Recruiting & Job Search, New York City Start-up blog by Marc Cenedella

Speaking in your town soon

My passion in life is jobs.

I find them fascinating: it's the intersection of human emotion, desire and dreams, and the more mathematical world of economics, markets, supply and demand. The field requires empathy, tough love, and a knowledge of human psychology while also profitably employing left-brain skills like econometrics, data analysis, and statistical studies of human behavior. I stumbled into jobs a decade ago and embraced what I found there: a calling that is rewarding, meaningful, and damn hard. Which makes it fun, worthwhile, and a job where I find myself wishing for more hours in the day. It scratches everything that itches on me.

And so I've been getting more and more requests to speak on the topic of "jobs" these days. It's not that I've solved the problem by any stretch of the imagination — we still have a lot of work to do here at TheLadders — but that the job search is so ridiculously opaque and frustrating and confusing that professionals like you have an enormous appetite for understanding it better.

"Speaking at the Kellogg Career Symposium"

Photo: Luis Vallecillo.

So this weekend found me hopping on a plane down to Dallas (and avoiding Snowmageddon here on the East Coast!) at the invitation of your fellow TheLadders subscriber, Nelson Hsu, to speak at the Kellogg Career Symposium at SMU. Nelson and his wife Kim were gracious hosts, and I relished the chance to speak to the 160 attendees at the Saturday sessions.

I prefer to build presentations around images -- a picture really is worth a thousand words. Especially on a Saturday morning, people don't want to be squinting to try and read your bullet point #7. So my standard presentation now is 152 slides, and other than title pages, a quote from a famous economist, and a final slide with my ten best tips for the professional job hunt... all images, no words.

"Saturday morning and the coffee's run out. I hope they had enough caffeine already!"

Photo: Luis Vallecillo.

For this crowd of career-minded professionals, I addressed:

The origins of jobs (when you think about, people didn't really send in their resume to become a peasant);
Freelancers (derived from mercenary horseback soldiers that carried lances, hence "free agent lancers");
How the newspapers dominated recruiting for 150 years, and
How Monster.com's 1999 Superbowl commercial marked the beginning of the end for the Help-Wanted section in the newspaper. (When was the last time you applied to a help-wanted ad in the paper?)
What the death of corporate loyalty means for you in planning your own career path;
The approach you should take when selling the next five years of your work (for the typical TheLadders subscriber, this represents almost $1 mm in earnings);
And how the Internet has made job information widely available, but, counter-intuitively, the job hunt itself much more difficult.

Whew! Seems like a lot to get through, but you actually already know more of this than you realize, and in the hour of presentation and Q&A, we had a lot of laughs and hopefully we all learned something.

"With my host, your fellow TheLadders.com subscriber Nelson Hsu"

Photo: Luis Vallecillo.

So if you have a club, an MBA alumni association, a trade group, or professional association that you'd like me to speak to, please remember that we prioritize requests from you, our TheLadders.com subscribers, first. Whether it's a couple hundred or a couple thousand, I'd love to meet you in person. Please send details along to:

SpeakerRequest at TheLadders.com

And I'll look forward to seeing you in your town soon!

Posted by marc: Speaking in your town soon | Comments ()

Monster's Super Bowl Ad features violinist, but there are no violinist jobs on Monster

As regular readers of Stone know, I am a huge fan of Monster's historic role in advertising the internet as a comprehensive resource for the job search. In particular, their 1999 Ad "When I Grow Up" is easily one of the Top Five Super Bowl commercials of all time, and they have done other ground-breaking work.

That's why I'm baffled at this year's entry. Their Super Bowl ad this year features a fiddling beaver that searches on Monster.com for 'violinist'. The beaver ends up getting the job, the girl, and the fancy limo ride through New York City.

There's just one problem.

There are no violinist jobs on Monster:

And it's not just that there are no violinist jobs on Monster today, but there are likely very few violinist jobs ever posted on Monster or elsewhere. Certain professions -- the performing arts, law firm attorneys (as opposed to corporate counsel), hospital physicians, etc. -- have not adopted the internet as a means for finding their next position. This is largely due to historical reasons, the nature of the work involved, and the way in which post-graduate-school recruiting works. Even Indeed.com, the 'Google of job search engines', only shows openings for violin teachers, and none for professional violinists.

Now I'm all for metaphor in commercial advertising -- heck, TheLadders' most famous ad shows the pandemonium that occurs on a tennis court to illustrate the point that "When you let everyone play, nobody wins" -- but it does seem to me that the particular use of your product that you actually highlight in your television advertisement ought to be germane to the way your service in fact works, even if you are illustrating the case by using a primarily nocturnal, large, semi-aquatic rodent of the genus Castor.

There are tens of thousands of jobs on Monster, and there's nothing for them to be ashamed of. So couldn't they have featured a position that is more typical of the types of roles one will actually find on their service?

UPDATE: Going through all the Super Bowl commercials now, and the other company that showed it's internet product in actual use was Google. And I think they did a brilliant job in demonstrating what you can actually use Google for, while telling a real sweetheart story in the process.

Perhaps no single human being has ever used Google to study in Paris, meet a girl, find a job and get married there, but each of the demonstrated searches tell us a little bit more about what Google can (magically) do:

- Auto-complete your searches
- Correct you when you misspell "Louvre"
- Display locations of your search results on a map
- Translate sentences from a foreign language
- Teach you the difference between truffles and Truffaut
- Tell you the status of your flight
- Find a job abroad

There's a certain poignancy to the ad that I really admired. Google is, in some ways, our confessor: we type our hopes, dreams, fears, ambitions, and desires into the search box and are presented with the answers. Who hasn't admitted something to Google in the privacy of their own laptop that they're hesitant to share with even the closest of friends?

So while the USAToday AdMeter panel differs with me dramatically, I thought the Google ad was one of the best in the game: it told a very human story (with a happy ending) and showed many of the amazing ways you can use their site.

Posted by marc: Monster's Super Bowl Ad features violinist, but there are no violinist jobs on Monster | Comments ()

Monster Acquires HotJobs.com

This news story:

In a separate news release, Monster Worldwide announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement with Yahoo! under which the Company will acquire the assets of Yahoo! HotJobs, a leading online recruitment website. Additionally, Monster and Yahoo! have entered into a multi-year commercial traffic agreement, effective upon the closing of the acquisition, in which Monster will become Yahoo!'s provider of career and job content on the Yahoo! homepage in the United States and Canada. The transaction combines Monster's online career expertise and history of innovation with Yahoo!'s vast network of traffic and provides significant benefits to millions of job seekers and customers globally.

