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.

The Alliance, Company Values: Good Enough Isn't

As I mentioned in my recommendation of The Alliance, it's given me a lot to think about. One aspect that has stood out prominently for me recently relates to company culture and values. Often in Silicon Valley, we work with the idea of "Good Enough". Minimum Viable Product is all about good enough. At the same time, when we deal with our internal culture and our relationships with employees, good enough isn't really good enough.

Don't get me wrong. Many businesses approach their employees with a Good Enough mindset. Good Enough is the checklist version of employee relations -- just enough health insurance to make it seem like the business offers more than minimal coverage, hamburgers and hot dogs at the employee event, an Xbox because all of the other companies have one. It's the checklist that is disconnected from the why (beyond being a minimum threshold for having employees), and it's a symptom of a business that doesn't understand it's relationship in the alliance.

If there is one lesson that the HR department should learn from us marketing types, it's that every action, every event, and every program should have purpose. It should convey a message.
 "For your holiday bonus, we've decided to give everyone a dollar."
Imagine that reality. Congratulations, you've just awarded every employee a holiday bonus; another check mark on the list of employee benefits. And yet most employees, if presented with this, would probably say, "why bother". Other than adding an item on a list, it's totally unrelated to employee needs or interests. Imagine if it were 50% discount coupons to Disneyworld? It's the HR equivalent of spam. Maybe you get response in the 1-3% range. Is that the way that you want to connect to the "corporate assets" that you depend on to produce the good shit?

At best, a good enough mindset and checklist employee relations is simply disconnected from its "constituent base". At worst, it's a trigger for anger at the organization -- "if you can't be bothered to take my interests into account, why should I care about the things that you say are important?"

And yet, regardless of how counter-productive Good Enough may be for employee relations, it's pervasive and it isn't going away. Why? Because these are the metrics that have been established to measure HR. Salary. Benefits. Costs. And because many businesses don't approach things like, 'we want the very best people, we simply need Good Enough.

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. 

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.

More on Ageism in Silicon Valley

I came across this post by Tim Worstall on Pando yesterday. At first it made me chuckle -- it reminded me of a topic that I wrote about recently -- clearly there is a bit of a content zeitgeist here.

While I'm not a big fan of the Pando post, it did link me to this piece by Noam Scheiber in the New Republic. The New Republic article reminds me of another one that I found in a search during some of the reseearch on my post. That article featured discussions about plastic surgery, people dying their hair, and how the clothing people wore during interviews changed improved some of their results.

Sometimes when you read these broad-brush thematic articles about how there are not enough women or minorities in tech, you can't help but feel the shadow of some academic or journalist looking for an angle to drive eyeballs. Meanwhile, a short trip through the bay area can be a vivid reminder of the reality of just how incredibly diverse the area is.

At the same time, Scheiber's piece works better as it spans hiring, culture, and even VC funding. The culture here is shifting, and not necessarily for the better.

Moneyball and Hiring: Why Businesses Don't Know How to Find Talent

By this time, most people are familiar with Moneyball, whether through the book or the movie, so it's not unfair to expect people to have applied some of the general ideas to their areas of expertise. If you were to search right now, you could find a number pieces posted on Moneyball and hiring. I think that we can safely say that the overall thematic notion has permeated our collective conscious. So why then do so many businesses suck at hiring and building amazing teams?

Forget about individuals for a minute. Instead, think about the predefined restrictions we place on the people we hire. I talked about ageism in this previous post, but there are many other ways. Google, famously, had it's brain teasers even though they later came out and said that the puzzles didn't correlate to better employees. Similarly, they have made college ranking and GPA into an important criteria. And what about all of those job listings that specify experience within a given industry -- sure it might get you off the ground faster, but are you excluding some exceptional talent because of your one-dimensional conventional thinking (e.g. Scott Hatteberg only being a catcher)?

Consider, most tech job listings tend to set Engineering or Business degrees as the preferred background, while liberal arts degrees tend to outperform them on GMAT tests. Why are we focused on Business and Engineering degrees? Conventional wisdom says that they will have the background and training needed to succeed. But what if the real secret to a great team member is the ability to learn new things, to understand complex concepts, to analyze and problem solve? And what about communication? What if communication does not equal cutting and pasting bullets from a Powerpoint?

