The story is always the same. Kid goes to college. Kid apparently was average student and had to pay 100% of tuition. Kid/Student pursues a useless major which any idiot could have told you is not worth the tuition costs. Now student is $100,000.00 in debt and has no clue how to repay.

While I’d like to feel bad I can not. Any High School graduate could have told you a degree in “Religious and Women’s Studies” would be worthless. In the image, the student seems to be able to afford a tattoo on her left arm however even though she is broke. Give me a break. Is the college partly responsible? Maybe. I got a degree in business only to find out accounting would have been more valuable. But I don’t blame the school even though my guidance counselers at Jersey City University could not guide bloodhound toward a rabbit.

Recently a recruiting trainer seemed to believe the insurance industry was immune to the recent 2008-2009 downturn. He was of course, dead wrong.

In fact the insurance industry, which is a significant portion of the U.S. Gross National Product, suffered second only to the banking industry. Agency owners have cut back headcount between 10 to 50% in many cases. While insurance carriers (companies) have struggled to hold on to current talent while also laying off.

While hiring continues it does in key, mission-critical areas such as sales, revenue generation, marketing, production, and producer-oriented underwriting.

When I turn my thoughts to recruiting and staffing associations … well … I fail to come up with similar comparisons.

I want to know YOUR thoughts. I am compiling comments and need plenty of them.

You can comment privately or publicly. Remember we are not singling out any individual trade associations. We have many of them representing various factions of the recruiting industry, from Insurance Recruiter Associations, to the AESC (American Associations of Executive Search Consultants).

The point is, does the multi-billion dollar staffing industry have a unified voice speaking proactively on its behalf to effect legislation before it happens?

Or, are these associations merely information dissemination services telling us how we should or should not compensate recruiters after the laws have already been passed?

Case in point: I received a call from a desparate search firm owner in California. After fourty years of managing a second generation staffing firm she was thinking of packing it in and disassociating herself with her trade group (I won’t mention which one).

This is how the call went (which I believe reflects the high frustration levels of many professional staffing firm owners):

“Frank, I’m calling you because you are on the East coast and I feel its safe to speak to you. Everyone hear in Southern California knows me. I’m a member of [******] and I feel they are letting us down. There’s no lobbying in Washington D.C. against healthcare reform except for one mass email I received.

Now that Healthcare Reform is passed, I feel my $450,000.00 of temporary payroll is in jeapordy. How can I remain profitable providing temps if I must soon factor in an additional 20% for healthcare? I can’t even get clients to pay a modest markup over the current worker’s compensation costs!  I’m at my wits end. Please promise you won’t tell anyone my name but I think our industry is suffering from the lack of speaking up.”

Being a man of my word I’m not mentioning her name (I already forgot it) or the association she is so frustrated with.

For my part, I get tired when I attend conference after conference where I am lectured the following:

1. How I must pay a salary when hiring recruiters (and how much is sufficient)
2. Being told I can not subcontract under 1099 (even though the insurance industry frequently hires commission only insurance agents)
3. Being told I have to pay a minimum wage at a certain level (even though the restaurant and hospitality industry gets special dispensation from the federal department of labor)

To me, these above examples are all the result of trade association shortcomings.  Here’s an excerpt from the Federal Government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics referencing the special treatment given to restaurants and hospitality workers:

“Tipped employees are those who customarily and regularly receive more than $30 a month in tips. The employer may consider tips as part of wages, but the employer must pay at least $2.13 an hour in direct wages.”

Aren’t recruiting commissions equivelant to tips if not moreso?  Why does the restaurant industry get to play under different rules? Same goes for the insurance industry which gets to hire sales reps under “one hundred percent commission” with the federal government’s wink and approval.

So why is our industry working under a different set of rules?

Do you think our trade associations should be doing more proactively?
Are you satisfied enough is already done?

Are you a member of a group? Did you change recently due to any dissatisfaction?

Might it be we have too many trade associations fracturing our industry?

PLEASE LET ME KNOW YOUR THOUGHTS BY POSTING COMMENTS.

You may do so anonymous if you wish.

THANK YOU!!!

