090602 #SocialRecruiting Links

Thought for the Day: Social recruiting is participatory or it isn’t socia.

• JobScience on Social Recruiting
  Ted Elliot has built JobScience into a technical powerhouse. They’re a primary sponsor of the Social Recruiting Summit. The add-iness distracts from the message. The service itself is extremely powerful.
• Who Owns Your Social Media Accounts?
  Michael VanDervert starts a good conversation on the question of who owns personal accounts that you build on the company dime. Probably the company but the area is murky.
• Finding New Employees, via Social Networks
  It’s weird to see a direct marketing datamining operation referred to as Social Recruiting. That’s part of the problem with the definition of Social Recruiting. Most of the tools really just automate a sourcing process. Nonetheless, this NY Times piece is a watershed moment for the burgeoning movement. The best advice in the piece is that job hunters should get social even if their prospective employers aren’t.
• Job seekers say social networking sites aren’t effective job search tools
  You’ve got to love any operation that will say “research says” without linking to the research. It’s like it’s 1950 all over again.
• Energy-Northwest Jobs
  Is a podcast social recruiting?
• Heather Bussing on Contact Ownership
  Our favorite lawyer weighs in on the Social Media Account Ownership question.

090526 #SocialRecruiting Links

Thought For the Day: Sourcing is not social. Using social tools for sourcing is not social. Networking is social. That involves communicating with other people.

• Social Recruiting and Your Job Search
  The dos and don’ts for candidates. Quotes David MAnaster heavily. Light on the “How to be social” part of social recruiting.
• The Future of Recruiting Technology
  You have to read this so you’ll know what to talk with Michael Specht about at the Social Recruiting Summit. He’s thinking hard about the way that technology moves through our industry. (PS… it moves in a non-uniform way. The future of technology in HR-Recruiting is not evenly distributed. It happens at differing rates in differing sectors.)
• Social Recruitment Gaining Grounds
  Australian blog publishes Jobvite statistics. Seems a little suspect. Read the actual Jobvite report for yourself. 68% of companies have mad a hire using social media?
• Define Your Efforts: Social Web Recruitment Funnel
  From the folks in Higher education… a way to visualize the social recruiting strategy. It’s like herding sheep into the shearing pens.
• The UK’s First Conference Dedicated To Social Media In Recruitment
  I happen to personally know someone who would make a great addition to this lineup.

Influence Happens In A Context

By John Sumser

As the Top 100 Influencers project unfolds, we’re going to provide a guided tour of the industry. After all, it’s a little illy to say “these people drive the thematic rivers of our industry without being really clear about the industry itself. For starters, we’ll just get the lay of the land.

The HR-Recruiting Industry is a vast assemblage of 80,000 companies and over 1,000,000 working professionals (1.5 Million by some estimates). Generally, one percent of the workforce earns a living in the HR-Recruiting Industry. Depending on who you ask, Recruiters make up as much as a third of the total number.

Tallies of size and complexity are complicated by the fact that the role is performed informally in smaller companies even though vendors deliver HR products and services to the tiniest of companies.

There are two coexisting components of the industry. An ecosystem of experts, recruiters, accountants, payroll processors and benefits managers serve the needs of the professional HR community, their management and stakeholders. The two sides, buyers and sellers, serve the needs (in the domestic American MArket alone) of 50 Million discrete job transactions per year as well as the payroll and benefits of the 150 Million in the American workforce.

The elements of the industry are

• Benefits
• Payroll
• Compensation Analysis / Management
• Training
• Organizational Development
• Talent Acquisition
• Succession Management
• Talent Management
• Workforce Planning
• Staffing
• Recruiting
• Vendor Management
• Labor Relations

Typically, each of these segments has a range of vendors providing a range of services. HR is rarely practiced as a standardized discipline. It’s more common to see each company develop and execute its own cultural approach to the HR question.

