Both situations are a little ludicrous.

The information economy is as yet very poorly understood. We’ve had agrarian economies for ten thousand years at least. We’ve had artisan, craft, and trade economies for two or three thousand years. We’ve had shipping economies for a few hundred years. We’ve had manufacturing economies for maybe three hundred years. We’ve had industrial corporate economies for just about two hundred years.

We’ve had the Internet economy for 20 years.

We’re still not used to it.  We are still getting our heads around the implications of coming up with things that have zero marginal cost.

Wikipedia or Facebook?

Not of course that we need to choose either one, but which of the two matters more? Looking at the net worth of the people involved, the market clearly says that Facebook matters more, while regular Wikipedia contributors and administrators would roll their eyes and say nothing because, for once, they’d  all agree.

It’s apple and oranges, it’s different people doing different things. What makes Wikipedia unique is precisely its refusal to pander to money markets.  Which publication matters more: People Magazine or Nature?

And yet there’s a common element to the two, and to many other things besides. The marginal cost of the product is zero, and that is what matters.

The movie business is an early information economy. The marginal cost of a view (a seat in a movie theater for two hours) is next to nothing. Economist Arthur De Vany described the unpredictable nature of the business is in his book Hollywood Economics.  Such economies can’t be predicted, and the Internet is the ultimate information economy.

Copyright 2012, Vincent Poirier

Honestly, what is going on here?

My blog posts on governance, risk, or technology get read now and then and I occasionally get feedback.

My blog posts on the unprofessional head hunting in Tokyo get more hits than a deuce on a Las Vegas black jack table. My blog gets more attention from these posts than it has ever gotten before.

Did I hit a nerve? Am I voicing the concerns of job seekers who don’t yet want to burn their bridges?

So I am posting again on head hunters and giving readers what they want.

“Rule number 1: we work for the interest of the client”

That’s the gist of the feedback I’ve gotten from recruiters. Now, we mid-career job seekers weren’t born yesterday. We were always aware that the employers were paying high fees to recruiters and it stands to reason that they expect service and options.

However recruiters never mention this to prospective candidates when they are interviewing them. They speak of opportunities, career change, etc. They dangle the prospect of a positive change without making any promises to actively promote the candidate.

All that matters to recruiters is to get the candidate’s verbal agreement to present him or her for a position. And they’ll use all the snake oil salesmanship at their command for this.

In Tokyo too many recruiters lack general experience

They are too young, or too geared towards the deal as if candidates were cattle or commodities rather than people. They forget that the résumés that enrich their databases aren’t given for free, they are given in exchange for a real shot at a job.

Let’s be positive

As I said before, this applies to most staffing and mid-level management foreign recruiters, and mostly in Tokyo but also I guess in Hong Kong and other Asian cities.  Of course, in other cities things work the same way: you work for the client, but the recruiters understand they have to keep a good relationship with the candidates.

Also, one Tokyo recruiter sent feedback that largely agreed with me, and his website shows that he expressed this before I posted anything. He promises candidates that he gets it. He was a recruiter before coming to Japan and he is upset that unscrupulous amateurs  are tarnishing the industry’s reputation.

To him, I wish much success!

Copyright 2012, Vincent Poirier

In January, a Wired article reported that some merchants were suing against fines imposed on them by card issuing banks for failure to comply with Payment Card Industry security standards.

The Payment Card Industry issues security standards that participants must follow. After some lab work with their standard for web application firewalls, I was pretty impressed with it, and I left it at that.

Unlike (ISC)2 for example, the PCI isn’t really a body whose purpose is information security in general. The PCI is there to promote security in the interests of its industry. Industry participants include financial institutions and merchants, but of course the big players are the financial institutions and the little players are the merchants.

On first reading this article, I was surprised that PCI rules were considered controversial. Both as a user of credit cards and as an information security specialist, I was very happy with the PCI standards.

Online banking versus credit card security

But then I started thinking of credit card security as compared to online banking security.

Consider this. Someone manages to hack my bank account and empty it. Accepting liability for my loss is pretty much at the bank’s discretion. If they find that my anti-virus software is not up-to-date or some other reason, they can refuse to return the stolen money to me. Security is the user’s responsibility.

Credit card security on the other hand focuses on individual transactions. Each transaction is checked and when an unusual appears, it is flagged for special authorization. If the credit card company authorizes what turns out to be a fraudulent purchase the card company is responsible.

As a result, credit card security is excellent while banks live in a dreamworld of “perfect” security where if anything goes wrong, it’s the customer’s fault.

Credit cards are just peachy, right?

