My love / hate relationship with Rozee continues, but the company is on a roll…

Rozee has been successfully unleashing a slew of highly focused products for companies that all seem to target a vision of having Rozee provide complete HRM / Workflow solutions to HR Managers on Rozee. From what I hear, there are ways of conducting HR Tests and evaluations even before your company receives a single email.

Their Sales teams have been tacking up the (expensive) “Top Employer” advertising spot, and now attracting some great employers, including Pepsi and McDonalds into their fray. Their specific marketing product includes an “interview with HR Managers” series where company reps give interviewing tips to candidates.

Finally, they are in the middle of a massive branding campaign, where you see them sponsoring events, conferences and speeches all around, radio ads, and strategic partnerships to get premium advertising space in mainstream areas.

In short, the company doesnt want to rest quietly.

I sat down with CEO Monis Rehman recently and am impressed by his vision and most the strategy he uses to pragmatically grow the consumer base in the system. These product, marketing and sales activies are orchestrated with an almost theatrical sense of timing.

Here is our observations from CDF’s hiring frenzy (which continues to this day…)

- The Rozee premium products are not giving us much value beyond being an advertisement channel. The trouble is, it is an advertisement channel that actually increases your costs (instead of revenue) because your HR staff will be hard pressed in filtering through the CVs

- There is still too little “signal-to-noise” in the quality of candidates. The premium products may give out 400 resumes a month or more, but my observation is that this will only increase noise. In our month as “Top Employer” next to Mobilink back in October, we were unable to close any one post from that channel.

- Just as any good product sells itself, any good working environment will sell itself through word of mouth. Focusing on building that environment, and then focusing actually on the text of the ad can be much more effective in attracting talent. We now use Rozee’s free channel (those text ads at the bottom) — but those ads let us choose job titles that can shown much better conversions than a well placed ad does.

- A lot of candidates visit rozee, then visit our website and apply from there. This seems to suggest that a lot of applicants in Rozee do not prefer to hand over control to an automated system.

- Most of the candidates who DO use the system (Rozee’s) for automatic job applications are never serious to begin with. We get applications for our “Product Manager” post, “Mechatronics Engineer” post, and “Linux Kernel Developers” post all by the same person! A lot of the candidates are just testing their worth in the market.

- Most of the candidates who we prefer hiring still dont use online job management systems. Word of mouth awareness is key, and we have found some of our best talent simply by asking our candidates for two referrals (pardon me if that is evil).

My top 5 pieces of free advice for Rozee

1- Help the candidates and companies carry conversations with themselves, instead of participating in workflows. I suggest(ed) letting Companies post a short 10-minute presentation about themselves to show to candidates on Rozee as a flash slideshow. (Or heck atleast give us Rich Text job descriptions with pictures!)

2- Rozee should slice deeper from one big “Job Fair” event into more focused and relevant events based on specific types of people, and make them a continuous process. Create a product for companies where they each pay a portion of the sponsorship of an event that Rozee creates and organizes for them — e.g. a special “day at the campus” in popular colleges. Allow companies to either attend in person or send you guys some series of videos that you all can play.

3- Rozee should focus on creating self-balancing communities. Fix the rating system so that encourages both companies and candidates to rate each other during the hiring process. This would be based on my participation in the common community created by Rozee (where I have discussions with candidates in the pre-hire phase) and thus based on my overall vision and merit as perceived by them. Think of this as a Virtual Job Fair.

4- Give candidates a series of tough interview questions to ask companies during the evaluation phase — complement with a series of horror stories of people who applied to posts not suited for them. In other words, perhaps it is just too easy to apply to posts, and the candidates need to be sobered down before they do.

5- Give companies offline tools. As much as we try to love your interfaces and try to shift our entire process away from our IT tools, we just like our tools better. If we can integrate ours with yours, and if making someone “rejected” in our internal software automatically updates the candidates’ ratings on Rozee? Hmm…