Not anymore they don’t since there isn’t a Gimbels left to tell. And the way things are going for Macys these days, who’d want to listen anyway? Still, this quaint old admonition against “giving away the store” reminds me of how easily companies reveal things without having the slightest inkling they’re doing so.
Take the online career site The Ladders. For the last several years it’s been running a nice little business providing a place for firms to list their open positions that offer six-figure salaries. Nice enough that not only do companies pay to list these positions, but job-seekers cough up $30-a-month or more just to look them over. However, what the HR folks at these companies–and their Investor Relations people–may have overlooked is what else can be gleaned from this site.
Back in the fall, for example, I happened to notice that Sears Holdings had a lot of posts available in marketing and advertising. More tellingly, it took just a few weeks for it to become obvious that these six-figure positions weren’t exactly being scooped up with alacrity. If anything, the list of openings out in Hoffman Estates was getting longer, not shorter.
Now this could have meant the company was growing like crazy, expanding all over the place, prospering in ways too numerous to count and thus needing to make lots of new hires. But we know better than that. More likely the majority of these open positions were the result of half the rats taking to the lifeboats while the other half was busy putting up automated “out of office” replies directing all future e-mails to Greenwich, CT.
In either case, it looked to me like The Ladders would have to open a seven-figure division before it could do much for Sears. And a classic example of the law of unintended consequences at work. Because here’s old Sears just trying to find an efficient way to fill a bunch of open positions. And all of us with a mind to assessing the company’s overall prospects can’t help but observe that from a recruiting perspective Sears “couldn’t get laid in a womens’ prison with a fistful of pardons” as the saying goes.
Picking on Sears, though, is almost too easy. (Nowadays, picking on that sorry firm is always too easy.) What about a much tougher target? Could Google’s current job postings and their fulfillment rate on The Ladders shed light on anything? They might, especially in the advertising sales area. Google’s supposed to be such a growing force in the advertising/media world you’d naturally expect it to have quite a few open positions in this area. So, does it? And more importantly, how rapidly are these positions being filled? If nothing else, it’s an interesting exercise in harnessing the “wisdom of crowds”. Because who would know better what Google’s potential strength in the advertising/media world might truly be: a few dozen analysts possibly caught up in yet-another wave of irrational exuberance, or the people trying to figure out if they should devote the next few years of their lives to working there?
0 Responses to ““Does Macys Tell Gimbels?””