As some of you know, Shannon is a Vice President at Bernard Hodes, the online recruitment marketing agency that makes next generation careers web sites and the like. Shannon was very fortunate to hire some former Jobster talent this year and one of those people was Adam Einiger. During a recent video shoot for a client the video and client team were testing the cameras when they asked for someone in the team to get on screen for the video and mic check. This is Adam’s version of a mic video/audio check…

I don’t know about you, but I really enjoyed his rendition and I’m pretty impressed by Adam’s creative side (awfully important at an agency where creative solutions are a must). I asked Shannon for a few words about what Adam does and she gave me this…

“Solutions Provider, Interactive Producer, Sales Engineer, Magician, F-bomb dropper, flip-flop wearer, new daddy, all around straight up good guy!”

There’s only one thing missing as far as I’m concerned with this content and it’s easy to fix. Get it front and center on the main Hodes web site. Hodes has some good video content on their site but I feel this content is better because it isn’t staged and it demonstrates (rather then telling) a creative mindset, technical ability, and a healthy culture.

While it’s a great example of personal branding it also represents a fantastic employer branding opportunity. I hear many people lament that they don’t have any good employee video to put on their careers sites. When was the last time you searched on Google and YouTube for your company name or the names of employees with the mindset of finding valuable content you can leverage? Right, social media has much better uses than as a recruiters tool to bust recent college applicants with wild Frat party pictures!

Just because the video isn’t about how great your benefits are doesn’t mean it won’t work when placed in context of an employer branding theme. More and more, there is fantastic employee generated content that employees would be only too happy to have featured in a positive light on your corporate site. Just ask and ye shall receive.

Technorati Tags: Adam Einiger, Bernard Hodes, Omnicom

a

Click to Play

Technorati Tags: social networks, social networking, social media, Facebook, Twitter, Jaiku, Mash Yahoo! Mash, MySpace, LinkedIn, Friending, blogs, blogging, vlog, vlogging

a

Shannon and I have been microblogging for some time now on Twitter. Shannon is also addicted to Facebook and thanks to her I’ve also been known to show up there. Come be our friends and share our life, we need all the help we can get!

The point is that we’re always publishing – just not necessarily on exceler8ion.

We have lots of blogs as you might know and we even update them once in a while. Taken alone, they can be all together too quiet – aggregate them and you can see that we’re always online doing something.

That’s the point of a lifestream – you use RSS feeds to get everything into ONE portal page. ONE ring to rule them all. We’re using a hosted service called tumblr to publish our lifestreams and we’re both very happy with tumblr’s servic now that Shannon hacked tumblr to include comments.

Come along for the ride and start a lifestream of your own. It was our friend Ami Givertz who inspired me to get off my duff and create a lifestream. I was lamenting on a phone call with Ami that I often grew discouraged by the difficulty of keeping up with so many blogs and yet still wanted to have them be separate and distinct based on content focus and reader interest. So after I finished bitching Ami said that he felt the same way and had done something about it. You can always count on Ami to be an action oriented cheeky monkey!

You’ll find our last 8 posts from each of our lifestreams right here on the right rail of exceler8ion or you can go to Shannon’s directly by pinging shannonseery.com or aka thegeekmarketer or mine here on Julians.name. If you start your own tumblr then make sure to add Shannon and I as friends so we can keep track of each other.

I recommend tumblr because it’s super simple to use, not the slightest bit technical, you can use your own url (or not) and you can post ALL types of content, including text, video, pictures, and many more. It does all this with a very inviting interface that encourages you to post. Yes, and there’s the aforementioned ability to aggregate all your RSS feeds at the same time. If you’ve thought of blogging but haven’t because you don’t have the time then a tumblelog on tumblr could be just what the doctor ordered.

Technorati Tags: lifestream, lifestreaming, tumblr, tumblelog

a

When asking employees why they like working for a company, one of the most common refrains is “because of the people, my co-workers, we are like a family”. Any recruitment advertising copywriter can attest to this and, after reading such feedback in the creative brief, will promptly roll their eyes and then try to find a new way to “spin” this age-old sentiment.

“Join Company X, and you not only get a great job, but you also gain a family”

Trite as it may be, employees are expressing a sentiment that is widespread and based in truth. The workplace is a community. A community made up of people that you often see more than your own family. There is an undeniable group cohesion that resembles “family” that the work company-employee work contract generates.

