No, seriously, I am — at least, that’s what www.humanforsale.com told me. I took their survey and the resulting value on my person was nearly $2 million. Of course, I’d like to think that I am priceless. (Waiting while you all vomit…) Try it for yourself and see what you’d go for on eBay…

But getting serious (and because that site doesn’t take into account the fact that I’m a sourcer) — let’s talk about what sourcing is worth. What are you, as a professional people-hunter/sourcer/search ninja actually worth?

If we knew the answer to this question, we wouldn’t be asking you, our readers. It’s a question that comes up often and almost never receives the same answer. Some people think that sourcing is only worth about $6/hr. Others command a hefty $100+/hr billing rate for sourcing projects. Regardless of how you approach this question, the answer will almost never be accurate and I believe that is because there is no cookie-cutter framework in which “sourcing” fits. For instance:

• Some sourcers do lead generation
• Some sourcers do lead generation + initial outreach
• Some sourcers do lead generation + initial outreach + pre-screening
• Some sourcers do all of the above as well as strategic initiatives, including pipeline development and employment branding projects

…yet they are all “sourcers.” To say that each of these types of individuals should be paid the same since they are all classified as “sourcer” would be as incorrect as saying a person working in sales at a retail storefront should be making the same as a person working in sales at a multi-national ERP software manufacturer, because they both carry the same title.

In my personal opinion, sourcers’ compensation should be determined based on two main items and one sub-item:

• Level of expertise (usually determined by years of experience, but not always)
• Scope of function

If you want experience, you must pay for it. If you want more work to be done, you have to pay for that, too. And if you are not willing to pay for either (translated — you are looking for a “top-notch sourcer” at at $13/hr) then you will engage in a never-ending search — either because you’ll never find a sourcer willing to take your job, or you’ll end up hiring all the wrong ones.

Geography also plays a role in determining a sourcer’s compensation. Where you are in the world makes a big difference — for example, sourcers in the United States and Australia typically get paid more than sourcers in Asia. Cost of living in a given location makes a big difference in what a sourcer could/should earn.

With this in mind, I invite all of you who are sourcers to participate in our Salary Survey so we can get a snapshot of what the actual compensation of sourcers is today. Please follow this link and take a few moments to anonymously fill out the survey. Once we get a good sampling we will share this information on SourceCon.com to give everyone a better idea of how sourcing is compensated.

While making the switch over to the new subscription service on the website, the existing daily FeedBlitz emails will continue to be sent over the next couple of weeks while existing subscribers update their accounts. Please take a moment to register for the new SourceCon Weekly email newsletter here.

Why Register for a SourceCon Account?

If you have any interest in sourcing, Internet research, telephone sourcing, or pretty much anything that relates to recruitment research, SourceCon.com will feed your hunger for knowledge. It takes just a minute to register for an account. All that is needed from you is a little information — your name, your role, your social security number, your ATM pin (just kidding…hehe) — and you’ll enjoy these benefits:

• Free email newsletter subscriptions
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• Phenomenal cosmic powers … okay, that’s a stretch

Some questions you may have:

• I’m already subscribed. Why do I have to re-register? Can’t you just transfer my old information? While this would certainly be the easiest thing for you, the old subscription service did not require a user “account” — meaning, you did not have to sign up with a password. The new subscription service does, and therefore to protect the privacy of the information which you’ll provide, you’ll need to register again in order to password protect your account.
• Why are you switching to a weekly newsletter? I want to read SourceCon.com daily. You still can! Just go directly to the website and you can read the articles as they are posted each day. You can also read the daily posts by subscribing to the RSS feed. Switching to a weekly email newsletter will provide you with more of a ‘digest’ of SourceCon.com. That way, your inbox won’t be filling up with SourceCon.com emails every day, but instead you will be provided with a collection of excellent sourcing knowledge once each week to dive into.
• OK — I’ve signed up for the new weekly email subscription. Why am I still receiving daily emails from the old service? If you are an existing subscriber, both newsletters will continue to go out simultaneously for a couple of weeks in order to accommodate the switch and give everyone plenty of time to register with the new service. You will continue to receive a daily email from the existing FeedBlitz service, but you’ll also receive the new SourceCon Weekly newsletter. Don’t fret — this will only last for a week or two to provide everyone with ample time to register in the new system.

