Zen and the art of recruitment.

(Somewhat off piste from the usual I know but it is the new year. Be grateful you weren't subjected to a  rundown of my 100 favourite blogs/shoes/gin and tonics of 2011)

Ah recruiters. my post holiday inbox is full of your invites on LinkedIn, your emails and your phone messages (nice trick the one who phoned reception and pretended they KNEW me). *sigh* 
Some tips.

I need to know the name of the retailer/company
blahblahnoise company doesn't want to reveal itself, blahblahnoise I can't tell you unless I discuss in person, blahblahnoise I need to know if you want to apply before I tell you, blahblahnoise I'm going to refer to 'a large multi channel grocery retailer whose online operations are based in Welwyn Garden City' secret code. If I don't know who it is I won't know if I want to apply. Coming from a top tier consultancy I have some great names on my CV and I don't need to especially stick to the big players but admiration for a company is a big factor.  I'm someone for whom strategic vision is everything so I need to know what the company is, what their plan is and where they're going.  So quit your mind games and just tell me.

Never ask if I know someone for the role:
a) I'm not doing your job for you and nor is my LinkedIn network
b) Surely you thought of me for the role because I'm uniquely awesome? No? Just spamming then.

READ!
My background is really varied yet people insist on offering the same roles which don't really fit who I am or what I do. It's so obvious they've just searched for a keyword which has popped up in my profile.

Similarly after I joined my current company last December I got about ten emails in the first month-  clearly I've just moved jobs, likelihood is I'm not looking for a change quite so fast!

Be genuine
Ok so partly this is a rant about my inbox and partly it's because I'm doing a whole load of recruitment at the moment. I'm learning a lot about it and what it's taken me about two months and about 200 failed CV's to realise is that I'm a lot better at it than recruiters we pay to do it. For a start I don't charge my company a gazzion pound fee (or any fee...hang on.....that needs to change....) but no, the key to good recruitment (in ecommerce, in retail.... in anything) is sincerity. Genuinely building a relationship with a candidate who you know will be honest with you and who you can be honest with is the way forward. For those who make this their career this means playing the long game I'm sure, for me it's stalking (ahem) developers where they like to hang out rather than waiting for them to come to me.

Ah you see - you thought it was going to be a rant but no, there was a moral in the end.

A/B Testing, some golden rules - aka What an idiot just learned

I have to admit I’ve always been somewhat dismissive of A/B and multivariate testing. As an ex retailer and someone who has worked on designing parts of some of the UK’s biggest ecommerce businesses I thought this kind of stuff was basically a buzz-concept trotted out by "marketing people" who had no knowledge or instinct and spent their days tinkering about which whether the ‘Add to Basket’ button should be blue or cyan rather than dealing with much more interesting and important things like ‘is my stock file up to date?’. Also I am generally of the opinion that most online retailers should probably get themselves up to at least some kind of best practice level of actual functionality before they start tinkering about with tests and suchlike.(Kurt Geiger.com- I kind of mean you)

No one will probably convince me of the difference between blue and cyan but I have learned a few things recently about A/B testing that I guarantee someone who knows the answer to that question won’t tell you.


I should probably sub title this post as “A/B Testing: The myth’s aren’t true (well they probably are but not for you)”.

-       Know what you’re testing

If you don’t know what you’re wanting to prove with a test what you end up with is some data. Just that, some data. No business question=no real results. You need to be proving something. This is why I often think basic functionality comes first. You don’t need a ton of insight to know whether customers want to be able to track their order or see their previous orders somewhere – none of this affects conversion, it affects customer loyalty, your operations budget and probably your brand among other things but it isn’t going to convert a whole load more. A more interesting thing you could test would be whether your customers convert higher when the price is shown on content or not (for example) . The moral is-  think before you test.

-       In most cases you need big traffic to see big differences


You hear all these ecommerce ‘experts’ speaking about how they improved conversion by about a million percentage points by testing whether a female or male model is better on their Homepage or not. That’s great for them, but I almost guarantee it won’t happen for you. I’ve had tests running for literally weeks on non-core pages – fact is you need visitors to that functionality. If you didn’t have many when it was just A – it won’t be much difference when you have A+B. Learn which things have enough traffic to test and which don’t. Think about the sample size you need and work out how long you’ll be testing for based on your current traffic through that part of the site.

 -       Statistical significance is all

The reason you need volume is to ensure you reach statistical significance. Think of it as a level of confidence in the result. For a normal non maths geek this means the difference in the results for A and B have to be different enough to not just have happened by accident. There is some great articles about this and calculating your sample size around on the web –most of them I don’t understand. What I do understand is-  no statistical significance, no result. The smaller your volumes also mean the less consistency you’ll see-  when a couple of visitors can tip your result you’ll see more ups and downs that when you get thousands.

 -       Don’t test more than one thing at a time

It sounds simple but is actually incredibly hard to implement. If you change more than one thing at once you’ll never know exactly what you did to cause the positive (or negative) test result. And yes this means when you add additional functionality in a lot of cases you can’t go re-designing your page around it. The best way to approach is usually to go for the concept first and then look at the design. Or think about designing without the functionality first, setting it live to establish a baseline and then adding in the new thing.
 
-       Don’t always hope for a positive difference

Sometimes the best test you can do is to hope that when you add something there is no difference – that way you know that developing that functionality isn’t going to have an adverse effect on conversion. There are other factors than conversion (like reducing the calls to your call centre for example).

 -       Don’t listen to agencies

 Just don’t. I'd explain but it will make me angry and stab at my keys. It's my birthday and I have a sprained wrist so neither of these things seems like fun.

 There'll probably be a part two to this.....