Making these talent tags free format opens up the “door” to a whole lot more uses……….for example, why not have your name as a talent tag? That way, anyone can look you up, check your availability and see what you’re doing now.
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:
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:
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:
Salary and Wage Costs Highlights:
Economic optimism (or not!):
Coping with the credit crunch:
Who and what is safe in the current recession? Are there certain industries and jobs that are recession proof?
Recession Proof Jobs
1. Healthcare - think doctors, nurses, surgeons, therapists, other healthcare workers etc…. (do more people get sick during a recession?). Conversely though, jobs such as dentistry may not be as recession proof. People will tend to put-off or avoid visits to the dentist in case there may be “hidden costs”!
2. Education - teachers (full and part-time), lecturers etc… people still need to send their kids to school although there is likely to be an impact on private schools as parents juggle their finances and save on school fees by sending their children back to state schools. For higher education there will be a lot of people looking to hide from the recession by retraining. So, anticipate an increase in demand for educators and trainers.
3. Other Public Sector - if you’re working on an infrastruture project that is government funded, the finance for the project is extremely likely to be cut. These are the projects that the government is trying to use to kick the ailing economy (with steel toe-capped boots on) into life again. You should be safe here!
4. Computers and Technology - well, it’s the future and every firm (just about) relies on technology to underpin its business functions. Good people (”Do-ers”) that are properly qualified are also hard to find. I’m not totally convinced that all job types in computer and technology are safe as IT is still seen as a huge expense by a lot of companies. New developments are likely to be shelved. Whether or not you think the IT industry is safe also depends on how you are employed. The ratio of contractors to permanent staff is important….contractors are a lot easier to shed in times of trouble than permanent staff.
5. Environmental Jobs - as concerns about global warming swell, more and more companies are turning green. There’s scope here for employment for green engineers, scientists and consultants to help firms become much more eco-friendly, save money and comply with new government regulations.
6. Matters of Life and Death - surely all midwives and funeral directors are safe in a recession? Ditto for good cheap hairdressers!?!
7. Despairing Urges - as we move further into recession many of us will sink into depression hence there will be a boost in chocolate manufacturers’ sales (think Eddie Murphy style logic in Trading Places). :-) Ditto for breweries I think!
8. Accountancy - Boom or bust, the world still needs accountants.
Recession Prone Jobs
1. Foreign Travel - Due to certain weak currencies and a weak economy people are less likely to travel abroad whether on business or for a vacation.
2. Car Sales - Car prices are rock bottom at the moment (both new and used). Maybe we’ll see the proper emergence of a “green car” soon.
3. Building and property - Any job title with the word “building” or “property” is looking extremely precarious. House prices are falling, nobody is moving and few people are thinking of extensions.
4. Discretionary spending - Any industry that relies on discretionary spending is going to be badly affected. Think of retail firms (how many high street firms in the UK will go bust this year?) or restaurants…. “eating in” will be the new “eating out” in 2009!
The whole world seems to think that their job is the next to go and maybe it will, but people need to keep in mind that a company shedding 25% of its staff would be big news indeed, however 75% are still in a job.
It’s also worth noting that the headlines in the Daily Mail, what I refer to as the ‘Daily Outrage’ that xyz bank is shedding half its staff does hide the fact that a good number of those will work for business unit abc which is being spun off or sold to another bank, so strictly speaking the Daily Outrage is correct the payroll will shrink by 50% but not all those 50% will be walking away clutching a redundancy cheque and a P45.
In the ‘Great Depression’ between 1929 and 1935 things were about as bad as they could get but only 10% of business folded, when the economy recovered the 90% of businesses that survived doubtless divved up the trade from the failed 10% between them. In a similar vein Matalan, Primark and Game are seeing increased trade from the demise of dear old Woolies.
This period of non stop bad economic news will, like all things pass and we’ll move on to better times, perhaps we’ll all be better people for the experience. But everybody should get this into perspective it’s not the end of the world or even the beginning of the end of the world. Things have been far worse than this; 1974 Britain had a government enforced 3 day working week. Power cuts and shortage of commodities particularly sugar I seem to remember were the order of the day. The recession of the early 80’s when I was starting my working life wasn’t a particularly rosy time either, that soon gave way to the boom years of the mid 80’s and the rise of the yuppie. Early 90’s another biggie which gave way to the longest continuous period of economic expansion Britain had ever seen, you remember that – the one that has just come to an end.
In a world of instant this and instant that, people’s expectation of action and effect has become distorted; an interest rate cut on Thursday lunchtime will not lead to the end of the recession in the following month. Petrol prices have plummeted in the past 3 months, mortgage costs will be following them down, remember many people have mortgages that the payment level is set on an annual basis. These will start to fall typically from the February payment. Gas and Electricity prices will start to come down in the spring.
All these factors will lead to people having more cash in their pockets. However, what they need is the confidence to spend it rather save it. Mervyn King and Alastair Darling cannot give people confidence it’s something that will come from within!
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 PMAs 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.
Maybe they’ll be cutting back on Dodgeball time in the corridors next!
Here are a few simple things that I believe job seekers really want from the Internet:
1) Maximum exposure of their CV or resume - not hiding in someone elses pay per view CV database!
2) Total control of what career and job information is displayed about them and when.
3) Ability to see metrics about who views their resume or CV and how often.
4) Display when they are available or looking for work (and update it easily).
5) Control over the keywords that describe who they are or what they do (not some kind of intelligent? robot that reads the resume or CV)
Any thoughts?
I thought that this was going to be a difficult post to write especially when the recruitment industry and hiring and firing in general is in turmoil right now, but when I got down to it my Top 10 predictions just fell out!
1. Recruiters stop using job boards to attract candidates and only use web apps in conjunction with revamping the job tab on their own website. The real (if difficult) birth of cloud recruiting begins.
2. Recruitment agencies halve (or more) their percentage fee. Tons of these guys will go out of business in 2009 (except for the ones that have a monopoly or add value).
3. Google comes up with an imaginitive way of finding and recruiting people.
4. Less and Less “career advice”, and more and more “how to keep a job advice” appears on those job boards that think we actually read that stuff!
5. The big job boards (Monster, Jobserve et al) begin to stagger around a little punch drunk. They’re being hit from a lot of different directions these days (Facebook, LinkedIn et al) and no matter how much they try and change the colour of their spots they’re still the same old dinosaur and can’t adapt to the planet’s changing economic conditions. They’re in the wrong game now and this year they may start to realise it!
6. Something really useful in the recruitment world will catch fire for mobiles that will change the whole game.
7. Buy-up of other job boards to reduce competition and try and keep revenue streams from drying up.
8. People/Job networking sites to rise and rise, although where there revenue streams will come from is anyones guess.
9. YouTube video shorts promoting companies, individual departments or individuals will put on a growth spurt but YouTube will need to add a smarter interface if it’s going to work.
10. The term “Personal branding” is dusted off, given some new spin to the point where it actually takes off.
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
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