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.

Technorati Tags: Steve Irwin, The Crocodile Hunter, Liz Handlin, Passionate Careers

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Blog Swap

Today we’re happy to publish the following article as part of the blog swap sponsored by CollegeRecruiter, a leading site for college students and recent graduates who are searching for internships and entry level jobs and Recruiting.com. This post comes from the blog of Mick Wist of Insourced.com. Insourced is an online gathering place for job seekers, employers and recruiters, as well as a repository of information accumulated by both Insourced writers and the site’s visitors, with the latter free to contribute to the site via comments, blog posts and forum posts.

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An article in today’s NY Times (subscription required), Spam Doubles, Finding New Ways to Deliver Itself, makes it abundantly clear that we are losing the War on Spam. According to the article, 9 out of every 10 e-mails that are sent over the Internet are spam. That’s a staggering statistic and paints a rather hopeless picture of our future struggle with this societal scourge.

But while spam is generally nothing more than an incessant annoyance for most of us, spam can also bring unwanted viruses, spyware, and other intrusions that can be extremely disruptive and harmful. Many people in offices around the world are simply not savvy enough to recognize all spam and/or they let their guards down for a moment – and that’s all it takes. One errant click on an e-mail link or attachment and untold havoc can be unleashed on the network(s) of unsuspecting companies, shutting down e-mail servers and potentially corrupting sensitive data.

Even the most advanced and expensive spam filtering systems are regularly being beaten by today’s advanced spamming techniques, so perhaps the best prevention is education at the user level. All employees that have Internet access, especially new hires, should be given at least an informal introduction to spam – how to recognize it and how to avoid it, with an emphasis on exaggerated caution. It is far from the ideal solution, but since spam seems to be unavoidable for the foreseeable future, it is best to prepare your people to properly deal with it.

Mick Wist

http://www.insourced.com

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

We recently surveyed more than 4,400 business professional members across our network of 11,000 niche career sites. We asked them “How long is/was your commute to work for your most recent job?” The purpose of this survey was to gather and share valuable information about the habits and interests of job seekers. The results were:

• 73 percent said they work less than 25 miles from home;
• 45 percent said that they commute less than 15 miles;
• 27 percent commute 15 to 25 miles;
• 17 percent commute 25 to 40 miles; and
• 10 percent commute more than 40 miles to work.

It appears that more and more candidates are choosing to work close to home in order to help maintain a healthier work-life balance.

Steven Rothberg is the President and Founder of CollegeRecruiter.com, a leading site for students searching for internships and recent graduates searching for entry level job opportunities.

Technorati Tags: CollegeRecruiter

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This blog entry is another in the series from guest bloggers through the Recruiting.com blogswap. Today’s guest is Steven Rothberg, President and Founder of CollegeRecruiter.com, a high traffic career site used by candidates who are searching for entry level jobs and internships.

Many employers with formalized campus recruiting programs pay their former interns to act as ambassadors on their college campuses during the school year. Those interns will help drive qualified candidates to future on-campus interview dates and act as liaisons between their employers, the school administrators, faculty, students, and other stakeholders. But there are other types of ambassadors on-campus as well, and not all of them are acting in the best interests of some employers. Unofficial campus ambassadors range from students who would never work for that particular company (think environmentalists and Big Oil companies) to students who wanted to work for a particular company but weren’t selected (think MBA students with average grades and highly competitive management consulting firms) to students who worked for a particular company but weren’t retained (think interns who weren’t offered a permanent position upon graduation) to students who worked for a particular company and were retained to staff and faculty. Any of these groups can have a huge impact on the success or failure of an employer’s on-campus recruiting efforts, but many employers are completely blind to this.

One of the best movies of all time was Bambi. I know, this is a recruiting blog, but bear with me on this one. (pun intended) In that movie, kids are taught that you are to treat others as you would have them treat you. When an employer treats students, staff, or faculty with a lack of respect, those students, staff, and faculty often return the favor. But unlike a typical employer who may only visit a campus once a year, those students, staff, and faculty often live on-campus, either literally or figuratively. If you visit once a year and tick off even one stakeholder who is on-campus for 365 days a year, who do you think will be more likely to have the greatest influence on that campus?

So what is an employer to do? Well, be sure to be as inclusive as possible during your on-campus recruiting trips. If you’ve only got two dozen interview slots and want to interview only those students who meet your minimum qualifications, fine, but also host an informational meeting in the morning, during your lunch break, or after the day’s interviews have concluded. Don’t just use it as a chance to chat up students who fit your desired profile. Also spend time talking with those who don’t because chances are great that they know students who fit your profile and probably have more influence over them than you do. If you blow off a student whose GPA is 3.0 because you’re only looking for students with GPA’s of at least 3.5, then what do you think that 3.0 student is going to tell their 3.5 roommate who is considering interning for your firm? But if you treat that 3.0 student with respect and cultivate relationships with the staff and faculty on-campus, then your firm is going to enjoy a favorable image on-campus, which will make it far more likely that you will succeed in your efforts to recruit that 3.5 student and many more like her.

