Facebook Partners With Companies to Violate Employment Law

I came across this article from the New York Times on Twitter. Since it's from the New York Times, it may be behind a paywall and you may have trouble getting to the actual article (here's another link to the article on ProPublica). However, if you can get to it, it's totally worth a read. As well, I've tried to craft a click-worthy title because I think that this story is really a must see.

The gist of the story is simple. Companies have been running job ads on Facebook that are targeted -- and thus, were only visible -- to a specific age demographic. In other words, if you're not 26-35 years of age, you don't see the ads because the company isn't interested in hiring you.

Facebook defends these ads. They want to make the case that the companies doing this type of advertising also run other programs on other platforms that target the people who aren't 25-36 years old. They think that it's great that companies recruit this way because of... well, whatever they say, it's really about ad revenue for them.

Knowing Silicon Valley, you might expect that we're talking about start-ups here, but not so. These ads are also coming from companies like Verizon, Amazon, and Target. Theoretically, these companies know that they can't put an "only under 50 need apply" in employment ad, so why would they use the age demographic targeting for an employment ad?

• It's easy. They simply need to tick a checkbox and they've focused their employment search on the candidates that they really want.
• It's very difficult for people to complain about something that they never see. Since the ads are only visible to the target demographic, it's unlikely that anyone outside of that demographic would know to complain. 

What I find most telling in this whole story is the difference between Facebook and LinkedIn when it comes to their reaction to ProPublica challenging them on the age-based ad targeting.

Other tech companies also offer employers opportunities to discriminate by age. ProPublica bought job ads on Google and LinkedIn that excluded audiences older than 40 — and the ads were instantly approved. Google said it does not prevent advertisers from displaying ads based on the user’s age. After being contacted by ProPublica, LinkedIn changed its system to prevent such targeting in employment ads.

Contrast that with Facebook's defense of the practice.

Facebook has argued in court filings that the law, the Communications Decency Act, makes it immune from liability for discriminatory ads.

Facebook also claims that since advertisers have to click a checkbox, the ads must be legal.

Facebook helps educate advertisers about the legal requirements they face so that they understand their responsibilities. We've also begun requiring businesses that show employment ads on Facebook to certify that they comply with the law before we show their ads.

While it's hard to say how the courts will ultimately rule on things, it strikes me that the spirit of the protections provided by the Communications Decency Act is about not being held responsible if someone posts something illegal on your platform. It's not designed to protect you from building a platform that sells them access to something that is inherently illegal.

Like the Russian political ads that helped shape the election, Facebook's advertising business seems to lack a moral/legal/ethical compass -- if not to avoid these kinds of issues entirely, at least enough of a sense of direction to get them out of it cleanly (see LinkedIn). It's like the ad revenue end of the business is fully-on Wall-Street-Bro-Culture-dollars-before-all-else, the kind of story you'd expect to hear coming out of Uber.

I actually am more sympathetic to Facebook's enabling of the Russian political ads using fake accounts than I am about this age-based targeting of employment ads story. In the Russian political advertising story, Facebook can fall back on the excuse that their systems were abused and that they were duped. With this, they set the system up to do this.

Of course, once this all plays out, when Facebook issues it's mea culpa and is forced to change it's practices, we all know that nothing will really change with hiring. After all, while Facebook built an advertising platform that enabled these businesses to selectively reach a specific age range, it was the prospective employers that implemented programs (that unexpectedly became public) that exposed decision criteria that have been operating in the background long before Facebook ever ran an employment ad.

This quote in the article from HubSpot spokeswoman, Ellie Botelho, made me laugh.

The use of the targeted age-range selection on the Facebook ad was frankly a mistake on our part given our lack of experience using that platform for job postings and not a feature we will use again.

While I haven't set up a Facebook employment ad, having configured numerous other online ad programs, I can say with some authority -- selectively narrowing the scope of an advertising program down to a specific granular segment isn't something you just accidentally click on. An accident could explain why their ad was also viewed in Europe or by people under the age of 18. An accident would have cost them more money. Selectively targeting an ad so that they only need spend on their actual, intended candidate criteria -- that takes extra effort.

Frankly, I hope that it costs the companies that have participated in this significantly. Perhaps if they'd had somebody from an older age demographic in their employ, that person would have had enough experience to keep them from going down such a stupid path.

LinkedIn: Goodbye and Good Riddance

Oh how I have grown to loath LinkedIn. What once was the most useful social network has devolved and deteriorated. What was once a site that I visited once per day has become a site that I may visit once a month. And it's not just that I don't like what I find -- or fail to find for that matter -- on the site. It's that when I go there looking for specific content that used to be available, it isn't there. Or it's nearly impossible to get to -- certainly not intuitive.

Remember when the contacts you linked to was almost like an address book in the cloud? This feature has gone through waves and waves of changes, sometimes making it next to impossible to contact people.

Meanwhile, these days, the main feed runs more like Facebook, with people posting "brain teaser" puzzles, "inspirational" posts. Oh, and ads. A rough estimate is that your feed has become 90-95% crap. Remember how the feed used to contain status updates for your connections? That's moved to an annoying click-through widget at the top of the screen that tries to force you to engage with it to see all of the actual "updates" on your contacts.

Most recently, I found myself on the Jobs page. Years ago I created several saved searches. It used to be a great way to lock down parameters. Now, what do you have?

1. A new search bar, so you can start all over again
2. Links to your saved searches that crash, telling you your search has expired and delivering no results
3. A "browse these jobs" picture interface similar to "people you may know" -- because, hey, that's a great way to look for jobs.
4. An ad for their premium tier.
5. And finally, more "companies you might recognize that are in your network" picture listings. Apparently, you can shape this list by setting up some preference parameters.

