Today, we’re happy to publish a blogswap article on EXCELER8ion and introduce our guest author, Liz Handlin, of Ultimate Resumes. Here’s a little more about Liz and her blog:

“Ultimate Resumes’ mission is to help great people find great jobs. In addition to my work at Ultimate Resumes, I am the Vice President of Marketing for Broadpeak Collaborative. Broadpeak is a professional services firm that provides financial consulting services and executive search for financial professionals. www.broadpeak.us”

This morning I saw Terri Irwin, widow of “The Crocodile Hunter” Steve Irwin, and her daughter Bindi on TV. Seeing them and hearing them talk about Steve Irwin made me wish that all of us could live our lives as he did. I don’t mean wrestling crocodiles, although corporate America can feel like a jungle at times. What I mean is that we should all strive to do what we love and do it with passion.

I don’t know if you watch The Crocodile Hunter on Animal Planet but if you ever have a chance to check it out you should do so. Steve was a larger than life person who clearly loved what he was doing. I saw a retrospective that described how Steve started out. You could see that he had no idea back in the days when he was wrestling crocs in the Australian outback that he would become rich, famous, and reach iconic status. He just did what he loved and he did it with such passion that it was infectious. I don’t even think money was that important to him except as a means to further his goal of wildlife conservation. Who would think that anyone could make crocodiles, lizards, snakes, and spiders seem vulnerable and in need of conservation? Steve Irwin did. And he was so convincing because HE was so passionate about those animals.

If Steve had cared about the kind of career path that crocodile wrestling would take him on back when Australia Zoo was little more than a small exotic animal park he might have decided to do something else for a living. But Steve didn’t worry about that. He was passionate about animal conservation and he had a way of showing us the beauty in animals that are not cute and cuddly. He was so passionate about what he was doing that the world couldn’t help but watch. The success, the money, and the fame all came as a result of Steve Irwin following his passion.

I am not suggesting that you should quit your job and run off to do whatever it is that you are passionate about without a plan. I don’t think Steve Irwin was capricious in any way. But I would submit that if you do what you love the money will follow.

Who knew that Martha Stewart would create an empire out of “gracious living”? She has sold us household hints, cooking tips, books, and magazines and now she is worth billions. But when she started out she was just a caterer who was doing something that she loved and was good at.

What about Joel Osteen? He has grown the Lakewood Church ministry in Houston to the point that they fill the Staples Center every Sunday morning. Unbelievable. Whatever your spiritual beliefs you should check out one of his sermons on TV sometime. He is so engaging and articulate. I think its because he is full of such passion for what he does.

Jodi Smith, owner of Mannersmith is passionate about her job. She has created a successful business and has authored several books on manners. She is doing what she loves and she has become a huge success. I would never have thought that lecturing on manners could lead to such personal and professional success but it sure has for Jodi. She is doing what she loves and the money and success have followed.

So, what are you passionate about? Can you turn your passion into your career? If so, you will never work another day in your life.

Liz Handlin

http://ultimate-resumes.blogspot.com/

This CollegeRecruiter.com Blogswap article is courtesy of Recruiting.com at http://www.Recruiting.com and CollegeRecruiter.com at http://www.CollegeRecruiter.com , a leading site for college students and recent graduates who are searching for internships and entry level jobs.

[tags]Steve Irwin, The Crocodile Hunter, Liz Handlin, Passionate Careers[/tags]

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For the Week 5 Blog Swap we were guest authors on Jason Golberg’s Jobster Blog. We wrote a post called Take This Job And Shove It…For A Year, discussing the very un-American practice of taking a gap year in order to expand your mind and actually make you an even better job candidate.

Apparently there were some questions regarding how the text itself showed up on the Jobster blog – and well, Julian felt the need to respond…so, welcome to my life:

technorati tags: gap year sabbatical jobster

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This post was originally published as part of Recruiting.com’s blogswap on Tuesday August 1, 2006 on Stlrecruiting.com, the recruiting blog of Jim Durbin of Durbin Media.

Want a low cost, out-of-the box way to reach passive job seekers within a 30-mile radius of your company headquarters? How does this sourcing list strike you?

