HRExaminer Radio is a weekly show devoted to Recruiting and Recruiting Technology airing live on Friday’s at 11AM Pacific
HRExaminer Radio
Guest: Peter Weddle, CEO of WEDDLE’s Media Group
Episode: 147
Air Date: January 29, 2016
Peter Weddle has been the CEO of three HR consulting companies, a Partner in the Hay Group and the recipient of a Federal award for leadership-related research. Described by The Washington Post as “… a man filled with ingenious ideas,” he has authored or edited over two dozen books and been a columnist for The Wall Street Journal, National Business Employment Weekly and CNN.com.
His most recent books include A Prescription for the Soul: A Historical Novel About Boomers & the American Dream, A Multitude of Hope: A Novel About Rediscovering the American Dream, The Career Fitness Workbook: How to Find, Win & Hang Onto the Job of Your Dreams, The Career Activist Republic and The Success Matrix: Wisdom from the Web on How to Get Hired & Not Be Fired.
Weddle is also the CEO of WEDDLE’s Media Group, which operates both a print publishing company and six websites specializing in employment and career issues. In addition, he is the CEO of TAtech: The Association for Talent Acquisition Solutions (formerly IAEWS), the trade organization for the global talent acquisition technology industry.
An Airborne Ranger, Weddle is a graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point. He has attended Oxford University and holds advanced degrees from Middlebury College and Harvard University.
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Begin transcript
John Sumser:
Good morning and welcome to HRExaminer Radio. I’m your host John Sumser. We’re coming to you live today from beautiful downtown Occidental, California. It’s a little Swiss-style mountain village of about 1,100 people tucked in the hills just before you get to the ocean in Western Sonoma County. You may not know this, although if you’ve been listening in, you might have a clue, Occidental is famous because it’s where the technical backbone of California’s economy got started. It’s where Leland Stanford had his railroad laboratories and built his famous Bohemian Grove. Today, we’re going to be talking with Peter Weddle, who is the CEO of Weddle’s Media Group and something called TA Tech and we’re going to find out about both of those things in our conversation. Hi, Peter. How are you?
Peter Weddle:
Hey, John. It’s great to be here. I’m coming to you from snow-covered Connecticut along Long Island Sound where I can see seagulls out the window but everybody else is chilly.
John Sumser:
You know we’re having a cold snap here. It got under 50 last night and we are getting out the down comforters and shivering. It’s refuted that it’s going to get under 45 tonight. We’re building an extra fire.
Peter Weddle:
Well, if it were the nation’s capital you would be going home; you wouldn’t have to work.
John Sumser:
You know there’s an argument that says that’s not dependent on snow. Why don’t you take a moment and introduce yourself to the audience? I think there are people listening here who have not heard of you and should know about you and what [inaudible 00:02:13].
Peter Weddle:
Well, as you mentioned, I run a very small media group. We have a number of properties that range from CareerFitness.com, which is a site for not just job seekers but what we call career activists. What recruiters call the purple squirrels out there. They’re the people who are employed but are looking to advance in their career. It’s a site with resources for them to do so. We also have a publishing company. We publish our own books here. We’ve been publishing a guide to the 150,000-plus job boards association career centers and aggregators since 1999 and the American Staffing Association was kind enough to call that the zagat of the industry. We have a number of sites for specific books.
The latest is a historical novel about the Baby Boom generation coming out in April called … and the site for that is OneStoryForAll.com. Then, as you mentioned, we have the association TA Tech which is the Association for Talent Acquisition Solutions. We have a lot of different balls in the air but all of them are centered on this challenge of helping employers find great talent and help talented people find the places where they can excel at their work.
John Sumser:
How’d you end up doing this? You were, if I remember correctly, you were an airborne ranger and a West Point grad. This seems like a long way from that kind of life. How’d you end up here?
Peter Weddle:
It’s a great example of serendipity in one’s career. Back in the early 1990s, I owned a business called Job Bank USA. It was not on the web but it was one of the largest staffing firms in the country that used computers to match people and jobs. Our business model was pretty simple. We ran the career centers for over 400 professional societies. Everybody from SHRM to the American Institute of CPAs. I sold that business in ’95 to Spherion and had always had an avocation for writing.
I decided, pretty naively, I think that I was going to hang my shingle out and anoint myself as a professional writer. Through pure, dumb luck, the Wall Street Journal was looking for a columnist to start covering this new space called the online recruitment industry and I got the nod. For the next 12 years I wrote a biweekly column for the interactive edition of the Journal and for National Business Employment Weekly and for CNN.com about that whole magical tour that took us up through the dot-com revolution, the dot-come collapse and then a couple years after that. That really was what launched me into this whole business of talent acquisition.
