In reflecting back on all this stuff, I started trying to recall what I did before I had these technologies available to me. I’m sure this is a question that many of you have asked yourselves as well, especially those of you in the ‘Baby Boomer’ generation, who can remember back way further than I ever could.

Seriously, how did we survive? What did we do for entertainment? Has technology really dumbed us down so much that we literally cannot find each other in a crowd without calling or texting our locations? Are we losing the ability to communicate face to face with each other because technology has allowed us the luxury of communicating through non-verbal and impersonal means?

A problem that arises with all these new social media technologies is that our interpersonal communication skills seem to be suffering in part due to them. In particular, recent college graduates are having a difficult time in the workforce due to their lack of communication skills. In a study done by The Conference Board back in 2006, it was found that “for graduates of four-year colleges, at least one in five employers found the recent graduates deficient in written in communications, writing in English and leadership.”

In 2008 the National Association of Colleges and Employers put an article out through JobWeb as a reference piece for the class of 2008. Within the article, they too discussed the issue of the lack of communication skills:

“Unfortunately-and ironically-the very qualities employers look for are the qualities they find lacking in many new graduates. More than a third of employers say new graduates lack face-to-face communication skills. They say many students tend to lack interview and presentation skills, telephone skills, and overall interpersonal (gets along well with others) skills.”

So with all of these hindrances that have resulted from the fabulous technology like that shown at the Web 2.0 Expo, how do we, in the business of recruiting, embrace it without letting it consume us? I think this question is best asked first of researchers and sourcers, since we are more likely to be the people who could get caught up in over-use. However, I think lots of folks in our industry are also in danger of “poo-pooing” every new thing that comes along simply because it’s new. As professionals in the recruiting industry, how do we not go from one extreme to the other and find a happy medium?

Be willing to try things out and find what works best for you. While other people may embrace certain tools, they may not provide value for your company. Find your own personal balance, and remember that your balance will be different from everyone else’s. Those of us who are researchers and sourcers are by nature going to embrace more of these tools and have a deeper interest in understanding them. Don’t fight it! If you are deeply interested in the technology, learn about it and apply what you learn to your job.

At the same time, don’t ignore new tools simply because you don’t understand them or don’t think they’ll add any immediate benefit to your work. Just because you never heard of it doesn’t mean it’s not worthwhile.

My experience helped to broaden my own knowledge base of what is available to me. Will I use everything I experienced? Nope! But I’m sure there will be plenty of opportunities at Waggener for me to use a lot of it. And because of that, I’m excited to be back to work and to be able to share what I learned with our staffing team and see how it will help us along the path to excellence in corporate recruiting.

Finally, it’s appropriate for me to thank Dave Manaster of ERE Media for giving me the opportunity to experience the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco last week. In chatting with him this week, he paid me a great compliment by saying that he was very comfortable offering me this chance because he knew I would do a good job, and he knew he could trust me. Also — my Waggener Edstrom coworkers, who went a few days without me while I was conferencing, were incredibly supportive of this opportunity and encouraged me to attend. Working with people who understand the value of learning about this technology is a blessing for me, and I’m so pleased to be part of such an awesome team at Waggener.

With that, I will leave you with a picture slideshow of some of the conference experiences, as well as a great video I was able to capture once the conference was over. I hope many of you will consider attending one of the three remaining Web 2.0 Expos this year, or the Expo in San Francisco in 2009.

I had many opportunities to speak with start-up entrepreneurs who were attending with hopes of gaining venture capital support. This conference was a great venue for many to talk with established technologists and business owners about their ideas, and an event called Launch Pad was held. Six new companies had the opportunity pitch their business for five minutes on stage, in front of the Web 2.0 Expo audience and a panel of VC judges. The six finalists, who were chosen through submission and panel review before the conference, were Acquia, Chirp Interactive, JobScore, Oortle, TradeVibes, and Triggit. Each company received feedback on its presentation right then and there from both the VC judges and the audience, and the VCs were given the option to offer these applicants non-binding term sheets for financing.

