My Favorite Posts
Found this new resource for IT professionals (and IT recruiters too!) – Masterbranch. It’s a network that’s currently only available for IT folks, letting them connect with each other through search based on projects, skills, and available opportunities.
According to KillerStartups review, “…through [Masterbranch] you can have something akin to an intelligent resume that reflects any change that should merit inclusion…This dynamic profile is built by looking at your sites and blogs (IE, your activity on the WWW) and the site also doubles as a sort of networking resource where IT professionals can meet up with each other and build relationships like that.”
This site grabs all your information based on OpenSourceID verification and it dynamically builds an IT ‘resume’ based on your web activity. Obviously, this wouldn’t be a resume that would be suitable to bring on an interview, but it’s a good sampling of your online presence and an additional place for you to build your personal SEO and be find-able to recruiters. For recruiters, this is yet another resource for sourcing! The site pulls your information from LinkedIn, Stackoverflow, Google, Sourceforge, Serverfault, Launchpad, Ohloh, GitHub, BitBucket, and your blog if you have one.
Once your profile is built, you can start looking at other community members based on projects and skill areas. The most popular areas are linked at the bottom of the page, and you can join project “networks” to be found based on skill area.
People search is also intuitive; start typing a name and it will suggest people who are community members. It’s still a small community, but it’s certain to grow quickly. Updates are automatically pulled from the online accounts you add to your profile. No manual updates are necessary once you’ve added an account – pretty sweet!
IT recruiters: this is worth taking a look at. IT professionals – this is another place for you to get noticed!
The Cool Tool Alert has returned! This week, I want to feature a neat iPhone app that is an extension of a service that I learned about way back in June at the Fordyce Forum from founder Lori Fenstermaker. Lori started AutoSearch almost by accident, and what started off as a “side business” has quickly become her main focus, with some pretty notable clients. (you’ll have to ask Lori for that client list!) Lori revealed to me at Fordyce that AutoSearch would soon be coming out with an iPhone app, and as an iPhone user I asked her to let me know when this happened. Well – here it is! AutoSearch Mobile:
“AutoSearch Mobile simultaneously searches leading business and social networking sites: LinkedIn, Twitter, Jobster, and ZoomInfo. AutoSearch Mobile also searches the entire web for matching resumes and CVs.”
Basically, it’s AutoSearch Lite. This is a great way to sample what AutoSearch can do. I tested out this new iPhone app and was very impressed with it. It’s quite user-friendly, compact, and relatively accurate. Keep in mind of course, you’re searching the Internet, which is not a recruiters’ database, so you must have realistic expectations of your search results. But that being said, the results I got from my simple search were actually pretty good!
Things I liked about this app:
- You can add in your own locations, or simply choose from the ones that are already pre-populated. To add new ones, you simply click on the Setup button
- It’s VERY simple. You type in some keywords, a job title, a name, or whatever you’re searching for, and you get results all on one screen from Jobster, LinkedIn, ZoomInfo, Twitter, and regular web search.
- The app accepts pretty much all Boolean search operators, or you can just simply type in a few keywords.
- Search results keep you in the app. You never have to leave the app to view them!
- Search results are easily email-able to your account or wherever else you’d like to send them – again, right from the app.
- Search results are amazingly refined.
Just a couple of things I’d like to see different:
- It would be great to see the actual Boolean search string in the results.
- You cannot save the searches done on the iPhone app.
- Would like search results to be able to be synched with the full version if you’ve purchased it.
It should be noted that in the full AutoSearch tool, keywords are automatically stored so this takes care of the saved search issue. At only $4.99, this is a great deal as well!
I’d highly recommend checking out the full version, and take a look at the video for the new AutoSearch Mobile app as well as the info video for AutoSearch itself. Definitely worth looking into!