Banks are happy, card users are happy, merchants are not so happy

Not completely. Just as the banks have account holders unwittingly accept almost complete responsibility for security, credit card companies use their power to force merchants into a similar situation.

It must be said that PCI standards are excellent but they can be a little difficult to implement and understand  for small merchants who must rely on the expertise of  vendors.

This points to a problem that has nothing to do with security, but that is more a problem of governance and allocation. And in this instance, the saying that “Might makes right” comes to mind.

The interesting point is that while security involves a cost and benefit trade-off between convenience and safety, it’s worth asking how much of the cost is borne by the party who benefits.

Copyright 2012, Vincent Poirier

But I should say a word or two about good head hunters and how they work. I have had only a little experience outside the Asia Pacific region, but in Montreal and Dublin I found recruiters more professional than they are here.

First, recruiters will be up front about who pays the bill: the employer. If they are representing more than one candidate for a single position, they will say so, and they will be honest about which of these candidates is their favored candidate.

Second, good recruiters specialize and they know the field in which they are working. Ideally, legal recruiters will be lawyers themselves, IT recruiters will have worked as systems administrators or programmers, pharmaceutical industry people will have degrees in chemistry or biology or medecine.

Third, they will find a way of benefiting candidates. For example, they could agree to represent you to companies without waiting for job announcements. (It’s called selling.) They could train you in interviewing skills. They could improve your résumé. This is just brainstorming, but the point is they ought to do something.

So why are mid-level management Tokyo recruiters so awful?

They sweet talk you into giving them your résumé. They call prospective candidates and say “Boy, have I got a job for you!” or “Our client looking to fill a position for which we feel you would be ideally suited.”

It’s not exactly dishonest, but they are not telling you about the other nine candidates they will be submitting at the same time. They just want your OK so that they can show their client that they have a variety of candidates. And if you are the one chosen (a 10% chance obviously) they pocket the fee. They don’t care about you the candidate. If you are not successful, they never give feedback. They don’t do a thing to earn your gift to them of your résumé.

Second, they care only about the deal. They are mostly young, inexperienced, with no formal education in their fields. They are too often former English teachers who came to Japan to party in Roppongi.

Of course anyone who works wants to be paid. But as I work, I want to earn my salary. I want to paid for a job well done; I do not want to screw my employer out of as much money as I can get away with. I would never present myself as an expert programmer when all I’ve done is tweak a few Unix scripts. But too often in Tokyo, recruiters present themselves as specialists and experts in fields about which they know next to nothing.

Finally, they just don’t care about the candidate. The business model is partly at fault here because it emphasizes the importance of the paying client over the importance of the candidate. Also at fault is the inexperience of the recruiters: they don’t know what makes a good programmer, they’ll just send anyone in order to stack the deck in their favor.

One good recruiter

Let’s end this post on a positive note, for once.

Skillhouse Japan is a good frontline staff and mid-level management recruiter.

They follow the same business model as others, meaning the employer will pay their fee not the candidate, but they manage candidates and clients separately. That is one way of resolving the conflict of interest hurting candidates. Also, the candidate managers have some experience in IT, so they are in fact competent to evaluate IT skills.

There may be others out there, and I hope to meet more of them.

Copyright 2012, Vincent Poirier

PS I’d like to once again repeat that my above rants have nothing to do with recruiting senior executives. For really critical positions such as country head or CFO, you might well need discrete competent help.

VP

That said, I do know one or two recruiters who are genuinely good at what they do. Most of them operate at a level or two above me, above the $500K/year level.

To be fair, you need a professional recruiter to find a country head, or a CFO. But not to find a local IT compliance officer or a branch security officer, or a project manager. If I were country head and I learned that anyone making less than $200K (without bonus) was hired via a head hunter, I’d have a word with the HR manager about what they thought their work was about.

I forwarded my last two posts to a few head hunters I knew. And I got a good belly laugh from their answers.  They talked about the ethics of guaranteeing me anything. Ethics from a recruiter?! Ha!

Better yet: Pshaw! I say Pshaw!!

And for Monty Python fans, I say:

Your mother was a hamster
Your father smells of elderberries
And I fart in your general direction! 

Ethics from mid-level management recruiter? That’s a laugh and a half!

What can we mid-level management and staff level job seekers do about it? We can demand the following.

First, if a recruiter submits your CV for a role, you must have assurance in writing that they will represent no other candidates for that role except for you. They can have represented other candidates BEFORE that have been turned down. They can represent other candidates AFTER you have been turned down. But they MUST represent only you for any one position at any one time. No compromise on this issue, and you will sue their ass off if they ever screw you on this.

Second, the recruiter must do their utmost to sell YOU, not their firm, YOU. That is your price for letting them submit your resume. After all, your CV in their database is an asset to them. Why give it to them for free?

