Digital Recruiting

Did you know?

As Alex tells us all about the latest 'wave' of advertising below - I thought we could end the week with some stats from attending the recent EIAA conference (European Interactive Advertising Association).

- Total Internet spend in 1999 came to £40m, which was seen back then as massive growth. Ten years later, we're now at £3.3 billion!

- Ten years ago the three largest reaching sites in the UK were MSN, Yahoo and Freeserve! (remember Freeserve? and where is Google?)

- Today, 45% of our Internet time is spent on just 10 sites, meaning the thousands of remaining domains have to fight it out for our remianing online time.

 

Today our audience are'media multi-taskers' - consuming more than one media at a time - e.g. surfing online while watching TV etc etc

In terms of the incredible transformation of the communications landscape, I really liked Evan Williams sentiment, on his recent talk about Twitter and its unexpected uses on ted.com

'Follow the hunch but never assume where it will go......'

Potential tsunami or ripple? Google signal the WAVEing goodbye of Twitter

Global recession or not, the pace of internet technology development waits for no economic cycle it would seem. Recently google have announced their latest project – something that’s potentially so big they’ve broken with their usual “release it in beta & then keep working on it” approach and have started drawing attention to it months before it’ll be ready for public release. Google Wave promises to be a “new tool for communication and collaboration on the web, coming later this year”.

Twitter killer? Certainly looks like to me. It’s gonna dent the hell out of FaceBook & other such platforms too you’d have to bet.  So what is Wave – well in their own words:

A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.

A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.

Here's how it works: In Google Wave you create a wave and add people to it. Everyone on your wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web. They can insert a reply or edit the wave directly. It's concurrent rich-text editing, where you see on your screen nearly instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your wave. That means Google Wave is just as well suited for quick messages as for persistent content — it allows for both collaboration and communication. You can also use "playback" to rewind the wave and see how it evolved.

And here’s the video of it being launched

you can find all of this and more (including signing up to be alerted when it is launched) at http://wave.google.com/

It is of course pretty scary if you let yourself think about how much more of the “conversation” & our data this will put within the google domain – and you have to wonder how anyone can now stop them becoming the MegaCorp of many sci-fi nightmares that humans eventually have to rise up and rally against – but right here right now I take my hat off to the visionary and mega clever people at google and pray that the ATS market is way too small, for a few years at least, for them to bother knocking out a killer beta app for that! *Gulp*

☺

What Women Want

Dell have launched Della - a website for women and how their computers can help enhance their lives by looking cute, fashionable and help them count calories.

Look above, at how the happy women, sit closely together with their pastel coloured laptops and share laughs, horopscopes and no doubt, are on Cosmo online, gleaning pearls of wisdom on how to make their relationship work.

Puts me in mind of one of my favourite Harry Enfield schetches - Women know your limits

So, how can I expect to benefit from a netbook as detailed on the Della site?

Well, once I get beyond how darn cute they are I can easily find recipe's, count calories, watch fitness videos and ensure I shop successfully at vintage clothing stores. Then there is the accessories section - where I can shop to my hearts content.

Oh dear...why are women seen as a specific niche audience when it comes to technology, who need to be given child-like tech tips like morons?  it's....well....its just plain insulting.

Note to self - do not ever do this in recruitment.

So, which colour is your favourite? I just can't decide!

Two Tribes...Control v. Creativity

Lately, I've been mulling over the reports that newspapers intend to charge for their online content.

A futile exercise by Murdoch and the like, long after the dam wall has bust?

or justified compensation for valuable content that in fairness should be paid for?

It's a tricky one for sure. To pay or not to pay.

In terms of recruitment, we blogged about the subscription model on recruitment sites, such as The Ladders a while back and more recently and much deeper into the recession, Matt has got the debate going nicely on his own blog.

I read an article from the Observer recently and it made me think.

It was all about Charles Percy Snows 'infectious idea/meme' that there exists two cultures in society.

Literary Intellectuals v. Natural Scientists - both who had mutual incomprehension and mistrust which had negative repercussions for society.

According to John Naughton, today its about those obsessed with control and those who celebrate openness and creativity.

Here is where it gets interesting - its the early 1990's when the dawn of electronic networking is being recognised. He presents two options from which we could choose from:

1/ 'Government-provided terminals in every home on which appear information and services from a small number of approved providers (the BBC and Guardian for news, the Met Office for weather information, Reuters for stockmarket information, and so on).

Everything is controlled and reliable.

2/A publishing system in which anybody can publish anything - including lies, propaganda and pornography - with no prior approval. '

Question: which system would you have chosen?

Second scenario: -to design the world's first global encyclopedia

1/ A huge project with top minds and thinkers, experienced editors who source the best most authoritative articles - all rigorously checked for impartiality and accuracy.

2/'The alternative proposal is from a guy who says "Well, I think we should put up a website and ask people to write stuff for it."

