Recruiting Futurology

I’m delighted say that the nine video interviews I recorded during my US trip in March have gone live on YouTube today.

You can see them here now.

As you may remember I spent March in Silicon Valley researching Recruiting Innovation and talking to a number of recruiters, thought leaders and technology providers. I discovered a huge amount across a range of topics but a few things came up time and time again:- the death of the employer brand as we have known  it, how social tools are being embedded into the recruitment process, the role of big data in recruiting, the ubiquitous mobile web and interestingly the potential future importance of Facebook.

The interviews I recorded capture a lot of this thinking in action and I’ll be writing a blog post with my thoughts round each interview individually over the coming weeks. My thoughts will also be appearing on Changeboard who I’d like to thank for their help in distributing the videos. I’m also planning a whitepaper which I’ll publish in late June or early July.

For now though I thought it would be appropriate to introduce the series and the interviewees via another video blog:

So this is the latest and last video blog from my Recruiting Innovation research trip. I’ve now got nine very interesting video interviews recorded which I’ll start posting after Easter. Thanks very much to everyone who has helped me and made me very welcome on this trip. See the video below for some thoughts on the relationship between social, mobile and video and why text heavy corporate recruitment sites are now completely pointless!

Due to popular demand the video blogging continues! I’m now two weeks into my trip and spending a few more days finishing up in San Francisco before heading to San Diego and ERE Expo (get in touch if you’re going and want to talk innovation).

This week I’ve met with John Sumser, Work4Labs, Smart Recruiters, LinkedIn, Facebook and Foursquare and had some very interesting conversations. Watch the video to find out more:

So my trip is now well under way and before I left the UK a couple of people suggested that I do a daily video blog. Now video blogging and me have traditionally not gone together well so I was slightly unsure. However I thought it might be worth doing a couple of short updates at the very least so here is the first one. NB it was recorded under the influence of severe jet lag, I hope you can’t tell!

Another quick blog post (two in two days has to be a first!) just to mention my trip to San Francisco which starts next week. I’m spending the rest of March in the USA doing some serious research into what recruitment innovation is starting to look like in 2012. I’m going to be meeting a number of recruiters who are using some interesting techniques and suppliers who have some unique offerings.

As well as reporting back here on the blog I’ll be creating some exclusive content for my friends at Changeboard.com and may well also distribute my thoughts and findings via a whitepaper and / or webinar in April. I’m sure I’ll share more details on this as the trip unfolds…..

I’ve already got some great meetings lined up but I’m convinced I must still be overlooking some important people so if you are in the Bay Area and want to get involved, or if you have a recommendation of someone I should speak to, then please get in touch with me on matt@metashift.co.uk. I’ll also be attending ERE Expo in San Diego later on in the month and I’m hoping to have a lot of great conversations there as well.

Suffice to say MetaShift is still very much open for business while I’m away so if there is anything we can do to help with your digital, social or mobile strategy then please don’t hesitate to get in touch!

A quick blog post to recount a very surreal but important experience I had this morning. I was taking part in the IBM Collaboration Diner at the Unified Communications Conference. The basic idea was to recreate Edward Hopper’s famous Night Hawks painting but revision it for a connected age where the alienated characters connect to the world through social media. While actors played out this scene there was a panel debate in the “diner” about the challenges and opportunities of social business.

Now I’m sure many of are thinking something along the lines of “what a pretentious load of ……” or “do some proper work” and I have to say that like you I wasn’t 100% convinced about it when I agreed to take part! However despite this it proved to be a very interesting experience.

The rest of the conference floor was full of standard corporate stands spouting standard corporate spin and the whole place was full of suits who had come to do “business” in the traditional sense. The IBM sponsored stand (run by Collaboration Matters) was designed to push people out of this corporate comfort zone and that is what it absolutely did. This is important because in my experience in order to fully understand the opportunities of Social Business, leaders in organizations need to step out of their comfort zone and embrace what might seem surreal and unnatural to them.

To be very clear IBM aren’t paying me to say this (although they do keep giving me free coffee which helps!) but I really like what they are doing in the Social Business space. Obviously they are selling software but they are also genuinely embracing the concept of being a social organization. Although I was too busy in the diner to see it, the topic of the key note speech this morning really illustrates this with IBM’s Social Computing Evangelist Luis Suarez talking about how he has given up using email because it isn’t social enough as a business tool. You can read more here and see the presentation content here

So is he a visionary or completely bonkers? Well only time will tell but I’m pretty sure that he is right and strongly believe that in the future we’ll look back at archaic tools like email and laugh at how important we thought they were. If proving this means I have to spend the morning pretending to be in a 1940s painting then I’m more than happy to do so!

If you want to know more about what IBM are doing in this space they have a new Facebook page here.

It seems that while the recruitment universe is still embroiled in tedious arguments about the value of social media and building technology that spams jobs listings into the social web, real life continues to move on and social embeds itself still further in the job hunting process.

Between them LinkedIn and Facebook have pretty much a billion members and the smartest companies are using the respective API’s to unlock the true power of this human network. Just have a look at this recent initiative from Glassdoor

Now just have a think about the implications for everything from employer branding to the validity of current recruitment processes. Humans have always behaved like this and these kind of platforms are unlocking and massively amplifying the thing that feels most natural in a job search…..asking our friends and connections for help and advice.

Yes there is a long way to go but change is happening fast in our recruitment world and I’m still not sure a lot of people are properly noticing. Let me leave the final word to one of my favourite film characters……..

Very few things make me angry. For those that read this blog regularly you’ll know there are many things that cause me to jump on my high horse and climb on a soapbox however if you know me personally then I hope you’ll agree that there are very few things that make me genuinely gut wrenchingly angry.

A company called Etsio and their business model though are one of the very few exceptions to this rule. For those of you who have missed out on hearing about this spectacularly unscrupulous company I suggest you take at a look at these links:

http://graduatefog.co.uk/2011/1779/etsio-pay-to-work-for-free/

http://www.recruiter.co.uk/interns-willing-to-pay-for-work-experience/1011919.article

http://www.recruiter.co.uk/internship-company-etsio-targets-recruitment-industry/1012090.article

For those of you who haven’t got time to read about them in depth, a quick summary. Etsio acts as an agent for companies who want to charge unemployed graduates for internships. Yes you read that correctly Etsio’s clients are happy to charge desperate young people up to £200 a day for the privilege of working for them. Etsio justifies this by claiming it is “training” and not employment but the copy on their website and actual “jobs” listed paint a very different picture

It would seem that that legality of this enterprise is down to the legal semantics of the words “training” and “employee” however I think most people would agree that the morality of such an operation is slightly more clear cut

I’m writing this blog post because I’m worried that this could be the thin end of the wedge and feel very strongly that our industry needs to make a stand against such practices. Bill Boorman has set up a petition here and I hope that if you feel as strongly as I do about this you’ll sign it and encourage others in your network to do the same.