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EXCELER8ion is participating in a “BlogSwap” with some of the best recruiting community Bloggers. Here is a terrific guest post from Dennis Smith of the Career Builders Blog:

I took the kids fishing this past weekend in my ol’ stomping grounds – Oklahoma.  After we had our fill of fishing and four-wheeling, they talked me in to visiting the “Ol’ Cemetery.”  I lived across from this same cemetery for years and never had a desire to visit, but hey, I guess the times have changed. 

If I hadn’t seen this sign with my own eyes, and had my daughter not taken the pic with my camera, I would’ve assumed somebody had worked a lil’ PhotoShop magic.  But, alas, it’s true.  There is a street on the south side of the cemetery called, appropriately, Cemetery Lane.  Making a right-hand turn onto Cemetery Lane I quickly noticed that I was turning on to a dead-end road.  There was a moment of silence (for the dead, of course), before we all broke in to crazy laughter.

Immediately I thought of Godin’s Broken video.  Then, I sent a copy of the pic to my brother who appropriately forwarded it to Leno.  Who knows, maybe our picture will get 15 seconds of fame. 

Now, since we’re talking about Dead End roads, let’s talk about your job.  CareerBuilder recently posted an article called “Dead End Job?  Seven Signs.”

Read through this list to see if you recognize yourself in these situations:

1. Overload
2. Unsung Hero
3. Out of the Loop
4. Looming Dread
5. Is this All There Is?
6. Temper, Temper
7. Alienation

Anything sound familiar?  If you can relate, maybe you are stuck in Career Depression Syndrome.  Or, maybe it’s just time for you to make a change.  If so, I’ve got a recommendation…start a job-search blog. 

Use your blog to chronicle your research about the industry and job you are targeting; about corporate and TPR recruiting blogs; your day-to-day job interviews; sites that offer up excellent info on blogging as it pertains to social networks, word-of-mouth marketing, and personal brand.  Seek out other job-search blogs; see what the job-search experts are saying in places like Recruiting.com, and then get advice on how to better equip yourself for job-search success at sites like CareerHub.

You can take a stab at doing this job-search thing alone, or, you can join the community of folks who are living it 24 x 7.  It’s just my opinion, but the Lone Ranger style of job search too often leads job-seekers to a dead-end road called…..“Cemetery Lane.” 

Dennis Smith
T-Mobile Recruiting
CareerBuilderBlog

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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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The Recruiting Animal

As part of Recruiting.com’s blog swap this week we’re delighted to host our favorite Animal, no not man’s best friend, The Recruiting Animal.

The Recruiting Animal says:

“A recruiter is a man. A man is an animal. Therefore, a recruiter is an animal.”

In our analysis (from tireless months spent reading The Recruiting Animal’s posts) we must conclude that if you are also Canadian then all bets are off. Canadians, as we all know, are Hosers first – animal second. So sit back, strap on, I mean strap in, and enjoy the ride.

The Effect of the Internet on Our Culture

As you know, I go to Starbucks early every morning to read and write. I say hello to all the regulars but, generally speaking, have no interest in extended conversations. Another regular, whom I’ll call The Jacket, because he wears a windbreaker even on the hottest days, is much the same. In fact, the first time I said hello to him he seemed to take it so badly that I sincerely regretted doing so and vowed never to invade his privacy again.

The other day, however, he looked up from his papers and suddenly accosted me. “What are your favourite websites?” he inquired. “I’m quite a fan of the Recruiting Animal,” I replied. “It’s author is not only witty but has a firm grip on the major business issues of the day. I can’t get enough of it.” “And, how do you think the internet has affected the culture?” he asked.

I was quite surprised by this question so I said the first thing that came to mind which was something I’d thought of a number of years ago, before the last American presidential election when few people had ever heard of blogs. “I don’t think it has an effect,” I said. “I’m a blogger and we tend to take ourselves pretty seriously but, in fact, few people read blogs even in our own industry. So, I’ve concluded that blogs are a lot like ham radios were in the 1950s; a hobby pursued by a small group of cranks but nothing with any wider implications.”

“Do you really think so?” he said. Apparently, he’d been reading Thomas Friedman’s “The World Is Flat. “Well,” I said, realizing that I’d given the idea short shrift, “About five years ago, there was a book called ‘The Death of Distance‘. And the title says it all. People can ship a lot of work overseas where none of our labour laws apply.”

