— Archive for January, 2010 —

• Leonardo da Vinci’s Resume

  Before he was famous, before he painted the Mona Lisa and the Last Supper, before he invented the helicopter, before he drew the most famous image of man, before he was all of these things, Leonardo da Vinci was an artificer, an armorer, a maker of things that go “boom”. And, like you, he had to put together a resume to get his next gig. So in 1482, at the age of 30, he wrote out a letter and a list of his capabilities and sent it off to Ludovico il Moro, Duke of Milan. Well, we at TheLadders.com have tracked down that resume and you can click on the image below to see the full-size version. The translation of this letter is quite remarkable: “Most Illustrious Lord, Having now sufficiently considered the specimens of all those who proclaim themselves skilled contrivers of instruments of war, and that the invention [...]

  Jan 29

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• Get back!

  *** From my Monday newsletter to TheLadders.com subscribers…*** Forty-one years ago this week, the Beatles played their famous last concert on the roof of their London headquarters. The Beatles were a mess in that January of 1969. The recording of an album tentatively titled ‘Get Back’ was meant to be a ‘back to the basics’ return to their roots, but personal problems between the Beatles escalated and culminated in George Harrison’s walking out on the band. After letting feelings calm down a bit, they got together again towards the end of the month at their company’s headquarters, Apple Corps, at 3 Saville Row, London. On the afternoon of January 30th, 1969, the Beatles walked out onto their roof and into history with a 42-minute gig that brought central London to a standstill. With Billy Preston joining on keyboards, the Beatles played a great concert that re-energized them and got them [...]

  Jan 28

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• History of Job Search, The 20th Century Model Breaks

  The Job Search in the first decade of the 21st century is a chaotic mess for all involved. Job-seekers, employers, and vendors have found themselves stuck in a bewildering terrain without landmarks or signposts to guide their way, and very little conceptual understanding of how the structural stresses on the model are leading to inefficient, frustrating outcomes. Two factors have contributed to our losing our way. The first, and by far the large, has been the arrival of the internet revolution. The creation of a nationwide information network, with zero monetary or time cost to search for job information and apply for jobs, unleashed new and unwelcome behaviors from job-seekers who understandably took the advice — that the job hunt is a numbers game — to heart. The secondary factor has been the continued evolution of career paths away from lifetime employment. Job-seekers switch companies more often, have taken responsibility [...]

  Jan 19

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• History of Job Search, When I Grow Up I Want To Have A Brown Nose

  The 20th century Job Search died on January 31st, 1999. That night, Monster.com aired its first Super Bowl commercial. The ad, “When I Grow Up”, is one of the top ten Super Bowl commercials of all time. (You can see the ad, as it ran, in OK quality here; and a much higher quality version but with slightly different wording here.) And it wasn’t so much the quality of the ad, or that Monster was behind it, as the new forces whose arrival it heralded, that made that night the end of the 20th century model. Because what Monster’s commercial signaled was the emergence on the stage of national recruitment advertising powered by the Internet. By addressing a national television audience, Monster created a database larger than, and inclusive of, local markets. The economies of scale afforded through national customer acquisition and nationwide sales efforts to employers, meant that Monster [...]

  Jan 13

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• What a waste of time…

  *** from my Monday newsletter to TheLadders.com subscribers *** A few years ago, the Internet was useful. There wasn’t that much spam on it, so if you were looking for information on a topic, a person, or a job that was right for you, you could find it. In those days, there was a certain allure to applying to jobs on the Web – and HR people felt it, too. Back in 2001, when I was an SVP at HotJobs.com, employers thought that applicants from the Internet were a bit more savvy. In-touch. Attuned. Today, for better or for worse, the Internet is huge. Enormous. Gigantic. And it’s quite a hassle trying to track down the right information about a place, or your old college buddy … or especially a job that you just know you’re perfect for. And that’s messed up the job hunt. With jobs spammed all over [...]

