Liquid HR

Broadbean: job posting distribution, liquid style

Broadbean is a service that allows recruiters and companies to distribute job postings to a variety of job boards, and to track job applications from these channels (job boards). So the scenario is: I'm a recruiter, I want to put my job advertisement on 75 job boards, but I don't feel like keying in the posting 75 times. I put it into Broadbean, click 75 checkboxes (one for each job board), and presto - the job will be distributed. That's their "adcourier" product. If I want to track which of these job boards is the most successful in eliciting applications, I can buy the Broadbean aplitrak product.

   

The recruiter or hiring company needs to 1: pay Broadbean for at least a basic adcourier service and 2: establish an independent commercial relationship with the job board. It's up to the job board to determine whether they want to charge the recruiter, but most do. On the other side, individual job boards pay a one-time setup fee of 1000 GBP (now over 2000 of our banana-backed American dollars) to be able to receive jobs from recruiters via Broadbean.

   

Technically speaking, the jobs come as relatively well structured XML documents, which includes roughly 20 dated-related fields (job title, duration, etc.).  The XML format is simpler than, say, the HR-XML standard for positions, but looks suspiciously similar. It is more structured than Google's unworkably bloblike full-of-garbage Googlebase XML data, and a bit more structured than indeed.com. In addition, job boards can customize these fields a bit – though this may turn off potential recruiters who would otherwise send through a job via standard Broadbean format.

   

OK, let me confess that I've actually worked with Broadbean on my own project to find some of these things out. I found them a pretty easy group to work with. And according to their Corporate CV's corporate culture assessment, their employees are a happy bunch with a balanced, if not slightly driven culture. I perceive Broadbean to be rather European in its style: rather than a high volume, free-of-charge service, you have to pay (more) to get into the Broadbean infrastructure, but your quality of service is better. Costly, but good, like the mobile phone networks.

   

But this does give rise to one complaint: job boards still must do business development with the recruiters that use Broadbean; just because you’re part of the eco-system doesn’t mean recruiters want to use you. As an intermediary, Broadbean would do well to encourage more matches between its buyers and sellers (recruiters and job boards).

   

My Angle:

   

Broadbean fits in with the Liquid HR economy, as they contribute to two of three Liquid HR components. They give a good start at standardizing HR data with a relatively structured XML feed. However, time will have tell whether their feed is structured enough to encourage more intelligent processing and matching of the data by job boards and networking communities. Furthermore, Indeed.com’s UK launch will be pressuring Broadbean. While indeed.com’s business model requires no fee, it also means their data is less structured. Broadbean would be wise to continue to exploit and maintain this qualitative difference, and should consider a larger counter-attack in the U.S. (I can see U.S. jobster is already onboard).

   

Broadbean’s large network of recruiters and job boards definitely encourages liquidity of HR information flow, but of course their membership fees preclude total liquidity. As far as matchmaking goes, Broadbean’s aplitrak product apparently helps clients not only track applications, but filter spam applications out as well. This is interesting: Broadbean is making a play at being more than a conduit of information, but being a matchmaker (at least for pre-screening purposes) as well – two of the three roles available for a Liquid HR company.

   

According to Broadbean’s claims ( 60% of the top 250 staffing firms; last month distributed in excess of 1.2 million ads. ) and press releases, it’s doing quite well. I’ve heard recruiters refer to them while doing business development in the UK. I think the big question is how less structured job aggregators like indeed.com develop – that is, how fares the battle between structured (XML) Intranet data and unstructured Internet data. Either way, Broadbean is worth a look even for U.S. players – but remember that if you are a job board, it’s an infrastructure play, not an advertiser for your services.

Zubka review: open the HR pipeline

Zubka.com is a combination job / board referral site, where members can collect a bounty by placing somebody in a job that's posted on Zubka. That is, it's a website where anybody can effectively be a recruiter, and where hiring companies are encouraged to post more jobs because they only pay if a match is made. The success-oriented fee (bounty) solves a big problem in HR, as many companies pay to post jobs on job boards, only to receive a flood of applications from unsuitable candidates. Zubka effectively charges companies to target specific candidates with jobs, by turning its members into job-candidate matchmaking engines. On the other side of the transaction, Zubka provides member-recruiters an online referral collection mechanism: a way to make money from their networking skills.