When making a career choice, candidates are searching for information about a potential employer and if they will spend time to look for it. Use your career site as a venue to publicly display your community of passionate employees. Lead the search results by authentically communicating your employer brand and providing a window into the “employee-experience” on your career web site. Openly illuminate your employee-experience by incorporating social features into your corporate career web site and encouraging employees to participate in online communities where your candidates are spending their time. Don’t fight the decentralization of your employer brand… *enable it*.

Controlling the flow of information to employees, customers, partners etc, used to be easy with newspapers, TV, radio, print, email, and the like. Today, your brand is being watched, augmented, and de-located. People are writing their own stories, thoughts, ideas, and developing new products and services using social media technologies. These simple technologies and services: Blogs, Wikis, Forums, Tagging, Podcasts, and RSS are connecting people and information in new ways, conversations, faster than you can say oh shit. (via Advancing Insights).

Companies try to hide what it is *really* like to work for them like they are a secret society that you get to have no real knowledge of until you are accepted and initiated. There is the reality of a group being its own worst enemy, and a need exists to balance the idealistic view that companies will suddenly open up and allow completely public free speech, with the freedom and open spirit needed to create a thriving online community.

Effectively communicating what your company’s community believes in, and what it is driven by, will determine the kinds of people you attract and keep. When it comes to communicating what the real employee experience is and helping to foster a public online community that potential candidates can explore when researching your company – do not put your head in the ground and fear your employee experience being public – embrace it and handle it with grace.

a

I awoke this morning to a subtle reminder to make every minute in your life count. I have a Google Alert set-up for ‘Shannon Seery’ as this last year of blogging has certainly taught me how important it is to monitor your online reputation and personal brand.  This morning there was an alert waiting for me. It was a link to an obituary for a Shannon Seery of Bourne, Mass.

There’s nothing like seeing an obit with your name on it first thing on New Year’s Day to make you take stock of how you are living your life.  Here’s to a New Year filled with Love and Laughter!

Year’s end is neither an end nor a beginning but a going on, with all the wisdom that experience can instill in us.

~Hal Borland

We will open the book. Its pages are blank. We are going to put words on them ourselves. The book is called Opportunity and its first chapter is New Year’s Day.”

a

I finally sat down to participate in the 5 things meme – mainly because I am dying to talk about something else, I finally have a few moments to breath, and I was tagged 3 times by women that I respect very much: Heather, Astha, and Rosie. (Funny how we seem to all stay to our side of the Mechitzah in the Recruitosphere ). Anyway – I have procrastinated a bit about this one as I have been wavering back and forth between, “I am boring as hell – what would be interesting enough to write about?” and “I CAN’T write about THAT – thats TMI!” This would be more fun for me if Julian was tasked with writing 5 things about me and vice-versa…’cause I’ve got PLENTY to tell you about him. Maybe in the next meme.  So here we go:

1. I wanted to be an Art Therapist right up until I graduated from school and feel head over heals for the web. My degree is in Neuropsychology and Art. Art Therapists use different art forms to help people understand and work through their problems through the creative process. I was going to focus specifically on Dance therapy as I took ballet up through high school and wanted to incorporate that into my life.
2. I have a problem with organized religion. My dad’s side of the family is Catholic and my mom’s side – well…not so much. I grew up as the oldest of five children and my mom tried to expose me to various religions so that I could make my own decision one day. I went to a variety of churches every Sunday (with my friends – not my family) and learned about various denominations. When I was about 8 – I was officially baptized at the Wilton Manors Baptist Church in Fort Lauderdale. They do the full dunking there. While there wasn’t one organization that stuck with me – a deep intellectual fascination with religion did. I took so many religion classed at Colgate that I could have double majored. Julian likes to say that I haven’t had something happen to me yet in life to turn it from an intellectual pursuit to a matter of the heart – maybe – I am open to that. I do know that Harry’s second item in his 5 things meme resonated deeply with me.
3. Julian and I met almost exactly 6 years ago in Phoenix, AZ at a Knight Ridder Digital National Sales Conference. It was a messy time in both of our lives to meet. I was just getting out of a really hard break-up and he was just getting out of his first marriage. I am not very sappy, but to this day I can describe it no other way than love at first sight, soul mate, ability to overcome everything type of love (not mean that overcoming everything was easy). Most people don’t know that Jules and I didn’t marry until 3 years ago when we were having our second child. I come from a family full of divorce and a common refrain for me was “I can’t guarantee that I won’t get divorced unless I don’t get married”. Since Julian had a hard time getting a ring on my finger – for my 26th birthday, we got matching tattoos in the shape of an infinity. On my 27th birthday, he bought me an infinity ring from Tiffany.
4. The obsession with the number 8 in our blog names comes from item number 3 above. Turn the 8 sideways, and you have the infinity. Forever.
5. I love to cross-stitch. Seriously. My last project took me 4 years to complete.

