http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_adoption_lifecycle

It’s no coincidence then that the early adopters of social recruiting who are having success are tech companies like Microsoft, Unisys, Cisco and Dell. Innovation is in their corporate DNA and that’s why they are first to properly experiment

Today I was looking at some old reports I did from 1999 in which I looked at the future of recruitment, the threats and risks etc., as I hope to find some examples to use to demonstrate and reinforce the case for social network recruiting investment, based on some of the lessons we learned in the past [and we noted others learned] and get some proof in the pudding that change did indeed happen, always happens and always will. We saw many sites & services herralded as revolutionary simply dissapear. But did they dissapear? Some maybe but also some NOT – they were part of the learning process. They failed but evolved into other things and some of them today are iconic [at least for now]. “This is how the world works” [said Einstein].. “I did not fail in my experiments, but I successfully identified 10,000 ways in which not to make a light bulb work”.

The use of mere fax [fax was even arround in 1865 - even before the telephone which is probably why trusty fax was so widely taken up by us recruiters!], the advent of email and later, online tools did themselves require some arm and ear bending to convince. Now back to today. It is déjà vu for me as I muster a case for change and seek to find old lessons and evidence that has me delving back 10+ years. However, the case for social media seems to be met more fiercly and eyes may glaze over as if im selling cryogenic insurance or drumming up volunteers to join an oriental basket weaving class [ok - no offence, cryogenics is good and I have nothing against oriental basket weavers either – im sure they are very cool!]. I think on the outset this is fear of the unknown and ‘unknown’ is difficult to trust as it’s not understood. What has been arround for 10 + years now has become the norm as if nothing existed before and what we have today will some how remain forever. We looked where the candidates went. Hey – arent they moving again!..

Of course, recruiting itself has been, and is still, for us, socially networking with your skills / people base – but now digitally, we can feed it with a more dynamic dimension, an avatar to which some Gen Xers, may not be easily comprehendable yet or that such a rethink in recruitment is for a rainy day. I like the idea that profits are proof of concept – [thanks Steve Pohlit] but having no proof of concept doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea either ~ but possible bad timing. Proof of concept applies to you and your experience – hence what works for one might not work for another. So lets get failing soon.. but who will be first to fail? All of us perhaps.

It is ‘viable’ and that is the first step and we start small – but start. When proof of concept in social recruiting comes then recruiters must change mindset, transition to a Gen Yer to remain viable in some cases. Listen up then Gen Xers as the future is written just as the last 10 years was written – except the next 10 years of change will be done in 3! When young, the future is driving space ships to work. For recruitment that is possible now.

We have put together a most wonderful innovative system in theory [and the reality one is pretty cool but only through years of time and investment]. Currently, no system is available that works correctly and in the correct business format. Recruitment Vendors need to play a part and wake up to real integration and API as well as security issues. Hopefully Listen to Einstein, but it’s not rocket science, a clever algorithm or like trying to work out how google works. I notice that whilst ahead, the US also has some more failures to make and watching closely. For now we continue with our in-house developments. Experiment number 2012… Actually, cryogenics might be useful.

I do think the whole furore with social recruiting is a bit premature, certainly in the UK at least. Other methods don’t suddenly drop by the wayside. It took the web many a year to finally result in dwindling classified sections and being so hit and miss as it is at the moment (and patchily subscribed to) it will be a fair few yet before social networking sites become the place to be seen in my humble opinion.

Another issue that I’m very concerned about is that job openings have a timeframe. Once a job gets filled and removed from a job board, it should not be searchable. If Twitter is to become a “job cloud”, the companies and services that tweet jobs need to be responsible for removing the tweets when the jobs get filled. Otherwise, there will be job tweets with links to pages that say “sorry, but this job is no longer available”. Bad for the company brand, and bad for the jobseeker experience. All the major job tweeters (Monster, Careerbuilder, Hotjobs, twitterjobsearch, tweetajob, etc.) are “fire and forget” with their job tweets. TweetMyJOBS is the ONLY service out there (and we’ve looked) that removes the tweet when the job gets filled/removed. Check it out yourself: Go to any account being managed by the other services, go back a couple months on their timeline, and click on some job tweets. Any company doing an RSS feed to Twitter cannot remove the tweet. The “Social Media Footprint” being left here is analogous to a hiker who drops candy wrappers every 10 feet as he hikes up a mountain. This practice doesn’t help the quality of job tweets nor the jobseeker experience, and is leaving expired garbage on Twitter. Soon we’ll have Al Gore on Mashable talking about “Twitter Warming”…

RSS Job search would function exactly as Indeed or SimplyHired. (I’m not sure if they already use RSS or simply scrap HTML) Indeed/SimplyHired have separate facets for filtering by Company, which to me is a much better experience than searching twitter.

But we all know you are such a person lol

Peter