In Defense of our Culture at Hire Better

Earlier this week I found myself on the phone with one of our service providers at Hire Better.  The company: Monster.com.  We’ve used their service with average satisfaction for about 5 years.  Every year we step back and evaluate it but ultimately, we’ve chosen to invest the $10,000-$15,000 that they want to charge for access to a huge database of largely uninteresting people – many of whom need work Visas to make career moves.

Our account comes up for renewal at the end of May.  We haven’t heard from anyone in their company since last September when our account was nearly cancelled FOR FRAUDULENT ACTIVITY.

A little bit of history – Last year an interesting thing happened: their Compliance Department caught wind of a report that the “seats” that we paid for were being used by IP addresses that weren’t in Austin, TX.  This set off all kinds of alarms at Monster.com and I received a disturbing voicemail from a woman who more than suggested that we were guilty of fraud because of our usage and that the legal team was looking into canceling our account without a refund – essentially a loss of $10,000 for us.

Why were they accusing us of Fraud?  Because our Corporate Address is in Austin, TX.  ”If your address is in Austin, why would you have anyone with an IP address in Iowa, Kansas or Arkansas?” they asked.  How very 1993 of them.  I challenged that same Legal Team and their Compliance Team by asking,

“Have any of our seats EVER been logged into by more than one person simultaneously and in different geographic regions?”

“No, never once.” they responded.

“And is our usage on any of these accounts outside of our terms of use or so heavy that it would make you think that we were trying to be fraudulent or mis-represent ourselves in any way?”

“No, not at all.” was their answer.

It took me a week and about 20 hours of our senior team’s time to explain to their Legal Department that we’re a Virtual Company that’s built around team members who work from their homes because of the Balance that it provides to each and every one of us.  We finally settled on an agreement with their team that we could give each and every one of our employees their own usernames and passwords and split up the usage of each “seat” into what was the equivalent of 50% of a traditional license.  This satisfied their Legal team and it allowed us to avoid a $10,000 loss.  My Account Representative at the time was a gentlemen named Chris Shaw.  He stuck up for us, was the internal champion for our cause and put his reputation on the line with that same Compliance Department to vouch for us and insist that there wasn’t any fraudulent intent or activity.

Fast forward to this week: my new Account Representative called me 4 times over the course of a week – only bothering to leave a voicemail once (a hint: while we’re virtual we do have “real” phones that have caller ID).  When Cortney, my Assistant, finally reached him to book our phone meeting, we were less than a week from our renewal.  Here’s the breakdown of the conversation:

9:15 AM Central Time comes and goes (our agreed upon call time)

9:21 My phone finally rings.  It’s my new representative.  It’s clear he doesn’t understand how OCD I can be about the timing on phone calls.  He starts the call with, “So how’s your business doing these days?” with an artificially chipper tonality.  I politely asked if he had turned on the news in the last 9 months and then reminded him that we had 15 minutes booked for the call and we were down to 7.5 minutes left because of his tardiness.

9:32 I’ve had to explain, at length, what the entire situation was that had happened during the previous September.  Apparently, the CRM system at Monster.com isn’t equipped to keep track of week-long legal boondoggles with clients that have paid them nearly $75,000 over 5 years.  If you’ll remember, I mentioned earlier that Chris Shaw, our representative at the time, was a great advocate for us.  Our new representative made it a point to remind me, at least 3 times during these 11 minutes, “Well, based on all of these exceptions that you benefitted from in the past year, you’ll clearly understand why Chris isn’t with our company any more.”

9:34 I’m now 4 minutes late for a commitment I made to call a prospective candidate for one of our biggest clients.  As politely as I can muster, I shared with our representative, “Look, I appreciate that you’re not a fan of Chris.  I also respect that you have a precious “rate card” that you’re allowed to discount from by 75% (side note, if a sales rep can discount by 75% off of a rate card, what’s the point of even having a rate card?), but unless you can wrap your brain around the fact that I’m VERY familiar with your legal contract and that I’m not willing to buy ONE seat (as he suggested) and pass around the username to everyone (which is in violation of their agreement) or 9 full, individual seats for our employees who spend about 1 hour per week each on your website, we don’t have much more to talk about.  And I’m late for my next call.  I need to go.”

9:36 It’s starting to get ridiculous.  Every effort that I’ve made to be polite so that I can move on to my next commitment has been ignored.  It’s as if I’m speaking an entirely different language.  My representative has shared with me things like, “You know, 2 years ago we were only permitted to discount by 15%” and “What you received last September was clearly a one time thing and there’s no way I could get that approved again.”  His arguments were as pertinent to our conversation as the amount of snow they received in the Napa Valley last year.  ”I know we’ve gone a bit over our alloted time this morning Jonathan.  Why don’t you let me go back to my managers and that Compliance Team from last September and see if I can work something out for you.”

3:10 Central Time – My representative called me back to share the news with me.  ”Jonathan, what I’ve gotten approval for is to sell you 9 individual seats at 75% off of our rate card.  This is a great deal.  Can I send over the agreement?”

If you’ve hung with me and read all the way down to this part of this blog post I hope you’ll let me clarify something: My intent of this post was NOT to air the dirty laundry of my discussions with Monster.com.  However, sharing that level of detail was critically important because this is what I want every company who acts as a service provider for us to understand:

1. Our Core Values are NOT something that we just hung on a wall for everyone to ignore.  Earning Trust, Having Balance, Adding Value and Respect play a significant part in every decision that we make every day.
2. I (and We) will never apologize for or alter our decision to have hired the team that we have in place that just happen to work from their homes all around the country.  Because we have Balance in our lives, the quality of the work that we do for our clients is TOP NOTCH.  When we work, we work hard.  And then we stop and spend time with our families.  We don’t waste time commuting, attending pointless meetings or waiting in line for lunch in the same 15 minute period that everyone else has to run to the local fast food joint.
3. We may need a concession or two from you, as a service provider, because we ARE different.  Here are some of the companies who have acknowledged that and will be Partners of ours for a long time:

• Pioneer Bank in Dripping Springs, TX
• 8×8: the providers of Packet 8 Phones
• Apple
• Otherinbox
• 37Signals
• Jintech
• Clutch Creative
• Spross & Associates

And one final note to Monster.com: it’s 2009.  It might be time for you to take a good hard look at services like LinkedIn, ZoomInfo, Recruiter’s Earth, Door64, Google, Craig’s List and a host of other websites that passed you by a long time ago.  For me, I’ll take the $13,000 I just saved by not renewing with your service and I’ll spend it on training our employees on AIRS.  After all, our commitment to our clients is that they’ll HIRE BETTER.  Your website simply doesn’t help us do that any more.

Tags: 8x8, A-Players, AIRS, bad hires, career history, clutch creative, hire better, hiring, LinkedIn, Monster, monster.com, OtherInbox, pioneer bank, proactive recruiting, purchasing decisions, recruit don't absorb, Recruiting, research, talent acquisition, talent vault, Topgrading, tweets, Twitter, unemployment, unemployment rate, virtual bench, zoominfo