As I have been saying all along in our newsletters (for those of you that subscribe) there are plenty of growth businesses out there – even the aforementioned for-profit schools in our last article.
Here’s the link to today’s growth companies http://customsites.yahoo.com/financiallyfit/finance/article-109065-4445-4-best-companies-for-job-growth?ywaad=ad0035

But for the past year, my team and I have noticed an enormous surge of for profit educational enrollment.

These are mostly the “ONLINE” colleges, like Kaplan, ECPI, Phoenix, etc. etc. They advertise aggressively on TV. On billboards, and all over the internet. Finally a Yahoo article is confirming what we’ve noticed for over one year.
Last year we arranged a “Survey” on LinkedIn and paid good money to open it up to LinkedIn’s population of professionals. Some 72% of hiring executives classifying themselves as “CEO” or “VICE PRESIDENT” stated they “Did NOT” find online school degrees to be comprable to their brick and mortar counterparts.

But trying telling this to a candidate seeking to improve their interview chances.

Here’s the link to the Yahoo article. Our LinkedIn survey can be found by searching “polls” on linkedin and typing “online colleges”.

http://finance.yahoo.com/college-education/article/109081/in-hard-times-lured-into-trade-school-and-debt

But that’s what my little “Corner” is for … speaking up on that which others won’t allow me to speak up on.

These sites, in particular monster.com – have become mind-numbingly frustrating to use.  If you really want to experience waterboarding-like torture – try posting an ad on Monster! Read on learn why these sites risk being extinct.
ONLINE JOB SITES

Are they becoming obsolete? 

Just a two Saturdays ago I realized that web-based job advertising boards are sorely falling behind compared to the incessant advancement of other technologies.

When I spent two full hours just to place four ads, two of which were carbon copies of the first pair! With only titles and geographic location changes for the second two … I knew that something was wrong. 

Not only was it too time-consuming … but the drop-down menus rarely worked and the built-in editor destroyed fonts I had set as well as usurping and resetting all my formatting when the final ad appeared with three sets of incompatible fonts! Two of which I NEVER even used in the original AD !!!

 Why did it take so long?

Why does the active server pages (ASP) design slow down each entry to a crawl? 

Back around 1998 it took me … and I type sixty-five words per minute (faster than most recruiters) … around 20 minutes for one single one-page ad.

I could easily knock out three well-written ads with poetic flourish in one hour or less.  It was no problem to do so while including editing, proofing, and spell-checking. And I could drink my coffee and eat a corn muffin at the same time while answering the phones!

Fast forward eleven years and the top three major job seem to have gotten worse than they originally were in terms of a user (employer, job-ad-poster) experience.

As the sites cram more elaborate, time consuming, and resource-craving and bandwidth guzzling gunk into their pages – the slower the experience becomes to the end user: Me.

As for customer service? It’s abysmal.  Despite the fact we pay tens of thousands per year combined for national accounts on some of these sites. I could have put a down payment on a nice car instead and have much less “agita”.

With active server pages, php, and more “advanced” technology crammed into the website I was using (Monster – there I said it)  I experienced crashing then restarting (of the ad) and cumbersome dropdown boxes and dialog boxes that stalled the process to a head-banging and hair-pulling crawl.

This didn’t happen once. But it happens every single time whether I use my laptop, desktop, wi-fi connection, or whether I’m on T1 or cable broadband. So I know its not just me.

Here are just a few of the specific annoying, time-consuming and mind-numbing experiences I went through with one of the national job sites during the last few months:

 Entire ad crashed just as I was about to click “continue” to select geographic areas and categories

Geographic areas have to be manually scrolled through. No automated way (hint: using keystrokes) of finding cities or sections of cities (Example there are about four or five choices for Boston, but first you must scroll down to fifty states (after selecting U.S.) “Massachusetts” then manually choose from hundreds of city choices “Boston” before zooming in on your city sector)

Categories are a mess. If I click “Insurance” it should automatically open up categories relating to insurance. Yet it did not even provide “underwriting” as a choice. I had to hack the system and fool it to be able to move on. It insisted underwriting was related to accounting.

NY Times Ad Option crashed – For $85.00 I could place an ad in the New York Times on Sunday. Great. I clicked yes, typed in my four line ad – and poof! It disappeared just after I had it set up to my idea of tasteful perfection!

