Interview - Chuck Taylor, VP of Marketing for Affinity Circles

by Jim Stroud

I read a lot of content. (A LOT!) Some I find online, other times people send me stuff for my opinion. Recently in my inbox, I discovered a white paper called - "Winning The War For Talent." I looked it over, liked it and found myself going over the papragraphs with a magnifying glass wanting more insight. So I emailed the VP Of Marketing - Chuck Taylor and riddled him with questions. To his credit, he did not let me drive him bonkers with all of my questions. (Smile) I wanted to share his insights with you guys (and some of my own), so I added them below. Enjoy!

The quotes below are all from Affinity Circles' White Paper - "Winning the War for Talent." (Click here to download)

Your report says:

"In addition, there is a shortage of students entering professional fields such as engineering, technology and medicine. In the 21st century labor market, the U.S. Dept of Education predicts that 60 percent of jobs will require skills possessed by only 20 percent of the workforce."

Jim: Do you think that the American Workforce is losing its grasp on innovation? How well do you think that companies are preparing to deal with the issue of (potentially) having to outsource professional work since there is not enough new talent coming in over the next decade?

Chuck: I don't claim to be an authority on the issue of employers losing their competitive edge due to outsourcing, but I think it's a great question to debate. Most of what I have read recently from globalization thought leaders such as Jack Welch, Lou Dobbs, Robert Reich, etc. suggest that outsourcing our knowledge workers poses a definite long term risk to our economy.

Your report says:

"Online job boards such as Monster.com and CareerBuilder.com have attempted to solve this problem by aggregating job postings and job seekers. But rather than delivering better results for employers, these communities flood the applicant pool with active job seekers who are frequently under qualified for professional positions."

Jim: Monster tried adding social networking to their site before, but just didn't get it. You think if they (and others like them) figured it out that they will be able to survive?

Chuck: I think job boards like MNST have two tremendous assets: job content and candidate traffic/data. Offering a closed marketplace to connect candidates with jobs may have worked well for several years, but now, employers can distribute job content across the web (for free) and candidates can find jobs through relationships instead of through job listings and resume databases. Thus, in order to stay relevant, job boards have to figure out a way to help employers build relationships with candidates, and their biggest assets are not going to help them do that. Job listings are too transactional, and resume databases don't provide any reputational information. I think job boards have to reinvent themselves fast or they will become obsolete, in the same way that newspaper classifieds have become for professional recruiting. (one caveat: newspapers and job boards are still well suited in their current form to non-exempt hiring, since that type of recruiting is much more transactional in nature. In that case, localization capabilities in sales (on the employer side) and search (on the job seeker side) are far more important than social networking. Job boards/Newspaper partnerships suggest that their strategy is to leverage the assets they currently have to maintain their revenue growth. That is fine, but it's unclear if they can do that while at the same time competing with social networks on the professional recruiting marketing.

Your report says:

"First they provide no authentication of the opportunities being presented within the community, the employers offering the opportunities, or the candidates being targeted. With no pre-qualification or screening, community members may not be the professionals they claim to be, and their academic credentials may be real or fabricated. The fact that there is no way to tell if someone is accurately representing themselves creates a credibility gap that can repel the best employers and candidates."

Jim: That being said, why do you think they have grown in popularity with recruiters? Is it because there has been no reliable alternative? Also, Facebook had some heat from its users recently around certain privacy issues and who controlled their data. You hear about that? What do you think about it?

Chuck: That is a great question. Why do employers and candidates use open social networks if they are inherently flawed? I think the answer is that the viral effects of an open network support very high growth, and they are better than nothing. Unfortunately, the flaws in many ways increase as a function of their size (trust goes down as the number of connections grows), and there are inadequate privacy controls for users since the business model depends on selling unrestricted access to recruiters. For this reason, there has been increased interest in niche, private networks such as those that Affinity Circles provides.

Your report says:

"In a competitive job market, candidates often have multiple choices, and a known entity is usually preferred."

Jim: How does your product help the "little guy" startup companies looking for the same talent?

Chuck: Great question. Our product is great for employers with low employment brand awareness in a few ways. First, we allow them to establish a branded presence (an employer profile) within sanctioned, trusted networks, which gives them much more credibility than they would have in an open network (ie. community members infer that their organization has endorsed the employer's efforts to recruit them). This trust is even more enhanced if their employees happen to be members of the community, since those employees can put a face on the company, ie. If I am a target candidate, I may never have heard of the company, but I may be interested if I know someone who works there. Second, the employer profile is the same size and functionality regardless of the size of the employer, so we provide a "level playing field" for the little guys. Third, we help small employers proactively reach out to people in the community through targeted ads to member home pages that drive awareness of their opportunities. These targeted ads provide even the smallest employers with the means to reach and engage the most desirable candidates.

Your report says:

"Narrowcasting can be most effectively applied in affinity-based organizations, where professionals with common interests actively congregate and network, such as alumni associations and professional trade associations. Using shared affinities to target candidates also helps reduce the risk of a bad cultural fit with a company - a problem experienced by 85 percent of human resource managers surveyed by OfficeTeam."

Jim: Many companies get a high percentage of their hires through employee referrals. Would your product compete with a company's employee referral program, or accentuate it?

Chuck: Good question. Our solution can supercharge an employer's employee referral program by highlighting relevant employees to candidates that the employer is trying to recruit. For example, if Google targets a candidate inside of the Stanford alumni community, that candidate will see their personal connections to all Stanford alumni who are Google employees, which makes it much easier for those employees to act as resources for that candidate, including providing additional information about the opportunity and providing references to the hiring manager.

Jim: Okay, here's a question you probably get a lot. What makes your product any better than LinkedIn and sites like it?

Chuck: I wouldn't say we are better than Linked In, since their phenomenal growth demonstrates they are providing value to users and advertisers. However, I would say we are different in an important way. While Linked In does a great job of allowing individuals to create a large network of personal connections, they prevent direct communication to individuals who are not connected, which makes it very difficult for individuals to access the resources of the entire network without investing significant time building out their network or choosing to pay Linked In a substantial fee for the right to sell unsolicited emails. Neither of those choices is ideal. What Affinity Circles does by contrast is create an exclusive network for the members of an established organization, where members can contact anyone in the network without having to create a direct connection first. This reduces the level of effort for users without reducing the level of trust.

Jim: Thank you for your time Chuck!

Chuck: My pleasure.

I recommend reading the rest of Affinity Circles' white paper - "Winning The War For Talent."

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