Recruitment Software, Outdated Government Regulations and Reality

I have been talking to several thoughts leaders, practitioners and customers about recruitment software. HR professionals tell me that applicant tracking systems are a necessary evil and sourcing of talent is the real problem.

The tens of recruiters I spoke to told me that the recruitment systems they use, irrespective of the provider, serve as reporting systems for recruiting managers and do not help recruiters get better talent.

Recruitment software systems are not good repositories of talent information either. LinkedIn does that job much better than any other managed talent database, because any managed talent database starts decaying the moment the information is entered. The agency recruiters I spoke to told me this.

Hiring managers told me that they hide their application systems from high-potential hires as long as possible and only make them go through the pain of applying via the system just to meet the compliance requirements of their company.

A VP of HR-IT  I spoke to recently said that he had to follow useless recruitment process and procedures which are out of touch with reality just because his company does business with the government. He said that he was wasting money for no good reason because all this additional expenditure does not bring any new innovation or better talent to his company. Spending money on recruitment software is akin to a very expensive insurance policy.

Job seekers see online applications as nightmare situations, that they have to deal with to get a job. Meanwhile software providers make a ton of money selling software that just protects company executives from law suits.

Successful recruiters and hiring managers flout all rules and laws and do what ever it takes to get the best talent for the company. Recruitment laws and software have lost touch with reality.

Something is very wrong with this situation. Very ripe for some crazy thinking.

Dirty Girl Tomatoes Have More Flavor

My friend and colleague @LorenWoo is a fan of the flavorful tomatoes from Dirty Girl Produce. He explained to me that Dirty girl tomatoes are water starved to the point of stress. So their plants produce a lesser number of  tomatoes with much more flavor compared to the regular tomato plants that are well-fed with ample water.

I have a similar philosophy for product development. Contrary to popular practice, I ask for less capacity, not more - particularly during the early stages of a product. I believe that the smaller the team, the better the product. A small team has limited time and can produce less features compared to a large team. However, a small team will be forced to focus on the most important things because they are under some stress to produce a viable product in the given time with lesser resources than normal.

Also, in a small team, people will be forced to hold each other accountable. This makes the team a lot more efficient.

Image from http://dirtygirlproduce.com/. If you live in the San Francisco bay area and want to learn more about these tomatoes, here is some more info. Loren Woo shared the link with me.

The More Obvious It Is To You The Harder It Is To Convey It To Others

When I was in school, I had a physics tutor. He was a professor in my Dad's college. He was a brilliant physics scholar and could explain the complex concepts of physics with great ease. I enjoyed learning from him and did well in physics tests. But he could not teach basic mathematics such as addition and subtraction to his 6 year old son. He was frustrated with is son. So his wife, a home maker, had to take over tutoring their son.

I asked him about it and he said "Two plus Two is four. It is so obvious. How come that guy does not get it. I have no idea how to teach him that." This was a great lesson for me. The clearer a concept is to me, the harder it is to convey it to others.



Every time I discuss product concepts and features with my colleagues, I keep this in mind and it has served me well. But from time to time, I do get frustrated when explaining concepts that seem so obvious to me, to my colleagues. For example, where you start when  a person asks you "What is Facebook?".

Image from http://www.huffingtonpost.com

Some Of The Books That Influenced The Design Of Career OnDemand

• Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein
• Simple nudges can significantly alter human behavior
• Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives -- How Your Friends' Friends' Friends Affect Everything You Feel, Think, and Do by Nicholas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler
• You shape your network and then the network shapes you 
• The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less by Barry Schwartz
• We have too much choice now-a-days. Simplify. Reduce.
• Design Driven Innovation: Changing the Rules of Competition by Radically Innovating What Things Mean by Roberto Verganti
• There are three types of innovation. Technology driven, customer driven and meaning driven.
• The Cluetrain Manifesto: 10th Anniversary Edition by Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls and David Weinberger
• Markets are conversations. So is work.
• Informal Learning: Rediscovering the Natural Pathways That Inspire Innovation and Performance  by Jay Cross
• Conversation is the best learning technology on earth.
• Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior by Indi Young
• The Wisdom of Crowds
• The crowd is almost always smarter than a smart individual.
• Cognitive Surplus by Clay Shirky
• Everyone now-a-days have a lot of spare time at hand.
• Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams
• A crowd can produce things more efficiently than organized labor.
• The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki 
• The crowd knows better.
• Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business by Jeff Howe
• Crowd sourcing is important for businesses.
• Get Rid of the Performance Review!: How Companies Can Stop Intimidating, Start Managing--and Focus on What Really Matters by Samuel A. Culbert.
• Performance management is about managing work not just staying compliant.
• Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations by Clay Shirky
• An individual can organize almost as efficiently as an organization
• Flow - The Psychology Of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
• People should be stretched enough that they learn but not so much that they quit.
• Working with Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman.
• The changing nature of work requires people to be intelligent in a different way. 

India Unbound

India Unbound by Gurcharan Das is a fantastic book illustrating the time period between 1947, the year India became politically independent and 1991, the year India became economically independent. Since I grew up in India and experienced the effects of the economic mismanagement and later benefited from the economic liberalization, this book evokes deep emotions.

I highly recommend it for those who want to understand why central planning is a bad idea and free markets are the best way to prosperity.