Amitai Givertz’s Recruitomatic Blog

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 2 in my Food for Thought series…

Early on in my professional career I worked as the Manager of Market Planning for BIS Banking Systems, a U.K.-based subsidiary of the now defunct NYNEX Corporation. That was back in the ’80s.

One of my earliest assignments was to input to the organization’s five-year strategic plan. BIS had never produced a five-year plan before, at least not to the exacting specifications of a U.S. monolith.

The project required my assessments of things like market size and potential for a variety of segments across international banking, computing and communications. Without the aid of anything remotely resembling the Internet, let alone search engines — or in Banking Systems’ case a library even — I took the task in my youthful stride thinking I could get away with semblance over substance.

Well, I was wrong. Expected to slice and dice markets with precise measurement and translate all that with something “strategic” left me stumped from the get-go. In short, I was well and truly buggered.

Read the rest here »

Part 1 in a series Food for Thought

Blogging for business continues to be a fascinating study for me.

As I continue to wrestle with the potential and problems that go with my efforts I am coming to accept that I cannot always grasp enough of what it all means, reminded of the adage: “There is no comfort in the learning zone and there is no learning in the comfort zone.”

Amidst my current bout of self-examination I can at least say why I started blogging: I wanted to be more involved in the online conversations about my work-related passion and interests, coming to understand at the same time how to use social media to help reposition my then employer RCI Recruitment Solutions. A simple enough task or so you’d think, not! As it turned out the “conversation” too often fell on deaf ears, the audience preoccupied with other things. C’est la vie…

Read the rest here »

The problem with being a boomer is being so easily bamboozled. The source of today’s bamboozlement is ki work, a “new model” for brokering professional relationships and outsourcing projects.

The site aspires to being a marketplace where ki work acts as the intermediary for globally dispersed talent that is otherwise available in everyone’s virtual backyard.

I don’t understand why reasonably good ideas go to market with nothing more than a reasonably good idea, do you?

Read the rest here »

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 »

…or the Naked Blogger meets Gareth Morgan:

…or how to take thirty seconds and end up running late!

It is embarrassing to be tapped as a “thought leader” when the output of trying to write my Recruiting Trends inaugural post is a waste-paper basket full of candy wrappers and a mind numbed with hyperglycemic confusion. If you could just see this “thought leader” in action! On my hands and knees I am reduced to digging through discarded pay stubs to recover half-scratched notes tossed out two hours ago, trying to work out what I was thinking when, for a brief moment before the sugar kicked in, I thought I had a thought…

Teaser scribbled under the heading, The Talent Management Time-Bomb:

If metrics is to planning what sourcing is to search, and assessment is to performance management what leadership development is to succession planning,’ then isn’t that like saying ‘if you keep doing what you’ve always done, you’ll keep getting what you’ve always got’ because ”past performance is no guarantee of future results?

Now that’s a doozey, huh? Try this, scribbled on the back of another:

If the personnel department [the Reagan/Bush years] preceded strategic HR [the Clinton years] then what does talent management [the GW years] precede?

I do hope all this A-musing will keep my detractors off the scent of a post published a year ago to the day of my scheduled debut on Recruiting Trends in which I said:

Thought leadership” is one of the phrases, like “best-of-breed” and “mindshare” that have an Orwellian ring about them that simply agitates the rebel in me. I know that those things in of themselves are not bad, no more than seed-money is sleazy, but anything that suggests that my brains need to be scrambled as part of a leadership strategy leaves me, well, muddled.

To my own defense, that post was written in a similar state of sugar-induced confusion, all “thunked out” I was.

[This post was originally published on the RCI Recruitment Solutions' blog Bells & Whistles.]

Well, it is rather late and I really should be tucking the children into bed and making cocoa for my long-suffering missus. But I have the notion that I can dash off a quick post, by way of an update on my Recruiting.com-in-transition thingie. I did promise I would be home before whatever-o’clock and I still have a minute or two, don’t I?

9:48pm: Recruiting.com

Parts three, four, five, six, seven and eight and nine and ten of my hypothesis on the future of Recruiting.com will not be published after all. Although it has subsided now, I’m afraid two or three weeks ago when I started the communal histrionics surrounding the outgoing Jason Davis and incoming John Sumser combined with my running out of emotional pocket-change left me uninspired, counting pennies.

I will say, having spoken at length to the now-gone and now-here bloggers-laureate I am convinced that my theories about Jason Goldberg’s strategic positioning of Recruiting.com as some kind of money-making proposition to rival David Manaster’s ERE (formerly Electronic Recruiters’ Exchange) may have exaggerated:

a) Jason Goldberg’s commercial interest in the so-called “Recruiting Community Portal” and in providing value-added content (read: profitable) to the market;

b) His tolerance for an unwise crowd of yahoos – or a vocal minority depending on the generosity of your point of view — enfranchising one minute and disenfranchised the next; and

c) Any interest in making good on his “endowment” to what must seem to him now to be a bunch of ungrateful link-gluttons, myself included.

I also think in comparing the two I might have unwittingly understated David Manaster’s ability to quietly get on with his affairs without drawing the ire of a whole genre. Certainly there is more to contrast Jason Goldberg and David Manaster. I wonder how the two men really view each other as movers-and-shakers, authentic and transparent. Much in the same way as a mirror reflects the reverse image to the observer I suspect a close scrutiny in the looking glass would leave David Manaster the only one of the pair able to distinguish the realities of online publishing and community from delusions of grandeur.

So there you have it, broken promise, number one. Or, is it two?

9:54pm: “Emailsification”

There has been some talk about the Recruiting.com community being portable. Hmmm, I don’t get it. What I am getting is so many requests to be someone or others’ friend on Jason Davis’ latest blogescapade — RecruitingBlogs.com — that new invites are getting junked in my mail folder. How ironic. My initial interest in social media came from the idea that email “spamming” and blogging mixed like oil and water, one being the antithesis of the other. Rather like screaming “Roll-up! Roll-up!” at an audience doesn’t quite jive with whispering a confidence to a “friend,” does it?

I guess finding a way to mix oil and water would be some kind of alchemy, would it not?

10:03pm: A contemplative moment

Oh, I get it! Sweet epiphany! I better start inviting everyone I know – and don’t know of course – to be my friend on RecruitingBlogs.com too. It will be like a boyhood adventure, playing childish games, Chinese Whispers, better still! Yes, I see it now. Reinventing the Recruitosphere, how marvelous! I wonder if Jason Davis will remember our dinner in Grand Central Station when we ourselves whispered in the others’ ear about such things. Who could have known that from a dinner of oysters one could find such pearls!

1:07am: Cold cocoa

I can hear it now, “Amitai, the children expect you to keep your promises and so do I. All this blogging — staying in the office until who-knows-when — is fine and dandy but don’t you think you could have sent us an email at least?

Daggit! I’ll send her flowers instead.