I have been meaning to write this post for a long while, but following the recent negative press around one of the recruiters that is particularly active in the same space as the business I work for (not mentioning any names CONSOL PARTNERS), I thought now would be a good time to share some of my experiences of using the services of Consol and similar agencies.
But first a recap on the story of the moment, as reported here by The Kernal and discussed some more on The Recruiting Unblog –
Consol allegedly had a candidate that they arranged two interviews for, a couple of days apart. At the interview at the first company (the source for the original article) was informed by the candidate that they had received an offer from elsewhere. After the interview the source informed Consol that they wouldn’t be taking the candidate any further and asked for them to inform her/she so that they could accept their outstanding offer from elsewhere. This is when the foul play occurs – it is alleged that Consol then decided not to tell the candidate in order to provide themselves with a better chance of persuading them to attend their next interview. Long story short – the candidate ends up missing the deadline for their existing offer after a series of false messages were relayed to them telling how the first agency hadn’t provided any meaningful feedback.
This is obviously a terrible example of how working with recruitment agencies can go horribly wrong (for agencies and indeed candidates) but I have to be honest I am not at all surprised. At my place of work we regularly receive in excess of 10 calls in a day from various agencies, often insisting that they are not recruiters and many that lie in order to try and get through to individual members of our staff. There are certain agencies that we have asked not to call us at all based on our previous experience and those of our peers and we try to be open and honest about it and just ask them to mark us not to receive phone calls. One of these agencies actually resorted to sending snail mail to us this week, and have in the past sent embarrassing grovelling emails to various members of our team to try and get us back on side again. I’m still considering if I have the time / energy to return the mail to them and once again request that they don’t take any more of our time!
I completely understand the need for these legitimate businesses to go about their day to day activity, but when a potential customer is so put off by your nauseating sales tactics that they actually ask you to refrain from contacting them again, you really do need to pay attention to that and have some self respect. I understand that the staff turnover in this target driven environment is pretty rapid, but I don’t need to hear about you taking over the patch from the previous employee every 3 months when they inevitably fail to meet their probationary sales targets, and all about how you are better / the best / the best thing since sliced bread – I’m not terrifically interested.
The worst calls we get are generally from the non-specialist agencies – in many cases the callers are either aggressive to staff members who don’t allow them to be put through to decision makers, or so desperate that they decide to pepper our inboxes with unsolicited CVs from candidates that have no idea they are being sent to us – the recruiters are just hoping to strike it lucky. On more than one occasion in the last 12 months highly confidential emails from our competitors have been inadvertently forwarded to me (whenever this has happened I have immediately emailed the person whose privacy has been breached and then deleted the emails – often receiving hilarious yet irate responses directed at the recruiters with myself copied in).
I suppose the point I am rambling towards is that the issue of recruitment agencies and their benefits will always be individual to the agency in question, and to the recruiter as well. As an industry recruitment needs to improve … and fast. With an increased uptake in social media usage for job seeking and the culture for digital agencies to be very accessible, our reliance on recruiters (as an industry) for full time positions is at an all time low. Great candidates contact us direct every week, and we are very happy to hear from them. My own personal exception comes with contractors, particularly designers and developers – and working with recruiters for this type of hire is occasionally (but not always) less stressful and something I have had positive experiences from with a very select group of suppliers.
So, some tips for working with recruiters and getting the most out of the experience:
- Do your research! Ask any recruiter you are thinking of working with for an in-person meeting to discuss your needs and how you want to work with them. Confirm the process for selection and any relevant dates / times for how you want it to run.
- Ask for references from their existing clients – not only for the candidates, but for the recruiter themselves. Any good recruiters will be happy for you to talk to their clients and find out what they think of working with them.
- Make a decision as a business, and stick to it. Do we need the help of recruiters, if you don’t then make it a blanket decision across your team and ensure that everyone knows what to say if you receive prospecting calls. There is no point in wasting everyone’s time.
- Create a preferred supplier list with an expiry date. Work only with the guys who pass your research phase and don’t even entertain input from outside this list. Refresh your list annually or when a recruiter is no longer performing well for your business. Put the PSL in a visible spot in your office (we have ours written up on the whiteboard) and make sure that those who answer the phones regularly know to check the list before putting anyone through. Prepare a little message for those who argue about this and be calm, and efficient when dealing with persistent callers from outside the list.
Recruitment as an industry has a horrific public image (right up there with parking attendants and employees of HMRC), but if you pick a rogue recruiter without performing the same basic due diligence you would perform before working with any new organisation then you only have yourself to blame. The goal of this post isn’t to be sensationalist – or to pile more abuse onto Consol, who I am sure will have had enough of this by now – but rather to provide a public service announcement:
PROCEED WITH CAUTION.
Please note: No recruitment consultants were harmed in the making of this post. The image is merely a terrible stock shot.
Many online communities are plagued with SPAM posts and contain a vast amount of unwanted content that becomes a real bind to monitor and take action against. In order to create efficiencies and ensure that moderator time is spent promoting content and starting conversations, rather than just deleting SPAM posts it is recommended that Mollom is used to automatically prevent this promotional / abusive content from ever making it onto the site.
