Entries Tagged 'Interactive Marketing' ↓

Cool hunters are often depicted as shallow wannabes who lack enough individuality to face the world on their own merits. To that I say, damn straight. But that’s just one side of the story. We also associate cool hunters with people looking for an edge, either trend spotters or drivers of important business, consumer, or social change. These are the individuals Malcolm Gladwell writes about in The Tipping Point, the connectors, mavens, and salesmen of our world.

psfk.com announces job board today for Interactive marketing industry.

You might be interested to know that psfk, a web site and community often associated with the words cool, hip, and innovative has just launched a vertical job board or blogboard. It makes me wonder if the world of filling jobs, building employer brands, and recruiting, are somehow finally making a move to a new address somewhere along Hip Street?

psfk’s Piers Fawkes (left) and Simon King (right) scowl and smile their way into the future. That future now includes a community job board.

Piers Fawkes and Simon King, founders of psfk.com are both A-list bloggers and Cool Hunters (yeah, the good kind) who started their site as a way to talk about what was happening in London and New York. Today, they’ve grown their stable of sites to seven and feature content ranging from interactive marketing and fashion, to architecture and business. psfk was among the early adopters of social media, their sites typically feature blog posts, comments and significant interaction from other writers and community members all centered around interesting stuff. psfk has a strong creative bent and that certainly is manifest in the high-design present in all their web sites.

Piers sent out an announcement last week soliciting job content from the interactive marketing community we are mutual members of. Piers extended a free job posting to the community as a trial for the remainder of the month. Disclosure: I sent Piers a posting for Shannon for a job she’s recruiting for on her own team at Hodes Interactive in the Bay Area. Shameless plug for Shan: here’s the job posting for an Interactive Solutions Manager.

I thought you would be as interested as I was to see an innovator’s take on a job board from someone outside our recruitment space. My suspicion is that we could both learn from each other. So I asked Piers to answer some questions for our blog and he obliged. Here goes:

First the press blurb to set some context (I feel that it is additive):

“PSFK the popular forward thinking innovation team, launch a new jobs listing service targeting emerging media, creative staff, employers and head-hunters. PSFK appeals to an audience of switched on creative professionals seeking inspiration in their day-to-day work place. Now users will have the added bonus of an international jobs list (jobs.psfk.com), which is targeted to professionals in companies driving the next wave of design, branding and media.

jobs.psfk.com is the first ever jobs site that uses a map function to help prospective candidates find jobs quickly in neighbourhoods they want to work in and provides an RSS feed for every type of category - plus email alerts. Listings are updated daily and companies at the launch include hip ad agencies, web publishers, video game makers, architects and design consultancies. Although the job site is international, the focus is on London, New York, LA, Berlin, Tokyo, Shanghai & Sydney.”

Now let’s have a conversation with Piers Fawkes of psfk.

exceler8ion: what spurred you to pursue this strategy?

Piers: “2 reasons. (a) we’ve been featuring quite a few jobs on IF! (http://if.psfk.com/if) and wanted to put them in a specific section to make it easier for people to find and (b) as we move towards a publishing business model, revenue from jobs listing will be a pillar of our success.”

exceler8ion: why now?

Piers: “There seems to be all these emerging and exciting companies and agencies but I don’t think it’s easy for people to find jobs in these agencies. We just wanted to put people in touch.”

exceler8ion: what do you hope to accomplish?

Piers: “Help inspirational people work in imaginative jobs.”

exceler8ion: Do you see the site being used to post mostly for full time positions? Or, would you hope for an equal mixture of freelance postings and users given the large contingent of freelance talent common to our space (interactive marketing)?

Piers: “We’ll see how the market reacts. I’m not too sure. In the past, we have featured full time jobs that we’d love to have.”

exceler8ion: how much does a job posting cost?

Piers: “$250 for a month”

exceler8ion: how firmly do you intend to manage the niche job content aspect of your job board?

Piers: “We want to list jobs we’d love to have. Adding jobs to the site is much like the content we put on one of our sites. We only put stuff up that interests us. By doing so, hopefully we’ll maintain a useful service to job seekers and recruiters.”

exceler8ion: Have you seen any pent up demand with your advertisers for targeting this new area?

Piers: “Maybe, it’s noticing an increase in numbers of jobs posted on blogs by recruiters who can’t find people through the regular channels.”

exceler8ion: With the highly virtual nature of our space, how do you think the location based Google maps will play with users?

Piers: “It’s about speed of access. People judge jobs on their location: for example, do you think people consider ad agencies in SoHo more forward thinking than midtown agencies. Location at a micro-level is very important to people in their job and it’s something that’s been long overlooked.”

exceler8ion: Would you like to use the expertise and experience you gain from this to roll out more job boards for your clients?

