Phil Wolff: staffing

Why Sayers Wanted.

Sat, 15 May 2004 01:14:48 GMT

What's a "Why Sayer"? LEO says:

I suspect it may be an attempt at a play on 'nay-sayers' -- people who never do anything but criticize. 'Why-sayers' is a coinage that emphasizes positive thinking, creativity, and questioning authority. (Go Ikea!)

On a flyer at Ikea:

We're Hiring
Why
Sayers

People who want to make things better. Make things more fun. More clever. People who aren't restricted by convention, but challenged by it. People who fit perfectly at Ikea. Because it's the why that makes us successful. Just give us a call and submit a voice application. We'll be in touch with you as soon as possible.

Call (866) 831-8611
or visit us on the web at
www. IKEA.com.

On the reverse...

Tied together by a hand-drawn triangle:

The Dream
to create a better everyday life for the many people

The Business Idea
by offering a wide range of well-designed, functional home furnishing products at prices so low that as many people as possible will be able to afford them

The Human Resource Idea
by giving down-to-earth, straightforward people the possibility to grow, both as individuals and in their professional roles, so that together we are strongly committed to creating a better everyday life for ourselves and our customers

Followed by:

The Realization
it takes a dream to create a successful business idea
it takes people to make dreams a reality

Things I love about this:

The inner rhetoric of the organization, plainly exposed to the public. Values, goals, the mental model holding things together. Do you speak our language?
Psychographic positioning. Being stark about who you are improves the quality of the inquiry pool. Are you in or are you out?
Simple action directions. Call us.
The promise of prompt human contact. Competitive advantage in an era of form-letter-non-response.

[aka staffing]

John F. Kerry wins in Iowa. 1 down. 49 to go.

Wed, 21 Jan 2004 05:02:39 GMT

OK, I gloated for an hour.

I'm only a little surprised.

A few factors contributed to the success.

The big management change in the Kerry camp in November. Strong organization on the ground.
All the candidates spent a year turning up voter turnout. With high turnout, a GOTV machine isn't a competitive advantage.
Kerry put all of his energy behind one punch. Can he keep his balance and sustain that level of effort? Will the same tactics that worked in a 2.9 million person state scale to one with 35 million people?
The whole message thing changed then too: They Let Kerry Be Kerry. He's great with people. Great on discussing issues. Totally affirms my view that campaigns are conversations.
Bush bagging Saddam elevates warrior status. Kerry served in combat, highly decorated. Served on the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee for 20 years. A long time architect of America's war on narcoterror and political terrorism.
Dean and Gephardt nuked each other. Not civil, and Iowans punished them for it. It's to Dean's credit he survived.
Kerry and Edwards have a higher Emotional Quotient (EQ) than Dean. Dean wasn't very likeable in the debates or in interviews. One long note of derision, frustration, just ready to burst out of his skin. Other candidates, like Kerry and Edwards, showed many emotional notes, in appropriate circumstances.
By process of elimination (angry Dean, babyfaced Edwards, civilian Gephardt) you're left with Kerry.

What should Dean do?

Keep on plugging, the machine was working.
Work on yourself. Get high, drunk, a massage or something so surgeons can expose your warm fuzzy side, the side that laughs, giggles, cries. Your true believers know it's in there.
Go two weeks without mentioning Iraq. It'll scare the bejeezzus out of Clark.

What should Kerry do?

Franchise your HQ. Start building tools so your volunteers can do more kinds of things. "Franchising" your headquarters roles lets each metro area lay solid groundwork before you come to town. (Call me. 510 444 8234)
Get six hours of sleep and keep eating your oatmeal.
Money follows support. Put supporter enrollment above donor armtwisting.

All said, I'm proud of my local team. Our small crew has five people on the road in Iowa and New Hampshire. We're actively working on our campaign craft, studying from old hands. We're doing the basics badly but learning from each experience, better each week. We're communicating well with each other, despite our circle growing.

Slowly those of us who were afraid to commit are becoming true believers. We can say things like:

John Kerry is the Real Deal.

We're sending a president to Washington, not a message.

He's the one we want on the podium opposite Bush.

and believe them.

And we have the nerve to ask people to join us.

Come to a Kerry meetup this Thursday night.
I'm shopping for a media relations strategist for the Bay Area, to help us take back the White House.
I need a team that understands precinct, CRM profiling, and direct marketing software, so all Americans can have health care at least as good as Federal employees.
Curriculum developer wanted, so we can build the Opportunity America we all deserve.
Speech communications professor, to give voice to the average American instead of powerful interests.
I need a conversation with someone who can coach newbies on project templating, so 20% of our children don't go to bed hungry.
A digital artist, to bring sunshine and transparency back to government service.

Call me. Or write: phil@dijest.com.

You're not seeing a lot of me here. I'm doing most of my blogging over on EastBayKerry.com (all politics is local). And spreading myself thin in bulletin boards, other people's blogs and doing campaign related stuff. My apartment flooded, throwing off my schedule and keeping me away from my computer for a week. Small stuff.

"akasig"

Where does IT go from here?

