In March 2000, Monster topped $86 a share. It was worth nearly $8.5 billion. It was still valued at more than $7.5 billion in 2006. Yesterday, recruitment firm Randstad Holdings purchased Monster for $429 million in cash, or $3.40 a share.
It would be easy to blame the decline in value on the Great Recession, which began in 2008 and took a lot of employment solutions with it. Employers laying off people and not hiring tends to be really bad for vendors who service them.
But blaming the tailspin on one incident, as important as it was, is also lazy. As someone who’s covered and criticized Monster for over a decade, the slide has been much more gradual than any single event.
Here is a list of my favorite missteps over the years:
Buying Tickle instead of LinkedIn. In the early 2000s, insiders tell me Monster had an opportunity to acquire LinkedIn, which recently sold to Microsoft for over $26 billion. MySpace was hot, and it looked like social networking was a bet worth taking. Word is the cost for LinkedIn was modest, but no agreement was reached and Monster opted to buy a little-known social network called Tickle. They mysteriously shut down the service a few years later.
Not really giving a shit about job seekers. Remember the days when Monster sold major slices of their online real estate to sites like the University of Phoenix or others who requested a social security number? Jason Goldberg of Jobster called Monster a “crap product” in 2006 and accused them of treating their site like Nascar. Here’s a link to the must-see video. Experience eventually improved, but not until well after the wave of people exiting for Indeed was well under way.
Allowing Indeed to flourish. The fact that big job boards like CareerBuilder and Monster allowed competitors like Indeed and SimplyHired to distribute their content was always a mystery to me. Like Craigslist, they both should’ve nipped the vertical job search trend in the bud when they had a chance. A simple cease and desist letter would’ve changed the course of history in favor of the incumbents.
Jumping on the “dating for jobs” matching trend. Monster bought Trovix in 2008 for $72.5 million. Let’s forget the fact that they didn’t just back up the Brinks truck and buy Indeed in 2008, and remember they bought a technology that promised to magically match job seekers and employers similarly to how dating sites match people looking for a hook-up. Others in the industry call the move brilliant. Don’t buy it. There was a slew of matching companies at the time, and they’re all gone.
BeKnown. When it became clear that social media wasn’t going away (shortly after Monster closed down Tickle), Monster made a bet on building a social network on the Facebook platform. It failed. The experiment that launched in 2011 shared its last Facebook Page update in 2015.
Whiffing on user-generated content. What’s it really like to work at a company? This is the question today’s job seekers are asking and services like Indeed and Glassdoor are happy to oblige, offering anonymous reviews from past and current employees. Monster partnered with Kununu to provide this content earlier in 2016, but it serves as another trend Monster will miss. LinkedIn allowing users to post content is another example of missing the user-generated trend.
Dropping $225 million to buy HotJobs in 2011. Two dinosaurs aren’t better than one. And it was another opportunity to acquire Indeed down the tubes.
Hiring Sal Iannuzzi as CEO. I. Can’t. Even. A 2014 Forbes editorial probably sums it up best, saying “… recently departed CEO Iannuzzi’s leadership narrative was never about helping customers having a better life. He focused exclusively on earnings. During a Monster town hall earlier this year, he didn’t mention job seekers once. Instead, he told his entire organization that the goal of their new strategy was to increase the stock price. Not help customers, not improve the industry, just increase the earnings.”
Missing on mobile. It’s been almost a decade since the launch of the iPhone and Monster has nearly nothing to show for it. A company with Monster’s resources and talent should be an R&D machine, and simply providing their site on a 4-inch screen is an embarrassment. The last significant update to their flagship app was in 2014. Services like Slack should’ve been developed in a Monster lab. Instead they’re buying a lukewarm app like Jobr.
Killing Trumpasaurus. This is last on the list, but I don’t think it’s inconsequential. The company’s odd-looking mascot was unique in our space. It was fun. It represented fun in an industry that wasn’t. Much like the Twitter bird or Snapchat ghost, users had a visual marker for the company. Losing the mascot from the site turned it into just another cold and corporate web site in an industry full of cold and corporate websites.
Great companies are bought. Badcompanies are sold. Make no mistake, Monster was sold. What maybe started out as a great company failed to stay the course. Poor leadership and market forces, along with a big dose of hubris, doomed the company to its current state.
I see nothing in Randstad that will alter the course. My guess is Monster will primarily become a big distribution center for Randstad job postings. Innovation that’s already on life support will die. The talent that’s left will rush to the exits.
In 1999, Monster unveiled the now-iconic “When I Grow Up” commercial. It featured a bunch of kids sarcastically saying they wanted to be things like “a ‘yes’ man” and have “a brown nose” when they grew up. It symbolized the desire to become something better. At the end of the commercial, viewers are asked, “What did you want to be?” Ironically, Monster failed at being what it wanted to be too.
About the Author
Joel Cheesman has over 20 years experience in the online recruitment space. He worked for both international and local job boards in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s. In 2005, Cheesman founded HRSEO, a search engine marketing company for HR, as well as launching an award-winning industry blog called Cheezhead.
He has been featured in Fast Company and US News and World Report. He sold his company in 2009 to Jobing.com. He was employed by EmployeeScreenIQ, a background check company. He is the founder of Ratedly, an iOS app that monitors anonymous employee reviews. He is the father of two children and lives in Indianapolis. Yes, he’s on Twitter and LinkedIn.
I have no memories (first hand, of course) of their now seminal Super Bowl spot, “When I Grow Up,” mainly because I was growing up, and, being in middle school, paid infinitely more attention to getting girls than I did getting a job.
That was still over a decade away, one that, turns out, went a whole lot faster than expected – likely because I’ve intentionally blocked all memories of high school from my mind and was barely conscious in college. But inevitably, that day came where my ass had to go out looking for my first job.
The first site I found was Monster, which had become something of a verb (kind of like Google) in those halcyon days when construction starts were booming, Bear Sterns was the belle of the ball and credit was pretty much free.
I never experienced looking for a job without doing so online; the archaic stories I hear about recruiters waiting on faxed offer letters or being forced to scour classified ads in the paper to figure out who happened to be hiring are something, thankfully, I never had to endure.
The Secret Annex: Job Boards Aren’t Dead. Just Different.
We take online recruiting for granted – at least those crazy “Millennials” like myself do, I suppose. The stuff that we do now as a matter of course in TA, from CRM segmentation and lead scoring to social engagement to career site design and content marketing, is a world away from the traditional, transactional approach inherently underscored in most every job board’s basic business model.
These changes, though, are largely iterative, and often, create a new problem instead of solving an existing one – and while they might be sexy, aggregators like Indeed, employee review sites like Glassdoor or even PPA recruitment media plays like Advorto still function off of the fundamental currency of pushing applicants from publicly posted job descriptions into a searchable database – in other words, exactly what job boards like Monster have always done.
Make no mistake about it: Indeed is a job board (albeit one that’s reliant on a third party platform’s algorithm as well as associated AdWords spend in order to make money off of the margins). LinkedIn is a job board, offering job postings and a resume database, just like Monster has done for decades. Glassdoor, with its aggregated postings, job feeds on employer pages and searchable resume database, is also a job board, by any definition.