This week, I am working from Las Vegas, as I will be attending the Fordyce Forum on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. I am presenting a pre-conference workshop on Wednesday from 2-5pm PDT on how social media can play a part in your recruitment plan. In an effort to practice what I will be preaching, I am going to have a live Twitter stream from my session using the hashtag #VegasRG through a site called TweetChat. You may have seen me using this hashtag over the last couple of weeks – I am keeping a sort of “Twitter journal” of my Las Vegas experience via the hashtag. My boss, Chris Hoyt, did this earlier in the year on his trip to DC with the #rgdc hashtag. I would encourage you to follow #VegasRG live between 2-5pm PDT and interact with those who will be attending the pre-conference workshop. My goal is to show them just how useful social media is from a conversational and information-sharing standpoint. Please feel free to respond to anything from the #VegasRG hashtag and present questions to the workshop attendees as well. I welcome any and all conversation!
I’ve done a lot of prep work for this presentation, because I realize that not everyone is as excited about social media’s place in recruiting as I am. Social media goes way beyond the popular LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter tools. There are also social bookmarking tools, cloud computing resources, podcasting/video/photo sharing tools, and so much more. In an effort to be transparent with my own use of these resources, I have decided that I will be going paperless for this conference and instead will be using some of the tools available through social media. I have loaded all of my presentation notes into my EverNote account and will be accessing them through EverNote’s iPhone app. So for anyone attending live, I promise I’m not checking email or text messages on my phone during my own presentation – I’m just following my notes 
In addition, I’m not going to be handing out any business cards this year. That’s right – no paper cards from me! If you want my contact information, you will need to send a text message with ‘researchgoddess’ to 50500. I am using a resource called Contxts to provide my information via SMS. It makes for a good conversation starter, and it also helps you to be more ‘green’
My hope is that those of you in attendance of the workshop will come away with some better thought process about how you plan to reach your audiences with social media. We’ll go over some tools of course, but my main goal is going to be to help you better understand the ‘why’ – because if you don’t understand why you are doing something, then how you do it isn’t going to make much of a difference.
Please pass the word about #VegasRG – I would love to see not only those of you who work in recruiting, but also my friends and colleagues in social media, marketing, and PR communities interacting during the presentation. There is so much we can all learn from each other. See you on Wednesday!
Please make note: the presentation is this Wednesday, June 10th, from 2-5pm Pacific time. So for Eastern time zone folks, that’s 5-8pm, and for Central, it’s 4-7pm.
I needed to open a can of tuna the other day. So, I reached into my utensil drawer and looked for my can opener. That did the trick.
Had I reached for a spoon, I would have had a difficult time opening that can. I would have said of the spoon, “This thing doesn’t work! It’s not opening this @*&#%#^ can, so it’s obviously a worthless utensil!”
How stupid does that sound? Everyone know that using a spoon to open a can isn’t going to work. Yet, I hear so many people say of varying social media tools “It doesn’t work!” when what’s really going on is they’ve reached for the wrong tool to do a job.
Not every tool is going to work for the purposes for which you want to use it. For example, if you recruit in the construction industry, chances are you’re not going to find Twitter to be a very useful tool. HOWEVER – that doesn’t mean that Twitter doesn’t work. It’s a fantastic communication tool for networking with PR, marketing, communications, and technical professionals. For those working in those industries, it works.
I’m tired of listening to people spout off about how social media is a waste of time when it comes to recruiting. Any resource that facilitates communication with people is going to be helpful to someone. I hope the day comes when recruiting professionals realize that social media tools are just another means of communication with their target audience and not some grand candidate databases contrived just for their perusal. You must ENGAGE. You can’t just sit back, spew forth YOUR agenda, and expect it to work. Would you attend a friend’s party, stand in the middle of the room, and shout your current job openings at everyone there? Didn’t think so.
These thoughts are just part of what I have planned for my pre-conference workshop, Incorporating Social Media Into Your Recruiting Plan, coming up at the Fordyce Forum on June 10th. If you’re going to be there, please let me know! If not, please follow my #VegasRG hashtag to see what’s going on. I’ve got some fun stuff planned!
