I own and run a software company that builds, sells, installs and supports an enterprise content management solution called RecFind 6. As such, I employ programmers, support specialists, accountants, consultants, trainers, pre-sales people and sales people to name but a few categories. This means I am always hiring and always reviewing applications from candidates.

Basically, most of the applications I receive are rubbish. They are badly written, badly formatted, not ‘selling’ documents and almost never focussed on the position I am advertising.  This is very sad but it does make vetting an avalanche of resumes pretty easy. I would probably spend no more than a minute or two reading each resume in the first pass to separate the real candidates from the flotsam. I move the results into two folders, one called possible and the other called ‘No way’.

This may sound a little impersonal but I have no patience with people who waste my time by firstly not reading the advertised job description properly and then by sending in a non-selling document. In fact, most resumes I see are great big red flags saying, “Please don’t hire me, I am a dope who didn’t read your ad properly and then couldn’t be bothered even getting the spelling and grammar correct or trying to sell myself in any way”.

So my first advice is if you are too lazy to allocate the time and effort required or can’t simply be bothered to sell yourself in the most professional manner possible then don’t bother because all you are doing is wasting your time and the time of any prospective employer. Prospective employers also have long memories so rest assured your next application to the same firm will be instantly relegated to the waste bin.

I only hire professionals and professionals do not send in a non-professional job application.

I only hire people who respect my time and I only hire people who manage to convince me that they really want the job I am advertising and are the best person for that role.

I figure that the effort you are prepared to expend on what should be your most important task at this time (i.e., finding employment) is indicative of the quality of work I can expect from you as an employee. If you send me a poor quality application then I assume everything you would do for me as an employee will be of a similar poor standard. If you are too lazy or too careless to submit a winning application then I can only assume you would also behave in this manner after employment so I have zero interest in you.

This is the bit I struggle to understand. How come the applicant doesn’t understand the obvious correlation any prospective employer makes between the quality of the job application and the quality of the person?

Please allow me to give you some simple common-sense advice that comes from a very experienced employer of people.

Always:

• Read the job ad very carefully. Note the prerequisites and requirements; the employer put them in for a reason and he/she would really appreciate it if you didn’t waste his/her time by applying for a position you do not qualify for.

• Always include a cover letter personalized for each and every job application. Your objective should be to convince the prospective employer that the job advertised is perfect for you and that you are in turn a perfect fit for the job.  If your past experience or skillset isn’t a perfect fit, use the cover letter to explain why it isn’t a problem and why you are still the right person for the job being advertised. All potential employers are impressed by someone who takes the time and trouble to align their skills and experience to the job on offer. Most importantly, use words and phrases from the job ad in your cover letter. This helps convince the potential employer that you have really thought about the position and have put intelligent time into your application.

• Clean up your resume, spell and grammar check it and convert it to a PDF for a much better and more professional looking presentation effect. All potential employers can’t help but appreciate a well presented and professional looking resume; it sets you apart.

In the end it is all about the initial impression you convey to the prospective employer. You have one shot so make sure it is a good one.

You need to convince your prospective employer that you selected their advertised job to respond to because it really interests and excites you and that you have the attitude, aptitude, character, experience and skillset required to make the most of this position. You have to convince them that you would be an asset to their organization.

It doesn’t take long to write a personalised cover letter, maybe an hour or two at the most and it should never be more than one page long. My final advice is that if you don’t think the advertised position is worth an hour or two of your time then don’t respond because you will be wasting your time. Don’t ‘shotgun’ job opportunities with multiple low-quality and non-selling applications. Instead focus on just the jobs you really like and then submit a smaller number of high-quality and personalised applications. I guarantee that your success rate will be much higher and that you will be asked to more interviews and that you will eventually get the job of your dreams.

The simple message is that you will get out of the process precisely what you put into the process. It is a tough world but in my experience effort is always rewarded. For your sake, please make the effort.

Like me I am sure that you have been inundated with ads, articles, white papers and proposals for something called BPM or BPO, Business Process Management, Business Process Outsourcing and Business Process Optimisation.