Customer Disservice – Calls to customer service resulted in rude responses. In two instances one of our team associates was hung up. Escalating the process to the national sales manager for the staffing vertical didn’t help either. It turned out he was just as frustrated of all the complaints and wishes more staffing members (a.k.a. staffing recruiters)  complained (hint to any of you executive recruiters also having such experiences).

Candidate Torture – While not related to our employer user experience, professional applicants have shared “I don’t put my resume on Monster.com because I know it messes up the look and I don’t want my resume looking like **** (rhymes with spit).”

Not only are they antagonizing the clients they are supposed to serve, but these websites are putting their candidates through a similar Gitmo-like process.  You would think an online job site would invest in its core functionality?

Namely, the user experience of placing the actual ads the site is built upon?

Forget about Kaplan, ECPI, and University of Phoenix ads that dance across my PC screen for attention like a matador’s red cloak. Why torture an executive search firm owner? Why torment any recruiter like this paying multiples of thousands of dollars for an annual account?

 These job sites better get on the stick … and do so FAST.

 Sites like LinkedIn are a breeze to get in and out of (for now anyway … that too may change). Even though linkedin is also a dynamic database-driven website. Somehow their software and coding engineers figured out how to design it better. And while it has bugs the bugs don’t gum up the main core functions … yet.

 I can search for specific titles and find “resumes” (in the form of profiles) within seconds without feeling like I’m being flogged and crucified by M.I.T. technicians in New England that have no clue what its like for a recruiter to want to get in – post an ad – and get out with lightning-fast speed.  

 It is starting to become evident online career sites have had their decade and are now at risk of fading into the twilight unless they transform themselves to something more than an electronic version of a nineteenth-century classified ad section.

 How can you spend millions of dollars on television NFL ads, and abandon your employers and staffing firm core clientele and job site functionality?

 The Way It Should (and could) Be

 Being as we are now in the year 2010, I envision a state-of-the art career site to offer the following as standard:

 About Me – Web Recording

• Ability for every candidate to post a webcam video of 60 seconds
• This should have the option to be linked to their resume/bio
• And would pop open in a new window for employers to watch/hear
• Could augment the black and white sterility of text based resumes now hundreds of years old

Instant Interviews

• A function offering a “click here” to arrange an instant video interview with the recruiter 
• Instant Chat with the recruiter could also be provided (would save days going back and forth by email)
• A radio button designation “who’s online now” so we could start prescreening candidates readily available

 Audio or Sound Clips

• For those not needing or feeling comfortable with the video aspect, but possessing great knowledge or skill … this could provide an option to voice record an “About Me” clip for employers to hear (minus the video aspect)

Image Upload Option

• Similar to how profiles are created in Facebook or LinkedIn
• Add a personalized touch for those willing to participate

Instant Chat

• If while reviewing resumes some candidate happens to be online a button or alert should designate that
• The recruiter/employer can opt to “instant chat” with the candidate
• You can schedule a web conference or determine the next step instantaneously

While there may be federal and Department of Labor issues to overcome with some of these ideas these sites are going to be best positioned to start taking advantage of the technology already being used on Myspace, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other gathering spots.

 Surely there is someway to enhance, advance, and modernize the connection between employer/recruiter and candidate while complying with legal regulations. Surely a company earning hundreds of millions of dollars would be able to figure this out?

 If these websites fail to upgrade their technology … and remain simply a web-based platform for the same type of stagnant, text-based classified ad used by Ben Franklin in the eighteenth century … they will eventually fall by the wayside and become technological road kill on the information superhighway.

 The inevitable new technology will come along (its already here) and knock this sorely outdated format off its pedestal.

 It’s no longer enough to be an internet based help-wanted site. Regardless of how much foot traffic you can get there.

 To succeed these websites must take things to the next level and work with government agencies to improve their services.

 Frank Risalvato

Executive Recruiter at www.iresinc.com

Telephone: 704-243-2110  Email: fris@iresinc.com

Twitter: @iresfrank   Linkedin. www.linkedin.com/in/recruiterexecutive 

facebook: www.facebook.com/frisalvato

I’ve always been a believer that the right individual with the right attitude can be trained as to deficient skills, while the most competent individual can be impossible to work with attitude-wise. This video (by a phd in industrial psychology) underscores what we have determined via common sense for decades.

Skills versus behavioral test benefits