Amitai Givertz’s Recruitomatic Blog

It seems the politicos at The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) have teamed up with JobTarget marketeers and are set to publish a 2009 Job Board Savings Book.

Apparently, you can use the coupons at over 1,000 niche, diversity and regional job boards that are slashing up to half the price on their job postings, all to help make the world go round. Think of it as cross between an economic stimulus package and a licked-to-go Green Shield Stamps program.

In times of economic collapse it is only natural that the industry’s leadership should bandy together and step up to the plate. Rewarding good behavior [buying postings] and facilitating commerce [direct marketing] is not a bad thing. To the contrary, it is a good thing. And programs like this are quintessentially American, aren’t they?

Read the rest here »

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!

In my research for this post I came across this from Steven Dutch who teaches Natural and Applied Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay:

A Note to Visitors

I will respond to questions and comments as time permits, but if you want to take issue with any position expressed here, you first have to answer this question:

What evidence would it take to prove your beliefs wrong?

I simply will not reply to challenges that do not address this question. Refutability is one of the classic determinants of whether a theory can be called scientific. Moreover, I have found it to be a great general-purpose cut-through-the-crap question to determine whether somebody is interested in serious intellectual inquiry or just playing mind games. Note, by the way, that I am assuming the burden of proof here – all you have to do is commit to a criterion for testing. It’s easy to criticize science for being “closed-minded”. Are you open-minded enough to consider whether your ideas might be wrong?

I do like that, it’s good isn’t it?

This is a rather long post. I don’t care. If you decide to read it, I have tried to make it entertaining enough to keep you engaged although my purpose – as always – is quite serious. I shall attempt to reconcile what has been described as my clumsy blogging with my personal view that your reading of this blogger is, perversely, none of my business. I am not a reporter. I am not a thought leader. I am not an expert with five ways to do this and ten ways to do that. I am not a vendor selling things. I am an individual who happens to be intrigued by the recruiting bubble and blogging and other things. From this post forward, I shall start referring to myself as “The Naked Blogger” in deference to another “inadequately informed amateur” who so influenced me as a childish boy: Dr. Desmond Morris.

Read the rest here »

Beyond writing my blog posts and hitting “publish” I freely admit I don’t know much about what goes on on the backend of my blog. As a result, not only was I blissfully unaware that I had disabled comments on my patient Blog Swapper’s recent guest post, Exotic Fruit, but when its author – Yvonne “Viva” LaRose – drew this to my attention - not even believing it could be done – I assumed she was as clueless as me. When I went to leave a comment myself I noticed it said “Comments Off” and I realized Viva was right and I was wrong. By way of karmic retribution – believe it or not – it took me an hour to figure out how to enable the comments, fall on my sword, and devise a plan for inviting you to please re-visit, re-read and comment as you like.

Yvonne has graciously forgiven me. I hope anyone frustrated by not being able to participate with a comment on her post will forgive me too. No sour grapes, please. Comments are still moderated! 

And, the Blog Swap continues.

By what authority who knows, but the Recruiting Animal says…

“You want readers, dumb it down. “Ten tips to a great resume” should get you a few. “Three things you should never say in an interview.” “What do you do if your candidate is cute?” Start writing these – even in your bizarre quirky style [the pot calling the kettle black] – and I guarantee a following.”

Recruitomatic asks, “Will this work?”

Three Ways to Clever Recruitment Blogging

1.  Find a source you can trust and “borrow heavily” from it.  If caught plagiarizing, distract everyone with a clever product launch.

2.  Quote anyone who falls into category one at length to avoid being accused of plagiarizing yourself. Appear well connected to make it all look innocent. Launch a new blog with a clever name.

3.  Realize options one and two will not sustain pay-per-click advertising. Invent a clever search engine to legitimize your use of everyone else’s content. Go to the top of the class.

Technorati says…

Recruiting Animal – dumbing it down since March 29, 2006 – ranks 99,625 with 69 links from 27 blogs. 

