RCEuro Member Blogs

10 days to go before I get on the big bird to Chicago and then a bus to Madison to join the TruCrew and a great line-up of track leaders  and participants to share knowledge at TruUsa .  I am leading some tracks (Job Board 2020, Culture Clash, JIT Sourcing)  and hope to pile into many others while there.

I have been thinking a lot lately about the future of traditional conferences, the Unconference movement and the more ad hoc ‘conferences' that we have on social media gatherings on Twitter with #hashtags like #TNL. Check out the radio show that Tru co-founder Bill Boorman and I conducted on Tuesday this week on hashtags and a range of Twitter tips from #mrbill

I was one of 3 speakers at a ‘traditional' event today, hosted by Recruitment Consultant Magazine , in Manchester (that is England, not New Hampshire). We ran the same event a couple of weeks ago in London (England, not Ontario) Recruitment Conference IT and Technology 2010 #recconfit2010  You might have seen my exciting effort at breaking the ice with audience in London.

Targert audience for both events was professional recruitment consultants (agencies), along with a smattering of technology suppliers and media types.  

I had the pleasure of leading off with a presentation on Social Media (a recurring theme, as I had the same slot at this conference a year ago). Raymond Pennie (@rpennie) of Kamanchi followed talking about creating effective strategies (with some focus on the impact of technology) and Felix Wetzel (@FelixWetzel) of Jobsite (a major #TruLondon sponsor) discussed candidate and advertiser behaviours (now and future) along with sharing some interesting research

Why do I bring this up when I am supposed to be writing about #TruUsa?  In one word: Engagement

I have spoken at, chaired or led more than 200 conferences, workshops or events over the last 10 years or so.  Which ones have given me the most buzz, the most satisfaction?  Other than Global Recruitment Conference 2008 , which I organised and chaired in Amsterdam, with an outstanding group of global thought leaders and delegates, I have to say that it has been those events where I set up or ran workshops/breakout groups. Why? Because in that environment, you get the engagement of every delegate/attendee - either with you as a session leader or with the others in the room.

In a sense, today confirmed that. We had an excellent group of delegates, professional and committed to their industry and their business, eager to learn from the 3 Talking Heads and the hosts.  All 3 of us tried to engage with the delegates (none of us are what might be considered wallflowers when it comes to speaking to an audience).  We had a few in the audience who were willing to discuss their company, strategy, questions and experiences. Feedback from delegates at the breaks and the post event drinks was excellent, delegates were happy, had learned and gathered real value from the day. The organisers (Jim and Gary) had two successful events and the sponsors/exhibitors did well.  But for Felix, Raymond and I, it felt a bit like an opportunity lost - for the delegates to engage in real debate and discussion with each other throughout the afternoon (although it did happen during the breaks).

That brings me full circle to Engagement - the real essence of an Unconference.  Track leaders start a conversation, hoping to guide it a bit and sometimes act as a referee if required.  The participants in the track drive the discussion/debate -its direction may go places other discussions just cannot reach.  In any session, the engagement of individuals - with each other, with a track leader or two (if we are lucky) is exhilarating.  Learning what challenges others have (Hey, look at me, I'm not so far behind) or successes someone is experiencing (Hey, if he/she can do that, we sure can!) - make it worthwhile flying 4,000 miles and taking a 3 hour bus ride to get to Madison. As it was worth it for the North Americans who flew over for #truLondon.

I can't wait. See you all there - or on video feeds on RCEURO, hashtag #TruUsa, twitter posts @rceuro, @alanwhitford or whatever means we come up with to share the experience.

As #mrbill says, it isn't just about the conference, it is about the conversations that happen for weeks leading up to an event and months afterwards. That is what I call: Engagement.

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Sitting in the back of the room of about 400 delegates for the Enhance Media annual conference looking at the future of recruitment.  Excellent speaker line up as we move into the afternoon sessions.