Over the last decade or so, larger companies experimented with Outsourcing

• HR in its entirety (HROs)
• Ownership of employees (PEOs)
• All or Part of the Recruiting Process

Recruiting and staffing are unique. According to Elaine Orler, VP of the Talent MAnagement practice at KnowledgeInfusion, “Recruiting must move at market speed. The rest of HR can readily move at enterprise speed.” What she means is that Recruiting focuses on meeting critical needs on the open market while the rest of HR is a purer overhead function.

This bifurcation of HR leads to conflict “in the house”. The administrative component wants careful movement and is a fundamentally conservative function. The Talent Acquisition team, on the other hand, has to be extremely resourceful and competitive. There is real and sustained difference between the mindsets.

There are about 7 Million companies in the American economy. Each of them delivers some form of HR to its employees. It’s a vast market with huge differences based on geography and industry.

Additionally, the industry behaves differently based on company size. The Fortune 2,500 are typically referred to as “enterprise companies”. They use industrial strength solutions like Oracle, SAP or Microsoft. Workday, a newcomer founded by the fellow who started Peoplesoft is a promising up and comer.

The remainder of the industry, the other 6,997,500 (or so) companies use a patchwork quilt of products and services,

Over the coming weeks, we’ll look deeper into the details of the industry on a niche by niche basis.

This is the environment n which influence is earned, delivered, purchased and deployed. While most marketing discussions treat the HR-Recruiting MArketplace as if it were monolithic, it is tremendously fragmented with most companies developing unique solutions.

Influence is therefore really important. Each company tries to navigate its way through the hurdles of regulatory requirements, talent needs and employee perks. The greatest HR-Recruiting Managers think for themselves. The issues are complex enough that the hint of truth is good enough to make decisions, sometimes.

Digging Into RecruitingBlogs.com v2.16 Tweeting Off

Tweeting Off

So, I was at this party a couple of weeks ago. All sorts of twitterati were there. There was even a small shrine for our forbears, Paul DeBettignies and Jim Durbin. The place was throbbing and crowded . If you yelled loud enough, you could hear yourself over the music. Lots of people lined up to yell at each other while pretending to listen.

You know the scene.

Anyhow, I walked over to the bar to get a drink. Along the way, I struck up a conversation with a couple of guys standing at the bar.

Are you here for the ‘tweetup?” I hollered.

“The what?” He replied blankly.

“This is a tweetup,” I said, “You tweet, don’t you?”

He started to edge away from me. “Don’t go. I haven’t asked about your strategy to build followers. How many tweets does it take to get a new friend? What’s your opinion on building a large group of followers indiscriminately?”

He was no longer just edging away. You could see real terror beginning to show in his eyes. He was picking up speed.

The other night night, I did a tweetchat on #talentnet. It was much like the bar scene. Lots of yelling, lots of chaos, not so much beer, no live music (Jerry Albright was working hard to fix the music problem). The tweets flowed like a river of coat hangers. It was as easy to strike up a conversation in the jangle of crossed wires as it was in the bar.

This time, it was everyone else who was leaving. From what I could tell, no one knew that I was talking. But, the one liners flew like knives from the circus knife thrower. It was dazzling and overwhelming.

It also served to underline my emerging view about twitter. While it is a great way to learn things and stay in touch, it’s not a very good way to have a conversation.

Digging Into RecruitingBlogs.com V 2.14 5 Recent Things

Digging Into RecruitingBlogs.com V 2.14 5 Recent Things

I have fun at my job. Recently, I’ve been writing about some things that I think are particularly interesting. The sustained downturn is causing innovation in recruiting to explode. I’ve been looking closely at trends and examples.

I have a weird perspective on the ‘future’. I think it’s already here and we are in the process of trying to uncover it. The best descriptions of what’s actually going on sound like science fiction. Our biggest challenge is always trying to see what is right in front of us.

So, my work involves trying to understand the things we are experiencing in a larger context. Some times I get it really right, sometimes I get it wrong. I get it right more often.

Overall, the idea is to deliver these views to readers who want to have their beliefs challenged. It’s boring stuff for someone who wants a pure tactical input. You’ll hardly ever see me write a piece called “How to…” You can get that other places.

