TwinTechs

Death of a Recruiter

As a growing small business we are fortunate to be one of the few companies looking to hire talented people in the current market. Twin Technologies is a firm made up of some of the brightest software minds in the industry and we need to continue to fine the best of the best to keep up with client demand for our offerings. 

Having already exhausted most of our personal networks in building out the current team we thought it was time to bite the bullet and bring in a professional recruiter.  After interviewing three prominent East coast technology-recruiting firms I was disgusted at the proposed terms of engagement for their services.  All three recruiters proposed a fee of 15-20% of the first year salary for each resource they source, payable up front!  Which means if I use a recruiters resource on a $120,000 hire I owe the recruiter $24,000 before my new employee works their first hour for the company. 

But sir, we have a very large Rolodex…

Using a recruiter may have been a worthwhile solution – and perhaps the only solution – to finding talent in the days of the Rolodex.  Remember those?  Contacts would hand out business cards but those same cards did not have holes that were needed to insert them into the Rolodex so you had to poke custom holes in the business card before sticking it into the Rolodex.  Of course the custom hole job was never good enough so the business cards always got stuck when flipping on the Rolodex and when trying to fix the jam the plastic rings would fly open and dump all the business cards to the floor… I digress…

Thank god for Al Gore who invented the Worldwide Web.  With the internet as a new vehicle for communication, the world was flattened and there are now numerous avenues to find talent – no matter how rare – and connect with them directly.

This my friends is exactly the direction we have taken in connecting with and engaging with our most recent 5 hires in the last two months.  We found a Director and three Sr. Consultants via simple LinkedIn searches.  And we found a Top Secret Security cleared Consultant for Uncle Sam work via a Twitter post.  The Tweet for the Top Secret resource found its way to someone abroad in Europe who knew referred us to a friend that just happened to be local to and perfectly skilled for the project.

The lesson here is Al Gore flattened the world; and it didn’t happen due to a glacier expansion – ZING!  No longer do we need to pay for a middle man to sync us with talent.  Does anyone actually use a travel agent any more with Expedia and the like available?  Put down your hand mom & dad… anyone else?  No.  It’s the same concept and why in the near future recruiters will follow travel agents and classifieds editors.

In the software industry – and this should really be the case within all vertical markets wherever open-minded people are looking to advance – any enterprising technologist worth their weight will have their profile prominently displayed within every major social media vehical: LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc. 

Sir, your time is valuable.  Let us help you get back to doing what you do best, and let us worry about resourcing…

It’s a great sales close but not applicable here.  The argument of a recruiter removing the burden searching and vetting freeing me up for other areas of my business.  Why this value add against opportunity cost does not work for me is due to our firm being driven by high-skilled architects, designers and developers.  Everyone that is cleared to carry the Twin Technologies brand has been vetted by two existing members of our team in the practice that the potential resource would be bringing to the team.  We have a best-of-breed reputation within the industry and any new hire must be able to meet that expectation, hence, the toughest critic in vetting will always be our own team. 

I imagine that almost every other small business or line-of-business within mid and large companies has the same hiring philosophy.  Since we are going to do the vetting anyway, there is little to no value in paying 20% of a persons salary for another organization to pre-vet which would always be substandard to our internal vetting practice.

We are five for five in freeware searches finding highly-skilled new team members who we have hired. We saved over $100,000 in recruiter fees by finding those five resources ourselves.  The level of effort was a 15 minute search on LinkedIn or a 30 second Tweet for each search.

There is one remaining bastion of value for recruiters.  When a company needs to quickly find a massive head-count, a recruiter is probably the best solution.  The key words in this scenario are ‘quickly’ and ‘massive’.  If speed in finding the resources in not a component then there is significant value to be found by first hiring a recruiter as an employee who then keeps the search internal.  ‘Massive’ is a variable unique to each company.  Searching for fewer than 10% of an employee base should be a manageable challenge to keep in house with the freeware meathod.

In conclusion, if you are a line-of-business staffing less than 10% of your division, and especially if you are a small to mid sized business; say goodbye to recruiter fees and embrace the staffing power of a flat web-based world.  

David Ladd, SVP Bottom Line

Building The Next Generation of Online Learning Platforms

A distance learning system is possible that is fundamentally different from other e-learning platforms available today. While most e-learning sites cater to corporate professionals and learning institutions, this platform can provide a means for the general internet user to create and participate in learning activities in a meaningful way. By providing flexible tools such as interactive video streaming and charting, workflow creation for lab exercises and guided self-study, a quiz creation and proctoring module and interactive presentations, instructors can create diverse courseware geared at fellow hobbyists, crafters, home schoolers and study groups. An easy to use online management system can allow quick and easy creation of content, while an online marketplace provides revenue for courseware creators.

