Often when discussing the issue with staffing executives, the issue of Blogging comes up, and it’s a topic of curiosity. The principle question among them being, the “Value Proposition” – “Why do Recruitment Blogs Matter?” As an effort to answer that question, from as broad a perspective as possible, I enlisted industry voices throughout the Recruitment Blogosphere to consider the following questions:

1) What substantive examples exist where blogs have influenced the products vendors develop, or the way products are marketed?
2) What instances would you suggest are instructive in terms of the power of viral marketing where recruitment blogs have played a major role?
3) Can you highlight the transition of the blogosphere from journal to its rise as a formative industry partner?

I am grateful to everyone who took time from their busy schedules to share their passion and insight on a question begging to be answered in unequivocal terms.

By John Sumser, CEO, Interbiznet
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A look at the comments on Kevin Wheeler’s latest ERE article is instructive. A fellow who was once a visionary in the field is outdated and appears so. Critics have jumped right up to tell him so. Blogs reduce the distance between “experts” and non-experts. Just check out the increased level of flack that I take each day.

Blogs have accelerated the speed at which information flows in the early adopter front end of the industry. The disconnect is pretty profound. Those who read and participate in blogs are light years ahead of the rest of the industry in terms of technique and results generation. Vendors and analysts alike are struggling to catch up. The gap between early adopters and the rest of the pack has never been so extreme. Most recruiters have no idea what RSS is or how to use it, for example.

You can’t underestimate the impact that Joel Cheesman has had on the industry. He has single-handedly made SEO a common thread (again, in the early adopter set). Both Martin Snyder and Colin Kingsbury have shifted boatloads of their marketing energy into the blog universe. By positioning themselves as thought leaders and participating heavily and effectively in a variety of conversations, they have reengineered their approach to marketing and made their companies vastly more accessible to market input. Martin tends to take the low road and Colin takes the high. This is solid positioning given their market segments. Martin’s tools are for nitty gritty recruiting while Colin serves a more organizational customer.

The give and take between Jason Goldberg and his market is really interesting. While he has taken a bunch of heat on the subject, Jason continues to innovate his product based on blog feedback. He relentlessly demonstrates the tough realities of being a blogger…you fail in public with an audience. But, that’s the essence of increased transparency and intimacy. It’s a vastly different game when you work in front of an audience. It’s even tougher when the hurdle is your level of honesty and authenticity.

Steven Rothberg’smarketing of CollegeRecruiter.com has become solely centered on the blogosphere and his inputs as well as the “BlogSwap”. So far, the history of the Recruitosphere is that good ideas are spawned in one place and then settle somewhere else. Rothberg is doing great things with the Blogswap and simultaneously making a great name for his company.

That’s really the trick here. You have to do something clever that delivers a strong benefit and then tag your aspirations to the back end. Each of the real leaders in the field demonstrate the “give first, take second (if at all)” method of marketing. They are not busy calculating the return on each incremental investment. Rather, they are giving freely with limited expectation of return. These folks will prosper.

Check the work being done by Matt Martone at http://www.jobsearchmarketing.com. He thoroughly utilizes his soapbox to publicly wrestle with his competitors. It’s pretty jazzy for a staid player like Yahoo (Note that in this universe, Yahoo is a staid player) He pokes at the enemy while educating his customers about Yahoo’s very interesting Recruitment offerings. It’s a great model.

Itzbig, the not so secret next offering from Hank Stringer and his band of Austinites has built a stealth brand awareness model through its blog http://www.itzbigblog.com>

Hans Gieskes, CEO of H3 has pioneered the art of influencing key bloggers to deliver his message.

A host of Bloggers have become key industry leaders in startups and well known firms. Their blogs reflect the transitions and demonstrate that professionalism is possible in the blog universe.

The rest of the story involves the (much slower) migration of actual recruiting into the blogs. Part if the issue here is helping people understand how to reach the audience that they need. Very little useful material exists on the subject of building the right traffic to your blog. It’s not really an SEO play. Rather, it involves the sort of traffic development pioneered by Kevin Strange at RecruitmentJobs.com

Ultimately, the competitive value to be gained from a blog will level out and diminish. That always happens. It’s important to remember that this is really about the bloggers, not the blogs. Blogs are tools. Bloggers are where the value comes from.

