Staffing Technology

26: Social, Alumni & Affinity Networks

I've been out and about at a lot of recruiting and HR conferences this fall. There is a lot of talk about social networking and how this technology may or may not be cost-effective for organizations. I'm thinking the business case for staffing is wrapped around increasing gross margin per candidate over their entire life cycle.

At HR Tech today, I heard a read-out of a report from CedarCrestone that noted most HR technologists are not currently spending their time or money on Web 2.0 technologies, like social networking. Lexy Martin, the presenter, suggested that this is not an indicator that HR organizations don't care about social networking; it's more like they are looking for additional education and ways to effectively apply the technology.

I've had the pleasure of hearing Gerry Crispin speak a few times this month and I think he makes a fantastic point - one that really resonates with me. He states that as popular and intriguing as MySpace and Facebook are - he believes they are our training ground, helping us to learn about social networks and online communities. His expectation is that social networkers will migrate to private, affinity groups, like corporate social networks (Starbucks example), corporate alumni networks (Deloitte example) and other niche affinity groups.

Currently, we see some staffing companies experimenting with social networking technology to help build a candidate community or to source candidates (e.g. hundreds of recruiters that are Linked In Professional users).

I just wrote an article on candidate relationship management concepts for SI Review (due out in November issue). One of the ideas that really struck me as I wrote the article is that the candidate life cycle need not end. The idea being that candidates who are aware of your staffing brand ideally transition into clients.

Maintaining candidate relationships past the job order close date is an interesting method for increasing gross margin. If a candidate is sitting in your database, you've already made some investment in them, that is, you've already paid to screen, interview and onboard them. Why not invest a little more to get more? Placing candidates on multiple temp assignments increases gross margin per candidate. As candidates develop their careers, multiple perm placements are a possibility for increasing profit.

Further, candidates often develop into clients - another opportunity to increase revenue. If your staffing firm builds a trusted relationship with candidates over time, you'll be the first to profit from their job changes and career development.

I think developing and fostering long-term relationships with candidates is a very interesting, and potentially profitable idea for staffing firms. This type of approach does not fit the transactional culture of staffing companies - certainly the skills shortage will motivate change. There is a ton of technology out there to support professional and social networks - it seems that developing and investing in the vision may be worth the effort.

24: Candidate data privacy

Word is that 1.6m resumes were stolen from Monster.com and there has been very little press coverage so far (Electronic Recruiting News, Cheezhead). My feeling is that it's not news because everyone who has a profile on these national boards has already been such a spam, etc. victim; they wouldn't even notice the impact of this particular thievery.

In speaking with itzbig the other day for an article I am working on for SI Review, I learned that candidate privacy is one of their key features. At first, I thought this meant that the candidate name was kept confidential. Actually, itzbig candidates don't store their contact or confidential data in the system at all. Rather, when a candidate wants to connect with a recruiter, they pass their contact information directly and meet outside the system. The point being that itzbig candidates won't be a target.

18: Branching into the Second Life?

There have been about one zillion posts (e.g. EXCELER8ion post, Dr. John Sullivan post) explaining how recruiters have started to utilize social and business networking sites (MySpace, Facebook, Linked In, Jobster) to source and assess candidates. 

Current buzz is around Second Life. Keith Shaw explains the basics nicely if you need them in DEMOletter. Corporate sponsors are trying to attract candidates and recruiting in this alternate universe, says CNN here and Dr. Charles Handler in ERE here.

Monster.com parent, TMP, announced that they are taking their online services to TMP Island in the Second Life.  If you are curious to see what TMP Island looks like, Peter Gold has inserted pics in his blog, Hire Strategies. Some people say that TMP has made a foolish investment, but I think it's a great idea as long as they can afford to work it and see how it pans out.  Monster has been getting a ton of PR from this move (e.g. Fox News article), which is great for them considering they have been losing market share. This move will help improve their somewhat tarnished brand image.

While I would love to help you open your next branch office in Second Life, I think it's important to remember that as much as we all love staffing and new technology, clients and candidates don't expect the high tech experience (yet). So, we've got time to let the market mature, test the waters and learn.

Here are a few things I think that you can do in the short-term and on the cheap so that you have something interesting to say and don't fall too far behind the times:

1. Dedicate time (or someone else's time) to track what's happening

2. Understand the current and future user base and map those demographics to your target candidate and client market

3.  Start drafting your strategy and plan relative to these technologies and update it as the market advances

4. Brainstorm business opportunities and realistically estimate when you think they might be relevant to your business

5. Brainstorm across all the possible business goals e.g. brand building, sourcing, assessing, retaining

6. Experiment with the technology on a personal level or small scale. For example, set-up a MySpace profile (other execs do it).  Staffing Industry Analysts recently reported that Manpower, AppleOne and @Work Personnel have MySpace pages (though I couldn't find them), maybe you should try that, too.

17: Matching Jobs & Candidates

I recently heard an eHarmony Valentine's Day radio commercial, which made me wonder (yet again)  where is the eHarmony of job boards? Almost everyone is open to hearing about job opportunities. Wouldn't it be great if we were all presented jobs opportunities based on a thorough profile that considers both our preferences and our experiences?

Don't tell my husband, but I've just spent 30 minutes completing my eHarmony profile.   That profile just kept going and going and I just kept clicking away. My steadfast opinion has been that candidates want to fill out their job experience and preference profiles about as much as recruiters want to fill it out for them, i.e. they don't.  Maybe candidates are willing to complete these crazy and lengthy profiles if they believe it will really lead to a great match.

