Just a quick note to say the Job Seeker survey is now closed. If you completed it thank you and if you opted to go into the draw to win an Amazon voucher they will be handed out very soon.
That’s it from me, a very busy week so there will probably be no further communications until March sorry.
I have been meaning to write an earth shattering post here for a while, but I guess that will have to wait a bit longer. In the meantime here are four quick thoughts to keep you going:
It has been a very busy couple of week, with this week looking even busier. This is a good thing.
One activity that has been taking a bit of time is a new business venture I have been looking at, providing a range of services to job seekers. In writing the eBook for job seekers I got thinking and have essentially decided with the help of a couple of other people to make it the basis of a new business. However before we go bounding off setting it all up we wanted to take a few minutes to pause and do a bit of market research.
So the start of this research is a quick survey. Unlike the other surveys for your time you can opt to go into a draw to win one of five US$25 Amazon Gift vouchers.
So please take the survey it is only 6 questions, including two yes/no ones so really only four.
It is only 2 weeks until the Inspecht HR Futures Conference, so if you are planning to attend make sure you register ASAP. $400 for the full day is very reasonable considering many events are up to three times that price per day. While the speakers will be of course great, the break sessions will allow you to network with your peers in a relaxed environment.
End self promotion.
Now time to promote someone else.
Kate Carruthers from Sydney town is organising an event in early March called “Entering the Mobile Ecosystem” as part of the venture Silicon Federation. This is a half day event and looks at how to enter the mobile marketplace.
This seminar is for you if:
- you are looking for new, inexpensive ways to reach customers
- you want practical advice from speakers who have done it
- you want to meet mobile app developers, including the developer whose Australian iPhone app tops the charts
- you want a clear understanding of the next steps for your business
Speakers
- Shane Williamson – Mobile Convergence Evangelist
- Graham Dawson – creator of the top rating Oz Weather iPhone app
- Keith Ahern – CEO of MoGeneration one of the leading Australian iPhone development companies with 5 high profile iPhone web apps released in 2008
If you are up in Sydney and interested in mobile applications and their impacts on business head over to Silicon Federation and register.
There are some major changes taking place within the recruitment software market at the moment. Changes that have the ability to remove vendors such as Taleo from being “top of the pops”.
What is it? Intelligent matching of jobs to social networks.
Both Australian job referral vendors 2Vouch and Hoojano do this but not to the level that we are seeing from players such as JobVite and Appirio. Appirio has a US$25,000 annual fee and connects with SalesForce and Facebook. Once employees opt-in the system reviews their friends list in Facebook and match potential jobs to friends. JobVite works in a similar way but uses both Facebook and LinkedIn, then the person who had the job referred to them can also opt-in to receive future job notices from the company. ERE had a review of both Appirio and JobVite’s new features.
These features validate the use of social networks for recruiting and move them from being a passive part of the process to a key component.
If you are in the market for a recruitment solution the decision making process just got a little harder.
(Disclosure: 2Vouch is a client of mine.)
Over the last two to three months I have spent a lot of time working with people on either their employer or personal brand. These discussions have lead me to believe that most organisations are not thinking about how social media can impact their employer brand.
Organisations are spending vasts amounts of time and money ensuring that their employer value proposition (EVP) clearly articulates to the workforce benefits that are both emotive (feeling good about working here) and tangible (remuneration, benefits and career development) for current and prospective employees.
Traditionally an EVP reflects the external image that the organisation portrays to the workforce and is reflected in the actions and behaviours of public officers and by company policies, procedures and practices. In today’s world through social media, blog posts, tweets, and video are controlled by the public and remain in search engine caches for a very long time, if not forever!
I call this new world one of a “socially generated EVP”. And your socially generated EVP is not one you can control or predict in a traditional manner.
Today I read about a survey conducted by Weber Shandwick and the Economist Intelligence Unit which found that while 67% of executives felt their companies reputation was vulnerable online. However less than 40% analysed their own reputation and 70% were either unaware or did not want to admit employees have badmouthed the companies online. The full replort is available (PDF).
This calls for social media governance within the organisation. With social media being a grass roots activity you might question the need for governance. However without a good governance model, your employees and the organisation as a whole, is left open to abuse and potential legal issues. At a minimum, put down some “rules of engagement”, depending on your corporate culture, they can be simple or complex, preferably simple! Don’t forget that by engaging with your employees as part of the creation process of the governance model can create self-regulation.
Last week I was meeting with Riges Younan and Jeremy Samuel from 2Vouch to discuss Riges’s presentation for Australiasian Talent Conference in Auckland, topic being “The Evolution of Social Recruiting”. To develop the presentation Riges wanted feedback from the recruiting community on their thoughts, ideas and case studies. To quote Riges:
I need your help to shape, contribute and assist in the creation of this presentation. I’ll be posting ways in which we can work together to create something that will assist many HR, Recruiters and Jobseekers around the world.