Mollom is a web service that analyzes the quality of content posted to websites. This includes comments, contact-form messages, blogs, forum posts, etc. Mollom specifically tries to determine whether this content is unwanted – i.e. “spam” – or desirable – i.e. “ham.” Websites that allow visitors to contribute or post comments are constantly being flooded with inappropriate, distracting or even illegal commercial messages, many of which are uploaded by automatic “spambots.” Mollom screens all contributions before they are posted to participating websites.
Websites using Mollom send data they want checked to mollom.com, and Mollom replies with either a spam or ham classification. If Mollom is not certain, it will return an “unsure,” typically prompting websites to ask Mollom’s CAPTCHA server for an audio or visual CAPTCHA challenge to present to the user.
Benefits to organisations from using Mollom:
- Automatic moderation of user generated content based on text analysis reduces the amount of post moderation checking required by the moderation team.
- Ability to mark suspicious content for moderation automatically without allowing it to be published immediately, thus allowing suspect content to be checked at a later date when the moderator has time, rather than allowing it to be published and needing to remove it when it is discovered.
- Simple and quick to integrate with the existing set-up of the community site, including the private messaging module we are using, low overheads in terms of maintenance, the system looks after itself and is maintained by the providers leaving little or no overhead in terms of developer time.
- Allows simple management of blacklists and profanity all via the CMS – add your own words quickly and easily as they become an issue, without the need for a developer. This is all integrated into the moderation dashboard and can be easily accessed by any user with appropriate permissions.
- Can set permissions so that users can be excluded from the automatic moderation, for example admin / content editors don’t need to be checked. This ensures that content editors / moderators can enter content whenever required without needing to pass Mollom checks.
- 3 levels of checking – Spam, Ham or Unsure
- Unsure produces a CAPTCHA for verification before allowing the post published
- Spam can be sent directly for moderation, the user can see the content but nobody else can see it yet
- Ham gets published to the site automatically
- Mollom allows site administrators to mark content as spam, allowing the automated spam filter to learn and protect the site against future abuse of the same nature.
- The pricing is based around real posts, you don’t pay for all of the SPAM posts so the package required initially can be lower during the beta phase and then upgraded as users switch to the new site.
- Mollom was created and is maintained by Dries Buytaert, the person that made Drupal. It integrated seamlessly with the Drupal framework and provides rock solid protection that feels like part to the system and not like a bolt-on module. As a consequence of this Mollom is bundled with Acquia Commons, the Drupal distribution recommended for community sites, and has been heavily tested by the Drupal developer community.
- It is likely that the cost of the subscription will be greatly outweighed by the anticipated savings in both time and cost v a more traditional moderation approach where staff members are required to continually patrol the site looking for “bad” content.
Find out more about Mollom here: http://mollom.com/
With the gradual, creeping and painful march towards decent broadband speeds in the UK now well underway, the innovative cloud based gaming service OnLive has finally made its UK debut.
“The OnLive Game Service is a groundbreaking on-demand video game platform capable of delivering the latest and most advanced games instantly over a broadband connection. You can play on your TV via the OnLive Game System or on virtually any PC or Mac via a small browser download. The OnLive Game Service creates an entirely new way to play, watch, share and demo premium games from the world’s leading publishers.”
“Founded by noted technology entrepreneur Steve Perlman (WebTV, QuickTime) and incubated within the Rearden media and technology incubator, OnLive spent seven years in stealth development before officially unveiling in March 2009.”
These days you can’t make a smartphone and expect it to sell (and perform well) without including a decent browser. The mobile web has come a long way since my first taste of it, the extremely limited WAP over GPRS as I had on my Nokia 6510, followed up by basic page rendering over 3G on handsets like the N95 and E61. Modern smartphones have a lot more to deal with in terms of complexity and content, and todays users expect a “proper” browsing experience, with all the features of a desktop browser available to them.
So after this trip down memory lane, discussing handsets of old, how does the N8 perform? The spec sheet seems to indicate that everything is in order claiming “Full web browsing of real web pages” and detailing support for HTML, XHTML MP, WML, CSS, Javascript and Flash Lite 4 and in my initial tests I was pleasantly surprised by the accurate approach to rendering pages from the N8. However, due to the comparatively low resolution of the screen, it can actually be quite difficult to “use” the browser with most pages initially rendering with only the top left corner of the content available without scrolling or zooming. This wouldn’t be a big problem if the experience of scrolling / zooming was more pleasant, but sadly the usually excellent capacitive display is slow to react to swipes when browsing complex pages and this leads to a less than pleasant overall experience.
Web standards compatibility
There is better news in terms of support for modern standards, with all of the standard pages I tested rendering correctly, and even some of the more advanced and complex pages rendering in a usable fashion. The currently in development jQuery Mobile is also compatible with the browser and has support at B-Grade level which the project describes as providing an “enhanced experience except without Ajax navigation features”. In reality this means that the N8 will be forward compatible (to an extent) with many of a new breed of websites and web apps that will support the fledgling standard as it grows in popularity, making it a safe bet for “normal users” (not me) who are likely to keep their handsets for the entire duration of an 18 or 24 month contract.