Market10 is aiming to be just that, the eHarmony of jobs. They have been smart enough to leverage WCC's Elise (bi-directional matching engine) which enables match scoring based on both job requirements and candidate preferences -- just like dating where both parties are considered in the scoring. Elise technology, in particular, allows the match equation to be codified, controlled and continuously tunded.   

Conceptual or keyword search is how most job boards accomplish ranking and scoring.  Conceptual search is great technology, but doesn�t account for the fact that candidate's have both skills (an offering) and preferences (demands). 

While I think the Market10 model is very interesting, I'm glad that they got additional VC-funding. Clearly, the eHarmony of job boards needs more than the technology components it also needs a candidate-hooking questionnaire so that candidate's want to provide all that fielded data, not to mention tons of marketing to attract and retain a national database of candidates.

Others on the eHarmony of job boards:

• Online Job Hunt 10 Years Later - Still Sucks by Steve Poland
  

14: Job boards and the candidate experience

I can never get over how many job boards there are out there. It seems that Interbiznet and ERE are always publishing intriguing updates about sites I've never even heard of and then I feel completely out of touch with what is going on in the job board space.

I must not be the only person overwhelmed by the sheer volume of boards and the non-stop introduction of new options.  According to the International Association of Employment Web Sites (IAEWS) there are more than 40,000 employment sites. Who could possibly keep close tabs on all those companies, services and people?

The mega job boards gave way to niche boards over the past five or six years.  Today, there continues to be a lot of niche board growth and a lot of press around -- improved job and candidate matching, presenting targeted job ads to passive candidates (especially in other web contexts) and leveraging referral or social networks to find passive candidates. I'm sure there are other hot job board trends; those are just the ones that spring to my mind.  I think these features are interesting but also focused on improving the recruiter business process and associated metrics.

With the deluge of job boards, it is surprising to me how much time I spend hunting for job boards that focus on the trend I would like to see creating a satisfying candidate experience. From my point-of-view, the best possible candidate experience is one where the candidate doesn't have to look for a job someone finds and recruits them.  Who wouldn't agree with me there?

I recently listened to an Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders podcast by Marissa Mayer, Vice President of Search Products and User Experience at Google, entitled "Nine Lessons Learned about Creativity at Google".  One of the things she talked about was how Google focuses on innovating and developing new services that will generate high usage and assumes that the revenue model will work itself out. I love that idea but feel that today's job boards have invested in just enough candidate experience to keep their user numbers up so that they hit their job posting revenue targets. So far, what I see is that the job board industry falls short on delivering a compelling candidate experience.

I have heard rumblings of candidate-centric strategies and designs, but as you all well know, in the software industry "seeing is believing".

As always, I'm interested to hear your comments and am just an email away.

Other links:

• I recently read a post (in English) on a Dutch blog by Marc Drees and he mentions that his new venture, Kangarooster, is focused on designing and implementing a superior candidate experience. Sounds promising to me. (If any of you saw the demo at ERE Europe, I'd love to hear your feedback).
• ItzBig
• Free AIRS 2007 Job Board Directory 

13: Portable resumes

Why isn't using a portable resume industry standard? 

I attended a great HR-XML meeting in the spring of 2003 where Microsoft spoke and talked about their plans to enable MS Word users to save their Word-based resumes as XML documents within the Microsoft Word Resume Wizard.  When I heard the presentation, I took it for granted that Word-driven HR-XML concept would catch on like wild fire. Not so. Now fast forward to 2007.

Distribution of job orders has been around for ages and this technology is well used. Simply Hired is offering a similar service, but for candidates, and it?s free (for their basic service). When a candidate creates a resume on Simply Hired, they can also distribute it to multiple job boards.

That?s pretty neat, but what I am talking about is enabling candidates to create and maintain a single profile that they can easily share and maintain. 

It's great that candidates can elect to distribute their profile from Simply Hired so that they only have to post from one place. That is, as long as they don't already have a Monster, CareerBuilder, etc. profile. And, once, they make changes to their resumes, they have to go back to the individual sites to update their profiles.

I signed up for Simply Hired's Resume Post to try out the service.  Creating the profile was really quick and as soon as I hit the submit button the emails started rolling from all five free job boards.  What was interesting to me was that I ended up creating a duplicate Monster and CareerBuilder accounts for myself. I didn't see a way to merge my duplicate profiles. So, I'd have to say while I saved time on posting my resume I've got more profiles to maintain if I want to keep my original Monster and CareerBuilder accounts.

Wouldn't it be great if I could just keep one profile up-to-date and keep it with me, so that anytime I ran into a job board, corporate career site, etc., I could just login and upload my portable profile? The profile would be in some standard format so that my data could be loaded into the job board's database without my help. (HR-XML Resume schema springs to mind).  Then, some resume distributing service, like Simply Hired, could help me both post and maintain my data from a central location.  If my data is already in their database, they would detect me as a potential duplicate and help me merge my records.

Sounds good to me!

If any of you are working on this, I'd love to hear about it.

Couple of related links:

o       In a 2004 post, DonXml tells us that you can actually save your resume from Word to XML format using Microsoft's Accelerator for Recruiting (assuming you have Microsoft Office InfoPath and have installed the add-on to export XML docs). 

o      Resume Builder by SarmSoft supports exporting your resume in HR-XML format and has both personal and enterprise editions.