Are LinkedIn and HR technology suppressing hiring?

Ask the Headhunter: Are LinkedIn and HR technology suppressing hiring?

Unfortunately, the answer is YES.

Yes, LinkedIn and Human Resources screening technology are suppressing hiring.  The fact is, the task of submitting a resume’ that will make it past the filtering technology used by almost all recruiters these days, requires cunning and a shrewd understanding of how to manipulate these screening apps, something akin to Search Engine Optimization (SEO).  However, HR SEO techniques requires a knowledge of the app itself, which is a closely guarded secret. WRT to LinkedIn, I have growing concerns that LinkedIn no longer meets the “WIIFM” test, or “what’s in it for me?”  LinkedIn seems to have aligned its business and destiny more with the needs of the recruiting industry than with my own needs, while still trying to sell me on the benefits of paid “Premium Membership.” Increasingly blog discussions on the value of LinkedIn to business users are concluding that it’s value has diminished sharply. Perhaps the recruiting industry represents a bigger potential revenue stream and LinkedIn does not wish to reveal that to its individual users. Then there is the matter of the LinkedIn merger with Microsoft, which has left many observers underwhelmed, despite pronouncements of the exceptional strategic value to both companies.

Reblogged from: PBS Newshour (WordPress)

Source: Ask the Headhunter: Are LinkedIn and HR technology suppressing hiring?

NICK CORCODILOS

BY NICK CORCODILOS  September 14, 2016 at 2:04 PM EDT

Only 5.2 million people were hired into the 5.9 million jobs available in July. Indeed, LinkedIn and HR technology stand between virtually every open job and all those job seekers, writes Nick Corcodilos. Photo by Michael Nagle/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Nick Corcodilos started headhunting in Silicon Valley in 1979 and has answered over 30,000 questions from the Ask The Headhunter community.

In this special Making Sen$e edition of Ask The Headhunter, Nick shares insider advice and contrarian methods about winning and keeping the right job, on one condition: that you, dear Making Sense reader, send Nick your questions about your personal challenges with job hunting, interviewing, networking, resumes, job boards or salary negotiations. No guarantees — just a promise to do his best to offer useful advice.

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I admit I’m a skeptic if not a cynic. I just don’t buy the ballyhoo about how much better the “jobs numbers” are. Whether the numbers we’re getting from the Department of Labor are getting spun for political purposes or the data are not reflective of what’s really going on, something just doesn’t smell right.

And now a new JOLTS report (Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey) from the Department of Labor has sent a jolt through some jobs watchers.

READ MORE: Ask the Headhunter: 8 steps to better hiring

In “A New Record for Job Openings Deepens Mystery Over Lack of Hiring,” the Wall Street Journal reveals a hole in our job market reality. Even though the number of jobs available in July grew to 5.9 million, only 5.2 million people were hired into those jobs.

After citing drops in unemployment numbers, the Wall Street Journal warns that:

What would normally sound like good news — abundant jobs — is tempered by the fact that people simply aren’t being hired into the positions at rates like in the past. About 300,000 fewer people are being hired each month compared with the pace reached in February.

Yep — fewer jobs are being filled.

The Wall Street Journal cites the routine suspects: “It could be workers lack the skills for available jobs or that employers have become too picky.”

Come on, folks. Let’s get out of the weeds and take a look at the huge tree that’s landed on job seekers — about 19.5 million who are unemployed, underemployed and looking for new jobs, as well as those who’ve “fallen off the rolls.”

Workers are no less skilled today than they were 15 years ago, adjusting for technology and other factors.

Peter Cappelli of University of Pennsylvania Wharton’s School has shown “lack of skills” is a straw man. Workers are no less skilled today than they were 15 years ago, adjusting for technology and other factors. Employers might be picky, but what analysts are missing is the employment infrastructure that dominates and suppresses hiring.

Indeed, LinkedIn and HR technology stand between virtually every open job and all those job seekers. Yet we’ve seen no analysis about whether or not these are the roadblocks. It’s too easy for economists to blame “the workforce,” because who dares question HR technology?