Don’t forget: you need to register with the new service in order to continue receiving your email subscription. Please go here to set up your new account.

Please let me (Amybeth Hale) know if you have any questions about the new email subscription service; hope you enjoy the new format!

I should have listened sooner. I finally hopped on the bandwagon and joined Quora just after the New Year. Granted, some folks in the recruiting world don’t think Quora is worth investing any time into, like Matt Alder outlined in his post. But the social media world seems to have embraced it — at least temporarily. And though we sourcers do like to believe we’re early adopters and farther ahead on the tech curve than our recruiting brethren, we still do fall behind the hard-core social media junkies in most cases.

First of all — what is Quora? Quora was founded in mid-2009 by a couple of ex-Facebook employees. It launched a private beta at the beginning of 2010 and opened up to the public last summer. According to the website,

Quora is a continually improving collection of questions and answers created, edited, and organized by everyone who uses it. The most important thing is to have each question page become the best possible resource for someone who wants to know about the question.

People use Quora to document the world around them. Over time, the database of knowledge should grow and grow until almost everything that anyone wants to know is available in the system. When knowledge is put into Quora, it is there forever to be shared with anyone in the future who is interested.

Sounds like Wikipedia to me. But with somewhat of a social twist, because you can connect your Twitter and Facebook profiles to it, as well as a blog, allowing you to share your Q&A content directly on your blog. Plus, the founders are big on community management and quality of content, so it won’t end up like a shallow Q&A site where the surface is scratched and nothing ever gets really deep.

The way we as sourcers look at these types of tools is completely different from most people. Which is why I think Alder and some of the other folks in the recruiting world who are relatively neutral haven’t given Quora a fair shake. A post by Beth Kanter, a marketing professional for non-profits, excellently summarizes a few of its benefits, some of which are:

• Slower, Reflective Experience: Quora offers focused attention, not reactive. It prompts deeper insights about topics in which you’re interested. Someone commented on a TechCrunch post about Quora, “This site has the ability to make you want to consume endless knowledge and to me that revolutionary in itself.”
• Subject Matter Expertise: The people who have been contributing to Quora thus far seem to be higher on the “expert” status indicator. That’s not to say that there isn’t the potential of the site being watered down as it grows by spammers and self-promoters. But Quora is heavily moderated so as to keep this kind of activity to a minimum. Moderation is to prevent contributors from asking yes/no or polling questions and to provide assistance for revising questions so they are more open-ended. This encourages more thoughtful responses.
• Object Based Social Sharing vs. Social Graph Sharing: It is one thing to know who is within your “social graph” — who you’re connected to and through what other networked connections. It’s a whole new thing to be able to dive right into the value within those networked connections. Quora isn’t a “social network” — it’s a site that happens to allow you to connect to it through a couple of social networks, but ultimately it’s about sharing content, not just connections.

So for a sourcer, the true value in any new, shiny tool is if you can use it to find relevant information — whether it’s people profiles or competitive intelligence.

First, when you register for Quora by connecting your Twitter account, it appears that you automatically “follow” any other Quora user that you’re also following on Twitter. The default Home stream of questions and discussions comes from those whom you follow, so if you’re using Twitter to follow your target recruiting audience, you’ve got instant access to discussions that are likely relevant to the industry in which you source. Any good sourcer knows that to attract the best in the business, you need to be part of the discussion. At the very least, you have the discussion right in front of you to make it easy to follow.