NOTE: This is the first in a series of perspectives from throughout the Recruitment blogging community to voice their opinions on the substantive value propositions that Recruitment blogs have offered as a stakeholder with influence within the industry.

When I learned my good friend, Ryan Money, CEO at HireVue, was having lunch with JibberJobber’s Jason Alba, I smiled. This guy, Jason, is meeting all the right people and making all the right moves with a great idea. What was even more enthralling was that he had a story everyone could relate to, we will all eventually be job seekers seeking career advancement. I decided Six Degrees had to introduce a new profile to it’s audience.

Listen to Peter Clayton Podcast and you’ll learn that Jason Alba was inspired by a temporary set-back. An out-of-work Internet application design expert with an MBA, he was frustrated that there were very limited tools to benefit his job search, and an over-abundance of often useless or fragmented information. Jason found a maze without a roadmap to guide him through his job search that would effectively meet his expectations and achieve successful results. He observed the job board space, convoluted – identifying over 40,000+ boards. He was frustrated that HR and recruiters and everyone else in this space had access to powerful tools but the job seeker had nothing of significance. The state unemployment department didn’t make his journey any easier. To qualify for unemployment, Jason learned that he had to contact (read: apply to) 2 or 3 new employers every week. He found an essential component missing in the state unemployment requirements, — it utterly failed to account for a job seeker’s networking efforts.

Jason didn’t bemoan the experience simply by enjoying an enforced diet of happy hours to cut expenses he took initiative above and beyond the job seekers usual destination of actual employment. He employed himself to create something new. Jason was determined to apply the lessons of his search as a job seeker to develop a new tool set to help job seekers not only keep track of, but manage all those different versions of their resume, cover letters, interviews, recruiters, leads, contacts, action items, follow-ups. Jason came well equipped to the task: He combined his Internet design skills with standard tools that salespeople use to organize their prospects to give job seekers free tools to use for the rest of their career. Simply stated, Jason automated all the complex and often frustrating process of finding a job and furthering your career into a solution platform, and he named it, JibberJobber! (Jason has a flair for creativity in every respect you see)

As Jason puts it, “ALL of my my previous experience (design, development, marketing, sales, management, customer support, etc.) – including his frustration based upon actual experience as a job seeker – has contributed significantly to launching JibberJobber, and it has been a blast!” Hmmm, interesting, finally a talent tool designed by IT that is actually user-friendly – behold!

WHAT IS JIBBERJOBBER?!!

JibberJobber is a set of tools that anyone with an interest in managing their own career should embrace. Basically it takes principles that career coaches preach (organize your job search, keep track of where you send your resume, prepare an elevator pitch for your interviews, track your expenses (which may be tax deductible), etc.) and networking experts talk about (take your network from a phone list to a relationship management level, like a CRM application would) to give you a long-term toolset to manage those 9 – 10 job changes in your career.

There are a few underlying philosophies, such as provide as much content and functionality for free because the last thing a job seeker needs to do is pay for something when they have no income. Also, provide a useful tool for active job seekers and passive job seekers alike. Provide a tool that is congruent with the idea that YOU are the only one that really cares about your long-term career. The ability to share information (see recruiter and coach interface, which are free) at the discretion of the user (job seeker). That’s where JibberJobber came from. (Still scratching my head on the Jibber part, but that’s besides the point, the guy’s creative, right?)

ALBA-ISMS: THE GOOD, THE BAD, THE MISSION

Jason, addresses issues we can all relate to:

Good Thing 1: a job search is something that requires collaboration between “the person looking for the job” and professionals, such as recruiters and coaches (professional, or mentor-like non-paid buddies). That is why there is an interface to allow the job seeker to share certain data (aka, grant access) to recruiters and coaches. More people need to understand this idea of building and using resources, as opposed to going it alone.

Good Thing 2: I sense that we are on a huge wave that we’re riding with amazing transparency in processes and reality, as you can pick out through bloggers in this space. It is fluid, so there is opportunity for different types of orgs to create business. The awesome thing is there is no one “right answer” and job seekers can benefit (once they get through the confusion of it all). The job seeker seems more empowered than ever.

Good Thing 3: Job seekers are beginning to do things like create their own personal branding (like my monthly award winner – http://www.jibberjobber.com/blog/?cat=18 ). I love the power that a person can have individually. And seekers are seeing the changes in the space and realizing that certain things are noise, and there are other ways to find the job. I think the info on the recruiter blogs is awesome, and adds to this empowerment.