Recruitomatic – mixing it up since June 10, 2006 – ranks 92,306 with 151 links from 29 blogs.  

Hey, who needs readers when we have eachother?

I am very happy to be hosting this week’s Blog Swap contribution from my friend, Yvonne LaRose. Of course, “Viva” needs no introduction from me, her post says it all. Taste for yourselves…

The Exotic Fruit

Amitai gave the other Blog Swappers a statement regarding the focus of his Recruitomatic blog. It says:

“I would describe Recruitomatic as a ‘perpetual work in progress.’ I write on whatever tickles my fancy as it relates to what is going on in the talent management space and anything else I think my readers might enjoy. That is all I would ask of you bearing in mind my intention is to broaden my base of readers beyond the Recruitosphere to include recruiting practitioners who are in desperate need – in my opinion – for something to stimulate their thinking out-of-the-box. If you prefer to write shorter posts (the length is entirely up to you) my short posts are typically a commentary on things I see going on around me that I think may be ‘buzz-worthy.’”

Ami’s blog is one of my partners for this week’s swap. I’m going to have a conversation with my friend about “the buzz,” as though being a career coach, as though being a colleague, as though being a friend passing through a point in time. Please pull up a chair and listen in. There are insights you may appreciate as well – or desire to comment on.

Read the rest here »

I am privileged to be hosting David Perry as my guest for this week’s Blog Swap. Many will know David for co-authoring Guerrilla Marketing for Job Hunters and his companion work Guerilla Job Hunting – The Blog. David is also a partner in Perry-Martel International which is a posh executive search firm based out of…well, they’re international.

David Perry Speaks… 

By the year 2010, the cumulative codified knowledge of the world will double every 11 hours, which means that what you go to bed knowing at night will be outdated by daybreak. Shelf life for knowledge will be the same as that for a banana. Already, product lifecycles are measured in weeks not months or years. In this environment a company’s survival hinges on its employee’s ability to share knowledge – a concept that is foreign to most organizations, where people hoard knowledge to safeguard their jobs.

In the forthcoming book, Building Organizations That Leap Tall Buildings in a Single Bound, authors Ron Wiens, Ken Sudday and I focus on how to build a corporate culture that produces a winning bottom line by focusing on the organization’s Relationship Intelligence. We demonstrate that the ability of employees to trust is a measure of the organization’s Relationship Intelligence.

Companies with high Relationship Intelligence will succeed because they can build new knowledge and therefore new products and wealth on a continuing basis. In contrast, companies that have low Relationship Intelligence and hoard their knowledge and will fail.

Make no mistake, responding to change is not new, but the speed at which companies must make high-impact additions to their leadership teams is new. A company’s leadership equity has a direct bearing on its ability to drive through new strategies, make tough decisions, and turn crisis into opportunity.  

This is an environment for lean companies, driven by a relative handful of highest-quality employees.   Your requirement for people with tenacity, real talent and dogged determination can only be satisfied by using a recruiter who can match those qualities for your recruitment drive.   Recruiting is becoming a “craft” the perfect blend of art and science.

Today, your recruiter needs to be your “success partner” – someone willing to search the world, call the right prospects, get their attention, raise your proposition above the background noise, keep at it tenaciously for however long it takes – be it weeks or months – and be intelligent enough to present the same opportunity in creative new lights until the persuasion works.

In short, your success partner has to know your organizational structure creates your business opportunities, and then work with you until you attain your desired future.  How does your recruiter measure up?

© Copyright 2006 David Perry

This week marks a milestone in my short blog-posting career. In the time that it has taken Lou Adler to post his eight-part omnibus On Becoming a Great Recruiter I have published a good many posts and left more comments around the place than Idi Amin had bastard children. And, as I am reminded that the consumption of human flesh must be an acquired taste – the African dictator was known for eating his detractors – I am also reminded that blogging may be a modern thing but the satirical post is not. Better known for Gulliver’s Travels with its prototypical little people and yahoos, Jonathan Swift is more enduring as one who knew a thing or two about horse-shit and how pretentious polite society can be. All this raises the whole issue of my own emerging online persona. Do I want to be known as a ranting firebrand barking for my own blogebrity or a bloggy-nerd preoccupied with the conversion of manure to live feed? I know for sure, neither of those things reflects who I am or what I aspire to. This online identity thing is a tricky business, difficult to manage for sure.

