There’s a lot of bad research out there.  And there’s lots of ways to disguise bad research.  Perhaps I’m just overly sensitive to it, but it seems like one awesome way to disguise your bad research is via the use of infographics.

Take, for example, this infographic about the relative impact of social media activity between Google Plus, Facebook, and Twitter.  In their research, they say that getting more Google Plus activity to be most closely correlated to increased visibility in Google results.

Now, I actually found this picture that explains the differences in social media via donuts¹ to be more accurate.  I just went and looked at my G+ page.  I follow ~100 people there.  Now, I freely admit that my sample isn’t anything that could be remotely considered to be statistically significant, and my sample is clearly skewed towards my friends (who are, generally speaking, geeks), but here’s the posts that I found from the past seven days:

• A Google employee²; he generally posts to G+ first and then (I probably shouldn’t give his secret away) posts to Facebook.
• A friend who is cross-posting everything from Twitter to G+.
• My employer, who also appears to be cross-posting everything from one of our official Twitter accounts to G+.
• A friend whose blog automatically posts a link to G+ whenever there’s a new post.
• A friend, who is not a Google employee, who appears to be actually using G+ to post content.  It appears that he’s posting weekly-ish.

Looking over my own experience, this research just doesn’t sit well with me.  I don’t know what I could do that would actually get 100 “+1” activities on G+, whereas my recent Facebook post acknowledging my wedding anniversary got ~70 likes and comments within the first 12 hours of the post.

Leaving aside my own experience, though, their methodology seems pretty dodgy.  They say that they got 100 G+ followers, and that increased their Google ranking by 14.53; on the other hand, getting 50 Facebook links and shares increased their ranking by 6.9.  And they even note that their methodology is dodgy, since they conducted their experiment in different markets with varying degrees of social media sophistication.  Also, it’s somehow a surprise that Google’s algorithm would give a higher ranking to activity on G+ rather than a competing site?

But they’ve got a pretty infographic, and they’re trying to sell you search engine optimization solutions, so it must all be good.  Their conclusion is just as slimy as you might expect from someone doing such bad research:

Regardless of the individual results, this study is another confirmation of the growing consensus that any well-rounded SEO strategy will have to embrace an element of social media signals.

Yeah.  This study is totally confirmation that you need their services!  I guess they get credit for being less shady than the fake malware scammers, but I prefer to set the bar higher than that.

I realized today that there’s a flip side to the unsolicited resume: the unsolicited request to submit a resume.  In the first case, a job applicant sends an unsolicited resume to someone who they hope is hiring.  In the second case, a recruiter or hiring manager sends an unsolicited request to someone who they hope might be interested in working for them.

If I, as someone who has an open position, email you, as someone who I think could be a good fit for my open position, part of my job is to try to convince you that you would be a good fit for the open position.  If I’ve worked with you before, then I’ve got a lot of experience and information that I can use when I email you to say that I’m hiring and would love to work with you again.  I can use that to craft an email that tells you how much I admired you when we worked together before, how I think that your skills would fit into this open position, how I think that you can grow in your career in this open position (and perhaps how I think that’s different from how you could do so in your current role), and what about the work environment is something that I think that you would find amenable.

If I somehow find you online and don’t know you, then I have to do a lot of work to try to convince you that my open position is one for you.  I have to be able to figure out from what I’ve learned from you online (most likely from your LinkedIn profile, maybe from your website too) what it is about you that I think would make you a good fit for my position.  I can try to guess at some of the other items that I listed above for the case when I know you and try to convince you that you should take this open position, but I have to tread carefully there.

It’s not enough to email someone and say “I think you’d be a great fit for this position” and then list out the job ad (or part of it).  After all, since my contact is unsolicited, I don’t know where you are in your career or what you’re feeling about your current role.  If I’m lucky, I’m emailing you at a time when you’re already thinking that maybe you’d like to try out something different, and so my unsolicited email is serendipitously well-timed.  If I’m not lucky, I’m emailing you at a time when you have just been promoted, have received a great raise and bonus, are working on an awesome team with a great dynamic, and have the best manager of your career.  In that case, I’d have to convince you that you’d get all of that five times over in my open position, and I probably would have to throw in an offer of your very own tropical island too.

These two cases have something quite important in common: since they’re unsolicited, they have to be extremely convincing.  They have to convince their recipient that they should take the extra and unexpected work involved to respond in the hoped-for manner.

When you send me an unsolicited resume and I don’t have a job open, you’re asking for me to go and try to convince people that we should interview you, and then (after you’ve rocked the interview) try to convince people that we have to figure out a way to hire you.  When I send you an unsolicited request for you to consider an open position on my team, I’m also asking you to spend unexpected time in updating your resume and portfolio, not to mention prepping yourself for an interview.

Whenever you’re crafting an unsolicited pitch, you have to be aware that you’re asking the person receiving your pitch to do work that they probably weren’t planning on doing.  To improve your chances of the outcome you’re hoping for, you’ve got to do a lot of work to ensure that your recipient sees the value in taking the time to do so.

Every once in awhile, I get an unsolicited resume from someone who is in user experience and is looking for a new job.  I don’t mind this — I know that finding a job is hard, and reaching out to people who have previously said that they’re hiring for a position in your field is a perfectly reasonable thing to do.

If your resume is unsolicited, you’ve got to do an even better job than usual of telling me why I should hire you.  If I’ve posted here on my blog or on twitter that we’re looking for a new researcher or designer, you’ve got a pretty easy opener for your email to me indicating interest and how you would fit into the team and meet the requirements laid out in the job ad.  But if I haven’t posted anything like that lately, or if you’re responding to a very old post, you’ve got to work harder.