Bad Thing 1: Too many people focus on a job search and not realizing that they need to manage their career. Even if you have a track record of keeping within the stats (changing jobs every 3 – 5 years), you still ignore the idea of tactics and techniques to ride all the rest of the job changes that are coming. Is this the big pink elephant that everyone ignores? Not fun to think about, but you have to have a paradigm shift, and understand that you aren’t making these changes because you are a loser, rather that is the way it is, and you have to figure out how to navigate it!

Bad Thing 2: Some companies/organizations are empowered by having totally dependent job seekers support them. I went to a staffing agency and showed a high-level manager JibberJobber. He realized how cool it is for personal career management, but he also realized that if he led people to JibberJobber he may be losing his business (I think his logic was flawed – if he would bring me a real, valuable tool as a job seeker, I’d recommend everyone to him, and I would have increased trust in his services to me). I don’t get this sense from recruiters (especially those that give it more than a 10 second glance and think “oh, this is like LinkedIn” (IT’S NOT)), although I think that lots of recruiter have their own issues and haven’t realized how cool this would be to recommend to job seekers.

Bad Thing 3: There is a lot of talk about “new ways” to do things, and you can see that from H3 and ItzBig and folks like that. But I honestly don’t see the main processes and mentalities of this space changing any time soon. I’m not very visionary, so I will get slammed for saying this, but I don’t see job boards going away. I don’t see all of the lame things (including lame things that happen to recruiters (people that don’t keep the recruiter informed on the status, etc.) changing. People need to network and that is how jobs are generally found, but so many people don’t put the right amount of time and effort into it. So, the worst part, I think, is this paradigm shifting that I have gone through but so many others don’t (until they are deep into unemployment).

TALK OF THE TOWN

The good news for Jason Alba is that he is the talk of the town among some very significant organizations that are looking at JibberJobber as a huge supplement to what they already offer, and, not surprisingly, he doesn’t mind the attention. He created it and lived the story that is fun because it’s inspiring – how many of us actually do more than complain and actually devise something new that benefits others? Ultimately, JibberJobber is a job seeker’s (or, professional’s) tool, not someone else’s tool that the job seeker can use and it puts all of us as potential lookie-loos in the driver’s helm of our next career opportunity.

Interesting – personal initiative, self-empowerment, and a vehicle from which to direct our energies to achieve our personal goals. Create a tool, and supply the demand. Duly noted. Hmmmm, Me likey!

For Additional Info on JibberJobber, Contact Jason Alba
JibberJobber Web Site
Listen to Jason Alba’s Podcast Interview

Special Acknowldgements to Peter Clayton at Total Picture Radio

Search internships at College Recruiter.com.

MONEY QUOTE:“….it was easier for recruiters to recommend those people with whom they felt comfortable”

I was perusing the weeks insight’s of my fellow peers and I found Joel Abraham’s perspective to be a bulls-eye on the importance of peer to peer networking and building relationships with your employer community overall. I have often said that the relationships you build today in times of excess and glutonney will likewise keep you fed in times of strife. The post Dot Com dive and subsequent post 9/11 crash are memories that do not easily escape me and they are in large part the catalysts for my passion for social relationship networks. Throughout each successive Dow Jones dip … your relationships are an economic lifeline, not to mention the basis of community that lends moral support at the key moment when reassurance meant everything. The person you drink and be merry with today MAY LIKELY be the one who offers the business card to the job interview you schedule the day after. Social networking platforms such as Linkedin, Spoke, OpenBC, JibberJobber and the assortment of other online communitities …..All make it that much easier.

I am sincerely amazed how often this message evades even the most senior recruiters and hence the critical need to emphasize the importance of accepting invites to connect from your fellow recruiters my friends! It’s not spam, it’s a connection worth embracing if a fellow peer reaches out to you.

Joel offers the following perspective:

Building your Personal & Professional Network:

Remember when I talked about how to control the future of your career when you cannot control the business market? Controlling your future begins and ends with building your personal and professional network. In 2001, I started throwing Pinkslip Parties in Wisconsin to help proactive employers network with potential candidates. Throughout that year, I saw approximately 55 people get jobs. Many of those individuals still attended the next event in order to network, even though they had jobs, because they found it to be fun. Yet others did not. Through the year, I saw many people who were laid off 3 to 4 time because of the business climate.