Felt like deja vu all over again to me:

TMP Worldwide Inc. (NASDAQ: TMPW), the world's leading supplier of human capital solutions, including the pre-eminent Internet career portal Monster.com(R), announced today that it has entered into an agreement to acquire HotJobs.com, Ltd. (NASDAQ: HOTJ), a leading recruitment company whose services include the HotJobs.com consumer job board. TMP intends to maintain HotJobs.com as a stand-alone site and brand. Monster and HotJobs will be a formidable combination in the online recruitment industry, with a total of more than 14 million resumes and more than 650,000 jobs.

It's an interesting story and probably worth a post. I think I'm the only person on either deal team still working in the industry. Fascinating.

Posted by marc: Monster Acquires HotJobs.com | Comments ()

Our 49 best articles on Job Search

*** From my weekly newsletter at TheLadders.com ***

Thanks so much to everybody who enjoyed my Beatles-themed newsletter last week! I read all your emails, and the memories, trivia and thoughtful comments on the Fab Four were really just a joy to receive in my inbox...

Now, let's face the facts. The modern job hunt doesn't make a lot of sense.

If you're a waiter or bartender, you can find a new job on Craigslist this weekend. But if you're a professional, the rule of thumb is six to eight months. In other words, the more experienced, talented and educated you are, the longer the job hunt has you sitting on the sidelines, biding your time.

I don't know who designed the system that way, but there it is.

Luckily, our Editor-in-Chief, Matthew Rothenberg, has been busy over the past year or two putting together knowledgeable advice packages with excellent advice on finding your next great job. I've included links to all 49 of them below.

You'll find great insights on age discrimination, handling the Web and social networks, what happens to your resume when you click "send", negotiating your offer, handling a declining industry and much, much more.

So, while I don't expect you to read all 49 of them (that would be more than 300 pages!), let me make a recommendation:

Pick the five that are most relevant to you, print them out, and read just one each day this week. You can do it on the treadmill, the train or as you're flying around this big old country of ours. It won't take much time, but it's a great way to get smarter about your job hunt...

Our 49 best advice packages (click on the link to download)

OK, Readers, hope these are helpful!

Have a great week on the hunt...

Posted by marc: Our 49 best articles on Job Search | Comments ()

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 and operation of the said instruments are nothing different from those in common use: I shall endeavor, without prejudice to any one else, to explain myself to your Excellency, showing your Lordship my secret, and then offering them to your best pleasure and approbation to work with effect at opportune moments on all those things which, in part, shall be briefly noted below.
1. I have a sort of extremely light and strong bridges, adapted to be most easily carried, and with them you may pursue, and at any time flee from the enemy; and others, secure and indestructible by fire and battle, easy and convenient to lift and place. Also methods of burning and destroying those of the enemy.

2. I know how, when a place is besieged, to take the water out of the trenches, and make endless variety of bridges, and covered ways and ladders, and other machines pertaining to such expeditions.

3. If, by reason of the height of the banks, or the strength of the place and its position, it is impossible, when besieging a place, to avail oneself of the plan of bombardment, I have methods for destroying every rock or other fortress, even if it were founded on a rock, etc.

4. Again, I have kinds of mortars; most convenient and easy to carry; and with these I can fling small stones almost resembling a storm; and with the smoke of these cause great terror to the enemy, to his great detriment and confusion.

5. And if the fight should be at sea I have kinds of many machines most efficient for offense and defense; and vessels which will resist the attack of the largest guns and powder and fumes.

6. I have means by secret and tortuous mines and ways, made without noise, to reach a designated spot, even if it were needed to pass under a trench or a river.

7. I will make covered chariots, safe and unattackable, which, entering among the enemy with their artillery, there is no body of men so great but they would break them. And behind these, infantry could follow quite unhurt and without any hindrance.

8. In case of need I will make big guns, mortars, and light ordnance of fine and useful forms, out of the common type.

9. Where the operation of bombardment might fail, I would contrive catapults, mangonels, trabocchi, and other machines of marvellous efficacy and not in common use. And in short, according to the variety of cases, I can contrive various and endless means of offense and defense.

10. In times of peace I believe I can give perfect satisfaction and to the equal of any other in architecture and the composition of buildings public and private; and in guiding water from one place to another.

11. I can carry out sculpture in marble, bronze, or clay, and also I can do in painting whatever may be done, as well as any other, be he who he may.

Again, the bronze horse may be taken in hand, which is to be to the immortal glory and eternal honor of the prince your father of happy memory, and of the illustrious house of Sforza.

And if any of the above-named things seem to anyone to be impossible or not feasible, I am most ready to make the experiment in your park, or in whatever place may please your Excellency - to whom I comment myself with the utmost humility, etc."

What a fantastic piece of personal marketing! There's none of his famous backwards-mirror writing here -- this letter was intended to be read and to persuade.

I'm a hopeless pedantic, so of course I'm going to take this opportunity to let you know what you can learn from Leonardo's resume...

You'll notice he doesn't recite past achievements. He doesn't mention the painting of the altarpiece for the Chapel of St Bernard; he doesn't provide a laundry list of past bombs he's built; he doesn't cite his prior employment in artist Andrea di Cione's studio.

No, he does none of these things, because those are about his achievements, and not about the Duke's needs.

Instead, he sells his prospective employer on what he can do for him.

Now imagine being the Duke of Milan and receiving this magnificent letter / resume from the young wunderkind of Florence. The specific descriptives paint a wonderful picture (that is, if you're a Renaissance Duke) of siege engines and bombardments and mortars and trench-draining and bridges to defeat the enemy. You can almost imagine the scenes that ran through the Duke's head as he held this letter in his hands and read through Leonardo da Vinci's bold statements of capabilities.

I mean, at that time, who wouldn't want "kinds of mortars; most convenient and easy to carry; [that] can fling small stones almost resembling a storm"? Sounds pretty enticing.

And that's exactly what your resume needs to do, too. Not the laundry list / standard bio that talks about you, but the marketing piece that talks about the benefits to your future employer and how you fit into his or her needs and desires.

So it turns out that even 500 years later, this remarkable fellow, Leonardo da Vinci, can even teach us something about the modern job hunt...

What a genius...

UPDATE: Too funny, this has been trans-mutated into a developer's resume over at YCombinator: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1086527. I wonder if it would work equally well for other professions?

Posted by marc: Leonardo da Vinci's Resume | Comments ()

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 through the rest of the year. Featuring now-classic songs such as "Get Back" and "Don't Let Me Down", the videos are a wonderful look at the last live performance of the 20th century's greatest music phenomenon.

And I think the experience is instructive.

Like the Beatles did, when your job hunt is stuck in recrimination, emotional turmoil, and stale, unproductive patterns, change your environment. Get out of your den, go for a run, shake your head in the breeze, grow a groovy beard like Paul, and change your routine. It will give you a fresh perspective and a new outlook on things.