In that way, the Moneyball strategy is looking for undervalued aspects and using that as the target criteria. If the market puts a premium on young, on engineering degrees, on GPAs and top tier schools, then those aspects are probably expensive. Meanwhile, there are probably lots of bargain talent in the pool of older, experienced workers with liberal arts degrees. And yet, so many businesses and recruiters are reluctant to consider candidates from this pool. Why? Here are three reasons that I can think of immediately:

1. An inclination to hire "like us" accompanied by an overall disregard for all things liberal arts. Remember President Obama's art history joke? When the guy who goes out of his way to avoid offending anyone uses a demographic as the focus of a joke, it's a telling perspective on 'common knowledge perception' of a liberal arts degree. The thematic aspect of this is the idea that, during college, we worked, we were focused on our future, while those liberal arts students all just read books, looked at art, film and music, or argued about philosophy. We were real world. They were the crazy ones, the dreamers.
2. The inability to measure or score capabilities and understanding accurately. We all want smart people who fit well in our team, but so many aspects of the interview are stacked against us. There are typical questions that we're expected to ask -- we've published a list of requirements and most interviews are like standardized tests on those topics. Meanwhile, as candidates, we review the test criteria, prepare our answers, practice our delivery and look for tactical ways to deflect things that probe our weaknesses. But companies really want thinking, analyzing, capable, so companies like Google explore techniques like brain teasers -- and candidates begin preparing for brain teasers. But the real problem is, just like in academics, somebody can go through an exercise and produce an answer, an essay or a result that matches the accepted response, but still not have thought about it, analyzed it, or understood the why behind it. But with school, you have several months to shake things up, to ask variations on structure and content in an effort to explore the processing capabilities of the student. Job candidates are typically decided in a couple of interviews, but you never really get a measure until they are on the team and under fire.
3. Recruiters, hiring managers, and what I'd call the "not shooting at the center effect". Some time ago, The Freakanomics guys did this podcast on soccer and the penalty kick. The basic premise was that, while it was a statistically underexploited approach that should yield more goals, when they have the opportunity to take a penalty shot, few players kick it toward the middle of the goal. The reasoning behind is that, if they do and the goalie stops it, the player looks like an idiot. In that same way, imagine a recruiter saying, "I found this really talented candidate, but they don't have the background that matches your criteria -- but I think that they are amazing." Not only will the amazing candidate probably still going to be looking for work, the recruiter probably will be as well.

Of course, all of this only matters if you need cognitive skills. Just because you understand the effect of heat on proteins doesn't mean you can fry an egg. If your looking for a production person like a line cook, you're probably better suited to hire someone that has repeatedly cooked eggs over an MIT thermal engineering graduate. But in the same way that most real world problems don't look like those word problems you saw on math tests, determining how to solve a problem isn't usually a basic execution problem. Consider the problem, "we need a brochure". Or another common one, "we need to find a new product that we can sell to a new market."

Years ago I was in Las Vegas as part of our company's team to help set up a networked product demonstration. We'd broght along a number of sample products, plus a product manager, an application engineering manager, our ace networking guy, and myself. On the night before the event, we spent several hours trying to set up this demonstration that involved a complicated bit of network routing. For hours, the network guy was trying different things to make it work, without success. After letting the experts bang away at it in frustration, at one point I asked some questions to better understand the problem. Shortly thereafter, I had to ask the question, couldn't you just do this? It was like a light clicked on for the network guy, and suddenly a solution to the problem became apparent. While, at the time, I lacked the specific vocabulary to detail the solution or the technical chops to implement it, I understood enough of the problem to spark a solution.

It's a different kind of thinking that enables these kinds of solutions. You may not need this kind of creative thinking if you're banging out eggs, but if you're an organization dedicated to creating something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty, then you need to be able to learn, adapt, and travel down new paths.

Moneyball Versus The Cheapskate
There are some businesses that look at the idea of bargain candidates as people that we don't have to pay very much because they will be grateful to get paid something. These types of businesses keep the threshold on salaries so low that only the most desperate will accept the salary and working conditions involved.

While you might be able to read this strategy into a Moneyball philosphy, it misses a key element in the psychology of enabling talent. Specifically, in order to get the best performances out of your team, you need people who are engaged, motivated, and want to participate. I could be the Albert Einstein of solving your business problem, but if you ask me to spend my day changing diapers, I'm relatively unlikely to direct much energy or passion into anything you put in front of me.

In that way, while Moneyball may seem like it's all about not paying people very much, what it's really about is finding undervalued talent. With the Scott Hatteberg example, the market was said you're worth zero as a player now and the A's said, we value you. From the mindset of the person being hired, they are being valued at more that their perceived market value versus not less. In practical terms, that means that you are offering them an opportunity, not exploiting them, which also correlates to engaged, involved output.

Moneyball and Your Hiring Strategy
So, if you're not thinking Moneyball in your hiring strategy, perhaps you should ask yourself why. More to the point, if you don't say anything, you're hiring team is also probably avoiding shooting at the center. Somebody like me -- I would probably never make it through even your first round of screening. So, the question is, do you want to keep playing to conventional wisdom or do you want to explore new approaches to building something great.

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.