When you are ready to start participating in some discussions, the search bar at the top makes it fairly easy to find relevant topics. It guides you to the best, already-established topics based on predictive keyword recognition — much like Google Instant. Here are a couple of tips I’ve picked up from my own search trials:

• For third-party folks and/or those looking for competitive intelligence, try typing in the words “are hiring” — you’ll get lists that people have created of companies that are hiring in a wide variety of industries and geographies. This will produce quick new marketing or CI lists for you!
• If you want to find lists of people, try typing in the words “who are the” and then add whatever keyword you want. For example, in a search for ERP analysts, three people were recommended, complete with first and last names, companies, and websites to reference. Of course, this kind of information won’t be available for every search, but it’s worth a shot. Here’s another excellent example of a user-generated recommendation list of “gamification” professionals, using “who are the smartest” as a start to the search. And another example — for web developers in Seattle.

Another method that might take you longer but could also yield you some excellent resources would be to search for topic areas that have to do with the industry in which you source. For example, if you work in banking, type in the word “banking.” You will then be able to refine your search and browse specific topics. Amongst those who respond to questions about banking are bound to be Branch Managers and other folks with whom you’d surely want to connect.

But good sourcers know that it is important to give and not just to take. A great way to leverage Quora would be to actually participate in some of the discussions and provide helpful information where you can. Keep in mind that the people you are looking for may also be looking for you.

The site does, of course, have its limitations. One limitation is obviously that since the content is user-generated, topic areas and industries represented are limited. There are lots of folks from VCs, start-ups, and technology backgrounds participating right now. That’s not to say that it won’t change as the site gains popularity. But if you are looking for construction project managers in East Timbuktu, chances are you won’t find much value in this site (yet). Brands also are not allowed (yet) on Quora — just individual people. Another limiting factor is that there is just SO much going on on the site that it can be overwhelming if you don’t really take the time to figure out how you are going to use it. And, you cannot search specifically for profiles on Quora (yet). That’s because, again, it isn’t a “social network.”

But there have already been some success stories from a recruiting standpoint to come from Quora. Check out this question that was posed:

(make note of the tags at the top, as well as the original question posed to which this was a follow-up)

Some of the responses to this question include:

“I’m a moderate quora user who has answered a dozen or so questions in my area of expertise. I’ve been headhunted by two startups, one yesterday and one weeks ago. Both early stage startups and relevant opportunities. Offers were more interesting than the ones I’ve typically received on linkedin. Im sure that tech startups and recruiters will start to use quora more often.”

“I’ve been invited to a few rounds of in-person interviews with several startups. They liked my answers to technical questions on Quora. I messed it up just because of my laziness and inexperience with typical Programming Interviews. The signal to noise ratio is high though, I’ve been talking to CTOs of companies, not recruiters. Mentioning their Quora answer in an email also works like a charm. I’m an old soldier and I don’t know words of love but this is one thing I want to express my gratitude to Adam D’Angelo, Charlie Cheever and the entire Quora team. This site really allows to bypass the bureaucratic HR department.” [emphasis added]

Sourcers, people are looking for work everywhere. As the above response indicates, they’ll happily by-pass us and our recruiting counterparts along the way. We might as well be where they are if nothing more than to monitor discussions and participate once in while.

Check out Quora and see if it can become a good resource for you — as of right now, I have already found it to be beneficial for SourceCon.com, FordyceLetter.com, and ERE.net in general. Let us know what your experience is like!

originally posted on our sister site, SourceCon.com

You may have noticed recently that under the LinkedIn Jobs tab, there are listings under a section called “Jobs you may be interested in” that offer jobs that are specifically targeted to end users. Here is a screenshot of my personal job offerings:

Pretty good, if you ask me. Based on my experience and the keywords I’ve listed in my profile, these jobs are pretty spot on for things I’d be interested in, though the AAE job would be a bit junior (a PR AAE is typically an entry-level or one-year experience role). LinkedIn started beta testing this and saw lots of success with clickthroughs from active job seekers. It decided to see what would happen if it put it on the home page, and they discovered that it was able to reach a whole new group of individuals — passive job seekers who were not actively looking for jobs — but when this offering was placed in the home page, they clicked through.