John Sumser:
Wow. What an interesting path. You are the CEO of a complex range of businesses. What’s a day like for you? What does it look like when you go to work in the morning?
Peter Weddle:
Well, you mentioned that I went to West Point and I learned some habits of personal discipline, there. I’m pretty hard over. I begin every morning pretty early. I’m usually in the office by six and I devote at least two or three hours to writing. You’re a writer yourself so you know sometimes that takes you down a lot of blank alleys but sometimes it leads to an “A-Ha” that’s really worth sharing with other people. That’s one of the real high points of my day, is trying to get some thoughts down on paper that others might enjoy reading. The rest of the day is devoted to our various properties but, by and large, we spend the most amount of time on TA Tech because it is a very fast-growing organization and doing a lot of different things. It just takes up a lot of time.
John Sumser:
What is TA Tech?
Peter Weddle:
Well, TA Tech is the Association for Talent Acquisition Solutions. We borrowed a page from the Better Business Bureau. We set it up as a member-based, private trade association and it serves the global talent acquisition technology community. Our membership ranges from traditional job boards to social media sites to association career centers to aggregators to cloud-based solution providers, mobile app developers, ATS companies, recruitment advertising agencies. Pretty much the full gamut of organizations that develop or deliver products and services to employers and recruiters to help them with their talent acquisition. A very diverse community, some of our members are multi-billion-dollar companies, global operations and some of startups bootstrapping it together with angel funding or Series-A funding and pushing interest whole new areas of technology or service delivery. It’s a day full of discoveries, by and large. Meeting new people, trying to forge connections for them, and then we have a very full range of activities. I mean we’re a typical trade association so we have four conferences a year.
We do a global awards program called the recruiting service innovation awards. We do two global surveys. One on job boards, a benchmarking survey and one for applicant tracking systems. Again, a benchmarking survey. There’s research going on; there’s educational programs and then what our members really enjoy most and through feedback all the time are telling us to do more of is network with one another. It’s a young industry; barely 20 years old. A lot of the original people who were in the industry are still here so sometimes we do sessions around just oral history. We’ve had the founder of Monster and the founder of Hot Jobs and the founder of the online career center all come in at one time on the stage at one of our conferences, for example, and just reminisce about what they remember from the early days of online recruiting. It was a hoot how different each of them remember what actually happened. It’s as very social organization as well as one that tends to the importance of business.
John Sumser:
That’s interesting. I’d love to hear some of that news of what happened. It was an exciting time back then. You have, I assume, in this organization everything: enterprise software companies to job boards and some picture of what all of the elements of that talent acquisition process are. Do you, as a trade associate, make judgments about what the best way to recruit is or now somebody might determine what the best way to acquire talent is for their organization? Do you go that fair in setting standards?
Peter Weddle:
No. We don’t and there’s a couple of reasons for that. The most important is that, in our view, the right or the best or the perfect solution for any employer is idiosyncratic to that organization. It’s very much dependent on their culture, their values, their leadership, their budget. The capabilities of the recruiting team. All of that means that each solution, if you will, is unique to the organization. What we try to do is to focus on that word that you just used, and that’s standards. We do that in a number of ways. Before I talk about that, the importance of standards is that if we have good standards then it’s much more feasible for organizations to make smart choices; to be smart consumers about deciding what is the best solution for their organization? Their enterprise.
Standards for us range from just basic business behavior. One of the values of membership in our organization, we think, is that we ask each member to make a public commitment to a code of ethics. Now, we did a lot of research on trade association code of ethics and they’re all imperfect, as is ours, but what we wanted to do is put a stake in the sand and say, “This is how we expect our members to treat our … their customers and this is how we expect our members to treat each other.” We are an imperfect organization, as all human organizations are, but I think what differentiates the membership of TA Tech is that at least the organizations that are members have made that public commitment.
In the beginning that standard is with all of the bad actors out there in the global talent acquisition community, and sadly, there are more than a few, this is a body of folks that at least has made the commitment to try to adhere to high standards of business operation. Then, we move down a level to perhaps a more tactical level of standards. In that regard, we want to make sure that terms and terminology mean something consistently across the industry. For example, a growing number of employers are using pay-per-click advertising. It’s a great form of advertising. It’s been thoroughly tested in consumer advertising before it even arrived in recruitment advertising but what is the definition of a click?
