Digital Recruiting

Twitter. What is it? Do you need to care?

Not sure how many of you have caught the Twitter bug, but it really is strangely addictive. When pushed to describe it to people, it's difficult to know where to begin. Telling people  "its micro blogging - instant and mobile" and that "you follow and are followed by people, with whom you're able to share ideas and links" just doesn't do it justice. The cutest way I've heard it described is by Wired who described it as "almost like ESP...a Social Sixth Sense".

There has been some dissenting voices in our space, but - like most things in life - there really is no substitute for giving it a try. Once you've found people you want to follow (the best way to do that is by checking out the followers of people - check out me /Carve on Twitter , Matt Alder and Peter Gold for example. If you follow people (and you've got something interesting to say) people will then follow you.  And that's it. It's only when you're involved in these micro-dialogues that you realise how powerful it can be.  For example, what about an airline providing its followers with real time flight offers, or delays? (one US airline is doing this) Or for a recruiter to send latest contracts via The Guardian recently wrote a great piece on How to get the best out of Twitter For those of you who can't be bothered to link, here's some cool twitter tools you might want to check out:

Finding people

www.Whoshouldifollow.com
www.Twitdir.com - directory
www.Twitterholic.com - the top users and accounts

Searching and organising

www.Summize.com - search for a word or phrase across the entire Twitter feed. www.Quotably.com creates threads of discussions between people.
www.Terraminds.com -  search engine, for users or phrases.
www.Tweetscan.com - search by user and time.
www.Twitterlocal.net finds twitterers near you.

Sharing

www.Twitthis.com,-  lets people looking at your site or blog share the URL via Twitter. www.Twitturly.com - what's being most linked-to and talked about?
www.Tweetmeme.com -  what sort of topics are being discussed?

Visualise

www.Twittervision.com -  Google Maps mashup showing where tweets are being posted.
www.Twitterverse - tag clouds
www.Twittearth.com - visualisation of tweets, put onto a spiralling globe. www.Tweetwheel.com - which of your friends are already following each other?

And..

http://pipes.yahoo.com/ouseful/tweetspeech -  Yahoo Pipes converts (incoming) tweets to speech
www.Twittersnooze.com - hit the "snooze button", briefly, on verbose friends ( if you're a follow of Alder or Scobble you need this ;-p
http://www.wp.korelab.com/yet-another-twitter-badge-twitter-balloon - your tweets superimposed on an image of your choosing.
www.twerpscan.com, avoid followers who befriend everyone: may be spammers.

After the Digital Recruiting blog beers last night, I am also pleased to report that Twittering is good of hangovers. See you on Twitter! Follow us: www.twitter.com/carveconsulting

I can't be bothered to think of an interesting title for this.

As someone has commented on YouTube, (adopt west coast drawl) awesome. However I was enthusing about it to a client, but that same 'ol glazed over look appeared. Ho hum

JobsGoPublic giving to the Bangladesh Relief Appeal, Whitehurst / TMP love-in: it must be Christmas

For those of you who haven't picked up on it yet, JGP have launched a blog - CTO Eben has recently posted an interesting piece on job board security. You'll also see there that JobsGoPublic is donating £10 to the Bangladesh Relief Appeal for every job posted on the site throughout December and January. Good on them, and a great excuse for using the site if you've never used it before. Full details here.

What with this commendable gesture, and a general feeling of "industry togetherness" that I have not experienced before, there is definitely something in the air. Certainly everyone I've spoken to in the online recruitment space is looking to 2008 with great enthusiasm - and with good reason.  Working with both consumer and recruitment brands, I have to say that recruitment could really lead the charge in terms of  the effective use and monetization of the new digital channels of engagement. (Having said that, helping launch a designer perfume for dogs was hard to beat in terms for viral pass-on-ability... ;-)

I am hoping to shatter the Christmas spell when talking at the Enhance Year Ahead conference on 1st Feb. The subject will be Employer Brands & Conversations, and I fully intend to pick out some of the crowd for embarrassing-Facebook-profile-related-tomfoolery, so if you're coming make sure you change your privacy settings now...

Hope you all have great Christmas

Paul, Carve Consulting

"Everyone in Second Life is a ****"

"Everyone in Second Life is a ****"

This is about the only thing I can remember from last nast night.

Two paracetamol and the remains of a shish kebab if you can guess the narrator:

a.) Tim Elkington from Enhace

b.) Craig Stead from JobsGoPublic.com

c.) Paul Harrison from Carve Consulting

d.) Ben "Blue" Nunn from Thirty Three

e.) The guy behind the bar

NotsoFreerecruitment and why recruitment consultancies need to develop their own candidate attraction strategies

Picked up a post by Dom from OME today directing the reader to Louise's UK recruiter forum which is currently hosting an impassioned debate following the news that Reed's Freecruitment is, um, now not going to be totally free. (The first 500 jobs will be free, but after that you pay.)

