The Myth of The Good Gate Keeper

This post is directed to two audiences in particular. The first is the management and executive team of companies and the second is the human resources and recruiting team of companies.

According to Wikipedia, in the social sense, “In an informal or social sense, diplomacy is the employment of tact to gain strategic advantage or to find mutually acceptable solutions to a common challenge, one set of tools being the phrasing of statements in a non-confrontational, or polite manner.” I’m writing this because I feel that it is a necessary consideration for companies, especially ones that are early enough in their life cycle to evolve in a positive way. After a certain point this becomes more challenging and expensive. This is a subject that usually comes up in the business plan stage of companies and often in marketing and customer acquisition stages, but not in the meetings of mature organizations. Perhaps this is because it is considered to be such a basic element of interpersonal communication that everyone assumes that they have their bases covered when it comes to diplomacy. In any case, the reason why I’m writing about it is because of a recent experience.

I’ve written about the reaons why gate keeping is needed, but have always emphasized the fact that it isn’t just about avoidance. In fact, avoidance can get you into trouble in much the same way that law enforcement efforts that only focus on enforcement get cities into trouble. Enforcement without community engagement and awareness is a double edged sword. When (not if) people perceive your enforcement effort as biased, inconsistent, only symbolic, etc. they will disregard it. When people get used to the idea of something being worthy of disregard they usually stick to their ways. Change is a tough pill for most people to swallow. So rather than thinking about how you handle your interactions with the people who you encounter via your company as a gate keeping experience you should consider thinking about it as a diplomatic experience.

How does this apply to hiring team members including human resources people, recruiters, managers, team members, etc. when incoming candiates, sales reps from staffing agencies, and others are involved? To begin with you should think about your interaction with people on an indivdual level first. There is no one sized fits all situation for candiates or for sales representatives. Someone selling to you today could be working with you tomorrow. Someone applying for a job with you today that isn’t a match for your job could be perfect for something else down the road that you haven’t even imagined yet. I’ll be the first to admit that nobody is perfect and that our mood on any given day along with our chemistry with individual people factors into human interactions, but the effect of this on how you interact with candiates, sales reps, etc. should be marginal at best.

There are universal rules that people should follow and if they don’t you shouldn’t feel obligated to entertain them. Among these are things like when staffing agency sales reps spam job listings, spam discussion forums, etc. The solution is obvious: click your spam flag. Don’t call someone’s cell phone as a first resort. And so on.

But then there is the bigger challenge: how to filter out the noise and potentially bad apples without shutting out people who can and will help you, but who might turn against you if you shut them out. And by turning against you I’m talking about the potential for a staffing agency to put a bullseye on your people because you are not a potential client and because they’ve percieved that you’ve treated them unfairly by letting some vendors do work with them who are less capable than they are just because you’ve already started working with another staffing agency. It is far better to create an open standard that must be met and judiciously and diplomatically executing that standard.

With regard to candidates this is really complex and usually involves investing in an applicant tracking system or at least the time needed to figure out a way to acknowledge receipt of resumes. A simple auto-reply email stating that you’ve received their resume and that they will be contacted if their resume has been selected will usually suffice provided you actually send them a note later (even if it is in a bulk email) letting them know that a hiring decision has been made or that they’ve been rejected, etc. You should be able to articulate the process both in your job descriptions and on your career website.

With staffing agency sales representatives things are at least as complex. Some form of policy and tracking system must be implemented to know who you’re talking to and why. You should have a clear cut reason why you working with staffing agencies and be able to articulate that to them – both through your career website and verbally. For example: We don’t work with staffing agencies who are not local under any circumstances. We also don’t work with staffing agency people who don’t take the time to know our industry and particulars about our company so don’t call us if you aren’t going to take the time to read our career site literature. We don’t work with staffing agencies who violate our rules of engagement (we’ll happily send you a copy of our rules of engagement upon request). In additon to the who, why and why not you need to keep track of candidates moving through your system, where they came from, when they arrived via which source, and where they are in the process. If you do work with a staffing agency you need to be able to tell them if you received a candidate from another vendor. Trust me when I say that two staffing agencies should both ask you for a payment if you didn’t tip them off that they were both sending you the same candidate in the same week. Your lack of organization is not an excuse – you must make the time to work with them.