A Conduit of Knowledge
In most self-study and homeschooling environments, the chief barrier to success is  lack of meaningful instruction. Most available courseware  is limited in scope or expensive. Even when appropriate materials can be found, often a lack of mentoring prevents students from getting past difficulties in the learning process. Those who have the ability to provide this mentoring often cannot afford to invest the time or money required, or a channel may not exist for their mentoring to reach those that need it. A conduit of knowledge is needed to bridge the gap and bring mentors and students together.

The new e-learning platform provides this conduit. For a yearly fee and a percentage of revenue, mentors have access to an online toolset that allows the creation of locations, classes and courses. Courses are the overall content unit offered to students as part of a searchable and categorized marketplace where they can shop for mentoring and instruction. Students will be able to reserve space or immediately purchase access to a course depending on whether a course is offered only during certain times, as limited enrollment or on an ongoing basis, . Courses may have prerequisites that can consist of any other course offered in the marketplace as determined by the instructor.

Courses are taught on one or more locations, which are online areas containing a set of tools. Locations are the settings for classes, which are an individual unit of work that a student is led through. Classes may occur only at certain times if live instruction is given or on an ongoing basis if guided self-study is provided. Instructors and students may communicate in forums or privately between classes to provide feedback and preparation for other classes. Instructors may choose which students are aware of or may attend each class according to course level or individual selection.

Students attending a class access a location, a page consisting of a set of tools. A tool may be a presentation or lecture, a video or live video conference, a project workflow, a live chart, chat, or live or recorded audio. Tools in a location connect with each other and interact. Tools also provide an interactive interface according to the settings the instructor chooses.

A Yoga instructor might choose to add a project workflow, live audio, video, live video and chat to a location. Students participating in a class may hear music, general instruction and question/answer sessions via live audio while being led through a series of videos showing correct form using the project workflow. Students that have questions use the chat interface to communicate with the instructor. The instructor can view the student in real-time and provide feedback via audio or chat. This allows each student to work on their form using the instruction provided in the videos while receiving instant interactive feedback.

Students can save the live chat, audio or video if allowed by the instructor, or can take notes that are preserved in the lesson. Instructors can create template web pages, articles, links and downloadable files to be available in the reference library linked to a course, allowing easy access to recommended resources.

Courses or individual classes may be private, group instruction or guided self-study. Guided self-study uses project workflows and self-auditing quizzes to guide students through study of a subject. A programming instructor may design a course that consists of several guided self-study classes interspersed with group instruction. Private instruction could be made available by the instructor as part of a course or on a premium basis.

Students pay for fee-based courses by credit card and can use the card to reserve a place in the class if set by the instructor. Free classes may be reserved by students on a first-come or instructor-chosen basis depending on the settings for a class or course. Courses can be open or closed, so students may or may not be able to take individual classes without taking the complete course. This flexibility creates a conduit through which diverse groups of instructors and students may exchange knowledge.

A Self-enhancing Strategy
Content on the platform will also be aimed at improving instructors’ skills and use of the tools provided. Instructors will receive one hundred percent of revenue for courses offered on courseware creation and site usage, creating an additional source of mentoring and revenue for instructors. The modular design of the tools allows instructors to create customized tools and locations that can be offered free or at a premium to other instructors.

Courses may be offered by one or more instructors and are rated by students on completion. Instructors can use this rating to offer guest instructor services for courses, as well as attract other instructors to offer classes in a course. By choosing a highly rated course as a prerequisite, students taking the high-rated course will see information about other courses they may wish to participate in. Students may also make their course lists public and receive credits for each referral that may be used toward other courses. The marketplace becomes a collaborative space that helps new students navigate the selection of courses while helping instructors find students and revenue sources.

I’m just wrapping up my first week at TwinTechs.  It’s been fun so far and I’m excited about what is ahead.  This is my third position over the past 8 years where I will once again be working from home.  Having worked as a telecommuter for so long, I’ve become very familiar with the challenges that come with telecommuting.  One of the main challenges most of us face is maintaining a sense of personal connectedness.  How successfully you compensate depends not only on your personal skills and experience but also upon the culture of the organization you are working for.

