Magic Pot of Jobs

Via my Technorati cosmos, I found Isabont’s blog, at which Simon describes a recent conversation with a recruiter about trying to match career changers and people whose qualifications are otherwise not exactly what the client has in mind to available openings.

Meanwhile, over at Hiring Revolution, Amy is writing about agency clients who need to rethink their insistence on candidates with agency experience.

I run into this issue on a regular basis. The client frequently has a long list of things they think they need in order to hire a candidate (and most of them are ad agencies or PR firms), but what they fail to notice is that ALL the agencies in town are growing, which means they’re ALL looking for people with agency experience, so the number of positions requiring agency experience are growing, but as long as they continue to insist on hiring only agency people, the pool of people with that experience isn’t going to get any bigger.

Meanwhile, I’m a voice, shouting in the desert about this, and some of my clients know me well enough to trust my judgment on that, but most of them are obstinate and continue to insist on that agency background. And I run into the issue that Simon describes- I either present candidates that make my clients question whether I’ve even read their job description, or I don’t present candidates at all. And then they wonder why I’m not sending them candidates, and I have to tell them that it’s because they aren’t listening to me when I tell them that there are no more agency people. The agency people are all working, and their employers are clinging to them like cold death. Even my clients who are accustomed to being barraged with candidates simply because of their reputations for doing the cool work are finding themselves scraping for people. So clients are going to have to get used to considering candidates with non-ideal backgrounds, or they’re going to have a lot of unfilled seats.

It doesn’t help that when I ask my clients whose work they like, they might name four firms, and three of them will be my clients who I can’t recruit from. In that sense, I suppose I’m a victim of my own success, since I work with almost all the cool kids.

But we’ve been beating our heads off this particular wall for days now in my office- the people we want are working, they aren’t reading postings, they aren’t going to networking events, they’re just out living their lives and not paying attention to the job market. So how do we find them? Direct recruiting, one by one, works, but isn’t that efficient. So how do we get to know these people?

I’ll tell you what, I’m about a minute from walking up and down K Street with a sandwich board that says, “Work with the web? Hate your job? Talk to me!”

According to the HR Blogging Community and Technorati, MPOJ is the #8 Job Hunting Tools blog. Yay!

You like me, you really like me….

True story: I get an email from one of my talent. He’s working at one of my very favorite clients, a model client who always treats both temporary staff and permanent staff with courtesy and friendliness. He’s doing a great job there, and I keep hearing about how much they like him, so with all that said, I can only assume the following incident was the result of a simple miscommunication.

On this particular day, my talent has a problem. You see, he arrived at work this morning to discover that the office where he had been sitting didn’t have any of his stuff in it, and he didn’t know why. He wandered around the office for some time, looking for someone in office services, until he was told that he had been moved from his office to a cubicle at the intersection of the two busiest hallways in the suite. He spends half his day writing, but now he’s listening to countless overheard conversations as people pass his desk. He tries to conduct phone calls with clients, only to discover that the ambient noise prevents the clients from hearing him properly.

Upon arriving at his new workspace, he began unpacking his things and discovered that one of them- a picture frame containing a photo of his girlfriend- had been broken.

Once I calmed him down a bit (he seemed a little frazzled from the whole experience; I would be too) I advised him to start using headphones to address the noise problem- he’s afraid it’s rude but I figure it’s more rude to not get your work done, no? And I emailed his supervisors to let them know that the headphones were my idea.

And now I’m going to get him a Red Swingline stapler.

I ran across a post at HRM Direct about Joel’s run-in with Monster, and while I think the point about educating one’s employees about how to engage with bloggers is a good one, I think there’s a larger-picture issue here.

At most companies, especially large ones, the written policy is that employees are not to comment publically about the company, and that only corporate PR and the execs may do that. If there’s not a written policy, there’s still a strong sense that making written public statements about your employer is a good way to get yourself fired. Corporations want message management, brand control, a unified face. As a result, they tend not to trust every employee at every level of the company to speak for them.

I contend that it is policies like this which are actually the root of experiences like the one Joel had with the anonymous troll from Monster. Would better employee education about how to engage bloggers have resulted in a better response to Joel’s post? Almost certainly. But the reason such training doesn’t happen is because companies don’t want their employees speaking for them in public, much less on the Internet.

So instead, employees who don’t like what they read about their employer try what the Monster troll did- they post anonymously, and since they always seem to forget that their IP address is being logged, they get caught, and outed, resulting in an even worse public image incident.

In order to prevent that from happening, companies are going to have to completely re-think their policies about public commentary. The blogosphere demands openness, transparency, and authenticity. Traditional corporate PR requires control, consistency, and a single voice. As a result, corporate PR departments who still take the traditional approach generally have no idea how to deal with blogs- it’s not that they approve of anonymous sock puppetry by their employees, it’s that encouraging their employees to do it the right way would require them to rethink their entire approach to PR and brand management, and they aren’t prepared for it.

So instead, they ignore the problem and hope it goes away, except of course it doesn’t, because- and here’s the thing they can’t figure out how to control, because they can’t- their employees have opinions. And when everyone else gets to express them on the Internet, the employees wonder, why can’t they?

And to a certain extent, I don’t blame the companies- when you’ve got thousands of employees, at least some of them are likely to be disgruntled for no good reason, or unaware of what kind of information about the company is confidential. Reducing the number of people who can comment publically about the company is one way to manage that kind of uncertainty.

A lot of people will just demand total transparency as the only answer. But that’s not a workable solution. Sure, corporate PR would certainly do well to add a lot more transparency and authenticity, but there are some things that just can’t be talked about. Financials, trade secrets, future plans, etc. And you can’t trust every employee from the CEO to the mailroom to know which category each bit of information falls into. Employee education is a good start to helping employees distinguish confidential information, but it’s not failsafe, and often the entire future of a company (and the jobs of its employees) rests on certain information being kept confidential.

So I don’t know what a workable, practical solution to all of this is. Certainly, companies should take the hint and be more transparent in their dealings with the public. And it’s a great idea for companies to start looking at their rank-and-file employees as potential ambassadors, rather than liabilities who have to be kept quiet. But I don’t know what the practical limit of that is- it’s probably different for every company.

I also don’t know why I insist on beginning all my sentences with conjunctions. But that’s a rant for another blog on another day.