Web Users Shifting to Social Media

According to a new report from Netpop Research, "Media Shifts to Social," the percent of time people spend communicating online has increased 18% since 2006, while time spent on entertainment has declined 29%. The Executive Summary says that Online entertainment is shifting to a small, powerful proportion of social media contributors fueling Web activity through blogs micro-blogs, social media, video and photo sharing.

Key Findings from the study include data such as:

• 105 million Americans contribute to social media
• Social networking has grown 93% since 2006
• 7 million Americans are "heavy" social media contributors (6+ activities) who connect with 248 people on a ‘one to many' basis in a typical week
• 54% of micro-bloggers post or "tweet" daily
• 72% of micro-bloggers under age 18 post or "tweet" daily

The report concludes that market trends and customer opinion are being shaped by end users more rapidly and with greater impact on business than ever before as an entirely new form of leisure develops around talking and sharing, providing opinions and perspectives... and suggests that Websites need to connect directly with users or the users will create their own venues that are harder for companies to track and participate with effectively.

To learn how to leverage social media and Web 2.0 to attract A-Level Talent contact your NAS Rep today.

Source: Research Brief: Web Users Shaping Consumer Opinion, March 09, 2009

You're Invited to Attend a Free Webinar

Campus Recruiting online is one of the most cost effective ways to recruit. . . students today don’t just use electronic tools; they’re practically attached to them 24/7! But don’t look like an out-of-touch company because you are not using social networks and text messaging to deliver the message. Join us for this complimentary session and see how NAS can help you tap this primary talent market

Campus Recruiting: Employing Web 2.0 Strategies to Attract A-Level Talent

Tuesday, March 10, 10:00am CST

Reserve your seat today by emailing Lauren Garten at lgarten@nasrecruitment.

Jurassic Web

The Internet of 1996 is almost unrecognizable compared with what we have today.

It's 1996, and you're bored. What do you do? If you're one of the lucky people with an AOL account, you probably do the same thing you'd do in 2009: Go online. Crank up your modem, wait 20 seconds as you log in, and there you are—"Welcome." You check your mail, then spend a few minutes chatting with your AOL buddies about which of you has the funniest screen name (you win, pimpodayear94).

Then you load up Internet Explorer, AOL's default Web browser. Now what? There's no YouTube, Digg, Huffington Post, or Gawker. There's no Google, Twitter, Facebook, or Wikipedia. A few newspapers and magazines have begun to put their articles online—you can visit the New York Times or Time—and there are a handful of new Web-only publications, including Feed, HotWired, Salon, Suck, Urban Desires, Word, and, launched in June, Slate. But these sites aren't very big, and they don't hold your interest for long. People still refer to the new medium by its full name—the World Wide Web—and although you sometimes find interesting stuff here, you're constantly struck by how little there is to do. You rarely linger on the Web; your computer takes about 30 seconds to load each page, and, hey, you're paying for the Internet by the hour. Plus, you're tying up the phone line. Ten minutes after you log in, you shut down your modem. You've got other things to do—after all, a new episode of Seinfeld is on.

On June 25, 1996, Michael Kinsley introduced Slate in an inaugural column. Two months later, David Plotz wondered who pays for the Internet. In 1997, Carol M. Beach pondered the possibility of taxing the Web. In 1999, Timothy Noah credited the Democratic Party with the Internet's invention. In 2003, Kevin Werbach heralded the return of the 1995 Internet. In 2006, Paul Boutin examined the highly imprecise science of measuring traffic, and in 2008 Chris Wilson complained that the Internet was still infuriatingly slow.

I started thinking about the Web of yesteryear after I got an e-mail from an idly curious Slate colleague: What did people do online back when Slate launched, he wondered? After plunging into the Internet Archive and talking to several people who were watching the Web closely back then, I've got an answer: not very much.