My own view is that I am surprised it's taken so long for Reed to start charging. They're still offering 500 free jobs, and an unlimited posting restriction is going to help stop the multi-post phishing still undertaken by some agencies...

But whatever your standpoint, I urge you to put 20 mins aside to listen to the sound of communal recruitment consultancies wailing. You will not believe some of the comments on the site from certain rec cons, who seem to think that a free Reed is some kind of God-given right.

My favourite post is this nugget from 'Simon' ( no agency given - I wonder why?) with his somewhat impenetrable ( 'scuse the pun ) "wall" metaphor:

My company has also received the email..........
REED has allowed many small start ups to be succesful, but at the same time they have cleverly used those posting on their site to BUILD the REED website.

Its a bit like giving away free bricks so you can build a wall to keep the wind off, but you must take my bricks which are coloured yellow. People take the FREE bricks and benefit but then all the walls eventuallly meet and those who have been taking FREE bricks now find that they have closed themselves in and the only way out is to pay. The wall is owned by REED and has been built by those taking FREE bricks.

Many small agencies will go to the WALL. There will be many fuming and Angry recruitment consultants out there.

They have built up business and supported livelihoods now they are beginning to destroy and damage livlihoods

REED have given promises thast they WILL always be FREE,
I have a letter to prove it dated 1999.

Is betrayal a word that exists in business? perhaps not?

(Spellings are author's own)

Simon, if you're reading this please make yourself known?

Talking to Louise, interestingly Reed have so far decided not to comment ( at least, in their company name. ) I presume they're aware that this debate is happening?

Meanwhile, despite Simon's melodrama, the folly of not developing their own candidate engagement strategies could hit some of these agencies hard...  I am pretty confident in saying that the consultancies we have the privilege to work will be mostly unaffected by this because they have invested to ensure they're not held hostage to Reed  - or anyone else  - by developing a range of traffic driving measures and candidate focussed websites. Will Reed-gate force Simon and his tribe to do the same?

Paul Harrison, Carve Consulting

 
 

They've got the power

You want proof of the power of blogging?

Exhibit A, M'lud, the Wispa's reappearance on the shelves of your local confectioners.

Exhibit B, just hours after posting the superb E&Y Recruitment Days video, we've been anonymously beseeched to post this magnificent slice of corporate navel-gazing from BNP Paribas. The people have spoken and lo, it became thus!

There are too many praiseworthy elements to recount here, but personal favourites are the hammily acted 'trading floor' recreation (a man talking excitedly into two phones), various members of the team fanning themselves with huge wads of cash, and stanza 4's rousing call to ".. make technology our greatest ally". In the light of the appearance of this on YouTube and now the mighty Digital Recruiting, it's another reminder to be careful what you wish for.

If you've got an awful recruitment / corporate video you'd like to share, please add them below - anonymously if your agency was in some way culpable ;-)

Google Earth + Second Life = Wet Dream?

We've been pretty excited about this for a while, but the post 'a Social Network for Google Earth?' on the Google Operating System blog really put some more meat on the bone

Basically the strong rumour is that Google is about to launch a Second Life-type metaverse or virtual world where users create their avatars and are then able to build, trade, engage in a virtual Google Earth.

As Anthony Mayfield hints at in his blog Open, this sounds to me like a brand manager's wet dream: the targeting ability of Google AdWords overlaid onto Second Life with the photo-realstic qualities of Google Earth.... So if someone pops into a virtual t-shirt store, you can target them ( in their language, in their time ) with a talking avatar for the same in the real world.

This is the Intro page shown to Arizona State Uni students who are apparently trailing this new world. All that remains now is for someone to launch the world's first virtual recruitment event ;-)

Oh Happy Day! Universal Search and why content is king once more

Have you heard about Universal Search yet? Well if you haven’t, you will soon.

Universal Search, as the name suggests, is Google’s response to the huge volume of different content now searchable online – web pages of course, but also podcasts, reference book pages, videos, forum posts, images, blog posts, RSS feeds and so on.

In a post entitled “The Best Answer is Still the Best Answer” Marissa Mayer, VP Search Products & User Experience, sets out the vision:

With universal search, we're attempting to break down the walls that traditionally separated our various search properties and integrate the vast amounts of information available into one simple set of search results.

Basically, this is good news for users (why search under different tabs for images, blogs, videos about Steve Jobs when you can now get all the results on one page) and good news for website owners who care about creating an engaging web experience because sites with regularly updated content ( blogs, podcasts, vodcasts etc ) are going to be better ranked than their non-dynamic counterparts.

