IMHO, online candidate search is a great service. I currently use two such websites and shell out almost $5000 per annum for the same. I always do a solid cost / benefit analysis and I have found that I am saving almost $15-$20K on my recruitment cost alone.

We manage to find decent candidates. However there are few limitations that you must keep in mind:

1) Candidates you get through online database search are more prone to attrition compared to those who are through a consultant. This happens because they have an active profile online and they continue to get offers from various companies.

2) You will get quality resumes for people with experience range of 0-8 years. People who are more qualified or experienced and hold important position in companies generally do not post their resumes to such sites.

3) Verification / validation of employees who come through these sites need to be done rigorously at your end. Like every online transaction, there is a probability of fraud in terms of forged resumes.

BTW, I found a very nice concept. Please check out http://www.yellojobs.com/ to see the new model of personal reference network for hiring. Its a mix between sites like linkedin.com and pure resume database sites like monster.com and naukri.com.

Abhishek

Everyone who watches television in India must have come across the "Hari Sadu" advertisement aired by Naukri.com. This ad became very popular for its creativity and also won the award from the Advertising Club Kolkata. Here is the full story board followed by the video of the ad.

There has been a lot of controversy around the advertisement by two set of people:

1. Whose first name is "Hari"
2. By a group of people who caused objection since "Hari" also refers to a deity in Hindu mythology

Naukri.com decided not to withdraw this advertisement citing that this is a work of fiction and they got a clean-chit from Advertising Standards Council of India.

This advertisement is really humorous and can be a great way to advertise a job site. In fact they managed to create a character – Hari Sadu, who can be recognized with the Naukri.com brand.

On the other hand, I find the ad to be in a very poor taste, showing bosses in very poor light who should be insulted and abused when opportunity strikes. This is teaching people to consider boss (or a business owner) as a blood-sucking beast, an idiot and an inhuman being. This is definitely not true in most of the cases. Above all, it shows that – when you don't need someone, have a go at him – and walk out of the door!

In a growing economy like India, where attrition is sky high, job ethics are hard to spot and consideration for one's job responsibility is at an all time low, this ad has only added fuel to the fire.

I know, Naukri.com has got superb mileage from this ad and it is close to heart of thousands of people. However, the question remains – Is this ad instilling the right culture? As a corporate, does Naukri.com understand it's responsibility to communicate the right culture to the people who are destined to shape the future of this economy – the young executives.

Business organizations can never be in equilibrium or achieve stable position. Either they are moving up or they are moving down, depending upon their innovation quotient. 

If you are trying to keep things stable, they won't remain so. You will slowly slide down simply because:

• there is no exclusivity,
• competition will catch up on the technology front and -
  • either cut price – if they too are not innovating (resulting in your margins to shrink)
  • or innovate and better the product – if they want to add value to the product and move up the value chain (resulting in your market share to shrink)

And if you continuously innovate and apply new ideas (refer to my post on manufacturing ideas), you will continue to move up.

It is unfortunate that in some cases, the entire industry decides to stabilize their position and take customer wants for granted. For example, consider:

• radio manufacturers,
• alarm clock manufacturers,
• camera manufacturers (there are some really big names out there)

They decided to stay at their position and were swept away by mobile companies like Nokia (who is the largest digital camera manufacturer in the world today). They decided to experiment and give more to their customers by integrating digital camera in mobile phones (possibly the thought process was that mobile, camera, clock, alarm are all things that need to be handy). It took some time to gather market acceptance which was created by the initial hype, but later on sustained due to the instant-in-the-hand value of the additional gadgets.

Seth Godin has highlighted how alarm clock manufacturers can still make a small change in their product and make it stand out. These are simple improvements which can make a product stand out and desirable!

Are you moving up or moving down?

I have recently signed up with this wonderful social media website Sphinn.com which aggregates news and articles on search engine marketing and social media landscape. The site has got excellent content and an active community.

However, while signing up, I got confused (for a while though) on the signup page.

The point of confusion is the disabled "Create user" button at the bottom.

The concept is that the user need to verify the availability of username (compulsory) and validity of email before the "Create user" buttom becomes active. The problem with this approach is that:

• By doing this, the webmaster has put the onus of verifying the username and validity of email on the user and is stopping him from moving ahead in the signup process.
• Above all, it is not in line with the general user experience in most signup forms, thereby resulting in a learning curve for its users.
• People may not like to learn a "new way of doing thing" for something as simple and one-time activity as signup with a service.

The user initiated verification can be an additional benefit and can be provided as a feature to improve user experience, but not at the cost of disabling the "Create user" button and verifying it at the site of form submission.

It seems sphinn.com is based on a popular script called pligg.com. If the signup form comes from that popular open-source social media script, this usability flaw needs to be fixed in more than one website

Abhishek

I recently came across a post by Loren Baker of SearchEngineJournal about Google Loves Transparent Links and Hit counter Spam.

It is shocking to see that Google has not been able to tackle such crude level of spam. We hear about site ageing, search engine saturation, quality one way link and latent semantic indexing as key factors that Google is using to improve search results. However what Loren has investigated in this case is absolutely shocking.

It shows how a million dollar keyword (i.e. payday loans made it to #1 in Google by using under-the-belt techniques like transparent links bundled in hit-counters offered by "free hit-counter website" in less than one year of existence and less than a dozen indexed pages with not-so-good quality content. It is really confusing.

We all presume that Google is very smart and to do well on this search engine, we have to be very smart. I just hope we do not need to be spam-smart

Read the complete research here – Google Loves Transparent Links and Hit counter Spam

Abhishek

I was reading about Ed Kohler's post about social networking update redundancy.

