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Ryan Healy is a recent college graduate. He is a founder of 
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This is the second in a series of posts discussing how Seth Godin’s Meatball Sundae applies to recruiting Generation Y. In short, the rules for marketing have changed. But the number one problem in corporate America is recruiting, not marketing.
What I’ve come to realize is that recruiting and marketing are not as different as one would expect. Godin’s 14 new rules for marketers capture perfectly the new rules for recruiting and retaining Gen-Y.
Here’s how trends four through six from Godin’s book relate to recruiting.
4. Extremely short attention spans due to clutter
I’ll admit it, my attention span is virtually non-existent. When a friend sends me a link to a YouTube video, if I’m not hooked in 10 seconds, I don’t watch the rest. When I stumble onto a new blog, if the first post doesn’t suck me in immediately, I usually leave, never to return again.
Godin says, “Commercials used to be a minute long, sometimes two. Then someone came up with the brilliant idea of running two per minute, then four. Now there are radio ads that are less than three seconds long.”
People will not invest time and energy into something that is not immediately appealing.
So what does this mean for recruiting? It means that your job descriptions must be amazing. The first sentence has to hook the candidate: it should explain why your company is great and how you are making some sort of difference. The rest should tell them how your job will position them for success in their career–and not just with your company.
The old approach is to list all of the responsibilities someone will have when they work for you. But we Millennials aren’t looking for a laundry list of things that you will tell us to do. We’re looking for a reason to believe in your company. Give us one.
5. The long tail
In his book and blog, The Long Tail, Chris Anderson claims that given the choice, people want the choice. In any normal marketplace, if you give people more choices, revenue goes up.
That’s why Amazon.com has defeated traditional booksellers. Since they don’t need concrete bookstores, they can sell millions of books, not just the 150,000 top sellers that fit in a Barnes and Noble. In other words, the internet provides too many choices. And the choices aren’t between Pepsi and Coke or Careerbuilder and Monster. The choices include every niche product out there, which can be found everywhere because of the ease of starting a business today, again, thanks to the Internet.
What this means is that you should find some niche job sites. Careerbuilder is a giant job board with cool commercials, but too much spam, and Monster is, well, a monster. Instead, use Dice or Tech Crunch for technology, use the ladders for the $100K plus hires, and scour the Internet for the top blogs in your particular field. The best candidates are hanging around the niche communities. They’ve already sifted through the mass of career-related clutter online. Now they’re waiting on your company to do that, too.
6. Outsourcing
We’ve all heard about people losing jobs to workers abroad who can perform the work for 1/5 of the price. It’s a very real problem and it’s going to continue.
Godin says, “Either what you’re doing is repetitive, in which case you ought to outsource it, or its homemade, insightful, and filled with initiative and judgment, in which case you can charge for it.”
At first glance, this has nothing to do with recruiting or with Millennials. But, think again: if your recruiters are doing the same thing now that they were doing five years ago, they’re wasting your time. Writing standardized job descriptions, preparing rehearsed speeches with three year old PowerPoint slides, using old marketing copy–all of that outdated recruiting activity can be outsourced for next to nothing.
However, you cannot outsource the personalization of the recruiting experience. You can’t send YourManInIndia to a college campus for dinner and drinks with a recruit, and you can’t send a worker in China to Mind Your Decisions to join in a conversation about Finance with some very smart young people.
A competent, contemporary recruiter can do these things. And if he has that kind of initiative, he can probably write you a great job description, too. And he will do these things, because it’s the only way to get top talent.
Can your recruiters be outsourced?
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Ryan,
What is your opinion of Indeed.com? Just curious.
Good question, Im still up in the air on indeed. On one hand they can find you any job on the internet. But its definitely not targeted, and its still the same boring job descriptions you find anywhere else.
-Ryan
I found that going to company websites were actually more helpful in getting a call than CareerBuilder/Indeed. The one “job board” that I actually found helpful was www.idealist.com
#4 – I don’t know if I’m disagreeing with your point or agreeing as the opposite extreme, but to be honest I don’t even read job descriptions. The first thing I did was jump to the bottom to see the requirements. If I met them +- 25% then I would jump back up. The fact is, and we all know it, job descriptions aren’t worth much. And it’s a fair point, if I had to write my job description, I’d have a hard time as well. It’s the same reason you have a hard time with your resume. It’s simply the limitations that a paragraph can have.