So – how did I do? TMI? sorry.

a

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

a

You may be a reader of blogs. You may even participate in blog conversations through commenting. But, starting your own blog and becoming a ‘blogger’ may be daunting. Such apprehension is often driven by a real fear of the unknown. While I can only speak for myself, there are a myriad of natural reactions / assumptions that may keep you from starting a blog:

• No one would care about what I have to say
• In some circles being a blogger has a stigma attached and the word is almost a pejorative
• People will think that I have too much time on my hands
• What would my employer think
• I am not technical and would never be able to set up a blog
• I don’t feel that I can safely write in a real and authentic way

When I hit ‘Publish’ on my first blog post in December of 2005 – my stomach dropped – I even felt a little nauseated. Naked is how it is often described in the blogosphere. And honestly, for me, blogging is a lot of work – work that I love, but work nonetheless. But, I never hesitate to emphasize, that I am so glad that I took the leap as the rewards have come in heaps. Having a blog has provided an outlet:

1. to publish what I think about Interactive Recruitment Marketing and Employer branding. The public nature of blogging has forced me to think in ways that I may not have if I knew that no one could see it.
2. to refine (and often rethink) my ideas.
3. to engage with others from inside, and outside of, my industry. When people are gracious enough to share their point of view on a topic – negative or positive – I have the privilege of learning from their ideas.
4. to connect with people that care about the topics I am writing about. These are not just virtual connections. I have been able to meet and talk with many of the people I have connected with online – at various industry events and via phone.

These connections are immediately deeper upon initial live contact because we already know to a certain degree what one another stands for. Further – the live interactions may have never taken place, we may never have met one another, had we not connected online in this type of forum first. We actively look for opportunities to meet live. I have learned more, and met MORE real people with which I share similar interests, than I did in all of those years of acquiring a top notch education.

Even though I still feel that I am relatively new to blogging professionally, I get asked often if I have any tips for a new blogger and wanted to put together a top-ten list of what I have learned. Creating this list was inspired by a recent post covering 21 tips – you can find that here.

Top Ten Tips for Launching a Recruiting blog

1. Don’t be afraid to let readers know that you are a real person. Include information about you and about why you blog. This can take the form of a ‘Welcome message’ on a side rail; a full ‘About Us’ Page; Pictures; Contact Info or all of the above. One of things that makes blogging so compelling is that it is usually content written by real people – not just company PR; White papers; or brochureware. ‘No bullshit’ is core of true blogging. The more readers can connect with a real person – the more people can relate to you.
2. Go ahead and turn comments on – for better or worse (just be sure that you have a good spam protector installed or activated. We use Akismet.). There are many blogs that have turned on comment moderation for various reasons or even require people to register before commenting. We have done neither of these as we just aren’t inundated with comments (that would be a great problem to have) and I believe that commenting is a bit of an impulse buy. I don’t want to introduce any kind of delay in gratification for the commentor.
3. Make Sure that you have your RSS feed turned on and visible on your blog. If you have some control over your feed – I recommend changing it to a FeedBurner feed as it provides a friendly nontechnical interface for readers that are grabbing your feed and it provides feed metrics. Further – I encourage the use of the universal orange RSS icon and use easy to understand words like ‘grab my feed’ vs. ‘Syndicate my site’. The goal is to make your content updates as easy to consume as possible for anyone interested. To that end – services like FeedBurner even allow you to offer blog updates via email. For those that feel the geek factor is too high with RSS – offering an email option breaks down that barrier.
4. Build some content before you proactively notify the blogosphere or search engines that you have a blog. 5 posts is a good rule of thumb. You may even want to do a little future content programming by making yourself a list of topics that you hope to cover on your blog. While there are posts that come during moments of pure inspiration – most bloggers get to a point where they ask themselves – “so now what do I write about”? It is bound to happen – that is why there are so many blogs that have “gone dark”. If you’re really going to be a ‘blogger’ – it gets into your blood and you will work through those moments. How you work through that is a moment of truth for bloggers.
5. Add a “Submit to Recruiting.com” bookmarklet to your posts. Read the post that I just linked to to get the code and insert that code in the HTML for your post. In WordPress – you click on the HTML icon in your rich text editor bar to bring up the HTML code. In Typepad, you click the HTML tab when you are writing this post. This will make it very easy for readers to submit your post to the recruiting.com community site where your content exposure will increase dramatically.
6. Once you are ready to launch – go claim your blog on here is a great link for tips on doing that and other SEO tips. Get the Google Sitemap plugin available for most blog platforms and turn it on.
7. Begin connecting with other bloggers – start commenting on posts in the Recruitosphere. Most bloggers LOVE comments and thrive on the interaction. By adding to the conversations on recruiting blogs, the authors will often recognize you and seek out your blog (this should go without saying, but be sure to add your blog address to the URL field in the comment form).
8. If you link to other bloggers via your posts or your blogroll – the blog that you linked to receives a notification. This is another action that will often prompt a blogger to notice you and check out your site. Often people will reciprocate with a post that mentions you along the lines of – “I just found this great new blog in our space”. Not everyone will do this – so don’t be offended. In addition to interacting and adding richness to the community – these inbound links directly affect your search engine rankings as well.
9. Frequency. This is an issue where every blogger needs to figure out what works best for them. The more often you post – the better your traffic. For those of us that work during the day and/or blogging is not a sanctioned part of the job – keeping up that kind frequency can be hard. There are bloggers that have to be disciplined about it and set aside a specific time every day or every week to blog. My posts tend to happen on the weekends or after my kids are in bed – so between 10pm – 2am
10. Promote your blog in as many natural ways as possible. For example, put a link to your blog in your email signature; add it to comments on blogs and forums. Add it to your LinkedIn profile. Add a link to your RSS feed as well. Put links to both in your MySpace or Facebook profiles. Participate in Recruiting Blog Swaps when they are happening. Be a guest author on other blogs – most bloggers love good free content, and if they respect your ideas, offering up a guest post can be a match made in heaven.