Piers: “This is just something we want to offer our readers. Maybe we’ll do something around each site - e.g. a fashion one for fashion.psfk (http://fashion.psfk.com). We’ll see. It took us a couple of days to build and prepare for this launch. We’ll go for it and see what the market says.”

exceler8ion: Can you confirm (because I think it’s quite a noteworthy accomplishment) that you put this together in a couple of days? Like as in 48 hours from a) hey I’ve got an idea to b) hey, here’s the finished site.

Piers: “48 hours from the time I decided to code it. Have been sitting around on it for a month or so.”

Did any of those answers turn your head? Sound off, tell me what you think.

Here’s a sample job posting (note the Google Map - I thought it was apropos considering that it was for a Google Job)

A sample job posting on jobs.psfk.com. Note the google map.

Wrap up

Where’s a functional keyword job search? There are two search boxes on the page (both powered by Google) but I couldn’t get either one to work with any reliability. Search engine indexing seems the likely cause resulting in delays between postings and valid search results. Then again, I searched for ‘hodes’ for Shannon’s job which posted on January 9th and had no luck. In another search for ‘TBWA’ I got a hit but then I was taken to the site’s index page showing all the jobs and not a specific job, or jobs, for TBWA. A search function connected to a psfk jobs database would seem much more useful here.

In contrast to this search issue, I love the simple craigslist style (or blog) reverse chronological order of the job postings. Simple works for me - as does the drop down box showing key cities for Interactive marketing jobs. I would add one called “Virtual”. Oh shit, they already thought of that. Not surprisingly, the design is clean, attractive and inviting, something the big boys like Monster, CareerBuilder and other careers sites would do well to mimic. Since psfk has a strong community, I’d love to see some interactive features added to the jobs section. Employer ratings or interview experiences for example, or a comments section where the job seeker or recruiter could ask questions of the job poster. All in all, with the exception of the job search, the psfk blogboard works, and the site’s base strikes me as a solid one to build on.

Technorati Tags: Piers Fawkes, Simon King, psfk, jobs.psfk.com, if.psfk.com, Cool Hunters, Blogboards, Job Boards, Niche Job Boards

My 2007 Wishes

I am not one for predictions - its not that I mind putting myself out there; rather, Julian can attest to how much I just hate to be wrong ;-). So instead I am going to put out 2 wishes for what will happen with Recruitment Marketing trends in 2007. A company’s employment web site continues to be the top “Source of Hire”. While this fact doesn’t speak to how candidates arrives at careers site destination, we do know that regardless of how they got there - they went there. The majority of candidates will visit the careers section of a company’s web site and it often represents the first opportunity to engage and connect with a candidate. Pair that with the HUGE growth in the popularity of social media like blogs; vlogs; and podcasts and you have the makings of my wishes for 2007:

1. That companies will not spend another dime on media that merely serves to drive traffic to their Corporate Careers web site before they spend that money improving the functionality; opportunities for interaction; content; and design of their sites.

Rather than dropping a bag of money on media - driving candidates to your site - and then having them leave because the site is horrible; difficult to navigate or boring enough to make the experience rate up there with going to the DMV…take a step back and spend that money where it will count - THE destination - the Employment Web site. If you have $250K budgeted that you plan to spend on media - i.e. print, trade pubs, job boards, Google AdWords etc - the best thing that you can do for your company, and your Employer Brand, this year is take 50% of that and put it toward overhauling your careers site.

2. That corporations take the leap and begin incorporating participation and conversations into their corporate careers sites. Companies do not have to have a separate blog, rather it is the easy-to-publish ability to generate real content and the two-way conversation that is the hallmark of blogging that should be incorporated in to the overall careers site. Employment web sites could be rebuilt on platforms that allow for the integration of blogs; private-label social networks; employee videos and even *gasp* the upload of video-resumes. This is something that most HR departments are not willing to do, as it is perceived as too risky. On the other hand, candidates are DYING for real information and real ways to connect to potential employers and even future coworkers to help them make their career choices. If this wish is going to come to fruition, then it will not start in HR. The companies that are using social media effectively are the ones that have had it sanctioned from the top down.

So there you have it. For 2007 I wish to see better Employment Web sites that balance the ‘process’ with interactivity and ways to connect - for real. What are your wishes?

Technorati Tags: career site, careers sites, careers web site, employer brand, employment brand, employment web sites

40 minutes after I finished posting about the speed at which information flies around the web saying:

In the Web 2.0 world, we have CEO’s blogging; employees blogging; reporters blogging; all with trackbacks and permalinks. The speed at which a story can spread for all to see in the blogosphere is dizzying. Social media and its uncoordinated actions of individuals - many voices, tones, and resulting comments - introduce a level of unpredictability into the equation that has to be managed.