* The Twitter Revolution I, II and III
Twitter isn’t what you think it is. The service lays the groundwork for a semantic search engine. The more stuff that gets input, the greater the demand for intelligent search. The Twitter folks have proven an interesting point: collaboration is best facilitated by less functionality rather than more.
* Just Work
A job is the only asset that doesn’t devalue. There’s an emerging movement that takes a different view of work. Instead of the 00s emphasis on position and title, this view is more 19th century. A good job is worth having, engagement passion or not.
* Job Boards Revisited I, II and III
Rumors of the impending death of the job boards are highly exaggerated. With a small bit of adaptation (see Jobvite), they have 30 or 40 years of good life left in them. In the downturn, the number of job boards continues to grow.
* Consolidate and Fragment
Over the coming months and years, we’re going to see a lot of creative destruction. Tons of social networks will get formed and abandoned. Ning resemble a huge shanty-town from some perspectives. Lots of starts rotting on the vines. The early web was just like this
* Novotus 1 and Novotus 2
Mike Mayeux is doing something different. It’s a little unfair to call his project an RPO but that’s the current nomenclature. The enterprise wraps basic recruiting services into functional modules and then sells with a guarantee. It’s revolutionary like one of those jets that works best at speed.

MicroCelebrity

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MicroCelebrity

By John Sumser

Part of the attraction of online media is the way it reflects. There are few things as cool as finding out that someone has responded to your post or that someone has followed your feed. For many, the feeling is intoxicating.

Microcelebrity is the phenomenon of being extremely well known not to millions but to a small group — a thousand people, or maybe only a few dozen. As DIY media reach ever deeper into our lives, it’s happening to more and more of us. Got a Facebook account? A whackload of pictures on Flickr? Odds are there are complete strangers who know about you — and maybe even talk about you. …..

If you really want to see the future, check out teenagers and twentysomethings. When they go to a party, they make sure they’re dressed for their close-up — because there will be photos, and those photos will end up online. In managing their Web presence, they understand the impact of logos, images, and fonts. And they’re increasingly careful to use pseudonyms or private accounts when they want to wall off the more intimate details of their lives. (Indeed, fully two-thirds of teenagers’ MySpace accounts are private and can be viewed by invitation only.) (Wired 15.12)

Recently, someone sent me a note with a link to a picture of my back at a party. He said, “You should trademark the ponytail.” Along with everyone else I know, I have had to become good at choosing my photos and managing an online persona.

Microcelebrity affects different people in different ways.

• Some people are really scared by it. One of the reasons people don’t participate in online community is a phobia about the spotlight. It’s related to the fact that the most frightening thing that most people can imagine is public speaking (glossophobia)
• Some people enjoy micoscopic increments of public attention so much that they blather on and on and disrupt conversation. For them, it’s better to have a ton of negative attention than none at all.
• Some people develop a craving for it. They get a little and want more. They do weird stuff to try to prove that they are micro-famous. You see them posting the same material all over the place. Every teensy increment of attention helps to satisfy the hunger.
• Some people are empowered by it. They become more confident and more daring. For these folks, microcelebrity creates a burst of personal innovation.
• Some people try to manage and grow it. This is the “Brand-Me” crowd. They work hard to shape and transmit information about themselves. There seems to be an inverse relationship between brand value and the energy invested to maintain it.
• Some people get very jealous. One person’s microcelebrity can seem enormous compared to yours (say the difference between 5,000 followers and 500 or the difference between a couple thousand blog readers and your 15.) Jealousy and envy quietly eat away at personal confidence.
• Some people confuse microcelebrity and hard work. A subset of envy, these people feel slighted and misunderstood. This is a teensy little bit like the stuff that rock stars complain about ie, this might look easy but it’s hard work.

I am certain that there are other ways in which microcelebrity drives the behavior we see online. I believe that it effects us all though I think Gen Y is more used to it than Gen X and the Boomers. The younger demographic, more digitally astute, has been using new media as a mirror. The dividing line is those who use their cameras to take self-portraits and those who can’t. It’s in the mid-20s somewhere.