OK, I like it. But there are some minor problems. Little tech-teething issues (I often get an exception thrown and not caught), and there are not so many jobs just yet. I tried searching for management consultancy positions, and project management positions, and it looks like all of them are being advertised by, guess who? Recruiters. OK, this isn't so surprising, but I can't help but feel the waters are a bit muddied.

Zubka creates value by either 1: disintermediation (replacing recruiters with Zubka members) or 2: Improving effectiveness of recruiters already in place (Hiring company-> recruiter -> Zubka member ->more and better pre-screened candidates). So, the first big question is simply whether companies can spend less on recruiting because Zubka is in the mix.

The second big question is whether members will be able to successfully collect on bounties. As resumes, CVs and jobs are increasingly available on various online channels, it becomes increasingly difficult to claim a bounty, without dispute, for a referral. Personally, I'd be a bit afraid to refer candidates to recruiters, as they might claim they already had the candidate on their own database despite my time and energy invested. This could lead to a multi-party legal dispute.

My Angle:

Remember, in order to foment the Liquid HR revolution, we must have bi-directional flow of HR data, standardization of HR data, and liquidity of HR data. Data has to flow everywhere. And, in order to be a player in the Liquid HR economy, a company must be either a conduit for HR information, an information provider (about candidates or jobs), or a matching engine that matches buyers and sellers (candidates and jobs).

Zubka motivates everyday people to act like recruiters. It encourages them to send job info to candidates, and candidates (resumes / CVs) to companies. So Zubka contributes to the liquidity of HR data, and acts a bit like an HR data conduit. Furthermore, assuming its members are at all selective when referring jobs to candidates, Zubka is acting like an HR matchmaker; or a pre-screening service of sorts. So, indeed, Zubka is adding value to the Liquid HR environment.

What's the danger? Well, in the abstract, as HR information becomes more liquid and standardized, Zubka will need to depend on its members' matchmaking efforts in order to be valuable (and make money) in the Liquid HR economy. Of course, in the meantime, Zubka will gain a lot more traffic (as a conduit), upon which it can capitalize. Furthermore, there are the classic Internet issues -- more ambitious, incumbent job boards can just add a bounty mechanism, assuming it wouldn't cannibalize their own revenues.

Verdict: I think this company is going to make it. We'll be watching.

Jobster.com the HR mashup

So Jobster.com is a jobboard mashup. It displays salary information for jobs from payscale.com, and various job postings via some kind of spider (I think) that pulls them from other sites – if they’re not directly posted to Jobster by members.

 

Hmm. There was a time when I looked at Jobster with grudging respect for its lovely big Web 2.0 features and smooth integration of the above features, but my sense now is that they’re jack of all trades, master of none. As a mashup, they have a decent web interface, but are not integrating enough features and services, not applying strict enough logic to the integration, and not consistently adding enough value to the whole mix.

 

My Analysis leads me to believe that people don’t seem to network there. The job postings seem redundant – I wonder whether the same position is often pulled from multiple sources. Blogging?...I think that’s gone now...

     

Now, their founders may chastise me as ignorant of their success – perhaps adsense and direct job posting revenues (a minimal fee) are making the company cashflow positive…but I have my doubts. Without a clear idea of what I am doing on a website, and what it can offer me, I tend to leave. I don’t want to network on jobster. I don’t want to search for jobs. I don’t want to be there. But, I do want to visit again in a few months.

            

Analyzing stuff...

 

While the network was undeveloped and the job board content seemed shakey, one feature of interest were the jobster's "inside scoop" feature, where members can talk about their experiences at certain companies. This seems to be available for companies with associated jobs posted directly to jobster. Unfortunately, as most jobs are pulled in from external sources, "inside scoop" is a very inconsistent feature. Additional tabs for members and jobs associated with the company reminds me a lot of Liquid CV's Corporate CV layout. [ Read more on the analysis ... ]

   

My suspicion is that Jobster shares our Liquid HR vision, but hasn’t found a way be a component in the Liquid HR economy. They hint at understanding the importance of bi-directional information, by providing members with a way to talk about experiences at the company. But this is a start – I don’t think the feature goes far enough to elicit or structure the feedback, and is inconsistent across the jobs and companies listed. Jobster hints at understanding the importance of standardization of information flow (by allowing job applicants to be exported via XML), and probably by importing some jobs via XML, but this doesn’t go far enough. Probably can’t get the partnerships (yet?). Jobster hints at understanding the important of Liquidity of Information Flow, by importing job postings as well as value-add services (e.g. payscale.com), but again, not far enough – the data (jobs) doesn’t seem to be clean. The member profile information is negligible.

