Digital Recruiting

UK Recruitment Tweetup - some more news

A quick follow up to the last post to announce that Twitter Job Search will be sponsoring the UK Recruitment Tweetup on 1st April. You can find more details on my Recruitment Futurology blog or just go straight to the sign up page if you want to attend

UK Recruitment Tweetup

Just a quick post to let everyone know that registrations are now open for the UK's very first Recruitment Tweetup.

 You can read more about the event here or you can just go and sign up straight away here.

The only rules are that you must be a Twitter user and connected in some way with the recruitment or HR industry

The Tweetup is going to be held at an undisclosed Farringdon bar in association with MyLongLunch and another major sponsor who we are just finishing negotiations with. More news when we have it!

@mattalder and @jamieasleonard

TribalTrekGate 09 - boldly going into industry folklore

Well - here it is.

There was a bit of a ripple in the webosphere about two weeks ago when we heard tell of a Star Trek Spoof video viewable on YouTube from Tribal Resourcing, fetauring the Senior Management team. Unfortunately it seemed to get beamed back up nearly as quickly as it arrived amongst us.

But the web has a habbit of Kling(ing)on to tomfoolery and one keen eyed & public spirited citizen managed to capture the footage before it hit warp 5 and so, hoping Tribal phasers don't go any higher than just stun, we thought we'd share and let you make your own mind up about it.

Personally - I think if nothing else it shows a bit of personality and a senior management team willing to not take themselves too seriously. And if it doesn't raise a smile (certainly 2nd or 3rd time of watching) then you're dead (Jim).





Oh - and appologies for pun overdrive. What can I say - I tried to contain myself but I got to a stage where I "couldnae tak it anymoor capn!" My pun overide sensors "werre gonna blow" if I didn't redirect the full force of the bad taste photon shield right back into the post.
:-D

Missing In Action – a recruitment advertising agency video, but not as we know it

We started this week with a bit of a ripple in the recruitment advertising twittersphere from a certain agencies video post - a ripple that despite the apparent best efforts of the generating agency to remove the video almost as quickly as it was posted has left a bit of a phasers to stun kind of afterglow.

A few lucky people got to see it and I have it on good authority from one such person that Tribal have produced a spoof Star Trek-esque spoof promo. Im afraid all I can show you is where it clearly isn't (you'll get what I mean if you click on the main video as it comes up  "we're sorry, this video is no longer available") - http://www.youtube.com/user/BHTribal1

It seemingly flashed onto the web Monday morning but within an hour or two was gone again.

For me it begs the question – how can something go that far and then be pulled? Does the pulling of it say more than the making of it (apparently all harmless fun that the person I talked to about it felt showed a bit of agency personality)?

Or perhaps there was copyright infringement that they hadn't checked and worried them?

Any one got any answers? Anyone got any other theories? Anyone got the video downloaded?

Come on Tribal - leave the klingons on the starboard bow and show us your funny bone(s).

:)

So, Digital Czars, what time is your Interview at?

I  read the following headline in my digital newsletter today:

'Government slammed for £160,000 digital-czar job posting'

Crikey, I thought - is that the price of a job posting these days? - no wonder people are a bit upset - back to the Sunday Times we go....

On closer inspection, the government has created a new post for a Digital Czar to help the government connect with people through the digital social environment - on such things such as Twitter, Facebook etc

Is this a grotesque use of public money, as one opponent exclaimed? - well no, I don't think it is.

If the role is to genuinely engage the public in dialogue, share information and involve them in the democratic environment, staving off apathy in the process, then it is to be welcomed.

Enabling participation and giving people a voice is one of the most positive lessons we can take from Obama's recent election campaign.

In a similar vein, is the future use of technology and social media in Labour's future re-election campaign.

What I found interesting last week was Obama's marketing guru Thomas Gensemer pitching for Gordon Brown/Labour party business.

Gensemer makes the point himself, that there must be, in conjunction, with the smart use of technology a clear message and objective.

For all the Twittering , Facebooking, iphone apps and mybarackobma.com sites in the world, unless the message and content is genuine and compelling, the desired result or election win, through clever uses of social media and technology is by no means guaranteed.

Back to the Digital Czar job:....

'This role is not for everyone - success will be achieved by influence and encouragement, not by issuing instructions from the centre.'

