Category: Recruiting

Recruiting

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Chicago TiECon ’07 Mentorship: Boosting Tomorrow’s Business Leaders

There are still a few seats left! TiE puts on amazingly high quality events, I greatly look forward to seeing you there! Sign up now, don’t delay!

TiECon Midwest is the premier event organized by TiE-Midwest held every two years. Join us in Chicago this October 5th for TiECon ’07 Mentorship: Boosting Tomorrow’s Business Leaders, a half-day event for leading Midwest entrepreneurs to share thoughts and ideas on business and innovation.

Over 400 attendees will hear a keynote address by local, successful, serial entrepreneurs Glen Tullman and Howard Tullman. Following the keynote, distinguished panelists will present topics aimed to increase Entrepreneurial IQ through a series of sessions. Panels topics are: Right Dollars at the Right Time, Business Model Refinement, Attracting and Retaining Talent and Executive Coach for the Entrepreneur. The event will conclude with a cocktail reception designed to foster networking.

TiE stands for Talent, Ideas and Enterprise and is a not-for-profit global network of entrepreneurs and professionals. Founded in Silicon Valley in 1992, TiE is an open and inclusive organization that has rapidly grown to more than forty chapters in nine countries. TIE Global is the world leader in cultivating and nurturing entrepreneurship.

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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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Seattle – New Search Marketing Executive Mecca?

The land grab described in the Seattle Times seems to indicate this might be the truth. Seattle and the surrounding region is a wonderful place, I’d love to live there one day either in downtown Seattle or Bellevue. It’s interesting that they are moving locations to where the available talent is. They should explore Chicago once they’ve exploited Seattle’s talent markets fully.

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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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How Much Equity For Your Venture Capital Funding and Employees?

As discussed in my recent post about a TiE event on Chicago start ups, there are many factors to consider when taking in funding and employees. Don Dodge discussed in great detail Paul Graham’s The Equity Equation post.

So I’d like to ask the blogosphere, “How does one judge this inflection point of being better off with this asset, person or money infusion?”I’d say this is an especially tough question when the many startups aren’t focusing on the priorities in the correct order. When I advise a start up or look to join an Internet, Web 2.0, search engine or mobile start ups, I look for the following things:

1) A workable revenue plan either now or that can be communicated in a believable timeline and/or a data model that collects opt-in data that would allow monetization once scaled.

2) An understanding that bringing in a person with strong knowledge of data models and marketing methods early in the process is critical to success and to reducing the revisions to applications later. A CTO without a logical end goal is all too often a wasted resource that could and should wait until there is a clear execution vision.

3) People that have a passion for creating, implementing and executing on an idea first and foremost.

4) A willingness to march into a new direction without limiting beliefs. This is where breakthroughs originate.

Again, in the end it’s all about judgment and knowing the current teams strengths and weaknesses! I wish you well in your start up ventures.

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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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Kijiji Falls Short

As much as I’d like to see something replace the aging Craiglist, the US version of Kijiji 1.0 announced yesterday, isn’t it.

There are too many things to list from a user standpoint, here are just a few:

1) No resume posting section in the jobs section. The reply to blind ads system in America is completely broken, why build another one? Why not create some unique value.

2) The user interface to reply to an ad is not good. Manually entering a bunch of data on a screen with a captcha is just plain brutal.

Improve and refine the data categories and user interface and then please try again. Thank you.