Many have taken value and direction from the career and personal branding blogs written by Recruiterpoet. We thought we would take this opportunity to provide a consolidated landing page of some of the top advice pieces published in the last few years.
We hope you take a few important nuggets of information and use them effectively toward setting yourself in the right direction toward your ideal career choice.
You don’t have to be in the Talent Acquisition space to know the canvas of recruitment is evolving faster than most other professions. The tools and resources available to network, identify talent, grow networks and manage referrals are tremendously effective and readily available. If you have had your business savvy hat on while enjoying a latte watching the stock market ticker, you will see that LinkedIn has been leading the way among the social media stocks. Their future looks bright and the numbers and enhancements to the platform support that.
As talent acquisition professionals, are we getting on the train to transition or waiting at the station for the slower traditional horse drawn train to come later on?
Whether you are a seasoned professional or a post recession recruiter, you don’t have to do much research to see that the workforce has changed:
There is a shift from an employees market to an employers market
Pay for performance is taking on a more critical role and traditional merit increases are flat lining
Less opportunities are available
More specific and defined skill sets are required for professional opportunities
Virtual employment is becoming a more cost effective option
Technological savvy skills are not longer just a “nice to have”
Targeted research and marketing campaigns are not just identifying the talent, but providing a complete profile of the individual to match them against the culture of the organization.
Strong candidates are being aggressively sought out while the less qualified are trying the “throw it and see what sticks approach”
Some see the employment numbers as grim; while others see great opportunity
Recruiters are no longer “processing” candidates; they are understanding the role, team, the culture and the challenges and matching them against the best talent to meet the needs of the role.
So, why would I say that recruiters are missing the train of change?
There are a number of wonderful tools for strategic sourcing, networking, developing and harnessing talent networks, managing candidate flow and marketing/outreach. We are anointed with more tools than ever before and yet we are wasting all this great opportunity.
What are we doing wrong?
We are not developing and leveraging our personal brand. How many LinkedIn profiles are either bland and boring or look like they were developed by a greasy haired used car salesman?
Too many recruiters are on the “big” social networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn) yet ignoring the little gems. Do you have an About.me profile? (about.me/recruiterpoet). If not, you need to.
We are still afraid of the risk. If a platform is new or not yet established as an accepted tool, we will not take the chance and determine its value. We wait for Mashable or several large companies to test the waters first. I jumped on the scalability of Bullhorn Reach from day one because it had a great development team, management team and partnerships with the large social platforms. That turned out to be a invaluable resource for myself, my team and the industry.
Recruiters do not effectively measure or understand the process behind analytics. Metrics are the key to any successful campaign. Understanding the numbers, tracking trends and developing effective strategy implementation based on projected outcome is essential in our space.
Are we leveraging the networks to the fullest extent? I am not sure we are. How many skill specific circles do you have on your Google+ account? How many regional or skill groups do you belong to on Facebook? Are you a member of 50 groups in LinkedIn and do you rotate membership to diversify your reach? Are you using sites like Reddit, Stumbleupon or Slideshare to brand your roles and company image?
We are not communicating in the social space. We feed jobs out like a Pez dispenser, but how many are talking to the candidates. I see talent acquisition folks are talking to each other on Twitter and sending sound bites from conferences, but shouldn’t we be talking and engaging with the candidates?
I am not proposing that traditional cold calling, networking and relationship building will vanish in the near future. I certainly hope it never does. I am witnessing a resistance or lack of understanding of the capability and value the social space brings to recruitment. If social space wasn’t so critical to our roles, the phrase “Social Recruiting” would not have been coined.
We are only tapping the iceberg of potential. I didn’t even reference the future of mobile technology in recruiting yet and for purposes of focus on this piece I will not, but if we don’t all board the train soon, we are going to be missing out on a great ride.
IPhone
Android
Google
Tablets
LinkedIn
Facebook
Smartphones
Potential life outside the Milky Way
Cyber crimes
We have thrust ourselves into the next industrial revolution. The only difference between the 1880’s and now is that the end product is 1/1,000,000th the size. With more content, knowledge and information being shared every second, how do we absorb it. More importantly, when do we have time to interpret and respond to that content before the next piece is fed on our plates? We no longer have to share content in real time; we can schedule when real time will be.
The pressure is building. Which will explode first, the robotic brain or the human brain?
I am done with the dramatic portion of this commentary.
Where can I possibly be going with this?