What’s interesting is that it’s not really celebrity at all. It’s a new factor in our lives. We increasingly live under constant 24 hour public scrutiny. It’s the feeling you get when every electronics device you encounter contains a camera pointed at you. It’s what it’s like to be online 24×7. It’s what it’s like to have a network of 500 friends, real friends.

The generational differences here are very important. A young person with 1,000 friends doesn’t usually feel more important, just more connected. The microcelebrity phenomenon strikes the older (over 25) demographic. There, a big network is a sign of relative importance. It’s new and disjointed from normal experience. In the younger set, it’s congruent.

We all just woke up and it’s either the Truman Show or a Talking Heads song.

If you enjoyed this conversation, consider joining our community. It’s even better inside.

I’m leading an Intensive workshop called Recruiting Strategy in a Down Economy: Identifying What’s to Come in the Upturn at the Kennedy Recruiting Conference in Las Vegas on May 19.

Digging Into RecruitingBlogs.com v2.06

Spending an Hour

(Feb 06, 2009) Have you tried the “Spend an Hour with…” project? I’ve been having a great time getting to know new and old people. It’s been a way to catch up with old friends (like Ami Givertz), renew old acquaintances (like Mike Johnson) and find new connections like Craig Silverman. Lots of conversations and lots of opportunities.

The idea is simple. You post a note (and send a piece of email) about the person you want to spend time with. The two of you figure out a good time to talk. You talk.

Magic happens when you use the phone. Physical reality is a remarkable supplement to online relationships. It’s a great reason to overcome your call reluctance and get to know someone new.

Last week, I talked with Craig Silverman. It took a couple of weeks for us to get an hour where we both were free. Although I have met Craig once or twice (including Recruitfest), we never had a conversation that went beyond “Hi, good to know you. Here’s my card.” With no agenda and lots of energy, we got on the phone.

There’s a reason that Craig has such a sterling reputation. The high energy entrepreneur spends his spare time coaching his kids’ sports teams. He was bubbling over with offers to help me do this and that.

These days, Craig is the Vice President of Operations for UMSHealthcare, a recruiting franchise operation in the Health Care Industry. Focused on Medical Staffing where there is a job boom and a candidate shortage, the company gives its franchisees a list of viable candidates each day. In boom areas, placements are easy and candidates are hard. The headquarters operation does the heavy lifting of finding candidates. Franchise holders simply find the job and make the placement. (I’m sure that Craig will help out with a correction if I have the basic model wrong.)

Things are going gang busters. In fact, RBC member Maha Akiki is the most recent franchise owner.

Beginning in late January, I have been speaking with tons of people who are optimistic about the future of the economy. From Danny Cahill (this week at Bullhorn Live) to Craig, each of the optimists are willing to work really hard to keep the bad news at bay. In Craig’s case, it’s fairly obvious that he’s going to have the best year of his career.

After an hour, I got off the phone hoping that I could find some ways to spend more time with Craig. I’m betting that I’ll have lunch with him in Redwood City several times this year.

Jason and Avature deserve a round of applause for figuring out the “Spend an Hour With” project. I keep getting as great deal of benefit from this really simple idea. It’s encouraged me to reach out and build real, multi-dimensional friendships with people in our community.

If you have any recommendations about people I should talk to, please let me know.

Digging Into RecruitingBlogs.com v2.05

Unsung Hero Sings

(Jan.30, 2009) Amitai Givertz, Mr. Recruitomatic, works tirelessly to aerate the featured content on RBC. Ami, as he is known to his friends, compiles the daily feature articles and his exhaustive “best of the week” collections. His blog here on RBC is an inventory of the great posts that top the site each day.

Ami is widely known for content density (he’s really smart), link mania (his stuff is heavily annotated with really useful pointers). a dry, self-deprecating sense of humor (bless Mother for that), limitless intensity (at last count, seven observable blogs), passion and dogged persistence. He has been in and around the recruiting industry since before the first sailor was shanghaied. He recently won the Recruiting Animal’s 2008 award for Recruitosphere Excellence. It sits on his trophy shelf alongside his Mikey’s Monkey Award from 2006.