We all know that the Internet has changed radically since the '90s, but there's something dizzying about going back to look at how people spent their time 13 years ago. Sifting through old Web pages today is a bit like playing video games from the 1970s; the fun is in considering how awesome people thought they were, despite all that was missing. In 1996, just 20 million American adults had access to the Internet, about as many as subscribe to satellite radio today. The dot-com boom had already begun on Wall Street—Netscape went public in 1995—but what's striking about the old Web is how unsure everyone seemed to be about what the new medium was for. Small innovations drove us wild: Look at those animated dancing cats! Hey, you can get the weather right from your computer! In an article ranking the best sites of '96, Time gushed that Amazon.com let you search for books "by author, subject or title" and "read reviews written by other Amazon readers and even write your own." Whoopee. The very fact that Time had to publish a list of top sites suggests lots of people were mystified by the Web. What was this place? What should you do here? Time recommended that in addition to buying books from Amazon, "cybernauts" should read Salon, search for recipes on Epicurious, visit the Library of Congress, and play the Kevin Bacon game.

Source: By Farhad Manjoo, Posted to Slate.com Tuesday, Feb. 24, 2009, at 5:33 PM ET

Recruiting Lessons from ‘Fast Company’

The March 2009 issue of Fast Company lists its take on the 50 most innovative companies in the world.

As I read their analysis, it seemed evident that the lessons learned about what makes a company innovative could be directly applied to the recruiting industry. With this perspective in mind, here’s how I’d translate business and product innovation into recruiting ideas.

Some of them are wild and crazy, but then again, they might just work.

Innovative Recruiting Lessons Loosely Interpreted from Fast Company

The order shown below is my ranking of the ideas themselves. The Fast Company ranking is also shown.

Amazon #9 on the Fast Company list. Innovative idea: developing the Kindle ebook based on the idea that you should focus first on your customers’ needs when delivering products and services, not some preconceived idea of the way it should be. Application to recruiting: if you want to hire top people, first figure out how they find career opportunities, why they engage with a company to evaluate a specific opportunity, and why they select one job over another. This seems so obvious, yet when I look at how most companies write ads, screen candidates, keep them interested, and make offers, it’s great advice. Maybe you should be reading this on a Kindle.

Intel #6. Innovative idea: created teensy chips for targeted market applications. Application to recruiting: stop posting big, boring job ads on career sites. Instead, use Twitter and micro blogs targeted to narrower audiences, or push your jobs using aggregators to specific functional sites.
Team Obama #1. Innovative idea: empower your customers to participate more actively using the latest online technology. Application to recruiting: create talent communities. This is a search engine optimized talent hub grouped by job class that’s easier to find than an individual posting, and certainly more inviting. This micro site funnels candidates to a prospect pool to be nurtured using some CRM tool. To capture their attention, prospects can interact with recruiters and hiring managers without applying, just to get more information. What an idea! Imagine allowing customers just to look around and easily compare products before buying one? Now that’s a recruiting idea worthy of consideration.

Google #2. Innovative idea: continuous innovation. Application to recruiting: always improve what you’re doing, use consumer marketing concepts to reach people before the competition to establish a competitive advantage, and try stuff out even if it doesn’t work. Application to recruiting: just about everything you do now should be reconsidered. It fact, maybe have the recruiting and sourcing department report to marketing or be run by someone who is customer-focused?

Hulu #4. This is the TV-on-the-Internet company. Innovative idea: make a site that’s easy to use and fun, and easy to create by getting rivals to work together. In this case, Fox and NBC Universal. Application to recruiting: make it easy as possible to have prospects find your site and get engaged. As part of this, maybe recruiting should have its own dedicated IT staff. There are just too many rivals for the corporate IT department’s attention, so this way you could try more new things faster.

Apple #5. Innovative idea: offer great design, charge premium prices, don’t stop innovating, and be green. Application to recruiting: Make your jobs different than the competition; offer something unique; sell on career growth, not compensation; and be green.
Hewlett-Packard #12. Innovative idea: partner with non-related companies in order to offer your customers a unique and custom product experience. Application for recruiting: Partner with non-traditional organizations outside your company to attract a different type of prospect. For example, you could partner with Trump Casinos and invite recent MBA grads to a poker championship (it’s been done by Harrah’s) or develop some type of online competitive interactive game for your sales reps.

Cisco #5. Innovative idea: continue to act like a start-up. Application to recruiting: don’t be bureaucratic. This means HR, comp, legal, and the OFCCP shouldn’t be driving the design of your hiring processes. This doesn’t mean you’ll be out of compliance, it just means you won’t be boring.

