We held an informal Midlands based follow up to the #trulondon unconference with a TweetUp in the foyer of the Barcelo Hotel in Daventry. I was joined by @BillBorman with his very lovely wife Fran, @prefio and @whatjobsite. Experienced mild internet trauma when I first arrived – wot... no free internet!!!... tried to sign up with swisscom for 24 hours and they were experiencing problems taking a payment – which to be fair were resolved after about 10 minutes but it was all a bit more painful that this kind of thing ought to be.
The night was peppered with conversation largely related to social media. I don’t think anything we said would contradict my default stance towards the impact of social media on recruitment. So yes, it’s important, and you ignore it at your peril. However while social media helps you connect with people in new and interesting ways it doesn’t change the skill that recruiters must show in connecting and establishing relationships. So I’m not one of those who think it’s the be all and end all. Where social media fails is where it’s used inappropriately to connect with and then essentially spam people. It takes a more rounded approach than just learning how to post jobs to twitter; recruiters need to think more carefully about the balance of content they provide and be more interesting than a stream of job opportunities which are largely inappropriately targeted and just appear as noise. Like anything that’s directed at me that’s noise I’m going to deploy a noise filter to your activity and screen you out.
The “ignore at your peril” comment means that I view social media as a new channel that sits alongside old channels and those who succeed will be those that are maximising opportunities across all channels; and not ignoring social media because it appears to a fad. Social Media is here to stay. I found myself contrasting social media with the arrival of the internet. On my bookshelf I have issue one of .net magazine from December 1994. I remember then when I was going to an internet cafe in New Mills in Derbyshire with magazine in hand to experience the new fangled world wide web. I remember my first 56k modem and “the tones” involved in connecting to the internet from home. I remember evangelising about how the internet would change things and I remember the nay sayers and prophets of doom telling me it would never catch on or never be important. It would be difficult to deny that the internet today isn’t part of the fabric and hasn’t changed the way we consume information, the way we connect with people and the way we shop (just to name a few of the more obvious impacts).
We had an interesting debate about whether the iPad is going to be a hit or a miss. I’m very definitely on the side of it being a hit. I think it’s going to transform the way we consume books and magazines and newspapers partially because of the form factor but also because the iBookshop (or whatever it’s going to be called) is going to do the same thing to print media that iTunes did to music. It’s going to change the way we consume. I think it’s also going to have a massive impact on niche publishers who print and distribute to a small number of localised readers who are now going to get exposure to the long tail of the internet.
Other things we talked about....
The rise of new business models in the recruitment space; Jobgate , Talent Puzzle , Talentdrive , and we talked about referral models (including Prefio) and vacancy clearing models
Sourcing – and we looked at Jigsaw , who are attempting to be the largest database of contact information and talked about using Amazon Mechanical Turk as a possible route to, for example, sourcing email addresses from name / company lists. We also learnt recently from people like Jim Stroud that it’s about the search for people, not the search for CV’s.
Trends in recruitment – we talked about HR doing it for themselves and the rise of RPO activity; all to the detriment of traditional recruitment agencies
We talked about the difference between Facebook use in the UK versus the USA. It’s much more of a business tool in the USA than it is here.
We talked about twitter and about organising lists. Here’s a thought for the way that you organise your lists; have you got columns for Targets, Influencers and Competitors?
We talked a little about presentations and The Back Channel book by Cliff Atkinson – subtitled “How audiences are using Twitter and Social Media and changing presentations forever. Cliff wrote one of my favourite books about presenting called Beyond Bullet Points. We had a very quick look at a new online presenting tool which I think is very cool called Prezi
A bit of advice from Bill on blogging – when you blog watch the impact if you can include “LinkedIn” in the title of your post.
We also briefly talked about ROI for social media and I must follow up with Bill to get the url of the blog post he talked about that nailed some salient points.
So we quite happily chatted until late into the night, fortunately I live in walking distance from the hotel. Another really interesting nights conversation arising from getting involved in #trulondon. Thanks to Bill and also to Alan Whitford of RCEURO fame who pushed me in the right direction in the first place.
A few links...
My blog post on day 1 of #trulondon
My blog post on day 2 of #trulondon
My presentation to the enhanced media conference on slideshare