Following Launch Pad, I was able to spend about an hour chatting one-on-one with Dan Arkind. He has a rich, hands-on recruiting background and is one of the co-founders of JobScore (profile). Those of you who attended the start-up session at ERE in San Diego will remember JobScore — a new product targeted at in-house recruiting teams that “breaks down the walls” between different companies and empowers them to working directly with each other.

Employers use JobScore to build their own pipeline through one-click job posting, referral emails, etc. — which is all well and good — but what’s new and different is that they can also privately share resumes amongst themselves. Dan called it “cooperative recruitment” — basically allowing different employers to share their un-hired resumes directly with each other. For each new resume you add to the pool, you can take one out. If you don’t want to share, or if you want to take out more resumes than you put in, you have to pay.

The way in which this is different from the Jigsaw model is that resumes, not just names/titles/contact info, are being shared, and candidates must grant permission in order for their resume to be shared; as well, once permission is granted, they can turn it off at any time.

I enjoyed talking with Dan, mostly because he let me talk for the first 45 minutes about stuff that I am passionate about (just kidding…kinda) I enjoyed hearing Dan’s thoughts on our industry and how he believes new web 2.0 platforms will impact on the way we work. One interesting topic was that the social/interpersonal skills and relationship development ability that it takes to be successful in recruiting will never be replaced by social media, automation, or any kind of technology tool. I certainly wish Dan the best as he embarks on this endeavor, and I would encourage in-house corporate recruiting teams to check out JobScore (this tool is designed for you!!).

I had the chance to speak also with another entrepreneur named Jacob Visnick, CEO and co-founder of Zambino. The reason I connected with Jake was because I saw him in the Blogtropol.us lounge wearing a University of Florida sweatshirt, and I just HAD to run over and meet a fellow Gator (I am a U of FL alumni)!

Jake and his business partner, Adam Richman, launched Zambino as the first video advertising network geared toward connecting advertisers directly with content producers. Content producers create a profile on Zambino highlighting what brands interest them, and what type of products and services they want to promote within their videos. Advertising options range from preroll to product placement, and is up to the content producers. Advertising companies then match up their products and services to the profiles, and provide content to make it a seamless video on YouTube.

From a recruitment standpoint, companies (advertisers) can post jobs/advertising that they are looking to have done in up coming YouTube videos. This will be a great way for them to viral market their jobs via video to targeted audiences.

A very interesting sidenote: Adam Richman is a 17-year-old high school student. Yes, that’s right - he can’t even vote yet, and this is not his first start-up company either. Several VC’s were quite interested in Jake and Adam because of this, and it looks like this is going to be a profitable endeavor for them.

While I was unable to meet everyone in the expo hall, there were a couple other interesting companies that caught my eye with products and services that will be helpful in our recruiting space:

• Yahoo! SearchMonkey: read the post I did on this last week. Once this search tool gets the kinks worked out and comes out of beta, I believe it has the possibility of being HUGE for us researchers.

This is different from flash previews that some sites, like ask.com, offer in that the ‘preview’ is actually right on the results page, as opposed to popping up when moused over, and can be easily scraped.

Read TechCrunch’s review of this tool: Mark Hendrickson says that “SearchMonkey should be a significant step toward the more personalized, and potentially social, search that’s been anticipated by many.”

• Yoono: a browser sidebar that will aggregate your social network upates and allow you to update all statuses at once. In addition, while you surf, Yoono displays a list of other web pages that are “people-rated” - others have classified them in their favorites. You can also find other users who have a particular web page in their favorites.

The recruiting element of this is more for the researchers and sourcers, in that you can look up users who have added selected websites to their favorites and communicate with them. So for example, if someone has bookmarked several popular sites in your industry, you could contact them about job opportunities you are working on in that particular industry.

• VisualCV: read the post I did last week on this company. It was recently named the multi-media standard by the AESC for their ability to offer greater depth, breadth, and substance than traditional resumes through networking capabilities, online career portfolio management, and social media components. These online blog-type resumes offer a richer glimpse into candidates’ skills and of course are highly searchable.