The bottom line? The only thing that LinkedIn was theoretically even remotely useful for -- job searches -- it's just killed that functionality.

It's mind-blowing!

And it's little wonder why they needed to sell the company -- that ship seems to have a laser-like focus on hitting every iceberg it can. But it's not like I expect Microsoft to return the utility to the software. As surprised as I am to say this, especially considering what it was even 5 or 6 years ago, I think LinkedIn is toast.

The Problem with Google's Campus Development Proposal

So the news of the week is that Google has proposed a significant overhaul of its business campus over in the Shoreline area of Mountain View. From Mountain View's The Voice,

Google gave the Voice a look at the plans Friday morning for a 3.4 million-square-foot campus to hold 10,000 new employees, the first buildings Google will have designed and built in Mountain View, despite the city being home to its headquarters since its inception. 

Of course, Google isn't the only one proposing new development, Google, LinkedIn and five real estate developers have submitted plans to build millions of square feet of new offices. Along with Google's proposal, there are a host of other civic improvements that they've bundled in too. The crazy thing about all of this is not the unique architecture, it's really more about trying to imagine another 10,000 people going in and out of that area each day. As anyone who has tried to navigate the intersection between 101 and 85 during rush hour knows, even with Google buses hauling thousands of Google employees in and out, the area is still a congested mess. Even if you consider their current numbers where about 1/3 of Google employees arrive by Google bus, that's still another 5000 or so cars trying to squeeze their way into the area.

The reports on the radio were all making a big deal about housing -- where are all of these new Googlers going to live? The reality is that that's really a minor part of the story. Unless the downtown Mountain View train station is redeveloped to look more like Tokyo station, with multiple train lines running through in multiple directions, the Magic Eightball prediction for traffic in the area is FUBAR.

The other funny thing about this is the "this will bring 10,000 new jobs into the area" message, the great canard of the "tech boom". The real truth underlying this "boom" is that this "10,000 jobs" number is not "people that need a job here in the area" -- this is not a new factory hiring local workers to come in and operate the machinery -- it's more likely 10,000 prestigious college graduates and international Visa holders brought in from everywhere else. I know that sounds like a joke, but having lived in Mountain View for fifteen years, I've had many Google neighbors but none of them lived here before they were hired by Google. In short, for most of the "new generation" of tech companies, there is a simple rule -- if you already live here, you're probably too old (unless you're a student at Stanford or Berkeley).

Don't get me wrong -- I think that the new architecture is interesting and would be a welcome addition to the office park. But beyond those buildings, those open spaces and those bike paths, there needs to be a lot more investment in how people get around. Money being what it is, I expect that it is unlikely to expect "the character" of Mountain View to remain the same as it was even 10 years ago, but what it's destined to become is a mess unless the infrastructure to support all of this is developed.

The Problem of Money

Earlier this week, there is news about another reporter quitting eBay Founder Pierre Omidyar's start-up media organization, First Look Media. Pando covers this with more detail, as the larger story has been something that Paul Carr has been following for a while.

For me, there is another thematic thread here. If you think back to when they were building this organization -- the promises and the prospects -- it was kind of like the story of building a modern dream team of media players. Rock star investigative journalists all pooled together in one old-media crushing modern empire that would rewrite the laws of news and journalism. And the first thing would be to sign these all-star players to big fat new contracts.

As is often the case, fat money is a harbinger of doom. Whether you want to look at sports and the performance of athletes in a contract year versus the year after they sign their fat new contracts or those newly signed top draft picks that never actually turn out to be the next Michael Jordan.

But what's driving the mega-contract opening bid? After all, anyone who's ever bid on eBay knows that you don't open big; instead, you swoop in near the end in an effort to win by inches.

But there's a second part to this equation; what's going on inside of the head of someone that signs one of these huge contracts. On the one hand, as employees negotiating salary, it's often essential to try and get the most money that we can on the way in the door. If it's a long term hire, this number works as a base that will, most likely, be followed with a very low percentage incremental increase year after year. And if the opportunity has a short life span, it's well worth getting what you can from it while you can. That being said, the kind of hire we're talking about here is different.

Like many other Silicon Valley opportunities, when these media people are moving into this new venture, they are going start-up. They stand at the beginning of the road to building something. In the start-up world, this often translates into equity versus salary. Equity versus salary isn't just about money, it's about gambling whether money today is worth more that potential returns down the road. And that, fundamentally, is about belief in the idea, belief in the potential. To buy into return, you must see a future. This isn't like investing money. You have only one of you, one unit of your time and effort that you can commit at a time. Equity is a win or lose investment.

To that end, when you're in for equity, salary matters less because you've already bought in. You've drank the Kool-aid. Which brings us to the second question in this "all-star" relationship -- if you believe in the idea, why would you want or need fat money to make the move? And, more to the point, what does that huge offer say to you?

From the guy with the money to the guys signing on, I don't think that there was ever a shared Kool-aid experience. This has been about guns for hire and the offer you can't refuse. And when you find that kind of offer on the table in front of you, you probably don't want to refuse. Unlike a select few, most of us need an income. But when the fat money comes, remember, you're probably in for a short ride -- don't expect an in-flight meal and no need to bother with the Kool-aid.

LinkedIn Search and the Illusion of Continuity on the Web

For several years now I've had a set of saved job searches on LinkedIn. Recently, I discovered that LinkedIn had made changes to their search system and that, when I looked at the results of my saved search, the results I thought I was seeing did not match the criteria that defined my saved search for several years. Put simply, LinkedIn broke saved search in such a subtle way that I only realized it recently and I'm not even sure how long it has been broken.

So here's what happened...

