FUSE and Recruitment

Joel Chessman is writing about Yahoo Mindset a new context relevant searching tool. Reading his take on things got me thinking back to FUSE and what it could have to do with recruitment. Essentially recruiters should be following the four stage in FUSE to help find a better candidate for the job, and search tools should be doing a better job as well.

From a recruiter’s point of view they need a candidate pool from within they can find a possible candidate, use the information through reviewing deciding if the candidate is worth putting forward, share with potential employers, and then extend by following the candidate over the long term.

Search tools should also be helping through facilitating data retrieval, maybe even adding a “PageRank” type value to online resumes etc. More on this later.

Mindset will help with the first stage. I like Joel’s thoughts on search engine rankings of the dot jobs domain, maybe there is value ;-).

Your neighboursphere

James Farmer (Blogtalk Downunder fame) poses some interesting thoughts around a concept he is calling neighboursphere. Having spent so sometime chatting to James at the conference I kind of know where he is going with this. Here is my 2 cents worth.

Virtual communities seem to appear when people publish online (I am expanding this statement to be broader than just blogs), there are many reasons for this but fundamentally as a human being we want to belong to something. A quick search on Google will show you a large number of items on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, layers 3 and 4 are focused on social and ego based needs. Belonging to a group (even a virtual one) helps fulfil needs to these levels. Tapping into this is a great idea.

I am not sure just a blog, even a multi-user blog is the way to go in building such a community. It is only one of many tools that would be required. Personally I see modified wikis (aka easy to use), discussion forums and social networking tools all required to enhance the overall community. A multi-user blog would engage each person within the community to publish their own personal narrative within the community context. A aggregation service would be required to help consolidate the overall opinions raised and enable the feedback loop required for the community to build.

Another thing to consider there has been considerable research into where there is a strong sense of community issues such as crime, depression, violence, alcohol and other drug related problems are lower than where no sense of community exists. A neighboursphere might actually help with many of the social issues we have within our society at the moment.

Overall I will be watching where James goes with the idea as it is very good.

Your Gooru

During the last few days while at Blogtalk Downunder (if you had not guessed that was where the flood of posts came from) I had the pleasure of meeting some many fantastic people.

Some of those people was the team from Zed Tycho who build social networking tools and other cool pieces of software. One such tool is Gooru, while this is a little premature as the site is not up and running yet, but I really like the concept.

To quote from their site as a job seeker Gooru is:-

Gooru is a lot like your Fairy Godmother but instead of make believe, Gooru and it members provide you with the tools to get the things you’d like to be, do or have in your life.

Here you can:

* Improve your career and life
* Build partnerships
* Locate education, and career development sources
* Subscribe to Mentors to encourage you
* Find Coaches to give you tools

Gooru is a special site combining your dreams with personal development. It has relevant content from well-known business leaders, with mentors and coaches to help you along the way.

Essentially the tool will combine jobs, social networking, career development, and mentoring into one place. A very interesting concept. While corporate tools have some of these features let face it most people achieve these activities outside the walls of a corporation. Job site and social networking tools are also merging but there is still a missing link to help enhance the career development of a person.

Just a thought, it might be an idea to watch these guys, oh and they have a blog.

Workplace Surveillance

Last week ComputerWorld published an interesting article on the new Workplace Surveillance Bill with some fairly major concerns being raised by the Australian Privacy Federation. One quote that stuck out in my mind was:-

“A major concern, from a privacy point of view, is as long as employers meet visibility requirements it is open slather – as long as the surveillance is overt, not covert, there is no requirement to justify the surveillance as reasonable or necessary. There is no requirement for the storage or from preventing the boss from misusing material gained from overt surveillance, as well as no right of access for workers to see the material. …

I will be keeping a watch on the progress.

Some notes and thoughts

Some of you might be wondering what happened to the first 3 speakers at Blogtalk Downunder, well the notes are on paper as I did not have my laptop up and running. I will try to document and post soon.

Regular readers might also be wondering when the flood of posts will stop, today as we finish at Blogtalk Downunder this afternoon with a Blogwalk run by Sebastian Fiedler.

Further to this now that I have most of my notes online I plan to review and see if I can pull together some threads from the conference. Some that come to mind immediately are:-

  • Blogs are a collaborative tool
  • Blogs are informal
  • It is more about that you write than what you write about
  • The long tail is alive (depending on your point of view it may or may not need us to survive)
  • It is about the conversation
  • Blogs seem to be bring students back to writing and reading
  • Most need be a blog reader before you become a blog writer

An observation, educators seem to call them “weblogs” while geeks “blogs”, why?

One final note to say thanks to Anne, James, and Adrian for organising the conference.

Panel – Mark Bernstein

What people write on the blog does matter, Mark uses the example of the guy that was murder earlier in the month. The post was not very well written, vocabulary poor, but the meaning is only useful when we understand the context of the post. Aggregation does not give us this ability, or does it?

What sort of stories do blogs want us to tell? We have to remember that conversations should be dispersed in time and society. Overriding theme to transcend credentials, education blogs are swimming against the current thoughts within higher education. PR vs true blogs comes down to authenticity, it is not authenticity as in I am who I am, but it is artistic truth (or maybe I screwed up on this one?).