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.