I’ve had a rash of unsolicited resumes recently.  All of them have consisted of 2 or 3 sentences asking me to consider them for a position on my team.  And I’ll be honest: I don’t even bother opening the attached resume or looking up their LinkedIn profile.  I do respond to say that we don’t currently have any openings that match the type of position they’ve told me that they’re interested in in those 2-3 sentences, but I don’t look at the resume.  If you can’t be bothered to tell me why I should hire you, I can’t be bothered to find out why I should hire you.

Writing a cover letter is hard.  It’s hard enough when it’s for an actual advertised position.  I understand that it’s doubly hard when you’re sending out a blind resume.  But if you don’t even attempt to do so, then I have no reason to consider you.

When I’m hiring, here are a few of the things that I’m looking for:

• articulate
• great communication skills
• can express how their experience and expertise would fit into VMware

If you’re sending me an unsolicited resume with only a couple of sentences, you’re not meeting any of these requirements.  If you don’t meet any of these requirements, it’s not worth my time to try to dig deeper to see if you might meet other requirements.  If I don’t have a position open but I have a great candidate, there’s a lot that I can do to try to create an open headcount.  I can have a conversation with my management about why we should go to upper management or to HR to fight for a headcount.  I can make sure that they understand how awesome the candidate is and that they would add a lot to our team, and that we should try to figure out a way to make this happen.  But this is quite a lot of effort on my part, and it’s probably a lot of effort on the part of my manager too, and it’s all effort that we weren’t planning on expending.

If you’re going to essentially cold call me, you’ve got to have a very convincing story.  If we talk and have a great conversation but I don’t have a position open now, and I can’t shake loose a headcount from my VP, I’ll remember you in the future.  That means that when I do get a headcount, you’ll be one of the first people who I contact to let you know that my team has an opening that might be a good fit for you.  Without that convincing story, you won’t stick in my memory, and I’ll never remember to contact you when a relevant position does come available.

This morning, I woke up to something that made me quite cranky: bad research.  Business Insider posted an article titled This Heatmap Proves That Looks Are The Most Important Thing On Your LinkedIn Profile, which refers to a study done by TheLadders titled Keeping an eye on recruiter behavior (pdf).

The heatmap, which was created by using an eyetracker to determine where users look on the screen and how long they spend their time there, is an awesome example of bad research.  The article shows exceptionally bad analysis from Business Insider.  Here’s how it goes off-base:

1. The heatmap ignores all known research about how people read screens.  In short, people scan the screen, and they start scanning in the upper-left corner.  In some 2006 research from the Nielsen Norman Group, they say that web users tend to scan pages using an F pattern.  Any designer who has been designing for more than ten microseconds knows that the upper-left corner is the most prime real estate in their design.  Given that LinkedIn’s profile pictures are in the upper-left corner of the profile, it is no surprise at all that the heatmap shows that it’s where everyone starts.
2. The heatmap ignores research about photographs on webpages.  To again point to the NNG, they published some eyetracking research in 2010 that shows that photographs of real people get the most attention on some types of websites.  So again, it’s no surprise that the heatmap shows that a real photograph gets the most attention.
3. The research does nothing to determine if moving the photograph elsewhere would have an impact on the amount of time that’s spent viewing the photograph.  The research that I cited in the second point implies that it wouldn’t, but it also appears from the report that all of the photographs that were used in their research started in the upper-left and continued on down the leftmost column, which is where the eye tends to fall naturally anyway.  To prove that the amount of time spent on the photograph is disproportionate, they would have had to do a separate eyetracking study that used a mockup of LinkedIn profiles where the photograph was placed elsewhere and compared the results.
4. The assertion of Business Insider about attractiveness aside, the research doesn’t appear to have actually considered the attractiveness of the person in the photograph.  The research did not compare profiles with less-attractive photos to those with more-attractive photos.  They just proved that recruiters spend time looking at the picture, not that attractiveness had anything to do with it.
5. The research doesn’t discuss profiles without photos.  Do those profiles not get as much attention?
6. The research did nothing to prove that there is a difference in outcomes.  They had recruiters look at the profiles, but it doesn’t appear that they were doing it with a specific goal of finding someone to contact about a position.  To prove that the photograph matters, as Business Insider asserts, you would have to show that people who are similarly qualified but have a better photograph are the ones who are selected to be contacted by the recruiter.  And you’d have to do this across at least three types of profiles: ones with an attractive photo, a not-attractive photo, and without a photo.

What I find especially amusing is that the original research from TheLadders says this:

LinkedIn’s profiles had higher levels of visual complexity, and their ease of use suffered substantially as a result. Advertisements and “calls-to-action” created clutter that reduced recruiters’ ability to process the profiles. Finally, eye tracking-based “heat maps” of LinkedIn profiles showed that recruiters fixated for an average 19% of the total time spent – on profile pictures, instead of examining other vital candidate information.

TheLadders’ recommendation is that you use their profile service instead of LinkedIn’s, and also that you have your resume professionally written, which (conveniently) is a service that they provide.  So we’re not exactly talking about unbiased research to begin with, although the assertions made by Business Insider are pretty unrelated to the original research.  I can only hope that Vivian Giang, the author of the Business Insider article, only saw that heatmap of the LinkedIn profile and somehow didn’t have an internet connection so that she could spend the three seconds necessary to find the original research.

Bad research and bad analysis, all wrapped up in one package.  How appalling.