I would guess that, like a lot of people, 98% of my snail mail goes straight into the recycle bin. I’ve tried GreenDimes and 41pounds.org but it seems that marketers continue to find a ways to kill trees and burn oil in order to send me information about stuff I don’t want.

As far as I can tell, I get two important pieces of snail mail: save the date notices and stuff from the IRS.  In the last 90 days, I’ve received one non-spam piece of snail mail. Snail mail is the de facto the vehicle by which people I don’t know and don’t trust attempt to communicate with me. Snail mail is a muddy communication mechanism.

Sadly, email isn’t much different anymore. Yet amazingly nearly every business application on the planet goes to great lengths to integrate with email (or tries). In fact, the single greatest technical ulcer-causer of any software web-based application is Outlook integration.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that email integration isn’t necessary. I’m just wondering if email’s dual-dominance of both the trusted and muddy communication channels is anachronistic. Why are messages from people and applications I know and trust being dumped into an unorganized file with untrusted messages? Why are critical alerts comingling with people trying to sell me email lists or consultants from overseas?

If you’re like me, your inbox is more like a “what do I do first?” box. I have documentation from my product team, invoices from vendors, people trying to sell me things, messages from dad, and most importantly, messages from my our applicant tracking software customers (which always get answered immediately I might add).

Many of these messages are coming from systems that are trying to boost my productivity: manage finances, complete projects, follow up with people and track progress. In essence, my productivity applications are taking their trusted communications (messages I definitely want to read) and dumping them into a message mud bog, then trying to clean them up after I deal with them.

Email needs a redo. How did I come to this conclusion?

Well, from a disclosure standpoint I have to admit that integrating with Outlook is really hard and pretty darn scary, and even though at Newton we’re probably going capitulate in some areas, we really don’t want to. Developers of software can control the reliability of their own environment, but once you start relying on someone else’s system you start touching all sorts of things you can’t control.  That’s why every time someone says “integrates with outlook” they never use the words “easily” or “never breaks” or “no plug-in required” in the same sentence. Here’s a simple guide to probably the most integrated outlook application on the planet:  http://tinyurl.com/cf6dae. This is the apparently shorter, “cheatsheet version”.

But, more important to me than the technical hurdles is this nagging belief that email might be the problem, not the solution.

Actually, I’m not even sure it’s the problem. I’m just starting to think that there’s a better path to productivity than dumping important messages into an uncontrolled, unorganized inbox and then forwarding them around like crazy, all the while trying to clean, reabsorb and reorganize them back into the system that created them.

Why doesn’t Twitter need email integration? Is it only because it’s a consumer application? Or is it because they are communicating with you by way of channels you already trust? I think it’s the latter.

It’s time to rethink how our business applications communicate with the people they serve. The mail paradigm is not just old, it is centuries old. I can think of some software companies already leveraging “clean” communication channels. Newton Software just became another.

In a few short weeks, we’re going to release a utility in Newton simply called “Tracking”.  We’ll release more details on “Tracking” as we get closer to the release date. In the meantime, think “Twitter feed” for your recruiting program. This isn’t just any “Twitter feed”. This is a personalized source of the information that you want to see and need to see.  It will be the only feature of its kind in the applicant tracking software world.

This is a glimpse of the future.

]]> http://www.newtonsoftware.com/blog/2010/08/16/email-and-twitter-a-collision-of-garbage-trucks-a-beautiful-disaster-or-a-glimpse-of-the-future/feed/ 0 http://www.newtonsoftware.com/blog/2010/07/28/how-to-hire-a-great-recruiter/ http://www.newtonsoftware.com/blog/2010/07/28/how-to-hire-a-great-recruiter/#comments Wed, 28 Jul 2010 00:58:44 +0000 jpassen http://www.newtonsoftware.com/blog/?p=828 Last week, I was doing a presentation for a prospective customer and the question came up: how can we hire a great recruiter? I’ve been thinking about this topic for nearly 15 years. I’ve been a recruiter. I’ve hired and trained dozens of recruiters (agency and corporate). Today, my company builds applicant tracking software for corporate recruiters. Recruiting is a hugely popular profession and everyone has their own ideas on what makes a great recruiter (most of which I tend to agree with). Over the years, I’ve developed my own formula for what makes a great recruiter, and since the economy has shown clear signs of improvement, our customers are hiring recruiters again. So, I’ve decided to share my insights on what makes a great recruiter.

My formula was cemented 10 years ago, when I was running a high-end, technical recruiting agency in Silicon Valley. I wanted to hire people based on their potential vs. their actual experience. I knew I could teach a talented, motivated person to be a recruiter. And, I was tired of guessing if people were going to be successful. So, I tapped an industrial psychologist to develop a selection methodology for choosing recruiters with the greatest likelihood to succeed. First, we had to figure what qualities to look for. This proved to be one of the most enlightening processes of my entire career. The psychologist’s team conducted a series of tests to distill the traits that made our top performers tick. We learned that in our environment (fast-paced, high volume and technical) self-confidence, flexibility, and the ability to stay focused were the top three traits that all of our best recruiters had in common.

