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It is better
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It Might Look Like This
(November 10, 2000) Our email box fills at an alarming rate. With over 400 news alerts, letters from readers, important customer correspondence, staff mail, family stuff and spam, we're buried in an avalanche of crud. It's really quite difficult to distinguish one piece of incoming from another. They blur to the extent that relationships suffer and bright ideas get lost. Until we find a better method, we're stuck doing things the current way.

Cutting through that level of noise is the challenge that faces all publicists (whether professional or an entrepreneur who dreams of having a professional). There are a variety of ways to attack the problem.

Sending large volumes of tailored emails is the approach taken by both Monster and Recruitsoft and a newcomer called HR.com. The underlying premise is to try to ship enough propaganda so that not all of it can be thrown away. It works to a degree.

Polished networking, practiced by folks like BrassRing, hire.com and RecruitUSA is another alternative. Building warm relationships with key analysts and pundits is a high maintenance approach, but it serves the proponents well. These companies go out of their way to create an enduring buzz.

Another approach is one we favor. Doing the journalists job involves writing a press release, chock full of facts and figures, that barely mentions your company. The goal, instead, is to give the journalist a day off. We wish we saw more of these.

And then, there is the old fashioned "brown-nosing" approach. Cleverly done, the method is not only inoffensive, it bears fruit. Here's a great example that is so good that it rose to the top of our inbasket:

First let me thank you for your thought-provoking articles. They are a constant source of healthy debate in our organization.

I'd like to share with you a report I produced for sales executives while I headed recruiting for MCI's Business Markets division in the mid-1990s.

The COOL Report (Cost Of Opportunity Lost) addressed opportunity cost and was much more relevant to my client-executives than any cost per hire data the HR folks repeatedly tried to quantify.

The COOL Report was built as a simple equation tied to our requisition report and was sent monthly to all sales VPs and above. The COOL Report utilized req aging data times the daily quota for sales reps to produce an "in your face" realization among our sales executives that to make their numbers they had to ensure hiring (and hiring well) was a top priority. A typical example might be that a National Account Manager carried a new revenue quota of $50,000/month. Divided by 31 days, that NAM was responsible for $1613 in revenue per day. If a NAM req was open 40 days, the revenue it cost the sales organization was $64,520.

The numbers expressed in the COOL Report were startling. It was not unusual for us to have several hundred open reqs at a time. We literally were losing millions of dollars per month and this report allowed everyone to know it.

When I first began producing the COOL Report, my fellow HR managers told me I was crazy to produce a report that showed that my organization was responsible for the company losing so much money. My take was the opposite. I believed I needed the sales executives to realize the size of the issue and take a business-like approach to recruiting for the first time. Luckily for me, my lead client-executive, Rick Ellenberger (now CEO of Broadwing Communications), was very receptive to the report and its implications and was a great supporter in helping me get the resources to build my recruiting organization to an appropriate level.

Since leaving MCI in early 1999, my team and I have been acting to a large extent as a "single belly button" for our clients and assisting them with recruiting strategies and navigating the e-recruiting maze. We appreciate your insights and join you in evangelizing better ways to approach recruiting.

As a "go-by", this is a fantastic piece: personal correspondence, a great idea, qualifications and lots of nice flattery.

As a result, we took a solid look at CRSEdge. It just may be the prototype for a single belly button service.

- John Sumser © TwoColorHat. All Rights Reserved.


Talent Markets


(November 09, 2000) We like the way the site's name is out of the status quo (not another JobBordello). ICPlanet has launched a meaningful national advertising campaign that targets the major markets (Seattle, San Francisco, Boston, DC). In doing so, they have purchased rapid the rapid growth of their Resume Database.

According to PC Data (whoever they are), this makes ICPlanet the #1 place to find independent consultants on the net. We wonder how Net-Temps, the longstanding owner of the space, thinks about this.

So, we thought we'd add some light to the discussion. ICPlanet has, in fact, made itself a good deal better known in recent months. But, here's how the companies in this space stack up.

The following list is based on the traffic measurements done by Alexa (although there is some measurement of the job board industry, it is always completely contradictory; no one is measuring the talent markets just yet). It is important to clearly state that traffic has no meaningful correlation with effectiveness. In the technical markets, with their predominantly male mindsets, measurements of relative size are used for street corner posturing. It may be hormonal.

With those lengthy caveats out of the way, here's the list of the top 10 sites (we left both Net-Temps and DICE off of the list since they cross boundaries...they would have been the top two). The number next to each service is a relative ranking among all websites. Think of it as "compared to Yahoo".