… these official internal Jobster communications were forwarded to me by a reliable source requesting anonymity.  The information was not meant as Organizational Terrorism - the intent was to share the real internal communications and take the place of the blogo-speculation that has come about in the absence of hard facts.
The first e-mail was sent out last week. The second was sent out last night. What would your reaction be if your company sent this to you? What type of employee experience does this provide?

Technorati Tags: Jobster, Jobster Layoffs

…It Has Always Been For the People By the People

“A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed.”

The ClueTrain is where the reality of today’s blogosphere and social media revolution were first predicted back in 1999. And sure enough, even my beloved - though often slow to ‘get a clue’ - recruitment industry is feeling the reverberations of social media. I am asked almost daily for tips on how to effectively incorporate social media to ‘create’ a ‘more modern’ employer brand that ‘gets it’ and resonates with the next generation of workers.

A company’s employer brand can not be created. An Employer Brand is made up of the relationships that exists between your organization and its employees, former employees, potential employees, job candidates, and even customers. These relationships, and thus your employer brand, already exist and cannot be contrived through marketing. However, it is the open and direct communications that are the hallmark of blogs, that if applied correctly, can strengthen these relationships through a deeper understanding of each other’s strengths and weaknesses. These conversations and their effects on people are at the foundation of social media’s power - a vehicle that has the opportunity to effect lasting change on your employer brand.

When a company suddenly realizes that they are having trouble hiring in this increasingly competitive job environment, they seek out marketing professionals to come up with an ad campaign that will increase their flow of applications and hopefully hires. The result is often an ad campaign that attempts to sell candidates on imagery and messaging that are built upon ideals that the company doesn’t really live up to. You are expected to prove you mean it in today’s market by your actions and by answering the questions put to you by the marketplace. Given this reality, do you want a one dimensional print ad or job posting to represent you or an interactive forum where a dialog can take place?

In this way social media can be particularly strong as a transitional vehicle when you want to communicate that your employer brand is ‘on the move.’ You might create a more traditional aspirational marketing campaign about your company vision and work environment while simultaneously using your blog to let your job candidates know that you aren’t implying you’ve reached your desired state. By inviting your candidates behind the curtain, for a peek back stage, you give them the opportunity to see themselves in the part of making that future a reality. We appreciate it when people talk with us, and not at us, and more often than not, communicating that you’re improving your business will only give you more credibility. Credibility is the key to improving your marketing results. Just as you can smell a rat when interviewing a candidate with all the right answers, job candidates too are measuring your words for ‘company spin’ and making their own judgments and performing their own Google searches to find out what the ‘real deal’ is.

Good or bad, what social media can do is give an authentic view of your company – that can be shared and commented on at lightening speed. Social media can go a long way toward helping you begin the process of letting go of your perception that you are in control so that your people can connect and share real information. Companies that let go of their focus on controlling the message, and rather focus on nurturing the relationships that people have to their organization - will reap the benefits of their people using social media to convey your employer brand with transparency and integrity.

Technorati Tags: employer-brand employer-branding social-media web2.0 recruiting recruitment-marketing talent acquisition

I always enjoy reading discussions about jobs from outside of our Recruitosphere. You know - the place where we don’t have all-expert opinions, all-the-time. It’s amazing what these mere amateurs know about our space.

There’s one such debate over on A-List blog LifeHacker. Go on, go check out the story called Ask the readers: get your dream job. Here’s a post excerpt to get you started:

“Reader Francis writes:

Since the age of 10, I’ve known exactly what company I wanted to work for (incidentally, it’s the Jones Soda company). I’m not 100% sure what I want to do, but I would like to have my foot in the door, have them know that I am out there ready for anything they might need. I am even willing to start at the bottom, working as a temp or whatever need may arise. So my question for readers is this: How would you go about getting your foot in the door at your dream job?”

I know - you’re thinkin’ what I’m thinkin.’

What the hell do they put in that soda and where can I get some?!#@!

I saw that a commenter also added a couple of links that I haven’t seen before (I feel so ignorant admitting that) and if by some chance you haven’t come across them before they’re well worth a look:

Here is an interesting story.

A few years ago a group of students at Pepperdine University sat around, and had no clue on what to do with their life, so they got a big RV (painted it green) went out on the road to find their own path in life, while interviewing other influential people on how they found their passion in life. The roadtrip evolved into a grassroots movement, a book, and a PBS show, if you are interested they have some videos on their site

http://www.roadtripnation.com/interviews/

It’s pretty interesting, the people they interviewed found their dream job (their passion) in so many ways that no two are alike.

http://www.roadtripnation.com/

Enjoy!

Technorati Tags: LifeHacker, life hacks, dream job, dream jobs, Jones Soda Company, roadtripnation, road trip nation