Magic Pot of Jobs

With the addition job search tools to social networking site Facebook, it’s apparent that recruiters are trying to reach soon to be and recent college graduates. For the most part, these applicants operate in a fairly similar way to job search engines.

The main difference is that Facebook’s job search tools enable members to have a frequently updated list of position openings uploaded to their profiles and main pages. This eliminates the need for members to use external job search websites.

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Jason Alba’s got another winner with: YOU’RE FIRED! Will you do us a favor and sign this before you go?

The title kind of says it all, actually, but I did want to touch a bit about a throwaway line from his first paragraph, because I think it’s an important point that deserves more attention (and it’s something that has been an theme in my own career lately):

Employers talk about not getting loyalty from the workforce, but guess who created that environment (hint: it rhymes with m-plaw-r)? All of the ra-ra team spirit stuff is fun, but when you get terminated what happens to those hours of team-building warm fuzzies? Should they evaporate? I guess the employer misses that part sometimes, when they FIRE you, you will be upset, and perhaps even see them and their team building exercises as hypcrotical at best.

It’s the truth, people. Do not allow yourself to be guilted into some misguided sense of “loyalty” to the company when the truth is that the company will do whatever it has to do to advance its own business.

This might sound sort of bitter and cynical, but think about it: A company exists to provide a product or service, and to make money while doing so. A company has employees only because employees are needed to accomplish those twin goals. The company does not exist to feed your family or to help you achieve your personal and professional goals. Those are YOUR goals, not your company’s.

As a result, your relationship to your company (note I did not say “your boss” or “your team,” which is a separate issue) is a business transaction designed to maximize benefit to each party. The company purchases your work in order to meet its own goals, and you sell your work to it in order to meet your own goals. It is a business transaction, like any other.

Recognizing this simple truth allows you to stop seeing these things personally: Your company will not hesitate to terminate you if doing so will serve a business purpose, just like you would (or at least, should) not hesitate to leave a job if it is no longer serving YOUR goals. “Loyalty” between a company and its employees is fiction. Your employer does not owe you loyalty, and you do not owe any in return.

So getting back to Jason’s point, I am consistently shocked when executives complain about their turnover and that they can’t find loyal employees. Hey guys, your younger workers (like me) are the ones who watched our parents get downsized from job after job- we learned early on about employer loyalty. Do y’all remember when you outsourced your operations to India? How about when that corporate reorganization shuffled people around into jobs they hadn’t signed up for and never wanted? I’m not going to fault you for cost-cutting, but I WILL fault you for failing to anticipate the natural consequences of commoditizing your labor force. You’ve demonstrated that you can’t afford loyalty, so why be surprised when workers realize that they can’t afford it, either?

So what is there to do, then? You should update your resume at least quarterly- monthly if there are lots of organizational changes going on. You should be (as I have said many times) getting out there and building your network and contributing to it now, so that it will be robust and full of opportunity when you need it later. And most of all, you should remember that only you are in charge of meeting your goals, and you should be doing all you can to ensure that you can continue to meet them.

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For the most info on Internet recruiting, checkout Cheezhead.

Jim Durbin has a great post up about the way putting your life online changes expectations between employers and employees.

I pondered posting a comment to Jim’s site, but my thoughts on it got kind of complicated so I decided it deserved a blog post of its own. I think there are several key points everyone needs to calm down and think about before freaking out about someone’s MySpace page, or the employer’s use thereof.

Employers need to recognize that this kind of behavior (college student binge drinking, bitching about your job offer, whatever) has always gone on; it went on with their previous hires, and the only difference here is that they found out about it specifically. If you hire a lot of college students, some percentage of them will have engaged in stupid, juvenile, even dangerous or illegal behavior while in school. Just because you didn’t find it on Facebook doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. So if you’re comfortable with the kids you didn’t find out about, you need to get comfortable with the ones you did.

And Jim makes an excellent point that ought to be put on a banner across the top of every MySpace or FaceBook page. Do YOU, Mr. Hiring Manager, want to be judged on the stupid stuff you did in school? I didn’t think so. The kid with the 3.8 average who interviews well does so because he’s a smart kid with good interpersonal skills. People grow up. So will your employees, and if you’re concerned about their behavior at the company Christmas party, that’s the trade-off for hiring cheap entry-level employees. If the bar crawls aren’t affecting the quality of work being produced, they really aren’t relevant to the quality of the employee.