This begs the question, why is one of these companies the world’s most popular career destination (and by a wide margin), one is poised to celebrate one of the most successful tech IPOs of the year and one just got acquired for a whopping $28 billion, but Monster, well, they get chump change and the ignominy of getting left behind by a market they themselves made.
As Dr. Dre once said, “I started this gangster shit, and this the mother f-ing thanks I get?”
Monster, surely, serves as a chronic reminder that things just ain’t the same for gangstas – although in online recruiting, we’re so busy hating the players we realize that the rules of the game are the same as they’ve always been. So what the hell happened, exactly?
A Recruiting Requiem: The Fiddling Beaver’s Last Dance.
First off, let me state that the only really surprising thing about the acquisition of Monster by Randstad is that Monster finally found a buyer, even one only willing to spend a bargain basement price to acquire a public company whose share price has tanked so badly it’s somehow gone from a component of the S&P 500 to the worst performing stock on the Street.
Monster Worldwide repeatedly put itself up for sale, most recently in 2014 under the disastrous junta run by Wall Street Insider and probable Gambino family member Sal Ianuzzi, desperately trying to preserve some value by offering to sell various pieces for scrap, more or less inviting in an LBO that never came.
Even value investors, after doing their due diligence, saw that there was likely no real value to be had – except, of course, for the one asset MWW did successfully dump: ChinaHR, which, you know, just happens to be the top online job board in China, the world’s second biggest economy and biggest labor market.
No big deal – at least they held onto that patent for BeKnown and even had enough left over to pick up a player like Goziak, whose major offering was automated job feeds on Twitter – something we all know every candidate just can’t get enough of.
This one proved about as prescient as their acquisition of HotJobs from Yahoo!, which amounted to more or less a three year deal to be the exclusive provider of careers content on a network that, perhaps not entirely coincidentally, only last week sold to what has to be the Randstad of the telecommunications industry, Verizon (joining AOL, which might be the better property to parallel with Monster).
Their acquisition of TalentBin, by contrast, was incredibly shrewd, successfully anticipating the explosion in federated search and CRM products in the market and negotiating for one of the most advanced products (and teams) in this burgeoning niche within talent technology.
It was just that, like their acquisition of Trovix, an early (and elegant) semantic search player which became the engine powering Monster’s SeeMore and 6Sense product offerings, Monster had no idea how in the hell to sell these complex solutions – far easier for an account manager on commission to push job slots and “enhanced job listings” to potential prospects than try to sell relatively complex enterprise software.
Despite their best efforts to rebrand and reposition themselves as an integrated talent management SaaS solution, Monster’s customer base (and larger market) never thought of them as anything other than a job board – and that short sighted approach is likely what killed the company’s long term viability and sustainability.
For many years, the product roadmap was less important to senior management than share price or hitting quarterly growth targets, similarly hindering the company’s ability to take the impairments or opportunity costs often required to ensure that a business and bottom line remain healthy, even if that comes at the short term expense of shareholders. Of course, Ianuzzi and his Wall Street cronies had such a significant position in Monster Worldwide at the time, that was unlikely to ever happen.
And so, paradoxically, the value of the company continued to drop. Enter Randstad.
Tulips, Fiddling Beavers and Dykes: Why Monster Is Going Dutch With Randstad.
I know this analysis is a day late, and there have already been many excellent posts deconstructing the Randstad-Monster deal, which is surprising, considering that this ranks up there with Oracle and Netsuite as the world’s most yawn inducing corporate marriage.
I probably would have put out something faster, but that this is news to many in our industry is a damning indictment of the relatively narrow view we take of the world of work.
Much of the coverage and insight so far has centered on the marriage of each company’s respective product suite, which is the central thesis of the press release announcing the acquisition, in which Randstad’s CEO, Jacques Van Den Brock (which sounds like an apartheid era politician or a 16th century Flemish painter) issued the following statement:
“With its industry leading technology platform and easy to use digital, social and mobile solutions, Monster is a natural complement to Randstad. The transaction is aligned with our Tech and Touch growth strategy and reflects our commitment to bringing labor supply and demand closer together to better connect the right people to the right jobs. We look forward to welcoming the Monster team and working together to shape the evolving global job industry.”
I question, however, whether Monster’s patents, product portfolio or anything even remotely related to technology had a damn thing to do with why Randstad made this acquisition, despite the suggestions otherwise. Let’s face it – you want the social, digital and mobile stuff, there are a lot better options than Monster that cost a lot less.
Randstad, as the arbiter of the world’s largest VC fund dedicated to early stage HR Technology startups, has to be acutely aware of this.
Furthermore, online job postings, media like display ads or retargeting on ad networks, or even resume database access, has really crappy margins and low deal size compared to selling professional services like BPO, MSP or contingent workforce planning, which are the core competencies which allowed Randstad to grow into the world’s second largest HR services firm in a relatively short period of time.
Here are three things I think Randstad is most likely to do with its newly acquired Monster holdings – again, this is wildly speculative, but when your topic is “temp firm buys job board,” well, there has to be a little bit of panache in there somewhere. Even if it’s just vacuum deduction.
1. Buying A Book of Business.
Think about Randstad’s global RPO business – they’re already hiring for literally hundreds of thousands of positions a year by playing the “technology agnostic” route (much like IBM does with Kenexa), embedding their recruiting teams onsite with some of the world’s biggest brands while simultaneously using the ATS and HCM systems that employer already has in place.
The cut they’d get from providing the software pales in comparison to the hourly rate for a global onsite BPO deal, which is why even though Randstad in fact has several proprietary or homegrown technology solutions in its portfolio, these generally only come into play if that client does not already have a system of record or engagement in place (and in these situations, the tech is often severely discounted, rightfully seen as a loss leader in a professional services environment).
So, get it out of your mind that this is a data play, or a way to increase revenues through Monster’s suite of products, search technology, ad inventory or point solutions. See, the thing is, when Monster bought Goziak and TalentBin – a social recruiting and CRM tool – they publicized the hell out of both these purchases, used both products heavily in collateral and, in the case of TalentBin, transformed this acquisition into a showcase product for analysts, customers and investors. It was, it appeared, the look (and direction) of the new Monster, one that was developing into a SaaS and data play instead of a recruitment marketing also ran.
At the same time, however, Monster made one more acquisition, and one that they kept so hush-hush their press release archives contain nary a mention of it, although their SEC filings confirm that, during the same quarter they were becoming that “digital, social and mobile” powerhouse Randstad alluded to, they actually acquired an RPO firm of their own.
While it only had about 20 or so clients at the time of the acquisition, TalentFusion was a well established RPO firm with a 14 year track record of success, a proven model and, most importantly, existing enterprise accounts that could form the foundation of Monster’s play into the recruitment services and RPO space. TalentFusion by Monster has continued to grow – albeit behind the scenes – growing a beachhead in the UK and EU markets in addition to their established accounts in North America.
A recent search for open positions available at Monster the day the acquisition was announced suggested the company has aggressively been hiring for all roles across TalentFusion, particularly for project managers and account services jobs, suggesting the company has been successfully winning and growing their RPO business in markets across the world while keeping an inexplicably low profile about what must have represented (from a perfunctory look at their financials) a significant chunk of Monster’s revenue.
