By Gerry Crispin, SPHR and Mark Mehler
mmc@careerxroads.com
Since 1996 our CareerXroads Update has been a monthly public commentary on the staffing industry. As we kick off our 12th year, we’ve added a second members-only publication: “CareerXroads Colloquium Bellwether” to highlight short news items that we find of interest. If you’d like to learn more about the Bellwether and our Colloquium click here. We welcome hearing from you at 732-821-6652 or mmc@careerXroads.com with ideas and queries.
Sources of Hire: The Good, the Bad and the In Between
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Our 6th annual 2006 Sources of Hire Study is posted and we invite you to peruse the results and commentary about the 207,000 positions 40 firms filled in 2006.
More than ever we’re concerned about the methods companies use to collect and report their SOH data. Part of our concern is the increasing importance that Sources of Hire play in staffing investment decisions. We believe there should be a high priority placed on improving self-reporting tools AND comparing these to one or more independent measures collected via the web, recruiter or on-boarding. In addition, the interaction of multiple sources may be much more important than we currently suspect. The ability to nominate and analyze multiple sources would make the staffing supply chain more credible to colleagues in operations, finance and other functions.
That being said, here are some results to ponder from our annual Sources of
Hire Study:
We will be having a Webinar conversation on these issues Friday, March 2 (with colloquium members and guests), March 6 with Linkedin and March 15 with Zoominfo.
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The Times, They are a Changin’
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Most employers could care less about mergers, partnerships and what not among the many vendors and suppliers vying for their staffing advertising dollars but this one is more notable than many of the others - and a portent of things to come.
The New York Times (and its properties) announced some days ago that they are entering into a (essentially co-branding) partnership with Monster.com. The Newspaper Association of America doesn’t post income from help-wanted classifieds for individual papers but there was a time around 2000 (certainly not now) when estimates of Help Wanted income from the Boston Globe and NY Times was in the vicinity of $400 million. The Times, they are certainly a changin’.
Convergence of “media” (print, web, tv, radio etc.) has been inevitable literally since the telegraph put the pony express out of work. (And history buffs might want to note that the pony express only lasted 18 months.)
And, no we don’t think for a second that job boards individually or collectively will ever eliminate print. But we also don’t believe that the success of a partnership between two very different and competitive forms of media can succeed unless their partnership blends not duplicates their respective strengths. They also must measure their customers’ results - and that is still a long way off. Obviously CareerBuilder, Hotjobs and other lesser known models of the web plus print or print plus web abound. These range from the late CareerSite to the beltway model of Chicagojobs, or the street corner approach of JobDig. Several others include a brilliant but shy Arron Matos of Jobing. Adicio, a less visible network engine behind the scenes is also a key player in the mix. (We will save the discussion of radio and TV for later writings).
Most of the strategies (but not all) that we see are focused on leveraging and expanding a print franchise by finding a local partner for a web entity. Some simply attempt to co-opt web models or, leverage themselves by building a co-op. None of these in our opinion is a change in kind.
We envision a day (sooner rather than later) when a recruiter working for a corporation has the ability to saturate a specific geographic area with a message to a targeted audience - and with a single flick of their staffing dashboard. In our scenario the well-written company announcement of an opening, with all its embedded links to the corporate website, might be posted to a job board - but that is just the beginning. The web site would periodically produce 3 indexes of all the jobs in their database (commute, title and company) for their newspaper partner and feed them with what is essentially thousands of two-line referral ads to be printed in the newspaper’s help-wanted classified section - on deadline. Each ad would appear in print under three cuts: Where, Who and What. The referral ads turn the classified section into an “archive,” a guide to who is hiring which then points to the web location where more information can be found. Now that is co-branding that impacts the employer and the jobseeker. And this is only one of several ways that newspapers and web partners would change the nature of how they get an employers’ message to their target group. The new blended service would be different than either a job board or a newspaper.
No one currently does this for ALL ads automatically and for a flat fee. Not
even close. That’s when we’ll see a new world or at least the part involving
Push.
It’s the Pull part that will really rock the boats.
But
the first step is holding hands.
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The Making of a Crystal
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An interview on CNN Thursday morning caught our attention like few others have. Amanda, a severely autistic adult, in deep conversation with a medical reporter suddenly riveted our attention as her hands flew over her computer and a voice synthesizer converted her keyboard strokes into a coherent verbal argument with a sophisticated tempo. She rapidly built her points, drew conclusions and, inserted several wry comments that caught the interviewer by surprise - and I’m sure the rest of the audience watching as well.