For others too, managing perceptions in this bubble should not be left to chance. I maintain an independent voice because all I have to share with you here is a part of me, a part of me that may not be PC enough to be corporately sponsored or packaged for mass consumption. And yet, here we are: icons, thought leaders, luminaries, and captains of industry, subject matter experts, professional pundits, front-line practitioners and naked-bloggers all sharing the same space and competing for the same something. Surely, a formula for the occasional ruffling of feathers wouldn’t you say?

If I had a comment for every email I received in response to my post Bill Cosby & John Sumser: Icons or Has-beens? that would have been one of the most commented on posts that I have written to date. The actual number may not seem much in the overall scheme of things, but what could have come of the thread: the realization that John Sumser’s interbiznet is a national treasure, a living history of online recruiting, or having to generate all that daily content is enough to make anyone cranky, or that John Sumser is hoping one day Jason Goldberg – prolific in his own right – will acquire his online franchise too? Why would so many prefer to comment off-line and effectively stump the post? It makes no sense, or does it? You there! Can I publish your email dated July 13, can I? Pour quoi?

Why would my reply properly correcting the Canadian Headhunter on his comments to my CollegeRecruiter.com post College Career Centers: Reality Online Checks Out be censored? Was it really too controversial for Steven Rothberg to publish or just too plain-spoken for “polite” company? Certainly, reproducing the reply here would be utterly useless, out of context. And, as I read what I felt obligated to post instead, I now feel the whole post – my honest effort – was somehow slaughtered in that one email that said, “You can’t say that. It’s too personal.” Why couldn’t I say what I had to say and then Steven Rothberg could have commented too, really got the ball rolling? Of course, if you’ve ever tried posting a comment on CollegeRecruiter.com you’ll know that it is like trying to spring a chastity belt with a bobby-pin. No key, no comment. So that’s a moot-mute point too I guess. Also, why do posts appear in reverse chronological order? To ensure that nothing makes sense?

And, why would David Manaster choose a curiously contrived email rather than reply to my Schmaltz Herring post when he could have embraced the readership, refuted the post, and leveraged the opportunity and forum to his own advantage perhaps? For example, he could have left this comment:

“Amitai, thanks for pointing out that I have been too busy to post but if you spent less time worrying about what I was doing and waited patiently for my reply you would have known soon enough that my time and effort has been given over to the launching my charity ERE Foundation – philanthropy I consider to be altogether more important than your silly little blog.”

“Ere, okay, David. Sorry.”

Yes, our online personas, personal brands, the management of perceptions – even the occasional marketing spin – becomes more important the more important you are. Blogging is a complex medium and it requires more than just an occasional post. When I started this blog, I didn’t know that, but I’m learning fast. Confusion and commitment are unkind teachers.

The democratization of the web, soap-box blogging as much a part of that as wikis, digging this, tagging that and what-have-you, cannot be realized when those who exploit blogging – legitimately I would add – for their own publishing gigs and empire building forget that, unlike political democracies, as leaders they are self-appointed, bought and paid for by favors and advertisers, elected to positions of “authority” by jerry-rigging the “election” process. They cleverly manipulate their “popularity” by building “credibility” by incredible means – search engine optimization and blog swapping and blending repurposed content, modern-day princes. And that’s okay, reality is what it is. But even in the virtual world we need a reality check from time to time. I say, the process of disenfranchising the dissenting voices – cutting us off at the comment – will not work. We’ll just blog and take another path of least resistance. We cannot be silenced unless we are scared into submission by the thought of being served up on some dictator’s dinner table. What bile!