Gen Y employees, on the other hand, need to understand that the inherent conflict between desiring privacy and putting all your bad behavior out there for the world to see. Yes, maybe you put it up there for your friends to find, but they aren’t the only ones with access to the internet. Grow up and learn to be more cautious about what you put up there, or learn to live with the consequences. Employers check up on candidates to find out what kind of people they are. That’s how the world works, and it’s not going to change just because you don’t like it. As someone who has been putting her life online for years now, I am particularly unsympathetic to employees who cry about privacy violations when they’re the ones broadcasting their misadventures to anyone with an Internet connection. Learn to set some boundaries- the whole world doesn’t need to know about the particularly excellent weed you smoked last weekend.

Finally, for the sake of all that is right and good, develop a sensible, flexible policy about employee web sites. It’s perfectly reasonable to expect that employees not air your company’s dirty laundry on the Internet. It’s very sensible to ask that they not discuss their coworkers in such a way that could upset the team dynamic in your office. You can require your employees to respect your company’s brand on the Internet and not use your name or trademarks in such a way that could damage that brand. But beyond that, you’re starting to intrude into how an employee chooses to socialize (socializing online is still socializing) and that’s not a good way to develop a trusting relationship with your staff.

I keep hearing all my recruitosphere buddies falling all over themselves to talk about how great ZoomInfo is and how much easier it make it for them to network and find candidates, and how if you say something on the Internet that you regret, ZoomInfo will surely find it.

Meh. So I go to check out my own summary a few months ago, and it’s wildly, woefully out of date. No worries, I say to myself, I’m sort of re-strategizing my personal brand and rearranging some web stuff, and I’m sure ZoomInfo will catch up.

Well, today, 6 months later, it hasn’t. It hasn’t found my new online resume. It hasn’t found my LinkedIn profile. It hasn’t found my name change, even though it’s on every one of my sites. If you look for Tiffany Bridge, you don’t find me. If you look for Tiffany Baxendell Bridge, it’ll find Tiffany Baxendell and ignore the Bridge.

People, I am all over the damn Internet. I am not difficult to find. I put that stuff out there so that it will BE FOUND. And yet the most recent information ZoomInfo had for me was a cached version of my MPOJ bio that’s at least 5 months old. One of the other references was from a staff listing at one of my old jobs. My name was taken off that staff listing three years ago when I left that job…

And yes, of course I can (and did) claim my summaries and update them (somewhat, haven’t finished yet), but surely ZoomInfo can’t seriously expect that everyone is going to take the time to do this, not when I’ve already had to take the time to fill out my profile on heaven-knows-how-many other profile-and-networking sites. It seems like it would be a lot easier to just not act like the Wayback Machine.

And then, even after I filled all that in, ZoomInfo has the same serious shortcoming that I’ve been taking LinkedIn to task for:

It has no way whatsoever to handle a person’s name change.

This is not rocket science. A significant portion of the population changes their names at least once, and then a significant portion of THAT population changes them again later.

Why is it so difficult for the makers of social software to add in a little extra functionality for “former names used” or “some people know me as?” Why, once I have claimed a summary at ZoomInfo and confirmed my identity, can I not change the name on that summary? My last name is not Baxendell anymore, and I’m working very hard to get that change reflected on all my various web identities, and yet LinkedIn and ZoomInfo refuse to add this one simple feature that would allow people who knew me at my previous jobs AND people who have met me recently to find the same information about me.

At least at LinkedIn I can include both names in the last name field and the search will find them both, but what about people who aren’t using their pre-married names anymore professionally? Should the people they knew earlier in their career or went to college with not be able to reconnect with them?

Maybe if the tools were better more people would, you know, USE them.

UPDATE: Lest anyone think I’m just pickin’ on ZoomInfo and LinkedIn, let me also point out that Jobster doesn’t accommodate former names that well, either. Hey JGo, can you do something about that?

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!”

One of the things I recommend to people for networking purposes is to always, ALWAYS ALWAYS carry business cards. It’s a simple way to be prepared for unexpected connection opportunities. But what if you don’t have a job? Or what if you’re looking for a new one? Or maybe the person you met is really more of a personal contact and you’d prefer not to use your job’s card?

Well, duh, get personal cards printed. It’s so cheap to do it that there’s really no excuse not to.