Mon, 03 Nov 2003 17:04:03 GMT

Shelley Powers' Burningbird essay The State of Geek: Part 1 -- Temp Job, No Health says the IT labor market sucks and ain't gonna improve much. But says it better. She closes saying she wouldn't encourage kids to go into IT. My take...

Temps first. I used to be vp for strategy and technology of the world's largest staffing company. You're right about employers using temps/contractors to minimize risk at the early stages of an economic recovery. Watch quarterly reports from Manpower and Kelly for upticks in temp hiring. btw, contractors and temps are the first to go too.

Barriers to entry. In tough times it is very common for employers to raise barriers to entry since they can do so and still meet their staffing needs. Project management certification books are flying off the shelves at Amazon. And employers aren't just looking for code warriors when they can get someone with a masters or PhD in compsci for the same price. The low barrier to entry that permitted millions of "accidental" programmers to enter the workforce has let millions more continue to enter around the world. At the same time, the enterprise need for code-level customization fell through the floor.

After the offshorin'. So you're already in IT. What should you be studying now? In this economic model, what's left for US IT are jobs that require:

"high touch", like requirements professionals;
cultural sensitivity, like localization and UX pros;
proximity to systems, like the overnight sysadmin who has to physically touch a box, but with skills not much more than a cable installer;
world class niche specialists, being the world's best in corrosion algorithms, or the only people who understand documentation of military control systems in a Czech, Russian, and Spanish blend;
content creatives that use IT for artistic and aesthetic expression that resonate with world markets;
teams that use proprietary tools to achieve 10-fold leaps in productivity over developers using off-the-shelf and open source tools;
work allotted via nepotism, pork, graft;
legacy system specialists, caring for dinosaurs until the business need for them evaporates;
coordinators that can rapidly assemble the talent needed for a project and provision them with the tools to work together; and
managers that plan and deliver outsourced projects.

It shouldn't surprise you that most of these roles have steel industry counterparts.

If I had kids in school, I'd be telling them:

The future lies in molecular manufacturing (chem, physics, materials science), pharma and cognitive sciences (neurochem) all informed by IT.
Assume you need postdoc work for job security.
Learn Mandarin, Spanish, and Hindi. Along with English you'll be able to speak with more than half the world.
And start your professional networking early (Can you leave your Ryze friends list to your kids?).

"akasig"

Visualize blogspace.

Sat, 25 Oct 2003 23:28:07 GMT

DiceLaRed ("The Network Says") helps its customers see and understand.

For example, here is a picture of a real time graph, shown in the browser, that shows Spain's political parties by share of the current news cycle. In real time. Clicking on a wedge lets you dive into the news stream.

The flow of news and blogs is beyond understanding. The headlines alone are overwhelming.

So we need machines to helps us make sense of the flow.

DiceLaRed creatively blends news crawling + lexical analysis + data mining + data visualization + customization + alerting.

Apply this to your customers' weblogs, your industry magazines, and local newspapers for an environmental scan.

Apply this to job board postings. Understand labor market demand across the usual dimensions. Then stretch to discover new buzzwords and "terms of art". Can you say competitive analysis? How about strategic recruiting?

Apply this to medical discussion boards. Look for spikes in conversation about symptoms to detect outbreaks and public health problems. Look for swings in interest to retarget investment in health education and social programs.

Apply this to your citizenry, to understand what political issues are emerging in importance, and with whom, in real time.

We are much closer to a dashboard that helps us understand and respond, sooner and with more precision. Thank goodness. "akasig"

Social Software in Recruiting.

Wed, 22 Oct 2003 19:45:35 GMT

I ran into Mason Wong on Ryze in August. Mason is the staffing manager for Advent Software. I asked him if he thought Ryze-like social software would find its way into the features of staffing solutions from companies like Hire.com. He wrote:

While the fundamental mission and functionality of Ryze is to expand an individual's network while employing a relatively narrow set of criteria in identifying new contacts, the fundamental mission of Hire and the functionality of its applications are to bring efficiencies to processes involving high volumes of people and heavy criteria sets in sourcing and selection. I, too, have wondered if the similarities between Ryze and Hire can ever be enough to bridge the differences so the two worlds could connect.

I could envision a highly progressive and online savvy recruiter, with a lot more available time than any actively working recruiters that I know, trying to maintain an online community of potential job candidates using a Ryze-like guest book style site as a supplement to a more traditional email newsletter subscription list, but this really is limited to the sourcing side of recruitment, which is only one part of the full recruitment process supported by Hire-like systems.

I must admit, I have mostly doubts about the value in linking up Ryze-like social services with Hire-like systems, especially because it has been my experience that to effectively use Ryze and to effectively use Hire applications, it takes a lot of time and focus for each. Without a clearly viable profit driven model behind such an effort, I don't expect many recruiters, much less hiring managers, diving into some sort of synergy between the two.

I agree with Mason's observations but I have a few other conclusions.

Imagine that, upon signing up at your career site, job seekers got a Ryze-like page. Even better, you get a weblog and news aggregator too. You can not only look for work, but easily subscribe to job listings as RSS feeds, mingle with other data mining software engineers, post about your new explorations in technology and work.

In other words, what happens if you make it easy for job seekers to build social capital?