Jonathan Swift was a brilliant satirist. At least I think so. I can only speculate how his “corrective purpose” would have taken shape if he had the benefit of real-time comments to reframe arguments and advance a meaningful social intercourse. When one chooses off-comment email to respond to a post, its potential is thwarted, the possibility of truth denied. If the suppression of discourse is not deliberate, the undertaker cares not. The post is dead. The stink is stunk. When comments are suppressed or avoided the cry for discourse becomes the shrill rant that blogging can so easily become. And when one’s emerging online persona appears to be mutating into something that does not reflect the real you, you are bound to try and fix it, no? I define who I am – not you. I don’t define who you are – you do. The sad part is we will continue to blog regardless of whether we should have started or not adding with varying degrees of regularity to the mind numbing cacophony of online drivel that on the one hand affirms our existence and on the other, simply negates it.

Here we are – a milestone in my short blog-posting career. The posts that I hoped would define me in this space – Hyperinflation, Possibility Recruiting, The Double Agent, India Stealing Jobs?, Your HR Guy Faces Off for example – eclipsed somewhat and temporarily by my own struggle to assert that I too have a voice. I will be heard. What resonates within me cannot be silenced until such time as I choose to return to a more sedate form of blogging: reading the feeds and being fed.

Thanks to Tod Hilton for his guest post this week as part of the Blog Swap, and for being a Recruitomatic stalwart. As you can see, Tod needs no introduction from me…

Which Side of the Fishbowl?

A quick little intro for those of you tuning in to the Big Bad Recruiting Blog Swap … My name is Tod Hilton and I will be your host for this post. What I am: a software developer at Microsoft and a bunch of other things [father, husband, gamer, snowboarder, etc.]. What I’m not: a recruiter or hiring manager, although I do interview candidates and give the infamous ‘hire’ or ‘no-hire’ recommendation.

If there’s one thing I quickly noticed about Amitai’s personality it’s that he calls it like he sees it…no matter what. Behold the evidence here, there, around-the-bend, over-that-hill, on-top-of-that-fence-post and oh-yeah-here-too. He’s been blogging for less than 2 months and his bluntness has made me laugh out loud [mostly in agreement] more times than several of the people I voraciously consume as often as they can post. That’s a tough act to follow [and I sincerely hope that he continues], but here goes nothing…

Imagine if you will, a goldfish [let’s call him Percy] swimming around a nice round little fishbowl. Percy knows that fishbowl like the back of his fin [yes, I’m assuming fish can see the back of their fins]. He knows exactly how deep the water is. He knows exactly where the tiny fake plant is placed. He knows exactly how many strokes it takes him to swim completely around the bowl. He knows everything there is to know about that bowl. Well, at least the inside of it…

That’s where I come in. You see, I’m not in that fishbowl with Percy. Sure, I see how big it is and that the water is X inches deep and that the tiny fake plant is placed a little off-center to the right side [of course, unless you turn it]. But I also see that the bowl itself is sitting on top of a counter. And next to it on the counter is a picture frame with a lovely family smiling back at me. Hanging on the wall above the fishbowl and picture is an Ansel Adams print [Oak Tree, Snowstorm taken in Yosemite]. In fact, the bowl is surrounded by all sorts of items that the fish doesn’t even really notice. Sure, Percy can see outside of the bowl, but it’s all a bit distorted to him. Obviously it would be distorted because of the convex shape of the glass bowl. But perhaps not so obvious, what is outside of the bowl is distorted to him because it doesn’t really affect his daily life. Percy can swim all day long, but that picture sitting next to his bowl doesn’t do anything for him. Or does it?

You can read about fish all day long [I’m not sure why you’d want too, but I suppose you could do it nonetheless] so let me get to a point…and yes, there actually is one. As a non-recruiter participant in the recruiting blog swap I see myself as sitting outside of the fishbowl while all of you recruiters are inside. Now, now, now…before you go and get all upset with hurt feelings let me continue. I have read many, many great posts over the past 5 weeks solely as a result of participating in the blog swap. Stuff I never would have been exposed to if I hadn’t made the rash decision [yes, it was definitely an impulse thing for me] to participate. You are all opening my eyes to issues you face [as recruiters] that I was only vaguely aware of. I’ve learned about how the recruiting industry is leveraging technology beyond just a simple listing of a company’s job opportunities. I have read several pieces about how recruiting should deal with individual transparency becoming the norm because of people revealing so much personal information online (i.e.: MySpace). I’ve gotten some insight in to how you view resumes [or the death of them]. All of it is great information and it has been a valuable learning experience for me.

