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Careers

Small Is the New Big

bonsai

A friend whose daughter is graduating soon from a very good college lamented that the young lady has not gained much practical knowledge about starting a career. He asked what advice I would give her, and—after much thought—I came up with the following: “Find something you can do without being dependent on a big company.”

I don’t think this was exactly the kind of advice he had in mind, but I’m sticking with it! Because one of the loudest, clearest messages in business news these days is that “big” is not necessarily a good thing.

In a recent Harvard Business article (“Why Small Companies Will Win in this Economy”), management consultant Peter Bregman contends: “The gap of confidence between small companies and big ones is growing. We used to rely on the security of big companies. That’s why we worked for them. And hired them. And put our money in them. “

No more, says Bregman, and he provides some interesting anecdotes about the shift of valuable contracts away from impersonal giants to the kinds of smaller companies where a buyer can get the CEO on the phone.

Job-seekers may be starting to feel the same way–and the “small is beautiful” trend has as much appeal for mid-career candidates as for new graduates. Wall Street Journal Careers columnist Sarah Needleman discusses some advantages in the article “Moving to a Small Company Can Lead to Big Rewards.”

So what does this mean for the Careers site? Three first thoughts:

1.  Smaller companies can start to use their size as a recruiting advantage. For example–promoting the values of an environment where workers have direct lines of communication to management.

2.  Bigger companies can work harder to provide personalization. Recruiter profiles and blogs, dedicated Career contacts, and messages from management are examples of features that create candidate trust.

3.  The value of having an alumni section is increasing. For one thing, it’s smart to keep alumni connected to the company—they represent a potentially very useful talent pool. But beyond that, with so much bad news about employment these days, candidates may be reassured by knowing former employees liked the company enough to stay connected.

One last first thought: Breaking big sites into smaller components (focusing on specific divisions, job types, career paths, or some other unifying theme) could be an effective strategy. But it’s a more radical approach, so I’ll do some research to see if the idea has merit.

Thanks to Dave Friel for the bonsai image.

7 types of recruit you need to serve online

There are 7 different kinds of recruit you need to identify and serve online, as part of your recruitment strategy.

No, I don’t mean 7 different skill-sets: obviously there are many more than that … I mean that there are 7 different life-stages that your potential recruit may be at.

Some of these won’t be relevant to your industry – perhaps you only recruit graduates and experienced professionals. However, you shouldn’t forget that any visitors to your site may become a potential recruit in the future (or customer, supplier or contractor), so you don’t want to give them a negative impression about the company or how you treat people. [Read more…] about 7 types of recruit you need to serve online

Great Question. Difficult Answers.


snow-1

The question:  “Is your website SNOWED?”

The question comes from a post by Jeremiah Owyang–and the acronym stands for “Stakeholders’ Needs Overwhelm Web Experience Design.”  For an example of this condition, the post point to this case study:

Take for example the American Airlines website, which was so frustrating to users that designer Dustin Curtis decided to mock up an improvement and write this open letter. One of the designers from AA responded, saying there were over 200 stakeholders involved in the final output of the product, resulting in the jumbled mess of a corporate webpage.

The AA designer’s lengthy response offers a glimpse of conditions that prevail at many large companies, and definitely worth reading.  Though the web team understands the requirements of user experience design, their judgments are often over-ruled by pressure from various stakeholders who want prominent page space for this or that message or function.  And the letter points out that in large companies, a clean, complete redesign is generally considered impossible.  Changes must be made “organically, as the site evolves.”  (Which is hardly the best way to replace a bad site with a good one . . . )

Owyang’s suggested solution is “have an empowered Web Strategist” to balance the needs of the user community, the business stakeholders, and the technology conditions.  Which sounds like an excellent idea–but not easy to implement at most companies.

The SNOWED problem can be a bit different in terms of the Careers area.  For one thing, there may be just one dominant stakeholder (often HR) and there may be a separate web team, or even a separate domain for Careers, and that could provide more design freedom.  But on the other hand, the functional demands of content management (job posting, for example) and applicant tracking offer added complication.

The balancing act for Careers could be combining (a) the machinery needed to fill specific jobs with (b) the demands of employer branding and (c) the need to offer focused messaging on certain job types, career paths, benefits, etc.  The Careers team may need to create multiple paths to reach multiple audiences in a time-critical way-which can be quite a challenge.

