JOBMATCHBOX

We live in web 2.0 world where data is free, but clicks are not, but that doesn’t mean that you should engage in shady business practices.  My beef here is primarily with ecnext because they are engaged in a shady business practice that I would liken to splogging.  However, both Indeed and Jobthread can put a stop to their shady business practice or at least make it easier for publishers and hiring teams to avoid beign tangled in your spammy web. 

Indeed needs to find a way for users of their job search widget to report spammy practices like the one that I encountered today.  If they don’t want to go that far then they should take the time to verify that publishers using their job search widget are not using it for spammy purposes.  Guidelines for publishers would be a good start.  For example: creat a policy that prohibits widget publishers from grabbing company names from their (Indeed) API and then listing ads that look like jobs or for just plain jobs from companies other than those associated with companies.

Here is what I’m talking about:

This is not ok:
Indeed Job Search [ Enter Keyword]  [Enter Location] Search
Acme, Inc. (pulled from Indeed’s API)
Ad Job - Work from Home
Ad Job - Job at Sprint

This is an ok use case:
Acme, Inc. Jobs(pulled from Indeed’s API)
Acme, Inc. Job #1
Acme, Inc. Job #2
End Acme, Inc. Jobs.

Ad…

This is an ok use case:
Acme, Inc. Jobs (pulled from Indeed’s API)
No listings found.
End Acme, Inc. Jobs.

Ad …

One such user that is currently abusing the Indeed Jobs widget is a company called ecnext that is based in Westerville, Ohio.  Their phone numbers are 614-682-5103 (main line) and 614-682-5105 (customer support).  They are an an online advertising company owned by Hoovers that publishes sites like Goliath, Manta and Standards and Poors.  They have a B2B relationship with Indeed.com that allows them to pull data from Indeed job listings (via API). 

What ecnext does with that data is identical to what sploggers do with the content that they lift from other publisher sites. ecnext pulls the data from Indeed’s listings, creates company profiles, then puts ads under the name of the company.  The ads are for other jobs - work from home, competitors, etc.  My example above is from their Goliath website. 

The company doesn’t get a voice in this and this is really bad because it makes it look like the company is either a staffing agency or worse - a scam operation selling work from home opportunities.  The case that showed up under one company that I looked at today (on Goliath) included work from home opportunities and jobs at Sprint like in the example above.  The company that I looked at had no affiliation with either work from home opportunities or Sprint.  This is very misleading and is used to improve the site’s SEO and ad revenue.

I called Indeed and they said that they would consider giving companies and opt-out option, but gave no promises.  This is a major headache because Indeed gets their jobs from other companies like Jobthread, a site that doens’t tell publishers or job posters that their content is going to be leveraged by a 4th party (ecnext).  The content is so far upstream by the time a company is hit with the problem that someone would have to contact a variety of publishers independently to get the problem resolve.

In any case, ecnext goes up in my hall of shame right next to the sploggers that shamelessly rip content from publisher sites and then attempt to re-monetize it.  I’ve been supportive of both Indeed and Jobthread because they provide much needed tools to job seekers and help hiring teams by simplifying the job posting process, but if something doesn’t change (on both ends) then they are going to lose my support.

I was talking to someone a few days ago and we got into the subject of company culture.  There are company cultures that put fire in our bellies and ones that make us watch the clock.  Having spent time in the small business and startup community I’ve come to hear people talk about their “open company culuture” frequently.  It usually involves a spreadsheet and a talk about how the company has an open books policy that everyone in the company has access to.  A few quarters go by and the company doesn’t do so well and everyone gets bummed because the spreadsheet doesn’t change, despite rhetoric to the contrary.  It doesn’t have to be this way.  If you run a company you can have an open culture without exposing your financials (and yourself) to scrutiny. 

A great example of this popped into my blog reading this morning.  Andy Monfried, CEO of Lotame.com, posted a blog entry titled “4 Minutes and a Buzzer” today.  He talks about how the company has all team members to share an idea and have it debated for four minutes.  Now I’m not just throwing this out there to point out that it sounds interesting.  This sort of thing happens around the Lotame offices on a regular basis. 