Jobs For You

Having found this to be successful with bringing a whole different set of eyeballs, LinkedIn took things one step further, which is where it’s at today in announcing the new Jobs For You. This new product offering will allow companies to share jobs with individuals conducting normal web searches, using information from their LinkedIn profiles to target them with specific, relevant opportunities.

While the concept of delivering relevant job opportunities is not new, LinkedIn has taken this to a new level. Others who have explored this idea have looked at data based on search activity, thus targeting active job seekers who have run searches indicating that they were specifically looking for jobs. Another method of targeting job seekers has been by using geotargeting. While using this approach will get you geographically targeted individuals, and often passive job seeker traffic, they may not necessarily be the “right” talent. They’re just targeting anyone and everyone within a specific location. With the data that LinkedIn has gathered from individual profiles, this new Jobs For You ad module will deliver targeted and relevant opportunities to individuals based on the information in their LinkedIn profile (as an aside, this means it’s a good time to fill our your LinkedIn profile completely!)

In case you were wondering, there are no privacy issues here: LinkedIn will not be selling your profile data to any third parties in order to accomplish this. As simply as it can be explained, LinkedIn reads a user cookie from your computer and applies it to the code in the ad module that will show up in your search results, on a career web page, or wherever else a company wants to place this coded ad. This cookie is unique to you and provides the LinkedIn ad with the information it needs to deliver a list of relevant opportunities from the company that purchased the ad. And of course, LinkedIn users will be able to opt out from this if they don’t want to participate. But who wouldn’t want an occasional interesting opportunity to be tossed their way?

To recap, Jobs For You will work both on LinkedIn as well as offsite. From what we know at this point, pricing is a CPM model. You can find out more detail info by visiting LinkedIn’s Talent Advantage website. This is a pretty interesting product, because from a recruiting perspective it takes targeting passive candidates to a whole new level.

Referral Engine

The second product that LinkedIn announced this morning will remain in beta until the first half of 2011, but it will make some waves in the area of employee referrals. This product, called Referral Engine, assists companies in hiring talent from their employees’ referrals by involving more employees in making referrals, and helping them make more quality referrals. One of the issues with receiving employee referrals is that sometimes, employees will refer someone for a job just because they’re a friend, or they think perhaps they might be a fit even though they probably aren’t. With Referral Engine, when a company posts a new job through LinkedIn, LinkedIn will make suggestions to employees tied to that company of individuals within their networks that would be a good fit for that job, and it will ask them simply if they wish to refer any of those individuals. Essentially, Referral Engine helps employees to “pre-screen” their own network in order to make quality referrals.

The even better part about Referral Engine is that it will be a free service to “Recruiter” customers once it is rolled out. Obviously, the more jobs posted by the company, the better this service will work. But this new product will really make a difference with employee referral programs and getting more employees involved in making referrals from their networks. It also opens another door for LinkedIn (or anyone, for that matter) to offer training to companies and whole teams within companies for using LinkedIn, getting employees involved, helping them to thoroughly fill out their profiles, etc.

You can learn more information about these two new offerings from LinkedIn on its Talent Advantage website.

According to its website, TalentSpring’s resume search engine reviews an organization’s open job descriptions, identifies the relevant attributes being sought (experience, skill, location, education, etc.), and then matches those attributes to tens-of-thousands of resumes found on social networking sites, job boards and the organization’s ATS. The search results are ranked and ordered based on candidate quality and relevance, saving recruiters and hiring managers time, improving hire quality, and reducing overall time-to-hire.

The power of TalentSpring’s system comes from harnessing the capabilities of semantic-search technology and algorithmic ranking methodology to automate the manual process of finding and reviewing candidate resumes. Today 40% of a recruiter’s time is spent sourcing qualified candidates (searching for and reading resumes). And, with a time limit of just 200 resumes per search, they are often unable to find the ideal candidates.

