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Social Media Staffing: $3 Trillion Opportunity

by Dan Robles on July 1, 2009

As the World Churns:

The cost of placing an employee approaches 30% of that employee’s salary.  In fact, most head hunters charge roughly 30% of the employee’s salary to find the right person to fill the job opening for a client company.  Sometimes the employee is recruited from a competitor causing a net productivity loss in a market due to disruption or “churning”.

The company also has a choice of hiring with the internal HR department.  In this case, they are paying HR personnel to place ads, review resumes, check references, and conduct interviews.  These costs can also run into a substantial percentage of the new employee’s salary.  From previous articles, The Ingenesist Project suggests that these methods may not even result in the best employee selection:

The Unnecessary Market Friction

Text only Résumé is no longer adequate in our complex business environment due to subjectivity, semantic inconsistency, and the time and resources required for fully interpreting the content. The cost of delivering a résumé has been decreased by computers and the Internet while the cost of reviewing the résumé has remained constant.  Keyword search programs often eliminate excellent and creative candidates based on criteria not related to the candidate.   Managers tend to hire what reminds them of themselves – from world that no longer exists.

Estimated wasted productivity:

Suppose that 50 Million professionals; doctors, lawyers, engineers, professors, administrators, managers, and directors are employed in the United States.  Suppose that the average salary is 70,000 per year.  Suppose that they change jobs 3 times in their career and that the cost of placement is 30% of salary, or $21,000 dollars per placement.

The total cost is $ 1 Trillion dollars multiplied by 3 placements in a career equals nearly 3 Trillion Dollars.  Now, divide this by 30 years in a career and we can see that 100 Billion dollars worth of human productivity are spent every year not necessarily matching the most worthy employee to the most worthy employer.  This does not include moving expenses, salary increases, disruption costs, or inflation.

The probabilistic electronic résumé system

The Ingenesist Project specifies a vetted knowledge inventory that resides in Social Media. The knowledge inventory, probabilistic electronic résumé system, and innovation bank together would make the paper and language Résumé obsolete.  The percentile search engine would scan the knowledge inventory of the corporation and scan the knowledge inventory of the labor market and seek matches with high probability of increasing net productivity – not unlike Amazon.com predicts what book you would like to read next.

Options, options, give the market its options

election criteria can be adapted to reflect social priority such as reduced traffic congestion or to reflect strategic objectives such as incremental or blue sky innovation requirements.  Trades across companies and industries can occur opportunistically not unlike interdepartmental transfers or even like trades in professional sports are conducted today.

Companies can manage peaks and valleys in employment by trading across diverse industries. avoiding layoffs all together.  Employees that can stay productive in diverse industries transfer new ideas and discover transferrable efficiencies.  Experience gained would be added to the knowledge inventory to enhance the probabilistic résumé inventory available for continuous improvement and tangential applications of innovation enterprise.

A virtuous circle? … A 3 Trillion Dollar opportunity nonetheless.

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Matchmaker, Matchmaker, Make Me a Match

by Dan Robles on June 22, 2009

The $40 Billion Dollar Dowry

Every organization wants to attract the most qualified employees and match them to jobs for which they are best suited. The human resources department is responsible for matching a knowledge surplus to a knowledge deficit through the hiring process. Fortunately for them, there is no knowledge inventory in society and managers don’t necessarily know what they want.

Human resources, training, and labor relations managers and specialists held about 868,000 jobs in 2006. The following tabulation shows the distribution of jobs by occupational specialty:

Training and development specialists    210,000
Employment, recruitment, and placement specialists    197,000
Human resources managers    136,000
Compensation, benefits, and job analysis specialists    110,000
Human resources, training, and labor relations specialists, all other    214,000

An HR Generalist pulls an average income of about $50,000 per year; A Director earns up to $140,000 per year. The total HR national payroll is estimated at $40 Billion annually.

Commodity Management:

Human Resources creates the impression that people are merely commodities to be treated as expenses rather than assets; or at best, like office machines or vehicles, despite assurances to the contrary.  The HR profession is built on the assumption that people cannot manage themselves, that human behavior is random and intangible, the independent variables for success are always known by management, and that the key words on a resume is the best predictor of a good match.

Innovation Economics; the science of incentives:

Social Media is providing systems for people to organize and manage their own career.  True knowledge inventories are forming as social groups coalesce around standard taxonomies of professional practice outside the corporate construct.  Knowledge assets are being vetted in communities of peers and the resume is being replaced by a Social Network Profile and “Search Engine Footprint” which more accurately predicts the quality and quantity of knowledge assets.   In the near future, a predictive search engine will be able to predict the probability that various collections of knowledge assets can execute a specific business objective at a known cost.  Scenarios can be tested and compensation will reflect true supply and demand.

Superior Value Comes in Many Different Packages:

So what happens when top management meets the new Human Resources Training and Content Development Manager who was sent by the Social Networks Search Engine to build the new corporate Blog and Social media strategy – sporting facial tattoos, a nose ring, and a black kilt, and dreadlocks?  If the fact that a top manager is not comfortable with a person of a particular culture or lifestyle can be perceived as detrimental to the innovation capacity of the organization, that organization is threatening its own survival.

Don’t Shoot The Fiddler

The story of Fiddler on the roof centers on Tevye, the father of five daughters, and his attempts to maintain his family and religious traditions while outside influences encroach upon their lives. He must cope with both the strong-willed actions of his three older daughters—each one’s choice of husband moves farther away from the customs of her faith.  The story resolves with a slow acceptance of the new world and creeping redefinition of what love is and what love can be.

In an Innovation Economy, the perfect match is no longer determined by those inside the construct of tradition, rather, it is determined by those entrepreneurs on the outside redefining tradition – and  earning 40 billion dollars.

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Social Enterprise; The Vetting Mechanism; #1

October 26, 2008

I read many articles with rants like “all this social network stuff is cool – but show us the money”.  Innovation Economics offers a way to see new markets and new businesses that are currently hidden by “the old way” of doing things.   This article is part of a series called ‘Business Plans of [...]

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