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Cynthia Giles

Cynthia Giles

The May Wrap-up


Hummingbird

Follow-ups and afterthoughts . . .

1.  One post in May asked the question Can “Disability Humor” Really Work?  Boston Globe business writer Drake Bennett poses a related query in Who’s Still Biased?, an in-depth look at whether diversity training actually works.  The cited studies and quoted experts in Drake’s article seem to suggest that no one really knows—but the provisional answer is “probably not.”  There seems to be little evidence that companies with formal diversity training programs improve in terms of hiring and promoting women and minorities.  It even seems that compulsory and/or legalistic training can have a negative effect.

What does (or at least might) work better?  The best plan may be adding “more explicit measures like minority outreach, mentoring, and even old-fashioned affirmative-action programs like setting gender- and race-based promotion targets and making someone responsible for them.”

2.  Perils and Perks:  Government Online recounted both a cautionary tale and a happy story.  Here’s a little more news from the happy category:  New York City, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., have all made a some key data sets available to third-party developers—and the result is an array of apps that sift through the official info and makes it more useful to users.  For example:  San Francisco Crimespotting offers a nice interface for exploring police report data.  And in NYC, a BigApps competition drew some inventive entries like Bookzee (enter the title of a book and the nearest public library with a copy will pop up on your iPhone).  Data access is not limited to developers, by the way.  Anyone can visit DC Data Catalog, NYC Data Mine and Data SF for serve-yourself downloads of permit records, purchase orders, code enforcement incidents, and more.

3.  Inside Unemployment looked at the experience of editor Dominique Browning, whose job at an upscale lifestyle magazine suddenly disappeared.  I think Browning’s book includes themes familiar to many people coping with unemployment, and offers interesting reflections on losing/finding work-life balance.  But I can also understand why the book has provoked some critical responses.  Carolyn See’s Washington Post review takes a rather sharp view of the book and its author, and although Browning defended herself in a recent appearance on the Diane Rehm show, it’s clear (from some of the negative emails received during the show, as well as comments on DR’s website) that people are very sensitive around the issue of unemployment.

Not much employment improvement in May—but things are not worse either.  Let’s keep a good thought for June.


(Many thanks to thefixer for this month’s just-for-pretty photo:  a ruby-throated hummingbird, caught in mid-flutter.)


Be Careful with Blog Outsourcing

 

320px-Smiley-sceptic.svg

I recently had some dealings with a company that sells business websites and blogging services.  An established company with a reasonable client list—so I was surprised by the fact that their plan doesn’t seem all that excellent.

Situation: The provider company needed some guest posts in order to fill the pipeline for a client blog.  The client (a mid-sized company, not a start-up) is in a technical field that requires some moderately specialized knowledge on the part of the bloggers.  I happen to know something about the field, so they asked me to suggest four topics to write about.

Here’s the first catch.  They didn’t tell me the name of the client company, just the topic areas.  I sent along four pretty good ideas, which they professed to love.  Apparently, however, they did not notice (or did not know) that one of my proposed topics concerned a product that belongs to a direct competitor of their client company.  So they okayed a topic that would have been quite a poor choice for the blog.

Second catch.  I was told to leave my posts in a queue, and the blog editor would provide images.  Which turned out to be true–but not exactly in a good way!  Most of the posts had small, rather outdated-looking stock photos.  And some of the posts had the same photo.

Third catch.  Most of the stories had a generic by-line.  I.e., “Posted by the [Client Name] Team.”  I’m personally okay with being anonymous, but it’s hard for a blog to establish credibility if it looks like a string of unowned news bytes.

During my brief involvement, I received no communication at all from the editor–and if there was a plan or philosophy for the blog it certainly wasn’t apparent to me.  Here’s the final catch, though.  They paid in the top tier of market rates, at least for my contributions.  Which probably means they are charging the client somewhere near top rates.  And the product they are providing seems . . . well, not “top” quality.  Or at least not so far.

Takeaway: There may be some very good reasons to outsource a business blog, especially when the goal is to provide industry-level content rather than company-specific content.  “Inside Acme Widgets” should be written by Acme insiders, but “All About Widgets” or “Widgetmania” might be done as well or better by professional bloggers.  Outsourcing is not the same as offloading, however!  Give the vending company detailed directions and monitor their work carefully if you want to end up with a good blog.

 

(Thanks to ArséniureDeGallium for the delightfully “skeptical” smiley.)