A saved job search is a pretty straightforward query. The odds are pretty high that you know what you are looking for and that what you are looking for doesn't change much day to day (except for those days when you think, I wonder what the job situation is like in Hawaii -- I could totally work in Hawaii). If you build a saved search, rather than rebuilding that job query each time you need to use it, you can just run the query and scan through your results. Many job sites will even email you the results so that you don't need to visit their site.

When you're running that kind of a search, it's probably most helpful to view the list with the most recent listings first. Instead of giving you repeats, it's the kind of thing that makes it easier to see what's new. Scroll down until you get to what you saw previously and you're done. It's the way blogs work, news feeds, you name it.

But when LinkedIn revamped their search, suddenly all of those saved searches that used to be sorted by most recent became sort by relevance.

Relevance is helpful if you want somebody to think that the search results are closely aligned with what you were looking for, but it's not very useful for determining changes because the same results will keep ranking near the top.

This is how I realized what happened. I ran my saved search a week or so after the previous time and the job listings were the same. Some of them appeared near the top for nearly a month. I began to look more carefully at why the results looked the way that they did and, low and behold, LinkedIn had changed recent to relevance. You killed my Saved Search! You Bastards!

While my instinct is to blame it on the accidental fall out of a software upgrade, part of me can't escape the idea that it is intentional -- that somebody felt like always defaulting to relevance would make their product look better. Or smarter. And while part of me wants to get angry, another part of me feels like this is the kind of thing that companies just do, like Adobe and their code bloat (when you realize that, with all of the modern faster processor speeds, memory, and drive interfaces, Adobe Photoshop still takes longer to launch now than it did when we were at version 3.5, there is a part of you that wants to rage!).

Anyway, bottom line. LinkedIn sucks. If you have saved searches, you may be seeing results by relevance now. Caveat Emptor. 

A Tale of Two Laptops

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way - in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
(and they say I write long sentences) Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities.

It was within the period of a little more than a month or more that two laptops were stolen. And while law and justice play a role in the unfolding of the events, sometimes the injustices that you find are bound to a different set of concerns.

Property crime is not new to Silicon Valley, or the rest of the world for that matter. For years San Jose promoted itself as one of the safest big cities, hiding under mantle of a low murder rate. But there was always property crime. Several years ago when we had an office in San Jose, somebody broke in one night and made a quick walk-through grabbing laptops off the desks where people had left them. At the time the thing that struck me was the irony of providing giving someone a laptop that never left their desk. In addition to the hardware, some data was lost as there was no structured practice for backup. In the months and years that followed, the official practice for laptop backup became being supplied an external drive -- maybe -- and a request/suggestion to back up to that drive.

Offices in the areas around what is now the Google campus used to get broken into a lot -- to the point that you would sometimes see more Mountain View cop cars in that neighborhood than your own. Friends that had an office in that area had several break-ins. Once, they not only stole computers, they also stole the software disks. It's probably better now with Google everywhere over there. Is it worth breaking into a building for a Chromebook?

Stealing laptops out of cars is so common, most local restaurants have signs warning you not to leave personal property in the car. Sometimes the signs even specifically mention laptops. Over the past couple of months, I've heard stories of several laptops being stolen from cars in parking lots. And one evening, when we were at happy hour and discussions about the cops in parking lot came up, it was noted that they were there because there had been repeated break-ins.

It was in this manner that Mr. Thinkpad was stolen. He was boosted from the passenger area of a car, window smashed, laptop grabbed, thief and laptop into the get-away car, and away. Mr. Thinkpad probably thought he was safe in the same way that novice campers may believe that bears or racoons won't take food of their tents or their cars. Unfortunately, glass provides little security and SUVs, wagons and hatchbacks live under greater threat as access to the cabin provides access to everything -- there is no real out-of-sight.

Most of what Mr. Thinkpad took with him was in the cloud, as many of our processes have moved that way. There were several active presentations underway that were lost, possibly more, but when it comes to work systems, Mr. Thinkpad was probably backed up more consistently than most. And the concern? Other than for the active presentation, perhaps the greatest concern raised was for the glass in the SUV as the vehicle was new.

In the days and the weeks that followed, a new system was spec'd, ordered, and arrived around the time when Mr. Air would disappear. In fact, Mr. Thinkpad's relative was sitting on a desk, still in the box, when Mr. Air vanished. Mr. Air was abducted, seized from the desk in a daring mid-day entry into our office around 1:00pm. The thief walked in through a normally locked door that was propped open slightly to facilitate international visitors going back and forth to the bathroom. This inside of a semi-secure building with cameras and a guard who often hangs out at the front desk in the lobby -- the illusion of security. The disappearance of Mr. Air was such a surprise that, people in the office thought that maybe somebody had played a joke, hiding him for amusement.

While Mr. Air was not a work system, work was sometimes done on him. It's one of those crazy things -- sometimes work doesn't invest in tools for the work environment and you find yourself working on a system that's five or six years old -- functional, but heavy, slow, and hitting the limits of it's capacity. When Mr. Air did do work, most of it was shared back and forth through the cloud, meaning that no work was lost. At the same time, what Mr. Air did carry from work was the password and keys to a host of systems that all needed to be reset.

But the greater loss with the disappearance of Mr. Air was the personal data. Not only did Mr. Air hold the passwords for work systems, he also carried passwords for all of the home projects. And then there's all of that other personal stuff, like taxes. Mr. Air was not backed up. Mr. Air's predecessor, Mr. MacBook Pro had been time-machined shortly before his surprising, untimely passing, but in a strange twist, the drive used to back up Mr. MacBook experienced disk problems in the weeks following Mr. MacBook's passing. So, also lost with Mr. Air was nearly a year's worth of activities.