This means Randstad isn’t necessarily just buying some tech partner – they’re doing a fairly traditional professional services acquisition and getting an existing book of business with recurring revenues to boot. This is why I think this is actually a smart buy for Randstad, financially speaking – ostensibly, their scale and expertise in the RPO space will help with renewals, upselling and new business acquisition which could very quickly surpass the value of the acquisition itself.
With MSP contracts often costing companies north of a billion dollars these days, it’s not far fetched to believe that one single, high value client that Monster somehow signed (or more likely, was a legacy client from TalentFusion) could be all the justification Randstad really needed to pull the trigger on this move.
2. Lead Generation.
Think about what Monster potentially represents for a firm like Randstad – basically a giant funnel for inbound lead generation for exactly the kinds of leads that form both the sweet spot for Monster advertisers and Randstad’s contingent workforce solutions: high volume, low skilled labor which provide more butt in seat than business value (except for the billable hours Randstad can charge back for their temp practice).
This is generally referred to as the “on demand RPO” model, and it’s one both Randstad and Talent Fusion by Monster have traditionally provided as core offerings to their respective client bases. And it’s worth way more money, at way better margins, than any job post in the history of ever (that is, if you’re the vendor).
A quick search of open positions on Monster reveals that most of the available positions are for questionable, non-market specific positions like “Financial Services Representative,” “Call Center Support” or seasonal/temporary labor, all of which are attempts of direct employers to disintermediate having to go to a temp firm in the first place by doing contingency hiring directly in house.
For Randstad, this means that every job posted on Monster can hypothetically function as a warm lead for trying to sell their contingency services, offering to kind of do the heavy lifting and assume liability and the manifold other selling points temp firms use to build their book of business – only instead of competing with DIY job listings or internet search, Randstad can essentially use the Monster platform and ad inventory to augment, rather than replace, what’s really their cash cow: contingent labor.
3. Vertical Integration: Making Monster Work.
With a database of millions upon millions of these resumes sitting in Monster, too, Randstad can actually leverage the biz dev capabilities inherent to their core business model on both sides – once they open a search or identify a client need, they’ll also be much more effective at finding temp and non-exempt workers given the scope and reach of Monster’s resumes likely far exceed even Randstad’s own internal system, allowing them to fill temp roles more quickly, which means more billable hours for them, quicker turnaround for clients and, of course, happier Monster users – Randstad owning both the temp placement process and job platform actually make it far more likely that the average Monster user is going to actually get hired.
But beyond all that, 6Sense and the rest of Monster’s properties constitute a killer CRM and lead list, but once the post-acquisition integration of these two entities is complete, expect that Randstad will be using Monster’s data to sell staffing services, rather than Monster using Randstad data to push product, as other industry pundits have speculated since the deal was announced.
I have seminal memories of Monster, as a candidate, recruiter and employee – and while I’m not sure about the future, all I know is that I can’t help feel a little bit nostalgic for the past, and thankful for the company that launched our industry, my career and helped literally tens of millions of global job seekers land over the course of its existence. It survived recessions, bull markets and busts, but it was always a constant presence in the insular, incestuous world of recruiting, and that was kind of reassuring in an industry that moves as quickly as this one.
While I don’t know what the future holds for this combined entity, let’s all go ahead and agree that it’s probably a good omen that we’ve set a precedent for Trump losing in 2016. Whether or not recruiters or candidates can win from this marriage of convenience, it seems, remains to be seen.
All I know is, I’m going to be pouring one out for all my dead homeys. Monster, you’ll be missed.
Your company just announced a merger. Panic and a lot of emotions ensue. While the executives are (hopefully) cheering a cash cow, there’s an emotional effect that ripples through a company’s culture. A new look starts to glisten from the eyes of employees.
That look? Uncertainty.
It’s obvious to see why a merger or acquisition rock a company’s boat in every way. It has a unique impact on employees when executives have basically admitted, for once, that they have no idea what the future of products or talent will be. From whispers in the hallways to employee exits, it shakes the confidence of even the most committed employees. Change isn’t most people’s strong suit, after all.
It doesn’t help that mergers and acquisitions shake confidence in their job security, too. Those of us who have been through multiple recessions now value that level of security more than ever.
That’s not just an observation or gut feeling, by the way. According to a recent ManpowerGroup study of 19,000 21- to 36-year-olds in 25 countries, millennials crave job security above almost all else (87% of surveyed group). That was second only to money (92%) and well ahead of all of those feelings we so readily associate with the millennial generation, like job growth and happiness which landed somewhere around 40%.
The Ripple Effect
A bunch of unhappy, scared employees post merger doesn’t exactly create maximum productivity either. Employees are coming and going, teams are shifting, and the needs of the business are changing. It can be a big headache, but it can also be a big opportunity. The company has a chance to restructure teams and make them as effective as possible.
And we need to be prepared because whether we like it or not, M&A activity isn’t going away any time soon. In January alone, global activity in the pharma industry totaled $56 billion, more than double the total at the same time a few years ago, the Financial Times reported. And that’s just one industry.
From a talent perspective, there are a thousands details to juggle as your inbox is pounded with hundreds, if not thousands of questions about one aspect of the future company or another. However, where we should be focused is team building.
This is a new beginning and we should proceed accordingly by building the best teams. Ones we won’t have to beg people to join, who lead by example and develop with the company, not against it. Let’s face it, it’s not every day that a company gets the opportunity to build the best teams possible with the best bench of employees. It’s basically the employee draft, and you need to be strategic about the selection.
Play Ball: Deploying The Dream Team
Here are some quick tips I’ve seen companies employ to make the most of the employee draft post M&A:
Reevaluating Roles: Look at what people are currently doing. What do you need them to do? Where should you put new talent? What roles make sense for them? Invest in employee talents and strengths via training and determine the best way to divide roles and responsibilities among changing teams.
Find Gaps: You may have acquired new talent after M&A activity, but you’re going to need more. After rearranging roles and responsibilities, take a look at what’s missing. Where are the gaps? What roles still need to be filled? Talk to employees to get their input, as well. What do they think is still missing? What do they need to make the team more productive and more successful in the face of new demands and challenges? Involving people is a great way to retain them, too.
Look For New Skills:Once you find the gaps in the team, fill them. Involve hiring managers from day 1 and anyone else involved in the hiring process. This is the time to establish a recruiting first culture.
Update Employer Branding: Internal messaging isn’t the only thing that needs to change when hiring after M&A activity. Job postings and other materials need to be updated to reflect the new employer brand. As it is, 61 percent of North American employees surveyed by Achievers in 2015 said they don’t know their company’s mission. After M&A it’s more important than ever to make the obvious. Update the career website, social media pages, job posts, and other employer branding tools to communicate these changes to job seekers. Solid employer branding can help ease candidate concerns about working for a company involved in M&A and help clear up any confusion they have about the employer.
While M&A can create a lot of challenges for HR, it also creates new opportunities. Take advantage of M&A activity to restructure teams, bring new employees on board, and create a workplace that makes sense for the changing business.