“That’s not what I meant,” he said. “That’s very superficial.” Hmm. I tried to look at the issue again to see if there was something I was missing. “People are using online dating services,” I remarked. “In fact, many of our transactions are moving online. But I don’t see how that affects the general psyche in any deeper way. Though, you know, I was actually thinking on the way over here that if telecommuting really catches on, our cities might look very different. There won’t be anyone pressing for expressways that turn downtowns into wastelands and local neighbourhoods might become more important. “How do you think the internet has affected the culture?” I asked him back.

“Oh, in every way,” he replied.

Well, this insubstantial response brought the interviewer in me to the fore and I said, “You can’t just make a general statement and leave it at that. You’ve got to supply some evidence.” “No,” he said, “I can see that you’re very opinionated and your thinking is so remote from mine that there is no point in pursuing the conversation.” He gave me a pained smile and looked back at his work.

I didn’t know if I should be insulted or laugh. I mean this guy not only wears a jacket every day, even in summer, but doesn’t welcome a good morning then bursts into an unexpected discussion. So why shouldn’t he end it abruptly? What more could I expect? It’s exactly the way things should be. But I can’t say I wasn’t disconcerted. I kept thinking I’d missed something. And, then I remembered a blog posting I’d written last year. It was about a blogger who was pursuing personal financial goals and revealed all of his personal financial information online in order to get input from educated readers on his big decisions.

This reminded me of the show-all-tell-all culture of the encounter groups of the 1960s. And, indeed, what have we been discussing lately in the Recruitosphere but the way in which the revelation of personal information on MySpace is creating tension between a candidate’s personal and professional life as recruiters turn to the social networks for reference checks.

So, if The Jacket asked me his question again, I’d say that the internet is helping to erase the boundary between one’s personal life and social information.

There has been an ongoing trend towards openess in our culture. In recent years, people have not been as concerned about hiding the truth about themselves as they were in the past. They’re open about their bodies, sex lives, failings, secret thoughts and incomes — all of the things that had to be hidden for fear of shame, punishment and ostracism before.

Personal websites and blogs obviously help move this forward. But so do dating sites which reveal your personal information to anyone who participates. And so do job boards which give those who pay access to the professional information of millions of people.

I don’t know if I’d call it the end of privacy because a lot of the information is self-revealed. But in fact, the search engine is the key to a lot of non-private information that just wasn’t accessible before. I’ll do a search on a name and find the person on a list of people who ran in a marathon to raise money for breast cancer in 2001. And that might include the names of the other people in his company who also participated. This isn’t private information. Anyone who was at the race saw that Joe Blow was there. But he might not want it broadcast about. Or linked up with every other bit of information you can find about him online. In which case, it does become an invasion of privacy and I often wonder if special events will stop publshing these lists.

So, what will be the outcome of all this revelation? As far as recruiting and hiring are concerned, I think it will have some effect but not much. I might look at a site like EXCELER8ion and see a smiling young woman and her pretty little daughter and say, “I’d like to hire her.” But, in the end, skill is always going to be the key fact in hiring. And, with the advent of cell phone cameras, so many people will be appearing (unwittingly) on student downblouse sites or candid beach sites let alone on tell-all blogs that this kind of thing will all become much less scary and, eventually, completely irrelevant.

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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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EXCELER8ion is participating in a “BlogSwap” with some of the best recruiting community Bloggers. Here is a terrific guest post from Mike Taylor of the Online Recruitment Marketing Blog:

I went to an e-recruitment seminar recently where there were presentations from companies who had really embraced online recruitment.

In fact one of the companies in the retail sector had such a good process that the first time there was any “human intervention” was when the candidate turned up for the interview at their local retail store!

Prior to the candidate appearing for interview they had applied through the company web site and taken an assessment test online as part of the process. The recruitment system then confirmed that they had passed the online assessment and then offered the candidate a choice of interview dates to choose from.

The interview was then put in the Recruiter’s diary and a copy of the candidates resume was then emailed to the Recruiter. As the candidate had a successful interview they were offered the job and as they were not currently working they started the next day.

Quite a change to when I was first got involved in recruitment!

Having placed an advert in the local press I waited for two weeks for the responses to come in via the external mail before photocopying the applications and putting them in the internal mail (where they typically go lost!) before hearing back from the line managers (at least a week later) on who they wanted to invite in for interview. Of course by then the candidate had got fed up waiting and was no longer available!

It is interesting that despite the many advantages that online recruitment offers there are still many companies operating in the second scenario. Be honest, how interactive is your recruitment process?

About the Blogger

Written by Mike Taylor who has experience of working in HR as a Corporate Recruiter and experience of working as an Independent Consultant helping companies with their online recruitment strategies (www.Web-Based-Recruitment.com). Mike is particularly interested in how emerging technologies can be used to help job seekers and recruiters online.

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All jobseekers need to realize is that during every step of the recruitment process there is always a silent interview being conducted.