Wolfram|Alpha, a new search engine that just launched in Mid-May 2009 to the general public, is the talk of our industry right now. Some say that it’s going to be a Wikipedia- or a Google-killer. Others (including me) think it’s neat, but that it’s really just a big calculator at this point. Still others are enjoying playing with it and discovering ‘Easter eggs’ hidden within.
Wolfram|Alpha is “a computational knowledge engine: it generates output by doing computations from its own internal knowledge base, instead of searching the web and returning links.” It’s a fact-machine – you ask it a question, and it will do its best to spit back an answer for you.
When it comes to academia, there are plenty who sing its praises. This will be quite a handy tool when it comes to researching academic matters. For example: if you wanted some quick facts about Winston Churchill:
However, if you wanted to know who just won the most recent Dancing With The Stars, Wolfram|Alpha is going to tell you:
As with any tool of our trade, what you get out of it depends largely on what you put into it. In addition, with Wolfram|Alpha, what you’re looking for is a big factor too. If you’re looking for hard scientific, mathematical, or historical facts, chances are Wolfram|Alpha’s going to help you out. But if you’re looking for current events or assistance with your sourcing efforts, you’re going to be disappointed.
Now, researching companies within an industry – that’s a different story. The database does side-by-side in depth comparison of companies and provides details on # of employees, revenue, etc., and on an individual search basis will also provide you with some basic company information (website, location, industry):
This could prove to be helpful when conducting competitive research within an industry or beginning to build a list of companies to target.
From a sourcing perspective however, the information we seek isn’t contained in its extensive knowledge base – that is, where precisely to find certain types of people for potential candidacy for our open positions. I tested this out, just to make sure:
Nope – not what I was looking for, though this is interesting information, and I believe Wolfram|Alpha will give financial search engines such as Google Finance and Yahoo Finance a run for their money. Wolfram|Alpha will do detailed, side-by-side comparisons of stock symbols where the other two currently do not, at least in great detail.
My assessment is that Wolfram|Alpha isn’t going to make any waves when it comes to useful recruiting tools, at least from a candidate search standpoint. Furthermore, I do not think it will be replacing any major search engines or information sources in the near future. In fact, if you click on the Source Information link at the bottom of the Winston Churchill search, you’ll see that Wikipedia is listed amongst the information sources from which it frequently pulls:
Regardless, Steven Wolfram has come up with a great start to tackling the issue of pure semantic search. (interestingly, plugging ’semantic search’ into Wolfram|Alpha produces no results) I think this will serve as a good jumping-off point for others to build upon. Check it out and give it a whirl yourself.
Flash drives are getting cheaper and cheaper, and are becoming more and more handy for making our work portable. Just a couple of common uses for flashdrives include:
- Resume storage for quick upload at a career fair, instead of carrying paper copies
- Backing up a presentation in case your laptop crashes or isn’t compatible with the A/V equipment
- Carrying all your recruiting tools with you so you can work from multiple locations
- Backing up entire hard drives
There is an increased need to secure these little devices as their storage capacity grows and grows. The more information you can store the more likely it is that security will be needed. Many people store personal articles and work articles together and if it were to be misplaced or stolen, it could be disastrous.
Fortunately, Ennova Direct was recently granted a patent for a new biometrical secure flash drive. Pure coolness!
“The flash drive features an OLED screen that acts as a fingerprint scanner for data security and has a retractable flip cover that keeps the screen safe and retracts the USB connector. The OLED screen is interactive as well as being a fingerprint reader and allows the user to choose specific files from the drive to access.”
Ennova Direct will plan to launch the flash drive under the ION Technologies brand at the beginning of 2010. Sign me up for one once they’re available!
Anyone else feeling a bit like Winston Smith lately? Social Media has invaded every aspect of our lives. We suddenly know when our coworkers are going out for a night on the town, get live scoops on how hot (or not) our friends’ dates are, discover that they’re playing hooky from work, and learn things about our high school classmates later on in life that we never wanted to know.
