Category Archives: rants

So, What Might a Good Job Advertisement Look Like?

A good advertisement is very job specific, but as per yesterday’s post on how you have to start with a good advertisement if you want to attract talent because carbon-copy blah-blah-blah indicates you have a talent management problem. In this post, we’ll give you a sample job advertisement that is much better than the carbon-copy blah-blah-blah referenced in last Friday’s post. The advertisement is in italics. For a comparison, we include the carbon-copy blah-blah-blah in code font. While this advertisement is not perfect in any aspect, it does illustrate some of the concepts outlined in yesterday’s post.


Senior Technology Sourcing Manager


Here’s an exciting opportunity for an experienced sourcing manager or CTO in the technology domain to join ABC Bank in its downtown Manhattan (New York) location in a permanent role. The successful candidate will enjoy a base salary of up to 200K, which will be augmented by an uncapped performance-based bonus (using our corporate cost reduction and avoidance formula), a first-rate health plan, 401K matching, gym membership, and an annual training allowance.

Here's a superb opportunity for an experienced sourcing manager within the hardware and software domains looking to join a top tier investment bank. This is a permanent position based out of New York City that will pay a base salary of 150K plus a competitive bonus and benefits package.


The Senior Technology Sourcing manager will be responsible for all hardware and software buys and leases, corporate data centers, application hosting, and shared sourcing initiatives. In addition to negotiating favourable awards that benefit the company and the stakeholders, the successful candidate will be responsible for supplier relationship management and development initiatives. Our company is planning to transition from multiple discrete data centers that host its different divisions to a small number of data centers that will support our entire global operation in a shared infrastructure setup. One of your first tasks will be to manage the sourcing of our service provider and the multi-year, eight-figure outsourcing contract that will result. This is a challenge worthy of a superstar.


In this role you will manage Hardware and Shared Infrastructure Software sourcing initiatives, support the post contract supplier management of critical suppliers, and liaise with the legal department to ensure favourable commercial terms. In addition you will constantly interact with senior management to relay critical information about vendor relations and contracts. This is an excellent opportunity for a qualified candidate who has had strategic sourcing experience looking to manage a high visibility, multi-million dollar project for a leading investment bank.


This is a Senior position and we expect that successful candidates will have 10 years of combined experience, with at least 3 in a technology sourcing or CTO role, and either experience in, or considerable exposure or education in finance and financial services. A Bachelor’s degree is preferred, but candidates with equivalent experience and an ISM CPSM or equivalent certification will be considered.

In order to be considered for this position, you must have worked as a hardware and software sourcing manager on a global scale within the financial services industry for several years.


ABC Bank is top-tier international investment bank that is in the Fortune 500 in the US and the Global 1000. ABC encourages a culture of open communication, teamwork, and innovation and believes its results, and not hours, location, or overtime that counts. Employees can work flex hours and telecommute when needed, and take advantage of leading processes and tools to get results. Each sourcing manager is given access to a complete sourcing suite that includes an analysis engine, an optimization engine, and an end-to-end negotiation and contract management engine to make the sourcing process as smooth and efficient as possible.

A top tier investment bank.

Complete information on the role, our company, and our culture can be found on our corporate website, www.abcbank.com. The corporate job ID is 647862, and the complete description can be used by searching for this job ID in the careers portal. Applications can be submitted on our site, e-mailed to career-647862@abcbank.com, or faxed to 866 555 5555. If you have any questions, you can e-mail questions-647862@abcbank.com, speak to one of our HR professionals in an on-line chat between 9 and 5 ET, Monday to Friday, by way of the career chat feature in the careers portal, or call 888 555 5555. If no one is available to take your call, leave a voice mail and we will get back to you within 1 business day. All applications will be acknowledged when received, and all applicants who apply by the closing date of August 31, 2011 will be notified of whether or not they were selected for an interview by September 15, 2011. Those candidates selected for an interview will be contacted within one week of notification to set up a time. ABC Bank appreciates your interest and hopes we can exceed your expectations.