In the hours and days following Mr. Air's disappearance, the main questions tended to surround aspects of Mr. Air: Wasn't he backed up? Didn't he use a password? Did he have "Find my Mac" enabled?

And, in the days following Mr. Air's disappearance, there were continued postmortem reports on the thief -- they got him on video, they could see the car on video -- as though this would provide comfort or a return of Mr. Air. Additionally, it was noted that, "it's too bad it wasn't a work system."

A cost-conscious business might question or nuance the liability, or hold no responsibility for events and property under their roof. But that same line of questioning might lead to larger questions like what is reasonable to expect from an employer or an office environment. And with the Internet, broadband and online collaboration tools, is it necessary to subject people to unpleasant aspects of a shared office environment. And while many businesses offer features like gourmet kitchens, free sodas, or Xbox gaming areas, is a base level of security a reasonable expectation?
----

The storyteller makes no choice 
Soon you will not here his voice
 - Terrapin Station

I don't have any good take-aways from all of this. Much has already been taken. I will say that, from a broader perspective, the entire experience has prompted me to reevaluate a number of my views on company culture. Here's hoping you find insights along a gentler path.

The Alliance: The Best Business Book I've Read in Several Years

On Tuesday, KQED's Forum program featured LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman talking about his new book, The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age. After listening to part of the program -- I had to get into a meeting -- I found that I was interested enough to head straight to Amazon to find out more about the book. One Prime membership and two days later, the book arrived this morning. I finished it by lunchtime.

Without a doubt, this is one of the best business books that I've come across in a long time. I highly recommend it.

The basic premise of the book is a redefining of the employer-employee relationship, designed to address the modern business environment. Gone are the days of lifetime employment, but we still carry residual assumptions that corrupt aspects of the employer-employee relationship. The Alliance provides for a better social contract, defining a framework for dealing with employment periods as tours of duty with goals for advancing both the company and the employee's interests.

The Problem with Most Business Books
It's not unusual to come across a business book that catches my attention. An interesting idea or an insightful look into a technology or trend -- if it's wrapped in a good story -- can usually spark my thinking, sometimes enough to buy the book. At the same time, for as many books as I've bought in the past couple of years, I've actually finished few of them. Mostly, that's because, once you work your way through the core premise and you understand the framework, the other content is typically provided as supporting information and it's rather tedious to work through. Usually, after a couple of days of hacking through a few pages here and there, I find myself drawn into other projects, then I stop carrying the book, and soon it's collecting dust on the cabinet.

The Alliance was far more successful. It's well documented, with anecdotes and examples from a variety of businesses. The examples used are typically brief, not more than a page or two, sometimes as short as a casual reference. The flow is fast, the chapters are short and it moves with the pace of a tight presentation deck. But it gets better:

• More than just presenting a concept, the book provides a rough framework for implementing an approach. It's like reading a manual with exercises and example. There is some good take-away material here.
• While it maps out the framework, it doesn't get bogged down in process details. It's almost more of an executive overview of a policy handbook, rather than a tedious policy handbook.
• At the end of each chapter, the book provides links to a web site where you can get more content online. This is the way modern book publishing should be.
• Even the appendices include example documents that help provide inside into the process and the strategy. 

In the end, this is one you definitely should read. It even provides a great context for how the social network should fit into the culture of the business -- but you could probably see that coming from the Linked In folks.

Not that they're reading my blog, but a hat tip to Reid Hoffman, Ben Casnocha and Chris Yeh. This is an exceptional book you've put together here.

Ageism, Statistical Discrimination and The Lost Civilization of Silicon Valley

With all of the back and forth about the cost of housing, Google buses, economic class warfare and other symptoms of something horribly wrong with things these days, I want to pull together something that is sort of a synthesis of several items to help fill in a few more dots on the changes in Silicon Valley. You might call this Part 2 of my endless rant on Silicon Valley Lost.

As I spent time reflecting on why the culture has changes so much, I was reminded of how much aspects of age have changed around here. When I first began working in tech back in the 1990s, I was one of the younger members of the staff. Demographically speaking, the workplace was reasonably well distributed in terms of age; young workers just out of college, middle aged workers that had been in the workplace for ten years or more, and older workers that had been around for a long time.

These days, much of that has shifted. Consider this data from research by Payscale:

• While the overall median age of American Workers is 42.5, the oldest median age in the Payscale survey of technology workers was at Hewlett-Packard at 41 years.
• The other five companies with older workers, in descending order of median age, were I.B.M. Global Services (38 years old), Oracle (38), Nokia (36), Dell (37) and Sony (36). Note that from this list Oracle is the only business that's primarily here in Silicon Valley.
• The seven companies with the youngest workers, ranked from youngest to highest in median age, were Epic Games (26); Facebook (28); Zynga (28); Google (29); and AOL, Blizzard Entertainment, InfoSys, and Monster.com (all 30).
• According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, only shoe stores and restaurants have workers with a median age less than 30.

You can look at that data and the companies and draw a lot of conclusions, but one that's noteworthy factor is that most of the companies in the youngest end of the rank are Internet and post-dot.com companies. Some of that probably goes back to a shift in thinking that took place back in the days of the dot.com era when part of the world wanted to invest everything in Internet clicks, and the brick and mortar world kept asking where the money was going to come from. Sure, some companies found ways to make money, but the conventional wisdom take-away was that the old guys just don't get it.

Perhaps, like this story about the economist on the dating site, hiring youth is more statistical discrimination than it is anything else. When I heard Stanford Professor Paul Oyer on the radio promoting his book, he also described some of the significant similarities between the dating world and the job market. To paraphrase something that he said during his KQED appearance, "like dating, both the employer and the job candidate must like each other and be interested in the relationship."