Self-Confidence

Flexibility

Focus

Working with the psychologist proved invaluable.  Together, we developed an agenda for our interview teams to follow and each person on the team knew their role. We created interview score cards and mapped behavioral interview questions to each of the traits making our roundtable sessions efficient and decisive.  In a matter of weeks, we improved our interviewing techniques and consequently started hiring people that stayed longer and produced more.

The system and the science worked. I still firmly believe that self-confidence, flexibility, and focus are the top measurable qualities that best predict the potential success of a professional recruiter. But, there’s something that’s always nagged at me, something that makes a great recruiter that I’m not sure you can learn from an interview or even a test. I’ve been trying to put “this” into words for a couple of years and last week during the meeting it came to me.

The best recruiters that I’ve worked with can empathize with the behavior, intentions, attitudes, and feelings of their contacts.  They have the ability to identify, assess, manage and control their own emotions and to use this information to guide their actions. Top performers develop a finely tuned heuristic engine that’s constantly processing information to find an optimal solution. And finally, they have the ability to empathize, control their emotions and solve problems while being bombarded with massive amounts of information.

Hiring a great recruiter is as important as ever. As the economy continues to gain strength, talent will increasingly become harder to attract and hire.  Hiring a recruiter for their network or because they have been a recruiter for decades should take a backseat to looking for the person with the right traits. A great recruiter will have the self-confidence to become productive almost immediately, the flexibility to be successful in a dynamic environment, and the ability to focus on getting the job done at all costs. And while it may be hard to determine whether or not a recruiter has an evolved heuristics engine that ultimately may improve their performance, it is well within reason to assume that you can determine whether they are empathetic and possess a fair amount of self control. Remember, great people attract great people. You have every reason to take the time to hire a great recruiter.

What we’ve learned is that when software achieves something valuable without being distracting or requiring hours of training, only then will it live up to its potential (those enterprise guys call this concept “return on investment”). Let’s face it: it’s usually harder to do simple things exceedingly well, than to just pile up features. The 80/20 rule applies here too: do well what 80 percent of your users do all the time, and you’ll create a good user experience that promotes user adoption.  That’s the goal isn’t it?

Here are some tips that we put together regarding promoting adoption for applicant tracking software. These concepts can be applied to just about any technology. Say goodbye to the age of killer features.  Say hello to the age of the killer usability.

We’re marching to a different drummer at Newton.  Adoption is everything. When users like hiring managers effectively adopt a corporate recruiting tool, productivity, collaboration, and efficiency skyrocket.  Isn’t this the goal?  We think so and we’re not alone.  The Sandhill Group, a strategic management, investment and marketing group specializing in the SaaS industry, conducted a study and found that the most critical factor (70% listed it as number 1) for software success and return-on-investment is effective user adoption.

No software platform is magic. Some users will love it. Some users won’t. We design Newton to increase your chances of getting more users which ultimately leads to a more productive recruiting program and a significant return on investment. There are other benefits as well. The more users you get, the better off you’ll be as you’ll capture critical information that you’ll use to diagnose and solve problems (it’s nice to be a little proactive once in a while). You’ll also capture critical compliance information easier.   When you have high adoption rates your recruiting platform will become the hardest working part of your solution.

Presently, the adoption rate for Newton is above 90%.  We put together a short video to explain how we make this possible.

Things are really coming together. Newton adoption rates are through the roof. This is a testament to Steve’s team designing the product to be easy for everyone to use. Companies that never envisioned having hiring managers use an ATS are adding dozens a month. Businesses that used to accept paper applications are using Newton to go digital with our customizable employment applications. And, we’ve partnered with a company that offers pre-employment screening tools, integrating their behavioral testing products into Newton creating a seemless experience for applicants and a clean applicant stream for businesses.

Here are some other June highlights.

• We released over 50 enhancements to the product this month.
• We signed up a record number of customers including some high-profile brands.
• Interest in Newton has never been stronger. More people contacted us this month than ever before. And, we are receiving referrals every week. This is a great sign.
• We were chosen as having the best technology, functionality, and usability in a competition that pitted us against some really established vendors in the applicant tracking space.
• We established 2 new strategic partnerships that we’ll announce in a couple of weeks.

Needless to say, we have quite a bit going on. The other day, Steve and I were talking about customers and the topic of where our customers are located came up.  I told him we have customers in places like North Dakota, Utah, New Mexico and up and down both coasts.  I don’t think he realized how geographically dispersed our clients actually are.  Wait until we hop the pond!