A lot of people go with VistaPrint because you can get cards for free there, and that’s an okay option. If you do that, though, please just suck it up and pay the extra $10 to have the VistaPrint ad removed from the back of the card. Please. The ad makes you look JV. The other hazard is that the free designs look like… well, they look like you got your cards for free.

So consider other options for the card you give people to remember you by. For those of you with Flickr accounts, a new service just launched that I can’t recommend highly enough. Moo.com’s Flickr MiniCards are little cards with your contact info on the front, and your Flickr photos on the back. You can get 100 cards for $20- 20 cents per card isn’t bad at all.

The Moo application is ridiculously well-thought out and easy to use. It uses the Flickr API to show you your photos in order in your photostream, by set, or by tag. You drag the photos you want into a holding area, and then the system shows you the crop area for each photo, and you just drag the photo around the crop area until you get the desired effect. The system is even smart enough to guess whether the subject of your photo is vertical or horizontal. For a usability dork like me, it’s heaven.

Then you order your cards, and your photos are evenly distributed across the hundred cards. So if you use 20 photos, each photo will appear on 5 cards in the set. Neat!

You’ll get free shipping if you order before the end of September, and they ship internationally (unlike some of the other Flickr photo products). Cheap, unique, and really beautiful. What’s not to love?

Get your cards, and get connecting.

Oh, MagicPotHeads, I’m back and in rare form after experiencing a bit of personal trauma earlier in the week. I’m queuing up some light stuff with which to entertain you before I head out for a family event this weekend but in the meantime…

I’ve got two Vox invites. Who wants ‘em?

Ragan asks another version of what I wondered early this week: Why can’t people be nice to recruiters?

Yeah, I know, Google is a great place to work and it’s very prestigious. But times change, people change, and the job market changes. Is it really that hard to imagine a time when you or someone you know might want to move on? Hell, having a recruiter in your network is a benefit to your friends, even if it’s not direct benefit to you.

My friends, I confess, there is an important truth that I have neglected to share with you for lo, this nearly one year of stirring the Magic Pot. This is the unspoken truth that we recruiters hate to mention, for it makes us shudder to the core of our very souls. But because I am committed to honesty in the process, I dare speak type it aloud now:

Looking for a job SUCKS ASS.

There are few things more demoralizing in modern life than sending out little sheets of paper (or computer files) from which some stranger in some comfortable office who has never heard of you is supposed to divine your potential worth as a cog in their corporate machine.

And then, if your resume is found pleasing, you get to dress up in your best dress-to-impress gear, and smile and nod and make polite conversation while more strangers ask you ridiculous questions and internally pick apart your every answer while the future of your career hangs in the balance.

Meanwhile, you’re sweating it out in a job you clearly dislike enough to want to leave, or god forbid, you’re sitting at home sweating it out while your bank balance dwindles because you’re out of work.

This is a terrible, soul-destroying process. But take heart- there are things you can plan for that will make it better. You can build what I like to call “your personal brand.” With a strong personal brand, you can achieve what a friend of mine predicted when we had lunch last week: “I’m not applying for my next job. I’m getting headhunted!” Your personal brand is the thing that makes people seek you out, instead of the other way around.

What is a personal brand? In a general sense, it’s the state of being known in a particular community for…something. Ideally, that something will be for your expertise or general fabulousness, not for that embarrassing incident at last year’s Christmas party.

For our purposes, a strong personal brand is the thing that is going to make your next job transition experience much better than your last one. It’s the thing that keeps you from being some random schmoe off the street sending in a resume, and instead makes you the desirable expert employers have been looking for. Essentially, it’s a highly-targeted form of celebrity.

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You’ll find jobs in London at Canary Wharf Jobs.com.
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Stephanie will be ably stirring the pot o’ jobs on her own this week, since yours truly will be honeymooning and the only recruiting I intend to do involves finding people to bring me fruity drinks with little umbrellas in them.

But before I go, a few links for you to chew on:

Why They Hate Recruiting - Dave Lefkow suggests that recruiting no longer be an HR function.

Develop a Who’s Who List of Outside Talent - How to develop a deep database of great candidates and referral sources.

Too Many Jobs, Too Few People - the Washington Business Journal finally catches up to what Stephanie and I have been noticing for months. Via Ben Gotkin.

Before Scoring that Job, You’d Better Ace the Test - The increasing use of personality tests in hiring decisions. If I weren’t about to go to our rehearsal dinner, there would be a long rant on this topic. The nutshell version: THESE TESTS ARE A BIG WASTE OF MONEY.