Amitai Givertz’s Recruitomatic Blog

Avatar

A Contrarian View of Life in the Recruitosphere

Do You Swear to BS, the Whole BS, and Nothing but the BS, So Help You Blog?

Some books are simply indispensable. One such classic is How to Lie with Statistics by Darrell Huff. I have had one of the over million copies sold on my desk since I first acquired a tatty secondhand paperback  in 1978. Of course, that’s when content was king and influence was measured in royalties, reprints and guest appearances on the Russell Harty Show.

I was reminded of what a useful reference that book is when I happened on Social Media Saturday: Who Are The HR Bloggers? posted by Laurie Ruettimann on her blog,  The Cylindrical Girl.

Social Media Saturday: Who Are The HR Bloggers? features an infographic that visualizes a survey of HR bloggers, presumably those listed in the day’s prior post  Ultimate HR/Career Blog List for 2011: V3.0.

Credit goes to Ms. Ruettimann’s lucky intern, comrades in marketing at Starr Tincup, for an otherwise delightfully decorative piece. And full props to Ms. Ruettimann for filing both posts under General Nonsense, even if it is, as seems to be the case, her popular site’s default category.

Read the rest here »

Recruiting.com: Reincarnation, Powered by Google

Recruiting.com has gone through many changes in the years since Jason Davis and friends put recruiting blogs on the map. So many in fact that keeping up with it has become quite a bore.

Despite this being possibly one of the most coveted domain names in the industry, like one of the corpses laid to rest in a Varanasi gutter, Recruiting.com has become one of those things stepped over by most everyone.

Long forgotten for its contributions to humanity, the drama of blogging CEOs, the experimentation with formats, threats of lawsuits, Canadian headhunters, and assorted industry louts, Recruiting.com has been reduced to a shell with no soul.

Read the rest here »

Six Degrees of Ranting

Following the roasting of a fellow Schwabelite in How to destroy your reputation by self promotion with special guest, Irina Shamaeva! Dave Mendoza follows up with a video: NJ Governor Christie Rips into Govt bureaucratic mess Over One Page Error.

Read the rest here »

Don’t Shoot the Messenger

Recruitopian Footnotes [October 26, 2009]

  1. U.K. blogger Katharine Robinson [aka The Sourceress] posts Performing Sourcery at The Recruiting Unconference. Hmmm…Nothwithstanding timezones, recruiting unconferences are so yesterday, don’t you know: Jeff Hunter’s Talent Unconference [2007]; John Sumser’s Recruiting Roadshow [2008]; Jason Davis’s RecruitFest [2008/09]; Susan Burns’ Talent Camp [2009] and some I’ve missed, I’m sure. Now, Bill Boorman’s The Recruitment Unconference taking place in London on 19th November…a sign of the times, no doubt.

  2. In Feel Sorry for the Recruiter… Lisa Kaye laments that recruiters “worry if they will wind up on the other side of the desk, interviewing for jobs that well frankly are no longer in high demand.” Look on the bright side: if they ever make it back into recruiting they’ll have a better grasp of what “candidate experience” really means. That should make them better recruiters, don’t you think? [Counterpoint: My Future in Recruiting]

  3. In his post It’s all about the message Michael Specht rightly notes: “…that clearly communicating the employment deal up front is a critical first step in having an engaged employee,” going on to say, “Employees who blog openly and honestly will allow prospective employees to see what it is really like in your workplace.”I guess shooting the messenger is out of the question then, eh, Michael?

John Sumser in the Fullness of Time

A year is not a very long time in the overall scheme of things. Online, time seems to be compressed in ways that defy imagination. We measure our time and attention span in the language of machines. We live at such a frenetic pace that rarely do we stop to pause and reflect.

Change happens in front of our very eyes but we often miss it. In so doing we miss out on developing a level of appreciation of things that should come as part of the pay-off. Somewhere in the over abundance of social media, participation, micro-blogging and chat we’re short-changing ourselves. It’s not sustainable.

Read the rest here »

Another One Bites the Dust?

Over recent weeks it would seem that RecruitingBloggers.com has fallen by the wayside. Based on the original “by-the-sweat-of-your-brow-vested-in-me” model for cross-posting it looks like Maureen Sharib might be nearing complete saturation. 

On the other hand, the brains behind the group blog – the Recruiting Animal — has picked himself up and dusted himself off, posting on his name-sake blog like the truthiest renaissance man he really is.

Ah, life in the Recruitosphere — where every post counts for something. What perspective!

Posting on Recruiting.com: Over My Dead Body

I believe Recruiting.com has fulfilled its purpose for me and is about to give up the ghost.  The so-called recruiting community portal serves no strategic purpose and drives all but no traffic. There is no interesting content that I couldn’t get somewhere else. There are no pictures of Filipino hot babes after all and, quite frankly, the site has turned into a useless waste of blogroll, more irritation than anything else.

Read the rest here »

Vomit

I learned yesterday that John Sumser will be vacating the Editor’s desk at Recruiting.com. His going — timed for early May — will mark the closing of  another chapter in this seminal site’s interesting history, perhaps the closing of the book.

At this point I have to ask: “Who cares?” John’s throw-away remark at the end of the Recruiting Animals’ Morning After Show referencing his exit suggests he may feel the same way. Who knows? For sure, for those who look within the Recruitosphere’s publishing clique for amusement it will be amusing in the coming weeks, no doubt.

To my own pathethic contribution…hmmm. Recruiting.com has been an interesting place for me to experiment with a number of ideas some of which fizzled out, some of which sputtered along and some of which remain open-ended.

Moving forward, I shall simply plug my Bunsen into the new mixture of gas and hot air on RecruitingBlogs.com, the combustible bloggy-ning thing where I now spend my early mornings. Like you perhaps?

Ah, Recruitopiadoesn’t it just make you sick?

Food for Thought: The Weakest Link

And another in the series, Food for Thought

I remember many years ago when subliminal advertising was being used for the first time, at least that we knew of, there was a hullabaloo about it in the U.K. when I was growing up. The concern was this Kremlin-inspired technique was nothing more than a cynical attempt to take over the minds of Coronation Street’s already gullible audience. Right, as if.

Read the rest here »

The 2008 Recruiting Landscape

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.

Read the rest here »

Changing of the Guard at Jobster, What a Difference a Year Makes!

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

Shooting Stars, Making Wishes

I came across a new social network called projectstars, yet another killer startup. The site touts “blog for stock in the largest enterprise business blogging network” as if to suggest the potential payoff for participation might be worth the mind-numbing prospect of having to fill out yet another blessed profile first.

How ironic. In an attempt to free me from the walled gardens of the Web 1.0 internet I find that I am now trapped in the particulars of my online ID, technographic profile, group identity and now with projectstars, my “net worth” too.

projectstars claims to be an online business community for enterprise professionals. I don’t want to appear to be dim-witted but what is an enterprise professional exactly and do they/we really need another business community? And if the site’s purpose is indeed to “share expertise, build relationships, and find projects” one wonders if there have been problems with existing networks liked LinkedIn.

Read the rest here »

Continue Next page