A few guesses...

Better Navigation. Social network features (like Technorati, blogrolls, buddy lists) make it easy locate clusters of related professionals. Job seekers are effectively answering in advance the question "Well, if you aren't available, do you know someone who is?"
Pre-branding. The knowledge reflected in the blogs, wikis, and discussion forums becomes a way for your employees to become aware of potential candidates.
Fresher Content. Bloggers tend to post frequently, hundreds of times more often than they update HR profiles or resumes. Contact information is up to date.
Transparency and Conversation. It may take getting used to, but you'll start to get useful and frank feedback about the job seeking experience, the company's products, etc. Engagement that's ongoing, perhaps throughout a career.
Career site as destination. To the degree your organization niches, your career site may be a magnet for people in related industry or occupational categories. Hang out with the other financial engineering leaders.

About your reservations, Mason, you're right for now. The positioning of the smart folks at Hire.com, and every other Applicant Tracking System (ATS) or Human Capital Management (HCM) solution, has been to automate HR bureaucracy. Their systems can save time, effort, and money in the day-to-day life of a recruiter.

This won't be enough. Skilled labor shortages will become more pronounced in the next 9-18 months. Recruiter workflow optimization, once executed, is yielding diminishing returns.

So where do you put your next staffing dollar? The inputs to the process: job seekers.

Manufacturing went through the same deep shift, widening from an internal focus to an external focus. From managing internal logistics to reaching outside the corporate boundary to the external supply chain. None of the new skills and practices, like MRP or quality circles, were abandoned. Attention widened to include a network of suppliers. And new practices emerged to better harmonize the internal and external.

When raw material is talent, the processes are more difficult than manufacturing lives with. The products are widely differentiated (people don't have SKUs). What they can do and where they fit changes day to day. The goods can't be moved when and where needed via UPS. And, unlike a can of soup, these goods have opinions and desires of their own.

So ATS and HCM vendors can expect pressure to serve this new focus. Employers like you will demand features that create value for candidates. Increasing a job seeker's social capital is just one type of value, one that Ryze supports.

So I see a future for Ryze's in HR.

As extensions to the career relationship.
As new tools for data mining.
As personal branding tools.
As a retention tool, binding workers to your intranet and extranet social networks.

After all, schmoozespace isn't so far from recruiting, is it?

[aka staffing]

Monster enters the community business. Look out Ryze.

Tue, 21 Oct 2003 00:53:49 GMT

Monster is getting into schmoozespace. Ryze, LinkedIn, et al are in for some competition. A gang of Monster execs tried Ryze in July: CIO Brian Farrey, VP Dan Miller, SVP Danielle McCabe, VP Douglas Hardy, software engineer John Hayward, VP Michele Pearl, Director Sean Luitjens, and Creative Director Sue Duro. Michael Schutzler too, SVP responsible for Monster Networking. Schutzler stopped by LinkedIn too.

Why does Monster care? Two problems:

Monster spams employers.

Monster makes it easy for job seekers to apply for a job. So they do. To lots of jobs. Multiply the number of job seekers times the number of jobs to which they apply, divide by the few jobs offered. Monster spews a supersonic torrent.

Employers are treating Monster-generated job applications like spam. The bigger ones spend heavily on applicant tracking systems that filter, blacklist, and screen, typically less effective than your average bayesian filter.

Monster needs to show employers the handful of needles in the career pool haystack. But how?

Monster needs to improve on the 4% Relationship with Workers.

The average job search lasts around two months. The average person gets a new job every 3.5 to 4 years, about once per presidential election. So you need Monster 2 of 48 months, between 4 and 5% of your career. What about the other 95%?

Monster has to advertise to you for four years so you return. That's expensive.

And your profile becomes stale the week after you post it. So employers won't pay to mine Monster's "resume" bank.

Can Monster bribe you to keep your profile current? To share your professional network? To write about your work life?

If so,

Your continuously fresh profile will be at least 20 times more useful to employers.
The record of your electronic relationships with others in the community helps employers find clusters of like-minded people, the better to recruit.
And you'll already be in the house the next time you launch your career campaign. Monster won't need to advertise to you again.

Monster's head start, challenges, and opportunities:

Monster's lead:

Traffic. 40 million job seekers have visited Monster sites. If even some of those email addresses still work, they might be able to draw a million people to try the community. Compare that to
Motivation. Job seekers have an economic interest in making it work.
Conditioning. They are trained to fill out forms.

Monster has real challenges.

Resumequity. Their current policies are hostile to user privacy. They claim ownership of all data you write when on their site, or any data they infer from your behavior. This runs counter to a strong cultural and political trend moving power and control of information to individuals.
Pay to Play. They want to charge for membership. It's not clear that anyone has made a go of that in schmoozespace.
Tone. Executive and contractor experiments failed in the past, not least because of the tone of the places Monster created. Time and staff have passed. Can they create a place that is safe, fun, social, purposeful, casual?
Friar's Fallacy. Groucho Marx wrote in a letter to the Hollywood Friar's, "Please accept my resignation. I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member." I don't feel any particular connection to other people in the phone book. Monster needs to foster feelings of affiliation and membership beyond a credit card transaction.
Big Walls. Monster doesn't open its databases to the world's programmers. Amazon and Google have, and thousands of experiments helped these giants discover new ways to create value.
All Work. Many other communities created for business find that people want to explore and band together about non-work things. Can Monster aggressively follow and support their users?