If you don’t like the idea of handling the responsibilities associated with dealing with a staffing agency or candiates then you should get out of business right now and go work in another job that doesn’t require dealing with people. The alternative is to put the work onto your hiring teams who will consequently have to take on the same responsibilities as you do but without your level of organizational preparedness.

Who ever said that government contracting was dull?

On several occasions we’ve talked about corruption in the government contracting industry that has made local and national headlines. Today the Washington Post’s Amit R. Paley writes (with research support from Eddy Palanzo) that “SAIC, one of the Pentagon’s largest contractors, conspired with federal officials to rig a $3.2 billion technology contract and tried to cover” (it up). According to Paley, SAIC worked out a deal to pass contracting work on to the Director of the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command’s IT Center in Louisiana in exchange for help rigging the contract, with a separate government entity that the Director apparently had strong ties to, so that SAIC would win it. The Director set up a government contracting company called ‘Applied Enterprise Solutions’ under his wife’s name (she’s a photographer, not an IT person) to receive the contract spoils. The director was later asked to resign. Others were involved. This is turning out to be quite the year for government contracting scandals.

A Clear Objective

If you are not getting the kind of response from your resume that you think you should then it may be time to consider whether you have a clear objective. This isn’t a difficult task unless you have a page long summary of your skills, experience and objectives. Your resume’s objective or summary or profile (note that you should only have one of these and I’d recommend going the summary route) should be written like a thesis statement: short, concise and to the point. 3-5 concise bullet points supporting your summary statement can go a long way in support of it. The overall summary with bullets should read almost like a composite job description. The rest of your resume will essentially act like supporting evidence that you are what the summary suggests. Provide a clear objective and you are on the road to career success.

Think Before You Move

With the economy in a continued state of flux people are thinking about government contracting vs. startup as it relates to job security. The old question of, “is it risky to work for a startup company” comes to mind. I’m always quick to tell people that working for a startup is a risky proposition if you choose a risky startup, but that the exact same thing is true for government contracting. People seem to think that because companies like Lockheed Martin have a brass plaque (literally) outside of the door to one of their undergraduate Computer Science program lecture halls and lots of name recognition that they’re a much safer bet than startups. If you spend some time talking to people who have worked in government contracting over the last few years, especially people who are in their early to mid-career years, you will find that many of these government contracting organizations have business cycles and competitive bidding situations that lead to much job security. Just last week I spoke with two people who worked for VERY large government contracting organizations that lost their contracts to smaller organizations (think 8(a)’s). Now these people are looking for new jobs or in a situation where they have to re-interview for their jobs. Another person I heard from is on the bench for a big huge government contracting company. Bench translates into out of work in a week or two. By contrast, the startup people who I know are doing well. Others find that they are getting offers for full time employment that are conditional, either directly or via the government contractor that the sub-government contractor who their would be employer is going through. This can translate into layers of insecurity despite the promises of big 401k contributions, etc. There have been a few that cut a few people or cut back on hiring, but aside from that things are largely back to normal. The bottom line here is that if you’re thinking that government contracting is a safer bet than startup life you should think again – every situation is unique.

Is Your Entry Level Resume Complete?

It is that time of year again when entry level resumes start circulating in larger numbers. For the highly competitive software engineering community, startups in particular, most entry level resumes follow one of two paths: from inbox to rejected folder or from inbox to maybe consider folder. Trust me when I say that you don’t want to end up in either of these folders. So how do you avoid it?

Most people think of the entry level resume as a history of every job, class, skill and activity they’ve ever done. This is where they go wrong. The resume really serves two key purposes: 1) to give someone a reason to want to talk to you and 2) give someone something to talk to you about when they do talk to you. I don’t care what the resume writing guides say, this is the absolute value of a resume. Most resumes read more like something from the reference section of the library which diminishes the chances of #1 and consequently #2 as well.