These days, Ami is turning the world upside down with his humbly named Brown Bag Recruiter program. The innocuously titled webinars are the gateway to Recruiting mastery. Like a bottle of Absinthe, the seminars are deliciously mind expanding. Ami has discovered an enormous cache of riches and is busily trying to give them away to any recruiter who wants them.

Ami’s webinars show you how to crack the code. Using Google accounts and Google toolkits, the programs teach recruiters to construct astonishingly rich and complex resume databases. Rather than focusing on hitting a home run like some search seminars, Ami teaches the virtue of looking ahead. Building an arsenal of data that can be reused and renewed is the ultimate object of the class.

Here’s the upcoming schedule. You’ll be glad you made the investment. Each webinar is $45 and lasts a generous hour. The entire series price is $95

* Wednesday, February 4, 2pm EST G-Recruiting: A 60-minute Digest (Register)
* Tuesday, February 10 2PM EST Search Engine Secrets, Part 1: Customized Candidate Search (Register)
* Wednesday, February 11 2PM EST Search Engine Secrets, Part 2: Vertical Search and Sourcing to Profile (Register)
* Thursday, February 12 2pm ESTSearch Engine Secrets, Part 3: Purposeful Sourcing to Drive Meaningful Relationships (Register)
* Tuesday, February 17 2pm EST Search Engine Secrets: A 60-minute Digest (Register)
* Thursday, February 19 2pm EST Search Engine Secrets: A 60-minute Digest (Register)

Digging Into RecruitingBlogs.com v2.03 Verbal Summary

Have you been following the de-friending trend? The notable tip of the iceberg is the Burger King campaign offering a Whopper in exchange for deleting friends on Facebook.

In an industry known for indiscriminate and promiscuous linking (Recruiting), Jason Davis has started what might be the Social Software version of the Slow Food movement. “Having Friends”, Jason’s post on RecruitingBlogs.com is an introduction to introducing ourselves to each other. How you use your networks is a question of what you want and what your network wants. Jason is wrestling with the question of what the network wants. He introduced the “An Hour with….” project to underline the emphasis on intimacy.

As I waded into the deeper relationship mine field, I was handed a number of opportunities. I asked Craig Silverman to spend an hour with me and we’re going to do it on the 26th. Wednesday morning, I spent an hour talking with Michael Johnson from avature. It was a great start and we’re talking again next week.

My first experience with the power of this idea came from Jerry Albright who posted “Wanna be my friend? It’s easy – just call me – 260-347-1715 – let’s get real”. It’s exactly the sort of thing JD was trying to promote. So I called him. We talked for an hour the first time. Into the conversation, it became apparent that he had built a product called Verbal Summary. Ultimately, I asked him to give me a demo. Jerry was so focused on delivering value to recruiters that I had to see what he was talking about. (This video will tell you a little bit more about Verbal Summary)

So, earlier this week, I got on the phone with Jerry for a demo of Verbal Summary. It’s a cool tool. At $50/license/month, there are few purchases that will give you a better return on investment. The software does three things really well:

1. It helps your client (hiring managers) distinguish great potential hires from run of the mill candidates.
2. It tracks the Resumes you send and the customer’s handling of each individual resume.
3. It brands your product with your logo and identifying information. Resumes are sent as PDF files that can be easily configured to include your branding)

The tool gets its name from its most observable feature. With Verbal Summary, you can easily record, edit and store recordings of interviews and job descriptions. The software makes it easy to create, send, archive, forward and manage audio files. The idea is that hearing a candidate in her own voice will distinguish one resume from another. Jerry says that it is a great value-add for recruiters. The idea is sound (no pub intended).

The second feature, tracking is a fantastic way to get your customer’s pulse. Are they opening the emails you send, are they looking at the resume? The dashboard summarizes customer transactions with your products. Until now, the only way to do this has been a cumbersome and very manual process using read receipts in Outlook. With Verbal Summary, you get immediate information when your customer reviews your materials.

