This week I moved my desk to the other side of the office to sit with our development team. Within my Marketing responsibilities at Qandidate.com I work closely with the development team, when it comes to product design and scope, so I decided to move my desk from one side of the office to the other, to sit in the development area.
When I say development team (or SCRUM team), think about a bunch of bright people, almost all of them are Gen Y. They are eager, smart, fun and really knowledgeable in the area they are responsible for. I know, talking stereotypes here, but its a typical example of a young generation who want to spend their time at a growing and vibrant tech start-up to make some fun and build cool stuff. You’ll get the picture.
So imagine a marketeer surrounded by a bunch of bright Gen Y developers. In the 2 days I’m sitting here now, I learned a couple of things:
- WordPress is for the lazy marketeer.
(Sorry, colleagues out there)
- Technology is never a blocking issue.
It’s the person who’s not making up his mind or not exploring the opportunities far enough.
- Innovation is an attitude.
Despite of all the articles and blogs which I have read over the last couple of years. The power to innovate is part of a person’s DNA. Of course a company need to provide the right infrastructure and atmosphere, but if you’re not open for new collaborative thinking, you won’t get it.
- It isn’t about instant messaging
It’s about instant feedback.
- Collaboration
Thinking about social business and exploring social collaboration tools for your company? Talk with your development team and learn why tools like IRC and GitHub are driving real value to this part of your employees.
- Email is already dead
While (HR) executives are still talking about reducing emails and exploring the implementation of social collaboration tools, these guys have already abandoned email. I haven’t seen a single email program on one of those 24 screens around me. I basically need to tell the guys that they have received an email from me.
- Learning
Learning gets a complete new dimension. It’s about self-learning. When was the last time you were hanging out with your peers at Starbucks at 7am to discuss and experiment business related initiatives?
- And last…
Never leave your laptop with these guys without password protection …. (although I have no illusion that password protection will make a huge difference…)
So, if this is the next generation of techies…what is your recruitment action plan to engage with this generation?
Ralph is responsible for marketing at Qandidate.com. He has worked his whole career at IT consultancy and software companies of which the last 6 years in the global recruitment space. He will share once in a while his view on life at Qandidate.com , marketing and recruitment. Follow him on Twitter or connect with him on LinkedIn.
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.
Posted by: Alan Whitford in Recruitment, online recruitment, On-line job hunting, media, marketing, job sites, job boards, Job board, Global recruitment, global, erecruitment, Advertising on
16 Sep 09
The Network , which brings together career sites from 119 countries and generates traffic of more than 45 million unique monthly visitors, held its annual conferenence in Bulgaria this month. The conference, hosted by partner Jobs.bg, was covered in Bulgarian publication, Human Capital, including videos of presentations from the managers of the leading job sites in France, Russia, Germany, Poland and Britain such as Totaljobs.com , StepStone and A denclassifieds .
Leading international career sites reported a decline in the published positions between 35 and 40 percent as a result of the global economic crisis. The good news is that some Western countries noticed a slight increase in the published positions last month.
The coverage and presentations can be viewd on the Human Capital site in native Bulgarian or the tranlsated version.
I am sitting today at my 2nd MLL with Mr MMLL himself so before my speed pitching escapades I thought I would take the opportunity to talk with Jamie about MLL and how he came up with such an original idea.
Q; How about a thumbnail view of your career?
A: Hardcore recruitment background, Stated out at Northcliffe Newspapers as an agency sales recruitment rep selling to the London agencies our regional newspaper portfolio, moved to Monster in 2003 and over the next 4 years built out and headed up their RAA channel. This ended up representing 15% plus of Monster's UK revenue. Moved to Fish4 in 2007 to do a similar job.
Q: Where did the idea for MLL come from?
A: A US road trip!! "as one does". True...I went with some mates, hired a car and off we drove. This gave me lots of time to think and my original idea was to create a community around the recruitment industry, bringing together the media and agencies, but based on "last minute advertising space".
Q: Can you expand?
A: Well I was amazed as I got to know the agencies and how they operated how much ad space can be left to filla s print gets near to deadline. All the reps hit the phones and try to use their agency contacts to take up this space, the agencies in turn will contact clients to see if an ad the previous week worked etc. This seemed hugely inefficient, so we came up with the idea of a site "Latespace.com" (working name) to speed up the process.
When we took the concept out to the market to road test we got a "big fat thumbs down". What we forgot is that no publisher wants to admit they might have last minute space to fill.
Q: What nexr?
A: Well the site was being built and we still wanted to be in the community. And to be honest the money for the site was running out. I had been to all the major UK recruitment events, I knew that getting in front of agencies can be tough, but also thought that the usual 30-45 minutes was becoming time inefficient. we put two and two together and bingo, MLL.
Q: Where do you go next?
A: We did our first Recruitment consultancy event with Louise from UK Recruiter last week and got positive feedback from both media and those attending in a "buying" mode. We are getting more requests for niche events such as the one we did focused on the Public Sector sponsored by JobsGoPublic. Also building out the community on-line via the site is a big part of our future.