Two approaches gaining increased attention are landing pages and micro-sites.  More on each topic in future posts, but in the meantime, here are two quick views from StandoutJobs:  Coming in for a Landing and Micro-site Strategy.

(Thanks to John Holm for the gorgeous snow scene.)


A Tale of Two Makeovers

Ever since Fred Astaire turned Audrey Hepburn from a bookworm to a cover girl in Funny Face, the makeover has been a Hollywood staple.  And more recently, a great source of ratings for reality TV.   Although a website transformation doesn’t have quite the same level of drama, it can still be entertaining—and instructive.

So here we have two makeover stories, both of which show what a difference design can make.  But while one is a clear winner, I’m perplexed about the other.

Let’s start with the unambiguous improvements made by DaVita early in 2008.  It was a perfect case study, with statistics to back up the effectiveness of the new design.  Within a year, site visits were up 88%, unique visitors up 76%, return visitors up 128%–and applications up 97%.

DaVita, a Fortune 500 company, is the largest independent “kidney care” (aka dialysis) company in the US, employing more than 33,000 “teammates.”  Also—winner of the 2009 ERE award for Recruiting Department of the Year, which makes the makeover worth a revisit.   For a fairly detailed presentation of DaVita’s approach to talent acquisition, watch this slideshow.

Here’s the single slide from that presentation which deals with the website:

DaVita Slide

Although the build text left on the published presentation makes it a little hard to see the old site, this side-by-side depiction of the old and new website designs clearly shows the increase in visual interest.  The lively new look features lots of people, along with clearly marked one-click paths to high-interest content.

The makeover goes beyond just improving look-and-feel qualities.  A big addition to the new site is a “Life in the Village” tab that focuses on this core message:  “The DaVita Community is a unique place where we care for our patients, each other and our world.”  One of the components is a Community and Charity section that goes far beyond the token presentations found on many sites.  DaVita organizes its wide-ranging collection of Village programs into three tabs (“Each Other,” “Patients,” and “The World”), ranging from employee recognition plans to clinical research grants to Bridge of Life, the medical missions program that “allows teammates to bring quality dialysis care to underserved regions, such as Africa, Latin America and Asia.”

With a full complement of social media connections, video tours, You Tube links, and other modern must-haves, DaVita touches all the bases nicely.  And it does so with a clean look that is cheerful without being frivolous.

Turning to the other makeover . . .

Earlier this year I picked the education/publishing company Pearson as one of the websites that charmed me unexpectedly.  It wasn’t slick and didn’t have all the bells and whistles we’ve come to expect—but it had an authentic, quirky feel.   Here’s how the “Our People” page looked in March:

Pearson Our People Old

And here’s how it looks now:

Pearson Careers New

As to whether this is an improvement, I think it depends on what measures you use.   The page is a component of a whole new site design that flows along a sort of bright, contemporary line—and there’s no doubt it looks more up-to-date and offers better functionality.  But it also seems generic.  The headline text on this page still emphasizes creativity and imagination, yet (to my eye, anyway) the design does not reinforce that message.  Perhaps there could have been a more engaging approach to modernization?

I’d love to hear other opinions!

By the Numbers: The Psychology of Unemployment


Number Swirl

It seems like every day begins with some news report on jobs and employment.  It all runs together after a while, but the statistics fall into two categories:  Jobs lost/created, and People finding/not finding jobs.  There’s a big difference in the two perspectives.

Plus, each category has several different flavors.  Here’s a super-speedy example of the kind of real-life information that’s aggregated into statistical statements:

Acme is making fewer widgets, so it needs fewer widget-makers, so those jobs are lost—but only until or unless Acme needs more widgets.  Acme’s competitor A-Plus decides to make only automatic widgets from now on, so manual widget-maker jobs are gone forever there.  However Acme decides to make special Fourth of July widgets this year, so there are some temporary manual widget-making jobs for the employees laid off by A-Plus.  But there are many widget-maker wannabes in the unemployment line who will be happy to work for less than the experienced Acme personnel.  Meanwhile, A-Plus needs robotics-nerds, pronto, and there aren’t enough to go around, so headhunters are burning up their cell phones . . .