The Wizard Can’t See You Today

 

Oz Museum

In today’s story, the Wizard of Jobs rejects all comers by putting up this sign:

There are currently no openings.
Please check back again later.

I recently came across those exact words on the site of a mid-sized, modestly successful company.  The company is privately owned, and may typically hire only when there’s attrition.  So (one might ask) why bother to put a more elaborate message on the Careers page?

Come to that . . . why bother even to have a Careers page?  Which is the key question here.  In the case of this particular company’s website–otherwise very well done–it’s hard to see the sense in having a page where the only message is “Go away.”

That message, or some variant version, often shows up on the websites of small- to mid-sized companies where hiring is fairly rare.  Or where hiring may be cyclical, seasonal, or otherwise intermittent.  In those circumstances it’s not surprising that on any given day/week/month there are no jobs available.

And yet!  If a Careers page exists, there has to be something on it.

Obviously the page offers an opportunity to provide further information about working at the company.  But that option only has value if the company really expects to hire people in the future and wants to build a pool of potential applicants.  If not, no point.

Big corporations almost always have some jobs available, so there’s value in offering visitors useful information about employment, along with incentives to return if no current job openings are appropriate.  That’s part of building an employer brand.

But in reality, smaller companies that rarely employ don’t need an employer brand.  Therefore, the obligatory Careers or Jobs page becomes little more than a place to say “No.”

Which doesn’t seem like an asset to the website.

The point for smaller companies is: Either do something worthwhile with the Careers page or don’t have one.  Use that real estate to extol the virtues of your company culture.  Otherwise, take down the page.  And either issue a real invitation (“Please come back in March, when we expect to have new openings”) or skip the whole thing.  After all . . . how often are people supposed to “check back”?  And for how long?

The point for bigger companies is: Consider what your corporate Careers site would accomplish or offer if there were no job openings.  After all, most visitors won’t find a suitable opportunity on any given day.  But they should still leave the site with something of value.

 

(Thanks to JoshBerglund19 for snapping this Emerald City vignette at a wax museum.)

Perils and Perks: Government Online


Hyperspiral

Two completely opposite experiences with “gov tech” led to this post.  The first was a catastrophe so vivid that it illustrates every mistake an entity could make in public.  And the second was a nice surprise.

Let’s start with the story of how an online system set up by an American state crashed and burned in less than a minute—in the process, outraging hundreds of thousands of citizens.  Seriously.  Here’s a quote from the most recent excuse letter sent out by the errant agency:  “The program experienced more than 38 million Web hits, and nearly 39,000 rebate reservations were made both through the Web site as well as the phone system. “

Do the math!!  Even assuming that half the reservations were made by 18,000 people who spent up to four hours to get through on the phone (1,000 calls a minute, says the letter), and assuming that every web visitor tried 20 times to hit the site . . . that would mean 900,000 people were trying to get through on the website to make one of 18,000 available reservations.  So two-tenths of one percent of the web applicants were successful.  (Even if everyone tried 100 times—well, you see the gist of it.)

So why is this worthy of a post?  I’ll content myself with proposing three takeaways:

  1. Realistic planning is vital to all online endeavors. In this case the problem was humongous numbers, but that shouldn’t have been a big surprise.  In fact, it turned out later that the program had been outsourced to a company that encountered exactly the same problems in other states.  So—how did these people (on both sides of the contract) end up so completely bumfuzzled?
  2. When something goes radically wrong, don’t make excuses. Do not talk about the problem in the abstract:  “X happened because Y.”  Go straight to “We failed and we are abjectly apologetic.”  How is it that no one ever learns this lesson?
  3. Do not tweet hysterically in a crisis. As the web mob became increasingly frustrated, they tried getting news from the program’s Twitterstream.  Here’s what the tweeter(s) were saying:  “We are experiencing unprecedented demand.  Please keep trying.” Which adds . . .

    4. Insult to injury.  In the first place, “trying” was irrelevant—the site wasn’t responding at all.  (No one can figure out, by the way, how any online people could have gotten reservations.)  And in the second place, encouraging people to keep hitting the site only made matters worse.

    If you are wondering why there was no queueing system, join the club.

    Meanwhile, for what it’s worth—just boil those three points down to Prevent, Repent, and Think Before You Tweet, and you can apply them to just about any situation, large or small.