Speed
When considering the speed of browsing it is a bit of a mixed bag. Over 3G the handset performs OK, no better or worse than any other handset I have tested in terms of its radio performance and download speeds, but when you take the browser into consideration it becomes painfully slow rendering complex websites. Over WiFi the story is much the same, with the N8 getting to pages and starting to download quickly, but the rendering seemingly going on forever.
Nokia N8 v Apple iPhone 4 – Browser Speed Test
In a head to head with the Apple iPhone 4 (running iOS4) the N8 was decimated, blazing speeds from the iPhone4 meant that in some of the tests I ran the N8 still had a blank screen when the iPhone 4 had fully rendered the page. In the above video the N8 was defeated 3-0 by the iPhone and in terms of raw pace was left well behind.
Wrap-up
Overall the N8 web performance is a bit of a mixed bag to say the least. From a technical perspective the browser performs well, rendering the vast majority of pages successfully, however, whether or not you still care what the site you are looking for has to say when it eventually finishes rendering is another matter all together. For users that only use the web occasionally and mainly live in messaging and email the N8 would make a solid companion, but more demanding (power) users should look elsewhere to a more modern phone OS with a more robust browser and a handset with more horsepower. Flash support is a pleasant and welcome surprise, but this isn’t enough to let me feel confident recommending the N8 for anyone who intends to use the internet regularly on the move. A good effort, but one that feels a little left behind when compared with the current crop of modern smartphone browsers.
How can online communities improve the quality of content and increase user engagement?
Technology blogs and news sites have struggled with the quality of their user generated content for almost as long as they have existed. The comments section at the bottom of any tech related post is often be a dangerous place to be, as users discuss their passions with their peers, often seeking to get one over on supporters of another games console, operating system or mobile ecosystem. Forums are traditionally segmented down to a specific user interest, with little opportunity for sharing of ideas outside a users immediate peer group, and are often frequented by users (referred to as trolls) who look to deliberately ruin the experience of others that they disagree with by posting abuse, off-topic comments or by attacking genuine users.
Engadget.com (a popular tech news site owned by AOL) has struggled for several years to improve the quality of the comments section at the bottom of posts. Various tactics have been employed, including complete removal of the commenting functionality for a nominated period of time, with the goal of reminding users that the ability to comment on their content is a privilege and not a right. The Editor in chief will post reminders about etiquette every few months, and new technologies such as Disqus have been rolled out in order to encourage the use of social network accounts in order to capture “real” identities and encourage them to behave more like human beings and less like feral animals hunting through the bins outside a busy restaurant.
Feb 2010 – Engadget.com turns off commenting
These efforts have proven largely ineffective, and have done little to encourage user input of a higher quality. Users are used to being treated as children, subject to draconian moderation and deletion of comments, along with limited control over how their posts are presented on the site – and as such they often behave as children, becoming preoccupied with being the FIRST to comment on a new post, provoking arguments with other users and generally being a nuisance. All of this does little to encourage the cultivation of a new user base, with the vocal existing user group acting in a hostile fashion towards newcomers, generally making them feel unwelcome and treating them as outsiders.
A little further than just lively debate, often users on Engadget will use personal attacks via f.cl.ly
A new way of thinking about user generated content
Following the restructuring process undertaken by AOL in the wake of its acquisition of the Huffington Post, many of the editorial staff left the site to seek employment elsewhere. The former Editor in chief, Joshua Topolsky, and several of his ex-colleagues soon began working on a new site backed by the successful sports news and blogging network SB Nation and six months later the new site was launched to the world.
The new website, ‘The Verge’, has an entirely different approach to user generated content, pushing it to the fore and giving users similar controls and flexibility to the editors of the publication. There is no “secret sauce”, no magic ingredient that makes The Verge so successful in generating higher quality user generated content and vastly improved interactions, instead it takes advantage of a simple approach that gives users responsibility, encouraging greater thought about what is being written and released to the community.
via f.cl.ly
Examples of higher quality debate on The Verge – via f.cl.ly
The Verge allows users to produce content that looks almost as good as that created by the editors of the site and provides a place where community content is given the opportunity to shine. Editors are active in the discussions, sharing personal opinions and experiences, and users appear to receive this very well. Several posts from the community have been featured and highlighted by Verge staff members and even discussed in length during the weekly podcasts.
With the incentive of the above, combined with an intuitive design and the feeling of a clean start on a new website, it is simple to observe the vast improvement in the quality of user interaction, the reduction in trolling behaviour and other barriers to entry for new users. It is possible to comment on an existing editorial post, posts created by other users or to create your own new post, which others can then comment upon. Formatting controls are provided, allowing users to add images, links and videos, and soon more controls will be rolled out allowing even greater control over the way content looks, providing a further enhanced incentive to think carefully about what is being posted before hitting the submit button.