And if you are a laid-off English teacher or a downsized stock broker, the whole widget thing is fantastically irrelevant anyway.  Aggregate numbers are next to meaningless for real job-hunters–but they contribute to the serious psychological effects of being unemployed.  The worse the news sounds, the more hopeless things may seem if you’re one of the statistics.

In the run-up to Christmas 2009, it was easy to miss this important New York Times story on the effects of unemployment, but it’s message is summarized in the title:  Poll reveals depth and trauma of joblessness.

More than half of the poll respondents reported depression, anxiety, and insomnia along with their more practical problems such as the threat of foreclosure and the loss of health insurance.  So not only is the volume of applicants steeply increasing at many companies, more than a few of those job-seekers may be struggling not only to make ends meet but also to cope with the psychological repercussions of unemployment.

What does that mean in terms of recruiting and the corporate Careers site?  Big unemployment numbers are made up of real people who go to company sites because they really need jobs.  Which seems worth thinking about.  I can’t point to experts or examples of best practices in this area—unfortunately there don’t seem to be any.  But here are some possibilities I thought up:

  • What if companies put an encouraging message on their site, noting that while there may not be a lot of jobs right now, there are some–and they really want you to apply?
  • What if companies provided extra information on their sites about preparing for interviews, improving resumes, and making the most of your application?
  • What if companies reviewed their rejection letters and made them more friendly and supportive?  (There’s a great set of suggestions at Careerbuilder.)
  • In fact—what if more companies actually sent rejection letters?  Or even followed up on applications?  These days, a lot of people are putting a lot of hope into their applications, and most would appreciate being nicely told (sooner rather than later) that their application really was considered, even if they won’t be getting the job.
  • And here’s my most radical idea:  What if companies took some energy away from the hunt for “passive candidates” and put it into looking for well-qualified applicants that really need a job?

I’d love to hear opinions and idea!


(Thanks to Iragerich for the cunning number swirl.)

Recruiting on the FTSE Websites: Still a Gap?


ftse

Talent management company Taleo summarized the results of a 2006 study in the white paper Careers Site Recruiting in the FTSE 100 Companies:  A Missed Opportunity.  The key finding:  “While almost all FTSE 100 companies (94%) have a careers section on their corporate website, only half (51%) allow candidates to apply online through a structured application form that can support a fully automated end to end recruitment process.”


Most of the other companies (43%) reviewed at that time accepted CVs via email, but six did not even have a careers section on their corporate site.  So how much has changed in the past three years?

I reviewed a number of current FTSE sites recently, and noticed several that still seem behind the curve in online recruiting–but it’s hard to assess, because many of the FTSE 100 companies are made up of smaller entities, and those may have a range of different approaches and capabilities in online recruiting.  Here’s an example scenario:

Associated British Foods (ABF) has more than two dozen components (from AB Agri to Westmill Foods), and the ABF corporate site does not provide an overview of careers or links to the individual company career sites.  On the ABF Our Companies page, I followed the link for Twinings-which took me to a map page.  Selecting the US I went to a consumer site, where there is nothing about jobs.  All the other map links lead to consumer sites, and as far as I can tell from the ones I can either read or roughly translate, still no jobs.  So I did a separate search and found a dedicated UK jobs site for Twinings, which I think can be reached from the map only if you select the UK.  The Twinings jobs site does accept CVs by email but does not have an application form.  There is no job search, but all the jobs listed are in the UK, so I’m still not sure how or if it would be possible to seek a job with Twinings in, say, China.

At two other ABF companies (British Sugar and ACH) it was easier to reach the jobs page, but in both companies, the application process is limited to emailing a resume.  GTG did not appear to have a jobs section at all.

That’s not a complete review–but in terms of a quick look, it seems likely that ABF (taking its constituent companies together) may still be in the “missed opportunity” zone as defined by Taleo.  On the other hand, BAE Systems, which is also composed of multiple businesses with worldwide locations, has a well-equipped Careers area on the corporate website and does have an online application system.  The only confusion is that some business components (e.g., Detica) seem to have their own websites with separate Careers sections.

I’ll be drilling down further on this topic over the next few weeks, to provide additional views.  Since Taleo did not specify which companies had which gaps, there can’t be an apples-to-apples update.  But it should be possible to spot some current best practices, as well as some remaining problem areas.

(Thanks to Jenny Downing for the bear’s-eye view of one day in the life of the FTSE 100.)