The Budget for Stupidity

• Author: Amitai Givertz
• Posted: March 2, 2007
• Category: Recruiting
• Tags: No Tags
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A provocative article published by InfoWorld under their Ask The Headhunter column ties in with our recent post ATS Sourcing Data: Can You Trust It? More interesting perhaps is that author Nick Corcodilos takes a potshot at HR slackers, the CareerXroads 6th Annual Sources of Hire Survey and job boards too, adding another dimension to the debate:

Gimme a break. Here we go again. The Human Resources Department runs around shrieking with glee, blissed out, eyes closed, obliviously buck-naked (hey, the board of directors certainly ain’t looking), running up its corporate tab at Monster.com, CareerBuilder, HotJobs and other job boards. Meanwhile, for the n-th time in as many years, CareerXroads publishes its annual survey about where employers find the people they hire.

The numbers are the same-old, year after year. I already covered last year’s stats in Garbage picking: The 2% solution and earlier ones in Job-Board Journalism: Selling out the American job hunter.

The bottom-line message that’s clear year after year in the xRoads survey: If you’re job hunting, forget the boards. The odds a company will hire you through one of the big job boards are somewhere in the vicinity of a statistical error (under 3%).

By way of contrast and balance Gerry Crispin who publishes the CareerXroads Annual Sources of Hire Survey with Mark Mehler answers his own question posed in an earlier muse that he aptly titles, Employee Referrals are 54 Times as Likely to Result in a Job than ALL the Job Boards Put Together:

Q: How much better are Employee Referrals than Job Boards?

A: So much better that the Job Board isn’t relevant.

Hmmmm. Curiouser and curiouser don’t you think? When you consider the underlying premise of our earlier post ATS Sourcing Data: Can You Trust It? which is that the source data gathered — the glue that holds these analyses together — is in of itself unreliable, and Gerrry Crispin’s own assessment of the relative value of job boards in generating hires, it begs the question, “So what?” Surely, it has to be more than “the budget for stupidity” when “money talks” still holds true for those with a really vested interest.

Last, I wonder why many analyses of job board ineffectiveness overlook the possibility that the employers do themselves no favors when they do odd things like:

• Post banal, nondescript announcements that neither engage job seekers or enable the flow of qualified candidates
• Select boards which for any number of reasons are inappropriate for the recruiters’ needs
• Fail to deploy job postings as part of an integrated sourcing strategy — not knee-jerk, willy-nilly posting as is so common
• Respond too slowly to the types of changes in user behavior and/or online trends which transcend job board branding, things like vertical search (Indeed.com, SimplyHired, Jobster and Just-Posted for example)
• Miss other online opportunities like behaviorial targeting and reverse posting which can supplement — and in some cases replace — bog-standard job postings.

Playing the blame game and pointing to source of hire data or job boards or whatever, too often diverts our attention from where the real problems lie, deeply buried in our own processes, practices and protocols. To the extent that flawed sourcing strategies and data significantly impact recruiting effectiveness — and without doubt they do — neither should we overlook the possibility that the answers to these interminable problems could be quite simple.

Perhaps Forrest Gump had it right when he said, “Stupid is as stupid does.” What do you think?