Picking up on the reports from the Milch & Zucker conference , A Journey from Attraction to Selection.  Still have a few to do, and will bring them out over the next few days.  Pictures and video are starting to appear on the M&Z site as well.

Opening up the afternoon sessions, with Miodrag Perin of Bertelsmann, New York office. Met him at dinner and found out he did his graduate degree at my alma mater, SUNY at Binghamton.  More evidence of how small the world really is.

This was fun, as Bertelsman has done a lot of interesting things, including setting up a specific Recruitment brand and website. Mio is a dynamic and engaging speaker.

A couple of key concepts if you are going to reach out with Social Media as a recruitment media:

• What works for marketing also works for us
• We want to be where the people already are

Tested the idea of video applications, by filming his own team - proving internally how it can work and what actually has to be done.  See the video of Mio on the RCEuro Video section.

Points out that individuals are spending lots of time on the networks (compared to amount of time on a company website), where content and information is relevant.

Create Your Own Career
Inside our thoughts, inside our heads - everyday there are tons of ideas, phrases, concepts that should be shared and used in candidate attraction.

Social Media is no longer a 'nice to have'.  It is a necessity.

What was the Bertelsmann journey?
18 months ago, on Flickr and the business networks like Xing, LinkedIn as individuals, not as company.  

Resistance from internal colleagues 18 months ago:

• Nobody Twitters
• What does this have to do with recruiting?
• What a waste of time
• We should have our own video player

BUT
We want to be where the candidates are
Decided to integrate sharing tools such as "tell a friend" into website  and
integrate various analytics into the website to deploy and track activities

Developed the tag line and the complete recruitment website:
Create Your Own Career 2.0 by getting inspired.

What has been the result?

• New career web sites in Germany and internationally
• 38,000 unique visitors  per month
• Top results of ranking, No. 1 in US, Europe, CEE
• (Potential Power Ranking 2009)
  

What does his social landscape look like today?
Blogs, maps, chat, self assessment, videos of real employees on YouTube, Flickr

Created presence on the major Social Media sites:

• XING group, 1000 members
• LinkedIn  group 850 numbers
• BrightFuse, Vault, e-followers.net, Facebook
• Twitter, over 250 followers without marketing it yet

This means that potentials can follow on the channel that is right for them - connecting with people where they are.

CYOC widget (developed with Milch &  Zucker), connects all the feeds, posting accounts.  400+ downloads of this gadget (Vista only)

Online video tour includes virtual tours and video assessment tool for self assessment to see how I might fit into the company.

GoogleMap application, features jobs, location

Have also put up a basic company profile on as many sites as possible to preserve company name - and who knows, they may take off. Brief intro to company and links back to their main SM sites

Key learning
Don't be afraid of the risk - and be sure, what is relevant for one company (or not) may not be relevant for others.

Just move forward.

Tomorrow?
Web 3.0- What is that?
Custom tailor information and delivery mechanism to the relevant real time means that the candidate wants/uses