Courtney Friel from FOX News

It’s pretty exciting to have FOX News live on site today. Here’s Courtney Friel from FOX broadcasting live from our sales floor…

Stay tuned….

October 30, 2009 | 

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Fox News — Fair, Balanced, and Live!

I’ll be appearing live on Fox News throughout the day — they are filming live and on location from our offices in SoHo….

UPDATE: Here’s the FOX News truck outside our building:

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New York Times Help Wanted Revenue Falling

Pulled the numbers on New York Times’ Help Wanted business — as expected, it’s a tough picture. By combining their annual report infographics with the 10-Ks, you can get a pretty precise picture of the carnage.

From a high of several hundred million at the start of this decade, they’ve seen Help Wanted revenue at their core NYT Media Group drop to $43 mm last year, and likely another 30 – 50% lower than that this year.

The shame is that they have a fantastic audience — including an enormous contingent of many highly intelligent, highly-paid professionals. We’ve worked with them on and off over six years to find a way to monetize that fantastic asset, but the way off-line media companies think and work makes it difficult for internet-native start-ups like us to send lots of dollars their way. (Contrast this with LinkedIn, who are very forward-thinking and know how to iterate campaigns with us and as a result bill us into the seven-figures per year.)

The only good news in all of this is that at the least NYT seems to be losing ground less rapidly than the newspaper industry as a whole. According to the Newspaper Association of America, the newspaper industry as a whole saw employment classified revenues drop 19.8% and 42.5% in 2007 and 2008 respectively. And this was followed by a brutal 67% drop in revenues year-over-year in each of the first two quarters of this year. (Yeah, a 67% drop, not a reduction to 67% of the prior year. Ouch.)

Could that actually mean that the New York Times Help-Wanted business has whittled away to just $20 mm per year?

Remarkable.

October 28, 2009 | 

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Beat the Interview Flu

I am going to start posting my regular weekly newsletter here as well — I write it for TheLadders.com subscribers and it is seen by 3.4 million people weekly….

The flu season is upon us; it seeks out many, it spares few. Beware! This malady tends to strike your co-workers on Thursday afternoons and Tuesday mornings, and can easily be mistaken for dentist appointments and sick days.

Yes, interview flu season is afoot in the land. It’s that stretch of the year from Labor Day to Tax Day when our thoughts turn to new opportunities, changing jobs, and rolling over 401(k)s …

OK, all joking aside, this is the time of year when many professionals increase their efforts in the job hunt. And that inevitably leads to conundrum: “How do I look for a job while I have a job?”

For most of us, our formative personal experiences with job-hunting come from a long time ago – applying to work as a waiter during college, interviewing for summer internships, hanging out at the University Career Office. And that leads us to make incorrect assumptions about what’s best for our job hunts today, as professionals.
Specifically, conventional wisdom about the professional job hunt is wrong:

“If my boss finds out, it’s catastrophic for me. Therefore, secrecy is of the utmost importance.”
That paranoia may have been appropriate when you were working summer jobs, or just part of a herd of first-year employees – easily canned, easily replaced – but the world is much different at $100K+.

“Got fired for looking” is extremely rare in professional positions. In fact, in six years here at TheLadders, and from the over 4 million subscribers we’ve had, I’ve heard of only one case – and when I spoke to the employee involved, the bad blood with the boss was already very bad by that time.

The far more likely response of your boss is Relief or Repair.

As a manager, you know how maddening it can be to handle troublesome employees. Just think how difficult it is for you to unload a lazy or ineffective headcount: filling out forms, endless rounds with HR, mandatory job counseling, etc. So finding out that your worker also knows it’s not working and is looking for work elsewhere leads to Relief: “Phew, I’m not going to have pay severance or go through the motions on these confrontational conversations about performance anymore.”

Or, in the much more likely case that this is bad news for your boss, comes the response of Repair: “Oh, my gosh! He’s thinking about leaving? I have to make budget this year and get all these projects done, I can’t afford to lose somebody right now. I’d better do something to get things back on the right track!”

And while the best way to approach your job hunt is to be discreet – there’s certainly no benefit to flaunting it – going to unreasonable lengths can actually be harmful.

Two instances in particular come to mind.

