Picked this one up from the boys and girls over at ERE.  Too damn interesting not to share here.

SnapTalent was a startup in the Human Capital space, described as an "Adsense-like ad network for recruiters that positioned ads on contextually related content pages of its participating publishers".  When that business plan didn't get traction, the company abandoned the ad network concept in favor of a college recruiting platform. It was introduced in the spring — too late, even in a good year, to interest many corporate recruiters. And 2009 is anything but a good year, as the Snaptalent team admits: “Market timing couldn’t have been worse … most calls to potential customers indicated that they wouldn’t be willing to spend or focus on this area for at least another year.”

But of course, that's not their fault for not understanding the market, right?  Of course not.  Let's blame someone else.  Anyone hanging around this sector with purchasing power that the boys from Snaptalent could blame?   How about HR?  Let's blame them - everyone's always accusing them of being lame anyway. 

It's sad, but true - the failed web startup guys didn't look inward.  They blame HR's lameness. From the final message on SnapTalent's website:

"The truth is that there are barriers to adoption of newer technologies which come down to the position of HR in an organization. Since HR isn't directly revenue generative, HR decision makers aren't as empowered to drive change required by revenue generative functions like marketing or sales. This creates a unique enterprise sales environment where companies that innovate too radically are too early to market/phased out despite those innovations being commonplace in other enterprise markets. You can't change behavior too radically for HR, which as entrepreneurs super excited by changes in the consumer web we felt incredibly frustrated by."

Hey Snaptalent gang - are you serious?  Let me get this straight.  You come in with a plan.  It doesn't work.  You quickly switch to the next plan, which is based on college recruiting and make exploratory calls after you make the change, only to find out then that the vast majority of the college recruiting spend is done for the year at that point.  All in a complex, hyper-competitive world known as recruiting?

I'm an HR pro.  I get what you were trying to do.  I just didn't want to buy your product because you didn't know what you were doing.

How's that for empowerment?