What’s going on right now is a true testament to the saying, ‘Be careful what you ask for.’ We asked to be more connected – we got it. We wanted to have faster and more accessible means with which to stay in touch with our friends, family, and in some cases co-workers. BAM – wish granted. But with much power comes much responsibility. And in this case – much paranoia over who’s watching us and why.
We have essentially created our own 1984.
I read 1984 in high school. For those who aren’t familiar with the book, it was published in 1949 by a brilliant author, George Orwell, who also wrote the well-known Animal Farm. The basic gist of the novel, and what it’s so famous for, is its portrayal of pervasive government surveillance and control – as well as government’s increasing encroachment on the rights of the individual. (which is a whole other topic I don’t have the time to get into right now!)
One of the most famous ‘characters’ to come out of 1984 is ‘Big Brother’. Big Brother, or the concept of him, essentially was used to monitor the every move of the citizens of Oceania, and to keep them in line. In Orwell’s world this was accomplished through telescreens, Thought Police, and through devices that would control citizens’ thoughts.
Think about where Social Media is today: we have the ability to read (on our telescreens, or computers) daily updates on Facebook or through SMS on our phones, follow career paths on LinkedIn, watch live lifestreams from Ustream, Oovoo, and Stickam, and essentially follow every waking moment of a person’s life on Twitter and FriendFeed. We monitor each others’ every moves, condemning each other when we either make mistakes or think differently from what we believe should be correct. We have the ability to make or break each other’s online reputations with a swift keystroke, and we constantly remind each other – and worry ourselves – that there’s always someone watching us online.
We are our own Big Brother.
We created this online world – we grow it, we participate in it, we moderate it.
And there is no one to blame for the extreme lack of privacy we are experiencing but ourselves.
After all – we asked for it.
While monitoring the NCAA Tournament Selection Show this afternoon on Twitter, I saw a passing tweet from Pete Cashmore (@mashable) of Mashable fame mentioning a website called Contxts. I was curious so I went to check it out, and I think this is a really neat tool that we as sourcing professionals can utilize from a social media / Cloud Recruiting standpoint!
Some info on Contxts:
Contxts is so much more than a professional social network. It’s a way to make meaningful connections while out and about. Business cards are so 2007. What with the environment in shambles do you really want to be that guy who is handing out chopped up pieces of bleached trees? We here at Contxts.com think that our site will solve this problem and more. By using SMS, built into every mobile phone, you can easily and rapidly distribute your credentials.
- Exchange all of your professional information with a single text message
- Keep all of your professional contacts organized in one place
- It’s eco-friendly (txt messages don’t kill polar bears)
- Rid yourself of “old school” business cards
- Link with other professionals
Essentially, this is a Twitter-like SMS business card. You’re given 140 characters to share whatever information you’d like with those who request it. You can put your name, your email, your blog URL, a phone number, a message, pretty much whatever you want. Colleagues can either send you a request by texting your unique username to 50500, or you can send it to individuals by texting the message “SEND 1234567890″ (recipient’s phone #) to 50500.
Even cooler, Contxts will store all the information on those who request your SMS business card. So it builds you a contact list, and for those contacts who have also registered on Contxts, you will have first and last names, phone number, and email address.
Psst….as an added bonus, those of you with smartphones will appreciate this: When someone requests your information, you can quickly either add them to your Contacts list on your phone, or find them. I have an iPhone and it instantly tells me who has requested my info. So – instead of having to hunt down the information, the combination smartphone and SMS business card makes for quick contact list recognition/building for your mobile.