Is a click one that’s only made by humans? If so, how do you tell that because the research shows that today there aren’t just as couple of thousand; there are millions of clicks being generated by bots. We want to be sure that consumers know when they ink a deal with some organization to provide paper click recruitment advertising that they get what they expect. They can talk in terms that both parties will understand and they can sign a contract with terms organizations will agree to. At the strategic level, good business practices. At the tactical level, standardized definitions.
John Sumser:
Let’s drill a little bit. The business of online advertising has always had the significant risk of fraud because of the way that online data is moved around is hard to measure. It’s hard to measure the current things that make the internet move quickly are the things that make it hard to measure in order to get the content that you want to see in font of you rapidly, you have to store it closer and as a result, the trackability of that data is suspect. It’s always suspect. It’s always suspect. It’s hard to tell. For instance, if you have a [task 00:14:48] at the front end of your enterprise and that college collects that content that people are using, it’s hard to tell whether or not the clicks that happened there are tracked back into the core. It’s very hard to tell. Impossible, even. When you talk about the potential for fraud and you talk about using standards, how do you correct for the things that are the very nature of the medium that you’re trying to help people navigate?
Peter Weddle:
Well, if you can answer that question, John, you need to quit your current business and go to Vegas; you’d be a bazillionaire. I think that we’re-
John Sumser:
Well, that’s right but-
Peter Weddle:
-still figuring this out.
John Sumser:
-the promise is that there is some way to figure that out and I’m not so sure. It’s been 20 years and it seems to me that every time somebody gets their arms around this a little bit, somebody else figures out a way to beat the system. It’s a long-term cat-and-mouse game rather than something that has a solution. I think it’s amazing that you’re helping educate people at the center of that conversation about what’s possible. It might be ambitious to think you can be the new sheriff and enforce the laws of the town. You might need a pretty big sixshooter to be that kind of a sheriff.
Peter Weddle:
Well, I would not say that that’s our ambition. I think where we stop is we want … I think you used this word earlier … We want to educate people so that they are aware of the potential risks that they incur and they are aware that the best vendors out there are making legitimate, credible efforts to ensure that they deliver what they represent. For example, there are at least three tiers of bots. There are well-behaving bots and that is a bot where when you … when the user agent … When you look at the user agent for a click, a good bot will identify itself in the user agent as a bot or a spider or a crawler, whatever it might be, and the best vendors will find those self-identified bots and they will strip them out of the traffic that they deliver to their customers. Unfortunately, there are two other tiers of bots that are not self-identified.
Much more difficult to uncover and those are the nefarious players out there. Even the best-intentioned vendors have a hard time figuring out when the traffic is legitimate or not. To your earlier point, just as a credible solution is devised, the bad guys find a way around it and they do something else and that cat-and-mouse game begins all over again. It’s like playing “Whack-a-Mole.” What I think our ambition is … what I know our ambition is is to just make sure that we educate our members on their obligation to deliver credible traffic to the greatest extent possible and we also educate the consumer so that they are making smart decisions about which vendors they should use and why they’re doing so.
John Sumser:
That’s interesting. How big is the problem? I don’t understand exactly how, if you were to say of all the clicks generated in this industry, 20 percent are bad? Do you have a sense of what that [crosstalk 00:18:58] is?
Peter Weddle:
I don’t have … Yeah, I don’t have that number but I can tell you that the interactive advertising bureau put out an estimate and I believe they’ve estimated that customers, not just employers in the recruiting space but any organization that advertises on the web, collectively they will lose $8.3 billion this year in non-human clicks.
John Sumser:
Wow. I think I should go into that business. I have to make sure-
Peter Weddle:
Yeah. A new line of business, John?
John Sumser:
Well, you know a marginal share of $8 billion is actual money.
Peter Weddle:
It adds up in anybody’s book. That is correct.
John Sumser:
It adds up in anybody’s book. You’ve got this trade association that spans an ecosystem of people who buy and sell from each other. What are the pros and cons of doing that?
Peter Weddle:
Well, I hope the pros is that at the end of the day, a trade association’s mission is to help its members be more successful and we spend a lot of time every single day trying to make sure that we move the ball forward in that regard but those folks can only be successful if their customers are successful. The other pro is that all of the stuff that we’re doing from the code of ethics to our conference coming up in the fall for employers and recruiters, all of that is a positive step forward in making sure that this ecosystem that you’ve described really operates so that it can enjoy long-term longevity. That it flourishes. It’s self-nurturing and eventually it … All of the players in the ecosystem are successful in their mission.
