A Contrarian View of Life in the Recruitosphere
Rogue recruiter and sausage salesman David Perry was nice enough to include me as one of the co-authors in his recently published, run-away best-seller, Guerrilla Marketing for Job Seekers 2.0. Yowzer!
If you’re lucky enough you might still pick up a copy on Amazon.com. If you’re really, really lucky you won’t need to.
The chapter I wrote is entitled Guerrilla Googling and the Job Hunters’ Dashboard.
Before realizing that Google’s products and services can be configured to meet the needs of recruiters like me [see G-Recruiter.com] I spent a good bit of time tinkering with a few “free” applicant tracking systems.
Not that there are that many to choose from, Zoho People impressed me the most, not because it was any good — actually, I thought is was a piece of crap — but because their customer service was absolutely amazing.
During our hours [and hours] trying to fix bugs and get things working one of the support-wallahs told me a new module for recruiters was being released in a “few weeks.” That was almost a year ago.
I recently upgraded my WordPress blogs. Thinking it was time to pick up the loose threads of a fraying online experience I was conscious that not only had my writing suffered for not writing but my blog had suffered for not blogging too.
To save you from my miserable experience farting around with incompatible plugins, suffice it to say that I disabled every one of them in order to get this site back up. In so doing I came to a remarkable realization…
John Sumser’s controversial post Digging Into RecruitingBlogs.com v2.08: The Death of Sourcing has has inspired a great debate about the state of our industry and the area of specialization we call “Sourcing.”
John suggests that “Former sourcing luminaries will be familiarizing themselves with the alarm on the French fry machine and the relative difference between Rare, Medium and Well done.”
Oh, dear.
I have been on a quest to find a search engine that will know what I’m looking for without me ever having to input a search term, let alone search strings, symbols or syntax. No, not natural language but something even less tiresome…brain waves perhaps.
More than that, I want the aggregated results to be served in context, arranged in folders by media and domain, sorted by date and relevancy, cross referenced to each other, color coded and appropriately tagged. Peer reviews would be nice.
Remember the Sabbath Day and keep it holy…
Google! Google! The end is nigh, the end is nigh! Prepare to meet thy Maker. Can I get an Amen, [Big] Brother?
Sat 31 Jan 10:25 via webHey, y’all. Do you get this when you run a Google search: “This site may harm your computer?” Or am I doomed…
Sat 31 Jan 10:28 via webI can Google! I can Google! Yes, People, there is a God! Can I get another ‘Amen’ Brother? Halla-freakin’-lujah!
Sat 31 Jan 10:42 via web
Sorry, God. I couldn’t resist.
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.
Some time ago my wife was suffering from a persistent abdominal pain. A kind neighbor who learned that medical science had failed us for years came over to lay hands on my missus and pray with the family.
Our apostolic neighbor got to work and in no time was possessed. She began uttering some unknown prayer that was only coherent to God and herself.
While it seemed quite possible that everyone else in the room was being transported to a higher place, I found myself being teleported to the Appalachian foothills where one imagines spirits of a different sort give voice to an equally unintelligible, if not distilled, form of incantation.
Somehow, in my befuddled Hebraic interpretation of what was going on I confused the “charismatic church” with the “charismatic me” and foolishly decided to apply the lessons of the day to some healing of my own.
Without going in to the pathetic details of my amorous overtures — or my completely missing the point with the snake metaphor — suffice it to say, getting lickered up, and my own very clumsy “laying on of hands,” resulted in my waking up the next day with a thick head and a lip to match. Go figure.
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!
I was in conversation with a client the other day. We were talking about low-impact blogging as a possible way to reconcile the “wanna blog but don’t have time” and “yeah, I wanna optimize my site” disconnect.
As part of my illustration that the disconnect can be reconciled with relatively little effort we jumped online to look at ways I had addressed this problem in the past. We looked at my Quote for the Day, On the Radar, Recruiting by Numbers and other experiments, managing to cover everything from SEO blah-blah-blah to reputation yada-yada-yada in the space of about 20 minutes.
I’m sure the conversation would have been more fruitful had many of my illustrations not been frustrated by a series of recently vandalized pages, courtsey of Jobster. Clicking through a series of blank pages is hardly a good first step in getting a reticent client to part with more money, is it?
Ho-hum…
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