Have you experienced M&A activity? How did it impact talent management?
About The Author:Robyn Melhuish is the Communications Manager at MedReps, a job board which gives members access to the most sought after medical sales jobs and pharmaceutical sales jobs on the Web. Connect with Robyn and MedReps.com on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Although you think “structured hiring” is simply rigid processes and inflexible procedures, think again.
It gives you a flexible framework that promotes better outcomes and a better experience for recruiters, hiring managers, and candidates. While it’s an imperative for companies to succeed in hiring the top talent they need today—and tomorrow.
We’ve gathered an awesome panel of HR and recruiting leaders who are using it now to navigate you through the nuances and lessons they’ve learned implementing these processes in their organizations. Rather than tell you, they’ll show you.
Watch this webinar to learn:
How to overcome objections and avoid pitfalls
Ways to measure the bottom line impact on recruiting metrics
Tips for getting everyone on board and putting it in practice
Every day, I’m lucky enough to get to talk to the people on the cutting edge of the recruiting technology industry.
Most of these are entrepreneurs who share a passion for their mostly cookie cutter products and the belief that, somehow, they’re going to help fix recruiting, which every single one seems to think is either “broken” or “a problem.”
The problem, at least as I see it, is actually entirely the creation of these companies looking to create a market for solutions and, in doing so, adding unnecessary layers of complexity to something that’s pretty straightforward and simple.
Recruiting isn’t that hard. I mean, anyone who denies that fact either sucks at recruiting or is trying to justify their job. But we all inherently know that selling a basic human need beats shilling, say, aluminum siding or job board licenses.
Not Afraid: Rumors of Recruiting’s Death Are Greatly Exaggerated (By Vendors).
If you know how to source, how to soft sell a candidate in the guise of a screen and how to present and package those candidates to hiring managers, you can fill a position with or without social, mobile, big data or automated matching algorithms.
“Sometimes I feel like all I ever do is
Find Different Ways To Word The Same Old Song.”
-Eminem,Guts Over Fear
I love the fact that millions of dollars of venture capital continue to pour into this space, and literally tens of thousands of startups have started up to try to serve the recruiting market. For the most part, I want to see them succeed, not least because the viability of highly niched or specialized point solutions dedicated to talent acquisition is the canary in the macroeconomic employment coal mine.
That these companies are succeeding is a sign that companies are hiring, because no product dedicated to proactive recruiting, no matter how awesome it might be, is going to survive if companies aren’t hiring, and the recruiting market wasn’t competitive.
So, I do applaud what these emerging companies represent in aggregate – but individually, they aren’t working to do anything more altruistic than be a quick payoff for the venture capitalists and executive team, another tech turnaround project to be frenetically flipped.
The market, historically, has tended to favor consolidation, and the end game for almost every single one of these isn’t an IPO, but rather, to get acquired by one of the bigger players – the exact same companies who actually created the problem they’ve built equity purporting to solve. That the goal is selling out to the very companies they’re selling against seems silly, but when you’re trying to cash in and get out as quickly as possible, that’s just business as usual.
If you think they care about the customers left under contract and forced to pick up the pieces of an unsupported system riding towards the inevitable SaaS sunsetting, you’re probably naive enough to think that, say, you should sink six figures into social recruiting or ‘gamifying’ your recruiting process.
The fact is you’re inevitably inviting a bigger problem by buying into these venture funded, unproven, commoditized “solutions” than any they might purport to solve in the first place.
“But up until the instant, that I went against it/It was ingrained in me that I wouldn’t amount to a shit stain.
I thought, no wonder I had to unlearn everything my brain was taught.”
Recruiting might be broken, but it’s up to recruiters to fix it – and there’s no tool or technology on earth that can actually do it for you. Don’t believe that the changing marketplace or platforms have changed the fundamentals – and you should be investing in training people how to make a cold call, disposition a resume, write a job description or close a candidate, not buying a product aimed at automating recruiters into oblivion.
Because the market might change, but the basics never do – and they’re far more pressing than the fact that you’re not using video screening or don’t have a branded talent community integrated into your ATS. That stuff is a fad. The rest?
That’s what we call “recruiting.” And if you don’t like the often mundane, absolutely essential core competencies that come along with the gig, well, there’s no tech in the world that’s going to fix that.
“Sometimes you gotta take a loss/And have people rub it in your face before you get made pissed off.
And keep plugging, it’s your only outlet/And your only outfit, so you know they gonna talk about it.
Better find a way to counter it quick and make it.”
That’s for real, Slim Shady.
Matt Charney is the Executive Editor of Recruiting Daily. Follow him on Twitter @MattCharneyor connect with himon LinkedIn.
Industry vets will know the name Doug Berg. He’s a serial entrepreneur that has done very well for himself thanks to ventures like Techies.com in the ’90s and Jobs2Web in the ’00s. The latter was acquired by SuccessFactors for $110 million in 2011.
In 2013, Berg exited the employment space briefly and launched TrackIf, a solution that allowed consumers to get alerts when products they wanted to buy went on sale at major retailers and online. That company is now known as MyAlerts. There was a $5 million investment in 2015.
Meet WebClipDrop
While still running MyAlerts, Berg couldn’t stay away from the employment space.
In Feb. 2016, he sent me a message to talk about a new service he was working on called WebClipDrop. “Hey, I have another new startup that I’m launching… want to take a quick look?,” he said. In a nutshell, it’s a Chrome Extension that allows users to grab data from sites like LinkedIn and dump that data into places like an applicant tracking system or CRM.
I had made a mental note to reach out to Berg for an update when I received a note from him touting a new feature. “We can both pull leads/info from Google results and enrich the data with full social, email, and other information,” Berg said.
The key to this update is being able to utilize Google search results to pull email addresses and social information on top of basic profile information.
“Many of our users prefer to use Google’s boolean search over many of the social search sites that don’t always provide accurate results or limited results when using their on-site search tools,” Berg said.
Technology focused on sourcing data from sites like LinkedIn is hot. Recruiters will recognize others on the playing field like HiringSolved’s Prophet and Charlie. Automation should make WebClipDrop particularly appealing for sourcers.
Knowing Berg’s passion for recruitment technology, as well as his past successes in our industry, makes WebClipDrop one to watch. Pricing ranges from a free limited package to $20-per-month for individual plans and custom pricing for teams. Checkout the company’s YouTube page for updates.
About the Author
Joel Cheesman has over 20 years experience in the online recruitment space. He worked for both international and local job boards in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s. In 2005, Cheesman founded HRSEO, a search engine marketing company for HR, as well as launching an award-winning industry blog called Cheezhead.
He has been featured in Fast Company and US News and World Report. He sold his company in 2009 to Jobing.com. He was employed by EmployeeScreenIQ, a background check company. He is the founder of Ratedly, an iOS app that monitors anonymous employee reviews. He is the father of two children and lives in Indianapolis. Yes, he’s on Twitter and LinkedIn.
Learning to Love Recruiting Metrics: A Crash Course for TA Leaders
As a recruiting executive, we know you’ve got a million balls in the air, from sourcing and scheduling to chasing hiring managers, wooing candidates and locking in start dates. But if you don’t pull up from the day-to-day craziness long enough to establish, monitor and report out on your key metrics, you’ll have a confused team and disgruntled business leaders on your hands.