Where is the economist assigned by the White House or Congress or the Department of Labor who is doing the hard work of reviewing the employment infrastructure that employers and job seekers rely on? Where are the success statistics? Where is the failure analysis?

READ MORE: Ask the Headhunter: How did recruiting become so perverted?

I think our employment infrastructure is the single biggest culprit, and I’ve said why in plenty of columns. (For just one example of where investment in insane HR technology is leading us, see “HR Technology: Who’s Bad?”)

The HR technology seems to:

• Encourage irresponsible “recruiting” — solicitation of too many people from untargeted pools of candidates.
• Promote automated, reductionist “matching” of candidate keywords to job keywords. The algorithms make it look like HR is recruiting when HR is doing nothing but diddling keyboards. (See “Reductionist Recruiting: A short history of why you can’t get hired.”)
• Result in rejection of good candidates because the keyword model is woefully inadequate.
• Turn HR into rationalization central. “We’re doing our job incredibly well using state of the art technology, so there must be something wrong with the talent,” they say. (See “Why HR should get out of the hiring business.”)

The JOLTS numbers should be a wake-up call to legislators and employers: You’re not addressing what’s broken.

Labor Secretary Tom Perez needs to stop blaming “unskilled workers” and start looking hard at America’s employment infrastructure, which is controlled by a handful of private companies that profit when jobs don’t get filled, not when they do.

America’s employment infrastructure is controlled by a handful of private companies that profit when jobs don’t get filled, not when they do.

Indeed makes no money when a company fills a job — only when employers keep paying to keep looking. LinkedIn’s incentive is to convince employers to add more criteria to job postings, to make it harder to match a good hire, to keep looking. Applicant Tracking Systems — software applications that enable the electronic handling of recruitment — earn huge subscription fees from HR departmentswhen HR can’t fill jobs.

So do you think any of these vendors design systems that actually fill jobs? That would kill their revenue streams. There’s your roadblock.

The tip-off to the problem is this JOLTS report — companies are not hiring. When the Department of Labor tells us, “we just don’t know what’s going on,” all I hear is, “We don’t want to look under that big rock…”

Dear Readers: Let’s put it to a vote here: What’s the real reason fewer open jobs are being filled? What is suppressing hiring?

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Nick Corcodilos invites Making Sense readers to subscribe to his free weekly Ask The Headhunter© Newsletter. His in-depth “how to” PDF books are available on his website: “How to Work With Headhunters…and how to make headhunters work for you,” “Keep Your Salary Under Wraps,” “How Can I Change Careers?” and “Fearless Job Hunting.”

Send your questions to Nick, and join him for discussion every week here on Making Sense. Thanks for participating!

Yahoo HR Case Study: CEO Marissa Mayer Ban On Telecommuting

This week’s decision by Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is an excellent Human Resources case study, worthy of further analysis and debate by our HR students.

Silicon Valley is reacting strongly this week to Yahoo CEO Marissa Meyer’s surprise ban on all telecommuting. The blogosphere is buzzing with posts about the new Yahoo policy, while the Huffington Post, and a host of other media outlets have also weighed in, most of it negative.  The coup de grace was Gloria Steinem taking a very pointed swipe at Mayer during an interview on PBS Newshour last night.  While affecting all Yahoo employees equally, it is being viewed as particularly insensitive to working women who need to balance their work and home lives.

Mayer is herself a new mother, but she has exacerbated the negative reaction to her decision, by having a nursery built for her baby next to her office.  Regardless of the justifications for the policy, it is unquestionably a Human Resources and Public Relations disaster for Yahoo, now being referred to as the Mayergate scandal on Huffington Post.

Despite the furor, Yahoo Media Relations has been silent on the subject for at least three days. Yesterday, Yahoo finally released a brief statement that only served to make matters worse. Its stance, in essence: Don’t project your office culture issues on our company.