Whatever the reasoning behind it, working from a general recognition that today's emerging companies are less likely to hire older workers, you can draw some other conclusions; specifically, if there is a surging economy in the world of tech start-ups and if you don't belong to a specific demographic, then, like a Google bus, you're probably not getting on in. It matters little whether you are a nice person with a great personality, whether your interests are aligned, or even if you've been waiting at that public bus stop for a long time, you're not going to get on that bus.

Want to see what the impact of this trend has been? Here are a couple of links:

• Check out this dynamic infographic showing the relationship between "private shuttles in San Francisco" and businesses in the those same areas in the city. The Pando post describing it in more detail is here.
• Then there's this link to a map of evictions in the city. Here's another Pando post on this one.

What you can see is that there isn't nearly the kind of growth out in the Avenues and the Sunset, the areas that tend to be older, quieter, more families. In that way, this is not a story of the awesomeness and desirability of the geography of San Francisco. Instead, it really highlights the demographics of this economic surge -- and the bystanders, or casualties, depending upon where you find yourself in relationship to that trend.

Today's Silicon Valley is trending Logan's Run. It's an Amazing place. There's just one catch. You are only allowed so many technology cycles before you're replaced by an H1B visa, an Ivy League intern or perhaps someone with not less than 4.6692 Likes on Facebook. Then, it's carrousel. Or you can run.

Career Positioning Ironies: Creative vs. Cog

Every job listing that you see always features the experience section, that list of prerequisites that a prospective employer is looking for. While we all have a sense of the importance of this section, it's in the nuances of how it's implemented where you can find a certain amount of irony.

As a prospective employer, we want to screen our candidates and narrow the field. After all, just because a million monkeys banging on keyboards might produce Shakespeare, why should waste your time talking to all of them.

At the same time, our hiring infrastructure is often designed such that the only candidates that pass the screening are monkeys that have typed Shakespeare. Forget about monkeys that have typed plays by Tom Stoppard. And no monkeys that, bored with theater, decided to author movie screenplays. Not monkeys that have written original, meaningful works. And definitely not that monkey that typed Tropic of Cancer.

I know that I've written about this before, but it's always disappointing when you see job screening done in this way. A couple of years ago, the buzzword theme was webinar. Everyone screening for a marketing job always wanted to know if you'd done any webinars. No webinars and you were out. It didn't matter whether you'd done anything of similar or greater complexity. It didn't matter what the corporate environment you were in was like or what the needs of your product were, it was a simple formula -- webinars, yes or no.

Experience is Valuable
There is a kernel of truth in this screening OS. When you do stuff a lot, you get better at it. Like making food. Make the same dish over and over again, and you'll have a sense of how it tastes before it reaches your mouth. Make it enough times and you'll probably have added some steps that you might not have followed the first time -- or maybe you stripped some out.

Conversely, if you've never done something and it's complicated, you'll probably have no idea where to begin. If I ask you to design and build a four-story house? Even if you have a sense of where to start, without some basic experience you're going to have a hard time answering questions like, how much will it cost, how long will it take, and what other kinds of things will be required.

At the same time, endless repetition does not equal better. If you've designed a thousand business cards, you're probably better than someone who has only done one or two, but does it make you better than someone who's done a hundred? Just because you've fried lots of eggs, it doesn't make you a better egg-cook than someone who may have done fewer, but with more methodology might have done. Who would you expect to make a better egg, the cook at your local Denny's or Wylie Dufresne?

What Experiences Are We Measuring?
The real problem is not screening for experience, but having a clear understanding of what's actually being measured by that experience. Are you screening those monkeys for writing or just for experience banging on a keyboard? The both look a lot alike, but faced with new challenge, your writer will produce interesting content -- on his best day, all you can really hope for from the keyboard banger is that he'll be able to replicate his keystrokes.

And to make matters worse, you can't ask the monkeys. Because once one monkey has banged out Shakespeare, you've got 999,999 others that also think that they are writers because they worked with the other monkey on the project.

LinkedIn and Freemium: Why Overselling a Premium Trial Is Bad For Brand

It's the dirty little secret that many online subscription services want to hide -- if they can get your credit card number and commitment to a 'membership', they can leech off of your bank account, probably for longer / significantly more cost than the amount you might have been willing to spend on the service. My most recent reminder of the audacity of this scam practice, was with LinkedIn and their 'premium' membership.

I mention LinkedIn in the title of this post, not because I consider them the worst offender. I think that the worst of the worst are pretty solidly in the neighborhood of scams that cloak the subscription commitment process (see the Scamville posts). In this case, LinkedIn is up front in informing you of the subscription, but it's the what you get for the price that got them this post.

LinkedIn initially got their hooks in through a free 30-day trial. Initially, the promotional email pitched it as a different version than their normal premium package. I remember reading it and getting the impression that this was a new program that they had started that would cost less and add some unique features that I might use. Considering that I had been active on LinkedIn for over three years before they targeted me with this program, there is an implied notion that this program was different than the premium package that I had already chosen not to pay for.

And so, for 30 days, I got the opportunity to see who had looked at my profile, the chance to send 10 introductory emails through LinkedIn -- something that I hadn't used any of the default five of -- and LinkedIn's tribute to virtual goods, a badge on any resume submissions that I sent out. And, while it's pretty cool being able to see who has viewed your profile, the package is certainly not something that I would run down to Fry's and buy for $30 if it were in a box. In fact, at $30, I would never buy these features -- but I might 'forget to cancel' a trial of the service. Thirty days out, I might even have forgotten what the price was that you initially quoted. And so, hooks in my wallet, LinkedIn proceeded to suck money and destroy any brand equity that they had built with me.