To avoid this you need to do a little research about the type of role that you are looking for and the type of company that you want to work for. For example: as an entry level person you should be able to find someone who works for the company on Facebook or LinkedIn and ask them what the company likes to see in entry level people long before you apply for a job or an internship with them. This is not going to get you rejected later so don’t think twice about doing it. IMPORTANT: READ THE CAREER PAGE INFORMATION PROVIDED FIRST! Asking a question that they’ve taken the time to answer for you will make you come across as lazy. The rule to follow is an obvious one: don’t be a pest. It is ok to send a few people who were recent entry level people or who might be your peers after you get going at a place, but don’t send a note to the company’s CEO or management team. Also, don’t call – this is a really bad idea. Use the tools that are designed for this like LinkedIn and people will not knee jerk when you contact them. In the case of smaller companies you might even want to send a message to the recruiter. For larger companies that have college recruiters you should contact their college recruiters too. The regular recruiters for large companies are probably not going to have time to respond.

If you happen to be looking for a job in design or web development then there are a few things you should do by default. Put up a website or blog with links to work that you’ve done, project details, etc. It should not be too personal, but don’t be afraid to show your creative. If you have a hobby that you are into that exhibits the fact that you are creative then include that because a lot of entry level people are hired because they’re well rounded and fun to be around in addition to the fact that they have potential. I’m surprised by how many people don’t do these things. Put this at the top of your resume.

If you are looking for a job outside of your current place of residence then you should provide details about why you are interested in the place where you are applying for jobs. For example, if you live in Kansas and are applying for a job in Washington, DC you need to explain that you are completely and without any hesitation ready to throw your suitcase in the car and drive to DC to start work tomorrow or that you have family friends who are there that you can stay with so that starting out in Washington, DC isn’t going to be a major life crisis. Remember that starting a new job is an adventure, but relocating is too. In other words, show the employer that your relocation isn’t going to be something that adversely impacts your performance as an employee.

Beyond this, you should keep in mind that if you are going to be working on software development, web design, etc. that you need to get some experience BEFORE you graduate. Many times internships turn into job offers later, but that isn’t the only reason you want to do it. If you have zero experience you are most likely headed for the maybe pile or the reject pile. Good grades and test scores can help, but if you have no experience you are at a major disadvantage to people who have some experience.

These are a few things to think about when planning your career strategy while you are in school and while you are looking for jobs and internships. Good luck!

When Only The Best Will Do

A few days ago I got a Tweet about the DC Metro train crash. Moments later an SMS Text Message. These were followed by messages, pokes and a flurry of phone calls. Some people wanted to know if I was ok. Others wanted to know if I had heard from a friend that we had in common who rides the metro. By the following morning theories were circulating about what caused the crash. A few people questioned why the death toll was lower than the day before in press reports. Today the headline story is concerned with computer system anomalies:

“investigators are looking closely at a 740-foot-long circuit near the crash site that malfunctioned during testing. “These circuits are vital,” she said. “It’s a signal system. It’s providing information, authorization and speed commands to the following train.”"

Let’s face one fact here. This is a computer system that involves software engineering. While the investigation is not complete and I’m not trying to suggest that this was what cause the crash, this topic of who runs and builds the computer systems that government and quasi government organizations like metro use is a subject that deserves more than just accident investigation related attention. Here’s why: The messages that I received via Twitter and Facebook were delivered via infrastructure built by some of the best and brightest people in software engineering. Twitter and Facebook have recruited the best and brightest people to work for them, something that didn’t happen by chance. By contrast, the government and quasi governmental organizations seem to do everything within their power to discourage the best and brightest people from working for them. Oh yes, there are moments when they outsource work to others too. Believe me, the outsourced teams are certainly not doing anything to change the equation.

I think the economy has helped bring this situation to light because more people that I know are looking for any kind of job that they can find that pays right now. I know people who lost their part time jobs and retail jobs because they were being paid too well or because the company is losing money or whatever the case was. I also know a lot of people who are looking for outs. A friend told a friend yesterday that they were going to apply for law school. Another friend who just graduated from law school told me he was having trouble finding a job. Another friend who is a law school graduate, but who just got an MBA tells me that the job market is moving slowly too. I guess a job market like this in a Federal town like the one we all live in makes the idea of government jobs appealing. But it isn’t always that way.

