Liquid HR

Linkedin Becoming the 500 Pound Recruiting Gorilla

Linkedin is starting to become the 500 pound HR gorilla. Fine by me. It has long since evolved past the novelty of being a simple social rolodex. It's got applications, status microblogging, "like" features, groups, and all the other things you're familiar with. And it's had, as we know, job postings -- including those direct to candidate (for which candidates can express a preference).

What I find interesting are two points:

-The continued evolution of profile details.

Over the months and years there are more details that people can use to describe themselves. Linkedin looks like it's just released the ability to add languages, certifications, patents, publications, and skills.

You know, I don't want to sound full of myself, but I have to wonder whether linkedin is slowly executing the vision I attempted with liquid-cv. A centralized place for a standardized CV / resume. These fields look a lot like the HR-XML standard fields. I'll ask around to see if this is exactly what they're doing.

-The semantic (AI) layer being applied towards looking for jobs.

That is, the "Jobs you may be interested in" section. I love it. It's taking all that profile information we are slowly structuring through tags and enhanced profile details and matching it to job specs. Seems to come up with some good suggestions -- a hell of a lot better than some of the crap that recruiters have called me about in the past.

I think Linkedin has the muscle to pull off driving the Liquid HR vision in full force. 

This will crush many traditional recruiting companies. Good. There will be some that survive and evolve of course. I talked recently to a company that sells into recruiters, and there definitely was the fear of linkedin -- like the Microsoft of the recruiting world that can just eat your lunch if it wants to. 

CVs for people, CVs for companies: bi-directional flow of information

Most career consultants would tell you that it's important during an interview not only to answer the company's questions, but also to interview the interviewer. This supposedly means you're "switched on" - a "go-getter" - not some kind of jobslut that will take whatever job is offered. Interviewing the interviewer should, in theory, also improve the selection process, by helping candidates self select.

In reality, candidates sometimes ask intelligent questions, but often ask softball questions for which the interviewer has rehearsed responses, like "we work and play hard," or "If you make a contribution, your work will definitely be recognized," or "it's a friendly work environment." Oh come on. Just once I'd like to hear: "If you make a contribution, your boss will take the credit," or "a lot of people are competitive, poorly mannered jerks in the office." I remember once a large consultancy's HR representative asked me, during a 5-hour multi-stage interview, whether I had gone to their on-campus presentation weeks before. I said "no, those presentations are all the same." I digress.

The problem is that there are no official documents or processes to enforce this bi-directional flow of information between candidate and interviewer. There are no standard questions a candidate might ask an interviewer that elicit insightful answers. We have CVs and resumes for candidates, but not the equivalent for companies. We have psychometric tests for candidates, but no group-culture examinations for the hiring companies. We have references for candidates, but what of the company? What are we to read, the annual report, or the classic PR sales job? Should we listen to Jobcasts? None of this information gives us enough of what we're looking for.

My Angle

I present to you the idea of a Corporate CV. Inside the Corporate CV we have a collection of valuable information, such as:

• Corporate Culture: a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the company's values and processes based on structured questionnaires deployed to employees;
• Employee List: list of people you can talk to that actually work there;
• Accomplishments: things that employees in the company have been able to achieve while at the company;
• Jobs available: simple enough, but also linked to the above.

Think of it. The process of matching candidate and company would be improved, increasing employee retention rates, as employees would self-select and know better what they were getting into. We as candidates can see how our own personality and talents might match the company in its current form, or compensate for the company's deficiencies.

Before you work at a company, wouldn't you want to know: "Who works there? What's it like to work there? What kind of things can a person get done there? What kind of culture do they have? Is my personality a match? Are they direct or indirect when they communicate? What's the management like? What's the career development process?" There's no reason we can't begin to standardize this, but it would first take a structure and a community effort on the part of a company's employees and past employees. Partners, suppliers and customers could potentially feed into this Corporate CV.

Some companies would resist this sort of thing, but I think it's inevitable. The search for talent is always a competitive one - that much more so in the era of global business. So companies are looking for ways to differentiate from one another as potential places to work. And the Internet and Web 2.0 are built for the exchange of information and building of communities.

I won't kid you: I have a project in motion to address this issue. The Bi-directional flow of information is one of three roles that a successful company can play in the new Liquid HR economy - so this is my angle on being a player.