Opportunities:

Nodespace Neighborhoods. BostonWorks' Jason Butler describes "nodespaces" as those data intersections that connect people with each other. Monster can create just-in-time community around specific job postings, employers, occupations, and interests. And there is no reason some of those spaces can't be branded.

Fellowship. Cynthia Typaldos addresses professional and personal workplace isolation with her professional guilds. If Monster can match and beat that, it's scale will have a chance to work.

Built in Word of Mouth. More jobs are filled by referral. By helping you form tribes, Monster multiplies the effectiveness of your job search. And increases the chance that you'll refer a Monster employer to a Monster networker.

Cross-Property Inolvement. Monster operates relocation, training, testing, and other businesses. An active and lively social network can be used to improve customer acquisition, retention, and satisfaction in many of their properties.

Hosted Blogspaces. There's no reason Monster can't host weblogs for every user, both on the job seeker and employer side. Most people won't try blogging, many will try and leave, but millions will try and stick. Monster could become one of the top blog hosts, along with Google, AOL, and Yahoo!

Humanization of Candidates. Job seekers are people. But you wouldn't know it from datafied personas job boards pass to employer databases. Social networks offer employers a chance to understand more of people than their "resumes".

Will Monster execute well and fast enough for employers to defer to Monster's network instead of rolling their own?

It all comes down to social capital. The more you help your customers harness it, the stronger your competitive advantage.

# # #

From the Monster PR site:

Monster Redefines Career Management By Harnessing Professional Networking; Network Available to 40 Million Job Seeker Members. excerpts, bulleting and empahsis mine:

Monster ... today announced plans to launch Monster Networking, a professional networking service.

Monster Networking is an online community where professionals across all industries and levels can exchange information about jobs, offer expertise and help others achieve their goals.

Monster will serve as the host in this community,

fostering introductions between members and

encouraging them to:

share career advice,

cultivate long-term professional relationships, and

support each other's goals.

Proprietary matching technology will allow Monster to

proactively initiate introductions between participating members as well as

promote relevant career opportunities based on criteria in a member's professional profile.

Member profiles will include skills, occupation, employment history, schools attended, titles, interests, and geographic location.

"In addition to leveraging the Internet as a powerful recruiting tool, consumers continue to rely on their network of friends, colleagues and peers when seeking professional guidance or advice about how to best achieve career goals. Today, we embark on a new Monster - one that serves all professionals who are looking to manage their careers, not just those seeking work."

Monster Networking is a subscription-based service that is expected to be available in Q1 of 2004.

"akasig"

Phil Wolff's profesional bio for BloggerCon. Suggestions?

Mon, 29 Sep 2003 14:39:58 GMT

I'm presenting at BloggerCon and needed to post a short bio. What do you think?

Philip Wolff hails from Oakland, California. In the last year he presented at the ProjectWorld conference (project blogging), BlogTalk Wien (the future of blogging), and BloggerCon (blogging behind the firewall). He posts regularly to a klog apart and Blogcount, and in moments of apoplexy to Don't Blog: Blogging the Weblog Backlash. Phil has been blogging for 5 years, computing for more than 30 years, a marketing and technology veteran of the Naval Supply Systems Command, Gateway, Compaq, Wang Laboratories, Bechtel National, and Adecco SA where he served as global VP for strategy and technology. When Phil isn't helping companies rethink their employment sites, his Evanwolf Group helps them develop strategies, plans and technologies for workplace blogging.
Contact: Ryze, Skype, email, Yahoo! IM, AIM.

I tried to say who, where, work history, affiliations, interests. And keep it short.

Suggestions? Things to add, subtract, restate?

Should all bloggers post a professional bio? "akasig"

Mower musings: 5 blognet justifications.

Mon, 22 Sep 2003 18:47:00 GMT

Matt Mower skyped me in my early morning hours. Blame errors or recollection on being awake all night.

Speaking from theory, what might be some core business cases for intranet blognets?

Project communication.

Team blogs. Project aggregators and RSS feeds. Individual blogs. Blog your thinking as you scope the project. Blog flash reports. Meeting minutes. Task notes. Use a blog-to-email gateway for stakeholder communications. Socialize new project members faster and more completely. Create better after action reports.

Projects often fail due to poor communication. Blogs aren't a magic pill, but they are a fast and cheap way to produce more and better communication. More, because blogs lower some of the barriers to communication and create personal and peer reinforcement for sharing. Better, because blognets' social nature also improves the quality and context of those communications. The PMBOK describes a basic project communication; you can live it with blognets.

Scale social network from small to medium, medium to large

When your workforce can fit in your neighborhood Starbucks, everyone knows each other. Blognets help you scale that experience. Do you plan for growth? Foster blognets to smooth the way, to preserve values and culture, to reinforce the informal organization that gets things done.