Oh, and be sure to be as polite as the always-sly John Lennon when he addressed the audience at the end, saying, "I'd like to say 'Thank you' on behalf of the group and ourselves, and I hope we passed the audition."

Dig a pony, this week, Readers!

Posted by marc: Get back! | Comments ()

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 for (though not accountability for) their own career paths, and have become increasingly mobile.

These shifts have contributed to a wholesale change in behaviors of participants and characteristics of the system. Over the past fifteen years, the utilization of the internet in a job hunt has grown from less than 1% of the population to substantially every job-seeker. And to this new experience, job-seekers have brought their old preferences. The institutions responsible for transmitting and processing this behavior, however, have changed much more slowly. Institutional response, in the face of changing behavior of individuals, always lags. It takes companies, recruiters, and vendors far longer to innovate new systems, processes, and models to handle the behavior of individuals exploiting new innovations, than it does for those individuals to engage in the new behavior itself.

More broadly, individuals follow the innovation adoption curve, proceeding from innovators to early adopters, to early majority, then late majority and laggards. It is a gradual, piecemeal, disaggregated process because of each of the individual job-seekers is an atomized agent. In the case of job search, these innovating behaviors break the institutional processes: for newspapers first, then corporate HR departments, then recruiters, and then finally for the initial innovators themselves (e.g., The New York Times, Fortune 1000 HR, executive search firms, and then finally, Monster.com itself.) Thus each component of the institutional structure has broken slowly, gradually, over time. It takes year for a sufficient number of trial-and-error experiments by various players to be successful enough to produce a new model. My initial impression is that in the case of job search, this will take place over the next decade.

These drastic shifts in behavior, and the corresponding institutional failures to adapt, have led to shifts in the underlying performance and characteristics of the system, that, very roughly rounded to an approximation, differ from the 20th century model by an order or two of magnitude. Response rates, response levels, size of audience, etc., have all moved ten to a hundred times away from the levels prevalent in the 20th century model.

These shifts have contributed to widespread confusion among job-seekers and recruiters, while leading to the not-inaccurate perception that the luck of the draw is as important as diligence and merit in the job search.

To wit, the Job Search has changed quantitatively:

The cost of information transmission has dropped to zero. The time, care, and cost of applying to jobs in the 20th century model have disappeared. Candidates no longer have to print cover letters and resumes, match them up with the right envelopes, and put a stamp on the envelope. Internet job boards have reduced the friction in the application process to a few clicks at most. On the employers' side, recruitment ads are 1/10th their previous cost while reaching a national (indeed, a global) audience.

The number of jobs a professional will have in a lifetime has increased by a factor of 10. The rise of career self-development has increased the attraction of, and likelihood to, change companies multiple times in a career. Average job tenure, then, is 1/10th of what it was. This has led to an increase in the number of hiring transactions that companies will process in a typical year, and a concomitant increase in the number of job searches that a professional will undergo in their lifetime.

The size of the addressable audience has grown 100x. In 2000, only four newspapers had daily circulation of greater than 1 mm readers. With the internet, the new job boards could reach the entire US market of 150mm workers, and Monster's unaided awareness among Americans reached 93%. Interestingly, anecdotal evidence suggests that mid-decade, clients were reducing their general interest job board vendors from 3 to 2 (typically keeping Monster and choosing between CareerBuilder and HotJobs from what I heard at the time). And towards the end of the decade, clients were increasingly choosing to go "either/or" with Monster or CareerBuilder as audience overlap and similar demographics made it inefficient to retain both.

Applications for a job are 10~100x more numerous than they were in the 20th century. With broader reach, frictionless applications, and the perception of an asymmetric lottery payout ("sure, I've never been a COO before, but if they choose me, it will be a big step up from marketing manager!") on the part of job-seekers, the actual volume of applications to a particular job has exploded to a level beyond which the institutions receiving them can handle or process. For a "live" look into the problem as it is perceived in the wild, review the results of this Google search on "Monster.com 'flood of resumes'" for an illustration of the challenges with the present experience.

The number of vendors shrank by 1/100th. In the past, when needing a national campaign to hire customer service representatives or local sales people, hiring companies would turn to RAAs to manage the hundreds of metro dailies and place the ads. The decline of the newspapers and their replacement as primary source of employees by the general interest job boards has reduced the vendor count by a factor of 100. Interestingly, I'd expect that in 2020, we'll see this ratio either remain at 1/100, or return to 1x the 2000 level. Either a pair of competitors will innovate in such a way that they effectively handle all levels, functions, and industries, or the general interest job boards will be supplemented by the rise of specialist niche job boards that cover industries, functions and geographies at scale.

Qualitatively, the system has evolved as well:

With a larger labor pool, and more labor mobility, there is greater specialization. A professional might define herself as a marketing specialist in the telecom industry, and place less importance on geography or company continuity. By contrast, the 20th century professional would define himself by company first, then industry or function, and transfers to distant cities or overseas came at the behest of the employer.

Greater specialization implies greater differentiation, which means that both sides in the Job Search will experience higher sales and marketing costs (more formally, greater search, information and matching costs). In any market, when products become less commoditized and more specialized, there's a greater need to explain the benefits and capabilities of that product. For a professional today, merely saying you are a direct marketer is not sufficient; you'll need to explain whether your experience is in direct mail, internet advertising, direct response TV, etc., and whether you've serviced the CPG industry, collectibles, magazines, or the luxury time-share market. The increase in the number of white-collar workers, the faster ramp-up times of specialized professionals, and the superior industry-specific contribution they can therefore make, drive this preference (for both parties). The advent of such specialized knowledge, and the needs of explaining with specificity, require greater skill on both sides of the job search.

Yet the job posting has not evolved beyond an administrative list of desirable skills and characteristics, and job-seekers systemically underestimate the importance of their resume as a marketing document, instead preferring to view it as an appropriate venue for auto-biography. In fact, I think this is another area where we will see substantial change over the next decade -- the need is there and analogous trends in marketing and advertising indicate it.

With that description of the present state of affairs, let's look next at how these systemic failures in institutional response to job-seeker behavior impact each participant in the Job Search.

Posted by marc: History of Job Search, The 20th Century Model Breaks | Comments ()

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 would be able to produce a comprehensive database of jobs and job-seekers, at a lower unit cost, than any local effort could possibly hope to achieve, and, specifically because it addressed employer's now-extensive cross-country needs for employees, provided a superior, total solution to them.

Because the internet made the costs of communication zero and eliminated the frictions previously experienced, the new job boards would henceforth draw on revenues from clients across the nation, not just a single metro area. A single brand could reach job-seekers across the country, aggregate them, and then allow access to employers for all of their local recruiting needs.