    Now for the nice surprise.  I heard somewhere that the Health and Human Services (HHS) department of the U.S. government wanted to leverage “the wisdom of crowds.”  (In case you’ve forgotten already, that’s the notion—popularized by James Surowiecki’s 2004 book–that aggregating the opinions of many will often produce better decisions than following the careful thought of a few.)  Intrigued, I visited their website to see how this desire would be implemented.

    It isn’t, actually.  The site is mainly about how to use blogs and social media.  But the reward for visiting is a very nice set of “guidelines” for the business use of social media tools.  Free for the taking, so stop by!


    (Yes—that is a hyperbolic spiral.)

Preboarding! (AKA, Recruitment)

Air_Berlin_boarding_apron_Sm_art

My inbox has been stuffed lately with articles, invitations, etc., related to “onboarding.” I’m guessing that reflects an expected uptick in hiring, plus the notion that better onboarding creates more productive (and therefore more cost-effective) employees. Get an overview of the onboarding value proposition in this HR Management article, which summarizes some findings from a recent Aberdeen Research report.

But whatever the reason for interest around this topic, it’s worth a revisit from the recruiting perspective.

Most discussions acknowledge that onboarding actually begins during—not after—the hiring phase.  For example, Mary Lorentz’s very good post Un-Boarding: 5 Ways Companies Get Employee Onboarding Wrong notes that onboarding should begin during the interview.  In a helpful post on Creating an Onboarding Plan, HR Bartender Sharlyn Lauby observes:  “onboarding to me is really about the pre- and post- hire process that helps an employee become acclimated to their new working environment.”

And yet!  There’s not much said in either case—or anywhere else–of what this truism might mean in practice. So I’ll go out on a limb and propose this basic standard for successful preboarding:

Don’t make the future employee hate the company before they get hired.

Onboarding is all about engaging the new employee, and that process is much easier if the employee is already disposed to like their new job.  The more unpleasantness they have experienced on the way to getting hired, the less optimistic they will be about the company.  Although some new-hires had a choice (i.e., they were persuaded to accept this position instead of one or more others) many or most would have taken almost any job offered—so they may be more relieved to be employed than excited about the new opportunity.

Here are three (hopefully obvious) rules for not alienating prospects online:

  1. Make the application process efficient and pleasant!
  2. Keep in touch—acknowledge applications, respond to email, and update applicants on their status.
  3. Provide plenty of relevant information on the website—and of course, make it easy to navigate.

And a couple of rules for not alienating prospects in person:

  1. Be sure the interviewer is prepared—and that absolutely does include reading the candidate’s resume beforehand.
  2. Listen!  Whether the interview process is structured or unstructured, leave room to draw the candidate out with real conversation, not PR fluff or obligatory chat.

Bonus thought: Feature some new-hires on the Careers site, talking about their experiences with the whole process:  finding/researching the company, applying, interviewing, and getting that magical offer.


(Thanks for the original boarding snapshot, Matti Blume.)


Farewell to Flash? (And Why That Matters)

 

Mashable screenshot

Among the Earth-shaking events of April 2010 was Apple’s announcement that iProducts will never, ever have support for Flash.

So?

It may not be important to follow the back-and-forth technical arguments about Flash, but anyone who has anything to do with corporate communications online should acquire at least a high-level overview of this development.  And since employer branding in general, and the Careers site in particular, have a strong interest in social networking and multimedia, there are very good reasons to be in the picture on this topic.

Oh?

Skip the details, and the issue is mainly mobility.  For good or otherwise—folks today want to see/find/do everything on their phones (and other mobile devices) that they can see/find/do at their desks.  In fact they want to do more, since they will be operating in physical space, in real time, rather than just looking at a static monitor.  Plus:  They want it all to be seamlessly familiar, easily accessible, battery-friendly, and plenty quick.

Leveraging the mobility agenda is increasingly important for effective recruiting.  So companies need to be aware of shifts in technology and ahead of the adoption/implementation curve.  If IT is trying to talk to you about HTML5, listen.  If they are not talking about it, worry.

For a fairly friendly introduction to the issues at play, follow these steps:

  1. Read Steve Jobs’s clearly written and well reasoned explanation of Apple’s position.
  2. Read Mashable’s follow-up post, Apple Didn’t Kill Flash, HTML5 Did.
  3. Read another point of view from Flash developer Richard Leggett
  4. Zoom out and review the big picture with Wired’s analysis of the Top 7 Disruptions of 2009.

Finally, make sure tech evolution is getting serious consideration at your company. Will those high-value passive candidates be able to view CEO greetings, employee testimonials, and other cool Careers content on their iPads??