• The Travel Channel
• The Golf Channel
• Lifetime Network
• Sci-Fi
• HGTV
• MTV

Which channels do you think your ideal candidates watch on TV at night? Now that Spot Runner has streamlined the purchase of local cable TV advertising and made the buy-in attractively low (think $500 not $5,000 or $50,000) maybe it’s time you found out.

Since its beta release earlier this year (read our EXCELER8ion post on Spot Runner beta here) Spot Runner has often been referred to as the adwords of TV advertising. Like Uncle Google (no blood relation), Spot Runner aims to make it easy for businesses to create, plan and execute an affordable media buy all from the comfort of their keyboard, albeit on cable TV instead of a search engine. TV advertising has never been a serious option for small local businesses (Spot Runner’s initial customer target base) because the production costs and pricing were either too complicated, out of financial reach, or both. Sound familiar? I could have just described the relationship between recruitment marketing and Television. In fact, if you replace much of what has been written about Spot Runner and replace ‘local’ or ‘small business’ with ‘recruitment’ you begin to see the opportunity.

“People think about mass market, but with local TV you can target practically the neighborhood level,” said Spot Runner co-founder David Waxman. According to the article TV ads on the cheap for small biz published on CNN Money.

Hmmm, reach people with specific interests in a targeted geographic location with the proven emotional impact of Television. You know, passive job seekers do watch TV! Why Television you ask? Here’s a quote from co-founder Nick Grouf that sums it up pretty well.

socalTECH: Why the TV space — when it seems like everyone seems to be moving toward the Internet for local search?

Nick Grouf: “Television is the most powerful advertising medium in the world. The average American spends half of their leisure time watching TV – twice as much time as listening to the radio and almost four times as much as reading the newspaper. Television also has the ability to capture people’s attention more strongly than any other advertising vehicle. TV has an aura of importance that enhances an advertiser’s image and prestige. By offering a dynamic message that incorporates sight and sound, motion and emotion, TV advertising has the ability to generate trust and excitement better than any other medium.”

I contacted Spot Runner and asked them about their views on recruitment marketing and they connected the dots with local Television advertising pretty easily.

“TV advertising is a proven, effective way for companies to brand themselves, and using it to attract new talent is an innovative application of the medium. With Spot Runner’s self-serve platform, companies can go to spotrunner.com and choose – from thousands of templates – an ad that reflects their brand, and customize it with a voiceover that fits their recruiting message. Then, they can easily create a media plan targeted towards their core employee demographic. If an organization with multiple campuses is looking to hire just in the Phoenix area, for example, they can utilize Spot Runner to launch a smart, cost-effective campaign in Phoenix. With just a couple clicks of the mouse, the ad can be up in just two-to-four weeks. Spot Runner’s intuitive website makes it possible for a marketer with no intimate knowledge of the local Phoenix media market to launch a smart TV advertising campaign,” said Keith Wiley, Spot Runner Corporate Communications.

Spot Runner just inked a deal with mega ad agency JWT. The combination is largely aimed at giving JWT’s national advertisers a tool to let franchisees and local dealers leverage their own national brand at a local level with appropriate customization and targeting. Just as national advertisers can leverage Spot Runner’s platform for national advertisers, so too can recruitment marketers. Perhaps Spot Runner will work with JWT’s recruiting arm in the future?

In the mean time, don’t forget the example of Arm and Hammer’s Baking Soda product. It was released in 1846 but it wasn’t until 1972 that people began using it to keep their food fresh in their refrigerator. Products have more than one use. Even though Arm and Hammer introduced multi-use interactive spinning wheels to illustrate the number of uses for baking soda it wasn’t until the refrigerator use that Arm and Hammer baking soda sales really took off. It’s no irony that the famous surge in their baking powder sales were directly linked to single-use TV spots featuring the fridge example – leveraging the mass-market penetration that TV is certainly most famous for.