The transformation of recruitment advertising that began that night would be played out over the coming decades, but with that humorous, timeless, Super Bowl spot, the newspapers were doomed.

(As an aside, HotJobs, my future employer at that time, also appeared in the 1999 Super Bowl. The original HotJobs ad, rejected by FOX Network (of all people!), showed a janitor and an elephant walking around in a cage at the zoo, oblivious to each other, while the announcer spoke about the importance of job satisifcation. Towards the end, the elephant sits down. When he gets up, the janitor has disappeared from view and the announcer asks, archly: "Stuck in your old job?" Really poor taste, but emblematic of the era.)

Disruptive technology represents a once-in-a-century opportunity for recruiting
Technological change can lead to disruptive innovation. By changing the cost, complexity, size, or availability of a product, certain technological changes lead to new businesses exploiting the technology at the cost of the older, established firms. For the best treatment of disruptive innovation, I'd recommend the work of my HBS professor Clayton Christensen, The Innovator's Dilemma, or this brief summary of disruptive technology from Wikipedia. It's interesting to note how often the new technology tries to emulate the form factor or marketing of the product it is replacing, even to the extent of advertising its primary feature in terms of what it is not: horseless carriage, wireless telegraph, or paperless magazines.

But when disruptive technology has changed the possibilities available to the businesses deploying it -- costs, efficiencies, performance, scale, and even competition, customers, and suppliers -- the new form of the product and the industry frequently look very different from the industry it is supplanting.

"When I Grow Up" signaled just such a change in how jobs would be found and employees hired. It inaugurated a period of dramatic change that saw the newspapers supplanted within a decade by the nascent online recruitment industry; the requirements for the recruiting function drastically altered from a tactical to a strategic role; and the job-seeker forced into a new world without any sense of the tools required. The job search had always been an emotionally draining experience, but with the rise of the Internet it became become an ongoing disappointment of alienating auto-replies, the "black hole" fate for job applications, and information seemingly everywhere with success evident nowhere.

The rise of the 21st century model is thus the story of businesses, human capital vendors, and job-seeking professionals feelling their way through the fog of confusion towards a new solution, with our journey to a more effective system only just beginning. The internet revolution dropped the price of disseminating information to zero, but this seeming benefit has in effect collapsed civil communications for both sides, as the 20th century model's rigidity, screening, implied behaviors, politeness and sensibility, evaporated and have as yet to be replaced by a well-understood pattern of behavior or a well-functioning system.

In the coming years, we, as an industry, will define what the new Job Search means for our customers. We have a chance to put the recruitment function in its proper place as a strategic asset to bsuiness in the 21st century. If we push to make our function accountable; if we do the hard work to provide the business KPIs, data, and metrics that make sense to our colleagues; if we innovate so that Talent Acquisition becomes more than just a reactive, tactical process in the planning of our companies' future success; if we take up the challenge and deliver; then we will have earned our seat at the table.

Or, failing that, we can allow recruiting to slip into old, bad habits. Job information will fragment among thousands of vendors, not because of any inherent utility from multi-vendor management, but because that will be the only way to re-create the screening implicit in the 20th century model. Candidate sourcing will remain a happenstance, unprepared reaction to a job order, rather than the forward-looking opportunity it could be. And the recruiting function will be relegated to the backseat, known for its fulfillment of orders from the smart kids in the front of the house, but otherwise banished from adult conservations.

The choice is ours.

The future is here, we are it, it is ours to own.

Posted by marc: History of Job Search, When I Grow Up I Want To Have A Brown Nose | Comments ()

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 the Internet, there's no allure for job-seekers or employers: there's too much noise, too many false leads, and too much garbage out there.

And that's why we created TheLadders seven years ago: We wanted to make a place on the Internet that was safe for high-end job-seekers and appealing for the people who hire them. It's why we only let in high-end professionals making over $100,000 per year, and it's also why we reject jobs that pay less than $100,000.

We literally block job listings and return the money to companies that attempt to post jobs that pay $99,999 or less per year. That's because TheLadders.com is only for $100K+ professionals, and we'll do the surfing, sorting, and selecting for you.

The vast Internet can be a big waste of time for you. We want to make the precious few hours a week that you have for job-hunting as productive, easy, and fast for you as we possibly can. We'll delete the spam, block the bad recruiters, and only show you true, $100K+ jobs.

Your friends at TheLadders are here, working on your behalf, and rooting for you all the way.

Posted by marc: What a waste of time... | Comments ()

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 the 7 million jobs lost in the Great Recession might be "gone forever."

How does that happen? How do the top talking heads in our business miss, not by a little, but by an awful lot, the critical implication of the demographic shift on our business?

Well, you can't predict the future with statistics from the past, and pundits shouldn't project trends forward based on statistics alone. Why?

Statistics are static. You have to consider how a statistic comes into existence in the first place. When it comes to data, there are many, many ways to measure something wrong, and far fewer ways to measure it right. The process of throwing out all the bad ones means that the remaining statistic is very, very specifically designed to measure one thing.

Statistics are backwards looking. And what that statistic measures happened in the past. Which therefore means the dataset it is based upon exists in the past, and the optimization you did to get just the right statistic is predicated on how data behaved... in the past.

Statistics don't evolve, behavior does. Which is a problem, because as behavior changes, the statistic fails to take into account those changes in behavior. And even modifications and updates of data gathering and statistic generation methods typically start from the point of view that the statistic "needs updating" rather than the more appropriate viewpoint of "throw out everything and let's understand our world anew given its new behaviors."

Forecasters predict the past. Forecasting is a profession in which very capable, persuasive-sounding people earn their daily living by explaining how the world will continue on quite a bit like it did before. Trends are extrapolated, numbers continue to increase or decrease, but the unexpected evolutions in behavior and changes in direction are rarely accurately predicted.

So what happened with this predicted shortage of Baby Boomers leading to a labor crunch? Businesses moved processes offshore, existing workers became more productive, and systems optimized around the cost-trade-offs of the labor pool as it was. Too many workers? Salaries fall, or don't rise, until the market clears. Too few workers? More investment in capital equipment and work done overseas. It was simply daft for our industry to predict that businesses would allow the deficiency of a primary input to disrupt the business.

As an industry, we in Human Capital must get better at projecting the impact of the future on our businesses. As an example of our fecklessness in advising the business on how trends in employee availability will impact our companies' prospects, the mis-prediction of the Great Boomer Shortage is a black mark.

Posted by marc: The fallacy of arguing from statistics | Comments ()

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 (air conditioning), to better production (glass, paper, metal), to better power generation (energy), the list of advances in making "stuff" has meant that we produce more and better stuff each year, with fewer costs and materials per unit.

Consider your TV, car, refrigerator, stove, and calculator in the 1970s compared to what you have today. They are better, faster, safer, and more effective.