There is my top ten gathered from what I have learned this last year. Of course, I forgot the most important one – have fun, connect to others, and make it a continuing learning experience that enriches your life and work. OK, that was more than one.

Next, we will follow up this post with a top ten list of “What Not To Do” when blogging.

Blog on.

a

A whole different kind of evolution

A lot of you have heard about the trouble Facebook is having with its new feed and mini-feed functionality. I’ve been meaning to pick up the thread I introduced about social media Darwinism in my recent post about Digg.com and Newsvine, two other social media communities, and then Amitai got me off my rear by forwarding this related link to me on Facebook.

According to a Wall Street Journal article “New Facebook Features Have Members in an Uproar” written by Jamin Warrn and Vauhini Vara, published September, 7, 2006

“Facebook.com, the popular social-networking Web site for students, is suddenly getting the cold shoulder on campus. On Tuesday, in an effort to make it easier for users to keep track of their friends, the fast-growing site rolled out two new features, dubbed News Feed and Mini-Feed. They track users’ actions on the site and then keep all of their friends apprised of those developments..”

Over 300,000 Facebook users have responded to these changes in a most unhappy manner. In my post I made the point that both Kevin Rose and Mike Davidson, respective CEO’s for Digg and Newsvine, are doing a great job of practicing poised social media skills. Like responding quickly and openly to criticism while avoiding any hint of defensiveness. How was I to know that just as I was writing this post Wednesday about Rose and Davidson, Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO for Facebook was providing a living, breathing example of what not to do.

As the story started to blow up in the blogosphere and main stream media, the first thing I did was locate Zuckerberg’s blog. I expected to find the same kind of skillful interaction on Zuckerberg’s blog that I have seen exhibited by Rose. As I sat there Wednesday evening looking at the headline of his post I have to admit I was more than a little surprised.

“Calm down. Breathe. We hear you.”

I thought that it was a pretty patronizing way to start a conversation. Apparently, Facebook users felt the same way. Of course, that’s one of the dynamics with this one dimensional world of online social media. It can really fail to communicate your true intent, and in others, it exposes your real feelings in ways that you didn’t intend.

Here’s the big difference between Zuckerberg’s post and Kevin Rose’s. Zuckerberg explained everything away (don’t be concerned, it’s all the same information you’ve already been sharing). Rose, acknowledged his detractors, admitted that part of what they were complaining about was still going to take place, but then went on to say that they were changing their system to address many of the very concerns being voiced by Digg users. In other words, Rose was fessing up, and he was taking action. When it comes to interpreting true meaning whilst it is leaving someone’s lips or fingers, it is what they do, not what they say, that has the most impact. Zuckerberg, was saying he was listening but he wasn’t showing it.

Even though I’m not Facebook user, as I am of Digg and Newsvine, Zuckerberg’s follow up today got him right back on track. We’ll have to see if his damage control will do the trick. I do think he’s moving in the right direction again by taking action, based on the feedback his community is giving him.

