Author: Douglas Wolk

Song was launched less than two years ago as a division of Delta Air Lines that could take over Delta Express’ old discount leisure routes, compete with JetBlue and act as a test lab for new ideas for air travel. It’s already drawn attention for being a very different sort of airline–for its employees as well as its customers.

    Workforce Management spoke to Tim Mapes, Song’s managing director of marketing, and Jaime Jewell, general manager of brand activation and training, about how the company chooses and manages its flight attendants.

    Workforce Management: You hired everyone at Song from Delta’s employee base. How did you select them?

Jewell: It was a huge advantage to be able to go in and be very specific about the brand behaviors we were looking for. We wanted people who would be a good fit with the culture, as well as the job requirements. So we had an audition process, which was very new to the people at Delta. They were asked to respond to a set of fairly open-ended scenarios that you might see when you fly–to make the customer happy, do the right thing and feel good about themselves at the end, within the context of the culture we’ve set up for them.

Mapes: Before we created Song, we did a tremendous amount of research among both customers and our frontline employees, and there were striking parallels in their feedback: that air travel, in general, feels almost oppressive in its policies and procedures and almost militaristic in how it goes about what would otherwise be a customer-service experience.

Employees as well as customers felt trapped in the system. The name Song came from the idea of self-expression, and that’s what we were looking for. Flight attendants traditionally read a script from something called the Red Book, which is an FAA-documented script; that’s why they all talk alike, with really bizarre language like the “aft lavatory.” We sought people out who, for example, could incorporate their own personalities into the speaking points. And we have them come off the plane into the gate area to introduce themselves. It requires a level of personal confidence and willingness to interact with people.

    Workforce: Let’s say there’s one flight attendant who’s perfect for Song and not so perfect for Delta, and another who’s perfect for Delta and not so perfect for Song. What would be the differences between them?

Mapes: Because Delta’s largely dealing with a business-travel audience, there is a formality to the way our Delta flight attendants act. In Song’s case, these are flights that leave from New York and go to five cities in Florida, Las Vegas or Nassau, for the most part. These are people who are on vacation and want to have a little bit more fun. So it’s more informal or relaxed on Song, and more professional on Delta.

    Workforce: How do you evaluate Song employees’ performance?

Mapes: Flight attendants are largely an unsupervised workforce–obviously, there’s not management flying around with them. We try to give folks the tools they tell us they need to serve customers, and then let them go. These are seasoned airline veterans. We don’t have a performance measurement system that would require something like a checklist or a formal evaluation. We do go out and talk with them as often as we can, and ask them what they’re experiencing. The role of the Song headquarters is essentially to support the front line.

Jewell: We encourage peer-to-peer feedback. We have a group called peer coaches, who go out into the system and offer support for new attendants and new procedures. … That’s been very helpful, and pretty well received.

    Workforce: You’ve said that you conceived of Song as a culture more than an airline. What’s come out of the culture that’s surprised you?

Mapes: The degree to which it’s egalitarian. Frontline employees have our president’s cell phone number. We host a conference call twice a month where they can ask any leader of the company any question. When you provide people with as much visibility and access as possible, they totally buy into what we’re trying to do, to the point of submitting product development and customer-service ideas.

One flight attendant in Tampa–his name is Will–came up with an idea to sell pink martinis on board and provide a portion of the proceeds to breast cancer research. We got this e-mail from him, and we jumped on it. It spread organically through the whole system that anybody who has a good idea can submit it and it gets acted on.

The people in the field who are the most vocal critics of what we do are asked to assume the leadership of fixing it. It takes someone who would’ve been out on the periphery and turns them into an engaged, vocal advocate. We sell food on board, and there were some flight attendants who had ideas on how we could do that better. We said, “OK, we hear you loud and clear. Why don’t you come forward with a plan to fix this?” And they did.

Jewell: We’ve also created a few special assignment positions around the system. Flight attendants or gate agents can be promoted into a short-term assignment that lets them test their abilities and see what it’d be like to be in a greater leadership position. It’s really worked out great.

    Workforce: How do you keep your employees connected to the brand?

Jewell: We have visible leadership and easily accessible management–we have an annual event called Songapalooza, where we bring everyone back together with the entire leadership team at an off-site location.

We walk them through the year’s business plan and marketing plan, addressing performance gaps and giving them an attaboy for the ones we’re doing great on. We spent almost the entire month of May this year working with frontline groups, and scheduled leaders to spend three days a week with them. We make the time.

    Workforce: What do you think people outside the travel industry should learn from the Song way of doing things?