To facilitate the process Riges wanted a blog and a wiki to collect the content and discuss the ideas. So http://socialrecruiting.com has been set up. If you have anything to say on social recruiting or recruiting in general go register and contribute, the rest of this post will be be about how I built the site.
When thinking about what tool to use to build the wiki I was very concerned that many wiki tools still use a Wiki-markup style, while basic can put a lot of people off contributing. We wanted the barrier for use to be low.
The blog was to be in WordPress 2.7, I did a bit of searching and found a wiki plugin from Instinct. While only recently released it had all of the features I needed to get the site going quickly. I needed to modify the code a bit to fix some of the bugs, I also updated the security components along with the theme to adjust how pages were edited. Once users register they can edit any pages through the WordPress administration dashboard. This way we leveraged the power features of WordPress as a blogging platform and also its very easy to use user interface for the wiki component. Security has been adjusted so all users can create and edit and page, upload images and video, create but not publish blog posts.
Some additional plugs have been used to add collaborative features including Add to Any, Collapsing Pages, GD Start Rating, and SlideShare.
Yes there are other tools I could have used but not for only 10 hours work across two days.
I would be very interested to hear any thoughts.
Social networking tends to take a bit of a beating in the mainstream press when it comes to the business value. They seem to ignore the good examples of how organisations use these tools, such as Dow Chemical to encourage their alumni and employees on long term leave to return. In the first three months of usage they had 25,000 referrals, 24 full-time jobs and 40 contract roles filled through the use of a social network (Source Gartner).
Which brings me to two very good articles I read this week.
First up was from the UK’s HR Zone looked at the benefits social network tools provide organisations in reducing the barriers to communication.
Organisational behaviour research has shown that collaborative Web 2.0 tools are particularly effective where technical knowledge is valued. In complex organisations like multinational corporations, finding someone who possesses highly specific expertise is often difficult. One reason is that expertise remains ‘hidden’ – and consequently unexploited – within organisational structures.
They even go on to quote a UK-based think tank indicating that social networks encourge people to create productive relationships and work the way people do.
The second was from Harvard Business Review on the benefits of social networks, focused around information discovery and sharing. Here we see figures such as 7%, 30% and even 40% improvements in productivty when employees where using communication patterns facilitated by social networks. What CEO doesn’t want 40% more out of their existing workforce!
With all this research being released I hope we will see some more positive articles from the mainstream media.
Today is day 3 or 4 of the heatwave here in Melbourne, by heatwave over 40 degrees Celsius, up to 44 a couple of times (that is 104 & 112 Fahrenheit respectively), things are a bit extreme at the moment.
To match the extreme weather it is time to learn about Extreme Interviewing.
Extreme Interviewing is a method created by the folks at Menlo Innovations, specifically Richard Sheridan and Lisamarie Babik. The idea is that traditional interview techniques do not match the culture of Agile programming environments. Agile programming is the new cool developer term for getting things done fast. Actually it is more than that it is about building the right tools for the right customers with the customers and delivery tends to be very fast.
At its core Extreme Interviewing is about matching the candidate with the organisational culture. This is done by taking candidate through a process where they have to work together and are evaluated on collaboration, and cultural fit first, then technical skills. You can read a great interview of Richard and Lisamarie on CIO where they discuss what Extreme Interviewing is all about.
More information is also available on the Menlo Innovations web site.
Twitter seems to be the flavour of the month. Every day I hear Twitter this and Twitter that, many times from mainstream press outlets.
It has taken the recruiting community a while to come to terms with Twitter. This is not a bad thing as the business value needed to be understood. I first blogged about Twitter in late November 2006, putting the tool in the cute category. My first thoughts on Twitter as a recruiting tool were in January 2007.
Things have changed a lot since then.
Now everyone seems to be on Twitter or have heard about Twitter. I know individuals who have generated significant revenues from Twitter. There is true business value.
This brings me to the list of Top Recruiters on Twitter. Originally posted about by Jim Stroud on The Recruiters Lounge, Jim used Twitter Grader to create a list of the Top 50 people who had the word recruiter in their Bio.
Then some interesting discussions the Recruiting Blogs followed about the pros and cons of using Twitter as a recruiter. Some of the cons were allowing people to “see” your candidate list, this is suggest shows a lack of understanding about social media.
Of course some people were unhappy about being missed off the list, only because they did not list the word recruiter in their bio or had recruiting. So now we have a list of the Top 100 Recruiting users on Twitter. (Have to say that I am top of the list. UPDATE: Ok not anymore but oh well.) The list is also changing rapidly as people update their profiles to include the “right” words.
The whole idea of a list of top Twitter users is very hard to define. Twitter is about the individual and as such what I find interesting you probably will not. Also just because you have lots of followers does not necessarily mean you are the most influential in that area, although quite often this is the case.
Of interest Australian recruiters Markus Hafner, David Talamelli and Greg Dwyer made the list original top 50. Three recruiters here in Australia that GET social media.
Michael Specht 