Branding and the ownership of data are hot buttons for recruiters. By automatically adding your branding information, Verbal Summary allows you to preserve the value you create while your product travels around the customer. There is enormous comfort (and great risk reduction) associated with knowing that your materials are tagged with your information.

The great thing about Verbal Summary is its focus and simplicity. The tool does three very useful things and doesn’t try to be more.

Jerry told me that he’d give RBC members a discount. I think it’s a bargain at $50/month. If I were you, I’d get Jerry committed for a long term contract. The service is worth more than he’s charging for it and the price is bound to go up.

As I said at the outset, “it’s not the shovel, it’s the garden.” That means that the tool is not as important as what users do with it. Both Verbal Summary and An Hour with…. are great examples of using technology to improve the lives of users.

Digging Into RecruitingBlogs.com v 2.01

Digging Into RecruitingBlogs.com v 2.01

(Jan 02, 2009) I’m entering this new year with a problem. These days, more than half of my communications are through social networks like RBC, Facebook and Twitter. More natural and less formal than freestanding email systems, each tool has its own utility and its own idiosyncrasies.

Twitter offers a flow of really fresh professional information tinged with soft personal identifiers. It’s sort of a news feed and coffeehouse rolled into one. I pay more attention to people who give value and gloss past some of the other stuff. It’s like a permanent river of the left hand column of the old Wall Street Journal. It’s getting better for interpersonal (one to one) communications but most people don’t manage their @s very well (a direct message is sent with a tweet addressed to @username).

Facebook has a better internal mail system. It has great event management tools and lots of nuanced ways to communicate with known entities. As long as you have a relationship with someone on Facebook, there are an enormous number of approaches including chat, commenting, and email. Simply being someone’s friend exposes you to their output. Communicating and network maintenance are an easy extension of watching the feed. The internal email system is pretty reliable (though some messages get lost) but it is a background piece of a deeper narrative. Email on Facebook doesn’t have the immediacy and urgency of Outlook or Gmail.

Periodically, I visit LinkedIn. In theory, I have “beelions” of connections. I have mastered the art of accepting invitations to connect en masse. Trouble is that nothing actually happens there. My LinkedIn email box is full of notes from people wanting something from me. My personal takeaway value is exactly Less Than Zero. As a massive resume database, however, LinkedIn has no equal. As a step away from the databases of old, it’s miraculous. For business development and hard scrabble networking, it’s less effective.

I spend a fair amount of time here on RBC. I have more friends on Facebook (friend me) or Twitter (follow me). But RBC is where my home is. It’s the right blend of friendship and professional connection. I love the goofballs, the hard chargers and the community minded barn raisers. Where the other services provide networking, news and slices of friendship, RBC seems to deliver home-iness. The email system here is wretched. I get bombarded with stuff that doesn’t matter and therefore lose some important things. Much of my professional email happens through the RBC system.

I opened a FriendFeed account the other day. The idea is good and the execution interesting. What I found was very absorbing. Some of my friends on Twitter, Facebook and services I didn’t know I had friends on were communicating with each other through comments, notes, likes and intra friend feed commenting. But, somehow, the very people I wanted to keep track of didn’t make the grade. And, there was no way to inject RBC into the mix. Friendfeed offers a very compelling information flow but it leaves out big parts that I want.

I tried TweetDeck. Cool interface, purely limited to Twitter. Nearly useless. I found BudUrl and loved it (it’s a tinyurl style service that allows you to track the clickstream of links you post).

Here’s the problem.

I can’t figure out how to streamline my communication process. I’d like a single interface for some of the things I do on each of the systems. I’d love to hear stories about your experience with this sort of information overload. I wasn’t all that good at email to begin with. Now, I’m dropping too many balls.

The email forwarding systems don’t work. I know that I can get it all forwarded to outlook or email. But, most of those notifiers are worth way less than zero. My email trash bin contains thousands of notices from he services. I want the meaty stuff only and all in one place. I want my response to go back through the system.

In Recruiting, we tend to operate at the edge of technology. I know that I am not the only one with this problem. I’m sure that some of our RBC family have developed really elegant solutions. Let me know what you’re doing.