   

My suspicion is that jobster is doing the right thing in trying what they’re trying, but their strategy is all over the place. Their mix of structure and unstructured information makes the interface messy and the user experience inconsistent. Their global, pan-industry focus distracts from capturing an audience or attracting specific jobs that might foster a better user community or more consistently structured information to accompany jobs.

Jobster, bless you for trying, bless you for being the leading competitor in the Liquid HR vision, and bless you for all your mistakes that we can learn from. We’ll watch. We’ll talk.

Horrible interviews, and what to do about it

I once did a psychometric evaluation with a psychologist poking around in my psyche in front of the hiring managers. On a Sunday. In another country. It was really weird. I had answered a battery of 240 questions some weeks prior, and now my results were being analyzed by a registered shrink while the potential hiring manager watched. It took close to 2 hours, but there were no real time limits. Apparently, I'm quite diplomatic and optimistic (I'll leave out any potentially bad scores or flagrant boasts). The real juicy part was when they departed from professional and started in on personal stuff. But what the hell, I signed up for the torrents of international business a long time ago.

So what's the fundamental problem with interviews? For that matter, the hiring process in general? Answer: It's way too one-sided. Companies learn all about us - we don't really learn about them. We can't apply the same scrutiny. This is strange, as it would help both us and the hiring companies if we did have such access.

Let me be gratuitous: rather than acting as if they are looking for a mate, partner, or a business equivalent, companies are still looking for commodities to acquire (candidates). Each commodity item has an ingredients label (CV or resume), and the hiring process allows the company to inspect the commodity, kick its tires, raise its lips above its gum line, see if gets along well with others. Psychometrics. Reference checks. Interviews.

The Golden Rule:

My feeling is that by allowing candidates to do gain equivalent access to information about the company, the candidate will feel more comfortable and respected, the selection / matching process will be greatly improved, and employee retention will improve. We need a CV for companies. We need a corporate culture analysis equivalent to an individual's psychometric analysis. We need a bi-directional flow of information.

When in interviews they ask me if "I'm a glass half full" or a "glass half empty" guy, I respond but ask them the same question.

Podcasting, videocasting, jobcasting: getting there slowly

So, there is a not so new phenomena: job podcasting, in which we hear interviews with representatives of a hiring company. There's also video interviews, sometimes with little mini-documentaries of companies, showing images of corporate campuses and offices. Hail the Googleplex in San Francisco. Anyway, let's refer to this family of items as jobcasts, shall we?

Pundits will extol jobcasts for utilizing a new medium to break out of the old corporate PR propoganda stream; viewers and listeners can really get inside of the company now. I think this is a bit unfounded. From what I've seen so far, a jobcast is about the equivalent of a first round phone interview with HR, and in the best case, inclusive of a tour around the building. I've partaken of various jobcasts, and that's about what I get out of it. Yes, there is value, but no, this is not what we're discussing when we talk about Bi-directional flow of information. This is an improvement in the efficiency of the current job hiring process.

So, there are sites like Career TV and blogs like Jobs In Pods, where companies have little interviews -- usually between their HR representative and a softball throwing interviewer who asks what seem to be pretty scripted, standardized questions. Again, this is better than a job ad on a website, but it really isn't getting a candidate any more information than they would have gotten in a standard corporate interviewing process.

The problem is that Jobcasts don't break into measured and qualified corporate culture information, or prospects for career improvement. They don't expose much beyond the standard corporate message. They don't reciprocate the candidate for his or her CV, psychometric profile, work portfolio, professional references, and performance history against targets. They don't yield what I call a "Corporate CV" (Go ahead, click here if you dare) - the reciprocation required for the Bi Directional flow of information.

Even if you allowed lots of employees (rather than HR representatives) to jobcast, the medium itself -- broadcast videos and podcasts -- would be too exposing for employees to say anything meaningful. Employees would need a safer structure; almost like an accounting standard -- where, for instance, corporate culture could be measured, along with job satisfaction, progression against career goals, etc.

So, we'll keep cracking on, searching for the answer. "Jobcasting" is an incremental improvement.

monster.com is dying

I think this says a lot:

Facebook making corporate citizens?