LinkedIn Premium ran in the background for over a year. I didn't really think about the cost until the other day when I happened to be looking at my bank statement and saw the LinkedIn charge. A sense of outrage came over me. They sucked $360 out of my account over the course of a year for a 'product' that I wouldn't have spent $30 on. $360 for a stream of trivia about who viewed my profile.

Ethical Business Practices Don't Operate This Way
Contrast this practice with Basecamp. Several years ago, I first signed up with Basecamp to share files and collaborate on projects. At the time, there wasn't really anything quite like it. Since then, competitive solutions for aspects of the service have come online. Sometimes, I'll go through a month or three where I don't use the service. But I still maintain a subscription.

Each month, 37Signals emails me a receipt for the charge. Each time I receive it, I ask myself whether it's worth continuing the service. It's been over five years. This is what an ethical business practice looks like. This is one reason why I have a tremendous respect for the team at 37Signals.

Subscription Pricing
Nobody ever forgets the cost of their Salesforce.com subscription. At $60 per month or more, depending upon the edition, it's not something that you forget. Even within the corporate budget, the question repeatedly comes up, "What about Salesforce.com? Do we need to keep paying for it? Are we really using it?"

At the other end of the spectrum, you have the subscriptions that try to disappear and hide invisibly. Remember when AOL moved from being your go-to dial-up ISP to an afterthought in the broadband world. They dropped their subscription pricing to $10 per month -- keep access to your email and use dial-up if you need it was the pitch. Eventually, they dropped the cost of maintaining an email account to free, but they made you jump through hoops to get them to stop charging. Think about all of those people who sat there -- and for how long -- with AOL leeching $10 or more a month.

Now look at some of LinkedIn's premium pricing options. At $30 per month (or $20 per month for the Salesforce.com-to-LinkedIn API connection), it's high, but not necessarily reaching the level of a something that you question the cost every month -- particularly if you're not being reminded of it. It's the cost of buying lunch for your colleagues. And yet, it's also almost a "how much can we get away with" price. And when you consider what you get, I don't think it's something that every user would benefit from -- more likely applicable to a select set. So, basically, you're dumping these crap features on me, leeching from my bank account, and testing the threshold of what I might tolerate? Congrats. You crossed that line.

When A Thought Exercise Goes Horribly Wrong

Recently, I was hired as the "Empress of Enthusiastic Evangelism". It's the kind of thing that many creative people might get very excited about. It's the kind of thing that I might have gotten excited about. Once. Some time ago.

Sure, everyone wants to work at one of those companies where they get to have cool, funny titles that spit in the eye of traditional business culture -- and now I do. Or thought I did. Until I was hired.

Once upon a time, this company -- my new company -- was the embodiment of that free-minded culture. But then they decided that it made more sense to stabilize and follow a traditional set of values. They decided that it would be a good idea to be predictable, to avoid changing. I came in after that, hired to replace the former Empress who had left, perhaps looking for a more regally appropriate environment.

It goes without saying that I'm not a woman. And 'Enthusiastic Evangelism' really only represents a small portion of what I do. Or am supposed to do -- since lobbying for a new title is one of the things that also takes up a lot of my time. But it's rather difficult convincing the "Lord of Strategic Conquests" that I'm not being taken seriously with my current title.

I've never been one to get hung up on job titles. After all, I do what I do, who cares what they call me. But this one is making it is starting to make me crazy, I mean, forget about the people I have to deal with not taking me seriously, I'm starting to wonder myself. The other day, I started wondering -- what's the next position, where do I go after empress?

Branding Pivot: The Ladders Moves Away From Only $100,000+ Focus

In my bulk emails this morning, I received an email from The Ladders tagged with the subject line, "Bye-bye!" A quick review noted that they're abandoning their "only $100K+ jobs" focus, instead focusing on operating a curated board. Here's a clip from the email:

We're expanding, and today we say "bye-bye" to helping only those over $100,000 and "hello" to helping all career-minded professionals. TheLadders now takes all salary levels and shows the right jobs to the right person. So while we're saying goodbye to our narrower segmentation, we are not saying "goodbye" to keeping your job search on TheLadders relevant, focused, and targeted.

So, for example, you won't see jobs that pay half (or double) what you're currently making. You won't see jobs outside of your field — we still won't show sales jobs to finance professionals, or marketing jobs to technologists. And we won't be letting in scammy jobs, work-from-home schemes, or commission-only opportunities — we'll still be vetting every job and every recruiter before we allow them into our community.

I never liked the $100K+ positioning myself. I always felt like it put too much emphasis on numbers and not enough emphasis on the quality of the candidate or the job. My sense is that now, when the economy is so crappy and the job outlook so bleak, that finding any fish in the opportunity pond is a hunt. Still, other than a slight scent of despair, do you really feel like this expansion of their audience does anything for you? If you were an established customer under the old $100K+ umbrella, do you feel a greater sense of connection now that they have expanded their marketing circle?

Amazon Gets California Affiliate and Sales Tax Reform Deal Through State Assembly

I came across this bit of news on the Amazon affiliate program and the sales tax law.

SACRAMENTO, Calif. -- Lawmakers on Friday sent Gov. Jerry Brown a compromise bill that delays California's effort to force online retailers such as Amazon.com to collect the state's sales taxes while retailers lobby Congress for national rules governing online sales taxes.

Under the compromise passed Friday, Amazon agreed to resume working with its affiliates.

No news yet as to whether Gov. Brown will sign it into law.