• eXpresso: a practical application to a commonly-used business tool. For those of you who have multiple locations, you can use eXpresso to share Excel documents and allow for storing, editing, and instantly sharing without having to email bulky documents or wonder which version you’re supposed to be using. This is also great for companies that don’t have shared common drives and/or have many remote employees.

• Twitter: It did not have a booth, but everyone was using it throughout the conference. If you’re not using Twitter currently, you may want to consider doing so. This tool is a great method for viral marketing information, including job openings or candidates seeking work. Take a look at the following video for information from the microblogging session at the conference:

If you question how Twitter can be successfully used in recruiting, just refer to Jason Whitman, Jim Stroud, or you can email me and ask how I’ve personally used it for sourcing and found success.

Check out the rest of the exhibitors here; there were so many I couldn’t possibly get to all of them!

There’s a lot of stuff available out there for us. Should you be using everything? Absolutely NOT. Think of embracing these new web 2.0 tools in terms of grocery shopping: when you hit the supermarket, you wouldn’t dream of purchasing everything there! You go in, get what you need, and get out. But — the items you didn’t purchase are still going to be there, available for purchase, if and when you should ever need them. The same goes for all these technologies — take a look at what makes sense for you and your company to embrace, and then run with it, knowing that the other tools will be available if and when you decide it’s time to try them out.

During the course of the week, I met a variety of attendees, from technology directors to marketing folks, from CEOs of brand new companies to engineers from industry giants. In talking with many of these people, I found that several of them had attended the conference with the goal of finding talented people to come work with them.

So naturally, since I was attending representing a recruiting resource (and being an advocate of making strategic networking connections), I offered to help them out by bringing some of their needs to the attention of the ERE audience. You can check out some of the folks in this video I’ve made.

Those with hiring needs attending the conference used different methods of outreach, and from my personal perspective there were some that worked well, and others that kind of flopped. Below are two examples, one good and one not-so-good, of recruitment strategies used by those in attendance.

Recruiting That Worked — Personal Touch Coupled With Social Media

Before the event, a Crowdvine social network was set up where conference attendees could reach out to one another and request meetings with other attendees. I thought this was a perfect method of finding people who had expertise in one area or another, or for locating a representative from a company that you wanted to work for. In the days prior to my arrival, I searched this network using keywords such as “hiring”, “recruit”, and “talent” to see who was going to be searching for future employees. I reached out to interesting people and we exchanged contact information to set up times and places to meet and talk.

One of these connections actually produced a very interesting hiring need that I thought would be perfect for several people who read ERE. I met JJ Toothman, co-founder of a new start-up called Shiny New Toy. Shiny New Toy is a social media consultancy that assists its clients in developing online strategy to reach new audiences using a lot of the Web 2.0 technologies that are available.

JJ initiated our contact after reading my profile on the Crowdvine network, and he told me he is looking for a social media researcher to work for him. He reached out to me specifically because in my profile, I mentioned that I work in recruiting and I use social media to do my job. His need is for someone who is an expert social media user and can help with research within their clients’ business areas to find communities of people who would have an interest in their product or service. They would need to uncover the influencers in these communities — the bloggers, analysts, superusers, etc. — and help establish relationships with those people, in addition to helping uncover news resources to provide for clients.

This position would be a great fit for someone with excellent research skills in addition to a thirst for knowledge, the ability to communicate effectively, and of course in-depth knowledge of the use of social media. JJ also told me that this would be a virtual position, and after speaking with him I told him that I had a perfect audience to present this opportunity to. :)

He was pleased, and I hope that this may result in a hire for him! (if you’re interested in his position, please let me know (amybeth at amybethhale.com) and I’d be pleased to do an introduction!)

(Admittedly, I also took advantage of the PR talent that was available and did a little bit of sourcing for Waggener Edstrom while in town. I was able to meet with a couple of potential candidates while at the conference which should result in some excellent hires for us!)