The end result of our being able to make things more readily is that we've found we need fewer and fewer people to actually make stuff.

This is the process of commoditization, and it is a good thing for our economy.

If you think about it, all human endeavors become commoditized. Newton and Liebniz, in the 17th century, were the only guys in the entire world who were smart enough to figure out the calculus. Today, it's something bright high schoolers master before going to college.

If you had told J.P. Morgan, at the turn of the last century, that someday his specialized field -- that of pricing risk on debt to corporations -- would be profitably pursued by over 100,000 professionals in the United States, we can forgive his lack of foresight for scoffing at you.

Indeed, in every field we see the body of knowledge progress from discovery, to experimentation, to mastery, to routinization.

And because we've commoditized the skills behind production, it is easy for labor in foreign lands to master it, and earn the lower wages that come with routine skills.

What does that leave for us? Will we end up a nation bereft of earnings power, the equivalent of a couch potato uncle, past his prime? No.

In the United States, the increase in white collar labor means that we are becoming a nation of thinkers -- web designers, engineers, marketers, IP lawyers, deal guys, inventors, dreamers, and mavericks.

So while that iPod "counts" as $150 on China's export ledger, in reality, the majority of the profitability of the iPod goes to Apple, and to the national distribution channels through which it is shipped.

Really, it should be no surprise that final assembly is the least valuable, and the design genius of Apple the most valuable, work that go into an iPod, iPhone, or (coming soon!) iTablet. It's been that way all along.

What the 20th century statistics don't capture about the departure of our manufacturing base is it's always been that way.

The implementation of all of those fantastic mechanical engineering feats above, and the rise in productivity thereby produced, always meant that some marginal labor was being replaced by automated processes. But because it all previously occurred within the confines of a firm, it was difficult to piece out that value created at a GE was increasingly coming from the Masters of Crotonville and less and less from the factory floor.

Today, with the ability to componentize a company, and separate its marketing from its production from its distribution, it's more obvious when the jobs have shipped to another state, or another country. But the history of work in America is an inexorable, inevitable shift to the work of the mind.

And I, for one, think that's a good thing. Because the more people we have engaged in medical research, or designing great electronics, or simply making trenchant observations on our internet economy, the better for us.

We are a White Collar nation, and our future is very bright.

Posted by marc: Our White Collar Nation | Comments ()

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 emerging 21st century model will highlight elements that are working well, and which have become irretrievably broken. With that introduction, let's define the components of the 20th century model at some length.

Job-seekers applied for a small number of jobs, for which they were reasonably qualified, because of the time, costs and aggravation involved.

Job-seekers in the 20th century faced job searches armed with precious little information and had to bear actual costs, in both time and money, in the application process. Because of this, job-seekers were geographically chaste, applying for jobs in their present location or in cities to which they were seriously considering moving. As the most common ways to learn about job openings was through word-of-mouth or the local newspaper, the amount of time and effort required to send applications far and wide was prohibitive. Consequently, an open position for a marketing manager in Cincinnati wouldn't receive applications and resumes from a candidate in San Diego (the exception being the case of a job-seeker looking to move there for family, work, or industry reasons.)

Job-seekers had to type or print cover letters for each position, address envelopes, fold them precisely into thirds, and make sure that the right cover letter got into the right envelope (a distraction of some great consequence for OCD people! "Shoot, did I put the Morgan Stanley letter into the Goldman envelope? Let me check again...") and then lick a stamp in order to apply for jobs. In modern parlance, we'd call this friction in the system. And this friction served as an inherent limit on the number of applications each candidate would be willing to complete.

Job-seekers were slightly less mobile in the 20th century due to costs of travel and relocation, and prevailing cultural norms that celebrated longevity of employment. Lifetime employment was the aspiration of the best and most qualified candidates. "Work at a place long enough to get your gold watch," was the advice given to youngsters by parents and wise uncles. This further limited applications for open positions.

Recruitment advertising targeted the local market, was sold at expensive rates, and allowed for abbreviated announcements of position openings, but not for a broader brand message.

In the 20th century model, recruitment advertising took place in the newspapers, which were local information monopolies. Even though most markets had two or more newspapers, the duopoly or oligopoly would tend to segment the audience into niches so that each paper might target a particular political, demographic, or income level. Radio and TV were never effective means of advertising open job positions as the much smaller amount of advertising space available meant substantially higher prices. Trade magazines and academic journals were effective means of recruitment advertising but at much too small a scale to be considered a dominant force.

Local papers were geographically circumscribed. With distribution, and interest, only extending tens of miles from a city center, the reach of local recruitment advertising was limited. Further, the high prices charged for help-wanted advertising meant ads would appear only once, or for a relatively short amount of time. These temporal and geographic limitations on audience served to limit the number of applications that a help-wanted ad would receive. Subsequently, many employers chose to interpret a received application as an indication that the candidate was highly interested, close-at-hand and available.

In placing help-wanted ads, companies would oftentimes engage the services of an RAA (Recruitment Advertising Agency) to design the ads and purchase the ad space. If, say, Pfizer wanted to hire salespeople in 50 cities across the country, the HR group at Pfizer did not want to have to call up all 50 newspapers in order to negotiate ad sizing, placement, and cost. JWT, Bernard Hodes, TMP and Shaker, among others, provided this service, typically in exchange for a 15% share of the revenue, paid by the newspapers.

In studying the 150 year history of help-wanted ads, I have not been able to identify a single industry innovation that significantly improved response, time, utility, or cost for recruitment advertising clients. The closest I have found is the 'blind ad', in which the identity of the advertiser is not revealed for confidentiality, or candidate management, purposes, although this is, strictly speaking, not a recruitment advertising innovation. The applicant would be directed to a confidential and anonymous P.O. Box provided by the newspaper itself. As of yet, I have not been able to identify the time and place of the emergence of this practice, though research continues... I suppose what is most significant about this lack of innovation is the implication that clients were not demanding innovation. Help-wanted ads worked well enough for their monopoly suppliers and the captive customers they served.

The recruitment function was a tactical function for processing candidates through the application process, not a strategic function for securing the highest quality employees.

In the 20th century, the recruiting function dealt with standardized inputs and outputs -- job requisition forms, ads in the paper, reviewing with the hiring manager the small number of applications, standardized offers and benefits packages, form-based offer letters. There was little diversity in approach, process, or marketing among firms, and few innovations attempted by HR departments. A function that trades in standardization in this way is a tactical, not a strategic, function. As a result, recruitment had much more in common with the purchasing department than it did with strategic areas such as R&D or Marketing.