I hope that I don’t sound superior in this post. I’ve made tons of mistakes in written communications before, er, I mean everywhere in my life, including my forays in social media. When I stuff things up, I feel badly, and I do my best to try and recover. Sometimes it is easy, other times I have to sulk first because I’m a stupid, overly sensitive man. Sometimes I don’t even do a good job of recovering and I have to chalk it up to doing better the next time (hoping there is one) just like real life. Of course, your online digital dirt doesn’t go away. So, in more ways than one, our very survival, from a professional and personal perspective, depends on how you handle yourself in your parallel online world. People will adapt, or perish, just as Darwin illustrated.

I don’t pretend to have all the answers as to how the proper online citizen should act. In the real world, especially in my personal life, I haven’t exactly found myself in alignment with typical societal values – in business I know how to play the game, I just opt out of that game a lot of the time. Unlike your personal life, I do think it’s much easier to give rules and guidelines for how businesses should handle this world of social media. I could give you a nice long list of social media tips. But then I’d have to charge you. No, but seriously, I would have to charge you a lot! OK, OK, I’ll admit it, I’m just too lazy to type anything up right now and I’m really in the mood for a broad brush, sweeping generalization kind of post, not a how-to guide. See – I can be honest. Now back to how businesses should handle this sort of thing. Two guiding words.
Intent.

Action.

I think that if you have a good intent, even when you blunder, that you’ll survive it. If you have the wrong intent, people will sniff it out and reject any manner of prose or impassioned speech on your part. I think it is key that you also act in a manner that is consistent with your intent. When you don’t – you’re not really hearing people, or you’re choosing to ignore them. And if you’re going to disagree, just come out and say it. I think Zuckerberg’s first post would have been a lot better if he had just said that he didn’t really think that users understood his actions yet and that they might be acting a little hysterical. They are after all, acting like someone had stolen their bank account number and broadcast is everywhere. At least, that’s what I took his piece to mean, because of how Zuckerberg acted. Give it to them with both barrels. The truth that is. Take action. Even if all you can say is that you’re forming a team to reevaluate your position and you end up coming back to the same position.

But enough about what I think. There are no true experts yet in the field of social media. We’re all beginners, with varying degrees of actual experience. What do you have to say about all this?

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg

In closing, I want to say that in no way do I mean to make light of Mark Zuckerberg’s unpleasant experiences. This guy is running a highly successful effort. He must be very smart. I would guess that he’ll be just fine. I’m sure I have NO idea what he’s really like in ‘REAL’ life but I still have to constantly remind myself of that because the only data I have on him is his company and his blog. I recognize that there are aspects of his ‘real’ personality that come to light in places like his blog, but that they’re also limited by their singular dimension. This online world is a real world, but it’s not the most important one. Not yet anyway. Not until it can dive in front of a bullet for a friend or hold a baby girl in its arms and say everything that needs to be said, with just a touch and a look.

And I promise I’ll get back to further defining what I mean by social media Darwinism more in some pieces coming down the pike. I’m still mulling it over. Until then, go out and kick a dog (not really) or kiss a baby or something.

Technorati Tags: social media, social media Darwinism, social media optimization, digital dirt, online branding, word of mouth marketing, online communities, Facebook, Newsvine, Digg, Kevin Rose, Mike Davidson, Mark Zuckerberg

a

As part of what I am calling Job Search 2.0 (see post just below this one) – there is a push for creating a standardized way for people to control their resume data. Instead of having to enter their resume into numerous job boards in a million different formats – there is a standardized online format that has been created and is gaining in popularity called hResume.

What the heck is hResume and why should you care?

hResume creates a new page in your blog specifically designed to present your resume in a visual form that is viewable by people and computers. The hResume Project has developed an hResume plugin for WordPress (sponsored by SPUR) that automatically embeds semantic markup as specified in the hResume Microformat. Microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards. By using this semantic markup, resume content can be read by computers operated by employers and employment websites. Additionally, the format will allow search engines to easily index resume content and return resume data in search results.

New and progressive sites like Emurse already accept hResumes. If this gains in popularity – it may force the big boards to accept resumes in this format as well. This puts the control of the content back in the hands of the job seekers. They are free to include only the information that they are comfortable sharing publicly. There is no *required* info to submit. Resume content can be housed and updated in ONE place (and then just ping job boards to advise of an update – just like posting a new blog post).

Given the ease of indexing the content – the adoption of hResume formats by job seekers would be quite a windfall for recruiters and sourcers. You can see how it works on our EXCELER8ion blog. Take a look at the nav bar at the top and you will see that there is now a tab that says ‘resume’.