Mapes: Marketing people tend to do an enormous amount of customer research, (but) they don’t use the same tools to go to their employees and develop similar insights. We did with our flight attendants and customer service agents, and it pays enormous dividends. When we see our customer-satisfaction tracking results, it’s the Song people and the interactions they have with our passengers on board that makes for the most frequent quote we hear, which is “This was the best flight I’ve ever had.”

Jewell: To be really proud of your product is a huge thing. If our front line feels really good about what they’re presenting–and that includes themselves, dressed in Kate Spade and Jack Spade uniforms–that has an enormous impact on the way the product is received.

When Geoff Workman, vice president of business development with the online event registration company Acteva, was recently looking for a consultant who specialized in payment processing, he didn’t advertise it on a job site; he looked for passive candidates on a social-networking Web site, LinkedIn. That’s how he found Scott Loftesness, principal at the consulting firm Glenbrook Partners. “He referenced his company’s blog and Web site,” Workman says. “I started paying attention to the blog and Web site, realized they were indeed the experts I was looking for and contacted him. Now his firm is engaged in a contract with us, and there’s no way I’d have found them by a Google search, or without LinkedIn.”

    “Social networking” is the business buzzword of the moment. It’s become conventional wisdom among recruiters and workforce-management professionals that friends of friends (or friends of friends of friends) often make the best candidates. More than a hundred Web sites attempting to map and facilitate these interpersonal relationships have sprung up in the last few years. They might be the future of both job-hunting and recruiting–even if they’re not quite there yet.

    Among the social-networking sites currently operating, there is an immense variety of goals and means. There are personal sites (Friendster, MySpace), professional sites (Ryze, LinkedIn, ZeroDegrees), and sites that cover both sides of their users’ lives (Orkut, Tribe). Some business-oriented sites are built for targeted contacts: getting users in touch with specific people via friends of friends. Others are better suited for “crawling”: searching for people by shared interests, former employers or chains of personal recommendations. Big money is flowing into social networking. Barry Diller’s InterActive Corp. acquired ZeroDegrees earlier this year. Sequoia Capital has invested in LinkedIn, and Google is throwing its weight behind Orkut.

    Many of the sites rely on their users to input information directly. A few, like Eliyon and Spoke, harvest data about people wherever they can find it. And Clay Shirky, an adjunct professor at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, notes that services that had existing social networks and didn’t see the rise of social-networking software coming, such as Monster and Yahoo, have been reintegrating the idea of formal social networking into their operations.

Networks in action
    The largest business-oriented social-networking site, LinkedIn, claimed 800,000 registered users, most of them white-collar workers, as of July 2004. It is based on targeted networking, and guards its users’ privacy carefully; you can see who your contacts’ contacts are, but you have to be vetted by people you both know to communicate with them. The company recently partnered with DirectEmployers Association to provide job listings.

    Another major player in the field, Ryze, with upwards of 80,000 registered users, almost all professionals of one kind or another, was founded in 2001, ahead of the social-network curve. It centers on message boards meant for “interacting” and “growing organizations”–more business-based community-building than job-seeking. And it sponsors real-world events where users can meet. Other business-based networking sites include Monster Networking (which proactively introduces professional peers to each other) and ZeroDegrees (which distinguishes between “contacts,” “members,” “friends” and “inner circle,” and relies on a friends-of-friends introduction system similar to LinkedIn’s).

    Doug Stone, CEO of the interactive marketing firm Abstract Edge, was looking for a vice president of marketing and business development last fall, and ended up finding a half dozen candidates–and hiring one–via Ryze. “We used their data tools to conduct searches on everything from some of our competitors’ company names to keywords like marketing, interactive marketing and vice president of sales,” he says. At this point, Stone says, he’s likely to use LinkedIn as well for similar searches. “There are gatekeepers in LinkedIn–not anybody can contact anybody–and as a result I think higher-caliber people are willing to join it.”

    Workman agrees: “I think the digerati are very well represented within LinkedIn–it’s company founders, top executives.” He uses it extensively to recruit contractors and to look for candidates for the company’s full-time job openings, half of which are director level or higher. Workman also notes that LinkedIn is useful to him for running background checks on candidates, and finding out who they used to work with who doesn’t show up on their references. “The great thing about those references is that they haven’t been in touch with the candidate–it’s good for independent reference checking.”

Benefit could diminish
    As widespread as networking sites now are, though, the experts are skeptical about how useful they can be to recruiters in their current form. “The key on the Net is not who you know but who knows you,” says online-recruiting consultant Peter Weddle. “Networking is absolutely the secret weapon for effective online recruiting; it’s one of the best ways to reap passive job-seekers. But the yield from social networking is considerably lower than from the chat areas, bulletin boards and so on where like-minded professionals talk to their peers.”