Practiced tactically in this way, recruiting was attached to the functions which most closely followed it in the employment processes -- personnel -- the department responsible for entering, maintaining, and exiting from employee relationships. Being warehoused in this manner (in the same group that handled compliance, benefits, and administrative work) will lead to the recruiting functions largely missing the turn towards the importance of employment branding in the first decade of the 21st century. Stylized ads in a standardized process did not allow for it. (Again, I think it bears noting that had recruiting been viewed as a strategic function in the 20th century, it would have inhabited a different place in the organization structure.)

As the application process itself involved significant effort on the candidate's part, 20th century custom dictated that, in turn, the candidates would be treated with some deference, civility, and politeness in the process. It was the expectation that each candidate sending in a resume or application would get a personally addressed letter thanking them for their credentials and, if a position were not immediately available, their information would be held on file for use in filling future open positions. (New, college-graduate employees at TheLadders find this particularly unbelievable.)

The hiring manager, possessing greater domain expertise, was often the first-line screener of resumes for an open position.

With a relatively small number of applications and resumes to review, the hiring manager himself could often do the first (and last) round of screening of the candidates received. With his position as an operator in the field, the manager would have extensive insight into the different types of experience available in the market, and, importantly, was able to judge first-hand the resumes against that standard. (Indeed, at times, there would not even be a first screen as candidates, having read Sunday's help-wanted pages, simply showed up at the place of business on Monday morning.)

Without needing to put down on paper the qualities and characteristics of the ideal person for the job, the manager was therefore frequently able to avoid the lengthy process of interpretation and explanation of job requirements to the internal recruiting or HR function. External, or third-party, recruiters, were often experts in their specific niche and would be able to craft appropriate position descriptions themselves without the assistance of the hiring manager. As we proceed into the 21st century, this absence of discipline in memorializing hiring managers' desires will become a critical flaw for the emerging new model.

Because of the small number of applications, reviewing the submitted resumes was not only not a chore, but an important source of market intelligence for the hiring manager, as he could ascertain the quality of talent at the competition and get a direct sense of the supply available in the market to fill his position.

The workplace bargain in the 20th century traded lifetime employment for lifetime development.

Throughout the 20th century, a steadily increasing percentage of the American workforce has been engaged in "white collar" jobs -- the managerial, clerical, design, marketing, engineering and professional work associated with managing business. Automated and routinized processes on the factory floor led to increasing productivity, the decrease in commodity prices as expressed in earnings power, and the subsequent rise in the importance of creating products and services that appealed beyond the merely functional. The innovations in design, culture, production, marketing, and distribution were driven by the managerial class (what former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich has termed "symbolic analysts") and replaced high-volume production and low-cost provision as the driver of corporate value. As the emphasis on work performed by the brains of employees increased (and decreased on work produced by muscle power alone), the need for an employment bargain that appealed to this increasing share of employees engaged in white collar work also grew.

Lifetime employment for managers, underscored by a broad "no-layoffs" policy among the nation's most prestigious employers, went hand-in-hand with an assumption of corporate loyalty on the part of employees and the expectation that their career development would be cared for assiduously by the company. In preparation for writing this series, I've gone back and read "The Organization Man" and "The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit", and their popular depictions of the expectations of middle managers clearly reveal the assumption of, and preference for, lifetime employment, along with the low cultural desirability of changing employers. At the managerial level, then, companies would try to hire once and hire best, and develop their managerial class by rotating them through a series of positions of increasing, and diverse, responsibility.

In this sense, companies and managers engaged in a mutual selling and buying. The professional purchased (and the company offered) career development, employment security, and the avoidance of job search costs throughout his career. He sold (and the company bought) loyalty, steady work performance, and a reduced need for companies to constantly monitor job satisfaction, job tenure, and compensation.

To take two examples, at some length, consider Rick Wagoner, until last year CEO of GM, and Bob McDonald, the present CEO of Procter & Gamble.

Wagoner joined GM as an analyst in the treasurer's office after graduating from Dartmouth and Harvard Business School in 1977. He became treasurer and then executive director of GM Brazil in the 80s. He was promoted to vice president, finance manager, and then director of strategic business planning in Canada. This was followed by a stint as VP, Finance for GM Europe, and then president and managing director of GM Brazil, before ascending to the executive suite as EVP and CFO in 1992, president and COO in 1998, and finally CEO in 2003. In all, 14 positions in 3 functions across 4 geographies in the 26 years leading up to his becoming CEO.

McDonald, meanwhile, joined P&G in 1980 after West Point and earning an MBA at the University of Utah. In the 1980s he rotated through a variety of cleaning products divisions -- Solo, Dawn, Cascade, and Tide -- before becoming Associate Advertising Manger for Laundry Products USA. In 1989 he became Manager for Laundry Products of Canada, and in 1991, GM of the Philippines. In 1996, he was named the Regional Vice President for Japan, and in 1999, President of Northeast Asia. In 2001, he was promoted to President, Global Fabric & Home Care; in 2007, COO; and in 2009, President & CEO. In all, 19 positions across 5 geographies in the 29 years leading up to his being named CEO.

What each of these brief biographies demonstrates (and many, many more examples like them) is the role the 20th century company plays in the development of the executive. Rotations through geographies, functions, staff vs. line positions are all directed towards the end of making a well-rounded executive suitable for the C-suite. The company rewarded loyalty with development and opportunity.

Or consider this 1964 Time magazine description of AT&T's then-CEO Fred Kappel, which shows the culture thereby fostered by lifetime employment practices in the context of the post-War period:

"Kappel is the prototype of the A.T.&T. executive, that particular type of U.S. manager whose training and abilities make the telephone company about the best-managed firm anywhere. One former A.T.&T. vice president wrote that the company's management system "is much the same as the Army's." A.T.&T. is a pure meritocracy, run by men who started at the bottom and worked up, step by step, winning the nod of many bosses along the way. The executives at A.T.&T. combine in themselves dedication, sense of service, awareness of public responsibility, invocation of old-fashioned virtues, puritan earnestness, Rotary Club friendliness, and a touch of self-righteousness They consider themselves a breed apart --and they are. They value continuity and gradualism in management more than most, and, though at ease in handling vast sums, run their company with a peasant's fear of debt and the thrifty conviction that every piece of installed equipment ought to be good for 40 years. Most of all, they view their job--helping the people to speak --as an almost priestly calling."

Again, the promise of lifetime employment, in this case based on a conscious emulation of the armed services, creates a culture of loyalty, separateness, duty and obligation. By contrast, the 21st century will see the rise, in some sectors, of a prejudice against employees who have stayed at a particular job or company for more than 10 years. Meg Whitman, CEO of eBay, has famously commented that 10 years was the right amount of time for any CEO to stay at the helm. And the realities of the modern business cycle eventually caught up with the concept of corporate loyalty. Lifetime employment will die in the United States on February 15, 1993, when IBM announced the end of its no-layoffs policy, a business and cultural milestone that changed the employment bargain forever.

