Entries Tagged 'BlogSwap' ↓

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

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.

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.

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?

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.