Technorati Tags: microformats, hResume, semantic markup, job boards, emurse

a

I wanted to play devil’s advocate with myself a little bit concerning online candidate brands and whether or not employers really have the right to consider your off-the-clock persona when making hiring decisions. We have the perfect example in Mel Gibson. Think of Mel as the ultimate jobseeker. He has some of the most lucrative skills and candidate brand in the world. Mel has been hired many many many times. Mel IS top talent and delivers for his employers. He has won Academy Awards, Golden Globes, People Choice Awards, etc.

With his Tequila party and resulting DUI arrest caught on camera; with his Mug Shot being shown everywhere online; with the charges brought against him this week; and with the reports surfacing that Mel made anti-Semitic remarks…well, many people say that his highly successful career will never survive this.

The story is still getting constant attention on the web and in the blogoshere (It is the #1 Technorati Search) – it is a perfect illustration of how the online “coverage” of your offline persona can forever damage you as a job candidate. In Mel’s case – while he has issued two apologies about what people are seeing and hearing – it kinda doesn’t matter. The “Mel the boozing anti-semite” perception won’t just go away.

To be honest – I really like Mel Gibson and always thought of him as an extremely sexy and funny guy (especially with his Aussie accent – but maybe I am biased). It is funny how seeing photos and video of people make us feel like we know them even if what we perceive is right on or off base from reality. While I feel that it is important to allow people to be real and authentic (anyone else getting sick of that word?) – I also truly believe that your brand as an employer is at its heart made up of your employees.

Please don’t say I told you so
While I still think that it is wrong to go “digging” for digital dirt without at least giving the candidate a heads up that this is part of your procedure – I do understand that employers are using the photos and videos and blog posts that are available to them as a way to get to know their candidates better. When they find a tequila party – it makes them have to stop and think about how you as an employee may affect their brand. What Mel Gibson is reminding us of is that there is a line, it’s invisible, but when you step over it, and it is forever captured by media, all bets are off. The same is true for candidates and companies using digital dirt in their hiring decisions.

technorati tags: Mel Gibson Candidate Brand Personal Brand Jobsearch 2.0 Job Search 2.0

a

Are you Google Juicing?

There has been a good deal of discussion going on regarding the importance of building and managing your online personal brand. With the likes of Google, MySpace and Facebook propelling our Surveillance Society more everyday, you never know when someone will use your online persona as justification to withhold a job offer, fire you, find out that you are the Wendy’s finger chick of the spam world, or let everyone know that you are a kook to date.

While I feel strongly that there will be future litigation regarding the use of digital dirt, as parents, recruiters and career coaches – when do you begin to advise people on building their personal brand online? How early is too early to let the world know what you have to say via blogging?

Meet Jake of BuyJake.com. He is 15 months old. While words have not formed or left his mouth yet – he already has his own website and blog selling ad space on his onesies. A bit cheezy? Perhaps – but his going rate is 10k a month. So – he is 15 months old and already workin’ it. He’ll never even remember his micro-celebrity status.

a

The conversation continues on and offline regarding the ethics of researching job applicants (read digging for dirt) vs. the perceived lack of intelligence for putting anything other than positive self-spin on social networking sites like MySpace. I know how I instinctively feel about the debate – but I decided to get on to MySpace and check it out for myself (go on, visit me, make a page of your own and be my friend..BTW – thanks to Ilya from GetCareer for being brave ). Why is this such a hot topic for recruiting? The audience of course! According to the B2Day blog today:

Hitwise announced that MySpace surpassed Yahoo Mail as the most visited site on the Internet. Although it seems odd to parse it that way. Yahoo Mail is part of Yahoo.com. It is the most visitied part of Yahoo. But perhaps if you add the rest of Yahoo, MySpace would not be No.1 quite yet (Hitwise, can you clarify that?).

One side recognizes that social networking could ruin or catapult your career depending on a variety of factors. But I want to explore how the companies might embrace MySpace or face the risk of job candidates that might flip the scenario and roast the companies that don’t and or worse…use them to judge applicants. Farfetched you say? Don’t doubt the influence of these types of communication channels on the next generation of job seekers. In a recent post exploring the ROI of blogging – Dennis Howlett writes:

I am 100% convinced that within the next 5 years the MySpace generation will bring their social networks to the workplace. They will want to know why corporations are not engaged in the kind of informal conversations that typify blogs. These new generation employees will hunger for knowledge. It is here I see the greatest potential ROI because learning adds value way beyond the things we learn.

Further – MySpace users could very easily turn the tables and use these very sites to wage negative campaigns against certain employers once they get wind that they are judging their job candidates by their MySpace pages.