Steve likes maps so the marketing team built him a map of all of our applicant tracking software clients.

View Newton Applicant Tracking Software Customers in a larger map

Here is what people are talking about now.



Size doesn’t matter anymore.

Not only has the labor market become increasingly dynamic, but the opening up of once closed networks via resources like LinkedIn, Jigsaw, etc. has fundamentally changed recruiting. It doesn’t matter how big your network is anymore. Every headhunter has access to pretty much the same information these days. Today, recruiting is about processing large amounts of information efficiently and marketing to prospects as effectively as possible.

Employment branding gets a little steak with that sizzle.

Frequently characterized by cheesy videos and faux employee testimonials, employment branding is being reinvented and this time it’s about actually improving job application processes, targeting and engaging micro-communities and promoting communication between employers, employees, and applicants (who are often customers too) to create and reinforce brand identities. In short, employment branding is getting more substantive. Traditional employment branding agencies are facing stiff competition from boutique new media firms and technology companies that operate independently or as partners to create employment branding 2.0.

Job advertising is trying to leave Las Vegas.

I’ve always looked at buying job postings as gambling. They’re a necessary evil in the recruiting world.   Throw some postings online and hope to see some return on investment.  Finally there are some alternatives.  Some job advertising companies are offering pay for performance job posting products and employers are taking notice.

It works like this. Employers set a budget for each job ad. Qualified views cost a few cents each. When the job is filled, employers pay only for the number of qualified views that job ad received. The industry needs more of this now. Indeed.com is a good place to start.  I hope to be able to endorse some others soon.

Automation sees its shadow

Before the recession began in 2008, human capitalists were buzzing about automating HR and recruiting processes. Many argue, including me, that these are the last business processes to be truly optimized in most organizations. As history shows, when a crisis ends the larger trends in place before the crisis usually resume. Automation, or taking what were once manual (paper) processes online, is back in full swing.

“We want to get rid of paper.” These words are being spoken all over corporate American. Whether it’s accepting online employment applications, integrating payroll interfaces or just generally streamlining, employers are making a push for increased productivity by putting processes on the web. It’s about time.

RPO moves the chains.

Direct-hire, executive search and staffing services all of which are more analogous to out-tasking are facing major competition from recruitment outsources that are structured to provide more cost effective, flexible services that compliment their clients overall recruiting processes. Just 5 years ago there were only a handful of national RPO’s servicing employers most of which with on-going, seasonal and generally iterative hiring needs.  Today, there are thousands of RPO’s many of which target high complexity environments ranging from healthcare to cleantech. RPO is the future of recruiting services.

Social media is changing the recruiting landscape. And while people are racing to figure out how to harness the power of social recruiting (and even define it), issues related to discrimination and equal opportunity employment are imminent. As you can imagine there’s information available on social networking sites that violates anti-discrimination laws. And, recruiting exclusively with social media can potentially lead to disparate impact. What does this mean? It means that it’s time to better understand the impacts of social media and the implications that it has on recruiting – and your recruiting program.

There’s a misunderstanding of what it means to be simple. Many professionals associate simplicity with weakness or that which ignores complexities. At Newton, we look at simplicity as being synonymous with intuitiveness, clarity, and essentialness. Sure, we design features to add power but not if they risk simplicity. Features, first and foremost, must simplify tasks.

Our focus on simplicity from day one is our competitive advantage. We are ruthless in our efforts to simplify – not dumb down – applicant tracking software. We don’t just focus on design for aesthetic impact (it helps). We’re interested in the simplification of process. Others may add some window dressing from time to time but their beauty is only skin deep – slick. If you don’t start with simple it’s impossible to end up with simple. That’s the goal isn’t it?

Make everything as simple as possible but no simpler.
-Albert Einstein

Listen to an exciting episode of NED as we feature the CEO of SayHired, Guy Hirsch. SayHired offers a service that automates phone screens for job candidates and their references. They’re system automatically phone screens candidates or conducts reference checks without a recruiter ever having to pick up a telephone. Say goodbye to scheduling nightmares. Tune in now to learn more about how their system works, what you can automate and what the future holds for recruitment automation tools.

What you forget when you are launching a content rich site is how much effort it takes to continually keep the videos and images fresh. To complicate matters (for me), we’re constantly making enhancements and adding to our product. So every 5-6 weeks or so I have to make a new video.


The other day, our web team called me the Scorsese of applicant tracking software product demos. I’m not sure if I was flattered or if they were just having fun with me. Regardless, I had to update our product demo this week and will do so again in about 2 weeks. This might not be The Departed but, I think it represents our product pretty well. If you want to watch a video with a table of contents you can visit our demo page.

Spoiler Alert! This video contains a feature that will be released June 4th.