He poses the question, why haven’t we found 1500-word postings about how much we love a particular enterprise app? I know there are VMS vendors that come to this blog, and if you sell one, what do your users rave about?
Before I go further, we should probably define the term “user.” Which cross-section of your users do have in the front of your mind when developing your software? Your clients? Your hiring managers? Your suppliers?
Lest I get labeled again as the Anti-VMS (which, I’m not…I would **love** to love VMS, I just haven’t found The One To Love yet), Michael Nygard’s post is about enterprise apps in general and lists the following reasons why users aren’t writing love essays about them.
They serve their corporate overlords, not their users.
VMS is sold on streamlining processes and also reporting capabilities. Perhaps it simplifies it for purchasing organizations. Perhaps its reporting capabilities give a sense of control. However, at the kernel of it all, is the hiring process. Are requisitions distributed more efficiently because of VMS? Are vendors submitting the best candidates, at the shortest time possible, because of VMS? Can you answer this from your suppliers’ point of view? Remember, your suppliers are your users, too.
They only do gray-suited, stolidly conservative things.
The post uses the example of corporate instant messaging. Let’s apply this to VMS. Oh no, she didn’t! You might say. Are you really talking about allowing staffing vendors talk to hiring managers? Yeah huh. It seems the whole idea is to make sure that doesn’t happen. Sure, vendors can get annoying, and yeah they tend to do “backdoor” stuff behind the VMO’s back, but if communication between right vendors (ie, the ones with legitimate reqs) and hiring managers is allowed, there would be no need to go behind the VMO’s back. Vendors don’t enjoy sneaking around. It’s exhausting, inefficient, and risky. But sometimes, a vendor’s gotta do to get the right information. So. How about it? How about something radical like built-in instant messaging client for VMS? Complete with “ignore” button. Heck. A vendor asks way too many stupid questions over IM? A vendor pings a hiring manager “just to say hello?” IGNORE. Too many “ignores” on a vendor? Kick them out.
Nygard goes on some more, but let me ask the question again. Do you have a VMS that you just absolutely love? We’re not talking VMO’s, just the software. Do you love it enough that you might blog about it? I’m not beyond writing about things I love. I’ve declared my love for all things Mac on many posts and around the blogosphere and yet I’m not being paid to do it, nor is Apple promising me any business.
I’m rambling here, but let me pose a question. How can the staffing industry create passionate users?
I watch the traffic on this blog and most are still coming here looking for information: “who are so and so’s clients?” Let’s get beyond this for a little bit. If you are a VMS company and you were to find that coveted list of VMS users here…what would you tell those potential clients? What makes you so awesome? What are your users raving about?
I came across HireMeNow.com a few days ago while surfing the Interwebs. From looking at the HireMeNow website, it is marketing itself as the “first online temporary employment marketplace, where employers can recruit for their own temps from their database of candidates and pay an across-the-board mark-up of 42%. Candidates get to name their own price and sign up for free, promising that they will never have to deal with a staffing agency again.
Let’s take a closer look at what HireMeNow.com (or doesn’t) offers.
For candidates:
I’m not aware of temporary staffing firms that ask you to pay for an application. Without candidates/applicants, our databases are worth nothing. In fact, we go through great lengths to seek candidates out. A candidate should never have to pay a staffing firm to sign up, not even to utilize a service such as getting a video resume done. It is counterintuitive for a temporary staffing firm to charge people for signing up.
Temporary staffing firms, their recruiters, in particular, are your advocates. They are not there to make your life difficult. They screen your resumes, copy-edit them in case you missed any typos or grammatical errors, reformat them in their clients’ preferred formats, submit them through their clients’ preferred methods, prep you before you meet their clients in an interview. They can give you insights about their clients that you would not otherwise get just posting your resume out on a job board.
The website features a testimonial from a Global VP of Human Relations:
“I never understood why I had to rely on a temp agency to pick workers for me - I would rather do it myself - online, faster, cheaper, better. With HireMeNow.com, now I can.”
42% is TOO EXPENSIVE FOR A PAYROLL SERVICE
At 42% mark-up, you are taking on the recruiting process and just having HireMeNow payroll the workers. This option is actually available through your temporary agency, at a much LOWER cost. I am willing to bet that there are agencies out there who would love to payroll a worker that you found yourself at 32%, way less than the 42% that HireMeNow is quoting. For a much lower rate, a temporary agency will even do a background check for you. It would cost you a “small fee” on top of HireMeNow’s 42%.
