In the eye of the hurricane

In December, I wrote about the hurricane that would hit the job board industry. Well, the hurricane landed and it’s tearing a path of destruction through the recruiting business. When hurricanes land, there is a lot of hyperactivity when everyone is looking for shelter. We get a flood of partnership proposals that only benefit the parties proposing them and a lot of people want to talk to “find synergies”. Voicemail from sales reps pick up as well… many seem to think that perhaps the 25th call will be the charm.

Keeping your family or business safe in a hurricane recquires a lot of teamwork handling preparations, contingency plans and situation management.  It’s a bit like a performance because you are tested in a sink or swim way in a specific time and place with all eyes upon you. In spite of the suffering which most of us have shared, watching my team work together over the last six months has been one of the most satisfying and memorable periods of my career. Thank you team LatPro!! Watch the hands moving in this video as you listen and you may get a small sense of it.

But, a hurricane is not a concert. As hurricane Wilma’s intensity grew, I was hearing the wind roar and scream as I watched it whip palms fronds out horizontally and drive walls of water across my backyard. The sliding glass doors were pushing in and out and the house shuddering, when suddenly, my neighbors trampoline flew into the air and smashed into the top corner of my pool screen enclosure. In another second, it blew off,  flying several hundred yards in the air before tumbling across the ground disappearing out of sight in the next block. In a real hurricane like this, there is the sense that our world is disintegrating under forces outside of our control. Fear of the unknown is the rule.

My mind, though, was elsewhere – I had decided that the future of our business was tied to Hispanic.com, a domain that I had been pursuing. I had obtained a verbal commitment from the owner to sell at an extremely reasonable price. But, at the very peak of the hurricane I was on the phone with the owner of the domain learning that my purchase was unraveling. My mood as I saw this gem slip through my fingers was perfectly matched by the weather.

Then, if you are in the direct path of the hurricane, as we are in the recruiting industry, the violence subsides as the eye of the hurricane passes through. This is where I believe we are today. In this phase, there is less noise. And today, a good number of my e-mails and voicemails go unreturned…   People are busy evaluating the damage and implementing whatever plans they came up with during the initial panic. If you poke your head outside you will see your neighbors doing the same thing… looking up and down the street at the mess. I even saw a small patch of blue sky in the eye of hurricane Wilma.  But it’s not time for cleanup yet, because next comes the backside of the storm (coming this summer to our neighborhood) and it packs a bigger wallop. So, brace yourselves!

After you get slammed a second time, the storm finally subsides and there is another round of hyperactivity as everyone gets busy with their checkbooks, chainsaws and wheelbarrows. When a big hurricane like this one moves through, it leaves your neighborhood unrecognizable. At first it looks like a garbage dump with downed power lines and uprooted trees strewn all over. Later, it will look nice and neat again, but with so few trees left standing it’s a different neighborhood.

After hurricane Wilma and the tremendous blow of losing the Hispanic.com domain, I searched deeply and came up with something far better then Hispanic.com – DiversityJobs.com.  We have been running a pay-for-performance job search engine at DiversityJobs.com for over a year now and while it’s still small, it’s the future for us. It’s a snapshot of the power for creative destruction of a big hurricane like the one rolling through now.

A big storm or several of them in in a row as we experienced in Florida is a major stressor that can exacerbate ‘pre-existing conditions’ and accelerate change.  Most of the job search companies that go out of business this year, will say it was the economy. But, the hard truth is that in most cases it won’t be the economy. The real underlying cause is failure to create sufficient value.  Look at all the retailers going out of business this year while Amazon.com, Zappos.com and B&H boom… look at Netflix.com stomping all over Blockbuster.  Consider that there are also job search engines that are booming right now even as my company and most others suffer.

So, here’s what I think our neighborhood is going to look like after the debris is picked up:

• Instead of 40,000 job boards, common wisdom will be that there are hundreds of thousands if not 1,000,000 or more in existence.
• Pay-for-performance recruitment advertising, job posting and resume search will have established a strong toehold and begin to thrive.
• ‘Don’t sell me… show me!’ will become the new mantra in hiring and purchasing.
• Job boards will be forced to evolve. They will have to choose between being a traffic broker or social networks with feet on the ground locally. In practice, most will only have one option.

I’ll try to hit on these topics with some follow-up blog posts.

What do you see coming when the dust settles?

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