Oh, and in case you wondered: ‘not being good at math’ is no longer a tolerable excuse. It’s time to get with the program.
So… what are the right metrics to focus on? How do you collect the right data? That’s what we quizzed our panel of reporting practitioners and experts on.
You’ll learn:
What data you should focus on gathering, and what to ignore. Don’t make things harder for yourself. Keep it simple. As a recruiter you have to know what the key elements are.
Our panelists’ key recruitment metrics. Don’t get lost in too much data.
How to have a data-driven conversation with executives. Without being wordy.
How to hold your team accountable through data. Having data on hand is great, but what are you using it for?
After we teach our kids how to survive with things like getting food into their mouths instead of all over their faces, using their words to communicate instead of pointing or grunting and wiping their own butts, we move on to social lessons. Things like manners and social cues.
As we teach these lessons every day in the classroom or at the grocery store, it’s inevitable that we slowly start to hear that faint echo of our parents’ voices. It’s as if their voices have been channeled through our own as we constantly remind our kids that it’s not ok to burp without saying excuse me or to sneeze without covering their mouths.
We hope they’ll listen and learn because we know what happens to parents who have kids with bad manners. The look. That judging glare we get at every event where parents and children are gathered in one place and we decide who the “bad” and “good” parents are simply by their obnoxious child’s behavior. I mean, farts can become infamous in these parent circles and you’re the pariah of parenting if the story is about your kid – whether you make a great follow up joke or not. Not saying it happened to me, but it happened.
This judgement cycle is part of why that record never stops being a hit. We know we’re constantly being judged based on how our kids are acting. It likely inspired their watchful eyes and whispered threats. Even with all the technology in the world, they’ll never stop hearing our voice. Our reminder to be good people, to do the right thing. A lesson that will be passed down by our kids to their own someday. We hope, at least. At home and especially at work.
Moral Operational System
The moral high-ground is a really vast space when it comes to hiring but some treat it like it’s thin ice. For example, why the fuck are we still talking about candidate feedback? Seems like a basic human right at this point. If someone cares enough to apply to a shitty job at your shitty company, and they don’t get the job, we have a moral responsibility to give them feedback as to why they didn’t get the gig.
Right? I don’t think I’m being unreasonable here. We can’t bitch and moan about them calling us back four times when we know the person that’s really in the wrong is us for not providing any feedback.
Then, why don’t we do it? The lame-ass reasons seem to be:
We’re lazy bastards
The volume of candidates is astronomical
Feedback is a major pain in the ass
We don’t want to give them bad news
We want to be liked
Oh yeah, it takes time we don’t have
Wait, time we don’t have. If only modern advancements in technology could come to our rescue.
{drum roll please}
Imagine a world where recruiters and hiring managers never gave candidates feedback. Where you could program your guilt away as actionable, brutal, thoughtful feedback that got delivered to candidates and no one in talent acquisition was involved with the distribution of said candidate feedback.
Seems farfetched?
WTF is a bot.
In come the bots. A bot or chatbot is software that is designed to automate the kinds of tasks you would usually do on your own, like making a dinner reservation, ordering an Uber, adding an appointment to your calendar or fetching and displaying information. They follow a series of prompts and simulate conversation. Bots make you feel like you’re chatting back and forth as you would with a human. #ish.
Okay, but candidates want deeper, highly personalized feedback. That sounds great. But right now, 70% of candidates don’t get any feedback, so maybe something is better than nothing.
One is more than zero for the non-math majors at home. Sarcasm aside, we’re already using bots. Who hasn’t asked Siri an inappropriate question just to see how she would respond? We’re seeing a lot more bots than we even realize like:
Taco Bell has a bot that allows you to order and pay for tacos through an automated chat conversation. Tacos, I love me some tacos.
x.ai can help schedule your meetings for you. Add the bot to your email thread, and it will take over back-and-forth conversation needed to schedule a meeting, alert you once it’s been arranged and add it to your calendar.
Facebook Messenger has bots to help you order flowers or check the weather within the app.
Slack allows third-party chatbots for work that can coordinate lunch or order supplies.
Digibank is a bank staffed by chatbots intelligent enough to answer thousands of questions submitted via chat.
WeChat is a texting service where you can pay for services from verified companies and restaurants within the chat app.
This is really just the start. I’ve heard kids yell to Alexa, not Mom and Dad, to watch a show. We’re getting a lot closer to the Jetson’s than the Jefferson’s, folks. Hell, our kids might just ask Siri to teach their children manners. It’s assumed that the kids will be staring at the phone the whole time anyway.
Bots are a combination of technologies: Artificial intelligence (AI), Natural Language Processing (NLP), Machine Learning (ML), ubiquitous messaging, computer vision, speech, and serverless computing. By combining pre-set scripts and deep learning neural networks, bots can predict an accurate response to a posed question or statement in a way that skips phases of conversation to mimic regular chat.
In plain English, that means they’re really really smart. Smart enough to figure out how to get more than 30% of candidates feedback, even without being really specific. The bots understands language, not just commands. They’re even scarier when you realize a bot gets continuously smarter as it learns from conversations it has with people. That thing could probably learn manners faster than your honor roll student.
The Bottom Line
Okay, okay, okay. At this point, you’re tired of me talking about bots. Maybe you’re terrified. In some ways, bots should terrify us at our core. After all, they could replace us.
That said, bots managing candidate feedback isn’t going to be easy, fast or cheap. And the naysayers and /or folks that generally hate technology will fight this advancement. They’ll say that this type of automated feedback isn’t personal enough.
Hold on. Really. A recruiter has never given the same feedback to 10 different candidates verbatim? Please.
Let’s be really honest here. Yes, candidate feedback can be standardized, it already is standardized, and it’s just not delivered in an efficient manner a la human beings. So, let’s take the human out of human resources already.
Why? Because it’s targeting very small businesses. Historically, this is a market that recruiting technology vendors fear to tread. But, like a honey badger, ipply “don’t care.”
“ATS’ have written small businesses off,” said Thad Price, Jobs2Careers’ VP of product. “We think that state of mind opens the door for us to pursue a tremendous opportunity.”
Maybe. Small businesses – think dry cleaners, smoothie shops, and the mom-and-pop burger joint – are not only an incredibly tough nut to crack, but they cost too much for most recruiting technology companies to worry about. Vendors don’t want to put sales resources toward a company that might only hire three people a year.
Ipply is no different in that regard. “We won’t commit salespeople to call on small businesses,” said Price. However, they may just have a way to make this free app to pay off if ipply ends up being a loss leader for Jobs2Careers. If J2C is good at anything, it’s data. Their business model of knowing what to pay for traffic, and making sure that cost is lower than what employers pay for job seeker clicks keeps the company in the black.
“Once they get it integrated with Jobs2Careers applicants, I think their clients will appreciate being able to sift through and sort candidates,” said industry veteran Chris Russell, managing director of RecTech Media. “If they execute well, it will help J2C strengthen its brand.”