  Jan 11

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• The fallacy of arguing from statistics

  In my decade in the human capital industry, fads roll in, come into widespread acceptance and fervent belief (without much sharp thinking going on) and eventually solidify into accepted wisdom — to our great detriment as a partner to our colleagues in the business. For the past decade, “the impending labor shortage as baby boomers retire” has remained, well… impending. This argument never made much sense in the first place, and I’ve tried to make the case that when proven wrong, these ahistorical assertions only serve to harm our credibility. Early in this past decade, Monster founder Jeff Taylor claimed that we will face a “generational labor shortage,” and Manpower CEO Jeffrey Joerres warned of the “rude awakening” coming for companies as baby boomers retired. Analysts followed with alarm about the coming labor shortage, and the importance of preparing for it. Yet here we are today with CNNMoney pronouncing that [...]

  Jan 7

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• Our White Collar Nation

  In a previous post, I’d mentioned that White Collar work had steadily grown throughout the 20th century, and thought I’d dig up the data. As a percentage of the workforce, White Collar occupations grew from 18% to 60% of employees over the course of the 20th century, as show in this graph: What does this mean? Farm productivity has exploded, increasing 1.9% per year over the last half of the century. At that rate, every 100 years, the same inputs on a farm produce 6.5 times as much foodstuffs. The percentage of the population engaged in farming dropped from 40% to under 2%, and yet we became a great exporting power in agricultural products. Similarly, manufacturing productivity rose 1.3%, on average, over the course of the second half of the 20th century. A brief list of 20th century mechanical engineering achievements is instructive. From better distribution (automotive), to better storage [...]

  Jan 5

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• History of Job Search, 20th Century

  Recruiting in the 20th Century worked well enough for its environment. Job-seekers replied to ads they saw in the local newspaper, which were placed by companies looking to hire, sometimes with the assistance of an RAA (Recruitment Advertising Agency). The hiring manager would receive a reasonable number of resumes that he could personally look through to select candidates for further review. And a specialized profession of executive search consultants was born and evolved into the modern search business. The most commonly identified deficiencies in the system were long cycle times, opacity of market information, the impossibility of conducting truly thorough, truly national searches, and the inordinate power of the most successful executive search firms. To understand what we’ve lost with the passing of the 20th century model, we’ll need to dig into the details of the system and the behaviors of the participants. From there, a comparison with the newly [...]

  Jan 4

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• The Hangover

  ***From my weekly newsletter to our 3.5 million subscribers…*** “The Hangover” is a movie about going to Vegas, having a better time than you remember, and waking up bleary-eyed with a headache to deal with the aftermath. Maybe we all feel that 2009 was a year that we had a worse time than we want to remember, and now we’re waking up bleary-eyed with a headache to deal with the aftermath. If you’ve been actively looking for a job these past few months, you might feel like you need to take two aspirin and just go back to bed. But that’s not what the doctor ordered. Herewith are my tips to get through the loooooooooooooong “morning after” feeling that comes with a job hunt during the Great Recession: Log in. I’ve mentioned on my Twitter account here that I’ve been spending time reviewing ‘microscopes’. These are detailed studies we do [...]

  Jan 4

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• History of Job Search

  HI, I’m Marc Cenedella, CEO & Founder of TheLadders.com – the largest site for professional jobs in the world. In my career at TheLadders these past seven years, and during my time at HotJobs before that, I’ve been fascinated with the evolution of employment, recruitment, and labor practices as the internet has created new possibilities — and new problems. As a result, I’ve embarked on writing “History of Job Search”, a comprehensive history and understanding of how we get jobs, how we attract and recruit employees, and how the industry that assists in both of those endeavors has grown and evolved. This series itself will probably be of most interest to people who work in the recruitment and human capital functions, the vendors serving those functions, and people with an academic or historical interest in the subject matter. I intend at a later date to create a summarized version that [...]

  Jan 1

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