Cross stovepipes

Marketing doesn't talk to engineering? Raise two blognets. Expose them to each other with discovery tools. Not only are you getting blogging's baseline benefits, hidden processes and thinking see daylight, and you can improve the quality of dialog.

Due diligence

Merging with another department or company? Buying one in the next few years? Selling your company? Start your blognets now. Help appraisers value your org's social capital. Reveal the power of your informal networks, your workforce's individual and collective knowledge and capacity.

You're buying one of two apparently identical firms, but one has a healthy blognet. Which has lower risk? Which gives you an added factor to consider, reinforcing management's claims?

Transition and Continuity Management

Your chiefs adopt a new strategy. The new direction calls for changing the workforce over 2-3 years. Layoffs. Mergers. Retraining. Recruiting. Retirement. For the chiefs, blognets shorten new hire learning curves. Help two organizations merge their informal social networks faster and with less struggle. For individuals, blognets strengthen your personal brand (good or bad, but stronger) and improve your marketability within the enterprise.

And I haven't even evoked tying blogs to your enterprise systems and processes. "akasig"

Code or Die - Recruiting promotions of the week.

Mon, 22 Sep 2003 08:45:13 GMT

Do you live for the elegant hack? Compete in the Google Code Jam 2003. Say you don't slay the competition.How dying for a living? Win a walk-on roll starring your own demise in Showtime's Dead Like Me (the Win A Job To Die For sweepstakes). The drawing is around October 1st.

Robert Walikis - Resume Blog.

Fri, 19 Sep 2003 23:23:11 GMT

I love it.

Rob's Availability. Interests. Experience. Links to resumes in various formats, for various roles. Professional colleagues by name. Professional affiliations. Blogrolls. Just throwing it all out there for the search engines.

This is a simple, free use of a blogging tool. It adheres to the four principles set by the Software Product Marketing eGroup for this project:

"I Own Me": SPM Members to retain as complete control over their own professional information as possible, and to allow for flexiblility in the display and inclusion of content
"Zero-Budget": Bootstrap infrastructure using publicly available, free / cheap / open source tools and services as well as establishing desirable alliances and partnerships
"Absence of Presence": Establish standard mechanisms for evaluating accuracy and strength of SPM members' information
"Social Networks Work": Drive ResumeBloggers to develop key skills in social networking, virtual collaboration, and social software application / use

Now if Rob only blogged about what he knows, thinks, experiences. It would not only be worth finding, it would be worth reading. "akasig"

Visualizing business models.

Sun, 14 Sep 2003 18:34:57 GMT

I love when you can explain your business in an elegant chart. Take a look at this one from Nanomix.

This 7k image is chock-full of information. It explains:

How products emerge.
The core activities and deliverables (and organizations? and talent mix?)
The rate of weeding out needed along the way.
That the process stops at creating the new product. They don't bring new things to market. Suggesting marketing partners or customers.
Key opportunities for productivity improvement (earlier in the cycle)
A basis for competitive comparison (how many ideas do you generate, how many designs can you model, what is your cost at each step)
That computational design comes before lab work, different from how research was done only ten years' ago.

The 1000-to-1 ratio is clearly hypothetical. But can't you see a quarterly report with real numbers and the funnels sized in proportion to the real levels of activity?

What's your business? Do you have a simple diagram that reveals your business at a high level? "akasig"

Should I make a career shift from IT to nano/bio? Larry Ellison says...

Mon, 08 Sep 2003 15:11:10 GMT

The San Francisco Chronicle: On The Record: Larry Ellison:

Ellison pulled out a crystal ball when asked what Silicon Valley will be like in five or 10 years: "It's going to be a lot more like Detroit than like Silicon Valley. The great news is we're going to be the molecular biology hub for the world, but we will have more competition -- in San Diego, in Boston, in Tel Aviv. But the gestation period of a company in molecular biology is very different from that of a software company. The returns will be slower in coming, so the whole metabolism of the valley will have to be retuned for that industry."

So, can I use my C# skills in molecular biology? Will we start teaching gene splicing to grade schoolers, so they'll be ready for college?

Job: Dean Campaign SysAdmin, Burlington, VT.

Sun, 07 Sep 2003 06:04:06 GMT

From the DeanForAmerica weblog:

Harish Rao, our IT Director, has asked several times that I post this job description. It's his birthday, so I figured I'd relent. Working here is a labor of love, so everyone is underpaid and the hours are brutal. Please apply only if you have professional experience in all the required areas and are ready to move to Burlington tomorrow.
Send applications to work@deanforamerica.com with a resume and references in the body of the email. Please title the email WILL SYSADMIN FOR AMERICA.
Responsibility Overview

Systems Administrator will be responsible and accountable for networksoftware, hardware, and telecom issue resolution. They will be expected to help design, maintain, and implement our current Windows 2000 client and RedHat Linux server nationwide infrastructure. The successful candidate will communicate daily with the IT Director and outline project status and completion dates, and assure that deliverables schedules are met. On a regular basis, they will collect new systems requirements from staff members and deliver documented solutions to them. They will also be responsible for ensuring that all systems are secure and available to field offices and off-site personnel.

"akasig"

How fast will the jobs return?