I think there can be a simple solution. To do this we may need a simple new standard format of data syndication, which can be a simple derivative of RSS. Basically every individual can have a personal RSS feed.

A person shall provide an input socket (it can be a XML-RPC based system, which already is used by WordPress and several other blogs) when he signs up with any social networking sites or any website where he might update his personal data or make comments or blog posts. These sites can have a system to push the information to this personal RSS feed, which can be the only RSS feed that your friend need to subscribe to know all the latest news about you or your company. I understand that when all data is pushed to the same personal RSS feed, redundancy can be controlled by smart pattern matching algorithm (may be simply matching the heading to start with).

I think this technical solution might work

Divya Narendra and his two other Harvard friends (Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss) have sued Facebook alleging that their founder, Mark Zuckerberg have stolen their business plan and source code. You can read the full story at rediff.com.

I was wondering if this is the case, why they didn't cried foul earlier.

In fact I doubt that Facebook has become so popular and valuable (not sure) because of the business plan and source code that was stolen (if at all it was stolen). In my experience business plan is just a starting point and then everything keeps changing and you have to adopt according to the situation. Above all ideas do not matter, execution does. Mark has executed the idea well and he deserves what he has achieved.

Anyways, it will be interesting to see the outcome of the lawsuit. Divya has almost nothing to loose, but everything to gain. He just might be able to make the kill. But I see very little probability of the same.

It all started with pixels. Alex Tew started selling pixels with milliondollarhomepage.com to earn some quick money. Public relation clicked and he became a success story with a wild frenzy among people to own a "piece of history". The "me too" crowd followed and we saw thousands of similar sites selling priceless pixels and few smart companies selling scripts to build such sites.

After one year came Joel Comm, who improvised the concept to link words instead of pixels, and launched 500words.com. This innovation was expected from an Internet marketing wizard like Joel, who is well known among Internet marketers and has a capacity to create a loud buzz. He sold the entire inventory and laughed his way to his bank with few hundred thousand dollars! Just like milliondollarhomepage.com, this improvisation triggered hundreds of similar website and scripts that can be installed to launch similar sites. In fact, I also launched software called wordsitebuilder with my friend Arun Agrawal, because I believe in selling spades when the gold rush is on.

Now, exactly after one year of the 500words.com gold rush, I came across another concept – Wordhugger.com & MillionDollarWiki. Now they have logically extended the legacy and moved on from words to a page dedicated to a given word / phrase. They have presented the concept in a much more lucrative way for prospective buyers. I was just wondering how is this different from squidoo.com? This seems to be picking up and I am watching the show .

So, overall, there has been a gradual transition from a pixel >> word >> page What's next? – A website / or a blog?

Let's watch the show!

I came across this quote today at BusinessPundit. 

We must embrace pain and burn it as fuel for our journey. – Kenji Miyazawa

How true When you start a company, you get rejected by almost everyone:

Bankers:

They want to lend you money only if you have a strong financial background. Ever thought, why will you even go for borrowing money if you have that solid financial backing!

Customers:

Have you heard prospects saying – You dont have enough credentials! Its a chicken and egg situation. You got to get few customers to build credentials. But to get customers, you need credentials.

Employees:

Have you heard people saying – I don't see a future in your company. I would prefer to work for an established brand. Have you ever thought that "established brand" was also built by some "go getters" who came out of their comfort zone and took risk to build the "established brand".

I don't want to rant about the pain. Just want to let you know that everyone faces this. Only those people, who use it as a fuel for their journey succeeds. Those who give up results in those 80% of the businesses that dies within the first few years of operations!

Keep going!

I recently read Ed Kohler's comment where he has ranked the importance of various "Google Apps" programs in the following order:

1. Docs
2. Presentation
3. Spreadsheet

However, I beg to differ.

In my personal experience I have found spreadsheet to be most used online collaborative tool of the entire office suite.

An online spreadsheet can be used in hundreds of ways for different purpose and help you collaborate much better for several reasons:

1. Spreadsheets keep data in a more organized way which can be further imported / exported as a comma delimited file and also imported / exported from a third party database

2. Some common usage can be sales tracking, basic level project tracking, bug management, issue tracking, any collaborative data gathering, managing petty accounts, etc. The list is endless. You cannot do all this using word processor or presentation tools online.

3. Every spreadsheet has several sheets, which enables various versions of inputs to be gathered from different sources, all put together in one place with a very easy-to-shuffle mechanism.

May be my opinion is based on the way I use Google Apps!
What is your opinion?

Abhishek

I have noticed that several companies offer joining bonus to a prospective employee to join early (or shall I say "immediately").

I was wondering if this is a right tradition? Is this ethical?

I see it this way –

A guy is working in Company A and he has a notice period of 30 days. if he wishes to terminate his contract/job with Company A and move to Company B he need to serve a notice period of 30 days to Company A. This is supposedly required so that he can transfer his responsibilities in a proper way to an assigned person by Company A enabling them to maintain the smooth function of the organization in his absence. However, Company B tells the guy – "If you can join us within 7 days, we are willing to pay you a joining bonus of $X.

I personally feel that it is like bribing the person to go against the separation clause of the employment agreement, so that he can pay for any financial loss (that might arise from any penalty clause) and enjoy a bonus amount – all for doing something wrong! I see this happening almost everyday.

Don't you think this HR practice is unethical and is further rewarding people to stoop low for some quick bucks?

What do you say?