— Archive for 2009 —

• What Technology Can’t Do For Recruiting

  Kevin Wheeler is an insightful writer on human capital and recruiting. And in his decade-end wrap-up, he discusses what makes for a good recruiter. There is so much packed into it, I really suggest both job-seekers and recruiters read it. I think his most essential point, that recruiting is sales and sales is human, is worth mulling over for a l-o-n-g time. The sooner we, the technology and Internet service companies in human capital, get that deep into our bones, the better and larger impact we will have. He writes: The decade began with the hope, maybe even the expectation among most recruiters, that the Internet would change things profoundly… As it turned out, neither the average cost per hire nor the average time to present a qualified candidate has changed much despite the introduction of all the tools that the Internet made possible… Because recruiting has still not agreed [...]

  Dec 30

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• History of Job Search, Newspapers

  Prior to information being free, ubiquitous, and liquid, it was costly, shepherded, and structured. The contours of information availability, like those of a topographic map, radiated outwards from geographic centers of production. Printing presses were large, immobile, and based in cities. The newspapers they produced were perishable, costly to ship, and the value of local news content to the audience decreased with each mile distant from the source. In a sense, the information available to you was tied to the land upon which you lived. Although limiting, these costs and geographic considerations were the reason that large, professionally-written, locally-focused newspapers were viable as businesses. By contrast, neither one-man bands nor a nationally distributed paper such as USA Today were economically feasible until very recent times. The history of newspapers is the history of mass-produced information being shared among burgeoning urban populations. The business history of newspapers is the combination of [...]

  Dec 29

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• When Snowmen Pass…

  Dec 28

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• History of Job Search, The Industrial Revolution

  When George Washington became President, we were mostly a rural country. In fact, when he was inaugurated, three-quarters of working Americans worked on a farm. And with the 2010 Census coming up, it’s interesting to remember that the very first census in 1790 showed that out of 3,929,326 Americans at the time, only about 200,000 of them lived in towns larger than 2,500 people. So how did we change from a country of Jeffersonian yeoman farmers to a nation of Dilbertville cubicle gophers? If free market capitalism is about, well…, free markets, then why don’t we still buy, produce, and consume everything in markets? I mean the old kind of market, the ones that existed long before Piggly Wiggly and Von’s. The type that you can still see abroad when you travel — the butcher and the leather-maker and the guy selling vegetables from his farm — all under one [...]

  Dec 22

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• But, hey, my resume is OK. Right?

  Last week, I shared with you the numbers on how we score resumes. We received a lot of email from you asking for more data, so here it is. We’ve just launched our first customer satisfaction surveys for our resume-writing business so that we can continually get better and better at helping you through your transition. Before people go through the process of writing a professional resume, we frequently hear this comment: “I know my own story, I know how to write English, and I have paper. Why in Hades do I need to pay somebody to do this???” After the professional resume writing process, here is how people grade their “old” resumes: It’s pretty clear that after seeing the finished product, our customers are no longer happy with what they originally had. And it’s sad, because, having reviewed thousands of resumes over the years, I’d have to agree – [...]

  Dec 21

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• RyanAir’s delightfully twisted sense of corporate humor

  Dec 18

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• History of Job Search, Before Jobs

  The notion of “jobs” and choice in one’s career is a modern invention. No, high school students back in the Bronze Age didn’t sulk in angst while choosing between “hunting” and “gathering” as a career. And the original Goths and Vandals didn’t fill out applications to become pillagers. For most of human history, what you did for your daily bread was determined by caste, church or king, and enforced by a societal molasses that discouraged new solutions, change, or movement. “Self-actualization” was tough to come by when 98% of humanity picked crops by hand and never traveled further than 25 miles outside their birthplace. Peasantry, serf & servant, and the horrific existence of slavery, define the vast majority of effort of all the human beings who have ever lived. Peasants in an anarcho-syndicalist commune being repressed by the system. The long trip from wandering around the savanna to seeing Hootie [...]

  Dec 17

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• Tiger Woods creates new business opportunity: third-party morals auditor

  With Tiger Woods’ endorsement deals falling apart and companies left to deal with the unintentionally ironic aftermath in awkward ways, it’s time for the business side to deal with reality. All of these companies undoubtedly have a “morals clause” in their endorsement contracts that allows them to exit in the case of inappropriate behavior such as Tiger’s. But a morals clause is a backward-looking, reactive way to handle such substantial business risk. A morals clause is… ..a provision in a contract or official document that prohibits certain behavior in a person’s private life. They deal with behavior such as sexual acts and drug use. They were commonly used in the contract between actors/actresses and film studios to uphold the public image sought to be portrayed by the studio. Morals clauses are included today in certain contracts of public figures, such as athletes, actors/actresses, and others. At the time that any [...]

  Dec 17

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• You can’t delegate the passion

  One of the challenges as you grow a company that you’re passionate about is delegating. A lot of fellow entrepreneurs end up never developing, or wanting to develop, the skills that enable one to grow from being a manager of yourself, to a manager of others, and then a manager of managers. This is sometimes called “not making it to the next level”, but that’s a foolish way of looking at it. It’s as foolish as saying a baseball player that specializes in one position and doesn’t change positions is “not making it to the next level.” While moving was great for Babe Ruth’s career, for the vast majority of ball players it makes more sense to focus on the one position that best exploits and exhibits their talents. So it’s fantastic that there are committed, crazy entrepreneurs out there who enjoy the process of making new companies so much [...]

  Dec 16

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• Fascinating use of Google Trends to predcit unemployment rates

  This summary concludes: The main limitation of the explanatory variable based on Google data is that it could be partly driven by on-the-job search, rather than unemployed job search activities which are the focus of this paper. Another limitation is due to the fact that not all workers have access to the internet, and it is also presumable that workers using the internet for a job search are not randomly selected among job-seekers. This should be a minor issue, given the increasing popularity of internet as a job search method and also due to the fact that a bias in the estimates would emerge only if shocks hit the unemployed using the internet for job search in a different way. From my experience at TheLadders and HotJobs, I would re-state the concern about the limitation of the explanatory variable. If on-the-job search drove job search activities on Google, it would [...]

  Dec 16

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