Digital Recruiting

A Change In Attitude

While watching a bit of TV I stumbled upon this and wanted to post the link ... it really stood out.

The busyness economy works on face time, incremental improvement, strategic long-term planning, return on investment, and hierarchical control. The burst economy, enabled by the Web, works on innovation, flat knowledge networks, and discontinuous productivity:

http://webworkerdaily.com/2007/04/19/busyness-vs-burst-why-corporate-web-workers-look-unproductive/

From looking at this and the clashes you have seen written about on this blog - it does highlight a big issue with the management of digital in our industry. Now I am not going to say one side is better than the other - THIS is to have a discussion not mark sides.

Well when you look at people - this can be the first conflict. The sort of person you need to really challenge and change the way we do things is NOT a typical recruitment advertising corporate player. In fact the exact opposite - how do we handle this? Building teams is always an issue ... especially teams to re-think our business. I would suggest Edward de Bonno, How To Have A Beautiful Mind as a starting point - it is more important to be interesting than to be right (both sides need to think about this).

When you look at process ... innovation does not come from formal business structures. It also does not come from business planning or attempts to talk about the future - you should not impose one's views on a problem; one should rather study it, and in time a solution will reveal itself (that was actually written by Albert Einstein but it summed up my thoughts). When you look at this the constant attempts to be the first or to do shameless self-promotion is not actually improving the industry. Intelligent collaboration is needed to improve our overall ability to achieve the migration to digital - so how can we work to improve our overall solutions.

Remove the short-term mind-set - I have got to admit I have never worked in an industry that based itself so much on short-term targets. When you look at every long-term debate. Recruitment is getting more and more of an issue for business (the Economist article earlier this year is probably the most important). So why is it that so many media owners and agencies are crying over their shrinking market? Maybe the business models of the past just do not work? If you look at Ralph Stacey, Managing Chaos - he suggests that as the process of change makes long-term planning more difficult then we need new flexible business structure to deal with this. Planning becomes more important - but not in the traditional mindset of 5 year development plans.

My final little point on this is saying we need to use the talent in the industry ... to be honest most brains are wasted on pointless delivery issues - caused by all of the above. Maybe it is time to start stepping up and changing things - it needs a new mind-set from the agency management teams + working together to have intelligent discussions and collaboration on key issues (a trading currency and system integration). I could go on but this is not a rant - I am really interested to see what people think?

interesting video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUkJfg-kAIc

a little bit odd ... but interesting stuff on advertising and hold to build a better relationship with your users ...

Shift Happens

Yet another potentially interesting YouTube video and yet another blatant steal from my mate Howard at Adventures in Digital Marketing. This one covers everything from globalisation, technology growth and future career / job trends, although at no point does it actually source any of it's stats.

I'm off on holiday for a couple of weeks now, so no posts from me for a while. I'm sure I'll have lots to say when I'm back though!

Matt

FaceBook - Getting Hooked

so who is addicted to facebook yet ???

poking and leaving messages at 3am ? (maybe i am just being strange)

thought you would all find this interesting

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3xmuFtRl74

... a lot more to it all than just this but a great bit of captology

The Future's Bright, the Future's Open Source

The team at work went out for drinks last Thursday night and I was asked by a couple of them how the Guardian Recruitment 2020 event had been that I had attended in the morning. I've a questionable memory at the best of times and the extent of my recollection was yes it was very interesting, I found the Futurologist speaker very good and enjoyed the four possible scenario's presented by the Demos think tank research. It was clear as you would imagine that technology and the economy would be at the heart of recruitment moving forward. Of course I also mentioned what mutual friends in the industry I had bumped into which is always nice and of interest to people.

Apart from the insightful quote by William Gibson - "The future is already here. It is just unevenly distributed" the one big thing that really stuck in my head and got me thinking was when the key speaker Andrew Curry also mentioned that Procter and Gamble were operating an open source policy for the development of their products.....this really had an impact on me. Typically when you think of open source you think of IT software development. Techies collaborating together on open and available software with the aim of pooling the best talent to produce the best possible product. Democratization of product development and its availability, allowing people to benefit from software without having to necessarily pay for it or at least at a reduced rate. This is often to rebut companies who may exercise market dominance or monopolies over certain products e.g. Microsoft Windows.

Without a doubt the Internet facilitates this ability for everyone to share, work on and review products and information, without it companies like Procter and Gamble would find it difficult to truly benefit from widespread intellectual capital that an open source model provides.

What role does open source play in recruitment? Is this blog a form of open source? – collaborative discussions and sharing of information yes, but perhaps a bit diluted in the desire of its contributors to share our deepest most innovative idea's on what we want to do and are in the process of doing for our clients. Or maybe we need a clearer focus on a specific objective or outcome we aim to achieve.

If I were a client perhaps I would set an objective for the industry under the auspices of an open source collaborative project. Or perhaps why should it be a client who lays down the gauntlet to achieve a wider industry good? Should agencies grasp the nettle? should the media open their products to the great and the good?

One area that would provide real tangible benefits to the industry as a whole would be a forum or regular think tank on tracking in online recruitment. In my experience the ability to prove that online works has always been fundamental to migrating clients online. I've heard people moan about how some clients and some agencies just aren't with it yet, perhaps this could be the way to kick start things.

Any thoughts welcome.

These will make you laugh

These were circulating a while ago during pre YouTube days.....that was the time we had to actually send video files to each other...how archaic!

Anyway it occurred to me that some of you might not have seen them. Not quite as funny as The Truth in Ad Sales but getting there!

For some reason YouTube won't let me embed the two sequels so here are the links

Ad Guy 2002

Ad Guy 2003