How can this be a helpful tool for recruiting? Well, considering you can make your “business card” say whatever you want, imagine the possibilities! You can use this to engage your online communities in a simple “text me for more info” manner. For example: let’s say that right now your biggest priority is finding a PR Manager in Chicago. You can request interested parties to text your unique username to express their interest, and Contxts gathers their information for you while sending them a customized message on your opportunity. You could also run contests by using your SMS business card as a way to register contestants, or by sending a message with a URL to the prize site. The possibilities are virtually endless. PLUS – IT’S FREE!! (outside of your standard text messaging rates)
Sounds pretty neat, huh? As someone who doesn’t readily like to share her phone number, I think this is a fantastic way to connect without having to pass out my digits. I decided to test this out and registered myself. To get my SMS card, send “researchgoddess” (without the quotes) to 50500 from your mobile phone and see for yourself. Go ahead – I dare ya! (maybe there’s a special message…)
Filed under: Networking/Social Media, Public Relations, Recruiting, Technology, Thoughts
Back in March of 2007, I wrote a post discussing the emergence of a new job function within companies – the Chief Networking Officer. I predicted that in the next 2-5 years there would be a drastically increased need to find individuals who specialize in the development and management of the social capital of a company. While the precise duties of such a position differ a little from where I believed they’d be, I don’t think there is any argument that since March of ‘07 (nearly 2 years ago), there has been a humongous increase in the need for companies to hire someone to keep an eye on their digital presence. I think this is the first time I’ve engaged in business trend predictions and actually been right! Woo hoo…
While “Chief Networking Officer” isn’t typically the title of choice for what this function does, the basic concept of the function is seen in titles such as:
Some people believed that this function should belong to HR or Marketing. Some people who left comments on the original post even believed that some form of a CNO was a silly idea. But many companies are now creating separate divisions specifically designed to monitor their online presence and engage in their clients and customers digitally (i.e. – managing relationships).
My belief is that people in these positions are combining the roles of recruiting, marketing, PR, web development, and business development.
- Recruiting: your online presence is a beacon to community members, customers, and visitors and representative of your company culture. These days, a company’s online presence is the first place a person learns about the company. Recruiting has traditionally been on the frontline for corporate representation, and many employees’ first contact with a company was from a recruiter. The person in charge of your online presence needs to know how to leverage that to draw the attention of people that would fit well into your organization.
- Marketing: anyone who took Marketing 101 in college knows the Four P’s of marketing: product, price, place (distribution), and promotion. The person in charge of your company’s online presence needs to know how to execute each of these in order to provide a positive online user experience, which leads to…
- PR: many people say that if you don’t manage your online presence, someone else will do it for you and probably not so nicely. Companies that don’t engage in good PR digitally are taking the risk that someone else is going to do it. It’s important for the person in charge of your digital strategy to understand how to manage the flow of information between your organization and its public.
- Web Development: let’s face it, if you have an antiquated website, it’s a big detriment to your company’s image as a forward thinking organization. Your digital strategist needs to know at least the very basics on how to optimize your websites with SEO strategy and up-to-date design so that visitors enjoy their time using your applications, visiting your communities, and browsing your sites.
- Business Development: driving new business is important when you’re talking about online strategy. Continually bringing new traffic to a site and showing potential customers what you’re capable of are important functions of a digital strategist’s role. Without new business, there’s really no purpose of having an online presence. (translation: if no one is visiting, why bother?)
Having read through these bullets, do you know people who possess these skills? I will tell you now – the folks out there who get this, and who execute these skills for their companies successfully, are few and far between. If this is you – you are a highly valuable asset to your company. Keep up the good work!
In closing I’d like to pose a question: from this point, where do you think a job function like this will be in the next 5-10 years? Leave a comment below and share your thoughts on the matter!
If you’ve ever had a day where you feel like you have learned too much, watch this video and it will put things into perspective. This is actually kind of frightening, especially the idea that a supercomputer is expected to be built by 2013 that can exceed the capabilities of the human brain. In considering this, my favorite quote comes to mind, spoken by Dr. Malcolm (played by Jeff Goldblum) in Jurassic Park, when he was discussing the creation of dinosaur embryos:
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think about whether or not they should.”
You be the judge…either way, this video reveals a lot about how far we’ve gone with information.
Thanks to LO and MB for sharing this vid with me. Also, if you, too, found the song to be incredibly addicting, it’s “Right Here Right Now” by Fatboy Slim