The Pinkslip partygoers who kept networking found jobs right away, and the others who stopped networking had to start all over again. The moral of this story is that the partygoers that kept networking got to know employers and employers got to know them. They felt comfortable with each other and it was easier for the recruiters to recommend those people with whom they felt comfortable. An analogy of the hiring process is that you have one or two dates, and then you are asked to get married. It is a scary process, so the better you get to know the company and the recruiter, the more able you are to make an educated decision. Lets face it, the hiring process in the U.S. considers if they like you first, then whether you can do the job.

The strategy is to develop business networks; associations that fit with your background and the industry you are trying to get into. Do not forget charitable groups, as there are a lot of companies that want their employees, managers and executives to give back to the community.

“I have too many family commitments”. My response is, “you have to make time!” This is a commitment for your future, both personally and professionally.

Search for jobs and careers at JobCentral.

If you want to maintain a competitive edge as both an individual contributor and as a corporate staffing organization overll, I highly recommend that my fellow peers take the initiative and Register to attend a FREE, feature-packed Webinar presentation by Shally Steckerl, among the recruitment industry’s reigning rock stars, detailing H3.com’s abilities to generate referrals for difficult to fill positions.

As an added bonus, all registered attendees will receive a FREE White Paper on which the webinar is based, detailing his direct experiences and suggestions utilizing referral based strategies for talent.

Wait who is Shally Steckerl you may ask? Recruiting Animal provides the definitive treatment here and here.

LEARN:
- Why Shally chose to try H3.com when looking for referrals.
- The power of referral hiring and why it results in high quality candidates.
- Best practices using H3.com including the benefits of rewarding your network.
- Participants will receive Shally’s whitepaper on H3.com.

For a Backround Perspective, here’s Shally preview on H3:

Don’t Forget to Register here

ABOUT MASTER CYBERSLEUTH SHALLY STECKERL

Shally is a proven leader in the development and implementation of Best Practices in Centralized Sourcing organizations. Starting his career in technical recruiting in 1996 Shally Steckerl has consulted with such industry giants as Google, Coca-Cola, Cisco Systems, Motorola and Best Software. From early in his career he has developed techniques that dramatically increase recruitment productivity and allow companies to exploit the Internet. He has been teaching those techniques to staffing leaders since 1998.

Currently, Shally manages the Research arm of Microsoft’s Core Technical Central Sourcing Team. Previously, he consulted at Google where he developed its central sourcing organization.

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Did you know that Dave Navarro and Carmen Electra broke up after two long years of marriage? Who would ever have imagined these two wouldn’t grow old together and rock on their porch swing speaking of days gone by? I ask if you knew because Carmen is sad. Yes I know she’s a lovely young lady, full of deep thoughts of consequence and her talents are numerous to be sure, but breaking up is hard to do!

Following a photo shoot in the mountain outskirts of Transylvania, Carmen apparently returned to her Romanian summer cottage to pick up her usual 30 pounds of research periodicals. Last night differed however from her usual routine after purchasing a D-Link DI-624M G wireless adapter. Carmen tended to her private musings on nuclear fusion online and was seeking fellow bikini models with likeminded ideas on hard water plutonium versus Propel and came to the conclusion that her lust for knowledge, if not Navarro could be best served by joining Linkedin.

Before she ventured into this social networking environment; as always the case for this perfectionist, Carmen decided to Boolean search on www.google.ro the keywords: linkedin endorsement example

Lo and behold, a twist of fate drew her attention to my Linkedin profile and to Six Degrees from Dave.

She was so impressed she decided to click through and alas …..

(Sound of screeching LP record player here)

Okay, that was my preferred version of events. It could have been Bogdan Illesceu, Senior Analog Designer at Intel Romania, or VP of an Central European Advertising consortium, or Staffing Director at Coca Cola Romania, or a venture capitalist wanting to invest in Six Degrees for Dave(?)

In all seriousness, today’s post is substantive, minus the titilation embedded in the introduction. Ah, the almighty introduction, yes, the origin by which we meet and establish our impressions and weigh the currency of each unique relationship. For the recruiter, the global audience afforded by personal branding is but one of many advantages in Blogging for Talent and establishing a substantial base of talent relationships. How often have you ventured to guess your name was of interest while web browsing in Romania? I didn’t until I reviewed my Site Meter and noticed visitor #28′s domain name and IP address was a reader from Lasi, Romania.