Intersting that this year there are probably about 50+ twitterers on the stream: #emconf2010. Last year there were 6 of us.  

We will cover the individual presentations in more detail over the next few days.

The Lineup:

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Wow, less than 4 weeks to go and the Bill Boorman phenomena takes on its latest iteration with TruLondon II and TruSource 17-19 February.

Inspired by RecruitFest in Toronto last year, Bill has grasped the Unconference model with both hands and taken it into places and worlds unknown. We have all gratefully jumped on board, giving us a chance to share knowledge and learning with colleagues and strangers on a level playing field.

No more are we seen as just 'talking heads', but as session Track Leaders. But. to me, even that is a misnomer. We are active participants, learning as much as we teach.

The only downside? I want to sit in on every session, itch to put in my $.02 with other leaders, learn from the delegates, ask them what they really want to see happen in recruitment and share in their triumphs as well as sympathise with their disappointments.

What will I be doing?
Talking about Job Boards 2020 with long time collaborator Keith Robinson and online marketing expert Simon Lewis.

Looking at the Cultural Clash of cross border recruitment (as a Yank abroad for over 30 years, I have experienced this first hand in many countries) with Brit Jon Ingham, American Laurie Reuttimann, Canadian Geoff Webb and Dee Allan from Singapore.

Discussing Bill Boorman's pet topic (one of many), Phoenix Recruiting with blogger and thinker extraordinaire, Andy Headworth.

Linking up with Shane McClusker to explore my own Talent Puddle principle; hoping to extend and question this concept.

Oh, and while this is going on, RCEURO will be there to conduct interviews, report on the action, broadcast online radio with our European Thought Leaders track and the Bill Boorman shows.

Come one, come all and enjoy a great three days. Click for Registration:

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Geoff Webb from Toronto, Radical Recruiter and session leader at TruLondon I in November has added to his many outlets with Tru Blogs , which should grow to include content from many of the proposed Tru events, including Tru London II in London in February and possible Tru North and Tru USA.

Spreading the gospel of Bill Boorman and many many thought leaders in all aspects of recruitment from around the world.

RCEuro.com is happy to be a sponsor of the London series and I am personally looking forward to travelling to North America (back near my roots of upstate NY, only 85 miles or so from Torornto) to share learning and knowledge with so many individuals I have met on Twitter and the various recruitment blogs.

Geoff has just posted a terrific wrap up video from TruLondon I, with original content, video from Andy and Sarah Headworth and stills from our onsite reporter, twitterer and all around good egg, Jill Elswick, which you can watch from the Audio/Video player on the home page.

 

 

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On behalf of RCEuro, I would like to congratulate industry thought leader Matt Alder on the launch of his new business consultancy, MetaShift,  a strategic consultancy which works at the cutting edge of the Recruitment and HR industries. Matt announced the new direction in his life in his blog Recruiting Futurology , which we are streaming on our home page.

We are featuring the the Recruiting Unconference video about Matt in our Audio and Video Player.

 

 

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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:

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I am in Bad Nauheim (Frankfurt) today for the Milch & Zucker HR/Recruitment conference, A Journey From Attraction to Selection .

Great lineup of speakers from around the world.

Leading off by Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Jager,HR-Marketing und recruiting in einer verntetzten Welt (HR and Recruiting in a Networked World)

Apolgies in advance, I will only pick out one or two highlights, as my German is not up to scratch for full translation. We will have links to the main presentations after the event.

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Attending a breakfast seminar today in London, hosted by Totaljobs , featuring Totaljobs marketing research and International Labour market research by the Intelligence Group for The Network

Paul Smith, Group Marketing Director of Totaljobs Group , led off the presentations, after the introductions by John Salt. We will write about the Intelligence Group presentation (which is very impressive) later.

