Become a recruiter for your friends

(Sorry long post.)

Today I was emailed about a new job referral tool in the Australian marketplace, Hoojano in semi private beta. As far as I can tell has stayed under the radar of almost everyone, a Google search yields 38 results. OnRec blog have covered it in a limited fashion, along with James Christian Ladd. The site is a referral service allowing you to refer your friends for roles and if the employee hires your get paid a bonus.

I spoke with Mike Willkinson from Hoojano today about the site and their plans.

Firstly the site is in a “friends and family” beta, probably almost an alpha to be honest. The current T&C’s are interim until the bugs are working out of both the system and the service. The site will be in this beta stage for about 6 weeks during which time Hoojano will not be taking their 20% commission as an incentive to get people & advertisers to use the service. Mike also mentioned that payments are currently being handled one on one through a manual process, basically Hoojano are making direct contact with all advertisers to ensure that are fully aware of the T&Cs and how the service works.

Like with all beta sites it’s missing things but there is potential.

I signed up and started playing with the service and initially was going to dismiss the site as yet another referral tool. Yes we have some cool AJAX technology but on the surface nothing revolutionary. But I then discovered the “import your contacts” function.

Cool, I’m curious.

Initially this just makes it easier to select a contact and refer the job to them.

But wait there was more, steak knives no. But still more. You can edit each contact on the site, update their desired salary, skills, keywords and education. Build meta profiles on your contacts to help automatically match them to jobs in the system.

From this new data the site will automatically start matching your contacts against jobs in the database, called the Head to Head feature, I love the way it works. You can pick a contact and automatically jobs that suit them will be found in the system. Even better the site will email you with new jobs that match your contact’s skills.

If you find a job you think fits your contact you refer them to the job. Then sit back and wait for the money to roll in. Well ok, they actually have to be hired for the money to flow but you get the idea.

Bingo I can now run my own little recruitment company connecting my contacts with jobs, a social network recruitment brokerage service. The best part is I get paid for this activity! (Laurel Papworth are you paying attention?)

For people with valuable contact lists this could significantly change the way recruitment take place in Australia!

User, or Registered Member as they are called, can directly apply for jobs, so this is not just a referral service but also seems to act like a traditional job board. It is not clear on how the bonus payments work in this scenario.

Some of the improvements I would like to see:

  • Clear information about how payments will be made, following the beta, as mentioned this is still in the works but some information up front or in the FAQs would be good.
  • Are there or will there be escrow services with regard to employers so as a refer so I know that I will get paid.
  • What is the privacy protection for referrers and candidates, over time the data in this system will be very valuable.
  • Information on how does the site comply with Australian privacy principles. The privacy policy refers to the principles but it is not clear enough how the moving parts work.
  • The basic job search capabilities are a bit limited, and confusing.
  • It needs an easier way to manager my contacts, the UI is difficult to navigate but looks good. Form over function?
  • Following on the contacts UI is a bit slow to respond to command, with my average sized data set how will it performance for people with large contact bases.
  • Linking my contact to a service like Plaxo, LinkedIn and other professional social networks.
  • Allowing me to export my contacts, cause once I have updated the site with all this very rich meta data about my friends why can’t I take it with me? This would also allow me to update the meta data of my contacts quickly and re-import to update the data.
  • The site will need lots more jobs to get traction, Mike, assured me this will come and right now they are focused on building the site and learning how it will be used.
  • Some of the above items could be covered in the very long T&C’s section, which also still seems in development, but I have to say is too confusing for my simple mind.
  • Finally a blog to connect with the community.

Overall Hoojano is a very cool start and worth a serious look.

Learning and YouTube

A couple of days ago I came across an article in the Australian IT about how a leading Australian university, Macquarie University, is starting to look at using YouTube to deliver lectures.

Very interesting idea.

Macquarie has been making lectures available for download to students for about 3 years now, so a move to video is not surprising.  However such a move is not without possible issues:-

Placing videos of lectures on YouTube is something the varsity is working on but two issues need to be resolved beforehand.

“We can’t just point the camera at the lecturer and upload the lesson. The back of a lecturer’s head isn’t necessarily the thing you want to be watching … we have to be more creative.

