Or, Why
LinkedIn gets paid even when jobs don't get filled
If you’re going to recruit and hire people for your
business, or if you’re going to look for a job, you need to understand
why America’s institutionalized employment system doesn’t work. It’s
important to know the short history of reductionist recruiting --
layers of matchmaking technology designed for speed, distribution, and
for handling loads of applicants.
It has nothing to do with enabling employers to
meet and hire the most suitable workers.
Would you pay Amazon if your
orders arrived only about 10% of the time? That's how LinkedIn and
Indeed work -- they get paid whether a job is filled, or you get
hired, or not. Nice way to get revenue. Bad way to spend a
company's money. HR: Are you listening? You're looking pretty
stupid. Join us on the blog: What are we all
paying for, anyway?
Ask The
Headhunter:
Take one weekly!
ATH on
Adobe's CMO.com
|
Want Ads
When somebody invented the newspaper want ad, it was
an innocent enough way to find people to do jobs. An employer said what
it was looking for, people wrote a letter explaining why they were
interested, threw in their resume, and mailed it in.
Because a want ad cost quite a bit of money
(thousands of dollars in The New York Times), ads were almost
always legit. Applicants had to pay for a stamp, and motivation was
high to apply only to the most relevant. What’s not to like?
Even when professional resume writers stepped in, and started touting
salmon-colored paper to make their clients’ submissions literally stand
out, it was still manageable; employers knew immediately which
applications to throw out! Meanwhile, the newspapers made out like
bandits advertising jobs.
Internet
Job Boards
When the Internet came along, somebody thought to
put all the ads online -- to get better distribution, and more
responses from more applicants. The jobs sites quickly realized this
made wants ads cheaper, and to make money, they had to sell more ads.
Wink, wink -- questionable ads, like
multi-level-marketing schemes, were welcome! So were ads for expired
jobs, kept there by employers who liked a steady stream of resumes even
when they didn’t need them.
The Keyword
Age
Employers no longer needed to read resumes or
applications. Software compared words in job descriptions to
words in resumes, and HR could accept or reject applicants without even
knowing who they were!
Clever applicants started larding their resumes with
keywords -- making HR’s job all the harder, and job interviews a waste
of time. It was so easy for people to fake their way past the system
that HR panicked and drew the blinds. Everyone was rejected.
This experience led employers to agree that, yes,
America is in a terrible talent shortage -- during the biggest talent
gluts in history. Even the U.S. Secretary of Labor, Thomas Perez, banged the
gong: “I speak to a lot of business leaders who are trying to hire.
They want to hire and the most frequent thing I hear from them is all
too many people coming through the door don’t have the skills necessary
to do the job I need to do.”
“Too many people”?? Say what?
Reductionist
Recruiting: Get paid for $@*#&!
Perez isn’t holding those employers accountable.
They use applicant tracking systems (ATSes) to solicit thousands of job
applicants to fill just one job -- then they complain they’ve got too
many of the wrong applicants. The employers themselves are responsible
for the problem. ( News Flash: HR causes talent shortage!)
Welcome to reductionist recruiting: Jobs don’t
matter. People and skills don’t matter. The coin of the realm is what
computer scientists call character strings: strings of characters, or
letters and numbers, standing in for jobs and people. That’s what’s
sold by job boards and bought by employers.
Think that’s far-fetched? Then why don’t
employers pay when they actually hire someone from a job board or
applicant tracking system?
The product is keywords. The system has nothing to
do with filling jobs, or that’s how LinkedIn, Monster.com, Taleo and
JobScan would get paid.
They get paid to keep the pipeline full of character
strings. Employers and job seekers get scammed every day they play the
game. And HR is the culprit, because that’s who signs the purchase
orders and the checks to use these systems.
The New Age
Of More Reductionist Recruiting
The high-tech-ness of all this (Algorithms!
Artificial Intelligence! Intelligent Job Agents!) sent venture investors
scurrying to put their money into reductionist recruiting, because
HR departments didn’t care whether they hired anyone. Their primary
business became the “pipeline” of job postings and processing incoming
keywords.