    Compared to sites that require users to map their own social networks, Weddle says, Eliyon Technologies’ site “is much more robust–they’ve used their spider to compile dossiers on over 19 million Americans.” For free, he says, users can type in the name of a company and get a list of the people on whom the company has built dossiers.

    That “free” will be a factor in social software’s future usefulness, according to Peter Zollman, founding principal of the consulting service Classified Intelligence. “Right now, if you want to find people who work for a specific company, you can. But as soon as these sites start charging and people start dropping out, that benefit [for recruiters] is substantially diminished.” In other words, the pool of users who’d be willing to pay to use networking sites is likely to be substantially smaller, with a higher ratio of active to passive job-seekers.

Risky introductions
    Social technology and social networks are, significantly, not the same thing. As Molly Wright Steenson, associate professor of connected communities at the Interaction Design Institute in Ivrea, Italy, points out, economic systems and nation-states also qualify as social networks: they work because of personal relationships. Steenson argues that what’s needed to make social software more useful to recruiters are better ways of visualizing exactly how individual networks work. “Recruiters naturally try to understand who is a ‘sticky node’: who’s going to be the gold mine for the people they don’t already know. Decent visualization tools might make it easier to find out who seems like they’d know the right person. But there aren’t a lot of those tools.”

    And the sort of targeted networking available through sites like LinkedIn and ZeroDegrees, Steenson suggests, may actually be counterproductive: “Let’s say there’s someone who wants to meet my friend the CEO, and is using LinkedIn to try to pass the message to me. Whether or not I’d want to introduce someone to my important friend is going to depend on what I think of the person, because if I waste someone’s time, I’m going to damage my own relationship with that person”–and a friend-of-a-friend connection makes that sort of introduction much riskier.

The future of social networking
    Most experts agree that the purely social Web networks aren’t too useful for recruiters, but that hybrid social/business sites may be somewhat more helpful. Shirky says, “If you go to Orkut or Tribe communities and say, ‘We’re looking for this kind of person,’ that’s midway between crawling–searching by interest–and targeting, or being introduced to someone. But it also means that you have to do a lot more filtering of inappropriate candidates.”

    In any case, the mini-bubble of networking sites may well contract. That’s partly because the market can’t support hundreds of them, but also because the more there are, the less useful each one becomes–users don’t like the hassle of dealing with more than a few sites.

    Acteva’s Workman notes that networking sites are still in their infancy, and doesn’t believe they’ll ever replace conventional job-search sites altogether. But he does think that they can be a strong supplement. “Right now, they’re a secondary or tertiary tool that helps us find highly specialized consultants for given projects, and prospective candidates for positions,” he says. For now, social-networking sites are a large, unruly experiment, cash infusions notwithstanding. The real usefulness for recruiters is yet to come. Says Zollman: “I don’t know how many people have signed up on social-networking sites because they honestly believe this is a way to improve their business, and how many have signed up because they want to see what happens.”

Workforce Management, August 2004, pp. 70-73 — Subscribe Now!

As Monster and CareerBuilder battle for the leadership position in online recruiting, a nonprofit association is quietly and slowly influencing everything from what they charge to how coveted customers like Cingular Wireless calculate their recruiting results.

    In recent months, DirectEmployers has announced a partnership with Business.com, allied with the networking site LinkedIn, and deepened its relationship with the National Association of Colleges and Employers. Its member companies say it provides an economical way to draw job-seekers to their sites, and that it has devised innovative methods of connecting candidates with businesses, and businesses with each other. But questions remain about how cost-effective DirectEmployers is, especially for smaller companies, and whether it’s more significant for its actual traffic or simply for being an alternative to the policy at Monster.com, HotJobs and CareerBuilder of charging by the listing.

“Social welfare”
    Rather than containing listings itself, DirectEmployers.com is designed as a search engine. It currently indexes jobs listed by about 1,400 companies, sending job-seekers directly to the employers’ own Web sites. The site is run by the DirectEmployers Association, a nonprofit consortium of about 170 companies that each pay a flat fee of $12,500 a year. Member companies’ listings appear above others in search results. DirectEmployers will also post them to America’s Job Bank on request. And executive director Bill Warren reports that DirectEmployers is developing plans to make large and small cities’ job postings available.

    Warren, the former president of Monster.com, put together the DirectEmployers Association in early 2002. It’s set up as a nonprofit so that its member companies can own and manage it through the nonprofit association, without owning stock. It does, however, pay taxes as a for-profit organization. (According to Warren, it has applied to be a 501(c)(4) “social welfare” organization.)