Which one would you have chosen?'

Now lets think of a recruitment scenario. You are looking for a job and you are given two future options:

1/An online recruitment service that provides jobs in your specific industry, houses your CV and matches your skills and personality to an organisations' cultural fit -

You Pay for this tailored service.

2/An online recruitment service that provides jobs in your specific industry, houses your CV and matches your skills and personality to an organisations' cultural fit -

You do not pay for this tailored service.

Which one would you have chosen?

Interesting Article On Newspapers

This was in the FT yesterday ... Future of Newspapers some very interesting points ... have a good old read.

The Conference Season

  

We don’t tend to plug many conferences on Digital Recruiting but I couldn't let the opportunity to mention mine and Paul Harrison’s double header and double bill coming up over the summer pass by.

As well as both speaking at the Onrec conference next month (Paul is talking social media and I’m chairing the panel debate) we are also both doing a turn at the UK’s first, Social Media Recruitment conference in July.

Paul will be regaling the audience with his thoughts on how to put a corporate social media strategy together and I’ll be getting my crystal ball out to predict how social media will evolve in the future.

Rumours that we’re both in the running for the most overexposed digital recruitment professional of 2009 award are of course completely unfounded ;-)

Matt

Sorry - It's Gone with the Wind

It's Bank holiday Monday and in the absence of anything decent of TV, I've put on one of my favourite movies, Gone with the Wind whilst I tip-tap on my laptop. The opening quote of the movie describes the fall of the American old south - Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered. A Civilization gone with the wind..."

Simultaneously I've been catching up with the latest news online and came across the article on how The Evening Standard is about to launch an advertising blitz ahead of it's relaunch this month-

Evening Standard launches ad campaign to say sorry to Londoners

After carrying out market research it found that Londoners have deserted the paper due to it being overly negative, too partisan and anti Ken Livingstone, too national in its outlook and not London focused enough.

'...Buses and tubes will carry a series of messages throughout the week that begin with the word "sorry." The first says "Sorry for losing touch". Subsequent slogans say sorry for being negative, for taking you for granted, for being complacent and for being predictable'...

It would seem the free London newspapers with their celebrity filled content on the latest starlet to fall out of the Mahiki club, has been a suitable reading substitute for commuters on their evening commute home.

There seems to be no mention of how the Internet, which will act as the main source of the latest news for Londoners throughout their day, may have impacted on the irrelevance of the Standard as a viable, reputable news source.

In fact, the access to news, as and when it happens, via visits to websites and RSS feeds may mean that the London free papers are a welcome diversion from reality on the way home.

I like the way that the Standard realises there is a issue and is trying to sell itself and in effect, its medium, to its target audience. To do this would have seemed inconceivable a number of years ago. However, is it fighting a battle when the war and its digital winner is already a foregone conclusion? 

It is absolutely right to get back to the local angle - as this is perhaps the one USP that it can still demonstrate its value to for its London target audience.

Everything else it would seem is Gone with the Wind. (sorry had to say it).

In the words of Captain Rhett Butler who after years of being in love with Scarlett is worn down by her seeming indifference to him (and their misunderstandings and cross-purposes), gets to the stage where even though he still loves, he utters his famous line 'Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn'.

Breaks my heart every time.

Twinternship for the twins

So, I have a little brother and sister who are twins and are in university at the moment. Gavin and Louise are their names, they are the babies of our family and although I may be biased, they are pretty great.

They are looking for a paid internship to start in September for a year and are finding it pretty tough to get one. Lou studies marketing and Gavin studies engineering. It's looking like they may have to go to plan B and volunteer for a few days a week at a company and continue to work in their part time jobs to keep them going.

It's pretty critical they get experience in the workplace if they are to stand a chance of getting a job when they graduate. And you know, I don't think its a bad thing to volunteer in exchange for really useful experience, especially in the current economic climate.

Last week I read that Pizza Hut have advertised a position for a Twintern in the USA.

'..According to the company’s site, the position will include sharing insights and experiences via social media such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, attending marketing meetings, ad shoots and other events, monitoring social media for happenings that may be of interest to loyal Pizza Hut fan, working on PR programs.'....

This sounds like the ideal job for 'digital natives' like the twins - especially for Louise, who studies marketing. So, fingers crossed Louise can get some experience by offering her services in a social media monitoring and response mechanism capacity. Fantastic for her in terms of gaining vital experience and great for the prospective company, in terms of a much need social media resource.

Of course there are a stack of tools that facilitate social media monitoring and response (certainly a considered strategy with content creation and distribution in social media is critical for our clients). However often one of the concerns of companies is the internal resource required to manage a social media strategy. 

Does the precarious economic and job situation that students find themselves in, offer companies access to a willing pool of digital savvy resource? Will students and graduates provide the necessary skills and time to execute a considered social media strategy for companies?

They just might.

Sinead