My first real telecommuting position was at FGM Inc.  I was one of the only telecommuters in a company of 180 people and the only one that was hired on as a telecommuter (as opposed to moving into it). Over my six years there, I maintained a schedule where I’d travel to the office one day a week.  For me, this was vital face-time and I looked forward to being in the office with everyone.  I frequently would take part in job related conversations that were struck up in someone’s office or hallway.  I noted how things like that would never happen when working at home and thought about what I, or everyone else, might be missing out on.  I gradually became accustomed to working at home and eventually preferred it but I did have to fight the tendency for people to think I was out-of-sight-out-of-mind.  A tool that I found vital was AOL instant messenger.  I would ping people throughout the day and relied on it heavily for maintaining a presence.  Almost everyone on the team had AOL IM accounts and made a pretty good habit of being online, although things didn’t start out this way.  Over the course of the next few years I voiced the need for people to be “online” and eventually it became standard practice on our team.  Having that chat client was the next best thing to bumping into people in the hallway.

I moved on to work for OpSource in 2007.  This is a company that, for me, stood in stark contrast to FGM as it is spread across timezones and continents.  They have to deal with being connected on a company-wide scale.  On the first day of starting at OpSource I was given my account credentials and I logged into their corporate Jabber server.  (Jabber is an open-source XML-based instant messaging platform that’s in wide use today.)  Wham!  I was hit with a “buddy” list of every person in the company organized by department.  This was a heck of a lot better than slowly building contact information over time and adding them manually.  In fact, it was corporate policy that if you were working that you should be logged into the Jabber server.  This was great for me (working from Richmond, VA) in that I could see when certain people were coming online in California or elsewhere.  Someone could tell me to talk to so-and-so and I could just look them up on the list and start chatting with them.  This didn’t solve all my telecommuting woes, but it was certainly a breath of fresh air from where I had just been.

Perhaps I was spoiled by my pre-populated buddy list, I don’t know.  As I’ve been starting at TwinTechs I’ve missed being able to simply see a list of my fellow cohorts.  There’s been a number of names thrown around that don’t mean anything to me yet.  Sure, I could look up their contact info on the wiki and email them, but it’s just not the same as being able to see someone’s presence online and being able to strike up a real-time conversation.  I’ve expressed the idea of having a corporate Jabber server to some of our folks and they seem to be enthusiastically in favor of it.  I went ahead and set up an Openfire Jabber server and added a handful of TwinTechs accounts to get something rolling.  Eventually, I would see us being able to log into jabber.twintechs.com with your favorite chat client. 

I intended to talk about using Jabber at TwinTechs but I found myself pondering some of my reasonings for wanting to.  I plan to follow up with a post on more practical things related to Jabber client installation, configuration, features, etc.

As Web 2.0 becomes main-stream is it really time to starting planning for the next major paradigm? Is the market ready to start to embrace the next generation of features? In my opinion the answer is a resounding ‘Yes!’

So what makes me so confident? First let’s describe both Web 2.0 and 3.0. Grossly simplified, Web 2.0 is about engaging experience and connecting users together in a way that allows them so collaborate and share knowledge. Technology is a facilitator that a user works through. Web 3.0 is about extending the user through technology. Here technology acts on behalf of the user interacting with its environment (individuals and technologies exposed as nodes). Web 3.0 leverages a mix of both structure manner as well as native to the node it is talking to (language or Semantic interface).

With that as a baseline here is why I think we are set for an acceptance of Web 3.0 applications that require us to lean (and trust) heavier on technology.

1) The Web 2.0 paradigm (along with an exploding device market) it has made access to the internet/technology available at any time: One of the problems that have plagued us over the years was how to build applications that a user (specifically a consumer) would rely on as part of their daily life. As soon as this happens they will then either a) tie themselves to a computer or b) leverage a device on them so that this ‘must have’ is readily available. Now that there is a broad user base that view the computer (or device) as a mainstay to the daily lives you the by product is that their appietite for new technology increases.

2) The Web 2.0 paradigm created a more adventurous and technology reliant group of users: They constantly demand innovation and are much more willing to try out new ways that they can use technology. Think of the hundreds of mini widgets that currently exist on FaceBook. The rate these mini-applications are published is dizzying and by their spike (and wane) of interest show the users appetite of the new and specialized. Web 3.0 is the shift from users interacting with technologies to having technology augment the user. This requires that users start to trust that technology can make decisions on their behalf. It will start by commoditizing actions that the user is constantly doing and expand to do ‘soft’ actions that it thinks the users will want to do.