Knowing how to read the tea leaves means ipply imagines a world where small business customers are motivated to upgrade their job openings to Jobs2Careers when they fail to get results. Imagine an ipply customer getting a notice that basically says, “This job is underperforming. Click here to boost your job on Jobs2Careers.”
How ipply works.
Small businesses download ipply on Android or iOS for free. Through the registration process, users connect an email address to their ipply account. Email addresses are limited to personal addresses like Gmail and Yahoo, and the service only works if clients connect via email address that is also used to post jobs to Craigslist.
After completing the registration and integration process, ipply’s secret sauce goes to work. A bot goes through your email and looks for confirmation and reply emails from Craigslist. From that data, the app can create a profile of job postings and applicants.
“We’re not reliant on Craigslist, or spidering Craigslist,” said Price. This is smart, since Craigslist usually takes issue with such activities.
The app also touts a simple screening tool that requires candidates to fill out basic questions that might filter out those who don’t have a car, for example, if the job requires having wheels. After applying, candidates receive a follow-up message that asks them to click a link and answer the screening questions.
The questionnaire landing page is mobile-friendly, and the service doesn’t require candidates to download a native app on their phone. Ipply says this process “completely eliminates common spam and unlikely candidates.”
Voilà, right? Small businesses now have an easy, free way to manage candidates through the jobs they already post on Craigslist. Not so fast. Because now ipply needs to get the word out to a traditionally elusive target market. But if ipply isn’t willing to commit sales folks to pounding the pavement and calling on the local ice cream shop, then how do they plan on connecting with prospects?
“We’ll be focusing on education through partnerships,” said Price. “We’ll connect with state and local Chambers of Commerce to get the word out about our service and how small businesses can benefit from hiring smarter.” Price also said the company will be targeting prospects via digital media, like Facebook ads.
Overall, ipply is a noble effort to help small businesses track and screen candidates in our everything-mobile world. I have no doubt small business owners who are already comfortable using digital marketing platforms will find ipply a solid addition to their tool chest.
I fear scaling this solution is going to prove incredibly difficult, however. My experience will small businesses is they shut-off anything that requires learning a new skill or potentially adding time to their already-busy life. For most, throwing an ad up on Craigslist and going through emails is comfortable. It’s not broken.
As a result, a solution like ipply is probably fixing a problem that doesn’t exist for most small business owners.
About the Author
Joel Cheesman has over 20 years experience in the online recruitment space. He worked for both international and local job boards in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s. In 2005, Cheesman founded HRSEO, a search engine marketing company for HR, as well as launching an award-winning industry blog called Cheezhead.
He has been featured in Fast Company and US News and World Report. He sold his company in 2009 to Jobing.com. He was employed by EmployeeScreenIQ, a background check company. He is the founder of Ratedly, an iOS app that monitors anonymous employee reviews. He is the father of two children and lives in Indianapolis. Yes, he’s on Twitter and LinkedIn.
You’ve probably heard the numbers. Referral programs drive employees that are more engaged and stay with your company longer. They have a significantly lower cost per hire – about $1,000 compared to the average $5,000. They’re 4x more likely to get hired and produce up to 25% more profit for companies than hires sourced from other methods.
Across the board, employee referrals are the best quality and lowest cost source of hire. So why do we accept that we’re running a less than average program? Why do we rely on shoddy programs and error filled processes?
In a world driven by technology and e-mail demand, how do you make the ask for a reference that doesn’t feel like another to-do list or something that’s not worthwhile for employees?
It’s time to give your referral program a tune-up. In this webinar, sponsored by Rolepoint, we’ll both teach and talk. Our speaker, Michelle Hinkle, Global Referral Program Lead at Oracle, will break down trends, best practices and motivations for referral programs. Then, we’ll shift to a live Q&A where you can ask your questions and get answers on how to make incremental improvements to your strategy.
You’ll Learn:
Trends across the market
Essential practices for a world class program
How to encourage colleagues to choose referrals first when hiring
How to gain additional referrals during urgent hiring times without the promise of a referral bonus or increased bonus
Maintaining a talent inventory (keeping talent warm during non-peak hiring times)
It’s both scary and fascinating what the world of robotics is getting into these days. There are drones, robots who can deploy and yes – even a killer robot. And no, I’m not talking about Terminator. There are machines that can decipher codes, drive our cars – really the possibilities are endless. The initial introduction of robots was cool but now, it’s pretty scary. I mean, we saw a robot kill someone in the last few weeks.
As we slowly introduce more technologies that function autonomously we can feel ourselves losing control to the algorithms and statistics that drive samples, but can’t encapsulate the human experience. Or so we think. We talk about artificial intelligence, virtual reality and all the opportunities we’re starting to imagine for them thanks to PokemonGo,
Of course, that sends some shock waves toward people in the workplace. If you can push the button, so can a machine.
Recruiting Robots
However, technology in recruiting has made it much easier to make informed decisions more quickly. Despite a mere two-and-a-half months stint in sourcing research, even I, a witless peon, know that things are so much more convenient these days. The monotony of rotary phones, writing on color-coded notecards, keeping physical files on people… blech. I’m happy people don’t have to do that stuff anymore with modern computer technology. It’s great that there are plenty of tools nowadays to assist with the recruiting game.
Recruiters are story tellers and they still tell stories of pre-job board, stacks of resumes and calling all day to find the right person or find the company that would pay the commission. Today, so much of that happens from a laptop before you ever pick up a phone. What was once the primary form of communication is not what it used to be and one of the least favorite methods of my generation.
There is still a huge need for recruiters to do what they do, however. Technology doesn’t simply replace them. Technologies that embrace complementarity between man and machine are the biggest players right now. Social media sites for professionals aren’t simply replacing replacing recruiters outright. They are built with software that complement the goals of a recruiter without removing the human element. Software mogul Peter Thiel emphasises the “power of complimentarity” in his book Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future. He cites complementarity as a key feature in the success of companies he founded like PayPal and Palantir.
Thiel’s Principle: The Proper Balance of Man and Machine
“Complementarity between computers and humans isn’t just a macro-scale fact. It’s also the path to building a great business.” (Thiel, 144)
So what does that mean, anyway? Take a look at PayPal. They were losing millions every month in 2000 solely due to credit card fraud. At first, they tried a software solution to catch and reverse all of the fraudulent transactions but criminals adapted and got around it too quickly. In the end, it was an algorithm that worked in conjunction with human efforts that prevailed at putting PayPal back into the green.
“This kind of man-machine symbiosis enabled PayPal to stay in business” said Thiel, who credits Palantir’s success to the same harmonic coupling of humans and software. Palantir software couldn’t have found Osama Bin Laden on it’s own, just as the analysts couldn’t have found him without Palantir. According to Thiel: “Better technology in law, medicine and education won’t replace professionals; it will allow them to do even more.” (Thiel, 148).
When I look at our own current tech landscape, I can’t help but see the same thing. Recruiting is, and always will be part detective work and part sales. It’s all about how you establish motives, discover hidden talent (and hidden reputations), and persuade the best one to sign the line and join your company. There’s no way a machine could take it all on. The tech that will fail, is the tech that tries. This is why the best recruiting software is software that lets the recruiter be the recruiter. Whether we like it or not, human resources must continue to be run by humans to be any good. That’s why technologies that amplify recruiter productivity are and will continue to be the the most valuable in the recruiting world.