Heck, depending on the position, some will even recruit at 42% mark-up. They will source, qualify, interview, coordinate interviews between you and your candidate, do hire paperwork, etc. All that, for 42% mark-up. If you can’t find an agency that will do that, send me an e-mail.
While it might seem “faster, cheaper, better” to hire a temporary worker yourself, there are many things to consider. Is it really cost-effective for an executive to spend time sourcing, qualifying, interviewing, recruiting, on-boarding a temporary worker? Perhaps, for one or two contingent workers. But even then, as I said, 42% is way above industry standards.
Am I missing totally missing the point about HireMeNow?
My friend Hasan Diwan tagged me on a note in Facebook, asking for thoughts:
The relationship economy suggests the traditional resume should die a quiet death. A resumè (or a CV) is a single-page summary designed to open the door to a job just enough to entice the company to interview you. In this sense, the resume will always survive, in one form or another. Perhaps it will merge in with the cover letter? Any other readers have thoughts. Please share them.
I am not sure what the resumè will evolve to, only that it will…but I am willing to bet it would still be text-based.
Say what you will about keywords, but how else are recruiters supposed to retrieve relevant search results out of millions of resumès out there? Perhaps it would evolve to be multimedia, as we are now seeing with video resumès and the like, but the fact remains, the recruiter or hiring manager still need to find their way to the resumè.
I think Dan Robles is definitely going somewhere here:
It must be read, analyzed, sorted and vetted by social networks and communities of practice. It must integrate with knowledge assets from anywhere in the world. A self-perfecting algorithm must be developed for a predictive percentile search engine in a pull system that seeks, matches, and deploys the ’secret sauce’ of success, specific to any application, anywhere, any time - and fast.
But my two cents: “vetted by social networks and communities of practice,” I read “huge potential for this algorithm to be gamed, just as we game Google’s algorithms.” It seems it would be a bigger mess, eh? Besides…this is already being done.
“Vetted by social networks and communities of practice…” Staffing firms are in a sense micro social networks and communities of practice made up of candidates, recruiters, clients. Candidates and their resumès are vetted in the recruiting process by recruiters and then by hiring managers who provide additional feedback. Staffing firms who have close relationships with their candidates and their clients definitely have this “secret sauce of success.”
David Searns from Haley Marketing (not brown-nosing, but it’s a site that I’ve used as a valuable resource over the last several years) opened up the Pandora’s Box of social media in my previous post – ROI!
I definitely agree with David, that blogging (or any other activity, for that matter), need to present economic value to an organization to justify doing it in the first place. That said, I personally don’t think blogging will directly lead to reduced recruiting costs, reduced sales costs, or increased revenue from current clients, and even if it does, I’m not sure what tangible metrics one can present to support it.
A blog isn’t a magic tool that will do any of this, and anyone who remotely thinks it would, might as well just not do it at all because they are going to be severely disappointed. There’s just no way a blog, in itself, will deliver measurable savings or increased revenue.
The trouble with social media measurement is that we’re attempting to quantify the value of human engagement and human interaction. How do you measure a shift in attitude within your target market? If your participation in conversations around a certain topic results in you being viewed as a subject matter expert, or if it earns you trust points from your readers who just might be potential clients, how do we quantify these?
But I do agree, metrics are absolutely necessary because if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. So the question for social media would be, what would you measure and how would you measure it?
There are lots of things you can measure, it’s just a matter of which items represents the goals you are trying to accomplish. Are you going for pageviews? A higher Google Pagerank? Referrals to your website? Trackbacks? Technorati Authority? Number of comments? Number of subscribers to your feed? Number of followers on Twitter?
It’s still early on, but perhaps after more data is available, one can make a correlation between pageviews, referrals, Google Pagerank, etc with revenue and savings. I’m personally not there yet, but it’s definitely something I would like to measure once I have data.
I suppose the bottom line is that while social media must be taken seriously within an organization, it should be seen as a part of a larger strategy.
While I truly enjoyed the Careerbuilder and Monster ads on this weekend’s Superbowl, I can’t help but think that it seems to be appealing to a shrinking demographic of the employed.
So perhaps they are the target audience — the passive job seekers. I still don’t think it’s a very appealing message. I can almost bet that while there are people who cry as they pull into their office parking lot, they are also thankful that they have a job to complain about.