Friday Reading Suggestions: Tech Jobs, $100M Businesses, and more

First, a couple of links from Pandodaily:
Here's an interesting story about how many more jobs are created by the high-tech sector and it's economic influence.
10 graphs that show how high-tech jobs are transforming the US economy

Here's another one from Sarah Lacy summarizing a study on businesses that have grown to be $100 companies. I like the 'where are the Web 2.0 companies now' aspect of the piece.
New study on companies worth $100M+ shows how much of a lie the Web 2.0 fad was

Here's one on hiring. Personally, when I read his hiring story, I have a hard time believing that an English Literature major wouldn't be able to speak to the books that he'd read. I would suspect that, rather than being an empty suit, the guy was probably not honest about his background. More to the point, my personal belief is that someone with a humanities background is more likely to be a rounded person with depth.
Losers exist. Don’t hire them

More on hiring. Here's Ben Horowitz with an interesting take on 'hiring old people' for your start-up. But you might not want to listen to him because he's an old guy, so you might question his motives. Seriously though, it's a thoughtful post and some good advice.
Hiring old people: The dangerous but necessary steroids of the startup world

Finally, here's an amusing read on venture firms winning a lawsuit against Best Buy for stealing the trade secrets of one of their portfolio companies. Good fun if you like to seeing karma come back to smack unethical behavior.
There is a lot of talk about being pro-entrepreneur. First Round and NEA show serious action

Does The Ladders Use Bait & Switch Email Marketing

High on the list of things that offend my ethical sensibilities are those people and businesses that exploit people in their most desperate moments of need. While you could argue that charging extra for sunblock on the beach or sweatshirts to tourists in San Francisco is exploitative, I don't think that is equivalent to what I'm talking about. What I'm referring to are the businesses like those credit repair scams businesses that use false hope to take money from people who can't afford it. This aspect of profiting off of the despair of the most needy borders on criminal. 

The business of helping to find employment has always operated with a darker side, and there's a segment of that business that profits on desperation. Contrary to that conservative belief that a huge percentage of people out there that are lazy and don't want to work, most people around the world want to work and are desperate for jobs. Exploiting this desperation often hinges on leveraging the promise of a good job as an enticement for doing something that would otherwise be unreasonable.

For many out of work job seekers, the desperation exploiters are those recruiters or career coaches that ask for an up-front payment from the job seeker. It's a classic scheme, traditionally promoted by people pitching jobs and salaries that make the payoff seem worth the gamble. It's a reasonable market when they are selling upgrades and the recruiter's client-base all have existing jobs, but when they exploit the cash-strapped unemployed, they cross an ethical line in my book.

So here's what triggered this post. I received an email from The Ladders the other day. Essentially, it was one of those emails from a specific recruiter with a job that might be a good fit for you. Theoretically not a newsletter or a bulk job listing email, right? So I clicked through the email to look at the listing and, surprisingly, I was met with a login screen. I needed to upgrade to a paid, premium account in order to view the listing.

I'm not desperately seeking work right now, but imagine if I was. Imagine if this were my first glimmer of hope in a long dark night. This was a recruiter reaching out to me, or so it seemed. But no, it was actually a crafted marketing device aimed at the soft underbelly of my desperation.

Sorry guys, I'm not that desperate. I didn't want to pay for access to your site because many of your job listings were web site scrapes or things that I could find for free. But if you focus your list on unemployed, I'm sure you can boost your conversion rate.

How Marissa Mayer Became Wayne Gretzky

So the top story in this week's news around here was Marissa Mayer taking over as CEO of Yahoo. Sarah Lacy had a nice look at the situation with, Why on Earth Did Marissa Mayer Say Yes to Yahoo? All in all, part of what made this such big news is just how unexpected this is. You've got all of the right elements for a great story.

First there's the Yahoo story: 
Once dominant Internet company, stumbling through repeated leadership challenges. So much potential (users, technology, brand), if it could just find the right missing ingredients to keep it's leadership position in today's market.

Then there's Marissa Mayer:
Technology celebrity/rock star with some big trophies from one of the dominant Internet companies of the 2000's. Sort of a female Buckaroo Banzai, she was a notable player on the team that repeatedly beat Yahoo in those championship games of several years back. In that way, she is a nod to accepting that strategic wrong turn that Yahoo took so many years ago -- 'if we had just gone that way, WE would have been Google.'

It's that sort of 'bring in a star to build a dream team' solution that makes so much sense in a theoretical world, but doesn't always play out in reality. Here's a great example.

The Great One
Years ago, the St. Louis Blues found themselves in playoff series after playoff series, but were unable to unable to win the cup. This despite having one of the top goal scoring forwards, Brett Hull. When St. Louis traded for Wayne Gretzky, there was this idea floated that, not only had they added this missing ingredient that would carry them through to the Stanley Cup, but we should also be prepared to be blown away by the combination of Gretzky and Hull. But it didn't happen. Chemistry, it turns out, is more than the sum of a couple of great ingredients.