E-mail careers@recruiter.com

Unlike the carbon-copy blah-blah-blah, this advertisement is specific, focussed on the role, educationally and experientially defined, clear on corporate culture and benefit information, and complete in contact information. It could use some work, but considering the doctor banged it out in 30 minutes, it’s not bad. And it makes a point. It’s not hard to write a good job advertisement if you want to. So if you really want talent, you’ll do it.

Your Browser Matters

While using Internet Explorer will not make you dumb, if you are using it, you probably are. That’s what a recent study by AptiQuant, that a gave more than 100,000 participants an IQ test while monitoring which browser they used to take the test, found. The results, nicely summarized in this CNN article that asks if Internet Explorer Users [are] Dumb, found that users of IE6 scored the lowest on the tests, with a score of just over 80, while users of Opera (the doctor‘s preferred browser by the way, using it since, believe it or not, 1997 when Opera 3.0 was released) scored the highest at well over 120. In other words, IE Users were at the bottom of the “dullness” range while Opera Users have “very superior intelligence” or, for the more technical, in order to include IE users, you have to go two standard deviations from the mean down, and in order to include Opera users, you have to go two standard deviations from the mean up.

Cheap shot at IE users? Oh yeah. Do they deserve it? Probably. There’s no excuse to be using IE, the most non-standards compliant browser on the market, when Firefox, Chrome, and even Safari are leagues ahead and cross-platform. Consider the recent HTML5 Browser Scorecard. IE9 Beta supports a mere 96 HTML 5 features, while Safari 5, Chrome 8, and Firefox 5 support over 200 features. So drop IE. Even if it doesn’t raise your IQ (as the doctor understands that correlation is not causation), at least no one will think you’re dumb.

Efficiency is Never Bad. It’s the Focus on Cost-Cutting that Kills You!

Glancing through my notes, I came across this piece in S&DC Executive from the early spring that asked if “too much efficiency [can] be a bad thing”. I bookmarked it because articles like this really grind my gears. We have enough problems without respected publications publishing idiotic articles, such as this, that try to answer difficult problems with findings from studies that identify correlation, not causation. (And as Pinky and the Brain explained in their brilliant lesson in statistics, correlation and causation are not the same thing. Simply put, correlation measures the relationship betwee effects, which have underlying causes.)

And while I fully believe the results from the in-depth study that asked what drives financial performance and analyzed the financial performance of publicly traded U.S. manufacturing firms from 1991 to 2006, as reported in Volume 29: Issue 3 of the Journal of Operations Management, I reject the editorial staff’s claim that the results present empirical evidence to support the view [that too much efficiency is a bad thing]. Efficiency is never a bad thing. It’s the principles guiding the application of the efficiency that is the problem.

As the article states, if there is no slack in the supply chain when a disruption occurs, then this will cause operational problems that will result in a negative financial impact. But the decision to go all-out with a Just-In-Time (JIT) philosophy is not an efficiency decision, it’s a cost-cutting decision. Less stock means less inventory and carrying costs. So some firms, in their effort to save every penny, go ultra-lean and then run into serious problem when a demand surge or supply disruption hits.

Efficiency corresponds to the production, inventory, and logistical processes used to manufacture, store, and ship the goods. It’s streamlining the process to eliminate time and resource waste, not cutting production quotas to dangerous levels. It’s minimizing packaging and storage space requirements by maximizing package integrity and space utilization, not eliminating safety stock. And it’s optimizing the distribution network for quick and affordable shipping, not altering lot sizes to fill an existing truck or lane to save a few pennies on shipping costs (when there are dollars to be saved from a network redesign).

Efficiency is never bad. Only ill-conceived supply chain design decisions and overly ambitious cost cutting is bad. And anyone who thinks otherwise doesn’t understand what efficiency means.

If This is Your Advertisement for a Sourcing Manager, You Have a Talent Management Problem.

You can’t manage talent unless you have talent. In order to have talent, you have to attract talent. In order to attract talent, you need to have an interesting job and an exciting career path for them. And, unless you already know of some really good candidates that you think you can attract, because you have talent who has worked with these people before and is actively recruiting them for you, your only hope to attract the attention of talent is through a public job advertisement. And I can tell you right now that you’re not going to attract anyone if your job advertisement isn’t good.