Products and tools get used by people in highly creative ways when they see an application for one of their business or personal problems, even if they have to do some translating or work-arounds to bring it all together. Necessity, the mother of invention. While, there’s no greater challenge in business today than finding great talent I believe recruitment marketers and HR teams alike could benefit from stepping outside their comfort zone when it comes to finding the best people. Is it a lack of imagination? Have we been lulled into one-dimensional thinking by recruiting focused sales pitches telling us how special and unique our little world is? When did we loose our ability to put 2+2 together for ourselves? Well, I don’t think we all have but it’s amazingly easy to take the safe and well-traveled route isn’t it?

If we mimic the example offered by Spot Runner and JWT it’s not hard to see how you could leverage your national or employer branding and hopefully, some existing TV creative to build your own recruitment TV spots. Voila, you can finally leverage the power of Television to build your recruitment brand or even with more of a direct response angle for a major hiring spree. Or, go with an independent film vibe and have employees interview each other about why they love working at your company and pick the best ones to air in your commercials. Make a contest out of it like companies are doing with consumer generated advertising content on the web. Oh, and while you’re at it, use the finished product in your web advertising and employee orientation package. It’s all out there – even the home run.

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As part of Recruiting.com’s blogswap, we submitted a Guest Podcast on Jim Stroud’s The Recruiter’s Lounge. I thought that listeners might be interested in being able to read the information as well as link off to the stories that were mentioned – so I have written a post covering the information from Julian’s Podcast. (And yes – I did it for the search engine love too)

There’s been some good debate and commentary over the last year in the recruitment space about the influx of Generation Y and the coming mass exodus of Baby Boomer knowledge in relation to productivity in the workplace. Doomsayers play the role of helping us see how bad it could be if we both loose this talent AND fail to make adjustments for it NOW. Given that our economic survival depends on figuring out solutions to this problem I believe we’ll come up with some innovative ways of harvesting our baby boomers knowledge and experience. Others won’t and they’ll likely go out of business. All of this has me thinking about our future. After all, everyone has a stake in it regardless of age, social, geographic or economic factors.

This discussion hardly started last year.
Back in 1995, when I was still in college and not even a twinkle is Julian’s eye – Julian attended a briefing by French Management Consultant and Author Robert Aubrey at a Stanford Breakfast Meeting. Aubrey’s book, Working Wisdom, Timeless Skills and Vanguard Strategies for Learning, co-authored by Paul Cohen (who became prominent as the editor for Tom Peter’s In Search of Excellence newsletter) takes a stab at defining how learning organizations could flourish by exploring how adults learn, how workers acquire wisdom, and how they use that knowledge to create more effective companies. The central theme of Aubrey’s speech that really had an impact on me was that companies were doing a terrible job of recognizing the wisdom in their employees, never mind actually leveraging that wisdom. This was the mid 90’s in Silicon Valley where young Wiz Kids were already ruling the roost, while older 30-somethings to 50-somethings were already looked at as ‘out-of-it’. Yahoo’s Stanford digerati Jerry Yang and David Filo were busy re-writing the rules and Julian was playing his own little part in that revolution while at the same time thinking about what he’d learned of history, culture and philosophy from his dad and thinking to myself that we were missing something important in our corporate world. Aubrey was telling us to wake up and recognize the great resources right under our noses and also encouraging us to build learning organizations so that highly immature technology companies like Yahoo! could do a better job of harvesting their own working wisdom. 10 years later Jerry Yang and David Filo, even at their young ages, are considered sage-like. There are legions of people who came before them, with them, and are still yet to come (our MySpace friends) that must all contribute to our collective corporate and personal consciousness.

Human behavior doesn’t change much over time. Right now the difference between a Baby Boomer and a MySpacer seems pretty vast – and they are in some ways – but looked at in context of our last 50 years, or a macro level, we see a lot of similarities. How different are a MySpacer’s behavior and social awareness from our mother and father’s ‘hippy’ generation? And is that so different from our own Gen X sensibilities?

The generations aren’t so different in fact. Interesting news stories about Baby Boomers have been popping up everywhere. In some instances, you could swap out Baby Boomer for Generation Y and have the same product – just a different target audience. Here are a few:

1- Nintendo Electronic game maker Nintendo has posted sales with an eight-fold increase over the last year due to 40 and 50-something’s buying game units…for themselves? Did anyone other than Nintendo see that one coming? How did they see that one coming?