General economic challenges have impacted the job market

• Decline in jobs
• Increase in jobseeker activity
• Google - recruitment query searches up 55% year on year

Advertising spend drops from £1.2 billion to £600 million

• Offline decline 50%
• Online decrease 30%

Paul projects a modest increase end 2011, early 2012 and online recruitment ad spend will pass offline in 2012

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As we have posted in the news section today, the CIPD report Jobs: The Impact of Recession and Prospects for Recovery had some interesting conclusions regarding movement of the economy and its impact on possible job recovery.

The scary area for me was the concluding comments by the Chief Economist at CIPD (raise your hands all of those that knew there was such a person at the CIPD), John Philpott:

“Unless the economy rebounds from recession far more strongly than most economists expect the likelihood is that the recovery will be broadly jobs-light, resulting in a slow grind back toward the pre-recession rate of unemployment. And while a jobs-loss recovery is not the most likely scenario it remains a distinct possibility, which means it is of vital importance that the government, the Bank of England, and their counterparts abroad, maintain expansionary fiscal and monetary policies for as long as necessary”.
Translation? We could be on the way to a "jobs light" recovery.

I will set up a poll/survey and look for your comments.

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Finding candidates in the shallow water

We started a bit of a global debate on the Monday evening ‘Ready for Lift Off '' online Radio Show hosted by Bill Boorman.   (The audio of the main show every week is available on our home page)   I dropped in my concept of Talent Puddle, as opposed to Talent Pool.  Michael Homula of  Bearing Fruit Consulting picked up on it and by the next day had written a great post on his site about it. 

This was my original thinking:
Talent Puddle - a term I evolved after years of talking to companies and conferences about building and using Talent Pools . Actually came to it after a fishing trip, trying to find the right fish in a very large lake, but success came in very small inlet.

Applied the thinking to Talent Pools  - Too deep, too hard to see the bottom where the best candidates are.  So, let's look in the shallower water, The Talent Puddle

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Great shows today

Bill Boorman's online radio show , in its third week had great guests from US and UK. This week's show features a collection of veteran recruiters discussing what clients want from the current market.

Listen to the full broadcaset in our Video/Audio stream: ON AIR - Ready for Lift Off. Or you can follow the link to to the BlogTalkRadio site and listen/download. Check out the first two shows either on our site or on the BlogTalkRadio site.

 

Listen to Billboorman on Blog Talk Radio

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Coverage of Lynne Featherstone's comments about CVs and discrimination by Human Resources online today brings up the age old conversation about how recruiters might discriminate based on what they read or see on a CV.  Full text of the article is also copied below.

Interestingly enough, a thread on Andy Headworth's blog today has been discussing the impact of Video CVs on the recruitment process, again with some hints about the possible discriminatory impact.

All of this reminds me of the Personnel Today April Fool article a couple years back that the EEC was going to require all interviews to take place behind a screen so that interviewers could not see the candidate at all, thus eliminating any visual bias in the process.  Of course, 50% of respondents thought it was a great idea!

Are we such a 'PC' mad society that we have to legislate for common sense, professionalism and fairness?  And, as Lisa Scales pointed out in the debate with Andy, no matter what is done before the interview, once the candidate is on-site,  having had an 'unbiased' CV will not stop potential prejudice happening during the interview.

Looking forward to the debate.

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What a great milestone today. Louise Triance has sent out issue no. 400 of the premier UK recruitment newsletter, ukrecruiter .

Starting small, she has built an amazing following and a stable of regular contributors.  I did manage to contribute for about a year with a series of technology oriented articles, but then faded away :-) 

Louise has grasped the blog world and continues to grow the business, having added new colleagues and services in the past year.

If you haven't subscribed, please do so here .

We can only hope that RCEURO will have the legs that ukrecruiter has.

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Wow, interesting series of blogs/articles out there on this topic.

I would love to see our blogging and social network experts like An de Jonghe, Ricardo Risamasu, Peter Gold, Bas van de Haterd all leap into this fray.

Check out: Tom Foremski of Silicon Valley Watch , who started this off this week relative to a PR 'expert' who advised on the use of Twitter and Facebook.

