Digital Recruiting

Biting the hand that feeds you

I was at one of my oldest friend's Charlotte's Solstice day party on Saturday.

It started at 3pm and ended at 3am and was hosted at the commune/shared-housing home that Charlotte lives in in Islington.

The day involved a fig tree ceremony where all party goers congregated in the garden, meditated and made a wish for the community and for themselves. Yup - was full-on, tree-hugger, liberal paradise.

The sun was still shining when a lady came up to myself and a friend and asked could she have a cigarette, we happily obliged and we got to talking. She was in her fifties, already a bit tipsy and was a journalist - an investigative journalist.

She was now teaching a journalism course in a London Uni and as she put it, was delighted to be giving something back to the younger generation after an illustrious career, working for all the broadsheets.

The talk turned to Twitter, upon where she declared herself a complete technophobe and wanted to know what all this twittering was about. Indeed she was very concerned about what jobs her students would have when they graduated, as all these bloggers, were thinking they could do the job of a proper journalist.....

It was music to my ears, I had in front of me a living and breathing Fleet street dinosaur, aghast at what the Internet was doing to newspapers.

She declared: 'Well, we'll always need newspapers, you know.'

I replied 'Why's that?'

She retorted 'er, well, em...well.....er..can I say that you have a very one track mind?

No, no,' I replied, 'I'm merely playing devil's advocate....'

'Well, people need papers, its important for the brand - you can't have a news brand like the Guardian if it doesn't appear in a paper. These bloggers like Guido Fawkes are biting the hand that feeds them. Take what the Telegraph has recently done with MP's expenses - a splendid job. Now, yes you could call it cheque book journalism, but that has required an army of full time journalist pouring over the fine detail of those expense claims.....how can a blogger like Guido Fawkes ever do that?'

The conversation went on, like this, to and for, was quite enjoyable, although I had to try and not upset her too much with my controversial views - it was a party after all.

I was particularly interested in the article in the Guardian (online) I saw on Monday about the Guardian launching a crowdsourcing project on the MP expenses data:

'The response has been enormous, the results intriguing and, thanks to the efforts of many thousands of Guardian readers, not one MP who has put in a dodgy expenses claim can think about relaxing just yet.

In a groundbreaking "crowd-sourcing" exercise, the Guardian appealed for help in sifting through the huge amount of data on MPs' expenses that was unleashed at the end of last week. Almost 20,000 people have taken part in gathering facts for the online project and about 160,000 pages have been examined.'

Just as well I wasn't aware of this on Saturday.....

Taking a little issue with LinkedIn believeing their own hype - Social Recruiting Summit

So for those of you who don't follow @mattalder on twitter (or work in whatever corners of Barkers Matt's cheery demeanor brightens each day, or belong to his close family and are in regular contact with him) you won't know that he's currently hobnobbing with some of the great and most connected of digital recruitment world at the Social Recruiting Summit  - being held at the uber webcool venue that is google HQ.

Anyway - as part of the stream of tweets coming out of google HQ (which, as I write this with the day only just starting, has me thinking that it won't be long before twitter falls over as a direct result of this event!) Matt sent this:

"accuracy of personal info when user has more than 10 connections better than a resume, people don't lie in public" RH #socialrecruiting

Now the RH he references is Reid Hoffman the founder of LinkedIn. And it got me thinking - yes they flippin well do! Certainly in my even limited experience it doesn't really prevent lying. But what worries me most is that encouraging naivety through misguided statements as above perhaps gives a greater false sense of validation to a person's profile and therefore any potential mistruths within.

I believe that as humans we're generally pretty polite to each other (in a "smile and say nothing" as opposed to "open and engaging" kind of way), particularly on a business level. So even if you click on a LinkedIn profile to read someone embellishing themselves to something unrecognisable from that which you know was the role they're describing, sometimes only discernible from the dates matching up with when you worked alongside them, would you really take steps to try and get that changed? And actually - for that matter - what steps can/would/could you take?

I recall instances where people have laughed our loud (yeh - really - not even 'LOL'd, but real laughter) having read what someone has said they've done or been responsible for on their Linkedin profile.

And then there's the validation of the profile "truth" - the recommendations from other people. It's just so, well, easy to ask a bunch of people to say nice things about you being pretty safe in the knowledge that they'll either ignore your request or be nice in the hope that you might reciprocate, perpetuating the flow of banality passing back and forth, with people so keen to scratch each others backs the true value of a reference is all but lost.

Now don't get me wrong - perhaps I'm just to polite (no - really!). I mean I took my profile off facebook because I just didn't like denying "being friends" to people I didn't know or even when I did wasn't particularly friendly with over 20years ago. Perhaps it's just me and I have social issues that transcend into social media. But I feel that Mr Hoffman has perhaps been supping a bit too much of his own Venture Capital PR laden spin-juice and is starting to believe his own hype.