So among recruiters out there, are you really selling only to the unhappy? I personally would rather sell to those who are aiming for upward mobility, not those running away.
At the risk of shameless pandering…I’d like to take a moment here to congratulate the company I work for, ATR, for launching a blog.
Being employed at ATR, I recognize that it does look like I’m essentially congratulating myself here by even mentioning it in my **personal** blog. But I mention it because I have received an e-mail here and there from people who want to start their own staffing blog and they were wondering about how to get started.
What I could share about launching the ATR blog, is that it definitely took a long time to even get it up and running. I’m not talking about commitments to post, not even installing a blogging platform. The decision to launch the blog was definitely a long, drawn-out process. We had to look at our objectives, we had to look at the risks. We had to consider our potential readers and how the blog would benefit them. Most corporate blogs aren’t trusted and are thought of as just another PR or marketing maneuver, so keeping that in mind, we had to think about how we were going to earn the trust of our readers.
The bottom line is…we just want a good, genuine blog.
Someone asked me over e-mail what I think makes up a “good staffing blog.” I can go on and on about it, but a “good blog” should help you accomplish a goal, and to me, a blog’s purpose isn’t to sell your organization. That function belongs to the corporate site. If I want to read about a company, I will go straight to their website. It’s not a place to publish whitepapers. There are more appropriate sections for that on a corporate site. To me, a corporate blog’s purpose is to allow outsiders insight into the minds of the people that make up an organization.
Wow. That sounds like a mouthful.
How does that apply to the staffing industry? A blog isn’t a place to post jobs for free. It isn’t a place to sell your candidates. It isn’t a place to sell your services. It’s a place to discuss things that are affecting the industry in a more candid fashion. Who would care? These days? I’d imagine that a lot of people are looking to us for pertinent insights into where we think the economy is going. After all, our business is employment.
I’ve been yapping away…I don’t think I’m trying to make a point, just my **personal** thoughts on the launch of the ATR blog.
I recently joined a VMS group on LinkedIn, but I don’t see a lot of discussion happening there, aside from a recruiter looking for an OpenVMS analyst, who probably didn’t notice that the group was about Vendor Management Systems and not Open Virtual Memory Systems.
So I posed a question — you can answer below under comments, or in the LinkedIn VMS group — how has the VMS landscape changed a year after Chimes’ bankruptcy?
Yes, sure, I did call this my “staffing blog,” but the web gal in me would like to make a quick comment about websites, particularly those that don’t function right when I’m using browsers other than Internet Explorer.
I’m not a big fan of IE, but when my developer hat is on, I keep my IE users in mind. I’m all about accessibility and would like to be compliant with as many browsers as possible. But Lisa the web surfer uses everything BUT Internet Explorer. I use Chrome on my Windows machine at work, Safari and Firefox on my Macbook Pro, and Safari on my iPhone, plus a concoction of mashups for my RSS subscriptions.
Please, please, please…I just want to view them in Chrome.
Did I mention that I don’t use the “contact us” page or send a message to the webmaster?
So a quick consolation takeaway from this post…if you’re a site owner, have you tried accessing your website from other browsers? Have you tried looking at it from a mobile browser? Does your site require plugins to display correctly?
Information that can’t be accessed isn’t useful at all.
Here’s a short, awesome video with tips on how to get found on LinkedIn.
DJ Patil says the networking site is seeing hiring activity and definitely an increase in membership, and says people are taking steps to look attractive to recruiters in this job environment.
Patil mentions that people are using the site to control their personal brand.
My two cents: in this age of social networking, one must control and keep an eye on their personal brand online at all times — recession or no recession, job hunting or not.
What does your LinkedIn profile look like? Here’s mine. Please feel free to critique and while you’re at it, connect with me.
As someone whose job description includes search engine optimization, I have to brag about being the #1 search result on Google, albeit on a very specific phrase: “staffing blog.”
Unfortunately, my #1 status on Google says very little about my authority. I don’t have an inferiority complex or anything, but my point is that the staffing industry hasn’t quite caught up with social media, blogging in particular. There are plenty of recruiters who blog about their trade because god knows there are plenty of things to write about in recruiting, so why not staffing?
I was actually not Googling myself when I saw that I was on top. I was looking for other staffing blogs to link to for my new blogroll and came up with pretty much the same results when I did this almost two years ago.
Does anyone know of any staffing blogs that I can add to my blogroll and reader?
I came across 