“Nintendo managed to attract new gamers in their 40s and 50s with its Brain Training for Adults, a collection of puzzles and quizzes designed to give older gamers a daily mental workout, and Nintendogs, a virtual pet game. It has just released an electronic sudoku, the numbers puzzle.”

2- From the recent Business 2.0 article (HT to Dave Lefkow), More Retirees Opting to Launch Startups, approximately 80 percent of boomers want to keep working in the years traditionally reserved for retirement – but with one big difference that jumps out at me – similar to what gets said about Gen Y – they aren’t afraid of work – but they want to do it on their own terms.

“For the past 10 years, adults ages 55 to 64 have been the group most likely to start a new business, according to a study released in May by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, which promotes entrepreneurship.”

They’ve got the drive and mobility that our young MySpacer’s have…but they also have money. And they’re hopped up on the power of networking because many of them have been networking for longer than MySpacer’s have been alive. In fact:

“Indeed, strong networks are what separate thriving retiree entrepreneurs from all the rest, says Wes Moss, author of Starting From Scratch: Secrets From 21 Ordinary People Who Made the Entrepreneurial Leap (Kaplan, 2005).

This sets the stage for my favorite “gray matter” so far…(Ok – truth be told, my FAVORITE Grey matter is Grey’s Anatomy), but anyway:

3- Did you know that Jeff Taylor formerly of Monster fame has been making news of late with Eons, Inc, the new (social networking?) site targeting the 50-100 year old demographic? Jeff’s keeping pretty mum on the details of the site, a clue to what the site will be can be found in an excerpt from one of Eon’s open job descriptions on Monster:

“Do you know the ins and outs of fostering a true sense of community on the web? Are you familiar with those tools and techniques that not only enable, but ENCOURAGE site visitors to take an active part in the conversations going on around them? Have you worked with message boards, blogs and viral marketing campaigns that produce REAL results and transform web sites from mere electronic versions of a print publication into a vibrant, dynamic community where the driving force of the conversation is as compelling as the original content offered by the site itself?”

For now we are thinking of it as “GraySpace” – the hair color equivalent for grown-up MySpacer’s. It does beg the question: “Will a kid land this open job at Eons and be the one building the “community” or will it be a boomer? Clearly someone thinks Jeff’s idea is a good one.

Are Boomer’s just emulating our youth or is something else going on?

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As part of the recruiting blog swap we’re guest authors this week on John Sumser’s acclaimed site. Although not proper protocol, since John’s site doesn’t have blog comments or trackback functionality, we are posting our contribution to Blog Swap on our site as well.

The last time we got involved in a conversation with John it was indirectly through the trouble he stirred up with Heather Hamilton from Microsoft on the subject of blog metrics. We disagreed with John’s methods more than his message, although we agreed wholeheartedly with Heather that it’s impossible to fully measure a blog’s value by metrics alone. In thinking more on this topic since that time I think we’ve refined our position and we figured that this was a perfect venue to re-engage in that conversation with John’s readers, and the man himself:

PAGE VIEWS, UNIQUE VISITS, NUMBER OF NEW HIRES GENERATED DIRECTLY FROM YOUR BLOG

Many of us continue to struggle to explain in measurable terms the business value of our blogs. The legions of companies starting blogs to market their jobs and companies to talented candidates are no exception. Having spent our careers in sales and marketing you’d think we were a huge proponent of metrics…and we are, but not of the blogging metrics we’ve seen used to date. At least not the typical ones we’ve all pulled out of you know where for lack of a more intelligent solution. Metrics, just for the sake of metrics, are stupid. We think the time to get these measures of value right, is right now and that we need to stop accepting poor representations of value – kind of a ‘Just say no!’ to irrelevant metrics campaign.

