And The blOSCAR Goes To…large overweight bald white guy and a Pilgrim, not necessarily the same person

Putting together this post took us forever. We have 2 full-time jobs, 2 small kids, 2 dogs, our own EXCELER8ion blog AND we’ve never been ‘judges’ before. Scary isn’t it. But let’s be real – You can imagine our surprise when a blogger from Canada, who writes a blog about the recruiting space, who goes by the name The Canadian Headhunter, wrote to recruit us to be judges for The Recruiting.com Post of the week – which we now affectionately call “The blOSCARS”.

Picking out Shannon’s gown and Julian’s Tux for our walk on the red carpet was fun but also nerve-racking as we couldn’t get out of our heads that we would be on the front of Recruiting.com, modeling our frock choices – but after everything that the Canadian Headhunter already revealed about us in his introduction – we figured we didn’t have much to lose.

This is serious stuff here. We’re talking about giving away $25 in Starbucks coffee, along with untold PR, fame and fortune. For the coffee-centric (read caffeine-addicted) people out there (probably 98% of you) we have felt a serious obligation to do our homework this week. Since we are a “blogging couple” our New Canadian Friend (NCF from here on out) tried to make it easy on us by allowing us to choose, not one but TWO winners. Oh sure, make the stakes even higher – $50 in Starbucks caffeine – HOSER!

And The bloMINEES are….

Jason Goldberg’s Jobster blog – online recruiting today, tomorrow, and 10 years from now
If we can over look the self-serving social networking slant (and we can) this post asks really good questions regarding the lack of innovation by job boards, a space that ironically touted themselves as the innovative, high tech, efficient, lower priced alternative to the paleolithic newspaper classifieds. Definitely one that deserved to be considered.

Viva at The Desk’s – Ethics on My Mind
Very timely and well thought out post (with some jabs at peers which seems to be a trend this week) on the topic of Ethics in Recruiting (Ethics in Recruiting panel set for the Electronic Recruiting Exchange Expo this week).

Recruiting Revolution’s – Lies, Smarts or Just Plain Tact?
I like this one because it relates to so many current topics: recruiting best practices, ethics and their overall effect on your employer brand. He gets that the ethics of your recruiting techniques may be debatable – but if they are “cheesy, aggressive” or just purely lacking any class – THIS has a real and often overlooked effect on your employer brand.

Was it was nice just being bloMINATED? In the end, we had to narrow it down to two pieces. Since we aren’t recruiters but interactive marketers that focus on recruitment marketing – we thought we would share a post from our interactive marketing neck of the woods about something near and dear to your hearts, blogging.

And the blOSCAR for Post of the Week goes to……

1- Marketing Pilgrim’s – Online Reputation Monitoring Beginners Guide
This is Andy Beal’s post on ways to monitor your online reputation. While this is not about recruiting, this post is a great primer on ways to monitor the blogosphere regarding your online employer reputation. We selected this piece because it was informative, educational, easy to digest and something that would provide great utility to a wide audience of bloggers. So on behalf of Recruiting.com may we be the first in congratulating Andy and awarding the first of our Starbucks gold.

2- And from within this tight circle of recruiting professionals we felt it would be hard to not acknowledge the hotly debated topic of blog metrics that surfaced this week quite spectacularly. We were hoping that someone would step-up and at least try to suggest some blog metrics that would make real business sense to measure (’cause God knows we weren’t going to do it). Our patience was rewarded late in the judging week in 2 posts on the topic by Jeff Hunter and his Commenters at TALENTISM.COM.

While we weren’t totally on board for the initial post itself, the conversation that followed and Jeff’s responses are phenomenal – even if he does describe himself as a large overweight bald white guy. http://www.talentism.com/business_talent/2006/03/junior_high_sch.html

It is the follow-up post where Jeff shines by taking a stab at suggesting the type of metrics that we might use to “prove” blogging worthiness to the company brass: http://www.talentism.com/business_talent/2006/03/response_to_hea.html.

It’s not that we agree with 100% of what Jeff said, but we liked that he took a leadership position and put his money where his mouth is. That is good – that’s worth some coffee. (Not sure how his commenters that helped make this conversation so good will get some of the coffee, but oh well).

Congratulations!! The after-blOSCAR party will immediately follow……..

– Julian & Shannon