Our first confidential career network site StrictlyExecs has been live for over two months and we are beginning to get a sense of the types of talent and opportunities that are using our service.  Executives and Career Opportunities are being added each day, however here is a snapshot as of November 1, 2010.

Executive Talent:

Executive Opportunities:

Here are some other interesting data points regarding the quality of the number of  matches discovered.

Matches per Executive Profile:  3.7

Matches per Executive Opportunity: 5.9

Every once in a while an article comes along that exactly hits the mark with your current thinking.  This happened to me this week when I read a reprint of a blog post by Mike Michalowicz (the famous toilet paper entrepreneur) that appeared in the Wall Street Journal.  The title in the WSJ guest column was “Resume Overload? A Shortcut to Spot Best Hires.” The actual blog post title was much more direct and appropriate “Swamped With Tons Of Crappy Resumes? Never Again!”

Mike talked about his ability to filter out the irrelevant using a technique he called the “Quick Qualifier.”  Simply put, he ads the following sentence about three-quarters of the way down in the ad,

“To prove that you’re a meticulous reader, you have to include the following sentence when you send your resume: ‘It is with my utmost respect I hereto surrender my curriculum vitae for your consideration.’”

He only looks at resumes that contain that sentence and this helps to filter out about 80% of the irrelevant applications.  This saves him time, effort and focuses his attention on the relevant.

This kind of home grown solution indicates the size of the problem at hand and demonstrates Mike’s creativity.  StrictlyTalent and our first online community StrictlyExecs has been designed from the ground up to formalize these homemade solutions and provide a system where the filtering is automatic and all of us can enjoy the same results.  Eliminating the irrelevant so you can focus on the relevant is what we are all about and our goal is to provide that value to both quality talent and great career opportunities.

Mike has used this method dozens of times and he admits that it has rarely failed to select the best qualified people for the job.  Now if I could only get Mike to write an article how hiring the right talent is a process and not a post, I would be in hog heaven.

Anyway, I hope you take the chance to read Mike’s full article and think about the message hidden behind his cleverness.

It is a common dilemma facing any mature industry looking toward the future.  The recruiting and job search marketplace is at this point.  Technology has been integrated for over fifteen years now and the first phase of the new paradigm has grown long in the teeth.  We are now facing the next shift which is more about how technology is deployed rather than the technology itself.  Over the past years, technology has solved many problems in the staffing industry, however most of those are related to speed, reach and access.  Speed in terms of instant gratification of posting an ad and letting it begin producing results.  Reach expanded due to the limitless boundaries of the Internet and our human thirst for information.  Access came by way of the economic boom in the early part of this decade as broadband infrastructure was laid across the planet.  While technology solved many problems, it also created new ones.

The greatest of these new problems is  too many resumes.  It may not sound like a problem at all, at least not looking back ten years or so.  And it really isn’t a problem if technology could simultaneously manage and keep pace with growth.  But when the stack of resumes grows larger, not because of more qualified candidates, but merely because of speed, reach and access, we have created an entirely new problem – Relevancy.

Relevancy is attacked in every industry when technology takes hold .  Just look at the US Post Office and the impact junk mail has had on the relevancy of what is delivered each day.  Or think how irrelevant your e-mail would be without spam filters and the unsubscribe button.  The no call list wasn’t created to help you spend a quiet evening at home it was championed by telephone companies whose customers were dropping their landlines to filter out the irrelevant and eliminate the irritation of unsolicited calls.

Irrelevance has a way of infiltrating just about anything people adopt in mass.  Look at Twitter for example.  Reading about what my old college roommate had for breakfast in 140 words lacks relevance.  That doesn’t mean that Twitter is irrelevant, but unfiltered it becomes so.  That is where the staffing industry sits today.  Irrelevance runs rampant as technology has empowered candidates to apply to jobs in which they are unqualified.

The biggest culprit is the search all button.  The second biggest culprit is social media.  Both of these contribute to a growing pile of irrelevance without providing for a solution to filter out the relevant.  Even the de facto business model in the industry ties its success to job postings, not actual relevant results.  Its quantity over quality.  The message is post your job here for a fee and we will give you millions of eyeballs and exposure.  Here is an example to point out how silly this model is being applied in the real world.  An executive colleague of mine was looking at applying for a CEO position being marketed by one of the largest job sites in the business.  He got all the way down to the bottom of the ad and it said local candidates only.  He lives in Texas and the position was in Cleveland Ohio.  The result – a waste of time for the candidate and a stack of irrelevance for the recruiter.

I told myself before sitting down to write this piece that I wouldn’t mention the communication “black hole” which really gets my blood boiling.  It represents just how bad things have gotten and a prime example of technology’s unintended consequences.  The fact that some company HR representatives and recruiters can look themselves in the mirror each morning knowing that they have failed to respectfully communicate with talent is wrong.  The industry has accepted this model of bad behavior that would have and should have gotten anyone of us fired just ten years ago.  And we blame it on technology – too much time spent filtering out the irrelevant.  This blame harms the very people we are encouraging to apply for the position and makes them the target of our poor decisions.  I don’t disagree that technology helped cause the problem, however the industry, by not vigorously fighting against it, has by default accepted this bad behavior.

The system is broken.  Let’s admit to ourselves that it is time to change the industry for the better and direct technology to not only solve our problems today but be smart enough to keep new ones from appearing.  Let’s create solutions that are flexible, intelligent and deliver relevant results on both sides of the table.  With 9.5% unemployment and an economy continuing to waver, now is the time to rehabilitate our industry.  We don’t have much time to get this right and the country and economy are counting on us to get our act together.  More than eight million jobs have been lost over the past two years and these opportunities will come back.  It is our responsibility to bring relevance back to a process that has so much riding on it.  It is our duty to get it right before we miss this chance to make a difference.

Let’s rise up together and begin the revolution!

Can you think of any better way to define relevance than talking about Betty White?  After 50 years in show business, Betty White is still relevant and earlier this year was drafted by Facebook fans to host Saturday Night Live at the age of 88.  This is incredible and a testament to perseverance and serendipity.

Relevancy in the job market means the time someone spends reviewing and submitting profiles and resumes to companies is worthwhile (stands a chance of success). Relevancy means the corporate recruiter or hiring manager is spends time sourcing, reviewing and vetting talent that is ‘close’ to the opportunity. These points are important because the processes we use as candidates and recruiters has become irrelevant. We spend too much time, too many cycles dealing with information that will not lead to the candidate or a job. The Internet pipes are full. Ask the recruiter at any company what happens when they post a position on the Internet. Ask any candidate if they expect a reply from the notorious ‘black hole’ once their resume is submitted. And for those who are thinking I don’t know what I’m talking about I do…check me out here.

Relevancy means a person and a company discover each other find value based on experience and industry resulting in a relationship that may lead to a current or future employment relationship. So why when I post positions on boards or social networks do I receive large numbers of unqualified talent that don’t come close to my specs? Why when I post at LinkedIn am I immediately served up talent that don’t align with my needs? I experience each and understand that in order to graciously protect my brand it is imperative I manage and respond to each so I do – or at least I try. When I started building recruiting software in 1994 that ultimately became Hire.com I realized that there would be many who would rush into the space seeking financial rewards and as a result they would create unnecessary inflection points in the process they could monetize. Some of those companies became successful Monster(s) while many fell by the wayside. Making money is great but only when you provide value…boards and social networks are recruiting sourcing stations that result in more work talent vetting and resume storage than needed.