Marissa Mayer may face a similar situation at Yahoo. Sure, there are all of the things that you can say make for a perfect fit, but the challenges that Yahoo faces are probably deeper and more entrenched than what you see on the surface. More often than not, the myth of a single hero as a solution to a systematic challenge is just that, a myth. Ultimately, only time will tell if there is real chemistry here... and real change.

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.

The Job Application Process and Marketing - The Hidden Message Behind the Differences Between the Front Door and the Back Door

Just the other day, I happened to come across a job listing with this listed as the application process that you must follow or, "Applications that do not adhere to the format will be ignored." According to the job post, you need to send an email to a specified address with a specific subject line (I've stripped that information out in order to provide a layer of anonymity). Here is how they specify that the rest of the email should be formatted:

- In the first line of the e-mail include your education details
- In the next 3 lines include your last 3 job titles, employers and duration
- In the following line include your desired salary
- Include 3-5 bulleted points listing your top strengths and your top measurable achievements, please be concise
- Attach a writing sample
- Attach a summarized one page resume -- preferably in .PDF format

Now it's not unusual for businesses to look for ways to screen candidates, but this one struck me as really pushing that envelope. I began to reflect on the entire approach, what it said about the position, about the company and about the process.

Why Would You Ask A Potential Employee to Structure an Application This Way?
The most obvious answer might be to establish a screening process that reduced the volume of submissions. Of course, the question that this points to is, what volume of submissions do you need to hit for it to be too much? At one end of the spectrum, you probably have numbers like Google, while at the other, the number may be zero or one. Even with the volume of resumes that they receive, Google doesn't force candidates to jump through hoops like this.

When it comes to demand generation marketing and the front door of the company, most businesses have strategies for addressing inquiries and screening leads. While web-to-lead forms may provide a low-pass filter that helps increase the likelihood of a lead qualification, we also use techniques like lead scoring to further automate the filtering process. What's more -- if you scan enough leads (assuming a certain amount of data beyond basic contact info), you can develop your own internal sense of scoring pretty quickly. Long story short, if the goal of this "structured" method of pre-screening is to streamline the process, the underlying message seems to speak more to laziness or lack of capability on the part of the reviewer than an actual process improvement. That's probably not a message that a business would want to communicate.

Another objective of this process structure might be an effort to escape the automated loop of volume job submissions. By asking candidates to do something different, this might filter out candidates that only had a casual interest in the position or make bulk applications -- application spam. But the corresponding question that you have to ask is, if you need the candidate to escape the existing application ritual, is it necessary to create such an extensive list of requirements? Stepping through a web-based form could achieve the same goal. Clearly, there is some deeper motive at play.

Please Be Concise
I think that the most telling aspect of this requirements list is the statement, "please be concise." The statement, along with many of the accompanying requirements, carries the tone of a school teacher setting down homework requirements for students. And it's just as pretentious as that college instructor who said it the last time. Layered underneath the words is the message, "our arbitrarily imposed structure is more important than you."

Clearly, this is not a job where you have the opportunity to transform their operations. This is not a position where they expect to be awed by their candidates. This is role that will execute on a specific set of parameters as though they were working the line in a factory. Creative ideas? Alternative approaches? We have no use for them here. Did I mention that this list of requirements is for a marketing role?

Communications and Your Customer
Imagine if this set of communications rules were customer facing. Instead of job requirements, imagine if you were to use this kind of framework or phrasing in your RFP. Of course, that hypothetical doesn't quite match because to make it truly similar, you would need an existing standard for RFPs, but then force customers to restructure their existing materials to match your RFP format. The whole prospect seems ludicrous. So, why would it be okay for prospective employees, for potential contributors to the health and well-being of your business?

When the economy is bad, some businesses treat is as a license to push employees harder, to drive the business on the desperate sweat of workers who can't afford to demand better. In a market where jobs are rare and your flexibility to change is limited, some use it as an opportunity to make people lick boots and jump through flaming hoops, they promote fear and profit from it.

If you're a marketing professional and you see a job listing like this, I would suggest that you close the listing and walk away. The language that they use suggests that they aren't open to new ideas -- your work here noteworthy, just another homework assignment. No creativity. No fun. Just work.

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?

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.

Are you a Growth Hacker?

I was doing some typical morning, poking around the web browsing and I came across an interesting topic that I thought I would share with you. I've been thinking about what to write on the topic, but I've got errands to run and a day to work through, so I thought I would start with sharing a quick link with you.

This is Find A Growth Hacker for Your Startup by Sean Ellis. Read and enjoy.

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.