Of course, there is also new challenges for brands and their agencies. This belief-defying, cringe-inducing Ernst & Young Recruitment Days video on YouTube is, thanks to Universal Search,  the fifth highest result on a Google search for ‘Ernst and Young’ .

Not a “Happy Day” for E&Y coporate comms, and another great example of why HR and PR need to carefully monitor social media and listen to the conversation

Enjoy the below, but do check out the post on YouTube as the comments illustrate the risk to brands of collaborative media.

Why employer brands should listen to online conversations - Guardian OBO vs. British Gas

We're often talking about the need for brand owners to 'listen to the conversation' and to develop cogent online reputation management strategies. Why? Well, if you don't know what people are saying about your organisation, how can you respond? For corporate recruiters, if you think of the internet in terms of a long tail of opinions and experiences, how do you begin trying to ensure that the prevailing view is positive?

It's not always easy however to articulate why - and how quickly - social media conversations happen, so I thought it might be interesting to consider this example from the Guardian's over by over ( OBO ) coverage of the recent England vs. India test match. To give this some context, the Guardian 'commentator' is watching the game on Sky TV and providing a loose overview of the action, whilst engaging in email banter with readers. It mightn't sound very compelling, but it's actually quite a social / engaging way of following the game. Anyway, Mike Adamson was reporting on this session; England are in trouble at 94 for 3, but - most importantly - Mike is not happy with British Gas. The entire session is basically taken over by participants giving BG a kicking, and it graphically illustrates how fast bad news spreads and how willing people are to dive in with their experiences, which are then in turn commented on and shared. These kind of exchanges happen in real life all the time of course; but it's not recorded ( and searchable ) as internet conversations are. And the audience to this little exchange is likely to run into 000s. The same treatment, of course, is also meted out to brands as employers, whatever the industry. ( One of the most visceral has to be the Professional Pilots Rumour Network which has a forum "...the beancounters hoped would never happen. Your news on pay, rostering, allowances, extras and negotiations where you work. Let others in the industry make educated choices on where the grass is less brown" )

So, a good reason for brands to take notice therefore. The question in this case is - have British Gas? In the 18th over Mike prints the following:

I'm going to open the floor up to Chris Armstrong all the same: "I'm going to incur the wrath of every other OBOer here, but I'm afraid I can only report good things about British Gas and my HomeCare 400 policy, they've come quickly (OK, within a day or two), phoned me half an hour before hand so I know they're coming, and fixed the problem and s*dded off." At least you can say this session of the OBO now contains a balanced arguement. For once.

So what's happening here? Has a real person bothered to write an email to defend British Gas??? Has Mr Adamson suddenly been gripped with a desire to be even handed?

I don't think so. I think what we're looking at here is BG moving fast to ring alarm bells at GU towers, and to organise the intervention of 'Chris Armstrong'. The use of light swearing suggests someone trying a bit too hard to be *real*, but the real giveaway has to be the precise use of policy name and exact capitalisation in 'HomeCare'. 

What do you think? And whose clients / brands have suffered at the 'hands of crowds' like this?

McDonalds put faith in staff to act as brand voice

Three cheers for McDonalds who are putting faith in their staff to act as the voice of the McDonalds brand, as PR Week reported recently.

Nick Hindle, McDonalds PR Chief, said at the PR and the Media conference that

"Clear messaging is delivered by people, not corporations. We need to inform and empower staff. They are the ones who talk about McDonalds on a daily basis. They are far more believable than a corporation."

He goes onto say:

"You don't manage your brand these days, you influence it... We should give staff the confidence they need - some will talk to the press, some will blog, some will talk to their mates down the pub. It requires a lot of bottle to give up control, but the upsides are significant."

This will be highly familiar to anyone who has read Naked Conversations;  ( book,  blog ) Basically, the premise is we're entering a new era when marketing won't be broadcast based ( i.e I, the brand, speak when I want to speak), but conversation led - that is, I the brand talk to you the consumer when you want to listen.

The point is that brand conversations are happening anyway; as a corporation, you can either try and control it ( no chance ) - or you join it, and you let your people speak.

Consumers / Candidates are incredibly savvy these days, and can smell didactic corporate-comms a mile off. So if you want to engage the two C's, what other choice have you got than to let your people talk? (Naked Conversations envisages a time when consumers will be distrustful of brands that dont have a staff voice.)

All of this is particularly important for recruitment, of course. I'd bet my house that everyone who reads this blog has been guilty at some point of producing recruitment marketing that had precious little to do with the actual experience of the vast majority of employees. That was possible when the method was broadcast (print ads, brochures, web 1.0) and when those employees don't have a voice. But employers trying to project a false / romanticised   image in the era of blogs, myspace and twitter however are going to be in big trouble (and with good reason).

So well done to the McD people.. if you have the cajones to do it, then perhaps other employers (with less to lose, frankly) will follow suit.

Paul Harrison