Just got an email from Lori telling me about her new blog HRLori that she launched over the weekend. Her first post is about blogging and keeping your job! She points to an interesting piece of law within California and how it impacts employees and employers.
Welcome to blogsphere Lori!
Just registered for Blogtalk Downunder in May, should be good!
It seems that SHRM has got their wishes for a new .jobs domain. Details of the SHRM release are here.
I posted about this in December and had some concerns over the introduction and how it would operate.
It will be very interesting to see how things play out in the coming months around registration processes etc. I really hope SHRM takes a global focus and does not make this just a US-centric activity.
On Friday morning I posted about Jobster and the misunderstanding many seem to have had about what they are trying to achieve.
I also commented in the post that I would like to see what made them tick. About 4 hours later I got an email from Jason looking to hook up and show me what they have been doing. On an aside it is good to see the new HR technology vendors (Indeed and ResumeFit included) are paying attention to the blogosphere.
I did not immediately reply to Jason as I was on my way out the door to fly to Sydney for the weekend to see family. On Saturday I logged into my GMail and replied to Jason saying I was in Melbourne (GMT+10) and maybe we could hook up via Skype? Jason replied via his Blackberry that he had someone who would be in Melbourne this week. Dave then replied via his Blackberry and we started to line up a time to talk.
Exchanges like this just reminds me about the power of the internet and the different communication devices that are available. 5 – 7 years ago I could have quite easily missed Dave’s trip to Melbourne as it would of taken us all several days to reply to each other’s messages.
The Jobster blog has linked to a item posted by Cote who was questioning the logic and design of Jobster.
Jason Goldberg does a really good job of explaining why they are doing what they are doing. That is trying to tap into the passive job seeker. He also explains why they are not opening up for people to register because they are active job seekers and not the target market.
It is interesting to see the disconnect between what people are use to seeing online and what is happening at Jobster. What do I mean? Well normally when a company launches with a big fan fair they want lots of people to register or try out their service, Jobster is different.
Having said this I would love to look underneath the hood and see what makes Jobster tick, out of pure interest.
ComputerWorld here in Australia have picked up on the IM issue today as well. This time they are quoting SurfControl and their particular report on the threats posed by IM technology within the enterprise.
Must be something in the air today?
Over the last few months I have touched on IM an its possible uses within organisations, and the lack of take up.
Today I noticed Dubs from HR Technology Discussion Board picked up on the HR.com item on IM and the reshaping of organisational communication. Dubs quite rightly mentioned several of the security concerns around using the consumer based IM clients, a reason the big players looked at developing corporate IM platforms and while Lotus Sametime and Microsoft Office Live Collaboration tools will take off, and why many IT shops block the IM ports, have locked down desktops and implement State-full Deep Packet Inspection on their networks. Dubs then found an item in CNet confirming his thoughts. Strangely enough, or not, if you download the IMLogic report you will see that most security issues have come from the MSN network about 75%. These attacks are using social engineering to successful infect end users and due to the nature of the tools being used IM worms will spread through your network at a far greater rate than any email based worm.
Ian Goldberg from blog*on*nymity also posted today on some the issues around IM and brings together some of the encryption and privacy items around the whole topic. Ian gives a very good technical background as to WHY consumer based IM tools have issues. He also raises some interesting thoughts on the whole identity management issue.
All of these issues are why organisations like IMLogic, and others, have created specific products in this area. Many of the existing accounting and legal compliance standard such as SEC, NASD, HIPAA and SOX have legal obligations around storage of client communications.
The benefits of IM are the ability to facilitate multi party collaboration, presence awareness, collaboration anywhere and immediate closed loop communications within your enterprise. These benefits have significant upsides especially when IM is implemented consistently across the enterprise and even integrated into business applications such as CRM, and ERPs. But while the benefits of IM are large from a collaboration point of view the downside can also be very large if not implemented correctly. Once again IM is an area that HR should be working “hand in glove” with IT to ensure all of the legal, compliance and people issues are taken into account.
It seems Mark Jen (ex Google and Microsoft fame) has been helping his new employer with their blogging policy. (Thanks to Michael Fitzgibbon for the link).
Overall it seem a clear easy to read policy that most employees would understand and be able to follow. In reading the comments on Mark’s blog readers have certainly pointed out areas for improvement, however that would be the case for most policies. Thomas Nelson Publishing have been going through the same process via Michael Hyatt’s blog Working Smart and have revised the policy to be more readable.
I hope Mark and the team at Plaxo have taken into account their organisation’s culture when developing the policy. For example Microsoft seems to have taken into account their culture with the very general “Be Smart” but that would not work for all organisations, Sun has done the same thing.
Registered last night for a new service called Jobs In HR. Jobs In HR is an Australian based service that emails jobs to subscribers on a weekly basis.
As of Mar 22 05 they had 3400 subscribers all receiving HR jobs on a weekly basis directly into their inbox. The jobs are ad free as the ad publisher is paying $A120 per ad for a month period, interestingly they exclude agency recruiter roles as they are classified as sales roles. Further they currently do not offer RSS feeds, however after contacting Vincent Ho from Jobs in HR he said they looked at it but doubted the wide spread addoption or RSS readers by HR professionals in Australia something I would have to agree with him on.
Great to see such a service, but I wonder about it’s long term viability if a job aggregator service like Indeed was to launch in Australia, in the meantime good luck to them.
Michael Hyatt from Working Smart has posted a great intro on how to actually start a blog. He outlines 8 steps needed to get going and stay going. Having spoken with several people recently who are thinking about starting but don’t know how, have issues on what to write, or the time to write his items provides a nice starting point.
I would add two things that if you are looking to set up a blog:-
1. Read other people’s blogs and comment on them.
2. Get an RSS reader so you can easily read other people blogs in an aggregated fashion.
Michael Specht 