Again, I know that sounds a little Pollyann-ish but I think that that’s our … that’s the pro of what we’re trying to do. The con is, if you want to call it a con, is in many cases we’re breaking new ground. This is an association of … for a relatively young industry. Many of our members are doing cutting-edge things with technology that have never been done before. We don’t always get it right first time out. Today’s environment is pretty unforgiving but we have to pick ourselves off, dust ourselves off and try again when we don’t get it right. Our goal remains the same: we want to create that level playing field for both our membership and their customers.
John Sumser:
It sounds like you’re in a campaign that leads to the trade show conference in the fall. Tell me a little bit about that. Where’s it going to be? Who’s going to be there? What are your aspirations for the event?
Peter Weddle:
Well, it’s called the TA Tech Conference and Expo. It’s going to be at The Palms Resort and Casino in Vegas on September 19 to 21. We believe that it is the only conference for, by and about talent acquisition technology companies but we don’t want it to be … Our aspirations are not to be a big mega conference with huge, plenary halls and everything. We really want a much more intimate setting. In fact, we’re not going to have a plenary hall. We’re going to do fireside chats with the leading business executives in our industry to give recruiters and employers a credible opportunity to really have a conversation with the people who are building the products and services that they buy.
I was talking the other day to a group of senior talent acquisition executives in the agra-business industry and I asked them what were some of the frustrations that they experienced on the job. They told me that one of the things that frustrates them the most is that they can’t answer the phone. They get calls all the time from the vendors with which they are working and they know they need to speak with them to make sure that they’re getting the maximum return on investment in the products they’ve already purchased and they get calls all the time from vendors offering new capabilities that they really feel as if they ought to look at.
The reality is, given their business day, given the load of reqs and all of the other things they have to worry about, they simply can’t pick up the phone. What we want to do is in one two-and-a-half day stretch, give them the ability to, A) talk to the vendors they’re current working with and, B) take a look at what’s new out there so that they can make sure that their organization is at the cutting edge with regard to resources and talent acquisition. All of the presentations will be delivered by folks from the industry.
They won’t be marketing puff pieces; they will be best practices for implementation and new ideas for the application of various categories of products and services. Then, there will be these fireside chats with key executives where you’ll have an opportunity to really mix it up with the folks who are calling the shots and setting the R&D guidelines for those products and services down the road.
John Sumser:
Wow. We have blown through our allotted time. As I would have expected the conversation has been brisk and interesting. What should I have asked you that I didn’t get to?
Peter Weddle:
Well, I would say maybe you didn’t ask me why should human resource executives or talent acquisition executives care about an organization called TA Tech? My answer would’ve been because this is an organization trying to make sure that the resources they depend on deliver what they promise, deliver the capabilities that those employers and recruiters deserve so that, as I said way back at the beginning, we try to find a way to bridge the gap between the talent organization’s need and the talent that’s out there and we get high-performing organizations and individuals coming to work each day.
John Sumser:
Okay. Is there anything that you want the readers to take away from the conversation?
Peter Weddle:
Well, if they would, please, come visit TATech.org. That’s our website. Take a look. We have a special channel just for employers. We have a free speaker’s bureau if you need a speaker for a corporate event or for an association or society meeting. There’s a speaker’s bureau there. We have free resources they can use to identify products and services for their various talent acquisition needs and there’s information about the talent acquisition conference and expo coming up in Las Vegas on September 19th to 21. TATech.org might be a place they could come by and pay us a visit.
John Sumser:
Fantastic. Would you take just a minute and reintroduce yourself and tell people how they can get in touch with you if they want to know more?
Peter Weddle:
Well, my name is Peter Weddle. I’m the chief executive officer of TA Tech of the Association for Talent Acquisition Solutions and you can really me anytime at ceo@tatech.org.
John Sumser:
Fantastic. Peter, it’s been great talking to you. I really appreciate the time … the fact that you took the time to sit down and tell us as little bit about what you’re doing. Thanks.
Peter Weddle:
Thanks for having me, John. I appreciate it.
John Sumser:
Oh, you’re welcome. Thanks, everybody, for tuning in. This has been another episode of HRExaminer Radio. We’ve been talking with Peter Weddle … that’s W E D D L E … who is the CEO of TATech.org. Check him out if you are in the talent acquisition business, this is the trade association that represents your interests. Thanks for listening today and I hope you have a great weekend. The sun is starting to pop up over the hill here in Occidental. Enjoy the rest of your day. Have a great weekend. ‘Bye-bye.
End transcript