Sun, 31 Aug 2003 00:00:31 GMT

Mason Wong asked, "What kind of job market recovery do you think the nation will experience? Slow and gradual recovery over years? Sudden and surprising surge 6 months from now?"

The big factors that concern me in addition to the usual macro indicators:

How much are VCs and banks funding the small business entrepreneurs who create most of the jobs in any recovery?
- Ask around. New money isn't available.
Will the increase in Federal borrowing (to meet budget deficits) suck up the money available for lending used for business expansion?
- Could force interest rates up.
Will the Bush/Cheney trickle-down economic policy still be in force?
- Trickle-down stimulus is slower and less direct than every other means.
Will resolution of California Gubernatorial and Presidential elections reduce managerial fear and anxiety? In what direction will the results of those elections move consumers?
Will the average American think our $1 billion a week spending on Afghanistan and Iraq will help or hurt the U.S. economy?
Is the resumption of a wartime footing and military-industrial complex redirecting innovation (the employment multiplier) from the private sector?
- Smart people often follow the money. But more jobs are usually made when a new technology sells to the worldwide market instead of just Uncle Sam.
How fast and far will labor market arbitrage drive down domestic white collar wages, so IT jobs remain here instead of move to India?
- You're a CIO. Would you resist offshoring your help desk (saving you $2 of $4) if your local workers offer to take a 60% pay cut? A 50% pay cut? How about cutting the pay of your senior software engineers from $75k to $40k a year, and the juniors from $35 to $20?
- You're a programmer. Would you take those cuts?
How badly will state and local government downsizing create new unemployment or impose new costs that stifle economic growth?

I'm neither an inspired fortune teller nor an informed Mr. Greenspan. I'm betting on fits and starts, uneven growth from county to county and state to state, and a relapse after the 2004 election should Bush win. "akasig"

HBR case study on blogging. Watch for the backlash.

Sat, 23 Aug 2003 19:46:59 GMT

In the September 2003 issue, by Halley Suitt.

A tech-savvy employee has something to say about everything at surgical glove manufacturer Lancaster-Webb. When she raved on-line about an older style of gloves, sales unexpectedly shot up. And when she posted damaging information about a potential customer's business practices, the deal collapsed. Is "Glove Girl" a priceless marketing weapon or a grave security risk?

"akasig"

A Piet Hein moment.

Thu, 21 Aug 2003 00:06:07 GMT

via je_apostrophe's makeoutcity"

Eric Sink writes about "Career Calculus." - His message is to focus on learning through out your career because it's in your hands only. - He writes about mistakes, "My own mistakes have been the difference-makers in my career. When SourceGear won the Inc 500 award last fall, the editors asked me to name the most surprising thing I had learned from being an entrepreneur. I told them the most surprising thing was that I could make so many dumb mistakes and still end up on the Inc 500 list."

And about managers who stand in the way of your learning, "This a basic axiom and a starting point for taking responsibility for your career: Don't work for a manager who is actively hindering your practice of constant learning. Just don't do it."

Reminds me of:

The road to wisdom?
Well, it's plain
and simple to express:
Err
and err
and err again
but
less
and less
and less.
— Piet Hein

"akasig"

Call for blawgers: "I own my blog" boilerplate for employment agreements.

Mon, 18 Aug 2003 16:19:11 GMT

One in 4 or 5 bloggers will start a new job this year. Maybe 750 thousand. They and their blogs are at risk.

Ever walk out of a job interview only to discover that you've signed away

(a) your right to blog on your own site,

(b) the freedom to post from work, and

(c) that if you violate a or b, your employer will lay claim to your weblogs, confiscate them, fire you, and sue you?

Employment and confidentiality agreeements frequently have language like this.

I want a piece of paper that I can bring to the interview, that the employer's agent can sign, that preserves my blog, my rights to blog, my ownership of my blog, and explicit freedom from retaliation for anything I post.

I want a similar piece of paper that a union bargaining unit can use.

Is there a Creative Commons style of packaging that can make it easy to create this boilerplate?

Any blawgers who'd care to suggest such language? "akasig"

I pre-ordered Emotional Design. Is it here yet? Is it? Is it here yet?

Thu, 14 Aug 2003 22:46:57 GMT

I can't wait for Don Norman's new book to arrive. Emotional Design: Why We Love (Or Hate) Everyday Things. It's a skinny paperback. Norman posted drafts of the prologue (500k pdf), chapter 1: Attractive things work better (245k pdf), and Epilogue: We Are All Designers (200k pdf). Wouldn't it be cool to understand why people love me but hate my blog? Or vice versa? Perhaps a companion piece to Fogg's Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do?

Out of work in Oz? Be a spy.

Thu, 14 Aug 2003 22:28:43 GMT

The Australian Security Intelligence Organization is hiring 250-300 new counter intelligence agents over the next 18-24 months. A job harder to offshore. more...

Scott Reynen gives code for Monster agent RSS.

Thu, 14 Aug 2003 06:27:46 GMT

Scott Reynen does a little of the RSSJobs thing too. Except he posted jobfeeds.php and jobSource.inc on his source code page so you can experiment with rolling your own for aggregating job board agents as a single RSS feed.

