Free Rise

While California school districts suffer catastrophic budget cuts, the employment skills gap has never been more apparent.

Official unemployment hovers dangerously close to 13%, with a real figure probably north of 20% (if you exclude the underemployed from the numerator and add back discouraged workers to the denominator). And yet Bay Area tech companies are fighting to fill thousands of open positions. What gives?

Even today, my old employer Accenture (called Andersen Consulting back when I was slogging through government IT projects for them) had posted street teams South of Market to pass out recruiting cards.

Yesterday at Google, gubernatorial candidate Steve Poizner repeated that Google would have retained another $10B over its life if it were located in Nevada instead of California. One could claim that it might have never become Google at all if it were anywhere besides Sili Valley. The Bay Area is one of the most prosperous places on the planet because of the people who choose to live and work here. And if companies here can’t get the right brains and skills for its open jobs — because the schools are collapsing, because houses cost too much, or because the state government has become a giant scheme to convert taxes into pensions for its workers — then Sili Valley (including the SF tech sector) will cease to be.

We’re not there yet.  But it feels closer all the time.

A few months ago, after I left Yahoo!, I put my full resume online for the first time. And it was generally a good decision; I got several calls for interesting-sounding marketing and product positions at appropriate career levels.

But then there were the calls from Siti Corporation.

Siti promotes itself as a “Recruitment Process Outsourcer.” Or as they say:

“SITI empowers recruiting departments to be faster, better and more effective in acquiring the best talent. SITI helps our clients redefine the power of their recruiting departments and change the way companies do recruiting.”

In other words, they take your job posting and send it to India.

So let me tell you about my two experiences as the potential recruitee, so you can see how your company would be represented.

1. One day in December, three different Indian women emailed me about the same position at Comcast. Then they all called my cell phone. Yes, all in the same day.

2. Today, I received a garbled voicemail from Rahul at Siti. He followed up with an email, subject: “Maketing fulltime postion.”

Hi Eric,

Enclosed below please find the details of the requirement, and please do send us your updated resume in word document ASAP, with the following details…

1. Full Name:

2. Contact Number:

3. Email Id:

4. Current Location:

5. Work Authorization:

6. Availability:

7. Rate:

Please let me know in which position you will be comfortable

Location: Santa Clara, CA

Fulltime

JOB DESCRIPTION:

• Marketing person who has done Webinars, Seminars, press releases, data sheets, event managements etc with expertise in IT area US national

Are you kidding me? You give me a misspelled subject line, a one-sentence job description with no employer name, and a demand for information from me? What a joke.

I’ve used recruiting outsource services before, with mixed results. Decision Toolbox has provided solid candidates and often excelled at screening. But for most positions, I’ve found that screening my own resumes and candidates has given me better results in less time.

It’s been more than a generation since our economy has been about making widgets for the domestic market. Today’s successful companies win by attracting and retaining smart, skilled, flexible talent. The recruiter is, in many cases, the first contact that a potential candidate has ever had with a company. So why would a company outsource this first impression to someone who can hardly communicate with them at all?