The Recruiting Animal ponders recruitment marketing for a bit and asks in his recent post:
I haven’t seen any recruiters raving about MySpace. Maybe because they’re not recruiting teenagers. Most of us focus on LinkedIn.
But will something more be needed to find and market to the candidates of the future, Peter Altieri’s YouTube Generation?
As many of you know by now, I am the oldest of five kids. My youngest siblings are 24, 22, 18 and 16 (Yes, I was the woops child and there is 7 years between me and the next kid). Anyway, I talk to my sisters and brother about where they spend their time online. With the 24 and 22 year old, their media consumption habits aren’t all that different from mine. By and large, they don’t spend hours on myspace, but they actually don’t know what LinkedIn is either. I find that interesting about the two of them - I absolutely would have known what LinkedIn was at their age, but I am much more computer savvy and wired today than they will ever be.
As for the teenage siblings, they spend their time on myspace and their cell phones texting each other. It is their wireless devices that I really see as the main conduit for connecting to these candidates in the future. My youngest sister covets my new Internet ready, Mobile Windows 5 carrying Cingular 8125 - immediately asking, “Can I get into myspace on that?” (you can) “Wow, that is so cool.”
How will this effect recruiting? The cell phone is just how they connect. This generation will never have landlines. Sending them a text message is not an intrusion, it is just how you get a hold of them. This is how they will receive their email and soon browse the web. I see most of the connections happening via wireless devices that we still call “phones” today.
The Wall Street Journal just ran an article about a new TLD that was approved - New Domain Name — .Mobi –Could Spur Wireless Web. Similar to dot jobs, I see this development as BIG for recruitment:
Executives at Mobile Top Level Domain, headquartered in Dublin, Ireland, believe that consumers would be more likely to tap into the Internet from their cellphones if doing so were easier and faster than it is today. Monday, the company opened registration for companies that want a dot-mobi domain name.
In a matter of hours, thousands of websites were signed up, including Yahoo.mobi and Hotjobs.mobi. For now, registration for dot-mobi Web sites is open only to members of wireless industry trade associations, which include wireless carriers, handset manufacturers and media companies, including Yahoo Inc., that want to make money from providing content to the wireless Web.
I haven’t found a WHOIS for .mobi suffixes to be able to see everyone that has registered their name, but I do find it interesting that HotJobs made the list.
Even more interesting to me, if you go to the mobile friendly Google on my 8125, there are no PPC text links.
EXCELER8ion is where Julian and Shannon Seery Gude write on Social Media, Interactive Marketing, Technology and Internet Business Topics. 
8 comments ↓
I don’t know any meaningful standard by which the new TLDs have been anything except miserable failures for everyone other than the registrars. HotJobs et. al. buy these because they want to protect their brand from squatters, not dedicate real effort to it.
Colin: I do have clients that have successfully employed their .jobs domain name to provide candidates with a direct way get to their careers information. We all know that most corporate web sites have done a very poor job of giving candidates a UI that makes it easy to find job / culture info, give HR their information if they are interested in talking, let alone have a conversation via a blog.
However, while the dot jobs domain has not caught on the way I had hoped (yet?) my clients that are using it and incorporating the URL as a direct link to their careers section have seen a dramatic increase in the number of visitors that actually make it see their careers information. Could they have done this with a dotcom? Sure - but .jobs in theory could become a standard and it keeps the branding consistent - i.e. microsoft.jobs vs. microsoftcareers.com. I think such a standard is good for marketing purposes. But that really wasn’t my point.
My point is that I think that the next generation of job seekers are going to expect to be contacted and will access content via portable wireless devices. I don’t care if the candidate gets there via dotjobs, dotcom, dotmobi, rss whatever - what I care about is that candidates can access the content on their terms and have a good experience. So whether sites adopt a dotmobi or just uses software to detect that it is being accessed via a mobile device and then redirects users to a site that is specifically formatted for the device - that doesn’t really matter so much as that companies figure out a way to connect to future job seekers via these devices.
Hi Shannon, I tried to trackback to this posting without success. Just letting you know. I clicked on the trackback notice above and copie the URL.
Wordpress sometimes seems to hiccup with pingbacks from typepad… it is weird. I have received other pingbacks from you in the past (i.e. the LinkedIn post).
Notice that my link to your original story isn’t showing up as a trackback on your story either.
So bloggyy…Wordpress will usually get over its bad self in time and the trackbacks will show up.
Somehow, when I get an email from someone who worked for the same company I did (small places like AMR or WPP), just twenty years later, I get a general feeling about LinkedIn. I’m supposed to “link” to this person becasue we worked at the same place, only twenty years apart.
Its that feeling you get when you go to one of the large trade shows and you/your company has a booth and every other person who walks by is a vendor.
As far as the phones go, just follow the bouncing fingers in overseas from the UK to China; then fast forward to the US about six months to a year. Good example here; http://talkingpoint.orange.co.uk/
“The Cell Phone is the New Car”
This makes more sense to me everyday; (from Trendwatching- complete article and link here- http://www.trendwatching.com/trends/MASTERoftheYOUNIVERSE.htm
“FREEDOM, MOBILITY & INDEPENDENCE
In a not-too distant past, the automobile was the ultimate symbol of coming of age: a way out from parents (and friends’ parents), from siblings’ prying eyes, from geographical constraints. No longer: for hundreds of millions of consumers worldwide, ‘The Cell Phone is the New Car’ (as the Economist cleverly stated earlier this year). Consider these similarities between the automotive and wireless/handheld industries:
• Model and customization define the owner
• Replacement is frequent
• Choice is massive
• Branding and design are key
• Competition is global
• Anticipation of new models is enormous”
Landline phones and phonebooths; going, going…….
I haven’t seen any recruiters raving about MySpace. Maybe because they’re not recruiting teenagers. Most of us focus on LinkedIn. But will something more be needed to find and market to the candidates of the future, the YouTube Generation? MUST READExceler8ion offers an interesting answer supported by field research. Source: The Network Unbound, Anya Kamenetz in Fast Company. More on Viral Marketing. Telecrunch on TagWorld.
I have just been reading agreat post on generational differences. Although this concerns recruitment I think it also has relevance in how do we engage people once they start working. The My Space generation are not far, and in some cases, already are in work. The old methods will not
Shepherd’s Pie and the boys had the Dill Salmon Filet. Ami drank copious amounts of coffee and the Irish girl and her campanion drank copious amounts of red wine. We will let the pictures taken from myCingular 8125 tell the rest of story: [IMG Ami & his coffee] Amitai Givertz of Recruitomatic & his coffee [IMG Jules and Ami] Jules & Ami Outside of TooJays [IMG Shannon and Ami] Shan & Ami Outside of TooJays
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