-From San Francisco, a report from the Web 2.0 Expo and what recruiters can learn from the goings-on.
As early as 7:30 Tuesday morning, I was meeting neat people. I sat at a table for breakfast with Sharon Shafer, a librarian at UCLA. She shared some interesting thoughts on research techniques. Sharon said that she believes a lot of research is being duplicated simply because due diligence is not done and people do not know how to look stuff up these days.
I spend about 20 minutes dorking out with her about research. I also met Sam Lawrence, the CMO for Jive Software (pictured) who had broken his ankle and, using Twitter, gotten a couple of companies to sponsor his wheelchair so that he could attend the conference.
I met Brian Solis of FutureWorks and PR 2.0, and Josh Bernoff of Forrester Research, who gave me a personally autographed advance copy of his new book, Groundswell, which talks about how to succeed in a world transformed by social technologies. I even got to shake Robert Scoble’s hand and introduce myself to him. And then, there were the sessions…how to develop social communities and properly manage them, how companies are leveraging microblogs to reach their target audience in a web 2.0 atmosphere, how to monetize corporate blogging…and what does any of this have to do with recruiting you might say? I think everything!
Web 2.0 is changing the way people interact, and if we choose to not embrace it, we will be left in the dust by those who do. After all, communication is a cornerstone of the recruiting business. While never forgetting the basics, we must progress with technology when it comes to social media and understand its importance in communication today.
With that in mind, I headed down to the exhibit hall and found VisualCV (site; profile) there. For those who don’t know, Visual CV was just today named the multi-media standard by the AESC for its ability to offer greater depth, breadth, and substance than traditional resumes through networking capabilities, online career portfolio management, and social media components. I spoke with Scott Herman who gave me some great information on some of the neat things they’re doing. VisualCV was launched back in February and is still operating in beta, so it’s brand-spanking new.
As of right now, over half their users are from outside the U.S., which is interesting because this was not their target market. Scott seemed to think it had something to do with the capability of adding photos and more personal information to the online resume, a practice that is more widely accepted in Europe and South America than in the U.S.
VisualCV also allows you to have control over what components people can view, shows you who’s viewed your resume and who hasn’t, and is in process of adopting OpenID and easy data portability to be in alignment with many social networks today. They’ve got a great concept, and I’ve got a profile there! I would encourage everyone to check them out.
More to come following day 2!
–Amybeth Hale