You’ve applied for a job. If you’re like most jobseekers and if you know the name of the company that you’re applying to, your next stop is probably Google for a lengthy search on the company.

Likewise, as pointed out by previous posts here on EXCELER8ion, your potential employer is also surfing around for a lengthy search on you. They’ll be checking out your MySpace profile as well. And the MySpace profiles of all of your friends.

Let’s assume that you don’t dig up any dirt on your potential employer and let’s also assume that the photos of you that were taken at last year’s Holiday Party were not unearthed. Yet. At this point, if everything is copasetic (your resume is in good shape, your potential new employer likes what they see so far, etc.), the first silent interview is over and you’ll likely be called for an actual interview.

Now the second silent interview begins. It starts the moment you look on a map to figure out how to get to your potential new employer.

Look at where this place is. It’s going to take forever to get there in traffic.

It continues as you drive up and begin to search for a parking space.

Why is there a gigantic lake in the middle of the parking lot?

Then as you sit and wait in the lobby, you begin to scrutinize everything.

Nice lobby. Two chairs and a plant. I’ve been in phone booths that are bigger than this lobby. And I think this plant is dropping seeds on me. This sucks.

On the flip side, your potential new employer is doing the same.

Where does this guy live? Geez. It’ll take him forever to get here in traffic.

Why didn’t he drive though our gigantic lake? Wuss.

Let’s leave him out in the lobby and see how long it takes for him to lose it.

The silent interview continues during your actual interview and through any subsequent offers and negotiations that you might go through. The further you go in the process, the better chance there is of another silent interview on Google to look for more dirt as well.

So remember – the interview doesn’t stop and end at the handshake.

Michael Dragone is an MCSE: Messaging who spends more time exploring technology than even he thought possible. You can reach him over on his Mikerochip blog at http://www.mikerochip.com/.

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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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EXCELER8ion is participating in a “BlogSwap” with some of the best recruiting community Bloggers. Here is the first terrific guest post from Louise Fletcher of the Blue Sky Resumes Blog:

As the owner of a career marketing business, I’ve been following the debate about My Space pages and online personal branding with interest.

On a personal level, I side with Shannon who disagrees with the “vanilla-izing” of our corporations and said this:

“Maybe Recruiters shouldn’t go looking for ‘dirt’ about candidates online unless they are willing to do that for their current employees – they might be surprised at what they find.”

But on a practical level, I think (a) research of potential employees online will continue and (b) companies will start looking for dirt about existing employees (if they’re not doing it already.)

Employers have always been interested in certain aspects of their employees’ personal lives. It just used to be much harder for them to find that information. Back in a former life, I was an HR VP and I fought 2 CEOs on the issue of drug testing. I felt very strongly that we had no business knowing whether our accountants smoked marijuana at home and, since the companies in question were in the music and video game industries, I was also pretty sure that we’d be opening a huge can of worms, not to mention losing the bulk of our management teams! I won my battles but in many companies drug testing is the norm.

It’s MUCH easier to check into someone’s background online than to find out if someone’s using drugs. And it’s easy for employers to claim innocence if they fire an employee our of the blue, because who can prove that they ever looked at a My Space page? Is it really a stretch to imagine an HR Manager checking a My Space page because of suspicions of substance abuse? Or to picture a homophobic manager snooping around online to find out if his employee is gay?

I recently wrote a resume for a music producer seeking investors for a new business venture. As I always do, I checked out his My Space page and the very first image was a picture of him making rock hands with a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other. He’s a nice guy and the picture was a spoof of rocker behavior, but I still made him replace it that day. Who’s going to give $15 million to a guy who looks like that?

At 43, I feel I’m a little too old for a My Space page, but I do keep several blogs, both personal and business-related and I don’t put anything online that I’m not comfortable with others seeing. I’ll admit a few foibles on my blogs, like my irrational interest in American Idol or my sadness about England getting knocked out of the World Cup (again!) but I won’t post anything that might really tarnish my personal brand. (OK, American Idol might put a little dent in it, but I’ll survive that one.)

I don’t know what the answer to all this is, other than I think everyone has to be realistic. The web offers unprecedented career marketing opportunities for savvy individuals – you can advance your personal brand through a business-related blog, a Squidoo lens, an online portfolio, or a MySpace or Tagworld page – but it also presents real pitfalls. It’s crazy to think that anything we put on the web is private and it’s naïve to hope that employers will restrain themselves from snooping around. That means the juicy stuff needs to be carefully guarded. Maybe Six Apart’s new Vox service is the beginning of an answer since it will allow bloggers to make certain things private while others are public, but I don’t think technology is the problem right now – rather it’s the fact that a whole generation of people are expressing themselves online in the naïve belief that nothing they say will come back to bite them. I wish things were different, but they’re not.

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