Amanda was explaining her interaction with the world around her while admitting to a struggle with a limited form of communication - a language of words and symbols (she was doing quite well however). Amanda has fewer filters than many of us so-called “normal” folks (she referred to us as “typical” not normal) and the inputs of smell, sight, sound, etc. all have an intensity few of us can imagine – at least without drugs. To Amanda, they were all part of her language. We just couldn’t understand it.
As she was talking about herself and her “conversation” with the environment around her, she also seemed to be describing the process of innovation. In the USA we take pride in our ability to innovate and credit to some extent our ability to bring diverse and divergent people to the table and get them to share, stimulate and, yes, crystallize an idea. The thought that perhaps we’ve not tapped the most diverse among us in our search for even more innovation, crossed our minds.
We are not strangers to the issues of hiring people who happen to be disabled and have written extensively about some of the recruiting challenges (the National Technical Institute for the deaf being one of them) but we have always tended to think pretty linearly. Listening to Amanda however, was less about wondering how to accomodate a person who is disabled and much more about how to tap into someone with an unusual ability who stimulated us to think in new ways.
Amanda came to CNN’s attention because of a YouTube video she made called In My Language http://www.youtube.com/watch? v=JnylM1hI2jc . It’s 8 minutes long and in the last 4 minutes Amanda explains the behaviors you see her exhibiting in the first four minutes. We were astonished. We think you will be too.
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Catch 22: El Nombre Circulo Vicioso
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An immigration Catch 22 may be in the making according to a Professor at Princeton University who has been researching the rapidly growing illegal alien population. His premise is that the problem isn’t about getting to the work but instead, is all about the cost of going home.
Princeton University Professor, Douglas Massey, presented a lecture on international issues that Mark attended last semester. The professor’s research and book offers an economic explanation for the explosion of illegal aliens that ought to make proponents of a Great Wall of China (look-alike) along our southern border take pause.
His findings suggest that the problem isn’t that our border is too permeable (every border can be crossed and anyone with enough incentive to get through it will find a way). People will pay whatever they have to as an investment to get to work and since we have increased our efforts over the last few years to stem the tide of illegal immigration, that investment (hiring a “coyote” for example) has risen astronomically. The tide obviously hasn’t been stemmed.
What we’ve really accomplished Masey maintains is to prevent illegal
immigrants from returning home (and thereby incurring a new, even higher, cost
to return). Instead of returning home they invest in getting more of their
family here and, eventually, settle in for the long haul.
Catch 22 El
Nombre Circulo Vicioso.
Professor Massey’s numbers suggest that if more citizens from Mexico were able to get low-cost, work visas AND come and go more easily, it would actually reduce the overall numbers - illegal and otherwise. Fewer folks would feel it necessary to settle here. His research, collected door to door includes several interesting slides worth perusing and we’ve posted them at http://www.careerxroads.com/news/MMP.htm
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Mrs. Robinson Redux
"The other night I went to a party and met a young man who had just left Cambridge. Slightly patronisingly, I asked him what he wanted to do with his life. He eyed me coolly and said, “McKinsey” and explained he had chosen it because the competition was even stiffer there than it was at the other places. I was impressed and depressed by this in equal measure. His logic was compelling, in a soulless kind of way."
Peter Clayton sent an article our way: Thrusting Young Careerists Give Lie To Generation Y, written earlier this month by Lucy Kellaway, a Financial Times management columnist, whose opening lines are quoted above. Her writing style gripped us and we tracked her Bio down on the net. It wasn’t surprising to learn that she was well known for her commentaries on modern corporate culture, had written two books and received a British Press award for "Columnist of the Year” in 2006.
Her article represents a different voice about what work means to the people engaged in it and reminds us that "finding your passion" is hardly universal. We think she revives a point of view we haven’t seen for a generation and pokes an interesting hole in the notion that we can determine why anyone chooses to go to work based on generic bio data- like their age.
This is a great discussion piece for a recruiting team.
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Where you’ll find us next:
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Full details of CareerXroads’ schedule can be found here.
Good Hunting! Gerry and Mark
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Links to CareerXroads are much appreciated but we provide no reciprocal agreements with any site. We want to maintain a level of objectivity free from even perceived conflict of interest regarding our opinions. We have no direct relationship with any job board or career site.
Gerry and Mark work full time consulting, educating and discovering how talent and opportunity connect through emerging technology. If we can be of help, you know how to reach us.
CareerXroads
The Staffing Strategy Connection
By Gerry Crispin and Mark Mehler
mmc@careerxroads.com - 732-821-6652