I have no problem giving a reference about someone - did so quite recently as it goes - but that's when I'm asked in confidence to give my honest opinion. Integrity means different things to different people for sure, and there's nothing stopping me spouting banality in a private response to a reference check either - particularly if you wouldn't mind that person moving on from their current employ - but in social space I think the danger of that happening is even greater, so to start giving a greater level of credibility to what someone has made up about themselves being true just because "it's out there for all to see and no-one's contradicted it" I think is naive in the extreme.

LinkedIn is a great background check for starters, a living CV if you will - hell, we've even built integrating features for it into the ATS we've built (sorry for the shameless plug ;) - but to think that "people don't lie in public" is just plain delusional. Has Mr Hoffman never heard of Politicians?!!!! They're like us, just more so.

Workthing+ - what I saw

With the recent launch of Workthing+, the “is it right to charge candidates?” debate was certainly re-ignited (read some of it here on Recruiting Futurology). I wanted to step a little away from that particular cut and thrust and, having tried to give it a bit more time to look at all that’s on offer, give my take on the Workthing+ offer itself. It probably is worth stating for the record though that I have no problem with anyone charging for a service, whatever that may be - I actually kinda prefer that sort of transparency because it allows you to make an informed decision about the value for money you receive, and because you’re paying you are more bought into realising the full benefit of any facility – in short, putting more onus on you to make it work for you.

OK – to the site/facility. My first observation is that there’s a hell of a lot they’ve bundled in. Loads of good stuff. From psychometric tests to a job seekers wiki/forum, to CV builders and activity planning. It’s all pretty nicely set out too (although some of the interface/navigation needs to have some “rough edges” smoothed – that’ll come with feedback and bedding down though), and whilst it’s hard for me as a non-job seeker to give the time and dedication necessary to really use all the facility to test what works for me and what doesn’t, I take my hat off to the boys and girls at Trinity Mirror Digital Recruitment (TMDR) for what they’ve got in place for launch.

If I’m going to be picky I’d have to say that I’d like to have seen more rich media throughout (videos and the like) to really engage the user, elements that would help establish a richer brand personality. The functional rather than experiential approach, I might even go as far as to say “flatness”, is typified by the home page “animated” element that would have been infinitely better had it a voiceover audio streamed with it – but all of this is easy to enhance and I’m sure is on a to-do list somewhere at Workthing+ HQ.

But there was one resource that I felt they’ve missed a trick by not making a consistent element within their own site. They have the facility to have your CV reviewed (a crucial part of the full service offer), but accessing that bounces you to a 3rd party site which kinda breaks my "in-site experience". It got me starting to wonder whether a 3rd party was suddenly going to start pitching me about writing my CV from scratch having already handed over my sign up money. Don't get me wrong - it's far far better to have it than not to have it (however broken it makes my journey), but if Workthing+ is setting up as a one-stop-shop then I feel it needs to look like that in every sense.

But all that said – I applaud the team at TMDR for stepping beyond ‘same old same old’ within the job board market. They have created something that I found to be very comprehensive and certainly doesn’t do the Workthing brand anything but good IMHO.

And one thing I particularly like, in a sad “I’ve clearly been hanging around this industry for far too long” kinda way, is the fact that Workthing started off all those years ago as a site that was intended to be an online careers advisory service first and a job board second. Over the years that got diluted as whoever owned it went for the mainstream “job board business model” – how wonderfully retro for Workthing+ to have effectively come full circle with TMDR, all be it with a changed business model that better reflects how the Internet has evolved over that time. Some good ideas just need time and business belief to prove themselves, here's hoping Workthing+ is given that second time around.

The end of an era?

Publishers spend too little on content

Interesting analysis of the US newspaper industry's cost base by Moody's Investors Service (though most of the rest of the report is unsurprising).

Written by Moody's vice president and senior analyst John Puchalla, the report contends that publishers spend far too much on producing and delivering a printed paper rather than on creating its content and selling it.

Here are the figures behind what Puchalla calls a "structural disconnect": only 14% of cash operating costs, on average, are devoted to content creation, while about 70% of costs are spent on printing, distribution and corporate functions.

The remaining 16% of costs are related to advertising sales, a first-class example of devoting too few resources to the principal revenue driver.

Puchalla sees this as a legacy of the industry's vertical integration and the result, of course, is that the high fixed costs - combined with high debt among many newspaper companies - is squeezing cash flow as revenue declines.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/greenslade/2009/jun/05/us-press-publishing-newspapers