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KickStart Solves the Wrong Recruiting Problem

While I have not seen or used the reported Kickstart, Techcrunch described it in the following manner:

“Yahoo is reported to be working on a new social networking service that matches college students to employers.” (emphasis added)

This is not a knock on Yahoo!, but this is not solving the actual problem that the entire recruiting industry fails to address well – highly intelligent people with excellent life experiences that are applicable in many ways in the secondary market, what some people would call experienced hires. A marketplace that is badly broken and fails to hire the highest potential, most innovative candidates that are capable of creating new paradigms.

The high value problem is the getting the productive utilization of underutilized assets in the US economy in the roles they should be in already. These can be people with resume gaps due to the events of September 11th, the increasing usage of temporary workers using checklists of keywords who aren’t truly qualified to do the screening based on what matters education and competencies, suffer from an out of favor job title due to a reorganization in their company or increasingly can be subject matter experts who research extensively on their own and often write blogs. Or the fact that position searches simply take too long. I’ve been told of companies with some roles that have been open for three years and they’ve been interviewing people all of that time. I have personally have been involved in search that is over 9 months old.

If Yahoo! (or anyone else for that matter) wants to be a hero by building a hiring application, I highly suggest building an application that reduces the insane amounts of friction and dysfunction in the experienced hire marketplace that reduces cycle times. I’m working on a few ideas of my own with some amazing people. It would be a pleasure to be a part of creating the solution in this arena.

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Is Google Starting to Change Recruiting Methods?

Those of you who have read this blog for a long time know that I’ve been critical of Google VP of People, Laszlo Bock, due to lack of execution in the past. Things like placing an ad in a magazine and forgetting to launch the microsite or worse ignoring employee referrals that were highly relevant frustrating employees and creating brand damage externally.

Google held an event with several senior executives last night in Chicago. Eric Olson told me about the event, I recently spent a fun day serving as a volunteer website judge with Eric at the annual FBLA-PBL convention – you can read those details here.

I was told by one source that they wish to personalize the recruiting process more and make it less about numbers, keywords and passive candidate recruiting and more about soft skills, knowledge and passion. Time will tell if they succeed in this attempt at change but even stating this shows that they are listening to numerous types of stakeholder feedback and innovating from that. It’s a positive sign. So I have to acknowledge these communicated goals as they suggest that change is a priority.

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Yahoo! Launches New Applicant Tracking System

Yahoo! recently launched a new applicant tracking system interface over the past few days. It has a much cleaner interface than the previous one. It also has a box titled concept search, where one could enter educational and leadership qualifications, technical and speaking skills, passions, competencies and blogs to get suggestions of potentially appropriate roles. Changes that were immediately apparent to me include shorter career position id numbers and a smaller set of categories that make it easier to navigate clusters of open positions needing to be filled by qualified applicants.

Below is a screen shot, I wish Yahoo! good luck with the new system!

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Post an MBA Alumni Job or Career Posting

Why post that experienced level Top 10 MBA business school or retained search opportunity to the masses when you could contact already well connected innovative thought leaders in Internet, search engines, mobile commerce, investment management, private equity and venture capital directly via the blogosphere?

Thanks for dropping by via your search engine of choice.

Comments on this post are now closed due to job spam. You may contact David with your MBA level jobs and he’s happy to talk to you about them.

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Maybe Yahoo Needs an Injection of “New”

I missed this post last week on the Internet Marketing Monitor.

It says:

“Maybe an infusion of new thinking, new experiences, and fresh perspectives would be good for Yahoo.”

Then later:

“Maybe employees who weren’t yet ingrained with Yahoo’s past ways of doing things would be able to breathe new, renewed life into the one-time Internet king. “

Time will tell if they wisely chose this path.

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Rick Rubin Doesn’t Read Music

Per this Time article, Rick Rubin (just like Tommy Emmanuel) doesn’t read sheet music. Yet few would argue his skills and ability. The irony is that based on today’s recruiting processes in North America, neither would be granted an interview, yet they have been self-taught and are the leading innovators in their fields.

When are the majority of recruiting departments going to realize that compliance based hiring doesn’t build best of breed companies?  They should try competency and potential based hiring as the magic formula?

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Education is Becoming Prepared – Is Your Hiring Process?

From Page 52 of Time, in an article about education, December 18th, 2006: “Jobs in the new economy-the ones that won’t get outsourced or automated-“put an enormous premium on creative and innovative skills, seeing patterns where other people see only chaos,” says Marc Tucker , an author of the skills-commission report and president of the National Center on Education and the Economy.

It’s interdisciplinary combinations-design and technology, mathematics and art-“that produce Youtube and Google” , says Thomas Friedman, the best selling author of The World Is Flat.

Yet human resources, hiring managers, executive recruiters, candidate sourcers, chief marketing officers and  chief financial officers haven’t yet mastered the art of finding this skill set of thought leaders seeing big picture patterns and seek out one dimensional candidates with “experience”.

What has to happen to integrate these skills into a recruiting and hiring mindset of what is this person capable of rather than a limiting belief frame of compliance? A discussion of how to recruit these types of skills more proactively is certainly welcome in 2007!