Pure Digital Technologies #7. This is the company that makes the Flip video recorder. Innovative idea: make the product easy to use and offer customers a chance to interact with it by customizing it. Application to recruiting: rather than have prospects find a specific job, drive them to a talent hub of all comparable jobs. At this warm-up page let them interact with recruiters, find related jobs or have them design an “ideal job” by describing the work they enjoy the most and are great at. Then let your ATS bring forth what “best fits” for them. At the extreme, maybe let candidate’s create their “ideal job” and then repackage the jobs you have open to fit this.

Ideo #10. This is the top design company on the planet. Innovative idea: the company has grown from just designing products to transforming systems to designing for behavioral change. This means adapting the product or service to incorporate a benefit, like saving the planet or at least getting better gas mileage. Application for recruiting: stop thinking about just hiring people to fill jobs, instead, think about offering careers. You’ll need to understand the behavior criteria your prospects use when looking and comparing positions to start this process. To implement it, you’ll need to apply every one of the ideas mentioned above.

As I review the other innovative ideas on the Fast Company list, there seems to be a number of common themes or principles that stand out as guidance. For one thing, all of these ideas are innovative. As obvious as that sounds, being innovative is hard, because you’re fighting the status quo.

So if you want to be innovative, expect lots of naysayers, a bit of ridicule, and some grief.
Start small. Being innovative doesn’t mean copying someone, it means being first, but copying can help to prove your point and establish your bona fides. Trying out lots of different ideas until one sticks also seems to be part of being innovative.

Continuous change and constant renewal seems to be another aspect of this.

What’s also interesting is that these companies have always been innovative; it’s part of their corporate DNA. So it’s not a surprise to see any of them on the list. This becomes a chicken-or-the-egg problem for recruiting, then. Can a corporate recruiting department housed in HR ever become risk-taking and innovative?

Perhaps not, but since all of these companies are doing fairly well from a competitive standpoint, being innovative certainly has a significant ROI that can be demonstrated. Maybe it will take some gutsy person to make an innovative pitch to the CEO to get the process started. This alone is pretty innovative, so show some guts and get going.

Source: ere.net by Lou Adler, Feb 20, 2009, 7:00 am ET

Success Strategies for Tough Times: How to Stand Up When the Chips are Down

There's just no getting around it. Times are tough. The economy is in crisis, businesses are struggling, previously secure workers are now fearful of losing their jobs. The emotional impact can be great, leading to feelings of anxiety and depression - and a concomitant loss of focus and creativity. The potential effects on work performance consist of reduced productivity, innovation, and overall employee morale. Yet there is opportunity for growth in the midst of these economic hard times. While it might go against intuition, success in difficult times calls for holding true to basic tenets of effective behavior. With the proper attitude and approach, you can indeed thrive in uncertain times. In the interest of full disclosure - and to give credit where credit is due - I have to thank my 5-year old son for the inspiration for today's tips. For it was during a delightful Sunday afternoon together - filled with game-playing, puzzle-assembling, artwork and general enjoyment - that my attention was drawn to the power of the basics. Here are a few tips I'd like to share with you:

Work as a team. Whether you're putting together a Spiderman jigsaw puzzle (as we were) or advancing a new product to market, there's nothing like the power of collaboration. Working together allows for faster progress and more creative solutions.

Be accountable. If you've made a commitment, stick to it. And while you're at it, hold those around you accountable, too. My son didn't waste a moment taking me to task when I tried to divert him from his much-loved game of Candyland. "But Mom, you promised!" And so I did.
Be supportive. When your coworker or report does something well, give him a well-deserved pat on the back. If he's uncertain and needs a little encouragement, offer it up. I can't tell you how lovely it was to hear my little guy comment on my drawing by saying, "Mommy, I love your work."

Share resources. Lean times can mean limited access to valued resources. The temptation might be to get what you can for yourself and your team, even if that means leaving others empty-handed. Yet sharing resources (in my case, taking turns with the yellow crayon) with others means they're far more likely to do the same for you.

Refresh yourself. Stressful times can take a profound toll on your physical and emotional well-being. Don't forget to take some time to refresh and reenergize yourself at regular intervals. Your approach to refreshment may differ from my 5-year old's (snacking on Cheerios and chocolate milk), so find what works for you. Then do it.

Be flexible. Challenging times call for flexibility and a willingness to do things differently. You may have to take on new responsibilities, modify your schedule, or work with a different set of people. Letting go of disappointment (for my son, that meant not finding his favorite program on TV) and being open to new opportunities will help you gain credibility as a resilient and cooperative team player.