First, scheduling job interviews is a challenge. There are only so many breakfast meetings and after-work drinks you can make in the course of a month, so, yes, inevitably, you’ll need to take some meetings during the work day. Kept to a reasonable number, this is fine – don’t stress yourself out if you need to do it two or three times in the course of a month. (And for some great advice on managing the dress code between a typical work day and the more formal requirements of an interview, read our advice about “Interviewing on the Sly.”)

Secondly, the “confidential” resume can hinder you without helping you. Like most people, recruiters prefer dealing with a name, not a number. And by making your resume “confidential,” you attract less recruiter attention. So while we have this feature available and honor your desire for it, I would have to recommend against marking your name “confidential” in your job hunt.

Finally: Please, please, don’t use your company’s e-mail, printers, phones, or stationery. (On the other hand, there is the plain truth in the job hunt business … looking for work takes place during work hours. Here’s a graph of average web site traffic at TheLadders.com during the hours of the day:

It always peaks just before lunch!

OK, Readers, hope that’s been illuminating!

Good luck with the job hunt this week, and remember – your secret’s safe with me!

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Senate Passes Blame By Vote Of 91-8

Chuckle.

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People are our most important asset, Part II

If people are our most important asset, why is the recruiting process a complete failure? Dr. John Sullivan highlights Five Ugly Numbers You can’t Ignore:

• * 70% dissatisfied — 70% of the external customers (applicants) and 28% of the internal customers (hiring managers) indicate they are dissatisfied with the hiring process (Source: Staffing.org).
• * 50% customer regret — 50% of the processes users (both managers and new hires) later regret their “buying” decision (Source: The Recruiting Roundtable).
• * 50% of current employees are actively seeking or are planning to seek a new job (Source: Deloitte).
• * 46% failure rate — 46% of U.S. new hires must be classified as failures within their first 18 months (fired, pressured to quit, required disciplinary action, etc.) (Source: Leadership IQ).
• * Only a 19% success rate — only one out of five of the process output can be classified as unequivocal successes (Source: Leadership IQ).

If the way you manage your most important asset is really so very badly broken, how in Hades are you going to make your company thrive? How does it escape your notice? Why isn’t it a fire alarm bell that you and your senior management are ringing, ringing, ringing, to bring it to the attention of everybody in your company?
Fodder for future posts: why are CEOs afraid to tackle recruiting and fix it? Why have we become so complacent, so inured to the pain, that we tolerate it like pleasantly boiling little frogs? How does this escape the notice of so many Boards? How is recruiting and retention never a cover story in the business magazines?
How – why – wherefore…. we’ve got a lot to talk about!

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Other thoughts from Caterina @Clickable

Some other thoughts I blackberried during tonight’s chat:

Caterina mentioned her well-travelled post “Working Hard is Overrated” which draws a line between panic and productivity thusly:

We agreed that a lot of what we then considered “working hard” was actually “freaking out”. Freaking out included panicking, working on things just to be working on something, not knowing what we were doing, fearing failure, worrying about things we needn’t have worried about, thinking about fund raising rather than product building, building too many features, getting distracted by competitors, being at the office since just being there seemed productive even if it wasn’t — and other time-consuming activities.

Looking back on the early days of TheLadders, this strikes me as pretty accurate. There’s also a lot of time earnestly spent in inefficiency (a good subject for a later post). And when it comes to procrastination, you should not, can not, must not forget

Snowfight.

Other gems / germs of ideas:

• The web is about synthesizing human-added information. Google is the most amazing company for figuring out that the human-added information implicit in the links to sites contained the highest differentiated value information on the internet.
• In reference to the Myers-Briggs test: You need ‘Ps’ and ‘Js’ to be successful at a start-up. Flickr was full of Ps and I was the compensatory ‘J’. And you don’t want to be the compensatory ‘J’.

And by the way, David Kidder and the whole Clickable team are great hosts. David does an excellent channeling of James Lipton!

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Best Thought from Clickable with Caterina Fake

So I went to a great talk tonight by Caterina Fake (she is my cousin’s cousin — no, not my second cousin, but my cousin’s cousin) at Clickable‘s Interesting Cafe.