I ventured further to find the Referring URL Linked to a google.ro search engine. Using the keywords Linkedin, endorsement, and example my new, loyal reader, of all things, located an archive link to my Blog site and subsequently laughed, cried, and sung praises (I think) to my witticisms and to one of many of the funny pictures Recruiting Animal designated for me.

On Weekends, I intend to refer to memorable blog postings I most often forwarded within corporate and among industry peers throughout the last week. Tis my disclaimer should anyone query about original content, that I find it imperative we broaden the reach of noteworthy and informative pieces and the authors who labored to tell us a story, and a substantive one at that.

In today’s highlight, our prolific friend, James Durbin, provides allegories as an excellent format to highlight the genuine value of “Blogging for Employment” effecting successful employment outcomes for job seekers.

August 18, 2006
Case Study: Getting a Job With A Blog
by James Durbin
Durbin Media Group offers marketing and design services that build brand loyalty

How do you use a blog to get a job? Recruiters and job-seekers are using this medium to get noticed, and I wanted to share an experience that one developer had in finding employment through his blog.

I’d like to present Chris Hammond, an ASP.Net developer in St Louis. Chris writes three different blogs, including a technical blog on DotNetNuke, a relatively new entrant in the .Net field, and one that owes much of its history to open source. The point is DNN experience is cutting edge stuff, a bit like being an experienced Java guy in 1997.

When the story beings, Chris is happily employed with a firm in downtown St Louis. He gets plenty of calls from recruiters, but none of them offer him anything but drab job descriptions and unimaginative projects. They don’t understand why he’s a good candidate – they’re just looking for buzzwords, and his resume has them. He’s not listed on any job boards, but he has been in the past when he looked for a job, and he knows if he needed one quickly, that he can sign up at Monster.com and Dice and get interviews. He is the prototypical passive candidate, with a good company, a solid technical understanding, and no desire to search for a job.

To get better at his job and to showcase his ASP knowledge, Chris participates in the ASP.Net Forums and writes code examples, tips, and announcements at his technical blog. One day, the President of EngageSoftware, a software development firm in St Louis, notices a particularly insightful example of coding prowess in the ASP.Net forums written by Chris. The President follows the link back to Chris’s blog because he notices that Chris lists his location as St Louis.

After reading the blog and checking out the online resume, the Engage Software president sends Chris a recruiting e-mail that piques interest. A set of interviews is arranged, and Chris decides to make the switch to a new company because the area he has interest in developing is one the new company has use for.

Notice several keys here:

1) Chris has been writing on this technical blog since December 2003. He didn’t start a blog, write two posts, and wait for the calls to come in.
2) As a passive candidate, Chris resisted calls from recruiters who lacked an understanding of what he did.
3) By reading the blog, the president of Engage Software was able to get a feel for Chris before sending him a recruiting pitch. The time he took allowed him to make a pitch that Chris responded to.
4) Engage Software has its own blog for marketing.
5) Chris still blogs, and that brings in attention and thought leadership to his company.

So was it the ASP.Net forums or Chris’s blog that led to a new opportunity? In this case, it was both, but the blog helped to reinforce the impression the president received from the forums. Knowing more information about Chris helped the president pitch his company.

The blog enabled a real conversation because it removed some of the uncertainty in the employment process. It’s just one example, but I’ll be looking for more, and when the trickle becomes a flood, we’ll know we are on to something.

If you used your blog to get a job, or if you read someone’s blog and offered them a job, send me your stories at jdurbin@durbinmedia.com

Personal Note: I received a call this morning from Greg Brauns, Analog IC Manager and an alumnus of Renesas. Greg was among those displaced by a facility shutdown last fall and was referred by my RTP insider, Daniel Zheng, (all knowing IC designer of who what where in the NC). Why do I mention Greg? Funny thing. I encouraged GB to develop a blog post detailing the regional job market and the disadvantage of nine years of managerial oversight as opposed to hands-on expertise when applying for design opportunities. It’s a a valuable perspective worth sharing, and likewise, it’s an opportunity to introduce his technical skills to prospective employers.

Hmmm. GB if you’re reading this, give Jim Durbin another input to his series, “Case Study: Getting a Job With A Blog” by emailing us your original contribution and perhaps we can follow your progression as you attempt to Blog for Employment.

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