Through my internship, I have been able to become closely acquainted with a lot of the recruiting technology out there. Getting on the inside of HiringSolved has given me a very intimate knowledge of their technology, specifically. I might be biased but I think HiringSolved’s technology fits Thiel’s ideal mold. It’s a complementary tool because it doesn’t try to replace recruiters.
Instead, it takes all the grunt work out of sourcing on the web by automating the process of compiling composite profiles that use information from disparate parts of the web. For everything else, you need the recruiter.
The “Big Data” Fad
Another important topic Thiel touched on with technology was to be wary of the “big data” fad. To him, more data doesn’t always mean more value and “big data is usually dumb data” (Thiel, 149). This is where it is interesting to see the inner-workings of a recruiting technology and how the engineers actively seek to filter dumb data out of their results. That’s another area where the machine loses. I know this because I know that a majority of HiringSolved’s data is dumb – or at least not smart enough to actually appear in searches through the service. This is by design. The engineers block profiles from appearing that aren’t up to snuff. For the millions of profiles that are visible, there are millions more that are locked in an attic where they will continue to reside there until they meet some vital criteria. They’ll be locked away until they’re decent and presentable. Machines know how to get a lot of data. People need to make it smart enough to know what data is worth it.
This thinking is akin to Thiel’s thoughts on how “the most valuable companies in the future won’t ask what problems can be solved with computers alone. Instead, they’ll ask: how can computers help humans solve hard problems?” (Thiel, 150).
People have romanticized the role of computers in doing everyday tasks without thinking about the massive human contribution. “We have let ourselves become enchanted by big data only because we exoticise technology. We’re impressed with small feats accomplished by computers alone,” (Thiel, 149), but we’re ignoring the human contribution and impact. Even if computers will someday become sentient enough to outsmart and dominate humans, Thiel predicts that this won’t really be something to worry about until the 22nd century or so. There’s plenty of time for us to take advantage of technology that makes us better at what we do that already exists.
About the Author: Christopher Murray is a growth hacker at HiringSolved. He’s also a Gangplank Chandler community member and volunteer where he supplies a weekly newsletter and blog. When he started with HiringSolved in November 2014, his knowledge of sourcing, HR, and Recruiting were at first based on frantic Google searches and blog skimming. However, he has since been able to immerse himself in the knowledge of the space and continues to gain insights to help him form opinions. Christopher has a strong background in freelance writing, hacking, and marketing. His duties at HiringSolved include site content growth, writing patents & press releases, conducting email blasts, and charting their marketing trajectory in the new media landscape.
Creating email lists when sourcing sucks. It is like flossing your teeth or working out. It sucks but you have to do it. And if you want to compete, you have to do it fast. There are lots of resources for finding emails, it is true, but where these resources fall short is actually putting them into a usable format so you can start your outreach.
Have you ever heard of the word “palliative?” Me neither until I read Seth Godin’s blog. “A palliative is a treatment that soothes even if it can’t cure the illness. By all means, whenever you can, fix the problem, go to the root cause, come up with a better design.” eToggler is the latest palliative Chrome Extension for creating targeted email lists.
Founder and CEO of eToggler, Lucky Vashisth, was spending hours trying to build prospect lists for all of the jobs he was recruiting for. He nailed it. This tool is fast, easy, accurate and inexpensive. (All of my favorite things)
The pricing for eToggler is pretty inexpensive. You can see below that for $29, you can find up to 600 emails but there are other packages available.
The ability to find emails is key to being able to find top candidates. I have used several email search tools such as Email Hunter, Norbert among others, and I am loving eToggler. Give it a try and tell me what you think in the comments below!
I have always loved the MTV show The Real World, and it had been a guilty pleasure of mine right from the beginning of the first show all those years ago. If you don’t know, it’s a reality show that takes seven strangers with wildly different backgrounds to live together and often work together , too. As you can probably imagine, working and living with 7 strangers makes for interesting TV. At least to me.
The problem is they are not real with each other in the way you think. They are, themselves, real, but the producers manipulate them and casting directors to cast the unfortunate cult of personalities that they knew would be, shall we say, uncomfortable with each other. The legitimacy of the show is compromised, but they were making good television and getting the ratings so when the money rolls in who cares, right? I joined a company a few years back as a senior recruiter that made me feel like I was a new cast member on the Real World.
No, I’m not going to name names, even though this went down a long time ago. I’m getting a little tired of being threatened with lawsuits from my writing.
Casting Call
I was miserable at my previous job so when a good friend and someone I not only respected but admired, called and said he was looking for a senior recruiter at a small but growing firm, I was in. I sent him an IM (instant message for those under 30) telling him I was interested in the role. I know IT quite well and thought this would be, for lack of a better word, a partnership made for the ages. He had two recruiters already – one, a pretentious older woman desperately holding on to the last days of her youth and beauty. The other a conceited young girl with more attitude than chops in the business world. She needed training but like most millennials, she was a special snowflake and there is no getting past that. The guy I really respected, let’s call him David, was frustrated. He didn’t have a team that could hire but he insisted he could make it work.
I went in to an early interview with the COO where he was very honest. He told me that he was not sure if the company really needed a fourth recruiter for the volume of hires. The real problem this fourth recruiter would have to address was that they were not filling the roles they needed to fill. He thought the team needed some new energy and that they may need to replace people. This is a warning flag. At this point, I should have known that I was entering the pit of despair, but the pit I was in was already devouring my soul. So, in my desperation, there was blindness.
I was hired, however, Dave and I were apparently the only ones excited about this move. The rest of the so-called “team” saw an outsider that they did not want, come in and upset the old apple cart. They barely tolerated Dave, and now Dave was bringing another unwanted outsider to the circle. If this happened on the Real World, I imagine everyone would be sitting on the couch staring at the “new guy” while they showed highlights of confessional tapes about how this person was invading the house.
The Arch-Nemesis
It had only been about three months of searching for candidates and I was having the hardest time with hiring managers. You know the ones. They have big egos and trust only themselves. They believe they’re never wrong and let it stand in the way of making decent choices. These managers in particular, fiercely protected their egos so they wouldn’t look bad to the upper echelon types. They’ll throw anyone to the wolves to be able to run away and gain another day of anonymity.
The worst place for leaders like this? HR, of course. They have the power to hire and fire and when you don’t fit and are wanted out, HR has a surefire way of getting you out. And then I pissed off HR.
Packing Bags: Talent Mobility’s Cost
“Sometimes the wrong choices bring us to the right places.” ~Unknown
My nemesis was the new Sales Manager who wanted an assistant and her open job would eventually be the seal on my termination letter. Personally, I think this woman watched the movie The Devil Wears Prada too many times. She was the epitome of being tough to prove she could do the job. She even tried to do my job at one point, scheduling a lunch and learn for managers on how to write a good job description.
I still giggle about that.
Her own job description was awful. The role was a good one actually, and it had growth potential. The young girl at the front desk had done this role with no real growth path to anything other than dying on the vine. She was smart, capable, and after me telling her about the role, excited about the growth potential in the company. Personally, I see no problem with talent mobility but apparently this was breaking a house rule.
