Sometimes when “something” becomes popular and successful for a long time it becomes a defacto standard, something that is just accepted, no questions asked.  Over time, other people and organisations try to catch hold of the coat tails of this success by copying (sometimes with slight variations, often with none) the original idea.

Often, everyone is too busy admiring this “something” to notice that times have changed and the world has moved on.  Such is the case of the ubiquitous job board.

There have been many massive market shifts by inventors and free-thinking people in history.  Think of the first automatically sliced loaf, a buzzer when you leave your car lights on, Dyson and the vacuum cleaner industry.  All were big revelations…the kind that make you think….well that’s obvious!

Well, it’s the same in the recruitment industry.  The job board market is lazily jogging along (fat from its profits) unaware that its nemesis the “people board” is about to sprint past it and leave it for dead (quite literally).

You see, times have changed.  The Internet is now much more people focused.  People/users demand more from Internet services and they want these services to be free.  Any Internet service that is going to succeed in a massive way must focus on the benefits for its users.

Job boards simply do not focus on their users.  What they do is in fact the reverse.  Many job boards focus on two areas; job advertising and a CV (resume) database.

For job advertising, they charge a lot of money for employers (or agencies) that wish to advertise their job vacancies.  The other side of the job board website, the CV database, is a little odd.  Essentially users can send their CV (free of charge) to the job board.  At first this sounds like a reasonable deal until you realise that the CV database is locked down.  Only employers who register with the job board and pay (far too much money) will be able to search for your CV.

There are three fundamentally bad things here:

1. The job boards are selling YOUR data and you gave them it for free!
2. The job board has effectively restricted access to companies who can afford to pay for the service. 
3. Your data is only visible for those periods of time when companies pay for it and actively search for some skills.

 People boards are the reverse of this and bring benefits for those actively looking for work, those not actively looking for work, employers and even agencies.

So what is a people board?

Here’s my definition:

A people board:

1. enables people to promote their skills
2. enables people to publish their availability and references
3. enables people to control how their data is presented and how they can be contacted
4. allows employers to search for people
5. 1-4 MUST be free of charge

We don’t need to overcomplicate the recruitment business.  There should only be two sides to it; employers seeking candiddates and candidates looking for roles in business. 

The objective of a people board is to make it much easier to put both sides of the recruitment equation in touch with each other, no matter what the business, no matter what skills the person has.

The people board is a simple concept, but then the best ideas usually are.

The following post is a summarised extract from a report published jointly by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) and KPMG called Labout Market Outlook (Winter 2008-09).  The report is the result of surveying almost 900 companies asking a broad range of job and economic questions.

The full report can be found at: http://www.cipd.co.uk/NR/rdonlyres/3D88488C-C287-4840-8AF8-1E638E29DADC/0/4742LMOWinterWEB.pdf 

Recruitment and Redundancy Highlights:

1. Over a third (36%) of organisations in the survey expect a decrease in staff levels (Vs 18% in the autumn survey)
2. Recruitment intentions have declined significantly over previous quarters; 62% planning to recruit compared to 75% and 86% in previous surveys.
3. One third of employers expect to make some redundancies in the next 3 months.  Primary tactics to avoid redundancies are to freeze recruitment and terminate contract staff.
4. Nearly a fifth of companies have introduced short-time working.

Salary and Wage Costs Highlights:

1. The average pay rise is expected to fall over the next few months with an average pay rise expectation of 2.6% (compared to a previous value of 3.45%).
2. The factors affecting people responsible for planning pay reviews, quoted in terms of decreasing importance are; the organisation’s financial performance, inflation versus business confidence, staff retention, rewarding high-performers and, way behind, the Government’s call for pay restraint.

Economic optimism (or not!):

1. 80% of companies believe that the economic condition of the UK will worsen over the next few months, with just 2% believing that it will improve!
2. 34% of firms think that their company’s financial performance will deteriorate in the short term. With almost half (46%) not expecting a significant change.

Coping with the credit crunch:

1. Almost two-thirds of companies experienced (or are about to) an organisational budget cut in 2008.
2. Travel budgets have been slashed or new restrictions (flights, taxis to name but two) have been put in place by many employers with many companies making use of telephone or video conferencing instead.
3. Increases in communication from top executives and senior management are also popular with many firms.

Seems like this lull in the recruitment industry is even taking the wind out of Google’s sails a tiny bit…..

The following entry was posted in Google’s blog a couple of days ago by their VP of People Operations…….

1/14/2009 03:01:00 PM

As we made clear during our last quarterly earnings call in October, Google is still hiring but at a reduced rate. Given the state of the economy, we recognized that we needed fewer people focused on hiring.

Our first step to address this was to wind down almost all our contracts with external contractors and vendors providing recruiting services for Google. However, after much consideration, we have with great regret decided that we need to go further and reduce the overall size of our recruiting organization by approximately 100 positions.

We know this change will be very difficult for the people concerned, and we hope that many of them will be able to find new roles at Google. They helped build this company, new hire by new hire, and we are enormously grateful for everything they have done.

Posted by Laszlo Bock, Vice President, People Operations

Maybe they’ll be cutting back on Dodgeball time in the corridors next!