Facebook's new ad service, as has been documented, is a three pronged approach:

1. Company Sites. It allows companies to create their own webpages, where other people can add feedback and become fans of the company, upload videos and pictures (not sure of what -- company parties and picnics? I guess promos.), etc. Really, it's not much more than a tweak of current facebook framework for people. But it's already working. You might even find a Liquid CV Facebook presence...
2. Social Ads. I'm still getting my arms around this, but apparently this is a system whereby facebook has a cookie on your computer, and when you come upon a facebook "social ads" customer or partner's website, that website reads your facebook cookie to determine your networking profile, and produce a targeted ad. OK, so that sounds a LOT bit like what I was talking about in an earlier post. ( check out this interesting BLOG I found. )
3. Data Mining. This is where customers of facebook get some kind of access to the network mapping information in raw form, which the customer can use for targeted ads on their own. How boring a topic. Data mining is so 90's.

Again, point 2 sounds like the cookie-driven job-ad filtering mechanism I was talking about. OK, so that phrase is a mouthful. Let's call the cookie-driven job-ad filtering mechanism....the cookiejob mechanism. And the job ads that people see with this mechanism are...cookiejobs -- because they're preselected based on the cookie info. I think what will slow the development of the cookiejob mechanism is simply the anti-competitiveness of the online HR industry in general. But it will happen. Hell, I'll inquire about becoming a Facebook cookie partner and think about implementing it on Liquid CV.

But what I really want to talk about is point 1 above -- Company Sites. This means that, owing either to Facebook's reuse of people-oriented website frames and widgets, or by Facebook's grand scheme (I think the former), companies will begin to take on a human face via Facebook. Pardon the almost-pun. This falls in line with the whole concept of corporate citizenship. Now, while I'm cool with CSR, what really intrigues me is that once the company takes on a human face, we begin to expect information about the company as we would a human -- friends, references, maybe even personality (Aha!! Corporate Culture!).  And thus, Facebook has helped generate a bit more towards bi-directional flow of information between companies, potentially hiring, and candidates, albeit in a convoluted and perhaps unintended way.

This is good for hiring! This contributes towards the Liquid HR economy. We just have to figure out how to get a piece of the action.

Google Open Social: stars are aligning

OK, if you recall there are three components of the Liquid HR Economy. What are they again?

1: Direction (Bi-direction) of information flow.

2: Liquidity of Information Flow.

3: Standardization of Information Flow.

And now Google has created OpenSocial, so I think we are making headway with Liquidity and Standardization. I'm going to take a deeper look and see what this API can do towards improving each of the Three. More on this later.

For the moment, I'm visiting blogs and websites that are discussing OpenSocial (is it one word or two?), and I'm starting to sense some mainstream reaction. People are asking: "what's Google getting out of this?" People are lamenting: "I like different social networks -- I like the exclusivity, the differences in rules; I don't want one big social network blob. I like the distinctiveness of different networks."

Q: What's Google getting out of this?

Well, let's begin at the beginning. Google's search engine service led to Google being the middleware platform for internet advertising, helping people put ads on websites (adwords, etc.). The Internet was the platform, and Google capitalized on its function as an ad medium.

Open Social is a strategic extension of that theme: people will use Google's API to again again target people, because social network context and activities are an even more accurate indicator of consumer intention and segmentation. Sorry, I know it sounds crass, but that's how it is, my fellow eaters.

Now let me be clear: ads mean a couple of different things. There are the obvious "Eat at Joe's!" ads (Adwords space), and there is the more abstract form of advertising, where we exploit a social network to get our application or widget used by more people. But, really, that's an ad too. Because it ends up attracting a target audience to our own service or website.

Facebook understands all of this, which is why they followed the growth of their network with an API, and are also launching their own "Eat at Joe's!" style ad platform. This then competes with Google's adwords -- not on the Internet, but on the social network. So naturally Google will counter attack -- if they weren't planning Open Social already. And as we all know, in the technology game, those who do not eventually follow the standard lose the war (unless they can set the standard, and I don't think Facebook can).

Q: Will social networks lose their distinctivess?

No. Pending my research efforts on the API, I'll have an opinion about how much you can really do with it, and what the ramifications are. But at this point, I wouldn't think of the API as a way to create applications for the social networks it accesses. It's a way to get information in and out of the system - it's a way to advertize. If you look on Facebook, the "applications" that people have written there are generally pretty simple, and they really don't break the rules or violate the spirit of the Facebook network. You're still just posting crap on other people's walls and sending them messages. Superpoke is just poke. Fun wall is just wall. So I think the fear that we will suddenly have zombie-biting applications on Linkedin is pretty unfounded. I'm relatively confident that further API investigation will reveal this.