For example, if you send out something like the following, which is along the lines of something that recently hit my inbox, don’t expect much. (A few details have been changed to protect the guilty.)

Here’s a superb opportunity for an experienced sourcing manager within the hardware and software domains looking to join a top tier investment bank. This is a permanent position based out of New York City that will pay a base salary of 150K plus a competitive bonus and benefits package.

 

In this role you will manage Hardware and Shared Infrastructure Software sourcing initiatives, support the post contract supplier management of critical suppliers, and liaise with the legal department to ensure favourable commercial terms. In addition you will constantly interact with senior management to relay critical information about vendor relations and contracts.

In order to be considered for this position, you must have worked as a hardware and software sourcing manager on a global scale within the financial services industry for several years.


This is an excellent opportunity for a qualified candidate who has had strategic sourcing experience looking to manage a high visibility, multi-million dollar project for a leading investment bank.

Now, many HR people are probably saying “what’s wrong with this?”. The answer, just about everything. There’s so much wrong that I don’t even know where to start, and I already wrote a long reply to the sender about how, in my opinion, their chances of finding a top candidate with this was pretty slim. But let’s take it from the top.

Top Tier Investment Bank
If the bank is so good, why are they hiding that they are looking for a talented candidate. Good brands attract good talent.

Based out of New York … will pay (a) competitive …
How competitive? An investment bank in new york is likely in the financial district where nearby 2-bedroom apartments go for 2,500 a month. (In comparison, in the North Dallas area, you can get a 2,000 sq. ft home for 1,000 a month.) New York has one of the highest tax burdens. In fact, it’s about 40% cheaper to live in Dallas than New York. So, 90K in North Dallas is almost as good as 150K in New York. A salary range should not be mentioned unless it’s better than average for the region and, if you’re looking nationally, attractive to top talent in other cities with similar talent. (And given that top talent in Dallas, Texas will probably be making 120K, it might actually be a pay cut for them in terms of their net cash position.)

manage Hardware and Shared Infrastructure Software sourcing initiatives, support the post contract supplier management of critical suppliers, and liaise with the legal department to ensure favourable commercial terms
In other words, what you would do in any sourcing job that managed the IT category. What is different or unique?

you must have worked as a hardware and software sourcing manager … within the financial services industry
So, unless you’ve worked for a bank, you haven’t done squat? Let’s ignore the fact that many multi-national retail companies need systems that are actually more complex as they have to manage a myriad of tax issues across multiple countries and states, manage global logistics, and allow for TCO calculations on products and services with a global footprint. And let’s ignore the fact that sometimes the best talent is someone from outside the industry who brings fresh insights on how to do things more efficiently and effectively. Like Alan Mulally who turned around Ford almost single-handedly with essentially the same team as his predecessor.

a multi-million dollar project
Well, duh. First of all, most financial institutions support a number of on-line, real-time systems that require banks of servers in geographically dispersed data centres. A 13U rack of high-density, low-power blades can easily cost 250K to 500K. So it’s obviously in the millions. It only gets interesting in the tens of millions or more.

high visibility … project
So, there might actually be something exciting to attract a candidate and you don’t at least drop a hint?

All I can say is if you write this swill, don’t be surprised if your applicant pool is full of swine. The vast majority of candidates who are going to apply to this are going to be out of work or not content with their current work, and probably a little desperate. Given that top talent saves an organization money, if a sourcing manager is out of work, there’s a good chance there’s a reason for that. Similarly, if a candidate is not happy, there’s typically a reason for that too. And these days, it’s because they’re overworked. But let’s not kid ourselves. Chances are that, given most corporate situations and the economy, they’re going to be overworked in your job too. And if they can’t stand the heat … (Now, sometimes they’re just unlucky and got axed in an across-the-board cut and sometimes they really do have a bad boss, but it’s not the norm, and most of the candidates that do apply will likely not be right for your organization.)