If you’ve been reading the press lately you’ll know that Monster have rebuilt their website.  I found a marketing brochure describing their great undertaking.  Here are a few quotes from the Monster literature:

When you invented the game, it’s okay to change the rules.

Today, we are reinventing the Monster Seeker and Employer experience, using patent-pending technologies to create new, never-before-seen products and services. In short, Monster is revolutionizing the way you recruit. Again.

That’s pretty big words from a pretty big company.  So the BIG question is “How much of this is hype, how much is bells and whistles and how much is blind panic by the Monster money making machine?”

I’ll do an in-depth review of the new features in a later post, but at first glance their site is still very busy to they eye.  There’s a lot of stuff that either has no relevance to me (the usual “career advice” and “how to write that perfect CV”) or, well just a lot of “job noise” that I’m never going to click on.

In their advance search, for example, they still stick to the rather dull splitting of industries into vertical segments and an old-fashioned list of click and select career checkboxes.  That’s not innovation surely?

At first glance, this isn’t anything like a full body makeover but more of a facelift.  Monster still looks ugly to me!

So how can we fix this?  How can we look at this beast of a recruitment industry and see beauty in it? Well first we need to look in the mirror and ask ourselves, “Who is this business for? Who is it supposed to benefit?”

The answer to those questions obviously depends on what your role is - a recruiter, an agency or a candidate.

For recruiters (read the old-fashioned meaning of companies that actually employ people) it’s fairly simple - we want the best people for the lowest cost.

For agencies - we want anybody for maximum profit.

For candidates - we want an interesting job that pays a lot of money.

Well ok, I’ve over-simplified things and people aren’t that stereotypical in real life but it states the basic positions of the parties involved in this uncomfortable triangle.

The Bad and The Ugly

I don’t think I’m on my own here when I say that from a candidate’s view I don’t see what value an agency adds to the recruitment process.  They are simply an obstacle between the candidate and the recruiter, a third party that can shield the truth (both ways) between the other two parties.  This can’t be healthy and isn’t the best way to do business.

It used to be that an agency would send me a bottle of champagne and a box of Belgian chocolates at Christmas, but sadly those days are now gone……. I don’t even get a Christmas card any more!  So much for the brave new world where social networking is King!

The Good

I guess I shouldn’t gripe about the current system and its processes without having a better alternative up my sleeve.

Well I have got a better vision although to realize it will take time and you can bet there will be a lot of opposition from certain quarters……

Let’s all promote ourselves instead of using job boards. 

If all recruiters and agencies could find you for free and see when you’re available or looking for work then we can do away with all this cloak and dagger stuff.

Personal promotion online and networking - it’s the way forward.  Wave goodbye to job boards. 

My top 8 topics of interest for the recruitment industry in 2009 and beyond are:

1. Personal Promotion (for want of a better phrase!).  You own the data, you know what your skills are you know when you’re available.  Who else is in a better position to know all this?  Recruitment agencies - I think not!

2. Social Networking Sites - Can recruiters engage with candidates using social networking sites?

3. Video Branding - How can employers, agencies and individuals promote and develop their own brands?

4. Recruitment Blogs - How can recruiters utilise blogging within their career sites?

5. Personal Tagging - Forget scanning CVs or resumes, use data tags instead.

6. Aggregators - How aggregators are used in online recruiting (I have an instant aversion to aggregation - just smacks of poor quality output to me)!

7. Recruitment and Web 2.0 (+ Web 3.0)! - Nice words but is there any substance behind all this verbage?  Do we really need to engage with Generation Y using these techniques?

8. Cloud Recruiting - The recruitment industry’s spin on cloud computing

As we’re all going through plenty of turmoil at the moment I thought it would be a great idea to take a fresh look at the process of recruiting.  More specifically let’s look at job advertising:

Why do companies advertise jobs?

• To attract the best people?
• To facilitate revenue growth?
• To cope with peaks in their workload?
• To generate awareness of their company?
• To phish for people’s CVs?

Maybe I’m cynical about this but surely sticking a job post on a job board is not going to attract the best people.  What it will do in the main is attract people that are either out of work, or just about to be out of work.  It will however increase recruitment agencies’ list of names to search for next time a similar vacancy comes up!

For service industries where a high percentage of contractors are employed, advertising jobs to bring more bodies on-board is a good idea especially for the directors of the company involved.

Advertising jobs to bring in new people to help smooth out peaks in workload seems like a sound practice but this depends on how many and how quickly they are brought in.  Large scale recruitment like this can lead to the “Emperor’s new clothes” style of project where everyone is doing nothing but everything is fine (according to senior management).  Call this the consultancy approach if you will.

Advertising fictitious jobs is a cheap method (in more ways than one) of raising the awareness of your company’s brand.

A very common ruse used by recruitment agencies is to “phish” for peoples CVs by advertising non-existent jobs.  People by the very secrecy of the process don’t get to know the name of the company supposedly with a vacancy to fill.  It’s cheaper than paying job board rates for searching a CV database and a useful hook (no pun intended) to attempt to get leads from unsuspecting people.

In the words of my business partner, the whole recruitment process is “so bad it’s not even wrong!” 

Maybe, just maybe, this whole thing is the wrong way up.  To be continued…..