Companies and their recruiters should be striving to be as relevant as possible to the next generation of job seekers and embrace these sites. Look at what Adidas did here with their MySpace page (which quickly gathered 55,000 + friends) and think of how this might be leveraged to build employer brand equity with segments of your applicant pool. Mike Davidson, the CEO of Newsvine, said recently on his blog:

As for additional streams of revenue and monetizing MySpace further, I’d drop the hope that companies will purchase pages that users will want to “friend” and concentrate on more on turning each and every kid into a walking product endorser. In fact, if I wasn’t running Newsvine right now, that’s the business I’d be in.

More ways on how to do this in the next segment.

a

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.

a

So I created a MySpace page – you can see it here. Go create a page and come be my friend, I only have 2 – Tom and Dave Matthews Band. Tom on the other hand has 87,609,208 friends and DMB has 105,924, and my step-son and little sister are *too cool* to be my friend – bastards.

So what does this have to do with recruiting? Well, I’m no pretender, and I don’t like to spout off my opinions on issues that I don’t really have a deep understanding of. So, after the discussion that ensued from my recent post frowning upon making hiring decisions based on the content of a MySpace page – it seemed really wrong to explore the issue any further without going “inside”.

In case you’re interested, I’ve chronicled my registration and some pearls from the process:

1. You go through the typical un/pass set up, but they also ask you for a naked picture right off the bat. Actually, I almost stopped my registration as soon as I saw this and worried that my experience might not live up to all the hype, “Photos may not contain nudity, violent, or offensive material or copyrighted images.” No Copyrighted images??? I’m a blogger – come on.
2. You then begin building your profile. They start out asking you about your reasons for using MySpace – your choices are as follows:
1. Dating
2. Serious Relationships
3. Friends
4. Connecting with prospective employers
5. Networking
3. Step three… here is where we have set people up to fail in using MySpace as a window into a prospective candidate. Step three asks for your interests. I will let this picture that captures the COMPLETE list of *interests* that you are asked for when setting up your profile speak for itself:

That about sums up what you hear about MySpace – Swingers; Alternative Lifestyles; Drunks and Druggies. Seriously folks – it isn’t fair to use this for hiring decisions – but that is just my two cents. As I brought up in the previous discussion – this is not called MyResume. It was never created to be a place where you advertised your “Candidate Brand.” Candidates should have rights too and not have recruiters digging for dirt so that companies can seemingly reduce their “risks” and protect themselves from making “bad hires”. Your job as a candidate is to prove that you have the ability to do the job that an employer needs and that is done through your work history and your accomplishments.

Regardless – if you are brave and can get over all the hype – online social networking and sites like MySpace, Facebook, Tagged, Bebo, Bolt, and Friendster can absolutely bolster your online recruitment strategy – check out John Sullivan’s article from ERE.net, Outside-the-Box Recruiting — Using MySpace.com as a Recruiting Tool, here.

Stay tuned for part 2 of my MySpace recruitment marketing adventures. I will begin building my network and let you know what I find. Warning – if you are in the recruitosphere and you have a MySpace page – you better clean it up because I am coming to make you my friend.

PS – I am still so happy apparently I am NOT too old for this – the site’s registered members fall into the core demographic of 16-to-34-year-olds. YES up to age 34…have I mentioned that 30 was a hard birthday for me?

a

My recent post regarding the problems that social networking sites like MySpace are creating for job candidates shows that there is definitely a large divide between those that say the issue is overblown and those that say – “write only what it is OK for grandma to see”, otherwise it may come back to bite you.

I was in a client meeting on Friday where I met a new client that is hilarious and also writing a book. I told her that she should start a blog to connect with other writers and she said, “No, way – I may want to run for government office one day, so I CAN’T have a blog.” She is funny, smart and was not joking.

I came across a great post over at the Recruitment Views blog (hat tip to Evolving Ideas) that cites research showing that:

Lying, exaggerating or trying to be someone else is par for the course for most people when attending job interviews. Research conducted on behalf of world leader in workplace assessment, SHL revealed that over half (57%) of the population think it acceptable to either lie, exaggerate or withhold negative information during the recruitment process. Just under half (41%), also admit to trying to ‘work the interview’ by acting like the sort of person they think the company wants rather than who they really are.

The more that is at stake, the more a candidate, especially a high-earner, is likely to cheat. SHL’s research reveals that the justification for dishonesty grows with desire. In fact, 70% of those who would do something dishonest said they would only do so if what they wanted was ‘very important.’

