Talent Technology Blog

Blogging holiday

I am away in sunny France until the end of July so blogging will take a holiday as well.  Much eating and drinking to be done!

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Do recruitment advertising agencies deliver?

In my experience, I have seen very few advertising agencies that actually know much about online yet so many of then have a Head of Digital.  That's a bit like me calling myself Head of Gardening just because I mow the lawn and any overhanging plants that dare to venture into my domain!

So is it up to HR to manage the agency like a Buyer, or is it up to the Agency to deliver?  I've started a post on the Talent Management Network raising this issue which you are welcome to join:

Can HR learn from Buyers?  Join the discussion.

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Second Life | Talent Management

It's been a while since I ventured into the dark side of of Second Life but it seems to be coming up in conversation again.  I'm sure the population has grown since I last visited, my million Linden Dollars quadzappled in value and my island ransacked but, IBM seem to be taking over the Virtual World.

An interesting post over at Business Week called The (Virtual) Global Office goes into more detail.  Maybe I can gatecrash the IBM party?

And not a Blackberry in sight!

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Step into the NHS

The NHS career site aimed 14-19 year olds has recently won an NMA effectiveness award.  Designed to engage young people and help promote the NHS as a possible employer, the site is simple and easy to use and gets the point across in a relaxed and easy manner.  The site was designed by Worth; who scared me stupid when the zapping, loud music came on about 2 monutes after I'd hit their site and was deep in concentration on something else!

You can click on the image to go and have a look around the NHS site - no scray music that I was aware of.

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Fish4jobs - reasons NOT use them!

I read an article/case study this last week about how Fish4 had used a SEO agency to improve their 'vital pathway' to their customers. 

And their crowning glory was:

Ranking in position 1 out of 81.7 million results in the Google rankings for the keyword 'jobs'.

Do they really?  And so what if they do!

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Vodafone Mobile Broadband - don't waste your money!

I was on a speaker panel yesterday and Employer Branding came up as usual; my view is that brand is more about what you do than say.  My experience with Vodafone was so poor that my view of them in their entirety is pretty poor.  Not that they would ever employ me anyway, I would not be interested after my recent experience!

Speed into cyberspace
Superfast and reliable – Download music and video clips at speeds up to 7.2Mbps – that’s 14 times faster than 3G. Our fantastic coverage in the UK means you can enjoy warp speed mobile broadband wherever you get a Vodafone signal.

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BT implements Enterprise Social Networking

After various trials, tests, internal debates with the policy makers, and technology changes BT have launched their internal Social Network.

You can read more details about what the network includes on the Inside Out Blog.  Well done to Richard Dennison and the team for getting this through the internal politics!

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Will job boards suffer

Microsoft have recently announced that they will be pushing comparison sites down the search results in order to improve the positions for branded sites.  Hopefully Google will follow suit and that they will also be able to do the same for what I call SPAM sites; otherwise known as link sites.

So how could this affect some of the job boards and aggregator sites like Totaljobs and Indeed?

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Social media developing brands

Lego has been one of the companies that has harnessed Web 2.0 to help it give its customers better products by engaging with them.  In fact, they were one of the first companies I came across that had a social network for their 'younger generation' customers i.e. kids.

One of their most recent products Lego Mindstorms NXT is an example of how Lego allowed their customers to create the products whilst Lego take a watching rather than a controlling role. 

Web 2.0, open source, listening; what next?

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Twitter comes of age

Over the weekend I had the 'pleasure' of competing in a rather long race.  We ran(!) 95 miles, across Scotland where the midges hunt, and ascended 4,500m which is more than half-way up Everest.  After almost 31 hours of not sleeping I was ready for a break which is luckily when I had finished!

But, being a fan of Twitter, I am an even bigger fan now and have managed to explain what a great idea it is to people who have no idea what it is.  My support team of 2 kept updating Twitter on what I was doing which a few people found quite amusing (I was not aware of any of it) and has also made it a lot easier for me to tell anyone how it all went.

Have a look what a 95 mile run looks like!

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Specialist or Generalist

Over in the 'real' marketing industry, where everything has lots of 0000's, there is debate about online video.  Should ad agencies with internal film departments create it or specialist companies who only focus on film/video?  Jack of all trades or efficiency gains?

But where does it apply in the world of recruitment?

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Hays Recruitment 'bully boys' vs Mark Ions

So who owns your network of contacts?  According to a recent High Court possibly not you!  In this case, the report I read did not define if Ions had uploaded his own contacts to his Linkedin profile or the entire Hays Recruitment database.  But, it raises some interesting points.

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Gen Y | What do they want? Same as us?

They seem to want more of this but less of that; jobs today for work tomorrow; recognition for their skills for jobs that they'll do that they can't define as they haven't been created (yet).

Ahh the youth of today; sounds just like when we were young!  How time moves on; everything yet nothing changes other than a label but more than we like to admit.

Oh no, is that a wagon I see?

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Talent Management | Bottom up or top down?

It's quite interesting seeing how the talent management software vendors are all jockeying for position and how their products are taking different start points.  But, the one consistent point is that automating talent management could very easily be seen as:

• Yet more work for management.
• Something that is 'done to' people.
• Too much change driven by technology.
• Not instinctive therefore not done!

But that's looking at it from a top down viewpoint.

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Not getting on the Gen Y wagon

I've seen a few presentations recently that have been focused entirely on Gen Y recruiting and how social media technology underpins the entire process; pretty much to the entire exclusion of everyone else of any age!

Fine if Gen Y is your only focus but missing the point if not.  Leaving the door open for others that are more enlightened!

That's the problem with jumping on bandwagons; you don't always know where they are going!

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An example of Google changes in the UK

I wrote a post on Talent Management Network showing how Totaljobs is sponsoring 'jobs at McDonalds' to advertise 'jobs at Burger King' and then dumps you on their homepage to then try and find a Burger King job!

Fair or foul?  Read the post in full and see what you think.

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Customer heal thyself

I have been thinking about how customers are best trained on using for example, a social network or ATS but have as ever totally missed the point.  They don't actually want guides and video, support teams and call centres, account managers and 'friends'.  They just don't want training, they want a UI that is so obvious it just works - so we stop bothering them!

I always think that if an e-commerce site requires that customers be trained before they can buy anything, then it will struggle at best.  Business technology, for the ad-hoc or base level user, should be simple and user friendly, avoiding the need to days of training.  Yet Is still see User manuals that make your inbox shudder as the 12mb file lands; no surprise User support get too many calls!

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Employer Internal Social Networks

We launched our first Employer Internal Social Network this week; soft launch only to a limited number of people but so far so good!  I can't share yet who the employer is, but they are a retailer and the network aims to engage people across the business to improve business performance as a result of better employee engagement and ideas.

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Who needs to go to work for meetings

If Cisco's Telepresence takes off like they plan (which means it will), should cut out a lot of travelling.  Amazing stuff!

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The social mindset

As we see more and more social media applications and Google's Open Social entwining itself throughout our lives, the way we live will (hopefully) get better.  Technology will start to really deliver on its promise and maybe the 9th Insight will become!  In the meantime, I've kicked off a discussion around this (indirectly) on the Talent Management Network:

Generation XYZ 2.63 - the social mindset.

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