The company is in the social media advertising space and doing some really innovative things.  If you ask the team where their most innovative ideas come from you will quickly learn that it is events like this that lead to many of them.

The following article has been re-published with permission from the staffmagnet team, a Washington, DC based company that specializes in attractive practices for companies that inculde active community engagement.

A few months ago a good friend took a job working for a startup company that you’ve probably heard of.   He had been having informational interviews with the top startup companies from around the area.  I say informational interviews and not interviews because these were more like conversations about what he wanted to do and whether or not they could line something like that up.  There were no developer tests or technical screen interviews (at least not in the early stages) or other major hoops that he had to jump through.  The companies that he interviewed with had an edge over the competition, but not a silver bullet.  Three of them had active community engagement programs.  One of the three didn’t have the flexibility to make a role for him, but the other two did.  He ended up taking the best opportunity of the two. 

The magic of what happened wasn’t that he responded to an ad on ANY job board.  In fact, there was not a job posted anywhere.  He had a connection to the companies that were hiring (all three) because they had active community engagement programs.  A few others out there do too.  The big ones have the resources to do this and usually implement programs that are directed toward college students, but smart companies these days are implementing active community engagement programs that leverage both their employees and their recruiting teams.  In one case I’ve seen a company hire a community manager outright.  A community manager who serves both the interests of the company and helps the company recruiter – together they actively engage the community very effectively. 

But even with all of the community engagement efforts of this dynamic duo, they miss a lot of really talented people who they would like to hire.  But the people who really miss out are the companies who don’t have any sort of community engagement program in place.  Some have passive community engagement programs, aka employee referral bonus programs.  The problem is that just offering a referral bonus is like offering someone a reward for referring their relatives and immediate friends.  The problem with this is that friends and family don’t get screened like prospective applicants and they end up taking more time than they are worth (think courstesy interviews).  Community engagement means that employees are actively scouting for talent all the time, because they have been trained to think about it and because they see the benefit of it. 

As I’ve mentioned, the power of community engagement is really clear to some companies, but to me it became even more clear today.  I would like to share two different examples: 

This morning I spoke with a candidate who I have been talking to for more than 6 months.  He works for a company that is well known for hiring too many people, overpaying them and then letting them go in bulk.  People stick around because the money is too good not to.  The candidate just got a big raise and had no reason to be looking for a job.  No job board resumes or job descriptions involved.  The candidate knows me well and knows that I’m a door opener.  I figured that when the candidate was ready to look that I would get a call, or at least a Twitter message.  Instead, I got a ping about the candidate having given 2 weeks notice.  I asked why I didn’t get a call (I had recently presented some great opportunities) and here is what the candidate said - It was his collaboration with one of the lead team members from the company he is going to go to work for in two weeks that prompted the move, not something that a recruiter set up.  Now I know the person who un-officially recruited this candidate personally too.  It is someone who is very active in a DC area group that both are involved with (I am too which is how I know one of them).  This candidate is a top notch developer, the kind that a lot of companies would move mountains for. 

Later today I spoke with a candidate who had also just given his employer two weeks notice.  He is going to work for a company that has hired more than a dozen people with hot web developer skills and experience (all local) while other companies have been pressed to hire any web developers with similar skills and experience.  The small company that he accepted an offer at doesn’t have an office or a recruiter.  They have done this because they have taken an active role in a local group and they send their people to this event monthly.  After each event they typically go out for drinks and appetizers with whoever is around.  The crowd is really social and the team members from the small company get to know the members of the group through this way.  It isn’t that the small company is doing something amazing, they are just spending time on a regular basis in the company of the people who they want to hire.  It has paid off for them. 

 It is easy to get lost in all of the different events that are going on these days, but there are only a few that happen on a regular basis that these companies have to hit to find who they are looking for and get to know them well enough to attract them.  While companies could send recruiters in to do the work of peer talent scouts, the result isn’t the same as a coordinated effort.  You know the saying, the more the merrier, and it is very true in community engagement as well.

Copyright 2008, Robert Neelbauer, staffmagnet, LLC.  Re-publication of this article without permission is prohibited.

