Digital Recruiting

The best "Rick Roll" so far?

Doubt they come better than this

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

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!

And another one...

Another recruitment video and this one is certainly different!

Video: Two men, two baby blue tuxedoes, two pianos

Skills Emergency

Just wanted to say thanks to Sam and the team at Chinwag for inviting me to be on the panel at the Digital Skills Emergency debate last night. Some interesting points raised and it soon become apparent how massive a topic this is. We really only managed to scratch the surface in the time available

From my own perspective the key issues for companies in this space are how they widen their talent pools, be cleverer about how they recruit and how they increase the sophistication of their staff retention strategies. It was interesting to see that companies like Conchango and AMV are already embracing these concepts and moving to more direct sourcing models.

Overall though I think there is a long way to go. It's crazy that most companies in an industry with such an acute skill shortage aren't even advertising their vacancies on their own web sites, let alone considering broader branding, attraction and sourcing strategies. It's only a small first step in solving a deeply complex issue but surely one worth taking!!!

Chinwag have produced a really good report on the issues which is available to download from here

When Google's parents leave town.....

This is funny.......but be warned it contains strong language and some mature content..............that should make sure you all watch it ;-)