Category Archives: Social Recruiting

Digging Into RecruitingBlogs.com v2.16 Tweeting Off

By John Sumser | Published: April 30, 2009

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.

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Digging Into RecruitingBlogs.com V 2.14 5 Recent Things

By John Sumser | Published: April 9, 2009

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.

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MicroCelebrity

By John Sumser | Published: April 9, 2009

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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.

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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.

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