“This isn’t a broad industry view on working from home — this is about what is right for Yahoo!“, right…
Read more at http://www.onenewspage.com/n/Business/74vpdrsn6/Yahoo-Finally-Responds-To-Mayergate.htm#x9aqhHsQ43LWWdud.99

Others have also pointed out that Yahoo’s move against telecommuting has also potentially damaged their brand, and more importantly may seriously impair Yahoo’s efforts to recruit the “best and brightest” new employees, which Yahoo’s competitors, notably Google, who lost Mayer to Yahoo, will be likely to pounce on.

There has been a minority of comment in favor of Mayer’s ban on telecommuting, which is worth noting.  But without a doubt this is a great real-time opportunity for our HR students to debate this, and to continue to watch this as it unfolds. The best minority viewpoint comes from my long standing colleague and friend Geoff Moore on LinkedIn, author of numerous books on entrepreneurship and management. Geoff argues in his post, “Misunderstanding Marissa,”  that “she had to do it!” 

Geoff Moore, Silicon Valley “Rock Star”

Read more: http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20130227181132-110300724-misunderstanding-marissa

As Geoff himself says, “What do you think?”

Big Data: Big Deal Or Not?

I have been having a spirited marathon debate with a couple of my friends.  Is this alleged new “Big Data thingy” so transformational that it will change our every day lives, or is it just an evolutionary advance that may improve productivity but not much else?  The same arguments may apply to the concept of “The Cloud,” and “Smart Mobile.”  The three, taken together, are coalescing into the major information technology forces that will drive innovation and productivity into the foreseeable future.

PollDaddy: What Is Your Opinion?  Big Data: Big Deal Or Not? Or Comment Below

We are hearing regularly in the media about so-called “Big Data.”  What exactly is Big Data? A number of differing definitions have been offered from a wide range of media sources. ZDNet‘s definition is one of the best I have seen so far.  In essence, big data is about liberating data that is large in volume, broad in variety and high in velocity from multiple sources in order to create efficiencies, develop new products and be more competitive. Forrester puts it succinctly in saying that big data encompasses “techniques and technologies that make capturing value from data at an extreme scale economical”  Prior to the emergence of commercial Big Data, the concept only existed where cost was no object: in the black world of the National Security Administration, and required the largest purpose-built supercomputers in existence.

A zettabyte (symbol ZB, derived from the SI prefix zetta-) is a quantity of information or information storage capacity equal to 10²¹ bytes or 1,000 exabytes (or one sextillion (one long scale trilliard) bytes).^{[1][2][3][4][5]…..I Billion terabytes….Today, you can walk into your local computer store and buy a couple of terabyes for a $100.  Only $500 Million for a zettabyte.  In real terms that is dirt cheap, and getting cheaper daily.   Now that we have that cleared up, we can move to the next level.}

With regard to the obvious issue of personal privacy, the European Union and other organizations have made efforts to protect privacy, with very mixed results.  Other governments, notably China, are aggressively implementing opposite policies to strictly limit privacy.  Highly sophisticated telecommunications equipment has been available for years that enables deep analysis of all of your voice and Internet traffic. We learned this when Dick Cheney secretly set up such equipment to track and record all voice and data traffic in the United States.  The equipment trapped and analyzed all of it in real time. You didn’t notice a thing.  The thing about your personal data is that they already have it. Most of it comes from public sources you authorized.   I not advocating this, I am only the messenger. The founder and former CEO of Sun Microsystems, Scott McNealy famously said, “You have no privacy. Get over it.”  We must not ignore the serious issue of privacy, but the problem is already here and deep data mining is thriving.  Privacy needs a revolution of its own.