Do you really understand what it all means?

BPM and BPO certainly aren’t new, there have been many companies offering innovative and often cutting-edge technology solutions for many years. The pioneering days were probably the early 1980’s. One early innovator I can recall (and admired) was Tower Technology because their office was just across from our old offices in Lane Cove.

In the early days BPM was all about imaging and workflow and forms. Vendors like Tower Technology used early version of workflow products like Staffware and a whole assortment of different imaging and forms products to solve customer processing problems. It involved a lot of inventing and a lot of creative genius to make all those disparate products work and actually do what the sales person promised. More often than not the final solution didn’t quite work as promised and it always seemed to cost a lot more than quoted.

Like all new technologies everyone had to go through a learning process and like most new technologies, for many years the promises were far ahead of what was actually delivered.

So, is it any different today? Is BPM a proven, reliable and feature-rich and mature technology?

The answer dear friends is yes and no; just as it was twenty-five or more years ago.

There is a wonderful Latin phrase ‘Caveat Emptor’ which means “Let the buyer beware”. Caveat Emptor applies just as much today as it did in the early days because despite the enormous technological progress we have all witnessed and experienced we are still pushing the envelope. We are still being asked to do things the current software and hardware can’t quite yet handle. The behind the scenes technicians are still trying to make the product do what the sales person promised in good faith (we hope) because he didn’t really understand his product set.

Caveat Emptor means it is up to the buyer to evaluate the offering and decide if it can do the job. Of course, if the vendor lies or makes blatant false claims then Caveat Emptor no longer applies and you can hit them with a lawsuit.  However, in reality it is rarely as black and white as that. The technology is complex and the proposals and explanations are full of proprietary terminology, ambiguities, acronyms and weaselly words.

Like most agreements in life you shouldn’t enter into a BPM contract unless you know exactly what you are getting into. This is especially true with BPM or BPO because you are talking about handing over part of your core business processes to someone else to ‘improve’. If you don’t understand what is being proposed then please hire someone who does; I guarantee it will be worth the investment. This is especially true if you are outsourcing customer or supplier facing processes like accounts payable and accounts receivable. Better to spend a little more up front than suffer cost overruns, failed processes and an inbox full of complaints.

My advice is to always begin with some form of a consultancy to ‘examine’ your processes and produce a report containing conclusions and recommendations. The vendor may (should) offer this as part of its sales process and it may be free or it may be chargeable.  Personally, I believe in the old adage that you get what you pay for so I would prefer to pay to have a qualified and experienced professional consultant do the study. The advantage of paying for the study is that you then ‘own’ the report and can then legally provide it to other vendors to obtain competitive quotes.

You should also have a pretty good idea of what the current processing is costing you in both direct and indirect costs (e.g., lost sales, dissatisfied customers, unhappy staff, etc.) before beginning the evaluation exercise. Otherwise, how are you going to be able to judge the added value of the vendor’s proposal?

In my experience the most common set of processes to be ‘outsourced’ are those to do with accounts payable processing. This is the automation of all processes beginning with your purchase order (and its line items), the delivery docket (proof of receipt), invoices (and line items) and statements. The automation should reconcile invoices to delivery dockets and purchase orders and should throw up any discrepancies such as items invoiced but not delivered, variations in price, etc. Vendors will usually propose what is commonly called an automatic matching engine; the software that reads all the documents and does its best to make sure you only pay for delivered goods that are exactly as ordered.

If the vendor’s proposal is to be attractive it must replace your manual processing with an automated model that is faster and more accurate. Ideally, it would also be more cost-effective but even if it is more costly than your manual direct cost estimate it should still solve most of your indirect cost problems like unhappy suppliers and late payment fees.

In essence, there is nothing magical about BPM and BPO; it is all about replacing inefficient manual processes with much more efficient automated ones using clever computer software. The magic, if that is the word to use, is about getting it right. You need to know what the current manual processing is costing you. You need to be absolutely sure that you fully understand the vendor’s proposal and you need to build in metrics so you can accurately evaluate the finished product and clearly determine if it is meeting its stated objectives.