“There’s also the question of copyright for when the lecturer shows a video as part of the lecture … it’s fine for us to show that on campus but we have to be careful if it’s on the internet and if someone downloads it,” Mr Hole said.

It will be interesting to watch where this goes.

(Disclosure: I happen to work for Nortel, mentioned at the end of the article but have nothing to do with this deal or any other deal. As it happens I only noticed the Nortel reference after I started writing this post.)

Reader numbers mean a rethink

When I setup my blog several years ago I decided to use FeedBurner to manage my RSS feed (http://feeds.feedburner.com/myhrblog). There were several reasons for this decision the top two were portability and statistics. When I moved my blog to WordPress a good couple of years ago I kept my FeedBurner feed and put a link to it on the sidebar. However WordPress still automatically created it’s own feed, http://www.specht.com.au/michael/feed/ which since browsers have become to recoginse RSS feeds in the HTML meant that a number of people started to subscribe to the WordPress feed. Subscribing to the WordPress feed is not bad, it’s the same content, but I was missing the statistics.

My reader numbers, according to FeedBurner, for the last year or so have been stable at about 240-250 readers. Not a huge number but given the lack of focus the blog has had, I was quite happy.

Last week I found a new WordPress plugin, Feedburner FeedSmith, that redirects requests to the standard WordPress feed back to my FeedBurner feed. I installed it thinking I would finally get a better understanding of reader numbers.

My reaction. Wow.

It seems there are a few more of you than 240, closer to 500.

Firstly, thanks! I am very grateful to you for finding space in your RSS Reader for me and my blog. Of all of the blogs out there, for 500 people to subscribe to this one blows me away.

This also got me thinking, given there are more readers than I thought I probably should double my effort on each blog post.

101 Links about HR

Today I received an email directing me to a new list called “The HR Bible: 100 Articles Every Human Resources Pro Should Read“. Given at one point had grand plans of building a one stop shop of this information, I had to look.

An initial scan over the titles provided we with a sense of excitement, all these good topics in one place, like:

  • Six Tips for Developing Your Employees
  • How to Find Great Part-Time Employees
  • HR Outsourcing Basics
  • Ten Ways to Attract and Retain Great Employees
  • Preventing Sexual Harassment in the Workplace
  • Top Ten Recruiting Tips: Ten Tips for Successful Employee Recruiting

I read through some of the article which were quite good, however not all of them are relevant to all sizes of employers or countries. For example the article on “How To Fire An Employee“, which comes from wikiHowTo which will also teach you How to Win a Street Fight, could quite easily lead you to a lawsuit in some countries.

Other than some items not being suitable everywhere the list is a good starting point for ideas and research.

I know the my title says 101 links, but the post only has 100 links so where is the missing link? The one on how to win a street fight, cause some days being in HR is like a street fight :-).

Twitter – Something is technically wrong.

Rant ahead, leave if offended.

First let me say I ❤ Twitter, and would pay for the service assuming below is fixed.

Twitter must be the most unreliable web service ever, there I said it! I help organise the Melbourne Twitter meet ups so normally I am very biased but reliability is something Twitter does not have.

Last week we had a schedule maintenance, that was moved without telling their users. Then after the real maintenance the stability was worse than after SXSW in 2007! Not as bad as the meltdown during Steve Job’s address earlier this month, but not a lot could be. 🙂

5 days ago there was a call out from Shel Israel for the guys at Twitter to get their shit together, Biz even replied saying they were working to fix things. It’s not the first time someone has asked for a little stability. Today we again had scheduled maintenance, 7pm – 9pm PST (I’m fairly sure but with the site down and no blog post about the outage I can’t be 100% sure). Twitter went down on schedule but seem to not come back. At about 10pm PST a little note was posted on the Twitter web page:-

“Update: We’re just warming up around here. You may experience some slowness. Thanks for your patience!”

As of 12:30am PST the service is still unreliable. The blog is down, Mobile web interface is down, IM updates intermittent, and general performance is terrible.

On top of this for the last few days in Australia SMS update have been dead, a fairly common occurrence.

Guys you hired some hot shot operations dude, posted you could handle the Super Bowl (the link doesn’t work at the moment cause the blog is still down), but still nothing seems to change. Please sort your operations out, if you worked as part of an internal IT department some of you would be without a job now.

