Posted on July 29, 2009 by Miller
I really enjoyed this post from Travis about his job search. It sucks that he’s having a hard time finding work, but his story of applying for work at Best Buy got me thinking.
from Travis’ post - “You see, it’s become common for national chains like this one to submit applicants to a long personality survey before they even look at your application. I guess since it’s run by a faceless boardroom at an unknown location, a personal touch isn’t really necessary if you can weed out perspective employees by asking them ridiculous questions for an extended period of time, and grade them by unknown standards.”
Basically, whether you want to work at Best Buy, Target, Wal-Mart or many other big-box stores, you can’t walk in and submit your application to a human anymore. No, off to the hiring kiosks you go. You’ll see them - they’re probably right next to a customer service station where returns and exchanges are processed. That way, everyone in the store can watch you apply - by machine.
After submitting your personality profile and answering a bunch of questions, the machine will sort all the applicants and I’m sure establish a threshold for hiring. Should you make the machine’s cut - then MAYBE you’ll get to talk to an actual human about a job. I also think that if you are hired then most of your ‘training’ will be via kiosk as well.
The point is, what does this system say about how these companies value their workforce? It says that they don’t even care enough to make hiring decisions based on demeanor, or a good face to face interaction - unless you pass the machine’s test. It says that the gig probably sucks, and that turnover is high so since you’re going to quit anyway, why invest human resources (expensive) in hiring entry level employees (btw, turnover has real costs as well - retraining, re-filing paperwork, rescheduling, etc).
You can read the full post about Travis’ hiring experience (or lack thereof) at his blog.
What stories do your hiring practices tell about your business? And what are people perceptions on how you value YOUR employees?
Posted on July 21, 2009 by Miller
In Utica, NY we have one daily paper that’s actually printed - The Observer Dispatch. When I was checking it this morning I noticed that they have launched an ‘online e-edition.’ I’m a curious creature - so I checked it out.
This is a paid premium service ($10 / mo. or $1 extra per year if you’re a paper subscriber).
My first impression was that it was basically a clickable PDF scan of the paper next to the text version of the article that you would normally see on the web. I was able to turn pages, zoom, etc. But it left me scratching my head…how is this a premium product compared to the regular website?
Granted, it is kind of cool the first time you see it once you get the hang of navigating. And the PDF downloads on the sample looked great. Don’t get me wrong, I applaud them for trying something different, but I get a sense that they’re trying to provide an alternative to the tangibility of paper - and give people who read a newspaper the same layout they’re used to. I just think there are some missed opportunities. No stories had hyperlinks in them or commenting capability, just a link to the ‘full story’ with a graphic of the paper to the left of the text.
What about moving to the next level of a newspaper website, providing content as well features that make it highly sharable, mobile, and interacitve… Charge for that.
What kinds of features? First, allow people to comment on everything, from pictures, to each news story. Show the most popular articles on the front pages as determined by the users - above the fold. Feature local bloggers or most popular comments. Take submissions from the community- a la Huffington Post. Use services like Facebook Connect or the TWitter API to let users tie their social profiles to comments and take the discussion across platforms.
Check out Gina’s piece on media transitions over at Save the Media (don’t stop with that one, she’s got a lot of great posts). She argues that through these transitions Something will be gained and something will be lost. Get over it. But trust your readers and users to help find ways to deliver the content they want at a fair price.
Take It Mobile
I should also mention that the New York Times is crushing the mobile gig. I’m super impressed by their iPhone app - everything from the layout, to search really makes reading the news on a mobile device feel natural (now if only I could tweet links instead of e-mailing them). But the point is that they’re building something that’s got a slick design, good content, and mobile. Once they get the user connectivity down, it would be a service that I would glady pay a monthly fee for.
The same can be said of the way they are utilizing the Kindle to deliver content and make it a revenue stream (though I haven’t used it - it looks damn good).
I can only speak for myself when I say that I would gladly pay for quality content that is on-demand, easy to navigate, mobile, and can be consumed on a device of my choosing. If newspapers think that what will save them is giving people the digital version of thumbing through a paper, then they’re in bigger trouble than we thought. This isn’t a discussion about whether or not content should always be free. I’m just saying that all eyes are on the newspaper industry to try something bold. Starting with making a kick ass premium (but affordable) service for users, or finding a better way to create value for advertisers is a start.
What do you think? Am I way off base on this? What’s your opinion of the e-edition?
Posted on July 13, 2009 by Miller
I was listening to This American Life online over the weekend. Normally I try to catch it live but hit up the podcast this time. Before the show plays, you get a nice message from Ira Glass telling you that the podcast is very popular and eats a lot of bandwidth – and bandwidth is expensive. So it’s very important that you support the program with a financial contribution. And it is. I try to pledge my support every year to my NPR station (you kick ass, WRVO). You should too.
Bandwidth had to be one of the most expensive costs for NPR. But I have a theory about it that I wanted to throw out to the web to see what comes back at me. For streaming live audio, I don’t see a lot that can be done to get around the cost of pushing that data to thousands of happy NPR listeners. But I wonder about the archived programs, the podcasts, the non-live chunks of audio that make up a large percentage of the audio bandwidth that NPR is responsible for pushing out.
Why couldn’t NPR use a decentralized structure for distributing its archived programs to listeners – via the bittorrent network – instead of dumping the cost of delivery on itself and relying only on contributions to support it. If they were to open the floodgates of archived shows from This American Life to Morning Edition and all points in between – curators would emerge that would volunteer to host a small collection of archived NPR data files on their home computers and serve them to other users. This would decentralize the bandwidth issue, using small amounts of the individual pipes from ‘Platinum NPR Digital Super Awesome Supporters’ instead of NPR’s servers. In much the same way that people collect and share complete shows of Dave Matthews Band, The Dead, etc. the redundancy of that data being shared would result in an even smaller impact on the individual user – since now we’re only pulling pieces of each file from each user.
What do you think? Is this even feasible? Would it build community or would it crash and burn? Regardless, what opportunities and challenges exist for organizations to decentralize their data? I’d love to know – leave a comment and show some love.