Recruiting That Didn’t Work — the Fishbowl

Lots of companies who had set up booths in the expo hall put out fishbowls to collect business cards. Several of these companies were giving away free stuff and all you had to do is provide a business card to be eligible to win. My guess is that many of these companies will also be using these business card collections to do some recruiting. I would imagine that about 90% of the people who dropped their cards in the fishbowl just wanted the free stuff (heck, Etelos was giving away a free MacBook Air; I’m perfectly happy at Waggener, but I dropped my card in for that!!)

Amazon hosted an after-party across the street from the Moscone West hall on Thursday evening, and at the party they had a fishbowl for business cards and a rep who was handing out cards with a list of job openings for which they are currently hiring. Sounded good, but there was absolutely no mention of this ulterior motive in the official party schedule.

In addition to that, the venue was terribly inadequate for the number of attendees, the food and drink service was too slow (party-goers descended upon the food table like starving piranhas and servers were taking drink orders as opposed to having an open bar available), and in the middle of all this chaos, they decided to have an Amazon rep make a speech about something that I’m sure no one remembered. For about 10 minutes, this poor guy stood up at the top of the stairs and spoke (about what, I couldn’t tell you because I could barely hear him and I was busy trying to elbow my way to the food table).

While I’m sure Amazon will find one or two good candidates from this chaos, again, I’ll bet at least 90% of the attendees were there for the food and booze, not to get an interview at Amazon. And whoever thought it was a good idea to give a speech in the middle of all this probably should have re-thought that strategy.

That being said, one could argue that gathering hundreds of business cards using a fishbowl could produce some good hires, but at the same time, purchasing an expo booth slot was VERY expensive (I heard one company spent $60,000!), as is hosting an after-party like Amazon did. I think the best route was the one taken by companies who explored the attendee network, pinpointed interesting people, and requested to meet with them. The cost of doing this? Maybe a cup of coffee (which was provided to us for free), 15 minutes to have a quality conversation, and whatever the admission cost was to attend (starting as low as $100 for the expo hall only).

Being a big fan of social media, and especially after having met these individuals, I believe that while it is important to know and embrace the fundamentals of recruiting, it is equally important to understand the impact that social media and the rest of the Web 2.0 technologies have already had, and will continue to have, on the way that we do our jobs in recruiting, sourcing, and research. These tools will help us do our jobs easier, but only if we allow them to. And career opportunities in this space are hot right now (obviously!), so jumping on board at this time could be financially rewarding for you as well!

In an upcoming article, I will discuss specifically two entrepreneurs I had the pleasure of meeting whose companies are geared to serve the needs of the recruiting community. I will also review some of the technologies that were showcased that will have direct impact on our recruiting research practices. Please keep an eye out for more videos, pictures, and reviews of the conference!

Basically, it takes Yahoo’s search engine and allows you to see into the data on the results link without having to click on the link:

Yahoo has combined “a free, open platform with structured, semantic content from across the Web.” SearchMonkey “gives all Web site owners an opportunity to present more useful information on the Yahoo! Search page as compared to what is presented on other search engines. Site owners will be able to provide all types of additional information about their site directly to Yahoo! Search. So instead of a simple title, abstract and URL, for the first time users will see rich results that incorporate the massive amount of data buried in websites — ratings and reviews, images, deep links, and all kinds of other useful data — directly on the Yahoo! Search results page.”

From a recruitment standpoint, this is an incredible timesaver for clicking through our results page! I asked them to do a sample search using LinkedIn, since LinkedIn had already provided some code for this demo. I know this photo isn’t the greatest quality, but this is what the results can look like. And if you know how to write code, you can actually write code tailored to what you want to see — so for example, using a site:linkedin.com search string, you could write code that would display the industry, title, location, etc. directly on the results page for individual LinkedIn profiles.

Keep in mind this is still in beta so some of the kinks are being worked out, but can you imagine the coolness of using site: searches and getting the information you need right on the results page, as opposed to having to click through every single result? Fantastic!

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