Finally, at the risk of sounding rather Pollyannaish,

Be positive. Even the worst of storms passes with time. Remaining optimistic, grounded, and focused on the future will help you weather the hard times and move bravely ahead. I was so proud of my son, who had been feeling somewhat under the weather, when he declared, "I'm sick but I'm happy." Now there's an attitude that will serve him well in both good times and bad.

Source: JobDig.com by Liz Bywater

Studies show that Marketing Execs Struggle to Show ROI- How about You?

Marketing executives are under increasing pressure from CEOs to show a return on investment for their programs, but many are struggling with complex processes, technological difficulties and internal resistance to measurement systems, according to a report from The Conference Board.

Because measuring marketing return on investment (MROI) is still relatively new, many executives say they lack the technological and institutional tools necessary to measure their programs, the study found.

Lack of resources, lack of connection with performance objectives and inadequate focus are some of the primary sources of frustration. Major barriers to implementing MROI programs - largely related to issues of business infrastructure - include problems with data availability or integrity (47%), technology/infrastructure (41%), resource dedication (39%), and methodology/know how (22%).

This holds true for recruitment advertising initiatives as well. Are you eating through your budget with no solid results to report back to your boss? Are you purchasing online job board contracts blindly and just hoping that you make the hires needed to justify your spend at the end of the year?

Allow us to help. NAS can work with you and your account reps to collect all of the (back-end) job board data and develop analytic metric reports delivered to you each month for your review and consideration. The information from the analytics will allow us to see which jobs/boards are providing you the greatest ROI for specific jobs/locations, as well as any red flags that need immediate attention. This information will provide essential information for planning where to most effectively place current job openings, as well as providing you insight for renewals in 2010. Then when your boss asks to see the ROI, you no longer have to shrug your shoulders in defeat.

Contact your NAS representative for more information.

Source: “Marketing Execs Struggle to Show ROI”, marketingcharts.com, Jan. 22, 2009

Are You a Web 2.0 Wannabe?

If you don’t invest in finding tomorrow’s candidates today, you’ll become history.

This article is one component of a Web 2.0 and rich media demonstration. It consists of a variety of simple broad-reach tools including webinars, surveys, discussion walls, Twitters, and videos. The purpose of presenting the article this way is to demonstrate how an individual recruiter could expand his or her visibility using similar low-cost technology. As you read the article, click through to the links and take the action suggested. Then imagine how you could apply similar approaches to your job postings to expand both its visibility and interest.

As a example, start by texting the word “sourcing” to 96625 and take the instant survey. Then create your own survey like this and Tweet me at LouA with your quick take. Then create a similar process for hiring by asking your employees if they know a great person for a new hot job, or pinging your resume database asking prospects if they’d be interested in exploring a potential career move.

Now back to the article. It describes some of the latest Web 2.0 recruiting and sourcing tools and likely future trends.

You can rank yourself to figure out if you’re still a Neanderthal or a new ager. On this scale, if your still posting boring job descriptions on the major job boards you’d be considered a Web 1.0 stone-ager.

Those in the current Web 2.0 era are now successfully using search-engine-optimized talent hubs, and pushing jobs using teasers ads to targeted blogs and social sites. Integrating and automating all this stuff based on robust workforce planning and process control metrics is Web 3.0. Here’s an online survey you’ll want to take to more accurately benchmark your company on this sourcing evolutionary scale. You’ll also be able to see the instant results and figure out what you need to do to move up to a higher order of species. (We’re creating a survey like this to figure out the decision factors candidates use when selecting one job over another. Email me if you’d to participate. Also, comment on my recruiter’s blog.)

To start this benchmarking, consider how many of the following tools, techniques, and processes you’re now successfully using to source top performers. As you read the six categories, rank yourself on a 1 to 5 scale. Give yourself a 5 if you are training others or you’re now being interviewed by the mainstream media. Rank yourself a 4 if you’re a recognized leader in the recruiting industry. Give yourself 1 point if you’re thinking about doing these things. Assign yourself a big zero if you say it wouldn’t work at your company.

When you’re done, total your score. Less than 10 points qualifies you as a true Neanderthal. If you score more than 20 points you’ll probably get some type of award at ERE’s next Spring Expo. Regardless, whatever you score, figure out what you’d need to do in the next 12 months to get an additional 10 more points. Then focus on this to rebuild your recruiting department. It will be worth it.