#6 – I think you’re spot on with outsourcing, the goal going forward has to be to distinguish what you can do that outsourcing simply cannot. In my role, I deal greatly with outsourced, back office workers. Fair enough, they do a lot of tedious work that would have high turnover and they are paid half as much (or less). But they don’t talk to clients. They don’t consult. They don’t offer solutions. This is all obviously industry relative, but those couple points are huge in my role, and while some of my support has gone overseas, I don’t think anyone here fears their role because it simply is not a gamble that can be taken in my industry.
@Nathan - That should have been www.idealist.org up there.
But they don’t talk to clients. They don’t consult. They don’t offer solutions. This is all obviously industry relative, but those couple points are huge in my role, and while some of my support has gone overseas, I don’t think anyone here fears their role because it simply is not a gamble that can be taken in my industry.
You may have heard the joke (is it already an old joke?) about the man begging on the sidewalk next to his sign that says, “Job was too specialized to be outsourced.” A little too true to be funny, honestly.
Here’s what you may not realize: not every outsource situation involves low-level jobs going to India or China. More recent outsourcing models involve higher-level jobs–even supervisory and client contact jobs–going to English-speaking countries like Canada and Ireland, where the standard of living (and, therefore, the cost per production hour) is lower, and there’s no need to subsidize things like health insurance costs, etc.
Today’s is a global economy. GenY is uniquely equipped to thrive in it, but not if you’re unprepared. Build your value proposition. Know it like the back of your hand. And be ready to explain why you deliver that value better than anybody, anywhere.
Sean, do you have any source for numbers on outsourcing high/mid level jobs? I’ve read a few articles in the abstract, but never anything concrete. To be honest, I’d still be surprised if I saw a significant percentage of outsourced jobs were high level. I would intuitively think they are, at this point, insignificant. I think that companies that already have an international footprint might mask the way they “outsource” by simply adjusting staff where it happens to be cheapest, but I’m not sure if that really counts or not.
I’m curious to see a profile on a company that has outsourced, with no previous footprint in another English speaking country, high/mid level jobs because it was cheaper.
Also, I have seen a cartoon like that with a very similar quote. I thought it was great.
Sean, do you have any source for numbers on outsourcing high/mid level jobs? I’ve read a few articles in the abstract, but never anything concrete.
I’m afraid I don’t have any solid “big picture” data–only the same abstract information you’ve already seen–but I suspect that companies are finding ways to hide practices like this (not surprisingly). I do have an real-life example for you though, and as far as I know, only the people who were affected by the change even know it happened.
Because I used to work with the company, I can’t identify them (or even their specific industry), but I will say that they are a major US-based company that provides information to client companies via subscription. Their model when I worked with them was to partner with smaller US-based shops that did the research and created the content for them to resell, primarily to US clientelle. Around 2005, they switched to an offshore outsourcing model. In the new model, the research and content development was completed by firms in India. However, the next part is the surprise: because the content is in-depth and sophisticated, and the Indian companies weren’t able to produce content that sounded “American” enough, the company employed a Canadian firm to handle middle management/supervision and quality assurance. Partnerships with all the US-based shops were dissolved, and only very upper-level management is still based in the US. However, when you go to their Web site, no mention of the new development model is made, and in fact, they tout themselves as “US-based” every chance they get. Flabbergasting.
My point is simply that any job can be outsourced if there is a financial gain to be realized. Of course I’m not saying that every job will be outsourced, only that it can, and that every employee would be wise to assume that his or her job is not immune.
That’s an interesting example, and something I would think is still a relatively small percentage of outsourcing. What I alluded to above, however, I do think is much more substantial. I have seen with a couple companies I have worked very closely with, that they are “outsourcing” by increasing their international staff if they already have the support structure. If I’m working in project management and I, as an American, and running primarily Canadian projects with Canadian partners, doesn’t it make sense to have a Canadian lead these projects? It does, and they have. My coworkers in Canada and abroad who have the same client centered roles have increased dramatically because it’s cheaper. It’s not outsourcing in the traditional sense, it’s simply load balancing…but the point remains.
The amusing thing is that at one time I’m sure it was spun “US based project managers!” as good thing where as now we get to see “in country project managers who have the necessary/specific expertise!” There’s no wrong move as far as PR is concerned.