2007: A Watershed Event
David Lefkow's excellent musings on ERE (The Rise of the Social Networks), was a reminder about the fundamental changes percolating through the staffing industry. Two days later Kevin Wheeler's enthusiastic ERE article on a new player in the job board/contact management space: Itzbig, A Sourcing Network on Steroids, reinforced our growing conviction that 2007 will be a time when staffing is reinvigorated with new models, new ideas and more employers willing to use them.
We've already been to three countries, more than 15 national/international conferences, three Colloquium meetings, as well as two of the most unusual gigs we ever attempted (one was a series of focus groups for another country interested in examining US career management practices and the other was an audit of the challenges facing the US Intelligence Community in hiring first and second generation US citizens- but that is another story). And the year is only half over.
While we are still preparing for the remainder of 2007, we cannot remember ever seeing an industry as ready for change since the inception of the Internet. The convergence of angry and increasingly scarce job seekers with disappointed but energized employers that are willing to spend for results has created a raft of new products and services for recruiters to spend their $$ on.
New models, some quietly developing for years, others newly bursting on the scene or quietly developing a proof of concept are proliferating in record numbers. It also doesn't hurt the impetus for change that we are now in the midst of the demographic shifts everyone has touted for twenty years - the staffing pain is plain to see and growing daily.
Here's a short list of what has been bubbling and boiling so far in 2007. Five observations/predictions that we have commented on privately:
- Social networks are reinventing themselves and shifting from a few publicly accessible applications to hundreds of closed systems built around true affinity criteria. The news continues to focus on Facebook and MySpace but Affinitycircles and Selectminds are two of more than a dozen social network applications gaining market share and traction amidst the hype.
While the more recognizable open and universally accessible virtual social networks have served us well over the last decade they began to gain traction about four years ago and served to educate many of us about the possibilities. Linkedin has especially been a training ground for staffing professionals as it continues to offer a powerful experience and exceptional value.
Last year's pioneering launch of an internal corporate network by Starbucks based on a MySpace-like template received many accolades earlier this year (ERE Awards for example) and was seen as a call to action for many employers. This year it also seems every college alumni organization, fraternal group or professional association is or will soon be launching a social network restricted to their constituents - repeat restricted. Recruiters of course will easily gain access, but that's not the point. The point, as Dave Lefkow noted in his article, is that the real explosion of networking is yet to come.
We see many of these "natural affinity" groups developing non-advertising network models supported by donations, subscription or membership fees to ensure the credibility of the organization as a trusted steward of personal information. The potential is enormous.
- Print and other traditional media classifieds as well as their online job board analogs are in the last stages as a pure play- simply listing a company's openings and little else. Employers will soon stop paying for the exposure of their job openings. Employers will, however, pay for dynamic services (tools that work in real time and don't tick off the user):
- Distributing job openings to the networks that produce more and better hires.
- Targeting potential candidates in ways that look more like a rifle shot than a shotgun (search engine marketing, keywords, vetted lists, name generation, etc.).
- Matching capabilities that can truly translate the language of job seekers and the language of employers so their discussion moves to a mutually helpful plane. Have you mapped an armed services rating to your internal job titles and descriptions?
- Mapping and tracking a supply chain flow of leads to hires by screening leads to identify contacts. Screening contacts to identify prospects. Screening prospects to identify candidates.
- Screening candidates to identify applicants. Etc.
- Assessing and Testing applicants to predict which will be more successful - and sharing the data with them.
Every new staffing tool seems to be touting features that encroach on traditional and established online models but building them in new ways at lower costs. Itzbig and Checkster are examples and recent entries from successful industry pioneers who have learned and returned with new ideas on new platforms. We recently described Itzbig's mashup (part job board, part ATS) as different from the established way of doing things as when Dick Fosbury decided to abandon the Western Roll and flop backwards over the high-bar. Checkster, on the other hand, gets jobseekers to engage in peer generated, self- assessment behaviors with an ease and depth we have not seen before.Job boards are evolving rapidly and Jobing which only recently had its coming out party (at the Palms in Las Vegas during SHRM's national conference) leaped into the spotlight. Jobing has actually been fine tuning its approach for years and is more evolved than any of its competitors will likely give them credit for. Their strategy employs little rocket science and mostly elbow grease. It is true grass-roots, organization by organization effort that is deep and has successfully been implemented in more than a dozen locales. Their one at a time approach works when most others are still trying to vie for attention by renaming stuff that doesn't as "hyperlocal."
It was inevitable (in hindsight) that the three largest job boards would partner with just about every willing newspaper in the US. While we believe these partnerships are, for the most part, in name only they do offer an enormous potential play to leverage the strength of each toward a common goal- influencing hiring decisions of employers and job seekers in a local market. While this is still elusive (given the print mentality) there is at least some hope of translating traffic's faux results into serious hiring numbers. We're convinced the likely outcome is that one will buy the other out and then amazingly their combined classified income will match what newspapers alone made 15 years ago.
In 2007 Job seekers will pay for:
- Job Coaching - if the coach has the ability to help make the companies a job seeker targets truly transparent i.e. guide connections to people (using social network apps). There are now 30,000 coaches- most are still clueless. There are no standards.
And, perhaps, the seeds are being planted for job seekers to soon pay for:
The Truth about their chances to compete for a specific job. (Something employers will resist doing to the very last). We are finding a few more firms willing to play but delivering is still like searching for the unicorn - a difficult hunt without a horn, a horse and a lot of glue.
Access to ALL the jobs existing on ALL company websites in a given location in a given industry with a specific title that were posted in the last 24 hours. Still a mystery. Only the claim is commonly found on most job boards today.
- Distributing job openings to the networks that produce more and better hires.
- Candidate care is increasingly becoming the central tool employers use to measure whether their process is effective. There may not be consistent standards around whether the candidate is (as we maintain) anyone who throws their hat in the ring or, (as in most cases) restricted to the qualified candidates selected for final interviews. Still, this year, the interest in and the number of competitive companies who are actively developing, measuring and improving their candidate care efforts has exploded.
- Online video is the medium of the moment. An explosion of video-related products in staffing is evident from almost any perspective you care to use. At the SHRM conference in Las Vegas where 750 vendors populated 1350 booths, we counted more than two dozen video resume, video screening, video interview, and video job description services. In addition to the publicity of YouTube, the ease of use, low cost and the ability to capture so much more information than text or even audio has contributed significantly to ramping up new approaches. We still think that searching the actual .wav or mp3 file itself to develop a paired comparison of qualified candidates against specific job criteria is a must and still a ways off. We are also fans of virtual job shadowing capabilities - combining videos, journals and blogs of new employees during their initial weeks of work.
- International integration is the number one challenge facing companies that view themselves as global. Conflicting international mores about selection are the true poster children for cognitive dissonance. Increasingly, global staffing leaders have made the effort to learn what local practices will truly benefit the firm and what practices need to conform to a global model. Efforts to build global staffing pages have made significant headway in the last year.
-- Article courtesy of Gerry Crispin, SPHR and Mark Mehler of CareerXroads.
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