The catch is that Kaila, the receptionist, reported to HR. That gave her some power trip and being in her early 30’s with three employees, she felt that this was her domain. She was mad that recruiting did not report to her, too. I don’t know if it was that or she was sniffing glue but recruiting Kaila gave her juice, and she was going to use it against me.
Maybe she was unhappy that the young girl was, young. She knew everyone in the company and was liked by nearly everyone. She was smart, hungry, and knew the business. She was perfect for the role, and I never say that. However, she was in her place. When the other so-called team members heard of what I had done, they gasped at my stab at talent mobility. The pure audacity was almost tantamount to heresy in their eyes.
David tried to calm the situation thinking, like me, that this wasn’t such a bad idea. The front desk position could be filled with a temp and would give Kaila a career path. This apparently fell on deaf ears and hardened hearts. Oh how I have seen this too many times in this industry.
A few days later, while David was in yet another meeting, I was summoned to the main conference room. Once inside, I saw the HR lackey in training along with the HR lady that summoned me in. They were sitting there staring, obviously nervous. I was being ”let go” as they felt, or better she felt, that I was not working out. The reasons were this: I was not working hard enough on the assistant role, but rather pushing for an internal candidate that was obviously the best choice. This company was always talking about mobility, but it was a sham. It was just another shade of lipstick for the pig in the room.
Good riddance, I say – but I advise you to consider ego when people are fighting talent mobility.
Editor’s note: Speaking of talent mobility, we’re doing a webinar for Rolepoint one week from today. We’ve asked Michael Goldberg, Director of Talent Acquisition at the American Heart Association, to share how he’s filling over 40% of open roles with his talent mobility program. This is a real case study into the how behind a successful program, not just defining the model we all know about. Click here if we’ll see you next Tuesday.
When Recruit, Indeed‘s parent company acquired SimplyHired a few month’s ago, there was a lot of speculation around what would happen next. Would www.simplyhired.com just redirect to www.indeed.com? What would happen to SimplyHired’s customers and their promoted jobs? Would they maintain two separate entities?
Well, it looks like we now know what Indeed’s going to do, at least for now. A quick look at search results on SimplyHired reveals search results that are predominantly sponsored listings from Indeed.com. Additionally, inquiries about job postings drive traffic to Indeed.
This move makes perfect sense, at least for now. Switching out SimplyHired’s search results with sponsored content from Indeed is a quick-and-dirty way to increase profits while not soiling your own brand. Imagine if tomorrow all of Google’s search results were predominantly sponsored links. People would freak and leave Google in droves.
Profits would spike initially, but brand would erode and traffic would die over time. But if Google bought a second-tier search engine, packed with with sponsored results and deleted the word “Google” anywhere on the site, Google wouldn’t suffer at all, but they’d continue printing money as usual.
According to Compete data, SimplyHired is still generating about 3 million visitors every month. If we guess one visitor equals an average of 5 jobs clicked per visit, at a minimum of 25 cents per click, then we can do some very rough math and conservatively estimate $3.75 million monthly being added to Indeed’s bottom line.
Indeed is in “the zone.” This move to eliminate a competitor for (what was likely) pennies-on-the-dollar, flip the switch on new revenue and further corner the pay-per-click market for job postings is so well played.
How long will this structure last? My guess is, as long as traffic keeps flowing and the search engine rankings remain strong, it’ll be status quo. However, if traffic deteriorates, then Simply Hired may just become a testing ground for new ideas and products, or just redirect back to the flagship.
Only time will tell.
About the Author
Joel Cheesman has over 20 years experience in the online recruitment space. He worked for both international and local job boards in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s. In 2005, Cheesman founded HRSEO, a search engine marketing company for HR, as well as launching an award-winning industry blog called Cheezhead.
He has been featured in Fast Company and US News and World Report. He sold his company in 2009 to Jobing.com. He was employed by EmployeeScreenIQ, a background check company. He currently runs Hire Daily, a site for recruiting news and is the founder of Ratedly, an iOS app that monitors anonymous employee reviews. He is the father of two children and lives in Indianapolis. Yes, he’s on Twitter and LinkedIn.
You don’t know what candidates really want to hear.
Our company talks a lot about excellence, but we don’t (or can’t) explain to candidates how we help employees make it happen.
You don’t actually know what your culture is.
We don’t know how to talk about our company in a way that’s different than our competition does.
We don’t hire 99% of the people we interview in-person but we don’t find out they’re not a fit until they’ve spent hours talking with us.
Our candidates are our customers, so candidate experience counts.
If so, keep reading.
_____________________________________________
Issues in our company like candidate experience, employer branding and employee engagement aren’t just buzzwords. They’re challenges we all need to pay attention to and for the savvy hiring team, they’re obstacles they want to overcome.
These teams start by scouring the internet for checklists and case studies only to figure out that sometimes the checklists don’t address your specific problems. At this point, it’s important to pivot to a new search. Now, it’s time to find the right technology: one that can help you not only identify the problems in your organization and indicate the right direction you should head to find the solutions.
Join us on August 10th at 10 am EDT as Crystal Miller and William Tincup host this private demo on behalf of the new eHarmony product, Elevated Careers. They’ll cover how this new product addresses these core challenges in your corporation and show you the in’s and out’s of this new solution from a recruiting perspective.
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Joel Cheesman has over 20 years experience in the online recruitment space. He worked for both international and local job boards in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s. In 2005, Cheesman founded HRSEO, a search engine marketing company for HR, as well as launching an award-winning industry blog called Cheezhead.
I have no memories (first hand, of course) of their now seminal Super Bowl spot, “When I Grow Up,” mainly because I was growing up, and, being in middle school, paid infinitely more attention to getting girls than I did getting a job.
I know this analysis is a day late, and there have already been many excellent posts deconstructing the Randstad-Monster deal, which is surprising, considering that this ranks up there with Oracle and Netsuite as the world’s most yawn inducing corporate marriage. 
Randstad, as the arbiter of the world’s largest VC fund dedicated to early stage HR Technology startups, has to be acutely aware of this. 
Here are some quick tips I’ve seen companies employ to make the most of the employee draft post M&A:
Every day, I’m lucky enough to get to talk to the people on the cutting edge of the recruiting technology industry.
It’s both scary and fascinating what the world of robotics is getting into these days. There are drones, robots who can deploy and yes – even a killer robot. And no, I’m not talking about Terminator. There are machines that can decipher codes, drive our cars – really the possibilities are endless. The initial introduction of robots was cool but now, it’s pretty scary. I mean, we saw a robot kill someone in the last few weeks.
However, technology in recruiting has made it much easier to make informed decisions more quickly. Despite a mere two-and-a-half months stint in sourcing research, even I, a witless peon, know that things are so much more convenient these days. The monotony of rotary phones, writing on color-coded notecards, keeping physical files on people… blech. I’m happy people don’t have to do that stuff anymore with modern computer technology. It’s great that there are plenty of tools nowadays to assist with the recruiting game.
About the Author: Christopher Murray is a growth hacker at 
