Amitai Givertz’s Recruitomatic Blog

I know one of the reasons why I was interested in participating in the Blog Swap was so that I could celebrate my own emerging blogebrity while better understanding a medium which I sense one day will replace – if only for me – Oprah, the corporal world and email. Quite possibly in that order. As I am going through the list of the blog swappers I am beginning to see each of them through a prism of community whereas prior I may have seen them as simply promoting a point of view or product offering or their availability for new employment. So, it is with this new perspective that I offer this suggestion:

1. Take a moment to read – Great Brands in Action posted today by systematicHR.

2. Snuggle up with a warm cup of cocoa and read David Kippen’s TMP blog which also discusses employer branding.

3. Sit back and wait.

systematicHR asks a great question in his post. I know from my own experience how trying it can be to ask questions to be ignored by those presumably best qualified to answer them. If this blog swap thing has any legs beyond the sharing of content – which in itself may serve little meaningful purpose over time – it should be the swapping of comments, ideas and new perspectives for us all to share and learn from. It should be to ensure there is communication even within the broader community among those of us who seek more from the Blog Swap experience than an honorable mention and yet-to-materialize blog-bling and backtracks.

systematicHR says: “Nobody markets for you better than your own employee workforce.” True, but I hope David will take a slightly different view recognizing there is more of an iceberg below the waterline than above it.

I got this email from LeadershipIQ in my box this morning:

“Poll: Enron and Corruption

Ken Lay, the former CEO and Chairman of Enron died yesterday.  Leadership IQ has launched a poll to measure your views on the convicted former CEO.  Take 2 minutes and make your views known (only 10 questions). 

This poll is only open today.  If you take the poll, you’ll get a special early preview of the results before we release them to the media.  And we encourage you to send this email to your friends and colleagues.

Visit the link below to take the poll:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=553502330892”

All I can say, having gotten to the end of the survey is, this is about as tasteless as marketing can get. I will be junking every email LeadershipIQ sends me from this point forward. I suggest you do the same.

Job boards are very good indicators of what is really going on around the world. Undoubtedly, North Korea is the archetypal military industrial complex. A clear and imminent danger? You decide.

This post is the first in a series for the Blog Swap. Here, Claudia Faust who is a founding partner at ImprovedExperience.com, takes a view on “Possibility Recruiting”:

Don’t Leave Home Without It

“Did it work?  It doesn’t matter.  What matters is that the possibility exists that it could.”  Amitai Givertz

 “The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; the pessimist fears that this is true.”  James Branch Cabell

I love the idea of Possibility Recruiting because – well, let’s be honest here, I am a die-hard optimist.  This gets me into trouble occasionally (well, more often than that, since I’m being honest).  However, I still like being this way.  So, thinking of recruiting as exploring what is possible?  Works for me.

That’s the simple part.  It gets more complicated when I admit that Possibility and Optimism aren’t exactly the same thing.  Oh, they’re compatible, no doubt – but in a distant-cousin sort of way.  Possibility is potential; it is a concept that is not yet verified.  Optimism, on the other hand, is a general feeling that everything is going to turn out just fine.  When taken to an extreme, Optimism beats a path to the doorway of Complete Denial.  You know, that place where natural laws (like gravity and physics) don’t apply to you.

It is also easy to confuse possibility and creativity – again compatible, but different.  Creativity is the ability to bring something new into existence.  Guess what happens when that goes into overdrive?  We’ve all been there: Utter Chaos.

It seems like a little balance might be good.  Optimism and creativity are balanced when you add a sense of purpose and persistence in measuring the outcome.  You see a goal, you try something, you measure how well it worked, and then you try again.  Now you’re talking Possibility Recruiting.  And what’s the point?  Why, to innovate of course. 

Innovation is the breakfast of champions in business, a primary driver of competitive advantage.  But that’s not all you get with Possibility Recruiting; you also get great experience (aka, the Art of Figuring Out for Yourself What Others Already Know Is True); and the ability to measure your efforts (aka, the Art of Communicating to the Business You Serve).  What more could you ask?

Possibility Recruiting.  Don’t leave home without it.

© Copyright 2006 Claudia Faust.

No doubt, much of the conversation this morning will be taken up with Blog Swap this and Blog Swap that, and to the extent that some of us have nothing better to do than to smoke our own dope, I guess it might be a conversation worth following. We’ll see.

My first guest post for the swap is for David Kippen. David blogs for TMP. This in itself presented a number of challenges as I sat down to do my thing. Not least of all, David’s is a corporate blog with an obvious bias toward TMP’s money-making interests – and color scheme I might add. And, why not? It is what it is.

Bearing this in mind I had to be sensitive to the nature of the beast. After all, I am a guest and I certainly do not want to be so rude as to find I never get another insertion order from an old friend and corporate ally. But, in light of Jim Durbin’s recent post I Am Not A Paid Shill where he chimes in on a discussion initiated by Joel Cheesman – and my own independence as a citizen-blogger – I had to think twice about what to write. I mean, I’m not an unpaid shill, am I?

I suspect there may a delay in getting my post up on TMP’s site and David Kippen’s otherwise unnamed blog, oddly unbranded I thought. The wheels in Legal grind slowly. And I know it has to go through proofing. So while you’re all waiting, take a look at what Darren Rowse has to say in his post: PayPerPost – Paying Bloggers to Post – First Impressions. Oh, one last thing – I heard on FOX News last week that it now costs 20% more to produce one penny than a penny is actually worth. That’s my two cents worth on shilling.