Liquid HR

Liquid CV: Personality and Corporate Culture

OK, readers, let me depart momentarily from my usual, objective viewpoint, and announce today that my own project, Liquid CV, has just released some significant feature improvements and will now begin viral marketing efforts. Check out www.liquid-cv.com .

We're working on incorporating personality and corporate culture in the jobhunting and networking process, so I would be quite curious about all of your reactions. We have created various assessments of corporate culture, such as an assessment of the Day to Day work culture and processes:

http://www.liquid-cv.com/questionnaire/D2D

That is, how structured is a company? How direct or indirect are people when communicating? Is it aggressive in its culture? Etc. Anyway, Web 2.0 techniques and user-generated dialog can be employed for getting this kind of community-born information. Individuals can describe themselves, but really only a community can give you a full view of a company. Liquid CV is focused on the bi-directional flow of information. We have CVs for candidates which corporate recruiters can read -- now we have CVs for companies which candidates can read. Of course, liquid-cv is also designed to be open and standardized (to encourage liquidity of information flow).

Jump on, give it a whirl!

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.

Review of itzbig: itznotworking yet

This will be a short post. What the hell does this website do? Some HR pundit out there who I should probably not annoy extolled itzbig on some blog somewhere. It sounded to me as if the itzbig guys were using a matching engine for CVs and Jobs (nothing really new there) to tell you what skills you might need in order to be eligible for a wider range of jobs (kind of new, but poses problems). But when I went to investigate, and first landed on the website, it basically told me, the would-be job seeker, “piss off, there’s no jobs for you.” The next time, it told me to “piss off, we have your email address already.” I didn’t bother with the employer section yet – because why bother if the website tells candidates to piss off? Anyway, I’m annoyed. I’m annoyed because this website was hyped. I'm annoyed because this website looks like it has a nice Web 2.0 interface but secretly is hard to use - at least for me, the dumb user. Itzbig, improve yourself and come back to me in 1 month’s time. Get out of Beta, or whatever.

iProfile (SkillsMarket) review: dying for web 2.0

I'm not sure how to structure my review of iProfile (note, the URL is www.iprofilecentral.com), given the confusion I experienced while getting familiar with their service. Much of this confusion stems from a fundamental assumption I made at the beginning: that iProfile is a consumer offering. In fact, while it has great potential benefit for job seekers, it really is an HR infrastructure play at this point.

Let me start over. iProfile is a service that allows candidates to create an online CV / resume which can then be kept standard across many recruitment agencies. The service is created by the Skills Market, who also offer related HR services. The idea is that rather than maintaining your CV on many recruiters' websites (databases), you can maintain it once and use it across all compatible recruiters. I found, however, that despite this seemingly wonderful attempt at standardization of data, there are some problems.

The root of the problems is that iProfile does not own the customer relationship - yet. The compatible recruiters do. You would never know about iProfile unless a compatible recruiter's website mentioned it. And you have to use some Google magic to find the registration form on the iProfile website (assuming you know about the website). After I found the registration form, I was told that my iProfile account had been created already - when I, erstwhile, uploaded my CV to some recruitment firm's website.

Now, the problem goes beyond simple marketing reach. After (re)registering with iProfile, I logged in and viewed my iProfile CV details, which were a mess. Personal details were in my objective. Companies where I had worked were missing altogether, etc. Why was it a mess? Undoubtedly my word doc CV was parsed (translated) into iProfile format, relying on CV/resume parsing software which is notoriously inconsistent. So I edited my account by hand.

Most recruiter's websites allow you to upload a word doc or text CV; they don't require users to fill out complex CV forms for fear of annoying potential candidates. Therefore, if iProfile is fronted by recruiters' websites, then most iProfile CVs are probably junky until you (knowingly) fix them up.

Next, I registered with two sites on the iProfileExchange list (preferred-it and lorien resourcing), and saw no initial mention of iProfile -- only a simple CV uploading form. So, there was no way for me to know (if I didn't already) that these firms were compatible. A day later, I was emailed an acknowledgement that preferred-IT was iProfile compatible, and that I could check on my iProfile account, which I did, only to find that my CV was again a mess! It seems my uploaded and parsed CV overwrote the edits I had made a day earlier.

OK, such a problem can be fixed with a programmer and a bit of time, but you can see where this is going. It seems like there's a weak alignment of incentives between recruiters and iProfile, and that iProfile is not leveraging consumer power to drive recruiters' behavior, which is in turn leading to poor implementation.

My Angle

Not all hope is lost! Also, according to various press releases on theSkillsMarket website, the company has 2 million iprofiles, is growing operations, and has just received 3 million GBP more in investment. Among other things the funds will be used to "Launch a new online portal, which will add advanced Web 2.0 functionality for candidates." Perhaps iProfile has been biding its time, building an infrastructure and relationships, and is going straight to the consumer now that it has some market power. With a proper online marketing campaign, iProfile can begin implementing a CV push - where candidates can write their CV once - as structured data - and distribute it outwards.

Somehow, I think the business relationships in place might suffer with such an CV-push offering, but it's the kind of thing we would like to see. (You know, I had an idea exactly like this once that slowly transformed into something else, but never mind that). But I have to wonder, if this is the plan, why didn't they do such a thing all along?

Could the SkillsMarket fit into the Liquid HR market? Clearly, it could. The iProfile is obviously contributing towards the standardization of data as its core offering, and it utilizes HR-XML (I'm pretty sure, as one of the SkillsMarket founders, who I once met, is a founder of the HR XML consortium for Europe). But what role does iProfile fulfill? Well, the forthcoming Web 2.0 frontend could include just about anything. As it stands, however, iProfile is not a Matchmaker (that's done by the compatible websites), nor an Information Provider. And this is where I believe the company is falling down: it is not yet a Conduit, either, because there is currently not enough incentive for compatible recruiters to share information, and candidates are not knowledgeable enough of iProfile or empowered to drive CV updates out through iProfile. Hence, not much data flow about candidates -- not a Conduit.

The verdict? If you're a recruiter or hiring company, check out the commercial requirements for partnership, and if they're not too steep, it's worth a thought. As for myself, I'm concerned about forcing my users into the kind of experience (i.e. profile overwriting) I had. For candidates, my jury is out - it doesn't seem like candidates are yet very empowered by iProfile. If you're an investor or industry person, I could be completely wrong about this business, but I'm wondering whether SkillsMarket has been too conservative in catering to the HR market in its old form to the detriment of its current growth and perhaps its future. I think the big bet is on the new Web 2.0 features. Tell me this company is highly profitable and prove me wrong, but I think these guys need to turn the corner still in order to realize their excellent potential. Otherwise, they're an HR integrator. We'll be watching!

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: