Wow, the previous blog entry I made was in March; don’t think I’ve ever left it for so long.

I think – like others – I was sorta kidnapped by Twitter; meantime though a number of things happened in regards to the LatinOcean practice. Allow me to make a recap:

1. Despite the GFC (remember it?) there were a quite a few clients keen to make investments in their staff education, reviewing processes and sprucing up internal and external systems. They were able to take advantage of their revised/lower opportunity costs (e.g. consultants less busy, more negotiation power with vendors, etc.).

2. What also helped us keep a steady path re. ‘business coming in’ was the expected growth of career management and transitioning/outplacement services from our larger clients. To leverage of this part of the cycle, we adapted our sourcing and recruitment focused offerings into the services from HR outfits that were preparing retrenched professionals for their next move. Our contribution had a lot to do with personal branding and reputation management on the web.

3. At the end of June, LatinOcean was sold to Jabor Holdings. Jabor Holdings is a private company in which I am a director. Our expectation is that LatinOcean will continue operating for as long as our customers want us around. If anything, we plan to explore how we can use the materials and IP developed over the last three years to expand into other professional services verticals.

4. Jabor Holdings is also owner of Digital Reach a new venture that came to life at the beginning of this year; focused on the online advertising industry, this startup needs lots of love and nurturing which is what hopefully we will be giving it.

This post is making me look back and now I understand why I haven’t blogged in such a long time.

In the meantime though, there have been interesting/encouraging topics/trends emerging; on which I can only hope I will be chipping in more proactively. For example:

- Less observers and more doers online; in particular more actual recruitment consultants walking the talk re. online sourcing, etc. and bringing insights from the real world. Greg Savage and Kelly O’Shaughnessy come to mind.

- The ever growing quality and volume output coming from the thinkers. The discourse and reports like Phillip and Michael’s sources of talent study opened the room for debate, discussion and further refinement outside the echo chamber.

- The ongoing tinkering with services and technologies supporting recruitment, sourcing, engagement

- The social recruitment meme, which was undergoing a stylish discussion entanglement until someone looked at the time and said that it was time to get back to work (just being facetious; I am always keen to listen and contribute to concept-shaping views on this topic)

Look forward to getting back into blogging shape. Thank you for sticking around

In the post-industrial period, comparatively small investments of time and money are dedicated to launch new tools and services that are firstly thrown into the hands of individual users, generally for little or no money. When this offering reaches or gets close to the proverbial tipping point, corporations and governments start to pay attention. Consumerisation effectively acts as a huge proof of concept.

The first example that comes to mind is ICQ; it supposedly started with pimply kids flirting and talking about music, right? Next thing, intranet based IM applications are vanilla services in business. Same for P2P, even email if you want to go that far back. The music discussions and flirting (may be) are gone but the design stayed.

So, next time you feel like rolling your eyes when someone tweets what she had for breakfast, may I kindly suggest you have a Stella, relax and reflect that in all likelihood the trivial stuff (maybe) will fade away from twitter, but its infrastructure will certainly remain.

You were able to get a .asia top level domain since around mid-march and it’s still early stages. Last time i checked the process is a little more protracted than the registration of other domains (.com et al) and I think it is a more expensive too.

A couple of people I have spoken to think this is a rip off. Although I don’t have a major problem with the conspiracy theory, my view is that for a few hundred dollars it’s worthwhile going through the process and see if the new domain takes off. To me that’s a better option than losing a web address that I would have liked to own because it goes with my regional presence, branding, etc.

If you need a hand with this drop me an email jorgeatlatinocean.com, though it is pretty easy

cheers.

referred site: The DotAsia Organisation

Just to bring to your attention what might be the type of online operation we’ll see more of in the coming months if it works for their stakeholders, Recruitment portals or markets are intended to aggregate employers and recruiters and take the friction out of a what is still very convoluted, and therefore costly, exchange. A couple of players coming up with soft and hard launch dates soon:

- VacancyBid, you can catch Danny Nerezov, the 24-year old CEO, on Facebook any day of the week. From their site:

VacancyBid is a Sydney based company which exists to lower the cost hire for employers, and create maximum revenue opportunities for recruiters.

- NeedRM; I met CEO Michael Rhodes many moons ago about this initiative, so I guess the business model has been reasonably worked. The tag line for the company from their homepage:

NEED Recruitment Market is a recruitment revolution that has the capacity to change global business dynamics. As an efficient recruitment marketplace that sits between employers and recruiters, NEED delivers real value to traders by harnessing the speed and global reach of the Internet.

I will be watching with interest to understand how they go to market and how well received they are specially in the context of:

- the continued growth of the BPO/Managed services deals between employers and one agency which brings its own exchange platform, thus locking out unauthorised delivery by other agencies

- the continued scarcity of talent, e.g. recruiters wondering “why do I need to go and bid for work which may not be overly profitable if I still have job orders I cannot fill?”

- the fact that these markets may rely on externally sourced data to reveal its effectiveness, that is employers/recruiters have to go back to the system and flag an engagement as closed (person placed)

In some ways, recruiters are already bidding for work using the classifieds model: if the see company abc publishing an ad for an accountant on a job board, I won’t be surprised if they receive a few calls from agencies canvassing the demand on an ongoing basis.

As I said, the marketplace is still partially intermediated. There’s a few challenges, I certainly don’t have the solution. My bet is technology alone will not diminish friction.

have a great year

Taleo has new plans to join Facebook as a way to give small- and medium-sized business customers the ability to network and source passive candidates.

Slowly but surely, we’re moving towards a multi-channel sourcing platform.

Don’t go too hard on me re. sample sizes and statistical relevance; nevertheless I hope it is of benefit to some of you out there, and feel free to pass. Enjoy

a suggestion: you layer it to appeal to your employee segments; and yes, theoretically at least you have to think about employee segments of one (maybe there’s a long tail post on employer branding coming soon).

So what are these layers?

- Foundation: this is the ‘infrastructure’ of the EB, the set of values, preferences, modus operandi, etc. that are company-wide. These will likely be ageless/long term and not-for-negotiation.

- Design: which attends to the business unit/region/division super-segments. These rest of the infrastructure but are tailored to match the aspirations and preferences of the people that operate within these groups, whilst enabling their strategic role.

- Features: focused on teams or individuals, embodied in sets of practices that enable the company to speak to employees with a personal tone (I cater to you). The features are flexible, interchangeable.

The interconnection between foundation, design and features produces EB execution. Example

foundation: the company is green (and not just for the last couple hours)
design: the finance team is prudent, errs on the safe side; the R&D team is innovative and risk-friendly
features: john works 2 days a week from home
interconnection: john is a part-time telecommuter from the finance team; he has a company laptop with an RSA token / VPN for remote access. He’s not been furnished with a printer.

Can you think of better examples? …. now if this is something I have unconsciously robbed off someone’s model from someone pls let me know.

It’s a bigger problem than you might think—jerks and bullies in the workplace. Research shows that they not only hinder recruiting and retention but also raise levels of client churn, damage reputations, and diminish the confidence of investors.

Interesting article from McKinsey’s on the costs of jerks and bullies in the office (need to register for free). This is perhaps more timely in the context of candidates shortages and the urge to recruit and place people quickly. Just make sure you don’t drive your TCJ (total cost of jerks) for your organisation.

- Multi-listing potentially devalues the job in the market and potentially devalues the brand of the employer
- Quantity becomes more important than finding the best candidate (e.g. consultants flogging CV’s only to be seen doing something)
- The client does more work and still pays the same fee
- The client does more work, resents it and starts to cut corners
- Exclusivity gives the recruiter time to do a thorough job to find the best candidate
- The reality is that all recruiters give priority to exclusive jobs
- The best candidates are put forward to exclusive jobs
- Other professions don’t do it

Text in brackets is mine.

He finally requests not to ask exclusivity for exclusivity’s sake (i.e. do the best for the client based on the circunstances)

I am sure recruiters can corroborate or not if this reasoning will get their clients to say ‘hmmm… ok! I will work only with you’.

Assumming clients know all this already, I’d say that the reason why clients opt for a portfolio approach is because they do not know which vendor is going to present them the most hireable candidate; this is how we go about making other decisions when outcome uncertainty is a factor, right?; investment in shares may be a good example (you don’t know which company will give you the best/desired returns)

Agency consultants themselves balance their options to source the right person for the client’s assignment. They run their databases, go to all the job boards, put the ad on the paper if they can afford it, etc. Again, they are trying to counter uncertainty by increasing coverage.

You could be rightly arguing that the chosen options are already coming from a pre-screened pool of vendors (e.g. the largest agencies, or the most trafficked websites). Even with this in mind, I put to you that lack of exclusivity stems from the vendor’s lack of offering differentiation, at least in the eyes of the paying customer. In this context, recruiters need to stand out, whether it is by focusing on service breadth, depth, originality, etc.

If this reasoning is sound, then your capacity as a vendor to get your clients to go exclusive with you is determined well before the client contacts you for your services; this perception was set when your customer understood what makes your product unique.

Now you tell me, is this a sissy theoretical argument and there’s no room for differentiation in the recruitment space? Do your customers care if you have a stand out offering? Do you bother in trying to lock in a client, and if yes what’s the clincher?

Have a good weekend

I may have a post-grad qualification but I am hardly your “let’s run the business idea through Dr. Pete’s 15-force revenue matrix as we learned it in the business strategy course” kind of guy. Having said that, during the summer holiday I had the chance to read blue ocean strategy, by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne.

I found the book appealing. It may have had to do that I loved picking up a book for grown-ups after so many Dr Seuss stories (yes, they also have a message for adults), but it definitely had its own merits too. I am also running a project that consists of the conception of a new business, and the book’s core premises were easy to integrate into the stated business vision, as opposed to the other way around.

As i was jogging my memory to remember the book’s ideas, I jotted down some of them, and thought I’d share them around in case it helped you. I also added a few things in brackets as if this was going to be used for an idea in the HR, recruitment vertical for illustration purposes. Here is it:

The idea behind ‘Blue Ocean’ is to develop and nurture a new market space, which is currently uncontested. Blue Ocean is the opposite of ‘bloody/red seas’ strategies that send companies to compete in highly contested markets, riddled with cutthroat pricing and low differentiation

Blue Ocean produces ‘value innovation’ which consists on not being superior to your competitors but making your competition irrelevant via the creation of leap value for your buyers; this is not only the result of the application of new technologies but the also of ‘market pioneering’ and extreme cost reductions compared to other players

The 4 actions framework

Reduce – what service components should be reduced well below the industry standard because they are of little value to the client?

Eliminate – what service components should be eliminated given that they are of no value?

Create – what service elements have never been offered by the industry?

Increase – what service elements need to be increased because they are of high value?

Addressing these questions creates focus (what we do and who we serve) divergence (we are different to everyone else because of this) and compelling tagline.

Reconstructing Market Boundaries (helps you in conceiving new market spaces)

You need to stretch the market in terms of audience, delivery, offering, competition, substitutes, etc. How do you go about stretching the market?

- Look across alternative industries (e.g. cinemas and restaurants aiming to fulfill a need for ‘a night out’)

- Look across strategic groups within industries (e.g. online assessment providers vs. high-touch premium personalized services)

- Look across the chain of buyers and influencers (e.g. candidates, companies buying on behalf of professionals, influencers/bloggers/specialist journalists)

- Look across complementary offerings (franchises to drive self-employment)

- Look across functional or emotional appeal to buyers (do you need to add or remove rational/feeling components of your delivery, e.g. do you need to use glasses instead of paper cups on the interview room?)

- Look across time and aim to identify trends which are decisive to the business, that are irreversible, and have a clear trajectory (e.g. candidate shortages, work-life balances, population ageing)

Creating New Demand from non-customers by value-innovating

Non customers Tier 1: people who reluctantly buy from your industry (e.g. candidates who hate agencies but will deal with them because they have the jobs

Non customers Tier 2: people who outright refuse to deal with you (e.g. applicants that go for jobs directly to employers)

Non customers Tier 3: Unexplored non customers that the industry has not thought of them as customers (e.g. high-school students, self employed professionals)

Testing for a Blue Ocean Idea

There you go.