Standardized Resumes and CVs

One of the clear pain points for all job candidates has been, and continues to be, simple data management: the data stored in a CV or resume. Every time a job candidate goes to apply for a job online, she types in information that she's already entered into a thousand other job boards and company websites. Now, many websites ask different questions, and have unique fields of data on their web forms for candidates to fill out. But a lot of these fields are the same over and over -- things like name, address, previous employers, and academic institutions.

Why not simply standardize the data, and put it in a central repository where the candidate can maintain and control its use? Wouldn't this not only save time for the candidate, but also empower candidates in a way that epitomizes the spirit of employee data protection?

The use case would go something like this: I'm a job seeker. I go to "distribute-resume.com" and see a list of 1,000 jobboards and companies. I click on the 35 job boards and companies that interest me. I click on another button, and presto - my resume is sent to them.

"But, wait," you say: "Not all of the websites want the same information." Well, I suppose that's true for the moment, but don't you think they would be happy to take a candidate's CV or resume without having to pay the marketing expense of attracting them in the first place? Surely, they'd take a free CV or resume, and THEN determine whether to keep it.

"But wait," you say, "Maybe not. They don't want just any candidate." Well, then, "distribute-resume.com" could preclude the wrong candidates from sending a resume /CV to the more exclusive websites. (OK, so I just gave away some of my old business plan. But never mind that.)

"But wait," you say: "candidates format and customize their CV or resume for specific companies or jobs." Well, a fair amount of that is because recruiters with low-attention span don't have time to read more than a page or two. If you turn the CV into structured data, software can do the first pass review instead of people, and the CV can be reformatted easily to fit the reviewer's needs. I spoke with an executive search company once about this, and estimated it cost them about 3,000 GBP (that's 6,000 of our banana-backed U.S. dollars) per year for a small recruiting agency to reformat CVs and resumes. With standardized data CVs and resumes, that all becomes automated.

Suppose you think that's too far fetched. So you do it a different way: every time a candidate visits a company website or job board that's part of "distribute-resume.com's" consortium, the candidate can click on a "distribute resume.com" icon, and her basic CV / resume information is pulled from "distribute-resume.com" into your current website's webform via XML. It would speed up a candidate's application online! A much improved experience.

My Angle

OK, I just gave away a chunk of my old business plan (just replace distribute-resume.com with Liquid CV. Note the cute little waterdrop icon on the liquid-cv website). It's a great idea, but I couldn't pull it off, so I focused on something else more oriented around the bi-directional flow of data (though you can still get your very own  XML CV on the site).

Back to the idea. How do we do this? Standardized Data to begin with. It's one of the three components of the Liquid HR economy. My thought was to use HR-XML's resume standard, but there's no reason we couldn't expand upon this. Of course, the more granular the data, the better. Right now, the idea of using standardized data is happening behind the scenes - in a more B2B context, but not with the consumer experience in mind. Check out my earlier review of iProfile to get an example.

This is a challenging proposal, because it requires the distribute-resume.com to do business development on the B2B / consortium end of the market, as well as the consumer (candidate) market. But it will eventually happen. Most of the time people spend customizing CVs and retyping them is a waste of time. Screw this. Turn the resume / CV into data, and let people manage it themselves.

Back to basics: the HR industry is broken

The HR industry is broken. That's why we have so much competition in the HR vertical online, yet the basic problems are still not solved. We all have our horror stories - there are many and of many different shades, shapes and sizes. People submitting themselves to psychometric exorcizes which analyze their personality and then tell them they're not worthy. Meetings with recruiters who do nothing more but pattern matching between a CV or resume and a job description. Candidates repetitiously keying in personal and professional background information each time they apply for a job at a different corporate website. The same information over and over. Recruiters paying large sums of money to job boards to post their jobs -- only to receive hundreds or even thousands of applications from the wrong kind of people. Money spent for no value. Poor data exchange. Middlemen. Pain.

   

How do we fix it? We create a Liquid HR economy. Where if there is an opening - a job available - it's filled immediately with a good qualified candidate. Like the financial markets - where we have standardized information flowing around in a liquid economy. And it goes beyond that. More than just jobs and CVs – it’s people learning about companies, and companies learning about company, in order to make the best matches.

   

There are three components of this economy: liquidity of information, bi-directional flow of information, and standardization of information. There are three roles one can play in this economy: information conduit, information source, and information matcher.

   

The stars are aligning, and the Liquid HR economy is beginning to happen. Job information is starting to flow, and we're seeing the dawn of liquid candidate information. Information about companies is starting to flow as well. I've got my own project to bring the elements together and add my own chunk of value to the equation as an information source and a matcher. We're solving the problem. Let me know if you're interested in learning more.

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.