Please don’t enter into negotiations thinking that if it doesn’t work you can just blame the vendor. That would be akin to cutting off your nose to spite your face. Remember Caveat Emptor; success or failure really depends upon how well you do your job as the customer.

We produce a content management system called RecFind 6 that includes several ways to capture, classify and save emails. Like most ECM vendors, we offer a number of alternatives so as to be better able to meet the unique requirements of a variety of clients.

We offer the ‘manual’ version whereby we embed our email client into packages like Outlook and the end user can just click on our RecFind 6 Button from the Outlook toolbar to capture and classify any email.

We also offer a fully automated email management system called GEM that is rule-driven and that automatically analyses, captures and classifies all incoming and outgoing emails.

At the simplest level, an end user can just utilize the standard RecFind 6 client and click on the ‘Add Attachment’ button to capture a saved email from the local file store.

Most of our customers use the RecFind 6 Button because they prefer to have end users decide which emails to capture and because the Button is embedded into Microsoft Office, Adobe Professional, Notes and GroupWise. A much smaller percentage of our customers use GEM even though it is a much better, more complete and less labour intensive solution because there are still many people that just don’t want email to be automatically captured.

This last point is of great interest to me because I find it hard to understand why customers would choose the ‘manual’ RecFind 6 Button, small, smart and fast though it is, over the fully automated and complete solution offered by GEM, especially when GEM is a much lower cost solution for mid-size to large enterprises.

A few years ago in 2005 the Records Management Association of Australia asked me to write a paper on this topic, that is, why don’t organizations make a good job of capturing emails when there is plenty of software out there that can do the job?  I came up with six reasons why organizations don’t manage emails effectively and after re-reading that paper today, they are still valid.

In my experience, the most common protagonists are the records manager and the IT manager.  I don’t think I have ever spoke to a senior executive or application owner who didn’t think GEM was a good idea but I have only ever spoken to a tiny number of records managers who would even contemplate the idea of fully automatic email management. Most IT managers just don’t want all their emails captured.

This is despite the fact that because GEM is rule-driven any competent administrator could write rules to include or exclude any emails they want included or excluded.

Another road block is that old red herring personal emails. In ninety-percent upwards of cases where my customer has decided against GEM this is given as the ‘real’ reason. It is of course rubbish because there are many ways to handle personal emails including an effective email policy and writing GEM rules to enforce that policy. This 2004 paper explains why we need to manage emails and also talks about an effective email policy.

The absolute worst way to mismanage emails is to mandate that end users must select and print them out for the records staff to file in cardboard file folders. This method is entirely appropriate to 1900 except for the fact that we actually didn’t have emails in 1990. It is entirely inappropriate and just plain ineffective, wasteful and stupid in 2012 but, tens of thousands of records managers all around the world still mandate this as the preferred approach.

Is it because they don’t understand the technology or is it because they stubbornly refuse to even consider the technology?

It can’t be budget because the cost of expensive staff having to be part-time records managers is monumental. You would be hard pressed to find a more expensive and less effective solution. So why are we still doing it?

Back to the title of this paper, “How hard can it be?”

The answer is that it is not hard at all and that every ECM vendor has at least one flexible and configurable solution for email management. More so, these solutions have been around for at least the last ten years. So why are we still doing it the hard, ineffective, incomplete and expensive way?

The answer is that it is to do with people and attitudes; with a reluctance to embrace change and a reluctance to embrace a challenge that just might force managers to learn a lot in a short time and extend their capabilities and workload for the period necessary to implement a new generation solution. I guess it comes down to fear and a head in the sand attitude.

I once had a senior records manager tell me he wasn’t going to install any new systems because he was retiring in five years and didn’t want the worry and stress. Is this really why you aren’t managing your emails effectively and completely? Isn’t it time you asked the question of your records and IT managers?