Government and quasi government organization jobs are usually prone to aggregious inefficiencies. These include ridiculously long, obtuse and complicated applications in addition to bizarre application windows. I can’t tell you how many government jobs that I’ve seen out there that have a two day or two week application window. Two days? Give me a break! These are frequently posted just because the hiring manager has to announce the job right before they take it.

True Story: I was at the DC Score (Small Business Counselor’s Office) at some point not too far back in time and while I was waiting to talk to someone there I overheard a Score employee talking (loudly) about how their relative just graduated from an accounting program and how they were hooking them up with someone who was going to get them into an IT job at a Federal agency. Never mind the fact that this person was not even an IT person. Nevermind the fact that the rest of us would have to apply for the job and hope we get pulled through by someone who can hire us. My HR and Recruiter alarm bells were going off like crazy when I overheard this. Ok, I should not have listened to the call. But if you have ever visited the DC Score office you know the place is tiny so to not overhear the conversation I would have to have put headphones on. I didn’t have any.

Back to the point. The DC government has had some major problems with hiring contractors through the DC Office of the CTO (DC OCTO) lately. Remember the FBI raid? While the CTO got off the hook, he had recently implemented a vendor management program. Oh, despite the raid and people being cut, some of the people overseeing the program are former employees of at least one of the vendors that is (currently) billing consultants to the DC Government. But even that isn’t the point. The point is that the DC government hires contractors who are NOT THE BEST AND BRIGHTEST. In part because they are hiring contractors through a vendor instead of employees. Contractors that are motivated by how much their margin will be, not by the quality of their work over time. Federal programs are no different.

There should be a real discussion in the government leadership circles about the quality and the caliber of the people who are hired to do the public’s high trust work and event he low trust work. Every time I hear about data being stolen and dig just below the surface there is a vendor and contractors to be found. I may have missed some examples, but in the cases I’ve read about this is the case. Why is that a company like Facebook or Twitter insists on the very best people, but a government office entrusted with personal data (health, voting, criminal, etc.) isn’t? A few days back I spoke with a contractor who had worked on a criminal justice program for government. This guy’s team built a web application that would allow a user to essentially remove someone’s criminal history with a few key strokes (his words, not mine). This was a guy who would not meet the quality standards of any of the least demanding startup company engineering teams in Washington, DC area (I’m not exaggerating).

I really do wonder if it is too much to ask that our government leadership take the matter of hiring the best people for their organizations seriously. I realize that not every government job will go to someone who is from among the best and brightest camp. I also realize that there are jobs where just having a warm body counts. But come on people. Let’s get smart when it comes to hiring people for critical infrastructure jobs, jobs where having a really smart and well experienced person matters, and push the bureaucrats out of the hiring process.

Beware of the Bear Trap

This is for all of you hiring managers out there so listen up, and take notes…

You’ve no doubt heard the expression: “You can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.” I don’t care where it originated, what I care about is that the premise of “recruiting” is “attracting” and that there are a lot of you who just don’t get this at all. If I’ve worked worked with you then you can check this off your list because I’ve probably reminded you of this repeatedly. So what is the point? And what is a bear trap interview?

To begin with, a bear trap interview is one where the call is adversarial or just plain intense from start to finish. You grill the hell out of someone like they are cadets who have shown up for the first day of boot camp. Ask them questions that are tough, some completely out there, and don’t introduce any levity into the conversation.

A bear trap interview is like vinegar. The one exception is that vinegar isn’t as loud. A bear trap is frightening. More importantly, a bear trap interview has the potential to scare off candidates faster than you can say bear trap. Oh, and candidates talk to their peers. Before you know it you will land yourself with a reputation as an intimidating place to work.

Back to the subject of honey. I’ve talked to a lot of software engineers and quant people who were actually impressed by a well orchestrated honey pot interview that had some bear traps set up as part of it. Some want to challenge themselves by getting accepted for the honey pot interview. These are usually well promoted by the company’s recruiting organization, recruiter, website, etc. and include things that are quirky and unique. When someone shows up for the interview they are expecting to be challenged. The key word here is challenged because they look at the interview as a puzzle to solve, not an adversarial session that more closely resembles an interrogation session from The Wire.

