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An interesting look at the benefits of Help files vs Google. I have to admit I tend to give a Help file only 30 secs to be useful otherwise, search engine here I come.
links for 2006-02-09
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The Asia Pacifici Headhunter provides us a great run down of how to nial the job you real want.
Coffee with nga.Net
Yesterday morning I had a coffee with Mike Giuffrida the CEO of nga.Net the Australian eRecruitment software provider. It was good to catch up with someone from the local marketplace to discuss the where we are today and future of the recruitment industry. We covered all of the typical topics in our discussions; social networking, job boards, job referrals, vertical search.
Of interest, last year Mike did the conference circuit in the US as a delegate and like I have found as well the shear sheer number of players in the US market is amazing. As always everyone plans to come to Australia with their products.
A word of caution to US based vendors looking at setting up shop here. It is different, it is harder than you think, it is a long way, timezones hurt, pricing is difficult etc. Over the last 10 years so many vendors from the US have arrived here only to back out again a couple of years later.
Sugar coated systems
Just a quick plug.
I am the convener of the Australian Human Resource Institute HRIS special interest group, which I have mentioned before. Next Thursday evening we will be running a case study on risk management/OHS systems, if you are in Melbourne feel free to register it only costs around $50 and includes drinks and nibbles.
A summary of the night:-
This session will present a case study on the implementation of a solution that has helped an organisation align strategy, processes, people, and technology in the area of risk management. Topics covered include :* How and why Sugar Australia recognised need for risk management software
* What was their key selection criteria
* The implementation, integration, data maintenance/accuracy and lessons learnt
* Their realised benefits and future plans
A Guide to Mobile Cooking
This item on Cooking with your mobile phone came across my virtual desk today. Not sure how long it has been around, I had not seen it before, it is a bit scary.
Many students, and other young people, have little in the way of cooking skills but can usually get their hands on a couple of mobile phones. So, this week, we show you how to use two mobile phones to cook an egg which will make a change from phoning out for a pizza. Please note that this will not work with cordless phones.
The site does not say what would happen if you used a 3G or GPRS phone! Does the cooking time decrease?
links for 2006-02-07
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The myth is us Australian’s play more than we work, that is just not true. Here is an article from the Sydney Morning Herald covering the issue Sydney has with a WorkLife balance, for more info see my essay on the topic.
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An item on the growth in background checking across the US
links for 2006-02-06
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From CNN 25 words that can hurt your resume, an informative read. I wonder what would happen if ATS vendors started to use these words to disregard candidates, oh boy!
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Being able to keep your conversation in one location is really good, this new tool makes steps towards this world. Very interesting.
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Have you ever wanted to try out an eLearning tool? Maybe Nuvvo is the thing for you. Nuvvo is a free Web based eLearning tool
Job ads on Search Engines
(Via Recruiting.com)
It seems there is a discussion happening on ERE on the effectiveness of using Pay Per Click (PPC) ads (Google Adwords and Yahoo’s Search Marketing).
While there are differing views on the whole topic I personally feel this type of advertising should be in the Recruiter’s Toolkit and used for the right job, I even mentioned it last August in a presentation on Online Recruitment. The right jobs would be hard to fill within a very specific topic that would enable you to buy a specific keyword that is targeted to your audience.
Michael Homula feels that if you are not at the top of the search results already you don’t have a good message. However if we all had a good message we would never need to advertise at all as candidates would just appear when we had a vacancy :-). Advertising is a key part of an attraction strategy and PPC ads just form part of the advertising.
The Art of Recruiting
In traditional Guy Kawasaki style he provides us an introduction into The Art of Recruiting via a top 10.
- Hire better than yourself
- Hire infected people
- Ignore the irrelevant
- Double check your intuition
- Check independent references
- Apply the Shopping Center Test
- Use all your weapons
- Sell all the decision makers
- Wait to compensate
- Don’t assume you’re done
Personnally I like numbers 6 (very cool), 7 (see next post) & 10 (oh the retention and engagement thing starts from Day 1).
What’s your conversational index?
I noticed over the last few days a bit of a buzz on the Conversational Index (CI) of your blog, originally started by Stowe Boyd and continued all over the place, ToDoOrElse.com, Don Dodge, Frank Arrigo and Mitch Denny.
Basically it goes like this. Get your total posts and divide by the sum of your comments plus trackbacks, (posts/comments+trackbacks). This will give you a ratio of how much conversation is generated by each post, the aim is to have more conversation than posts ie a CI less than 1, any higher than 4 you need to improve the conversation by changing what you write about.
I did a little sum on this blog :-
Posts = 694
Comments + Trackbacks = 429
CI = 1.61 (Not bad)
But the comments and trackbacks include inter-site trackbacks which inflates things a bit and I am missing my comments from my old blog (maybe 50 but I don’t know) but the posts are included in the 694. So let’s say the real CI is around 2, which I guess would be average.
What do you think? (Yes I want to get my CI down so comment or trackbacks.)
Michael Specht 