An Amusing Look at Unusual Resumes

I've written about unusual resumes on several occasions. Here's a post with some amusingly unusual resume examples. It's probably worth noting that most of these are creative people seeking creative jobs... marketing is creative, right?

http://www.businessinsider.com/insanely-creative-resumes-2011-6?op=1

Whom you should hire at a Start-up: A Repost and An Obeservation

Earlier this week, there was an interesting post on Techcrunch. I always like these types of posts when I come across them. Whom Should You Hire at a Startup? (Attitude over Aptitude) by Mark Suster is another post from a VC and former entrepreneur on how to look at the problem of building a strong team in a start-up. It's a short, easy read and I recommend going through it before you move through the rest of this post.

The area that I wanted to explore is one that is touched on in his second and fifth recommendations:

2. Find people to “punch above their weight class”
5. Attitude over Aptitude

If you add up some of his statements like

It means that many management teams I know feel the need to hire people who have “done it before” and frankly many VCs encourage this. It’s a mistake. When you hire somebody too early who has already “done it” you often find somebody that is less motivated in tough times, less willing to be scrappy (as many startups need to be), more “needy” and less mentally flexible / willing to change their way of thinking...

You said, “Eff experience. I want to know whether you can deliver. If you can, you’re golden. You’ll go a long way. If you can’t – you’re toast. Are you up for it?” It’s Tristan Walker of FourSquare. They hired him when he was an MBA. He had no right asking for a senior biz dev role at one of the hottest companies in the US. But he was ready to punch above his weight class. And he pushed for it.

You might wind up with the take-away of, "don't hire tired experienced people, hire hungry inexperienced people." If that was your take-away, I recommend that you read his other post from his blog, Who Should you Hire at a Startup? This post presents a more comprehensive look at the role of talent, capability and experience, and provides some additional insights.

The Reality of Experiences That Make You Tired
While it's easy to see students coming out of school with a hunger and a naive sense of excitement, most of us that have struggled in difficult employment environments understand that there are a lot of pressures that can wear you down, weigh on your sense of enthusiasm, and make you a bit cynical. After all, if everything at work was exciting, challenging growth, you probably wouldn't be motivated to do something different. And when you interview, this is one of the challenges you often face in positioning yourself -- you don't want to seem like a grumpy curmudgeon that simply can't get along with the people you work with, but you need to position some clear reasons why you're considering this change. But regardless of how you present it, people want smiles in interviews and you're carrying frustrations.

So here you have the "Attitude / aptitude" issue wrapped up in a microcosm of perception. Perhaps the driver for your frustrations are the bureaucracies of your current employer or tired of being told that you don't know how to do your job because the organization doesn't follow your recommendations. Perhaps it's all driven by your frustrated desires to have a more senior role or more control of the process. It's even possible that you've tried to do more, only to be shot down as 'not getting it', too inexperienced, or not the right fit. In one sense, this might put you in the "punch above your weight class" group, but it also depends on the individual.

People react to adversity in different ways. As a long-distance cyclist, I've seen very tired people face hills near the end of a ride and get angry. I've seen them give up. I've also seen people who dig deep and continue to work, continue to push to get to their goal. In the case of people that you're considering for a start-up, while the environment that you're hiring them from may suck, I think that what you're looking for are the people capable of continuing to turn the pedals when the going gets tough. That doesn't mean someone who is happy to continue turning the pedals in a bureaucracy, but that's really back to the attitude question.


So What Do You Think?
Can somebody who is coming from an environment where they have been beaten down, told that they don't know what their doing or that they are doing it wrong be successful in a start-up? Can they succeed in an interview? Perhaps more to the point, if you're looking for a position where you can "punch outside of your weight class", do you really believe that a company will consider an "underqualified" candidate in today's job market? In other words, are you targeting a market where you have a realistic opportunity?

Growth Hacker vs VP of Marketing

Just a brief follow up thought related to the idea of the growth hacker concept referenced in the link in my previous post. The core premise behind the growth hacker is that startups in earlier stages need to be focused on growth -- dynamic, agile, and even experimental. Often, when people think of qualifications for a VP of Marketing, they think grand plan, strategy, and years of experience in a specific industry. What this may also translate to is limited adaptability outside of a focus industry and correspondingly, a less agile, less dynamic engine for growth -- someone who just wants to replay the classic hits.

I suspect that the right fit actually falls somewhere in the middle. A good marketing pro doesn't just repeat the same formula. Every business, every situation, every moment is different. While the idea of a growth hacker relentlessly experimenting, trying to crack the growth nut is a compelling image that captures a sense of necessary urgency, for me it underplays the importance of fluency in a broader vocabulary of the practice. First and foremost, before you can ever begin to conceptualize and hack growth programs, you need to have a strong understanding of those same programs and the language that their constructed from. You can't play guitar simply by watching music videos and you can't hack a .php form by simply browsing the web a lot or even reading stories about code injection.

Beyond vision and program execution, there is an equally important aspect to having a grander vision -- an understanding that some growth vehicles have a dark side and not all hacking is white hat. Look at Zynga and some of the other social game companies profiled in the Techcrunch Scamville series. While Zynga was able to ride these questionable practices to an IPO and, theoretically, some operational reforms, several of the companies that used this approach got burned. The recent stories about JCPenney and some of the more noteworthy SEO manipulation highlight kind of issue. Understanding the risks and being able to weigh those against the potential benefits requires some conceptual understanding beyond simply figuring out an execution path.

Ultimately, whether you're a VP of Marketing or a Growth Hacker, the bigger problem is that often people simply want to repeat a lightning strike. Sometimes, beyond time and space, there is some luck involved. Just because Twitter took off at South by Southwest, doesn't mean that going there is a strategy. And yet, simply understanding how something like South by Southwest has impacted a number of social networking software startups should be part of your marketing vocabulary. In that way, I would thing that the job description should probably read something like, "creative, experimental problem solver with a broad marketing background and a solid vision of the big picture needed..." But somebody like that can probably also solve the problem of what title that they should have.