The core question then becomes whether Big Data, and for that matter, the Cloud, and Smart Mobile, represent revolutionary and transformational changes in technological capability and also consequentially, human culture, politics: how we conduct ourselves in the World.  Or is it just so many more boring zeros and ones zooming by at the speed of light, stored in chips, and processed by quantum microprocessors?  No big deal, just IT management as normal.  Frankly, this is a significant philosophical question.  For this discussion, we will focus only on Big Data.   Discussion of the Cloud and Smart Mobile will follow later.  My most recent post on Smart Mobile gives a hint of my thoughts:  Mobile Market Share: A War of Titans Worth Following, http://mayo615.com/2013/01/21/mobile-os-market-share-strategy-war-of-the-titans-worth-following/

In fairness, I cut my teeth on Marshall McLuhan‘s ideas while in university in the 1960’s.  In an amazing irony, I soon fell into Intel Corporation at the birth of the microprocessor revolution, and later, I was also present to personally participate in the emergence of the personal computer. My memory of McLuhan kept popping up everywhere.   As my career progressed, I seemed to jump onto each new wave: networking at Sun Microsystems,  then the Internet infrastructure build out explosion with Ascend Communications, and finally a host of new companies, based on Internet-based capabilities.  Through all of it, I could only conclude that somehow McLuhan, like some kind of modern Nostradamus, had foreseen it all.   Most importantly, my own life was transformed by it all, and I saw with my own eyes the massive transformation occurring all around me.

So I have no doubt that Big Data is transforming our lives, and will continue to transform our lives, in ways we cannot yet fully grasp, as I could not grasp McLuhan when I first heard him, or the significance of the Internet as I sat right in the middle of it.

I have previously described Big Data as analogous to the evolution of Chaos Theory.  For centuries, full understanding of the complexity of nature’s designs were thought to be the realm of God, and beyond human comprehension and explanation.  Then in the 1960’s in places like Santa Cruz, California and Germany, the elegant simplicity of a solution to chaos began to emerge.  The massive scale of Big Data is a very similar nut to crack. We are now seeing an elite group of data scientists and mathematicians begin to solve Big Data in a way similar to how chaos was resolved.  Google, Microsoft Bing, Baidu, Yahoo and Amazon are driving the development of these mathematical skill sets.

Last year I showed my UBC Faculty of Management students a YouTube video on Data Mining. In the video, the two Hungarian mathematicians leading a data mining company, described how they had solved hideously complex problems that were previously beyond any computational solution. The key to their success was their ability to extract very precise useful information from extraordinarily large stores of information.  The metaphor here is more like finding a particular grain of sand on a very large beach.  A parallel key factor has been the incessant march of Moore’s Law.  Even 10 years ago, successful data mining on this scale could not have been accomplished. The computational cycles and high speed mass storage were not available or were too expensive.   Today those microprocessor cycles are available.  The costs will continue to plummet, making further advances inevitable. Failure to consider Moore’s Law and available computational cycles has also been the cause of many failed ideas over the years. But the threshold has arrived.

Today, developments like Google Spanner, the largest known database architecture in the World, have joined with the computational solutions.

Unveiled this fall after years of hints and rumors, it’s the first worldwide database worthy of the name — a database designed to seamlessly operate across hundreds of data centers and millions of machines and trillions of rows of information.

Spanner is a creation so large, some have trouble wrapping their heads around it. But the end result is easily explained: With Spanner, Google can offer a web service to a worldwide audience, but still ensure that something happening on the service in one part of the world doesn’t contradict what’s happening in another.

Google’s decision to reveal Spanner has many dimensions.  First, it provides a peek into the black World of the U.S.  National Security Agency and the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency.  Previously, the existence of such large and sophisticated global databases were only imagined. We now know they exist and are a crucial component of Big Data.

Read more in my post, Google Spanner, the single largest database in the world

http://mayo615.com/2012/11/26/inside-google-spanner-the-single-largest-database-in-the-world/

For me, the most compelling example of how this all works, has been the extremely sophisticated Big Data mining used by the Obama campaign to achieve re-election. As early as March 2012, the Wall Street Journal began reporting about “Dashboard,”  the Obama campaign app that was mining Big Data to find undecided voters in key states.  But not only undecided voters.  Dashboard can key in, find and persuade “Off the Grid” voters.  Off the Grid is the term used to describe those people, such as students and other young people, with constantly changing locations and only a mobile phone.  These voters have historically been virtually impossible to reach.  This short PBS Newshour video below speaks volumes about the extraordinary impact and value of Big Data, not seen before.