Founded in 1999, Talent Technology is a provider of recruitment and hiring software and component technology. Its goal is to deliver products that make it faster and easier for recruiters and hiring managers to find and hire top talent. With its HireDesk and Resume Mirror products, it has helped many organizations, from small independent recruiting firms to global enterprises, attract and recruit the people they need to drive their success.

There were whisperings at the recent HR Technology Conference in Chicago of something going on between these two companies, and a TalentSpring podium was spotted residing in the Talent Technology booth. But no official word had been shared — until now.

There is no further information at this point, but there are sure to be some very cool things to come about from this partnership. Stay tuned for more details as they are made available!

If you can’t make it in person, you can still catch much of the great content by watching the live stream carried here on the ERE.net homepage or at www.sourcecon.com.

Things will get kicked off at noon Eastern on Tuesday, September 28th and will continue on Wednesday starting at 8:45 a.m. Eastern. You can find the full schedule of sessions here.

You can watch the stream online right here on ERE.net, or you can watch on the SourceCon homepage, participate in the live chat, and follow the event on Twitter using the #SourceCon hashtag. Just click the ‘play’ button on the uStream box and you are all set!

Led by our chairperson Eric Jaquith, this year’s speaker lineup includes sourcing experts such as:

• Glen Cathey
• Gary Conway
• Jeff Eveler
• Chris Gould
• Kristin Kalscheur
• Earl Mann
• Shannon Myers
• Michael Notaro
• Tim O’Connor
• Maureen Sharib
• Shally Steckerl

You can read more about all of the speakers and what they will be talking about on the Agenda page.

Oliver Ryan, Director of Recruiting (or “People Wrangler” as it states in his LinkedIn profile), joined Twitter about a year ago. When he arrived, there were no full-time recruiting resources at Twitter, and total headcount was only around 40 employees. Since then, Ryan was offered a full-time position and the company has grown to over 250 employees, with the recruiting team now at eleven people.

How did this happen? Ryan says that lots of startups believe it is best to outsource recruiting instead of investing in building in-house teams. But not Twitter. The company has really focused on investing in the recruiting infrastructure, and as a result, there is a culture of recruiting built into the entire organization. The whole company views recruiting as a high priority — “It’s one of the most important things that we’re doing,” says Ryan. For example, Twitter loves people who contribute to open source projects. The Twitter engineers may run across other engineers contributing to open source projects and be impressed with their work. They’ll either reach out themselves or pass the information to the recruiting team, who then reach out. Essentially, everyone in the company “recruits.”

Ryan says “there are no ‘secrets’ to what we do.” He is quite proud of the recruiting team that it has assembled and sys that they focus and specialize within their roles. Many of the recruiters have worked as solo recruiters for various start-ups and are quite capable of doing the full cycle recruiting thing. But he believes that by allowing his team to specialize, it will be better equipped to find the “right people” for the company.

So how does Twitter go about doing this? Ryan says that it does not target specific companies or competitors from which to hire people away. It also does not conform its hiring to individuals who have certain types of degrees from a specific list of colleges and universities. Instead, the recruiters focus on specific talent and skillsets. Ryan says that it takes a great interest in discovering what kinds of hobbies and outside-of-work interests potential candidates have. Basically, he says, “We are looking for passion.”

Ryan also shared that the most important part of Twitter’s recruiting process is ensuring a positive candidate experience. From the first contact to the final interview, the recruiting team as well as the rest of the employees, strive to make the experience a pleasant one for candidates. This way, even those who are not hired go away feeling good about the opportunity.

Regarding the video (which was inspired by a scene from Wes Anderson’s Rushmore), Ryan says that someone internally who focuses on company culture had the idea to create it. They saw other recruiting videos and wanted to put something together that reflected Twitter’s culture, but that was also tongue-in-cheek. He joked that they did not want the nerf guns and the ironic high-fives to appear in their video (i.e. not too much cheese), but they did want to show the real people behind the product and that the company has a fun, laid-back, yet productive atmosphere.