There is no totally correct way to run an interview, but if you take some time to think about the fact that an interview serves as a social bonding session that will is one step on the way to hiring someone and not just an opportunity to catch someone in a lie or to expose human insufficiency then you will find yourself heading in the right direction.

KISS vs. Overwhelmed

Do you ever wonder why a company with 3 employees has 10 pre-sets on their phone system? Press 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 and you get the same person. Press 6, 7, 8, or 9 and get the second person. Press 10 and get the 3rd person. A long time ago I learned a principal called KISS. It stands for “Keep It Simple Stupid”. The idea is that you should not do more than you have to in order to get whatever you are trying to accomplish done. I’m betting that the same companies that somehow make time to add fake phone lines are the same companies that take time to post fake job ads too. And so on.

The problem with bells, whistles and other things that are intended to impress others is that you can get so tangled up in the effort to impress others that you fail to accomplish important objectives.

Most small companies need to do two things to survive: get customers and keep customers. Many of them invest time, energy and money in all sorts of things that serve to distract and in many cases overwhelm the founders. While I’m not suggesting that differentiating yourself is a bad idea or that doing things to make you look bigger than you are is always a bad idea, I am suggesting that before you decide to build the Titanic, you should make sure that your ship can sail.

Yesterday I had a conversation with a local venture capitalist who told me that a lot of startups are really focused on building products, but that they are not building businesses. The startup founders pitch a product and ask for someone to pay for it, but haven’t done so good of a job engineering a way to make money off of it. In other words, people aren’t just going to fall in your lap wanting it. The KISS analogy applies here too. Don’t get so into your product that you forget that you have to get customers and keep customers. An investor doesn’t want to invest in a product just because it is amazing…they will want to know that you can succeed in the highly competitive marketplace.

If you don’t get KISS, you may as well kiss your entrepreneurial dreams goodbye.

Big Job Boards vs. Jobmatchbox

When I meet someone new at an event I’m always curious about their organization. Over the past two years that has mostly meant startup and small technology companies with 1-150 employees when company executives were involved. However, when we are building their organizations we often talk to employees of larger organizations. I often look for patterns that explain their company culture and success factors.

A great barometer for this is the composition of their technology team. Does the organization hire a lot of people who have a degree in computer science from Strayer University or University of Maryland University College, or do they hire a lot people with computer science degrees from University of Maryland College Park? Do they hire a lot of people who went to random schools in Asia and studied mechanical or computer or electrical engineering (this is very common) that later got a two year masters from a Masters degree in the US involving computer science that have spent the last 1-5 years taking a different job every 9-11 months. Do they hire a lot of people who talk more about their own free agency on their resumes and LinkedIn or VisualCV bios than they do about their service to their employers?

I think about this same composition element when I make the decision to recommend a product like Monster, Dice, Careerbuilder, HotJobs, Jobfox or Jobmatchbox to someone. The exact same questions apply. With exception to the composition of Jobmatchbox, the resume and jobs platform that I’ve spent the last two years developing, these sources consistently deliver everything but the guys with the computer science degrees from the University of Maryland College Park. In fact, if you went through and did an analysis of the composition of job boards like Monster, Dice, Careerbuilder, HotJobs I am confident that you would find that the ratio of solid, dedicated, employee types to be way out of line with what the vast majority of hiring teams are looking for. I’m excluding JobFox from this because Rob McGovern has focused less on IT and more on the mass market. He has run radio ads and so on, but he hasn’t spent even a marginal amount of time in the technology circles. There is nothing wrong with that, but I will point out that Careerbuilder was never known as a tech job board and resume database either. He’s focused on the traditional market and he’s doing a pretty good job of that from what I can tell.

So what does this mean? I suppose it means that if you are looking for something you need to go to the place where you will find it. The case for recruiting technology professionals using Craigslist is more compelling than Dice. Strong statement, huh? Here is a nother strong statement: The case for recruiting solid, dedicated, employee types using Jobmatchbox or Craigslist is stronger than on Dice, Monster, Careerbuilder, Hotjobs, or Jobfox. Surprised? Not sure?