Master of Business Annihilation

After reading a number of recent articles on the decline of American Industry and the rise in MBAs, including this recent article in Time on “why a rise in MBAs coincided with the fall of American Industry”, I’ve decided that what MBAs were really being trained for was Annihilation of the economy.

I have to agree with Bob Lutz, who, in his new book on Car Guys vs. Bean Counters: The Battle for the Soul of American Business, says that we need to fire the MBAs and let engineers run the show. After all, who else would insist that a Cadillac ashtray be designed to function at -40F (which means that it won’t function at normal temperatures and will stay closed unless you’re in North Dakota, Northern Maine, or Canada in the middle of winter).

Just “imagine Apple with an MBA on top”, like Brooke Crothers did. There’d be no iPad and no iPhone — just netbooks and Motorola Rokr clones to take their place. After all, if you’re a MBA, all products have to be low risk, devoid of inspiration, and easy on the balance sheet. And if you’re an engineering pitching a MacBook Air to an Executive MBA for the first time, you know you’re going to hear “What? You’re saying you want to build a unibody laptop out of one piece of aluminum with only a few connectors? Do you know how much that will cost to build? I don’t see anyone else doing it? HP? Sony? And who’s going to buy it? Are you brain-dead?. And then when you try to pitch the iPad, you’re likely to get a “Hold it. Stop. I’ve heard enough. 10 inches but no physical keyboard? What would anyone use it for? Just buy a laptop. And we already make those. And I suppose you’d want to make that out of aluminum too with almost no ports. What rock did you crawl out from under? Where’s your cost argument? Didn’t you get the memo?“.

In other words, MBAs are increasingly trending toward the short-term, myopically balance-sheet-driven management that has infected American business. And while I’m all for mathematical modelling, game theory, and complex statistical analysis, they have their place. And their place is to reduce sourcing cost, not to restrict product innovation. Before the MBAs took over in the late 70s, the leading companies spent most of their time and money on new technologies to create the best possible products or service on the if you build it better, the customers will come philosophy. Which, if you look back, worked great for almost a century. Then came the MBAs. And now entire industries, like the automotive sector, are in decline.

And it’s all because of MBAs and their balance-sheet-driven management that is focussed on the quarterly numbers. As the TIME article notes, this just results in planning that’s reactive rather than smart: force the highest-paid engineers to retire, even if they are the best, and reduce payroll costs across all divisions rather than invest in the ones that are pushing the New New Thing through the pipeline. And when your brightest engineer, like your top coder, is many times more productive than an average engineer, as she is the one coming up with great new product designs, lean process reductions, and sustainable designs (that your marketing department can go goo-goo ga-ga over), this is just stupid.

Moreover, it’s ultimately their focus on the quarterly numbers that is responsible for the extended jobless recovery that we are undergoing right now. After all, as Jeffrey Immelt told a jobs summit at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, responsibility for hiring lays with business. Business have to take action — like taking some risks, and thinking about bringing back jobs that had been moved overseas.

And this, of course, is precisely what the MBAs are advising against. Taking risks means risking the quarterly numbers, moving jobs back means, at least initially, increasing payroll cost (even though, with good ol’ American ingenuity, productivity might more than make up for it over the long term), and going first means breaking with the pack that is now blaming debt ceiling uncertainty for the jobless recovery instead of their own incompetence.

And while a change in government policies, such as new free trade agreements, a reform of visa rules, and an overhaul of procedures for permitting new projects will help, they are not hindering the average business. There’s often an alternative source for raw materials, products, and services where a free trade agreement is in place. The visa limits are high enough at the present time, considering no one is hiring anyway. Plus, if more American firms would follow Blum Inc’s example and build their own Apprenticeship program, they would have more than enough talent at home to choose from. And given the current administration’s need to create jobs, there is a real interest to make sure projects are permitted by any organization that follows all the rules. (This means you will need an expert in red-tape, but that will always be the case. Government is not ever going to regulate themselves out of the way.)

There’s just no evidence to the contrary. MBAs are the Masters of Business Annihilation.