Fun fact: Ryan appears in the video dressed as Uncle Sam with some of the recruiting team (at 0:51). The ironic part of this is that he is originally from the UK. (when we spoke, I guessed wrongly that he was Canadian!)

The question that I’m sure many of you have at this point is this: How does Twitter use its own product for recruiting purposes? Twitter obviously was not specifically designed to be used as a recruiting tool (shocking, I know!) but there are many applications of it for recruiting purposes. Ryan says that regarding anyone who applies at Twitter, they investigate how they personally use Twitter. Are they purposeful or scattered? Helpful or spammy? Bot-like or interactive and personal? They have also set up an ‘official’ recruiting Twitter account called @jointheflock. That account currently has more than 18,000 followers and follows a small handful of accounts which appear to be its recruiters (in addition to @biz and a couple of company accounts). Within this list is a relatively new account for them, @TwitterU, which was created specifically for its university recruiting efforts. (sidenote: looks like it launched on August 17th and already has over 2,500 followers!) I have it on good authority (OK, Ryan shared with me!) that it is really hitting the pavement hard starting this week with its university recruiting efforts.

Looking deeper into the three “corporate” accounts for their recruiting efforts – @jointheflock, @TwitterU, and @TwitterEng — you’ll notice that the company mixes feeds with real human interaction. It appears to use an automatic feed delivery tool called dlvr.it (which, incidentally, we also use for some of our feeds) but peppered in with the news feeds are human tweets from company employees. Additionally, the accounts follow relevant people who work at Twitter and frequently re-tweet them. In turn, the employees follow these accounts and re-tweet job opportunities to their own followings. They truly share a fishbowl glimpse of what it’s like to work at Twitter.

My biggest takeaways from my conversation with Ryan:

1. Twitter is very much focused on giving its audience, whether it be customers, investors, or potential employees, a transparent view into the company and how it functions.
2. Everyone within the company participates to some degree in the recruiting practices, because they know bringing in good talent is beneficial to them individually as much as it is to the company as a whole.
3. Twitter practices what it preaches. It uses its own product effectively to recruit, but focuses on what’s most important: the people and the relationships.

I would venture to guess that your personal feelings on any of these questions are directly tied to the level of involvement you currently have in social media. Those of you who have put time and effort — TRUE time and effort — into understanding how social media tools work, are seeing the positive results.

And those of you who have merely dabbled in it here and there aren’t seeing what you thought you would.

Keep in mind — social media is, quite simply, social. You get out of it what you put in. And you have to contribute first before you can expect to get anything in return.

This may not be the answer you were looking for, but truly, there are some things in life that you can’t shortcut and be truly successful at. Diets, marriage, and building fulfilling and lasting relationships all take time and lots of effort to find true success. Just ask anyone who’s had to shed a few pounds or who has been happily married for a long time.

I am looking forward to addressing some of these items during my discussion at The Fordyce Forum coming up this June.

It is important to first understand what social media is, because understanding is the first and most important step of mastering anything in life. I’ve been having conversations with some folks in the HR and recruiting world who have embraced social media tools and have seen some great results in their recruitment efforts, so I’ll discuss that as well.

And I’m looking forward to some lively crowd interaction as well as a few surprises I’ve got planned. Even if you can’t attend, make sure to check out my hashtag, #VegasRG, to keep up with — and maybe participate in — what’s going on in the training session.

For those of you who will be attending, I want you to start thinking about what social media tools you’ve already begun using, and what you’ve learned from those experiences. Have you had positive or negative results? What have you observed others doing? Have you engaged a professional consultant or have you been learning on your own?

My only request? Come with an open mind and a clean slate. Proper thought process about the use of social media tools, in my opinion, is more important than understanding all of the technical “ins and outs” of them. I am excited to see you in Vegas in just a few short weeks!

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