I find this cultural fear that someone might see us with our pants down, and society’s willingness to punish us for it alarming. Steven at CollegeRecruiter.com just put up a terrific post illustrating this fear and punishment at work (great comment by Maureen Sharib as well).

Maybe we should just stop this whole MySpace thing and just start using our technology to create a Gattaca-like “perfect” society and “perfect workforce”.

a

Do you have a MySpace Page? I don’t and I don’t have any real plans to have one. Not because I am against MySpace, not because I am trying to keep potential employers from learning about who I am – I just don’t have time to build another social community right now, but I might sometime soon. My 16 year old sister has a MySpace page. My 15 year old step-son has one. We have a witch in our town – she has one too (you can see it here), but that’s a whole other story.

I really support how MySpace has fostered an environment of self-expression and I totally support the undercurrent of a revolution that you feel every time you hear how many more users the site has. Ross Levinsohn, President of News Corp’s Fox Interactive Media unit (see his MySpace page here) recently said,

“Kids don’t have a way to express themselves, and that’s led to the rise of social networking…It’s all about getting them to interact and express themselves. We are starting to take a different mindset. We don’t want them to sit back and be passive.”

Right on. No More Boring Vanilla.

Sites like this are increasingly enabling people to develop their personal brand, but they are also being used as a window into what I am calling your ‘candidate brand’. We keep hearing the references to young adults missing out on job opportunities because of what recruiters are finding out about them on the internet. MySpace and other tools are being used to target and/or research job candidates. Unfortunely, recruiters are often shocked at what they find. It seems that one’s personal brand doesn’t always bolster their candidate brand. According to a recent article by Alan Finder in The New York Times,

“Many counselors have been urging students to review their pages on Facebook and other sites, removing photographs or text that might be inappropriate to show to their grandmother or potential employers. Counselors also encourage students to apply settings on Facebook that can significantly limit access to their pages.

But it is not clear whether many students are following the advice. “I think students have the view that Facebook is their space and that the adult world doesn’t know about it,” said Mark Smith, director of the career center at Washington University in St. Louis. “But the adult world is starting to come in.”

The adult world? Or the Real and Authentic World? The Canadian HeadHunter over at The Recruiting Animal in a post here liked Julian’s snippet from our recent project building a corporate recruitment blog:

“My favorite moment from blog training? When a recruiter explained that she didn’t see how she could possibly write on the company blog when all she’s done for the last year is tell her teenage son to avoid posting on blogs for fear of sexual predators. That was one question I didn’t anticipate.”

Do we as a culture really want companies, and thereby the employees that make them what they are, to be as vanilla and safe as your average gated community on a golf course? Is this what builds a great company? Are we too afraid that we will see something about their “lifestyle” that isn’t safe or vanilla? So much of our culture, especially corporate culture, is just devoid of any real character. Everyday it seems that there is an article or a post out there that points to how we need job candidates to only have “safe” representations of themselves on the web, we want safe and ‘professional’ blog content in order to have it be ad supported and we need corporate blog policies to keep ourselves from making an ass out of you and me.

But I digress….just like Employer Brands, Candidate brands should be built on truth. Employer Branding is not supposed to be about what you think job seekers want to hear – it’s about displaying the realities of your organization and getting to its essence. More and more the next generation of job seekers are willing to give that to us – their essence – their personal brand – but we are trying to squash them for it. Instead of trying to quell the revolution that is happening on social networking sites – employers should embrace it and participate openly in online communities to get out the company’s value proposition and message to connect with talented job candidates. Like it or not, it’s the *real* content on these user generated pages that is the gold.

From an article in The Economist:

“Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones, two British academics, eschew the notion that effective bosses can be constructed piecemeal. Their implicit message is that bosses are born, or at least made before they delve into books on management. Rather than suggesting that high-quality leaders can be constructed from what they dismiss as an “amalgam of traits”, they stress that there are “no universal leadership characteristics”. The talent that the pair thinks most vital is “authenticity”.

After 25 years spent observing well-regarded chief executives and good managers further down the ladder, the authors conclude that those who are true to characteristics they already possess make the best bosses. Their message to the aspiring high-flyer is “be yourself”, have a lot of self-knowledge and be comfortable with who you are. Identikit executives hiding behind the latest management fad, ambitious role players, time-servers and office politicians may manage to creep to the top. But Messrs Jones and Goffee insist that those they seek to lead will soon find them out. Authenticity cannot be faked, they say, and a little eccentricity won’t hurt either. The authors approvingly cite Mr Branson’s casual style and endearing difference from the norm that his followers appreciate.”

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.

a