 

Should make it interesting ;0)

Recruiting: SoMe, Web 2.0, Pros & Cons and the future - some thoughts

I was recently approached by OnRec.com ("The Magazine for Online Recruitment around the world") to contribute to an article. You can read the article here - Using social media and Web 2.0 effectively (with additional contributions from Jamie Leonard, Euan McDonald & Lucian Tarnowski). I thought I'd post my full thoughts here too.

How can recruiters use social media and Web 2.0 effectively to engage candidates?
The best way to use social media to engage candidates is by first ensuring you understand your target audience. If you have an idea of where they may already be congregating online or what they’re consuming (by way of web content) then it’s a great idea to ‘listen’ to them first whilst you work out what you can bring to the party. If you’re hoping that a couple of tweaked press releases every other month will in any way be engaging then you’re setting yourself up for a very public fall, or worse: indifference.

Put yourself in the audiences’ shoes because they’re asking “What’s In It For Me” and if you can’t answer that with some degree of empathetic certainty then best manage your expectations right down from the start. Engagement requires the buy in of both parties – and if you aren’t offering anything compelling or interesting then you can’t really expect to reap the benefits.

But once you are confident that you know your audience then the best advice is just to get on with it. You’ll soon know whether you’re hitting the right note and raising any interest, and then: keep it up; keep listening; stay true to your brand values; show integrity; keep looking for other avenues to broaden that reach. Overcoming the initial inertia is probably the hardest part of the whole thing, after all then you’re just doing online what you do in the real world.

What are the benefits and also pitfalls to avoid when using social media and Web 2.0?
The very least you should achieve is an enhanced search engine profile (Search Engine Optimisation), because the search engines love regularly updated content - and you should be producing that if nothing else. But the full rewards, if you get it even modestly right, are very compelling:

• The potential to broaden your recruitment horizons – reach outside of traditional, potentially stagnant talent pools and desperate active job seekers.
• The opportunity to change preconceptions about your business that might otherwise have harmed your recruitment activity (often without you knowing).
• Influence / balance online conversations that would otherwise negatively affect your employer brand.
• Reach passive candidates, establishing and then maintaining a front of mind presence with them.
• Differentiate from the competition - tangibly.

The main pitfall to avoid has certainly got to be underestimating the time commitment this will require. For some people the ability to write engagingly comes more easily than for others, but either way once you’ve started any such activity then you have to keep it up, otherwise that can often be perceived more negatively than not starting out at all (stagnant blogs or poorly updated social media groups can speak louder of your organisation than the outdated content). Another pitfall is not being prepared. If you haven’t listened then you won’t know what you might come up against, you won’t add any value and worst of all, you might not have anything interesting to say (in the target audiences eyes at least).

And finally it’s important to remember that nowadays people “trust peers over marketers”, so be ready to take the rough with the smooth as people will look to openly validate your messages against other (sometimes disgruntled, often highly cynical) commentary. If your company isn’t willing for you to be open and honest, perhaps your Employer Brand is actually as much fiction as fact, then maybe it’s best to get that right first before opening yourselves up to the full frankness of the web.

How do you see social media and Web 2.0 developing and influencing the recruitment industry in the future? What will be the next big change?
I think that web will increasingly force the transparency of employer propositions’, certainly within key skills markets. Companies will begin to understand the tangible business value of being THE “Employer of Choice” and invest in managing their Employer Brand more fastidiously, doing so from the inside-out, also realising the benefits of actively encouraging an open culture to further enhance the external Employer Brand.

Potential candidates on the other hand will increasingly hear about jobs through any number of web touch points, peer to peer networks being increasingly ubiquitous, but will also have more and more sophisticated “search agent” type tools that will scour the web on their behalf, sifting through information and collating “must read” lists that will include appropriate job opportunities and articles/comments about previously flagged target prospective employers, all bundled together with their other daily news and active interest subjects feeds.

And what this will all mean is a significant shift in the balance of recruitment spend from what is still overwhelmingly focussed on attraction based activity to a far greater investment in long-term Employer Brand management and broad reach digital engagement activity. Why? Because companies will grow to realise that the new web paradigm is more a technology underpinned attitudinal one than a new medium to be controlled, so getting someone’s attention becomes a (still) crucial but fundamentally relatively smaller part of the overall business picture.