Motivations In The Workplace Animation

A friend sent over a link to this earlier this week, tucking into an NPR planet money post. In discussing, the presentation has been around for a while, but the animation is really what helps make this interesting.



There are more video presentations that have been animated using this whiteboard style of animation posted on YouTube, so check them out if you get a chance.

Follow-up On Google Hiring: A Kinder, Gentler Google

Following up on my post, If Google Posts A Job Opening, Does It Really Count As A Job Opportunity, I came across this article that was pushed out on Twitter by Google Recruiting (@googlejobs). Google tries new angle on hiring by Richard Waters of the Financial Times is an interesting read into how Google is trying to change their hiring practices and culture. I felt so moved by the piece that I thought, maybe I should go ahead and send them my resume and apply for a couple of openings. I am one of those "people with entrepreneurial, rather than purely intellectual, talent." Then I got to the last sentence of the piece, "It is currently receiving 75,000 applications a week," and, remembering my original post, I decided to write this blog post instead.

Yet Another Reason to Read Job Postings

If you have a steady job, your current employers and the people that you work with may look twice if they find you looking at competitive job listings. Even in those toxic work environments where everyone is disgruntled, most of the time businesses culture makes it taboo to look at competitive job listings. And while we could probably do a deep dive on why that taboo exists, let's look at why you should be looking at competitive job postings instead.

Forget about being disgruntled, frustrated with your job and wanting to leave -- job listings are an excellent research platform. Tucked away in those listings are a host of requirements for software that you should be familiar with, technologies that you should understand, and programs that you should have run. These aren't just job listings, they are your own personal MBA case study series detailing a similar business problem and how other companies have solved them.

It's probably also worth noting that if you come across a job listing that references tools or practices that you don't use, it's unlikely that you would be able to ramp a program up quickly simply to make yourself a good candidate. However, if you're one of those disgruntled people who are actually seeking a new job, being familiar with the terms and practices will also help you explain why you aren't using those tools so that when the interview comes, you are ready.

Don't Get Busted
While there are a lot of great marketing research justifications for looking at competitive job listings, they probably aren't strong enough to keep you out of hot water if you get caught breaking the taboo. While all environments are different, most employers not only want to think of you as content, they also like to think of you as too busy to be looking at competitive job listings during your work day. So while looking at job listings is probably more productive than managing your online farm, both will probably leave you equally cooked.

If Google Posts a Job Opening, Does it Really Count as a Job Opportunity?

We've all heard about Google's exclusive hiring practices and how they go through extraordinary efforts to hire what they consider only the most exceptional candidates. So it struck me the other day as I waded through a LinkedIn job search where where the first two or three pages of results were Google listings, if Google posts a job opening, does it really count as a job opportunity?

Consider this recent news from Google, Google gets 75,000 job apps in a week - for 6000 openings. That works out to about 1200 applicants per job. While you could look at this from a lot of angles -- hiring on internet scale, the compelling value of Google's work environment strategy, or even the real sucktacular nature of the economy -- let's think about how many of those 1200 people actually have a shot at that job. While you could argue that 1 in 1200 is a lot better odds than you have for winning the lottery, your odds of winning the lottery are simple probability. For those 1200 individuals, there are factors for qualification, differentiation, and probably a bunch of invisible, unspoken ones as well. For many of those 1200 applicants, the odds of winning the Google job lottery is actually zero.

Is a Google Job Listing the Equivalent of Spam?
Out of that group of 1200 people applying for an opening at Google, my guess is that there is probably a list of preferred candidates drawn from employee recommendations or other more direct submissions. But let's assume for a minute that the process is open. Following on the themes that I talked about in one of my Please Hire Me posts, how do you differentiate yourself in a pool of over 1200 people? Imagine a person reading 250 resumes per day for per position with a constant stream of new resumes coming in all of the time -- and that's just reading them, not following up, etc. If you think about that kind of scale, at best you're looking at an algorithmic scan of them all. At worst, you're looking at a giant pool of resumes that are simply ignored.

Think about what that means in terms of timing for when you submit you're resume. In the old days, you might have a week or two to position yourself, customize your resume, and focus your cover letter. If you're submitting to a position at Google, all that time you spent has just put you in the back of a chronological line 1200 people deep -- 1200 people whose 15 or so skills listed as requirements also match the position.

Finding the Deeper Meaning in Google's Applicant Volume
If you think about that pool of 1200 or so candidates and the difficulty of filtering that pool, you might start to wonder whether that type of process would yield a top-tier, unique candidate. Or even the most qualified. So, if you can't find the perfect drop of water when you're looking at the lake, why would you use a process that created so much water? What if the purpose of having so many candidates isn't to look at the candidates, but rather to provide statistical data that supports the idea that you looked at lots of people before you selected the candidate that you chose? The question is, are those 75000 resumes really about 75000 candidates or simply better justification for the 6000 that Google does choose, assuming that they fill each position from the pool that was generated that week. What about the candidates that they target and recruit, like from Apple or Microsoft?

The funny thing about all of this is that many job search sites (like Linked In) include check boxes so that you can just search listings from a specific company. When you look at the numbers, perhaps what they need is support for exclusion filters or Boolean search terms like, "not Google".

UPDATE:  I did a some research and experimentation using the Linked In search function. It turns out that there is Boolean support in Advanced Search. You can use AND, OR, or NOT, but they have to be in capital letters. While I was able to make this work in the Keyword search field, the company field doesn't appear to support Boolean search. So, if you want to filter Google out of your search results, you can add NOT google to the Keywords search, but you also risk filtering out jobs that might include Google as part of a skill or a capability.