ResearchGoddess

Don’t forget to register for the next Cincy Tweetup on Friday, January 16th!

Join other Cincinnati area telecommuters for a day of working in a collaborative environment. We’ll meet at Crossroads Community Church- the church graciously offers free wifi and coffee during the week for the local community. The idea here is to have folks who work in many different job functions working together in an open environment. The expectation is that creative juices will flow and new friendships will be forged. Hope to see you there!

Register to attend the CincyTweetup here.

When:Friday, January 16th

Where: Crossroads Community Church
3500 Madison Rd.
Cincinnati, OH 45209

Check out these other networking events in January as well!

• New Media Cincinnati- Saturday, January 10th
• ERE Recruiter Meetup – Wednesday, January 21st
• OTR Tweetup – Thursday, January 22nd

Taking a break from my usual content here just to wish my Florida Gators good luck in the BCS National Championship Game tonight. I’m a 2000 graduate from the University of Florida’s College of Health and Human Performance, and I bleed orange and blue through and through. Regardless of who wins and gets named #1, it should be an awesome game.

For anyone who will be in Columbus, Ohio tonight, I’ll be watching the game with the Columbus Gator Club at Average Joe’s, so if you’d like to come join us please do! Just make sure to cheer for Florida or you won’t be welcome (just kidding…kinda).

Back to regular programming after today!

All throughout my research career, one of the things I’ve consistently had to do is to look for individuals who possess a certain title level for whatever job I happen to be researching. This is always interesting because depending on the size of the company, the titles change for various levels of experience. For example: an employee at a 5 person company with the title of “Vice President” would almost certainly not be suited for a “Vice President” position at a company employing 500 people. At the same time, a person who is a group manager at a 10,000 person company would most likely be well suited to be a managing director or a VP for a 100 person organization.

Having an elevated title can be both a blessing and a curse. Achieving the next level in your career quicker than normal can be exciting – but at the same time, it can also potentially hurt your hire-ability elsewhere. There is certainly something to be said for earning your promotion – but if you’ve gotten a title boost without having really earned it, you might be in a tough situation should you ever decide (or be forced) to leave your current place of employment.

Let’s take a look at this scenario: a PR professional with roughly 3 years’ experience joins a company and is given the title of Account Manager.

Now, let’s back up a second and take a look at the title system in the world of PR. Public Relations is an ideal industry to use as an example, particularly in the agency setting, because titles are pretty universal. Entry level positions are Account Coordinator (AC) and Assistant Account Executive (AAE). From there, you get promoted to Account Executive (AE), Senior Account Executive (SAE), and then to Account Supervisor (AS) or Account Manager (AM), both of which are around the same level depending on which company you are with. Then, it goes to Senior Account Manager (SAM), Account Director (AD), and on to the various levels of Vice Presidency and Executive titles. There is a natural progression from one level to the next which is pretty universally accepted.

Back to our scenario: at 3 years’ experience, it’s pretty certain that an individual would not in actuality be at an Account Manager level in their career. Nevertheless, this individual is excited about having this title and accepts it. However, if this person ever wants to switch companies, they are going to run into some problems:

1. Once you have a title of Account Manager, it is highly unlikely that you are going to want to take a step back. (hey, I wouldn’t want to either!)
2. Other companies will see 3 years’ experience and will almost certainly not be willing to compensate at the Account Manager level for that amount of experience.

Is it possible for you to earn experience and be promoted quickly? Absolutely – companies call this fast-tracking. But it’s not for everyone. Just keep this in mind as you do your career planning. You do have a career path mapped for yourself, right? If not, this is something you should begin immediately.

When you are progressing through your career, this is something to think about very seriously. It is especially important for folks who are just starting out their careers. Be wary of taking positions that offer elevated or inflated titles with no exchange of earned experience. Titles will not pay your bills. Earn your experience – and your promotion to higher levels.

A good friend of mine has a great saying that I think fits perfectly with this important topic: “You can feed your ego, or you can feed your family.” Titles are not going to feed your family, so make sure that you aren’t hurting your earning potential by taking an elevated title too early in your career simply for the aesthetic pleasure of it.

ERE has been listening to us Cincinnati-based recruiting professionals belly-ache long enough: they’re hosting a Meetup right here in our neighborhood later this month!

ERE is starting off the new year by hosting a Meetup — a chance for recruiters in the tri-state area to do a little networking after hours. Thanks to our sponsor Taleo, we’ve got drinks and appetizers — all you need to do is show up to meet and network with familiar faces (and some new ones) in our industry!

Over the past few months we have held ERE Meetups in Boston, New York City, Miami, San Francisco, and most recently Dallas. They have had a great turnout and the recruiters who joined us had a fantastic time!

We will be holding this meet-up at the gorgeous Cincinnatian Hotel in downtown Cincinnati. Here’s the info:

____________________________________________________________
When: Wednesday, January 21st
5:30 – 7:30 pm
Where: Cincinnatian Hotel, 601 Vine Street, Cincinnati, OH
_____________________________________________________________

Please RSVP for the Queen City Meetup in the comments section of the ERE post!

Given the recent Shorty Award craze, I started thinking how I could leverage its popularity for my own sourcing purposes. After all, there is a ton of information available on the website – just take a look at the massive number of tweeters who have been nominated for various awards! So, the idea of this post is to provide a few examples of how to source shorties.

Consider this: the tweeters who were nominated for these awards are interested in social media, and are considered some of the best movers and shakers – by their peers – in the Twit-o-sphere. If you are recruiting or sourcing in the social media space, this website is a veritable goldmine of potential connections. There are corporate accounts as well as individuals, so this is also an opportunity to company-shop, seek out potential new clients, see what companies are really capitalizing on business use of social media, and find the individuals who have taken Twitter and run with it.

Even if you’re not looking for social media people, there are enough categories here to quench your thirst outside of the social media circle. For example, some interesting categories include politics, religion, fashion, journalism, education, music, and non-profits.

First of all, look at the complete list of award categories. There are a total of 26 official categories and a whopping 1,808 user generated categories! That’s a LOT of areas of interest. The thing I would do with this list first is copy it from the website and dump it into a spreadsheet. Then, you can sort by either the category or # of votes. When you sort by the category name, you’ll be able to target the specific categories that are of particular interest to you. For example, categories in which I personally would take a great deal of interest would be advertising, PR, socialmedia, marketing, communications, journalism, and media.

You can of course click on the links to each category right from the website but this spreadsheet approach will give you your own workable list of potential connections that you will be able to manipulate offline, and this list only contains the top 10 nominees, as opposed to the web lists which will give you every single person who was nominated. Once you’ve done this, I’d focus on the website for most of the rest of your sourcing.

After determining the categories in which you are interested, you can go to the website and start systematically clicking through the categories to learn about the nominees. Take the time to read why their colleagues nominated them. At the top of each nominee’s page, you will see both a link to their Twitter account and whatever website they have listed in their bio. Plenty of great information about each of these folks, including short, under-140 character recommendations and Twitter character references. 

And, as a bonus for those of you with Broadlook tools, I tested this out on Eclipse and found that, with some manipulation, you can actually pull the information directly from the category pages and extract full names and twitter username URLs. I would imagine that one of eGrabber‘s tools would work here as well.

I think this is a great way to start developing contact sheets of some of the folks you want to connect with on Twitter. They’ve already come recommended by peers in a nice, neat little package for you. All that’s left is for you to reach out and start developing good relationships. Happy Sourcing!