(Significantly, as we move further towards a white collar workforce, the number of blue collar production jobs decrease. Nonetheless, we as a country are getting richer. As one economist pointed out, considering the success of Manhattan, the fear of manufacturing jobs moving to China is misplaced. How much meat do we produce in Manhattan's Meatpacking District? How many garments in the Garment District? Well, if you contemplate Manhattan as its own country, did the "offshoring" of our manufacturing jobs to the rest of America across the Hudson over the past 100 years leave us in penury? The departure of production jobs mo more leads to a decrease in wealth than the physical separation of the factory from company headquarters leads to declining incomes for its executives.)

Increasingly, then, the American workplace has moved towards white collar work, which, in some senses, is brain work (as opposed to muscle work). As the 21st century dawns, and the availability of information explodes, this characteristic of the American labor marketplace will have far-reaching implications for the new model.

Executive search arose in the 20th century to provide high-touch services which the low-touch, high-volume recruitment ad could not.

While employment agencies were a common feature of American life in the 19th and 20th centuries, the history of executive search firms begins in 1926 with the establishment of Thorndike Deland Associates, the first retained executive search firm. Thorndike charged $200 plus 5% of first year's compensation to find expert buyers for department stores. McKinsey and Booz, the predecessors of today's management consulting firms, also established executive search practices at this time (indeed, it appears that executive search firms were more commonly called management consulting firms until well into the post-World-War-II period.)

Executive search satisfied employers' demands for recruiting candidates for which the standardized processes of the 20th century model didn't work. Specialized skill sets, national search requirements, and top executive leadership required a more diligent scouting of available talent and more expert management of the courting process. As no product existed which could satisfy these requirements, a professional service was born. Applying customized human effort to the problem of finding, assessing, and recruiting top-level or specialized employees grew steadily throughout the 20th century.

The recurring problem of executive search, as a business, was that the means of producing revenue were based on the capabilities of the executive search consultant himself. Despite various efforts to build proprietary databases, executive search in the 20th century was unable to develop a capital asset that would see the firm itself, rather than its employees, delivering a substantial portion of the value created in an executive search. As a result, recruiters would frequently leave a firm to "hang up their own shingle." For example, Booz Allen Hamilton alumni launched firms such as Boyden (1946), Heidrick & Struggles (1953), and Spencer Stuart (1956). And when McKinsey & Co. decided to exit the business for perceived conflict of interest reasons at the end of World War II, John Handy (1944) and Ward Howell (1951) left to start their eponymous firms. The Big 8 accounting firms entered the field in the 60s, but were forced, under political pressure, to divest their operations in the late 70s due to the belief that these additional ties threatened the independence of their audit opinions (seems like this story recurs once a decade, doesn't it?)

For much of this time period, there was a popular perception of something unseemly to executive search (hence the great umbrage some recruiters take at being "insulted" as headhunters -- in fact one 1974 New York Times article lists additional epithets such as "bodysnatchers" and "flesh peddlers"! A surprisingly negative assessment, in my view, of an industry engaged in finding people new jobs they like more than their old jobs.)

Hypothesis: smaller labor pools, lower labor mobility, and less effective means of categorizing workplace attributes lead to more genericized searches in the 20th century than presently.

A hypothesis that I will be working on proving or disproving this year speaks to the nature of job fit given the available pools of labor talent. Given the smaller audience exposed to a particular job, and the lower likelihood of an employee moving to another company, the requirements for filling a job may have been more broad than is customary today. Did "Get me an ad man" or "I need a sales star" inherently devalue industry expertise?

In Japan, where lifetime employment is still the strongly favored cultural norm, executives are transferred within conglomerates to wholly different industries and functions. During my time in the import-export business, my customers were primarily Home Centers (Japan's version of Home Depot or Lowe's); one of my retail clients was entirely populated with executives from the group's declining steel production business. This preference for company-loyalty over domain expertise in staffing would seem to be more prevalent in lifetime employment systems, and I'll be studying further.

Conversely, when recruiting for TheLadders.com today, we frequently heavily prefer Online, Online Subscriptions, or Human Capital experience in our candidates. With increasing specialization of the work required, and the lower ramp-up times experienced by industry-knowledgeable executives, do contemporary recruitment practices inherently create smaller, specialized labor pools?

Summary

Markets seek clearing prices: the price at which the supply of a product of certain usefulness will match the demand of customers for it. As we consider recruiting models in the 20th and 21st centuries, it is wise to bear in mind that changes in the utility of a particular solution impact its price and volume in the marketplace.

In this sense, the 20th century model -- the particular combination of customer behaviors and product utility made possible by technological, cultural, societal, and business processes -- found its market clearing price. Help-wanted ads serviced the high-volume, low-functionality end of the marketplace. Literally billions of help-wanted ads were created, purchased, and read over the course of the century. And executive search firms serviced the low-volume, high-touch end of the marketplace; and despite the low volume, search firm revenues may have equaled those of the help-wanted advertising industry for at least the latter part of the century.

In preparing to analyze the 21st century model, it perhaps make sense to try and formalize the elements of the model as a useful tool for comparison. The factors of that model can be summarized along five dimensions: geographical range, cost in dollars, time available for the process, amount of time required, and the presence of domain specific knowledge. For each of our players -- job-seekers, recruitment advertising, the HR or recruiting function, hiring managers, and executive search firms, the model is expressed as follows:

Job-seekers
Geo: Limited
$ cost: Reasonable (the cost of applications, stamps, transportation to and from interviews, etc.)
Time available for process: Large
Amount of time required: Significant
Domain specific knowledge: High

Ads
Geo: Limited
$: Significant
Time avail.: Small (amount of time ads would appear)
Time required: Small (it did not take a lot of time to place an ad)
Domain knowledge:Low

HR
Geo: Limited
$: Reasonable
Time avail.: Reasonable
Time required: Significant (for the management of the recruitment process itself)
Domain knowledge: Low

Hiring managers
Geo: N/A
$: Insignificant
Time avail.: Sufficient
Time required: Small
Domain knowledge: High

Executive Search
Geo: National
$: Very high
Time avail.: Large
Time required: Large
Domain knowledge: High

As we take our journey through the History of Job Search into the 21st century, a useful exercise is to ask yourself: "How has the internet changed these dimensions for job-seekers, recruitment ads, the recruiting function, hiring managers, and executive search firms?" The answers, as we will find, are illuminating.

Posted by marc: History of Job Search, 20th Century | Comments ()

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 where we study a job-seeker's activity on TheLadders to understand what makes people successful and how we can improve everybody's chance of finding their next great job ever more quickly.