Where do we start with creating meaningful new ways to value blogs? Good metrics for measuring a blog’s ROI have been elusive because we don’t yet understand all the reasons why blogs are working. We ‘get it’ to some extent in our gut, we feel it, but the value of a blog is still an intangible that is hard for us to define. Let’s throw out the typical online yardsticks and start with good old-fashioned research, testing and validation from an unbiased source to determine exactly how blogs influence us. If we focus on trying to better understand why blogs connect with people, won’t the metrics that we use to measure a blog’s value become self-evident?

MEANINGLESS METRICS
I was reminded of the continued use of meaningless online metrics in another area recently – online ad impressions (impression = the amount of times an ad is viewed). I was talking with a good friend who took over my job managing the ad network for a major U.S. news publisher with forty web properties, who told me that these forty sites are currently pumping out about one billion ad impressions per month. If you compare this number to how many banner ad impressions MySpace serves in a single day, it is mind-boggling. MySpace hits a billion ads served by about, oh let’s say 5:38AM of any given DAY; equaling the ads served that a major, forty-site publisher serves in an entire MONTH. According to Nielsen/Netratings, one of every ten ads viewed online in October 2005 was viewed on MySpace. Their numbers are so different that it reminded me of the gross irrelevancy of the metric ‘ad impressions’.

As an online publisher when we run out of ad inventory and are in need of more ‘impressions’ – we can just stack more ads on a page or just segment existing content and force users to click and load more pages in order to get at the content. Bad user experience. The good publishers (then and now) create engaging new content and tools, forge new partnerships and actually market their product – the result being more traffic and greater product value (which in turn creates more ad inventory). You’d think the method described above where we force users to click thru to more pages with no added value went out with the first dot-com bust. But there’s still strong evidence of using this tactic – case in point, MySpace. Mike Davidson, CEO of the user-generated news site – Newsvine, wrote about the effect on total page views and revenue for MySpace if they were to undergo a site redesign to make their site more user friendly:

“Here’s a sobering thought: If the operators of MySpace cleaned up the site and followed modern interface and web application principles tomorrow, here’s what the graph would look like: picture of graph [picture can be found here]. That’s right. I hold that at least 2/3rds of page views would disappear.”

But what about the metric that we’re all ultimately judged by – the Big Kahuna of all metrics – money? MySpace will have revenue of about $200 million this year, according to estimates by Richard Greenfield of Pali Capital, a brokerage firm in New York. This is around the same online revenue of that major news publisher we used to work for. Interesting eh?

Back in 2002 we went through just the kind of re-design for that news network we worked at that Mike Davidson talks about with MySpace. And guess what? We changed our page and ad layout significantly (navigation as well) – reducing the number of ads served per page by 40-50%! Did banner revenue drop? Not a lick – because the junk ads being served on that inventory were either completely unsold or were remnant ads valued in the pennies – just like MySpace. The real value of MySpace is the audience, and the potential influence on their thinking and behavior – not the page views, or number of ad impressions. Valuing MySpace based on their $200 million in ad revenue and directly linking that to page views going away is akin to valuing blogs based on page views. Rupert Murdoch (NewsCorp) certainly didn’t have MySpace’s current online revenue in mind when he paid $580 million to acquire MySpace, he was thinking about the value of the young and influential audience he would gain access to and what they meant to his companies future. Put a metric on that one! He did some would say by paying $580 million for them but I bet if you asked Murdoch in ten years about this acquisition he’d admit that he got a bargain. Have the MySpace execs figured out how to monetize that audience yet? Not yet, but when (not if) they figure that out – WOW! Same for blogs – we think that when we figure out how to capture their value (beyond what we intuitively sense) we’ll all say WOW.

Want to read more about why blogs are a new animal whose value defies simple web metrics, especially for recruitment marketing? Head over to our next post (if you dare) and read the next rant in this series.

Update: August 1, 2006

Since our recent round of blog metrics stories that we kicked off on July 12th there have been some new posts in the recruiting blogosphere by Gretchen and Zoe from JobSyntax (“The Metrics, They Are a Changing” on Recruiting.com here) and then more recently Jim Durbin penned his response “Recruiting Metrics? Pah.” over at Stlrecruiting.com here. Take a look at their posts for some fresh and tasty perspectives and remember there’s three more stories in our series as well. Here’s the next in line on EXCELER8ion.

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