Six Important Web 2.0 Plus Trends and Tools

An integrated social media engine: Facebook pages, LinkedIn networks, and pushing ads to appropriate blogs is fine, but not too automatic. A social media engine links all of your networks sites onto a common platform pushing teaser ads to sites most appropriate to your target candidate audience. For example, it makes sense to send compelling two-lines ads to power-engineering blogs rather than MySpace if you’re looking for people with heavy industry experience. MySpace and Facebook might be more appropriate if you’re looking for part-timers for your retail store or young adults just graduating. While many progressive companies are already doing these things, the automation piece is where the short-term action will be. Jobs2Web is the leading player here, so watch closely what these guys are doing.

Use of talent hubs and the phaseout of traditional job descriptions for advertising copy. I’ve made this prediction for years, and it’s finally coming true — the idea of posting individual job requisitions is archaic. The likelihood of the right person finding it is problematic, and even if they do, they’re so boring only the desperate will apply. Talent hubs represent the new thinking here. View a talent hub as a portal or micro-site for a group of jobs that’s marketed using the latest consumer advertising concepts and optimized to be easily found outside of the traditional career sites and job boards. The messaging needs to be compelling and access needs to be open, inviting, and warm, usually with some type of IM feature. While talent hubs are comparable to an integrated social media engine, they’re less robust and less costly to build and maintain.

Developing a proprietary prospect database with automated CRM. On the surface this is a technology solution, but down deep it really has to do with involvement and interactivity. The strategy behind this is to build a personal prospect pool that is constantly nurtured using automated candidate management relationship tools. This is how you maintain the involvement. More advanced tools are on the way that allow you to create events which trigger some type of action, usually an email, but it could be a Tweet or text message. Prospects are notified when opportunities arise, and as long as the messaging is compelling, you’ll have a number of great candidates express interest. This concept is at the core of just-in-time sourcing.

Applying advanced consumer marketing tools for recruitment advertising. If you’re still posting boring ads, subtract 5 points from your total. Boring advertising especially on a job board is a waste of money. So if you want to continue to use job boards at least post ads that will attract someone’s attention. Here’s an ad that SimplyHired posted on their career site to give you a sense of how an ad should be written. Consumer marketing companies are the early adopters of this idea, since this is how they attract their customers. They know that targeted messages pushed to their audience creates interest. Here’s a big thing to think about on this point: don’t use your advertising to sell the job — use it to establish a connection. This is a paradigm shift in terms of where recruitment advertising is heading. Don’t sell your products first; create interest and demand first.

Reduce the time to find you. One of the most important competitive advantages a company or independent recruiter can have is getting the best candidates before everyone else. This is the driver of much of what’s described above involving the concept of “be found first!” When good people enter the job-hunting market they tend to call their close confidantes first. To tap into these early entrants a “call me first” strategy gives you a significant advantage especially if you have a great job available. After a week or so these people will start Googling for jobs or go to an aggregator like SimplyHired.com. To get a sense of where you stand on this early-bird sourcing strategy, start asking your candidates how long they’ve been looking. Give yourself a high ranking if most of them say “less than a week.”

Continuous change and time warping. When you think about what’s happened in the past 10 years, you realize that the rate of change is increasing, not slowing down. So if you have trouble thinking about what solution is best to implement, you need to step it up a notch. Not only do you have to start changing how you source, but also implement flexible technology and business solutions that allow you to adapt and change faster than your competition.

The recruiting industry has gone through a number of inflection points over the past 10 years, and it seems that they’re coming faster than ever before. Web 2.0 has been here for two to three years and many companies are just starting to employ some of its enormous capability for sourcing. Automation, optimization, and integration are the next big waves, which only a brave few have ventured this far.

While all of this technology can help, it still needs involved hiring managers and effective recruiters to make it all work. For a top person, changing jobs is a big decision, and the position selected will largely be dependent on the leadership qualities of the hiring manager combined with the career counseling ability of the recruiter. Fully integrating these high-touch components with the high-tech still seems to be a way off. Regardless, there are plenty of tools available for the individual recruiter to get started trying it all out.

Source: Are You a Web 2.0 Wannabe by Lou Adler, ere.net, Jan 23, 2009, 5:06 am ET