And the next big change?
Joe Public and the Corporate World have a long way to go to get up to speed with what is possible today. The vast majority still barely get Web1.0, so there has to be a period of catch up and consolidation as the technology already here gets converged and simplified – and that’s actually what is going to be the big change: a massive swell of new and existing internet users switching from just accessing 2 or 3 elements of the web resource to becoming immersed in the complete social web.

The systems, technology and downright mindboggling cleverness underpinning the web will continue to evolve at a lightning pace too (not least in pursuit of the next next big change – The Intelligent Web), but I believe a large part of the focus will switch from “what” can be done to “how” it’s done – most importantly delivering the user experience that enables the greatest number of people to engage with each other as efficiently as possible. And with the Internet increasingly being where we store our information and where the software we use runs from (as opposed to on our local hard drives) so barriers to access will continue to diminish and remote functioning capability improve, all furthering the swell of immersed users – welcome to the age of Cloud Computing.

Best Blogs

So, I was reading the Sunday Times at the weekend and had a look at their best blogs article.

I was of course, shocked and bewildered that digitalrecruiting.co.uk wasn't on there, but hey ho....

Anyhoo - there's a blog on there on the Advertising world from a copy-writing fella named Dave Trott.

I've been reading it ever since and am loving the content and his writing style.

Check it out if have a moment - some great content on what a client briefs you and what they actually mean, a fantastic post on whether in design, all elements should be purely functional or should include non essential emotional elements to enhance and complete the full design- the WW2 story of the British colonel, the Nazi concentration camp and lipstick made a real impact.

The oft-fricticious relationship between the client facing Account Manager and the internal creative department . This particular post put me in mind of the old days at my previous agency and the relationship between the Account Handlers and the 'Interactive' department as it was once called.

Was having some banter with a colleague in the pub last week who was an Account Handler back then at same agency.

I did my impression of Account handlers back then;

'Hi Mr Client, whats that you say? you want a fully functioning website with ATS/annual online media strategy  in two days?  - sure no problem - that's completely feasible, its very easy you know...

'Hi Interactive team - what do you mean you can't do it!!!! - you guys are so obstructive and useless - JUST do it!' MR MD, Interactive are being cr*ap again'!!

She retorted with her impression of the Interactive team:

'Ok, so we are a commercial business with targets to hit and are trying to get our clients to do some best-practice interactive stuff - have managed to sell this is and its a bloody hard sell....

'Hi interactive, can you please do this project that is sustaining your department and team? Whats that you say - you need 6 months to do it?, a Prince 2 diploma project plan, with gant charts...for no apparent reason, just for the sake of it?? - argh!!!!

Good times. Good memories. :)

Two years on and still going strong

After having a conservation with someone about student marketing this week, I couldn't help remembering the video below. I first posted it on Digital Recruiting two years ago and I'm pleased to say that, despite some  formidable competition, it remains one of my favourite worst recruitment videos ever. However having clocked up nearly a million views maybe bad is good after all!

Have a great weekend

Sorry about removing content

You may have seen a rather nasty post about me recently ... i thought that is odd as I had never met the person.

From further investigation I have had to remove the content because not only had they made the comment but it had been linked to to make sure it ws listed highly in the google search results.

It is rather sad that this industry forum was used for a personal attack.

Sorry as I am a great believer in free speach ... but this was done to play a rather nasty trick.

Association of Graduate Recruiters (AGR) Winter Survey 2009

The Association of Graduate Recruiters (AGR) have just released the latest AGR Winter Survey 2009

 

Phil Lane discusses overall ideas and especially David Lammy’s solutions over in the Barkers Blog

 

But I want to look at a different side … the increase in investment in websites and campus activity vs. the decrease in paper and online advertising.  

 

I just want to say – at last!

 

For many years I have seen pointless campaigns running in the media and I am sure no one asked why are we doing this?

 

And if anyone did question the ideas we were hit with the same old response – we have to do it.

 

Do we have to?  

 

Campus based activity will always give the best rewards … and back it up with a great search campaign and a well optimised website.  Have a dialogue and let people find you.  

 

It makes a lot more sense than shouting to people who are really not interested in the same old advertising …