15 August deadline for best workplace contest.

Wed, 06 Aug 2003 20:10:07 GMT

Dann Sheridan reminds us that you can nominate your employer in the small- or medium-sized category of the Best Small Companies to Work For competition. Entries due August 15.

What we need is a competition for the best places to look for work. <shameless plug >Check out Candidate Voice if you want to compete in that category.</plug>

An interview with RSSJobs creator, Steve Rose.

Tue, 05 Aug 2003 22:26:30 GMT

I've been following two things very closely for many years: content syndication and labor markets. Last week RSSJobs was announced, bringing the two together. Here's my interview with Steve Rose who built RSSJobs.

What inspired or provoked you to create RSSJobs?

It was a combination of things. First was the frustration with my own job hunt. Like many IT professionals, I was unemployed for 6 months. When I did finally find a job, it was for half my previous pay, and in a environment I never would have considered otherwise. Even after starting that job, I was still job hunting. Every morning I was greeted with emails from Monster, and Dice, and several others with the results of my saved search agents. They were pretty useless. Monster only allowed 5 agents, and the emails only had up to 5 jobs per agent. I had to go to Monster's web site to see all the results. Then there was Dice. It gave me up to 50 jobs for each agent every day. Most of them were the same as the previous day's results! They were supposed to be just the new ones. I was spending all my morning time before work weeding through these, and I rarely had time to check any other sites that I didn't get emails from. Sites that didn't get updated every day went un-checked for weeks or months. Who knows how many potential jobs I missed out on because I didn't have time to check all the sites I wanted to check for updates.

Second was exposure to "RSS". I started reading all my web based news using NetNewsWire earlier this year, and was amazed at how much easier it was to keep up. So I stared playing with the RSS format, creating some feeds for my own personal use, and I thought this would be useful for checking a local University's job board. I wrote a quick java servlet to parse the new job listing and return the results as RSS. It was so cool! Not long after that, I added Dice and Monster to the mix.

At this point, it was all just for my own use. About 2 weeks later, I went on a job interview, and when asked what kind of personal projects I had, I mentioned this and described the benefits of RSS. One of the developers interviewing me knew about RSS, and thought it was very good idea. He said I should market it. So I came up with a simple business plan, adapted my servlets to a subscription-based model, and built a web site around it.

How would you describe what RSSJobs does?

RSSJobs is simply a search agent for other job boards. It takes search parameters from the user, searches the job boards they want, and returns the results to them in RSS.

Who is it for?

Ideally, RSSJobs is for anyone looking for a job on the internet. It is well suited to individuals who have jobs, but want to keep their eyes open to other positions, and don't have the time to do an exhaustive search every day.

That being said, the average person out there doesn't know about RSS yet, and has a hard time understanding the benefits. It's a paradigm shift for most people, making adoption of RSS more difficult. Web browsers are comfortable, and people don't want to give them up, despite their limitations.

So at this point, I don't expect most job hunters out there to "get" the benefits of using RSSJobs, so I am not targeting them just yet. Right now I am focusing on those who are already using RSS. As RSS use becomes more widespread, the target audience will expand.

When did it go live?

The official live date was August 1, 2003. The site has been up for a few weeks, but only myself and a few friends knew about it.

What's your day job? What's your technical background?

I am a Software Engineer. As a Software Engineer, I have done a little bit of everything. My strongest language is Java, but I also work in C/C++, as well as various 4GL type languages. I've done application, database, web, and multimedia development, sometimes all on the same project.

What programming tools did you use to construct RSSJobs? What platform are you running the apps on?

It was developed using Java 1.4.1, and currently hosted on Mac OS X Server 10.2.

What version(s) of RSS do you produce?

RSS 2.0

What do you think of the Echo project? Will you be supporting the new syndication formats?

I don't know much about the Echo project, but I plan to closely follow the market for RSS content. If other formats gain popularity, I will consider supporting them as well.

Most of the job boards bar "reverse engineering" and other screen scraping, concerned over theft of data by rivals and disintermediation. How does your design work around or through these concerns?

I have considered this, and I don't expect there to be an issue. The site clearly states that the user is searching other job sites. The job listings from the various boards are accessed on demand, and nothing is cached by RSSJobs. There is no attempt to mask the origin of the content. If the user wants more information about the job, they are sent to the job board, where they can apply for the job if they like. Users should still register and upload their resumes to the job boards being searched for maximum efficiency.

I liken what RSSJobs does to a personal assistant or agent who does the research requested by a client, and presents the results. For example, say my friend doesn't have internet access, but wants to use Monster.com in his job search. He asks me to search for jobs for him. Is there anything wrong with me typing in his keywords, downloading the results, and putting a summary of the listings in an Excel spreadsheet on a floppy disk for my friend to look through? It seems perfectly reasonable to me. RSSJobs does essentially the same thing.

Many employers use HR information systems that output job listings in an HR-XML format for bulk uploading to Monster and most of the big job boards. What kind of information is lost between employer and candidate?

I have no idea.

What's on your wishlist for news reader features?