I believe we are transgressing back to a simpler time when connections were about two people working together for the common goal. That goal can be a job, a collaboration or a project. Needless to say, relationships are becoming more and more critical in the employment community as technology is fighting harder and harder to build on innovation and gain market share.
This is an interesting conflict to wrestle with.
Let us look at the state of career IT solutions:
Programs are developed in IT solutions that monitor activity levels. As individual move closer to a change (loss of job, move, etc.) they tend to become more active including updating profiles and resumes.
We are no longer identified by the wealth of experience we bring to the table but by a series of skill tags.
We are not people but a brand. Some a simple brand while others saturate the market with their image.
Business cards are not exchanged, meetings are not had; We are officially engaged with a Facebook friend request, a LinkedIn request or a Google+ circle initiation.
The summation of our growth and development is summed up with visual or verbal sound bites and our performance is rated by the number of +1 or likes we receive.
Big brother is watching. The difference between Big Brother of old vs. new; He doesn’t have to try very hard to find dirt on you.
Jobs are posted everywhere but no one is hiring? How bizarre.
If it involves physical effort, there is an app for it so sit back and relax.
Where exactly does Groucho Marx come into the picture? As you can see from his famous mirror scene, the impostor was trying to convince Groucho’s character that he was looking at himself in the mirror. By mirroring his moves, he was creating a relationship. One of deceit but still a relationship. Throughout his career Groucho would befriend woman, professors, government leaders and con men offering them the world and then dancing the night away in the end. Sometimes it takes an old film to remind what is still the most important thing in our lives; the relationship.
Connecting with others, not by common tags or mutual friends but by the respect and passion their have for their career choices is critical for you to continue to grow. We live in an employers market and most likely will for the rest our lives and perhaps our children’s. Opportunities are limited and skill requirements more specialized. Now is the absolute time to find those that share your passion; your energy and you desire to continue to grow.
Network with them. Not through a network but human interaction.
Without that element, we are lost in a cyber melting pot. Once you fall into the deep abyss, there is no turning back.
“It is silly of you, for there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.” – Picture of Dorian Gray
Recently I have tried to tackle the question of social media narcissism and determine if our desire to be noticed and followed is more marketing/branding focused or pure self absorbed selfishness. Perhaps the root cause may even go deeper to some rooted self-esteem issues. I understand the importance of “likes” and “+one” as they help shape SEO and effectively lead brand marketing your way. I even understand the significance of comments as they have become an integral part of our communication patterns.
Though, without a deeper and more significant study of a broader audience can I make any clear deductions. For some, a virtual presence has created a significant and even lucrative brand which has grown and flourished well. For others, mobile social networking has made instant gratification almost an obsession. I can certainly think of worse obsessions than an instant upload of your life.
I have witnessed extremes when it comes to active participation in the social space. Some are passionately against the public exposure of their lives and some embrace it as an extension of themselves. Each has their own medium/platform of choice. Foursquare has given individuals a sense of social celebrity status allowing them to check in to each and every spot and often rewarding them with mayor status and a digital star but no financial reward. Facebook allows users to upload pictures, video, status updates and location status within a few clicks while still allowing the opportunity to monitor each and every like and comment. Does this take away from the “actual” experience of the event? Who am I to answer. I rarely have a phone with me when I am out and I do not even own a smartphone.
So what is the fascination with ourselves? How many Facebook and Myspace pictures can you find of people standing in front of their own mirror taking pictures of themselves with their IPhone? Probably more than most of us care to want to know. We have become a society so self-absorbed in ourselves that we may be forgetting the importance of sharing, volunteering, helping and given back to those that had been there for us in the past.
If we resort to selfish tendencies, we will never recover from the economic and social woes we are so deeply entrenched in.
By no means can any one single person reverse a societal shift, but we cannot ignore the fact that there is one. Mobile technology, social media and cloud technology have given all of us a global audience to promote the one person we know so well, ourselves. In exchange for selling our soul for the opportunity at instant cyber fame, we are becoming numb to the moral standards that once made this world a better place to live.
Maybe a Mayan apocalypse isn’t such a bad thing.
There is nothing wrong with self promotion. We all want a little attention every now and again to give us the confidence we all need to get through this thing called life, but we also need to lean on our support network that has and continues to be there for us. We cannot become a “me” community. We have to look around and hold hands in unity if we are ever going to recover and prosper again.