    The association announced a partnership with Business.com at the beginning of June. DirectEmployers also provides job-search functionality for Classmates.com and LinkedIn. Asked about the financial arrangements, Warren says of all three partnerships, “We provide them a service, they provide us with additional traffic, and there’s no money exchanging hands; I can’t go into more detail than that.”

    In addition, DirectEmployers and the National Association of Colleges and Employers cosponsor NACElink, a recruiting system that connects employers’ job listings with college career centers’ résumés for students and recent graduates. NACElink now covers almost 350 schools, and plans to expand further. It’s currently beta-testing a campus interview program. But how many job placements has it led to? “The hirings are a tough one to measure,” says NACE’s executive director, Marilyn Mackes. “But when we were at 300 schools, we had more than 100,000 students using the system.”

    Steven Rothberg is president and founder of CollegeRecruiter.com. “We don’t feel like [NACElink’s] presence has hurt our business in the slightest, and in fact we think it’s helped our business,” Rothberg says. The DirectEmployers/NACE partnership, he says, has “hurt MonsterTRAK a lot more than they’ve hurt the smaller independent boards–they seem to have broken up what was close to a monopoly.”

Influencing market prices
    Other observers note that DirectEmployers itself is significant for challenging the big boards’ position–and providing an alternative to their spiraling fees. “Employers have reason to want a competitive environment,” says Peter Zollman, founding principal of Classified Intelligence. “They want to know that if Monster were to become as arrogant in pricing as newspapers used to be, there would be an online alternative. Now, with the tremendous growth in traffic and postings at CareerBuilder, the landscape has clearly changed since Monster was the overwhelming number one, with competitors barely visible in the distance.” (Asked to comment on DirectEmployers, a Monster representative noted that it has a policy of not commenting on other companies.)

    “I see the big commercial boards becoming something like the Wall Street Journal is now in terms of recruitment advertising, where people only go to them for hard-to-fill jobs,” Warren says. “Charging $300 to $400 per ad–that’s going to be tough in the future.”

    Paul White, director of staffing at Cingular Wireless (who is also on DirectEmployers’ board of directors), agrees that the presence of DirectEmployers has softened up the big boards’ costs to companies: “The major job boards are much more willing to negotiate pricing now, and we’re not seeing increases year after year.”

    Ray Schreyer, manager of Internet recruiting at DirectEmployers member IBM, says he remembers “when job boards cost $3,000 to $4,000 a year. But within a few years, we saw the cost for large companies rise to millions of dollars. DirectEmployers gives us hope for a level playing field.”

Competing on cost per candidate
    The question is, though, how many candidates–and of what quality–does DirectEmployers.com drive to its members’ listings? It’s hard to say. As of June 21, Alexa.com’s numerical rankings of Internet traffic listed Monster.com at 152, CareerBuilder at 316, HotJobs at 494 and DirectEmployers.com at 23,808. Then again, Warren says, “Alexa rankings do not apply in any way to us. A job-seeker will come to our site and stay there an average of about 22 seconds, and then they’re off to a corporate Web site. Our measurements are how many people are hired, and how effective it is for recruiters.”

    Still, there are no audited figures for the measurements Warren suggests. And workforce-management professionals, especially at smaller companies, want numbers that are comparably cost-effective to those of the big boards. “When I look at advertising media,” says Chuck Matthews, director of human resources with G&T Conveyor Co., “I’m very interested in knowing what the subscriber base is, how many Web site hits they get, how many unique visitors–it’s like a newspaper ad. DirectEmployers has solid companies, but I’ve never really found out how many hits they get. And they’re cost-prohibitive; for $12,500, I can do a lot more with other endeavors.”

    For larger companies with more positions available, though, the flat rate may represent less of their overall recruitment advertising costs. Cingular’s White says that, this year, DirectEmployers has driven about 23,000 candidates to Cingular’s listings–about 2,500 in all. “The major boards are driving more traffic,” he says, “but when you look at cost per candidate, it balances out to be roughly even.”

    Even so, because of DirectEmployers’ low-key approach, it’s still not well known among job-seekers. David Tanguay, CEO of recruitment-monitoring company Wanted Technologies, calls DirectEmployers “one of the best-kept secrets of job banks out there.”

    Randy Mehl, managing director at Robert W. Baird and one of the analysts who covers Monster.com, agrees that the word hasn’t gotten out: “DirectEmployers hasn’t had a noticeable influence yet.” The consortium’s members, Mehl says, are “companies that would probably pay a million dollars a year for online recruitment advertising–so about 1 percent of their budget goes to DirectEmployers….  Companies are paying for where you’re actually going to get candidate flow. I think the online recruitment segment can support growth, but it’s going to be challenging to make progress beyond the big three and the established niche job boards.”