Then Jason Gorham has picked it up and run with it as it relates to an 'expert' in digital recruitment advertising.

This topic stream could be related to any type of 'expert consulting' in our and other industries. How many of us who do have the expertise from actually using the products/services/strategies have been pushed aside by a client/prospect because we do not come from one of the 'big name' companies?

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Take Action Against The Credit Crunch!

Please take 2 - 5 mins to complete the following confidential survey on the impact of the global credit crunch - the basis of which will be used by a trusted colleague of mine to establish a non-profit consultancy in the U.K., which will assist those impacted by the global credit crunch in their search for work. 

http://tinyurl.com/d5pdx4

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Response handling and new technology applications:
Will technology finally unlock recruiter productivity?

Alex Charles, product director and co-founder of iProfile
Alex is a board member of HR-XML , the global standards body for sharing HR information.

Alex was second up at The Recruitment Conference , covering a topic close to our hearts and minds. I have known Alex for a number of years and worked closely with him as we got HR-XML off the ground in Europe.

His theme on recruiter productivity is a good spin – away from the usual stuff that Alex and I have done for years about what the technology is and how to use it.

Agenda

• How far have we really come?
• Future ideas
• Address capability of your staff and technology
• Threats and risks

An interesting question: Are recruiters more productive because of technology?
Only two of us in the room say yes

Why aren’t we more productive?

• Is it the quality of technology?
• Is it the challenges of the cynical recruitment business owner?
• How do we compete with the larger online players like job boards?

Good slides showing the spaghetti junction of information, tools, contacts - slides will be made available on the conference website.

Challenges about the data we hold in our databases now

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DAXTRA
Steve Finch
Bringing the Internet Inside
Automating Recruitment Knowledge

Integration of the use of the Internet with the internal business processes of recruitment

Knowledge=Information + Process

Information on candidates, job boards etc and the internal process/workflows

Who Wants What?

• Candidate wants job
• Employer wants employee
• Match = knowledge heaven

Where, when and why
timing, location and message

(Guess what, Recruitment is a sales function – which we have been saying for what seems like forever)

Where is the information?
Job boards and social/business networks, comms systems, referral networks and knowledge sites

How can we exploit all of these data sources?

Good slide with the boxes and arrows, can’t replicate here

Some good slides of Recruitment and Internet 1.0, how thinks used to link together.

Another view of Internet 2.0
About the knowledge interface and integration of the processes.

Info and text from the web and elsewhere is only unstructured information, is not data which can be knowledge. Need to use the extraction/parsing tools to structure the data.

This approach enables new recruitment business practices and models because the data can be searched and matched more effectively

Improve the efficiency of the processes: Use Multi-search to examine a wide number of information sources/databases

Conclusion

• Greater quantifies of knowledge
• needs to be integrated into workflow
• Some technologies can do this now
• More will come

 

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Josh Smith of Facebook leads off the afternoon session. Lots of stats, so will only give you a few:

• 150 Million users globally
• 800 new registrations daily
• UK has 1 million new users per month
  

• 25% of audience is over 35
• 65% of UK internet population join Facebook
• 50% of members return daily
• 25 minutes per day on the site
  
• average 2 vists per day
  
• 55/45 split between male/female

OK, enough of those statistics :-)

How is Facebook evolving as a recruitment medium?

Targeted marketing is the key.

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Last session before Lunch Finally, a future view will be discussed by Giles of Enhance Media, our hosts. - this is what we came to hear.

A view of online recruitment from Web 1.0 to Web 3.0 - although I am not sure Web 3.0 is necessarily 'real' , as Web 2.0 is not really fully utilised or even really well defined within most pe0ple's minds - which Giles is referring to.

Future elements  will be based on:
Long Tail
Semantic Web

Funnily enough, we talked about Semantic Web 3 years ago as the 'next thing' and Long Tail has been in 2 of the 3 presentations this morning.

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