Trina’s the co-founder of Flickr and Hunch, a service I love deeply and one I am getting to know.

The best insight was a comment once made to Caterina about her company:

Flickr is a wonderful place to be a photograph.

Hearing that, I felt that twinge of recognition you feel when the picture flips for you and see the lamp and the faces on either side of the lamp for the first time.

Sure, we should make websites that are fantastically useful for the users, but a well-designed, well-constructed website should also make it a great place to “be” the asset it is designed to manipulate, sort, search, store, analyze or probe on behalf of the humans.

For TheLadders that would mean making our site a wonderful place to be $100K+ job. I don’t think we’ve ever quite thought of it in that way before. But now we will.

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Zynga: org structure follows business needs

In an overall good article on the App economy, I particularly enjoyed this insight into Zynga’s work:

With employees grouped into a series of discrete loft offices, Zynga’s operation looks more like 11 small startups glued together than one large one. It’s a reflection of how the company is run: Studio heads set goals and are given freedom to achieve them any way they can. Those who succeed are rewarded with cash and stock bonuses and are granted extra resources such as new hires. When a new game called Café World recently set a company record for growth, signing up 16 million users in its first two weeks, its head, Roy Sehgal, was rewarded with a bevy of new employees and the leather couch he had been requesting for his office for weeks.

It is very interesting that Pincus, a CEO with no previous experience in the gaming industry, would adapt and structure his company to capture the hit-driven, autonomous nature of gaming’s coders. The correlation between the success of Farmville and CafeWorld and MafiaWars is low, being much more dependent on characteristics of the gameplay itself than on any corporate directive. Thus firm-wide policies and procedures allow significant variation, and the winners are rewarded. Very clever indeed.

Pincus calls this style of management “true meritocracy” and says it’s modeled partly after the approach at Amazon. It applies to regular staffers as much as managers. In his first three months in the poker group, Harsimran “Sim” Singh moved up the company ladder three times for helping to bring growth back into the company’s longest-running game, Texas Hold’em. A year after landing at Zynga with no direct reports, the 25-year-old runs the entire poker unit, a team of 45.

A start-up company must be purely meritocratic. At TheLadders, we’ve had amazing ideas (and crummy ones) come from all levels of the company — as a matter of fact, most of our revenue-generating divisions were the ideas of people who weren’t me or who weren’t reporting to me. And I think the recruits who have had the most difficult time adjusting to work at TheLadders, and who have eventually failed, were professionals who were more accustomed to the deference due their years of experience, or loftier title, or age. And when the data turned against them, they were too inflexible, and too lacking in their bag of tricks, to find a pathway to success.

October 26, 2009 | 

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Passive Candidates on a Job Board

John Zappe reports that Dice is doing something interesting: configuring access to its database to allow access to “passive” candidates. Dice now shows a tab on its search results page with candidates who match the search but haven’t been back in more than a year.

It’s actually quite a clever approach: Give recruiters exactly what they want, but tease them with easy access to vintage candidates they wouldn’t otherwise see. A value-add that may raise the value of aging inventory, and benefit once-active candidates.

I agree that it’s an interesting take on the passive candidate model. And I suppose it begs the question of what we mean by a passive candidate anyway: somebody who’s been in a job a year? A month? A week?

And a passive candidate has two characteristics relative to sourcing: his or her information, and then, importantly, his or her receptivity to contact.

How will that receptivity vary depending on the source? Is somebody more or less likely to respond to a recruiter’s email if it comes in entirely cold, if it comes in via DICE, or it comes in via LinkedIn?

I’ve been thinking for a bit as to how we as an industry might measure the “passive-ness” of candidates, and the usefulness of various passive databases. At one end of the spectrum, aggressively and permanently passive candidate (example? the announcer for the New York Yankees.) brings zero value to a database, while perhaps the aggressive and opportunistic job-hopper at the other end of the spectrum likewise brings zero value.

Given that, how do we measure those valuable middle-of-the-pack passive candidates, and the quality of the databases wherein they appear? Good food for thought.

(By the way, I loved how Zappe refers to these being “vintage” candidates — if the automobile industry terminology prevails, before long, we’ll see “previously employed” candidates on offer from one of the big job boards!)

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