I would like to see an RSS Reader that could manage the items from an RSS feed as individual items. A user could archive specific items for viewing later after it is no longer included in the feed. Adding locally-stored comments to an item would be a nice feature too.

Is there anything employers could do to make your job easier when searching jobs.Acme.com?

Yes, when they post jobs, keep the content simple. No embedded HTML tags, or other things that RSSJobs has to filter to keep the XML valid.

Where do you think the other bottlenecks are in getting work to workers?

I think the biggest problem is getting the word out about available jobs. There are so many different ways jobs get announced, between Job Boards, classifieds, and company web sites, it is hard to keep track of them all. RSSJobs is trying to help with that.

Where do you see RSSJobs going?

For now, RSSJobs is just a part-time endeavor. If it helps people out, and provides enough revenue to cover the hosting costs, I will be happy. It will expand slowly, adding new features and more search sites on an ongoing basis. Ideally, I'd like to grow it large enough to become a full time job, and maybe even provide a few jobs as well. But this is not going to be another .com flame-out, trying to become too big too fast. I've been part of that already. If the demand for RSSjobs is there, it will grow to meet that demand. If not, no-one is going to loose money over it.

What kind of feedback have you been getting from new users? What have you been learning from the RSSJobs experience?

Surprisingly, I have received very little direct feedback about it. What I have received has been positive, even excited, with a few requests for features I have already considered for the future. But the loudest statement has also been the quietest one. People are using the site! The site is still in its early stages, and I don't want more volume than I can handle, so I haven't done much to promote it yet. The little bit I have done has drawn more traffic than I could have expected, and people are actually using the site as it was intended. that says everything.

What have I learned? I'm not sure I have learned anything yet. It is all happening so fast, and things have gone remarkably well, almost too well. It's when things go wrong, particularly very wrong, when you learn the most. I'm sure that will come. Hopefully sooner rather than later.

###

A road campaign for truth, justice, the American Way. And a job.

Tue, 05 Aug 2003 06:34:55 GMT

Need an outspoken, thoughtful, Minnesota family man with software experience? See JobForJohn.com, a project of John Andrew of Northfield, MN.

Is the blogosphere a labor market in the making?

Thu, 24 Jul 2003 21:44:16 GMT

Lilia Efimova asks (in response to Martin Roell):

Q. Are there enough bloggers looking for a job?

If bloggers are typical of the population, they change jobs every four years. An active job search takes two to four months. So at any given time 7-8% of the people are both out of work and looking for it. Many people are passive job seekers, not hitting the job boards but open to suggestions, keeping their ears open. If there are 3 million active bloggers, 225,000 are now looking for work.

1 million career-minded bloggers by Q1-2005. Assume active blogcount will grow to 9-12 million people in the next 18 months; AOL, TypePad, intranet, iMode, and either Yahoo! or MSN turning on blogservers.

Q. Are there enough companies open enough to hire someone who blogs and most likely will continue blogging?

This is really two questions:

Are there companies that view blogging as risky, a bad thing?
Are there companies that value blogging?

Blogging as Risk.

Few HR people have heard of blogs. Same with corporate counsel. Even CIOs are just learning about blogs and wikis.

When this changes, look to email's history. It was feared and tightly controlled at first. Managers wanted to approve and inspect messages. Lots of rules came down on accepted use. Do you remember workshops on "how to use email"? Eventually, it became treated like the telephone, but with a record.

Blogging provokes the same concerns, conversations, and reactions. Then it will just be one more tool to be used for good and evil.

Blogging as Reward.

Companies have always hired people who are prominent in their profession and visible in their communities. Blogging is fundamentally no different than appearing on local news television, writing for trade publications, or joining industry organizations. Some firms even pay bonuses for positive publicity.

Blogging demonstrates ability and willingness to communicate. A prized characteristic.

When blogging becomes more mainstream, management and human capital professionals will exploit it. "Klogging" reveals sources of information, areas of interest, and professional networks. All valued when fitting work to the workforce, assessing performance, and measuring social and intellectual capital.

Lilia and Martin keep asking good questions!

The Feds centralize recruiting. Salvation or Pandora's Box?

Thu, 24 Jul 2003 02:27:35 GMT

Every U.S. government agency has a "careers" or "jobs" page. Under new orders, you won't find jobs there. Or be able to apply for them. For that, go to a portal run by the Office of Personnel Management.

Benefits:

Faster security clearance and background checks.
Able to mine more "resumes".
Able to browse more jobs.
Chance to simplify the application process.

Concerns:

Privacy. Or lack thereof. Could be a Total Information Awareness branding snafu.
Bland Branding. Forcing everyone to recruit with the same forms, the same tools, makes it harder for job seekers to tell employers apart, to choose the right jobs.
Choked Innovation. This makes the Fed's recruiting ecosystem homogenous, succeptible to advances in computing. Also means fewer internal innovations.
Single Point of Failure. Technically, organizationally, and fiscally.
Raiding the Private Sector. If the economy starts generating jobs, the Feds may make the war for talent even stronger.

Suggestions:

Federate, don't centralize. Reaffirm your investment in department career sites.
Open the jobs database to public programmers. Follow the lead of Amazon, eBay, and Google.