The difference lies in the same sort of grassroots organizing that Obama’s team used to beat McCain in the most recent election. Craigslist goes to the roots of the community at large. The guy who is out there looking for a mini fridge for his micro-brew hobby is the same guy looking at developer jobs. Jobmatchbox takes the jobs to the people in the tech community on their turf. The big box job boards are pushing themselves via search engine marketing, banner ads and big box job fairs anywhere they can. They’re marketing is one to many, just like Craigslist, but less direct and touchy than Craigslist. Jobmatchbox is only local, only in tech circles and as a result the people in who come through job listings on Jobmatchbox are consistently solid, dedicated, employee types. The best part is that Jobmatchbox is free. Craigslist is $25/job/category/week (yeah, to get noticed you really have to post weekly so the true cost of Craigslist is $100/mo per category) and the other big box job boards are well over $100 per job listing. And note that because Craigslist is national so is the job listing spam that comes from everyone who has figured out how to write a spam script for their shady staffing agency. Plus you’ve got local staffing agencies who are spamming Craigslist…they haven’t heard of Jobmatchbox because we don’t talk to them. Oh, and if you feel like paying for something to improve your profile in the local tech community then consider taking out a featured employer ad on Jobmatchbox. Proceeds are reinvested back into the resource.

So in light of all of this, we hope you will share your jobs with the Jobmatchbox.com community in the name of building better technology and startup organizations.

Own Up To Your Experience

Last week I spoke with a job seeker who has been working in consulting for a while. The candidate sent over a resume a few days after we spoke. My notes from the phone conversation indicated that this candidate was a little difficult to size up. I would ask a yes or no question and get an answer that was either in paragraph form or downright evasive. The candidate has a LinkedIn profile so I have an idea of their work history (I told them them this). Yet somehow, when the “resume” arrrives, it is a multi-page summary that does not include work history.

One rule of recruiting that I’ve learned over the years is that the wordier the resume is the more the candidate is hiding. If I see an extremely wordy resume my first instinct is to ignore it and just start sketching out a new one. This includes dates, experience, etc. This takes a lot of time with a candidate and feels more like a resume writing session than a recruiting call so the candidate has to be easy going or I’m going to cut the call short and move on to someone else. The reason why I take time to help someone like this in the first place is because I feel that so many people out there are giving job seekers bad advice about what to do with their resume and their career. This is especially true of people who have spent too much time working as a “Consultant” for big box staffing agencies. Conssultant is a loose term when staffing agencies get involed. Hourly employee is a better term.

The point here isn’t that big box staffing seeks the lowest common denominator or that multi-page summary without work history details and calling it a resume is a waste of your time and your recruiter’s tiime. It is that you should own up to your experience, whatever it is.

If you’ve worked as a consultant or hourly employee for many years you’ve no doubt developed a set of skills and experience that may be worthwhile for someone, but uninteresting for others. Instead of playing charades with your resume you need to spend your time concentrating on who will find it worthwile and getting them on the phone or to at least read your email and messages on Facebook, IM, etc. You should also seek these people out where they are most likely to be found. If you’ve worked as an hourly employee for staffing agencies for 10 years then odds are your resume and references will appeal to them. If you’ve worked as a migration specialist (software, hardware, whatever) then find the people who do that frequently. Own that. Chances are that you’ve probably enjoyed the work which is why you’ve done it as long as you have. If you don’t enjoy it then consider a major career event like graduate school or teaching or opening a restaurant.

I’m not kidding about the major career event suggestion either. I’ve talked to an attorney who practiced for 15 years who is thinking about opening a burger joint recently. A few months ago I talked to a programmer who opened an Indian restaurant (they serve good food). I’ve also known a lot of so-so developers and IT professionals who have opened “consulting companies” and staffing agencies. Some even went to work for big box staffing agencies to learn the ropes. While these types of transitions don’t happen in weeks or even months in many cases, they are can be liberating and allow you to make the most of your experience. Don’t fight the Ocean, go with it.