Digital Recruiting

LinkedIn and the death of the CV

I’ve always felt that in the rush to debate and trial innovation in digital recruitment the basics get neglected and the obvious gets missed. LinkedIn for me is starting to fall into the obvious category, at least in terms of where the debate should now be.

Compared to Facebook and the like it’s growth seems slow but at the end of last year it reached the million UK users milestone and I think I’m making a pretty safe prediction to say it’s second million is going to come pretty quickly. It seems to be discussed more and more these days and I know a lot of people who got hooked on social networking during the Facebook boom (is there a bust to follow?!) that are now turning to LinkedIn to explore online business networking for the first time. LinkedIn also seem have got their act together in recent months, there are more paid for advertising / engagement options on the table and rumour has it that there is now a UK office.

So what’s in it for us from a recruitment perspective? Well, in my opinion, three main things. Firstly and most obviously there is a captive audience to market /advertise to. I’m not going to say anymore about this other than to refer you to mention of a London sales office in the paragraph above. Second is pretty obviously as a source of active and passive candidates. Again I’m not going to say much about this other than that I’m amazed that there are recruiters in the UK who are unaware of LinkedIn or who are just not using it as one of their sources!

Thirdly and most interesting is what I want to focus on. Is LinkedIn the beginning of the end of the CV? I’m already starting to see people sending links to their profile rather than their CV for jobs in the digital / technology space. This a trend that is only going to continue and jump to other industries as Linkedin becomes even more mainstream. After all why bother digging out, updating and resending a word file continuously when you can have your career history in one place, update as you go and just drive potential recruiters there when the time is right for you. Makes sense doesn’t it!

Now I’m sure that lots of people won’t agree and that I’ll be inundated with 101 reason why CVs aren’t going the way of press advertising (did you see what I did there). However maybe there is another way to think about it all while we wait for the revolution to run it’s course

How often do we find ourselves in the awkward position with recruitment sites (be it a direct employer’s or a job board), where huge amounts of passive candidate register but no information is collected that is really usable. Its great having a nice email database of interested people but how do you know whether they are appropriate for your role or not? It’s almost as if we need a half way house……something that allows candidate to leave lots of usable data in a way that requires no time or effort on their part. I’ve not seen a space in a registration form to upload your Linkedin profile URL yet but surely it’s only a matter of time! Watch this space…

Matt

Really insightful article about the Uk digital recruitment industry

Find it here

Ah it must be Friday!

Twitter Revisted

Almost a year ago I wrote a brief blog post about Twitter, used it for a few weeks then got addicted to Facebook and forgot all about it. Recently I've become aware of more and references to it and read Jim Stroud's recent posts on Twitter and recruitment with interest. Anyway I dug out my password, took another look at it today and was really impressed. Lots of very interesting conversations and information sharing going on, I've downloaded a useful desktop app and will be joining in regularly in the future. There are some good Twitter tips here and if you want to "follow me" you'll find my profile here

Matt

Gen X / Gen Y - or just Generally Lazy

I’ve never been a particular fan of pigeon holing and mass generalisations, especially when it comes to recruitment and the web. It’s probably a chip on my shoulder accentuated by approaching another birthday, but whilst I appreciate the need for them in some discussion contexts, when it comes to recruitment I think the way many people jump on such terms such as Gen X & Gen Y when trying to define job seeking / applying behaviours is little more than lazy.

But it’s not so bad – just as I was feeling dejected and non-pigeon-holeable – not Gen Y in age, not Gen X in digital traits, Pepsi have given me and people like me a pigeon and a hole of our very own. I only just fit in (I don’t hesitate to add), but it would seem I’m a 'Reborn Digital' (35 to 48-year-olds). Frank Cooper, VP for flavoured carbonated soft drinks at Pepsi-Cola North America. "…there's a group in that category that's 'reborn digital.' They've lived through the change and learned to adapt to it."

If I were being picky, as is my wont, I’d suggest that such a group have actually learnt ‘to adapt it’ to our requirements, as opposed to 'adapt to it'. I may even be so bold as to suggest this group will have played a significant part in shaping the development and success / failure of many aspects of the digital environment in which we find ourselves and continues to evolve – but I’m probably a little comforted to belong to some grouping none the less.

The digital world is moving at such pace and is such a personal as well as environment / circumstance dictated experience, grouping one entire generation as a defined user group for recruitment, which must be considered a micro activity (as opposed to a macro activity such as accessing news, utilising communication channels etc), makes most debate built around this of little relevance. Especially considering that these days we can generate real track-able results that we can harvest and scrutinise, therefore reducing the need to fall back on such massively crude generalised boxes.

I’ll concede that there may at times be some merit in talking about recruitment as a general activity, but our assimilated knowledge and tools available today should make recruitment activity, if not quite scalpel-esque, certainly more carving knife than sledgehammer in approach. And if that’s the case then surely the debate should move well beyond lazy people with their generic claims and nothing new ‘guff’ hiding behind generational groupings which have little relevance to clued up recruitment specialists. And make no mistake, recruitment is a specialism not a generalism, so please let’s try to make sure we’re not guilty of being lazy in our debate. Come on, let's push that bar – gen’.

Oh - and if you're genuinely Gen addicted, try considering Gen C instead ;-)

Bless him

They don't win very often, so we're letting him have 'his moment'...

Everyone's going green - including us

It's only taken us 3months since agreeing on a new look and feel to get it on the site - so by our usual collective efforts on this blog that's pretty quick.

Is only simple (like us), but hopefully a fresh look will help soften the debate and help everyone find a happier place full of love and respect. OK - that's rubbish - but it helps stop this 2bit blog looking like every other 2bit blog. :-)

Thanks go out to Rachel & Simon for making this small but significant step happen for us.

Please do let us know if you like / hate / couldn't care less. A blog is all about comment after all. 

Matt's 15 most read blogs

I've been inspired by the comments on the link I posted yesterday to start thinking about what makes a blog popular and even what makes a blog powerful. I also realised that while I've often been asked to list my favourite blogs, I'd never previously investigated which I actually read the most. So here, courtesy of the "trends" function on Google Reader, are the 15 blogs I've read the most in the last month. The results were somewhat of a surprise........

1) PDA

2) Indexed

3) Cheezhead

4) Louise's UK Recruiter

5) Jim Stroud

6) Guru

7) Techcrunch

8) Brazen Careerist

9) Micro Persuasion

10) Adventures in Digital Marketing

11) Mashable

12) Wikinomics

13) E-Recruitment in Retail

14) Recruitment Views

15) Six Degrees from Dave

Good to see Louise and Stephen featured as they were two of the people who commented on the original post. Perhaps it would be interesting to see some other people's lists!!

The world's 50 most powerful blogs

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/mar/09/blogs

Anyone subscribe to all 50? ;-)

Going Down?

1) House Prices

2) My Football Team

3) Google's share price

4) Facebook's UK traffic

I'm not really an authority to comment in public on the housing market and number 2 is just depressing..... so what about points 3 and 4?

A very small reality check for two big brands, absolutely. The beginning of the end for monetised search and social networking, absolutely not.

This is still the beginning of the beginning!