Well, it's no secret that finding a job is a job in itself, and those subscribers who log in regularly and consistently, and follow up on job leads, have a better chance of success. A lot of folks have a burst of initial activity but then let the drudgery of the job hunt wear them down. "You've got to be in it to win it," and that means logging in to TheLadders every week to see the new job listings.

True or false? Your resume should be about you.

This is one of the biggest myths in the job search. Your resume, although composed of your accomplishments and background, is not about you.

It's about catching a hiring manager's attention - really, it's about what that hiring manager needs, not what you want. That's a subtle difference but a pretty important one. The better your resume answers the question of "what can this person do for me?" the more it stands out from the pile.

For all of our resume articles and advice, check out our News & Advice section, or have one of our professionals rewrite yours to catch a hiring manager's eye.

Cheer yourself up. Yes, the job hunt is a drag. But if you let that feeling sneak into your phone calls, your interviews, and if you let it sap your strength, you'll never make it through.

You need to take mental health breaks regularly without letting them turn into Cheetos-on-the-couch-channel-surfing procrastination. (I'm particularly susceptible to the Cheetos Crunchy Flamin' Hot - dang, they're good!)

Set aside five minutes an hour where you're going to get off the job hunt and do something relaxing: watch a few of our favorite videos on YouTube like laughing Swedish baby (I defy anyone to not smile after watching that) or the autistic basketball star to get in a good mood or get inspired, and then get back to work.

Look, folks, from everything we're seeing, 2010 is starting off a lot better than 2009 did, and let's hope that momentum keeps us going. We'll be here rooting for you.

Posted by marc: The Hangover | Comments ()

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 will be of assistance, and interest, to professionals who are currently seeking work.

This series will be a work in progress, and I welcome the contribution of all -- colleagues, friends, academics, and (especially) competitors. A better understanding of how we got here will enable all of us to design better products and services for our customers.

So, on this first day of 2010, I thought it would be appropriate to create a post that brings the links to the posts in this series together in one place. I will update this post with links to additional posts as I write them.

History of Job Search
I. Prologue
II. Before Jobs
III. The Industrial Revolution
IV. Newspapers
V. The 20th Century Model
VI. When I Grow Up I Want To Have A Brown Nose
VII. The 20th Century Model Breaks

As a note, this blog series is a bit of an experiment and I'll be following slightly different conventions from those common in blogging in general.

For example, it is typically customary to not change the wording or formatting of a blog post once it is posted, but to address any new information or thoughts in an "Update" section appended to the bottom of the post. As this is a work in progress, and probably more akin to the rough draft of a book than meant to be a definitive statement of views on a particular date, I will not be following that convention, and will update the post itself, in the body of the post.

I'll add other notes about the project here as they arise.

Thanks for your readership and your assistance! Happy New Year!

Last update: January 13, 2010

Posted by marc: History of Job Search | Comments ()

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 with the business about KPIs, technology is unable to assist in improving those KPIs. One of the most commonly used measurements -- "time to hire" -- is a proxy, at best, for good recruiting. [Would you compensate your salespeople on "time to close" instead of dollars actually brought in?]

Until recruiting, as a business process, has readily-agreed-to and measurable KPIs, I'm afraid the utility of technology for solving more of the recruiting puzzle will be limited.

..Recruiting is sales. It's that simple and anyone who expects to succeed in any decade has to understand this.
Good recruiters are coaches, consultants, and psychologists. They need to not only sell candidates, but also hiring managers

In my experience, this is what technologists are most likely to miss when the analyze recruiting and recruiting workflows. Recruiting, like sales, is a human process, and rather obviously, the internet itself is not human. It can enable humans to do their processes better, but it simply can not replace them.

I'm surprised at how many times HR industry people quiz me on why we at TheLadders.com use executive search professionals to fill some specialized positions. Yes, we absolutely post the job on TheLadders, and we get great candidates (some of which we've hired through executive search firms) from our own site. But the quizzical look I get comes from the mistaken assumption that internet job sites are an excellent replacement for recruiters, when in fact, they are enablers for excellent recruiters.

Just like Hoover's and SalesGenie.com, as sources of great sales leads, are not trying to replace salespeople but, rather, make them more successful, TheLadders.com exists to be phenomenal at what the Internet is great at -- collecting, collating, and curating information -- in order to allow the industry's professionals -- recruiters -- to spend more time at what they're great at -- the person-to-person discussions, persuasions, and negotiations of recruiting.

Similarly, a great recruiter, like my old colleague Dave Carvajal does so much more than merely processing leads. There's understanding the flavor of the job, the mentality of the person, the assessment of cultural fit, shepherding the negotiations between the two parties and enabling them to each get what they value most, etc. etc. Technology is simply not going to replace that.

Toward the end of the decade social networking appeared and became the new buzz. Recruiters had tools that would give them unprecedented access to candidates and make it much easier to create talent pools and stay in touch with candidates. Recruiters eagerly adopted Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and other tools as the new panacea, feeling perhaps that if the Internet couldn't fix their problems, then social media would.
They too have been disappointed, because the Internet, applicant tracking systems, CRM, and social media are tools that enable knowledgeable, skilled recruiters to do a better job. They are not, in themselves, solutions to anything and will not magically make anyone a good recruiter.

The excitement that we all felt the first time we signed up for any of the social media properties is part of who we are as humans -- "I can't believe how many people are on here!" But mistaking that elation at the presence of so many colleagues, old classmates, and childhood friends, for the simplification of the hard work of recruiting for us -- prospecting, marketing, qualifying, screening, and selling candidates and hiring managers -- leads to a dangerous lack of productivity for the hours you've spent surfing.

There is a myth that anyone can recruit for any industry because the Internet and social networking tools make access to people and information ubiquitous and easy to get.

If your VP of Sales came to you and said, "hey, all of our sales recruiting problems are over! I got the list of all 648 buyers in our industry. The hard work is done, we can have the interns call them up and they'll buy right away!", you would fire him.

Similarly, just because everybody is in the white pages, or on Facebook, or using Google, that hardly means your job is done (or, really, that it is even started). In recruiting, as in sales, collecting good prospects is the start of the pipeline, not the end.

Never underestimate industry knowledge and experience as a major factor in recruiting success.

There's the famous progression of understanding from data to information to knowledge to wisdom. Technology generally, and the Internet in particular, are phenomenal at the data, very good at information, and sometimes quite effective at knowledge.

But technology will never surpass humans for wisdom. And the sooner the industry recognizes that, the quicker we can get on to solving the real problems of recruiters and HR departments today.

And I think this is why a recruiting guru like Kevin Wheeler can look back on the past decade and be disappointed. The whirlwind we Internet recruitment people have unleashed is very, very good for recruiting and is also very, very bad for recruiting. In the next decade, let's do more of the good.

Posted by marc: What Technology Can't Do For Recruiting | Comments ()

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