I also know the service is free, but if it can’t cope free go for advertising to tied you over until the real business model appears.

Update: Well a new day has dawned and Twitter is still down (in 10 mins this will have been for 15 hours), but this time the blog is up and there is a small explanation.

End Rant!

Top companies to work for

Just a quick follow up post, on my higher ESAT = profitable companies post last week.  The 2008 Fortune Top 100 Places to Work for in America has been released, and the winners are:-

1. Google
2. Quicken Loans
3. Wegmans Food Markets
4. Edward Jones
5. Genentech
6. Cisco Systems
7. Starbucks
8. Qualcomm
9. Goldman Sachs
10. Methodist Hospital Syste

Now my question is given there is now research to back up the fact of higher ESAT = profitable companies, will we see the stock prices of these companies increasing in anticipation of higher profits?

When your social graph breaks

There is a lot of talk these days about social graphs, a newish term used to describe our online social relationships across the myriad of web sites these days. If you are unsure what a social graph is read this description from Jeremiah Owyang.

Another common discussion at the moment is the cross over of all these different social networks and pain they cause. USA Today had a story last week about this with several examples of where people’s different networks collided and too much information was shared across the boundaries.

If you are online you need to manage your social graph and decide up front how you want to manage your different identities. Will you let them merge, do they have to kept separate and what happens if they do merge? Are you concerned about what your online identity will do for your personal brand?

These are all question the think about. Especially given that it is fairly common practice for potential employers to use the internet for background searching on candidates.

Today I read a report that the Australian Industrial Relations Commission “upheld Telstra’s appeal against an earlier ruling that Carlie Streeter be reinstated and paid compensation for being unjustly sacked following the romp last February”. What happened after a Christmas party a few employees stayed in a hotel and she had sex with another male employee while other employees were in the same room. The other employees claimed sexual harassment. It’s more complex than that but I hope you get the picture. This got me thinking where do the boundaries lie online?

It is fairly common for executives to be sacked if they do something that not in the best interests of the company, mainly because they are the public face of an organisation and should be a role model.

But with everyone possibly having a public identity and if public identity is associated with their employers could they also be will also be sacked. We all know of bloggers who have lost their jobs for posting confidential information or lying this is not what I am talking about. I’m talking about the person who posts, clearly outside of work hours, on their Facebook, MySpace or other account that they might of “hooked up” with someone, got drunk on the weekend, or discussed religion or sexuality and loses their jobs. I know that an investigation would be held and it might be found that they were using company time to interact online or some other “excuse” to justify the sacking.

But where will the boundaries lie? Will we all have to become politically correct just to stay employed? Who decides what is appropriate? Will what’s appropriate for a 25 year old entry level employee be the same as a 45 year old mid-level manager?

I don’t have any examples of this so if they are out there I would really like to read them.

Tips on being laid off

Amazing what happens during a week of stock market turmoil. I have seen a number of posts over the last few days about losing jobs, getting new jobs, companies going broke etc, etc.

Today I read a post from one Robert Scoble, you might know him :-), who provides 17 tips for job seekers. Read his full post to get the real details, I have pulled a summary together below.

1. Don’t get lazy.
2. Make sure you spend at least 30% of every day trying to find a job.
3. Start a blog on the field you want to work in.
4. Do things that will get you to be recognized as a world leader in the field you want to be in.
5. Learn from Loic Le Meur. How did he get thousands of videos uploaded on Seesmic everyday? He networked.
6. Do a video everyday on YouTube that demonstrates something you know.
7. Show your friends your resume and cover letter.
8. Do the basics…I got the interview just by having a great cover letter and an interesting resume.
9. Don’t feel bad about taking government assistance.
10. Go to any job networking session you learn about.
11. Go where the money is.
12. Take a little bit of time to work on family and health.
13. Volunteer.
14. Make sure you take advantage of any help your former employer is offering.
15. See if you can keep coming into the office. This isn’t open to everyone…
16. Go to every business event you can attend.
17. Always have your suit ready.

While focused on find a job in the technology industry, many of the tips apply to generic job hunting.

For me the key is to stay focused on the end goal, a new job, ensure you network, promote yourself, have a resume always available and be prepared to interview at a moments notice.