Monster.com, Linkedin.com, and the Liquid HR Economy

Linkedin is a different form of job board that targets people with jobs and some discussion content based on their network connections. Beyond that, it's actually a pretty limited networking tool, because it's not open -- it's more of an online rolodex to keep track of the people that you have already met. Most of the people with whom I'm connected on Linkedin are those I met in the real world. The others are spam-linkers. Introducing yourself to new people on the website requires either purchasing a pay-per introduction product, or submitting your introduction to a chain of potentially uncooperative members connecting yourself to your target. So networking is pretty constrained. (Xing, on the other hand, is more open, but we'll examine that later.)

 

OK, so targeting people based on networks makes sense -- since networking is how most people get jobs anyway. However, the cost for job posting is still a constraint. And keeping a job within a network precludes the scenario where a candidate finds a job outside of their network.... silly me, I thought we loved the Internet because it can link people with opportunities and information that was not available before...?

 

Monster.com and Internet 1.0 job posting was actually going in the right direction: it was making opportunities available to a far broader audience than before. However, Linkedin and similar Internet 1.5 companies (no, linkedin is not Internet 2.0) didn't continue evolving this model, they actually constrained it to the old-world dynamics of using personal networks to find jobs. While this is gratifying in the short-term - providing an incremental improvement to the recruiting process- it actually begins to reverse the progress towards global job and worker movement that monster.com had begun.

   

So why did this happen? Because of spam applications. People put a job requirement on monster.com and got 1,000 applications from unsuitable, unqualified candidates. In response to this, Linkedin and similar companies fall back on the old world solution: keep the job in the family, keep it in the network.

   

So what should we do? Should we go back to monster.com and put a spam filter on it? Well, no, not exactly. Network information about a person can be a valuable differentiator, but that information is slowly starting to open up as Web 1.5 companies become 2.0 companies by opening up their websites with APIs - so that the network information about their members can be extracted and applied to a job matching process.

   

Here's the scenario: I go to www.Jobboard2.0.com or a similar place where there are 1,000 billion jobs listed. I log in. This creates a cookie on my machine, with aggregated information about me pulled from various sources on the net -- zoominfo, rapleaf, linkedin, facebook, all kinds of places. This cookie is read by the big matching engine on Jobboard 2.0, which then pre-selects suitable jobs for me to see (so, if I'm an unsuitable would-be job applicant spammer, I'm filtered out, and never see a job for which I'm unsuitable). I can a much more select list of jobs. I can have my own preferences as well, which narrows the selection even more. It might not need to use a cookie, but creating a normal account might be too time consuming and cumbersome.

   

So what is all of this? Matching, matching, matching. Of course, the matching engine guys will benefit greatly from this - WCC, actonomy, probably a host of others.

   

It's also a much more liquid economy for job applicants and jobs. The suppliers and value adders in this economy are:

• Conduits: Big fat pipe conduits who get and transport the information about candidates;
• Information Providers: Websites and services that can provide unique and interesting information about candidates, which then goes into the Conduits.
• Matching Engines: Who do the best job of matching candidate to job.

But wait -- we've only explored one half of the equation: candidates. What about the jobs? More on that later.

High Level: what's wrong with HR

Let me start from the beginning. I’m going to attack the HR industry. My beachhead is the Internet. I have several strategic positions that I’m going to take. There are some that are helping me who are part of the natural Internet evolution. However, some of those people are being converted by the old enemies who are adapting to the new technology brought by the evolutionaries. What the hell do I mean by that? I’ll tell you later. I'm a little tired.

Strategic Positions in this attack:

1: Direction of information flow. Information needs to flow in both directions for effective hiring and collaboration. Right now if flows from us (Candidates) to them (companies) – they take the information from us. We’re going to start taking the information from them. I’ll explain why we want to start taking information, and how we’re going to take it, later.

2: Liquidity of information flow. We need pipelines for the universal flow of information. We need to open wider the pipelines that are already there. Until recently Internet 1.0 produced regurgitated versions of the old pipeline tycoons – companies like monster.com – who sat on the flow of information and capitalized upon our resumes and CVs.

3: Standardization of information format. Come on, that’s an easy one – what’s the purpose of improving the information pipelines if we can’t read one another’s CVs and job descriptions?

OK. So I’ll rattle off more about these topics in days and weeks and months to come.