I do not mean that you should be arrogant. There are plenty of people who are better than I am, but not every company can get the best person, and not every one can get the best job. 

As a job seeker, you cannot expect a recruiter to guarantee you a job. But it IS fair to expect them to guarantee you something.

And that something is their effort to sell you, and the way to measure their effort is by the interviews they get you. If they get you interviews and you don’t get the job, fair enough. They did their bit.

If they can’t get you interviews, why would you need them? What possible use are they to you? If they can’t get you interviews, they are parasites living off your good will and you should spray them with insecticide.

Copyright 2012, Vincent Poirier

Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us doesn’t really deserve being a full book, but its ideas and insights should be of interest to civil engineers, factory managers or to any organization where maintenance is critical to its operations. In particular, it can inspire some productive outside-the-box thinking for operational risk managers.

Copyright 2012, Vincent Poirier

Copyright 2012, Vincent Poirier

I’m glad the article doesn’t accuse Japan of racism. If the story is true, and having lived here 23 years I suspect it is, it points to a different problem which I believe is pervasive in this country: cruelty.

Japanese people can be extremely cruel to one another.

Compare what happened to the Canadian reporter at Narita Airport to the story depicted in the Japanese movie “I Just Didn’t Do It” by director Masayuki Suo.  In this film, based on a true story, a young man is falsely accused of molesting a high school girl on a crowded train. The young man is arrested and questioned.

While the camera moves through the police station, we witness the questioning of a (presumaby guilty) molester, a suited businessman who caves in and apologizes immediately, signs a confession and pays his young victim 50,000 yen (about 450 dollars in 2007). The entire incident ends by only slightly embarrassing the perpetrator.

On the other hand, the innocent young man is bullied by his interrogators and warned that things will go very badly for him. Yet, he stubbornly refuses to confess to a crime he did not commit. He is no hero, he is not noble, he’s just an ordinary kid who won’t say he did something he knows he did not do. The system eventually finds him guilty.

In the meantime, his treatment in custody is not so different from how the Canadian reporter claims to have been treated at Narita Airport. The young man was interrogated at all hours for 23 days without any legal representation. His first lawyer urged him to confess because he had no idea what lay ahead, guards were incredibly rude and coercive. They were also corrupt charging 1500 yen (12 dollars) for a cup of bad coffee, money which they are allowed to pocket.

If you play along with the system, things won’t go too badly for you. If you don’t follow the rules, including the unspoken rule of playing along, then things can go very badly for you indeed.

When Japanese officials treat a foreigner harshly they are not being racist, they are in fact treating him like a real person. The problem is that Japanese officials can often treat real people very very badly.

Copyright 2012, Vincent Poirier

As for all bills, the sponsors of SOPA came up with a name which by itself makes opposition to it unthinkable. How could anyone not want to stop piracy? Mozart died poor because he did not benefit from copyright protection, so how could anyone oppose a bill to stop online piracy of music?

Would Amadeus have approved of SOPA?

It’s very very good that Obama opposed SOPA. Intellectual property law needs serious reform. As it stands lawmakers and the courts still have a poor understanding of what constitutes a cyber crime. Judges know well the difference between shoplifting a loaf of bread and holding up a bank. When a mother gets successfully sued for 1.9 million dollars (after a mistrial!) for downloading 24 songs illegally, we have to wonder if the law is doing what we want in the way we want it done.

Making it easier for large industries to bring expensive litigation against people is the wrong way forward. Making SOPA the law would have given over way too much discretionary power to private interests.

The internet is still a badly understood wild west. Until it is understood, discretionary powers should belong to the courts only and no law should be created that effectively removes those powers from the hands of courts and into the hands of litigants. The mere threat of a spurious lawsuit should never be enough to scare people from behaving reasonably.

Copyright 2012, Vincent Poirier

PS I probably won’t sue if you copy & paste this anywhere .

VP

As Jeffrey Fox writes in his book “How to Land Your Dream Job”,  looking for a job is selling yourself. Selling is a craft and it can be learned.

I’d like to make one thing clear: not all head hunters are parasites. When you are looking for someone to head a division with multi-million dollar turnover, when a two thousand employee company is looking for a new CFO, it makes sense to use a reputable firm to find the right person. The wrong person in a critical position can destroy a company.

But most jobs in a company are not top level critical jobs. It’s important to get the work done of course but many people can fill a slot in any number of ways. Why would you need recruiters operating on a commission for that? And as a hands-on staffer or mid-level manager, why would you entrust your future to parasites?

Worth: Just because you're necessary doesn't mean you're important.

Copyright 2012, Vincent Poirier