  1. Guru.com     1461
  2. Elance     2796
  3. EWork     5838
  4. FreeAgent     6489
  5. ICPlanet     12555
  6. Ants.com     14972
  7. Skills Village     31427
  8. Iniku     38670
  9. Aquent     39214
  10. IPros     44316
Several competitors are interestingly not on the list. Opus360, who made a splash in the early part of the year is way back in the traffic statistics. Most interesting, however, is the fact that talent.monster.com ranks below the 1,000,000th website.

Before you get your shorts too twisted, we don't place much stock in traffic measurements. Since the earliest days of the web, some people have tried to measure traffic. Others have figured out how to beat a particular measurement (usually the one mentioned in their press releases). Meanwhile, shrewder businesspeople have focused on customer satisfaction, leaving braggadocio about size to the macho subset who are worried that theirs is too little.

That's why we try to measure relative mind share in our annual surveys.

- John Sumser © TwoColorHat. All Rights Reserved.

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Phil Wolff II


(November 08, 2000) You may remember our earlier article about Phil Wolff, Adecco's "Vice President of Extrapreneurial Strategy and Technology". We fawned over his website and remarkable contributions to the movement of thinking in our industry.

We recently received his monthly newsletter by email and we're wowed again.

While making the topic open to public participation, Phil offers a relatively comprehensive look at the things job boards do besides offering jobs. Nice one.

In a solid essay on Labor Micromarkets, he notes:

Effectiveness is harder to come by, however. What makes a labor market work is that it consists of lots of smaller micromarkets. When you slice the US workforce by metro area, occupation, industry, and seniority, you find markets like "St. Louis Public Safety Workers" and "US Neonatal Prenatal Nurses".

Critical mass is when you have enough workers and employers that, when they play, they have a fair shot at making a match. You must have a critical mass in a micromarket to be effective in solving worker/employer matches for that market.

A look at a new job board for unemployed campaign workers and the beginnings of a discussion of the flaws in the temp industry round out the pure Recruiting sections.

Phil just keeps on digging.

- John Sumser © TwoColorHat. All Rights Reserved.


Talent Fusion


(November 07, 2000) Careful readers will have already taken a look at Boston based TalentFusion. Founded by refugees from the leadership ofKeane's Recruiting Department, the new venture focuses on the IT Marketplace. From the website's propaganda, you'd think they had read our last week's worth of articles:
In Search of IT Talent?

As a technology-dependent organization, you are struggling to secure talent in a labor-short market. Finding and attracting Interested/QualifiedŽ candidates is a huge battle, one you may lose without the proper weapons.

In order for your company to succeed, it is absolutely necessary that your recruitment is well-executed. Very soon, a revolutionary company will fuse the "best practices" in recruitment with the most advanced technology tools to bring you a system that delivers predictable results, rapidly scalable solutions, and reduced costs and cycle time.

We've peeked into the hearts of the founders of the operation. Watch out, once they take the wraps off.

- John Sumser © TwoColorHat. All Rights Reserved.


NotJobs


(November 06, 2000) Here's a new spin (and a sign of what's still possible). NotJobs (the anti job board) opened its doors in early September and now has nearly 150 customers in various stages of satisfaction. Operated by one of our heroes (Colleen Gildea), the company aims to reinsert people into the internet Recruiting process.

Rapid growth, focus on service, delivery of real results and a maniacal focus on the market are at the core of the business. Above all, they're willing to promise results. We think they may be rewriting a small section of the playbook. Top 10 reasons NotJobs.com will work for you!

  1. Where else can you find a recruiting assistant for less than $1000.00 a month?
  2. We're never late or sick and we're always eager to serve you!
  3. Why pay for resumes that you don't need?
  4. Our candidates will call you back.
  5. We contact the candidates that aren't looking for work so you don't have to.
  6. We provide potential hires not resumes.
  7. We take the search out of searching and put the hire back into hiring.
  8. We teach you how to recruit smarter.
  9. We personalize the web and build relationships with our candidates.
  10. We teach our candidates to build relationships not resumes.
Here's their 'value proposition':
NotJobs.com is putting people into the electronic recruiting mix. Our R.I.D. (Recruiter Intelligence Division) takes away all the tedious & time-consuming efforts associated with online recruiting. When you sign up with NotJobs.com you're getting all the benefits of having a personal recruiting staff at a fraction of the cost. Your personal Research Consulting Team allows you to focus on potential hires not useless resumes.
While it's far too early to figure out the likelihood that NotJobs will succeed in the market, it's clear that this offering is taking off fast. The difference they bring to the market looks like confirmation of the emergence of real 'candidate agency' and web driven recruiting. Their rapid ramp sales success should make everyone else take heed.

- John Sumser © TwoColorHat. All Rights Reserved.

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