I enjoyed listening to John Sumser in the Recruiters Lounge this week, stumping for the Recruiting Roadshow. I think the Recruiting Roadshow is a brilliant idea and all for a good cause. It will be interesting to watch how things roll out in 2008. I hope that I have been helpful in some small way getting the thing in motion.
On the same day Jim Stroud posted his interview with Sumser, Shally Steckerl posted his reflections on his year doing the conference thing, linking to one of the posts I wrote on the subject: From the Frontlines to the Home Front: A Different Kind of Conference!
The lessons learned form all this? Well, altogether too many for a quick missive but the most important lesson was maybe this:
Those of “us” who are bound by the niceties of political association, cliquey affiliation, fat-cat business, product to push, thought-bleedership, social status, blogebrity or whatever — those of us who collectively make up the industry’s self-appointed infrastructure — need to get out more. There is nothing quite like seeing 98% of a Roadshow audience — representative of the local recruiting community — bemused by talk of the social networks, blogging and search engine stuff to put things in perspective. Video resumes? Give me a break! Skype? Isn’t that a skin disease?
In a hard, hard world where people still run help-wanted classifieds and equate sourcing with Monster page views some of us could do a lot worse than get to know the people who we are supposed to be serving, then actually serve them — why not?
Lesson learned? Hit the road, Jack — or whatever your name is!
Read my take for the coming year just published by ZoomInfo…
Amitai offers a different take, predicting that early adopters of social media for recruiting will remain in the minority. Too few frontline recruiters will risk the perils of transparency in corporate environments that need to mitigate risk and innovation and apply bottom-line metrics instead. As the economics of recruiting come under closer scrutiny with a softening economy and an inability to quantify the ROI on social media, there will be a slowdown in the rate of adoption by recruiters.
Continue reading ‘The 2008 Recruiting Landscape’
Well, its Christmas Eve. It seems everyone is at home googling this and googling that.
A larger number of visitors than usual are flocking to this ever so ‘umble blog today. To read my learned works? Nah, its that Kingsbury fellow!
Being a contrarian has historically been a mixed career move. On one hand, it may get a statue put up in your honor. On the other hand, it will likely be erected on the spot where you were hanged, drawn, and quartered before a cheering crowd of thousands.
Bah, humbug!
Mon asks a recurring question on my Hungry Blogger post:
I am wondering whether blogging makes a noticeable difference to your SEO. I have been blogging for my company for a few weeks and have no idea whether i am causing any real differences. Are we appearing higher up in google? No idea, but am having a bit of fun while i am doing it at least.
There is plenty of stuff online that will help you understand how to make the most of your blogging, get some Google juice.
Here are a couple of resources you will find helpful, sites you might want bookmark if Google itself isn’t good enough:
You should look up Michael Specht — he is an Australian blogger like you, closer to home if you want to try and make a human connection. I don’t know what platform you are using but here are Michael’s earlier experiences trying to get some lift off a WordPress platform.
Have you considered joining a community like RecruitingBlogs.com where asking these types of question will get you a more varied response? If not, you should.
Yeah, yeah, yeah…I could have answered Mon in the post’s comments but I need the juice, you know, to gargle with!
Incoming Chief Executive Officer Jeff Seely on Monster.com:
I like an industry that is defined by some really great class A players
Outgoing Chief Jobster Jason Goldberg on the same subject:
Crap product!
In the final analysis, money talks.
Hat tip: Jason Davis, RecruitingBlogs.com
Bill Vick gave an excellent — albeit abbreviated — presentation last week at John Sumser’s Dallas Recruiting Roadshow. It was interesting on many levels. Taking the elevator up, first floor…
Bill’s presentation introduced “bleeding edge” technology to recruiters who by and large — by their own show of hands — were hemorrhaging on old notions of how to use the Internet. It was that that was was most interesting to me. I wondered, “Is the so-called war for talent going to be won with what most recruiters are currently equipped with?” I don’t think so.
Mezzanine level, going up: On the topic of the importance of online profiles — why recruiters should have them, how they are used in recruiting, and how they will be used in the future — Bill made an interesting comment, something to the effect that the day is coming that everything that could be known about a person will be available for anyone to sniff out online. Hmmm…that may have some downside, don’t you think?
First floor: Listening to Bill, I was reminded of a couple of things taken off my morning reader earlier in the year. The first was a post by John Sumser on ERN called More About Search and the other was posted on Proverbs31 titled He Knows My Name. Somewhere there was a stream of conciousness that went from technology for recruiters to playing cards to house of cards to, well, frankly I don’t remember — I’ll have to read the posts again!
Second floor: Somehow in that flow of confused recollection I concluded that in what Bill was suggesting — our being sorted according to relative value [good deeds] and reputation [good name], and all that for some omnipresent recruiters’ advantage — it would be just as well to remember what happened the last time tried to create such a thing — a whole heap of confusion!
Roof top parking: Just a thought.
Part 4 in my Food for Thought series…
The Discovery Channel airs an interesting program called Man vs Wild. The star of the show is Bear Grylls, a real life Action Man who demonstrates techniques for surviving in the most inhospitable landscapes.
To accentuate the extreme nature of his adventures — and the diversity of what we eat on planet Earth perhaps — we are treated to the spectacle of watching iron-gut Grylls eat some particularly horrid things, or delicacies depending on your stomach.
Under normal circumstances, goats’ testicles or a wild boar’s fully loaded bowel [cooked of course] is hardly what a good TV dinner is made of. And, while it is fascinating to think you can make a brew from the water extracted from an elephant’s feces, one wonders how any kind of tea can taste good if it is not served in a china cup.
Continue reading ‘Food for Thought: Ripping Yarns’
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