Update: I found this post with a related story while skimming the day’s job seeker Tweets.

I can’t say that corporate values come up all that often in the startup world, but today I’m inclined to suggest that founders and officers should consider getting some.  All too often in business, there are situations that come up that invite us to do things would not be acceptable in any other situation.  Things that might threaten relationships, credibility and even our reputation.  There are situations that happen on a daily basis that offer us the opportunity to shine too.  In business we tend to look at these situations like chess players, and as a result we are thinking about which move will help us win the competitive advantage.  Unfortunately, competitive advantage for comanies doesn’t always translate into success or competitive advantage for people.  People and companies come and go, but the people behind them have to live with themselves and in their communities long after they depart from their company or exit from their startup. 

My company isn’t really big enough to have a lot of corporate values yet, so this is a great thought excercise for me.  We do have a mission, and our mission is:

“Our success is tied to the success of our clients.” 

What that means to us is that if we do something that negatively impacts one of our clients it has a negative impact on us.  The flipside of that, which is what we emphasize on a daily basis, is that what we do helps our clients do well and when they do well so do we. 

I’ve seen a lot of corporate values over the years, but one of my favorite ones is the Gold Rule (do onto others as you would have them do onto you).  Now this is a corporate value that I like.  It doesn’t just emphasize work situations, but also community and life situations.  If big corporations followed this rule then maybe they would think twice before they implemented slash and burn policies that adversely impact the communities that they live in and/or serve. 

Of course we don’t live in a perfect world, and we do make choices that we look back on and have second thoughts about.  In thise situations it is best to learn from our mistakes and to do our best to make better decisions in the future.  We are all human.

A little under a year ago I had a personal aha moment where I realized that I was onto something big.  Like most, the events that lead up to this happened over the course of many years, but unlike most of them it would change my life.  I realized that the phrase “Human Resources” had to go.  I reached this conclusion after spending a number of years interacting with the staffing industry as an agency recruiter, consultant, temp and human resources recruiter. 

It wasn’t that the human resources team needed to go or that certain members of the team needed to go, though I’m sure this could be true in some organizations as much as it is with other teams or individuals.  The problem is in the wording and everything that it creates with respect to workplace attitudes.  According to Wikipedia, the objective of HR is “The objective of Human Resources is to maximize the return on investment from the organization’s human capital and minimize financial risk. It is the responsibility of human resource managers to conduct these activities in an effective, legal, fair, and consistent manner.”  The funny thing is that a few days ago I was talking to a recruiter buddy and he mentioned a similar phrase that was even more of an issue in my book: “Human Capital”.  He’s still an hr recruiter. 

Disclaimer: I don’t fault him or anyone else who uses this terminology.  I do believe that it needs to change.  I also think that the industries that propagate it are in need of some radical change.  And like it or not, they are going to change whether they like it or not.  There are some who are pushing the envelope like Best Buy did with their results-only work environment and others that are just making solid efforts to help people cope with the challenges of being a full time employee and having a life too like J.M. Family Enterprises.  I’m not sure about best buy, but I’m pretty sure that J.M. Family didn’t get to where they are today overnight.  Neither did Google, but both companies are in the Fortune 100 Best companies to work for in 2008 along with Starbucks.

But not every company is a major retailer or the largest Lexus dealership in the world so they can’t afford to experiment or invest in experimental programs like the one that Best Buy embarked on or like J.M. Family maintains.  These programs are expensive.  So what I am proposing isn’t an expensive journey, just a starting point.  The starting point that I’m proposing is to eliminate the use of the phrase “Human Resources” and along with it “Human Capital”.  As a replacement I propose that organizations use a more pleasant phrase like “Employer Relations” or “Work Stream”.  I really like Work Stream because it emphasizes the organic aspect of how people interact with the work ecosystem they are a part of.  Something that happens upstream impacts life downstream, and things that happen downstream are critical to the survival of those upstream. 

With a new philosophy for employers in place there will not be overnight progress toward becoming a top employer, but none of the companies that I’ve referred to got where they are today overnight either.