Now that I am officially a Californian, I stopped by an In N Out Burger over the weekend and had a cheeseburger and a chocolate shake. The restaurant I visited is right down the road from my corporate apartment of Castro Street in downtown Mountain View, and I was amazed at the quality of the staff that was working. These people were friendly, attentive, and in genuine good spirits. It was a unique fast food experience to say the least. In N Out is doing something right when it comes to talent acquisition.
If you haven’t been there, In N Out Burger sells 6 items. That’s it. I counted. Only six: Burgers, Milkshakes (chocolate, vanilla, strawberry), Sodas, Milk, Coffee, and French Fries, as I recall. $350 million per year of these 6 items by most estimates (they are privately held so we don’t know for sure).
I couldn’t help compare this with Jobster, whose latest change of direction is buoyed with the assertion that they believe the value is in the match (as in the match between person and job), so we corporate recruiting types can now post our jobs for free. Um, by definition, the value has always been in the match. No value is created for either employer or employee if jobs aren’t filled and job seekers don’t land jobs. Given that we are moving from the Search Era (everything available with the right query or question; a la Google search) to the Discovery Era (the right information served up to you before you ask based on complex algorithms, collaborative filtering, and historical data; a la the Netflix Prize or Amazon’s suggestive selling engine) this would be the holy grail of recruiting.
The talent marketplace is not that efficient. An efficient market would let us all know all the available, well-suited jobs that meet our criteria (location, compensation, job scope, company profile, leadership team, culture fit, the list goes on and is highly complex). I envision this as my internet home page (currently Google with lots of widgets) serving up only the jobs that I might be interested in and also well-suited for. Relevancy is very important, as there are already too many candidates pursuing jobs they won’t ever get hired for because they cannot discern whether they are well-suited for the role. Similarly, the best talent doesn’t want to be solicited for jobs that don’t suit them any more than I want Amazon.com to recommend something that I’m not really interested in (which they annoyingly do by the way).
This is a huge challenge for Jobster, and I’m not optimistic that they will be able to pull it off for several reasons:
1.) Complexity: Creating relevant matches between jobs and people is one of the most complex algorithms I can think of. Amazon can’t even get relevant matchng right and they know a lot about my preferences for books and music. It’s not clear to me how Jobster will be able to create relevant matches (and they must be relevant) by matching the multifaceted, multidimensional requirements of jobs with the multifaceted, multidimensional requirements of human beings.
2.) Range restriction: People don’t want to change jobs that often. Yes, the velocity of careers has accelerated to where the average person changes jobs every couple of years, but in reality, there’s not a lot of time window when non-job hoppers really want to hear about other opportunities. This makes the data set smaller. For example, if you only order one book every 2.5 years, Amazon’s not going to serve you up much of a relevant menu. Funny anecdote: the week after I started with Google, I got a call, in my office at Google, from a headhunter about a head of staffing job at Home Depot after the Nardelli Implosion. Talk about poor relevancy matching…
3.) Unclear job specifications: Those of us in recruiting know that the key to an efficient and ultimately successful search is really qualifying the requisition with the people responsible for making the hiring decision. Very few hiring managers have thought through what really drives success in a job, and generally don’t develop a robust specification for the job. This complicates things even further.
I’ve alluded to this topic a few times, but simplicity forces value creation, whether it is running a recruiting department, a burger chain, or a software company. Admittedly, I’ve only done one of these.
What I have done is made a career out of observing and assessing behaviors, competencies, and the subsequent results of executive leaders with whom I’ve worked with at both large companies like Starbucks, Microsoft, and Google, and at the small 50-person start-up Oracle technology consulting company that my team and I helped rapidly scale in the late 1990s. I have become a student of competencies, behaviors, and their resulting impact on business results.
One of the key behaviors I see effective leaders consistently dispay is to separate the productivity from the activity in their pursuits, and winnow that down to clarify business results around a single, well-defined objective. Generally, things aren’t as complicated as we make them. I haven’t seen Jobster create this level of laser focus around a business problem that can clearly be monetized.
I mentioned in a previous post that I didn’t know what business problem that Jobster was trying to solve. Unfortunately, now that I know and as much as I want them to succeed, I am no more optimistic about their probability of success. It will be interesting to follow their latest tack.
Recruiters always have and always will use multiple tools in their job - "best of breed" or simply "my stuff". Yet time and again people invest and want to build the mother of all recruiting multi-tools.
Guess what? I'm the on of those nerds who owns four different Leatherman multi-tools, but when I do jobs around the house I still carry and exclusively use my hammer, my drill, my screw drivers and my pliers...about six tools.
Posted by: hans gieskes | February 25, 2007 at 07:04 PM
Great post. But what exactly did this have to do with In N Out Burger?
Posted by: Albert Francis | March 22, 2007 at 04:18 PM
Dear Sir,
i want to job.
Posted by: Muhammad Imran | July 08, 2008 at 12:17 AM