Watch How Much Do Digital Campaigns Know About You? on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.

The campaign’s hiring of Rayid Ghani, as “chief data scientist,” and an army of data analysts, set the stage for what was to come.  On election night, Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan were absolutely convinced that they had won the election, but were shocked to find otherwise. Working through their disbelief, both candidates later remarked about the enormous voter turnout for Democrats in key locations and the “technology advantage” of the Obama campaign.

So from my years of observation of the march of technology and its impact on my own life, I am convinced that we are entering another transformational period as profound as the emergence of the Internet itself.

I have been repeatedly drawn back to Steve Job’s 2005 Stanford University commencement address, in which he closes with references to Stuart Brand and The Whole Earth Catalog. Stuart Brand is an extraordinary futurist.  One of Ken Kesey’s original Merry Prankster’s chronicled in Tom Wolfe’s book non-fiction novel, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Brand had been inspired by the legendary first photograph of the entire Earth taken by Apollo 8 astronaut Frank Borman.  Brand is also the founder of The Well,  the very early Sausalito-based Internet Service Provider, who is now considered one of the most important thinkers on human culture, technology and its impacts.  Word of Job’s commencement address spread virally around the Valley...”Did you hear what Job’s said at Stanford today?”    Steve was basically saying that he too understood what McLuhan had said, and that Stuart Brand also understood the transformational importance of the Global Village, by publishing The Whole Earth Catalog.

PBS Frontline: The Untouchables…Corporate Crooks Too Big To Jail

PBS Frontline’s January 22nd broadcast will expose “The Untouchables,” the blatant criminal frauds perpetrated against us and the glaring lack of criminal prosecutions.

Watch it.

Big Data: The Next Frontier in Competition, Innovation and Productivity

http://www.mckinsey.com/Insights/MGI/Research/Technology_and_Innovation/Big_data_The_next_frontier_for_innovation

This report from McKinsey adds to the list of similar reports coming from the HBR blog and numerous other sources, emphasizing that Big Data is here, and is going to have a huge impact on all business.  What has become known as “Big Data,”  refers to the terabytes and zettabytes (that’s a 1 followed by 21 zeros)  of data that have been collected and stored on each one of us…for better or worse.  Data mining is the industry that is emerging to make commercial sense of Big Data.  It is a well-known fact that more data has been collected on us in the last two years, than in all of the previous years of computing combined.

Last week, PBS Newshour featured an election eve story about the Obama campaign‘s use of data mining. In the story, Obama election canvassers revealed how they were using Big Data and data mining to target their efforts. Rather than slog through neighborhoods knocking on every door, the Obama team had devised an ingenious field system using smartphones, GPS and mountains of data about the people living at each address.   Each home that fit a precise profile that indicated their tendency to perhaps vote for Obama, or would be open to persuasion, was marked with a blue flag on the smartphone. The propensity to support Obama was determined by statisticians and mathematicians at Obama HQ, house by house, using a highly complex database of household information.  This was not just income and age. It included information about magazines, organizations, that had already been shared publicly by the household.  This dramatically improved the effectiveness and productivity of the field workers pounding on doors.  From the election results, we now know that this system is worth its weight in gold.

Last term, UBC Faculty of Management 3rd year students investigated the emerging new “data mining” industry.  We learned from example videos that data mining was being used to solve highly complex management, operational and marketing problems that had hitherto seemed unsolvable.  Also, traditionally, assessment of industry trends had been highly subjective gut level judgments by expert researchers.  Things like fashion trends, and video gaming preferences were thought to require mostly observation and guesswork.  However, Harvard Business Review and other journals are seeing that Big Data is being mined to solve even these seemingly intractable problems.

The emergence of Big Data and data mining is essentially very similar to Chaos Theory, and the emergence of mathematical algorithms that solved the problem of apparent chaos in nature, which was discovered to actually follow an elegant order.