But consider my perspective. I’m a software developer. I only spend time recruiting in an official capacity if I absolutely have to [like the recent SDET position we filled on my team]. And trust me, I didn’t particularly enjoy it so I’m not looking to make any career changes in that direction. To me, on any normal day, the conversations y’all are having are like that picture outside of Percy’s fishbowl. I can see them and hear them, but they’re distorted because they don’t directly affect me. For me, it’s like I have jumped in the fishbowl and am now swimming around with you recruiter-type-goldfish for the first time. But where does that leave you recruiter-type-goldfish?

Now think about that for a minute.

OK, minute’s up. I’ll tell you where it leaves you…you’re still swimming around in the same fishbowl with the same goldfish and the same tiny fake plant. Sure, you might be talking more than you were before, but what are you talking about? Survey says…recruiting [ding, ding, ding].

In all fairness, not all of the posts have been focused solely on recruiting issues. I would be doing a disservice to everyone if I inferred that the subjects were so narrowly scoped. There have been several discussions that moved outside the normal boundaries of recruiting [although I don’t know whether to count Gretchen’s haikus ]. I think it’s great that you’re all cooperating like this and getting the conversations started, but I challenge you to break out of your comfort zones and move the discussions into unexplored territories. I have learned just how much recruiters can affect my life by simply jumping in to the bowl with you. That’s something I never would have known if I hadn’t noticed that family picture sitting next to my own little fishbowl.

A fish, a bowl and a picture. Which side of the fishbowl are you on, or rather, should you be on?

© Copyright 2006 Tod Hilton

At the time of this writing I have been unable to determine the wellbeing if industry icon David Manaster. It is possible that personal matters have kept him from participating in the Blog Swap over recent weeks. I suspect one of his minions has been putting up the guest posts which appear to have gone unreciprocated in recent weeks on the inferior blogs now lacking for want of David Manaster’s thought leadership.

I concede that David Manaster is out of circulation for reasons which are perfectly legitimate – worthy of our sympathy even. It could be that he underestimated the difficult of recovering Jason Goldberg’s Blackberry from the bottom of Lake Washington or the challenges of working with union labor as he gets the pipe and drape ready for the upcoming ERE soiree in Hollywood, Florida. Who knows? Perhaps it is simply a matter of poor scheduling.

What I can say is this: It is very rude indeed to make commitments and break them while taking advantage of those of who are nice enough to provide content for your blog and a guest spot for your posting each week. I can only compare it to his breaking wind during a group hug. At best, that type of behavior is antisocial, unpleasant. As we all come to terms with our online personas it would be a good idea for the well-to-do’s among us to realize that their behavior sometimes appears to be arrogant and uncouth, even though that may be far from the truth.

Thankfully, I have been wrong on many occasions and, surely, I am wrong again. In the meantime, for those of you who may have scheduled a little time this week in anticipation of some value from David Manaster you will not go away disappointed. Courtesy of a Hire Calling – David Manaster’s elevated blog – I offer you these quality posts:

Online Communities – The View from My Window posted by Frank Mulligan

Perils and Potentials in Community Building posted by Yvonne LaRose

Talent Wars 2.0 – Does your recruiting strategy reflect what’s important to your candidates? posted by David Perry

Should your outside-of-work-online persona be considered by employers? and posted by Tod Hilton

As evidenced by the quality of content on David Manaster’s blog, it is obvious that a thoughtful and intelligent post takes some time and effort to produce, perhaps more than David Manaster’s personal or business circumstances might permit. I understand that. But, would the courtesy of a reply email have been too much to ask? Or am I being silly?