That's why Reid Hoffman and Jeff Weiner are getting
rich while you can't get a job.
It’s all stupid now. The head of Monster.com
promotes “semantic processing” algorithms that match keywords better
than any other job board. LinkedIn ( LinkedIn: Just another job board) claims that
special keywords -- called “endorsements” -- add powerful credibility
to all the other keywords on people’s online profiles. And “job board
aggregators” like Indeed.com collect all the keywords from every job
board, grind them up and sort them, and deliver more and better
keywords than any other technology.
We know this is all a big load of crap when the next
iteration of recruitment start-ups are designed to further distance
employers and job seekers from one another.
Reductionist
Recruiting 3.0
That’s the point behind a new start-up called
JobScan. This new service gives job seekers the same power employers
have. For a fee, JobScan “helps you write better resumes.” Cool
-- we need better ways to help employers make the right hires!
But it turns out JobScan doesn’t do that. It doesn’t
help match workers to jobs any more than ATSes do. All it does is help
job applicants scam ATSes by using more words that will match the words
in employers’ job descriptions. More reductionist recruiting.
James Hu, co-founder and CEO of JobScan, told TechCrunch that, in the past, a real person
would review your resume to judge whether you were worth interviewing.
“But now you are just a record in the system.”
Duh? And Hu’s service treats you as nothing
more. JobScan’s home page shows two text boxes. In one, you post your resume.
In the other, you paste the description of the job you want to apply
for. You click a button, and it tells you “how well your resume matches
the job description.” Now you can add more of the correct keywords to
your resume.
In just a couple of entrepreneurial generations,
we’ve gone from stupid ATSes that rely on word matches to deliver “too
many people…[that] don’t have the skills necessary to do the job,” to a
whole new business that enables job seekers to manage the words they
dump into those useless ATSes.
(Note to venture investors who missed out on the
first rounds of Monster.com, Indeed.com and LinkedIn: This is a
new opportunity!)
JobScan’s algorithms tell you which additional
keywords you need to add to your application to outsmart the employer’s
keyword algorithm.
It’s like your people talking to my people, so you
and I don’t have to talk to one another. We can sit by a pool sipping Caipirinhas (my new favorite drink from Brazil),
and wait for our respective people to do a deal that will make us all
money.
Except there aren’t any people involved. Reductionist
recruiting, meet reductionist job hunting: DUMMIES WANTED!
A Short
History of Failure: More venture funding wanted!
Entrepreneurial ATS makers game the employment
system to make loads of money while employers reject more and more job
applicants. Now there’s another layer on this scam -- and it was
inevitable. Entrepreneurs are getting funded to create ways to help you
beat the databases to fool employers into interviewing you, whether you
can do the job or not. (I wish thoughtful entrepreneurs like Hu would
put their talents to work creating value, not outwitting admittedly
silly job application systems.)
Job seekers are taught every day that it doesn’t
really matter whether you can do a job profitably. What matters is
whether you can game the system to get an interview, just so you can
get rejected because, in the end, employers don’t hire words that match
jobs. They want people who can do jobs. They just don’t know how to
find them. (See Getting in the door for alternative paths to the
job you want.)
Of course, any dope can see the real problem: HR
isn’t willing to hire key words, even though it pays an awful lot of
money for them. And it certainly has no idea where the talent is.
I can’t wait for employers to wake up and smell the
coffee: Start paying LinkedIn, Monster, and Indeed only when those
suckers actually fill a job.
Am I nuts, or has America's employment
system gone completely to hell with plenty of venture
funding behind it? Join us on the blog!
Best,
Nick Corcodilos
Ask The Headhunter®
Have a question? Ask away. Each week I'll publish a Q&A that I
think readers will find helpful. I will not publish your name if you
submit a question through this link. Please see terms
of submission below. Sorry, I cannot answer questions privately.
Please do not send me resumes; I won't read them.
|
No comments:
Post a Comment