employment sections, people were relying on them less and less. While people were running from classified employment ads, they were running TO Linkedin and other ‘new’ ways to find work. Revolutions are uncomfortable things.
I believe this is the next “revolution” we’ll see. At least I’m hopeful that we will. Just like no one wants newspapers to completely disappear (after all it IS where most of the serious reporting and reporters still reside) I’m not advocating that the big boards disappear. But like the newspapers, the days of “post and pray” recruiting would be a desired victim of a job board revolution. The big boards have their place in an overall strategy but for too many recruiting departments that place takes up too much precious budget money to prove truly valuable. Remember that a large percentage of Recruiters report getting a LOT of candidates from big boards but less than 20% of all employees actually report finding employment through the big boards.
If Craigslist can automate, facilitate and communicate better than your old classified, is it not too far fetched to imagine that a technology is coming that can do the same to “post and pray” recruiters?
It is all a question of “value” and who can provide the value faster, easier and with less cost. If the road from consumer (Hiring Manager) to product (candidate) can be streamlined by taking out the middle person who adds little to no value to the process then the “revolution” is for the better.
The only way to reduce the discomfort of revolution is to find a way to add value to a process. As we are seeing with the newspaper industry, if you are not adding value, you are not going to survive.
