ResearchGoddess

We have some truly amazing women who work in our industry, and I think it’s time to pay tribute! So, I am asking for all of you ladies who work as recruiters or as sourcers/researchers to let me know who you are, because I’m cooking up something fun for us.

Please send me a cool photo of you. It doesn’t have to be professional, in fact it should be fun and depict your personality! If you can send me a picture with JUST you in it also, that would be great. Remember to keep it [relatively] clean – no booby-licious pics or suggestiveness. I’m working on a fun project, but I want to keep it tasteful

Email me your photo and use AWESOME PHOTO MONTAGE as the subject line. It’s important that you do this because I’ve set up a filter for my email for these pictures so they don’t get lost amongst everything else.

Stay tuned for what I’m cooking up – if I get enough of a response on this request I should be able to have this project done in just a couple of weeks. Pass the word along to all your female recruiting/research colleagues as well.

I needed to open a can of tuna the other day. So, I reached into my utensil drawer and looked for my can opener. That did the trick.

Had I reached for a spoon, I would have had a difficult time opening that can. I would have said of the spoon, “This thing doesn’t work! It’s not opening this @*&#%#^ can, so it’s obviously a worthless utensil!”

How stupid does that sound? Everyone know that using a spoon to open a can isn’t going to work. Yet, I hear so many people say of varying social media tools “It doesn’t work!” when what’s really going on is they’ve reached for the wrong tool to do a job.

Not every tool is going to work for the purposes for which you want to use it. For example, if you recruit in the construction industry, chances are you’re not going to find Twitter to be a very useful tool. HOWEVER – that doesn’t mean that Twitter doesn’t work. It’s a fantastic communication tool for networking with PR, marketing, communications, and technical professionals. For those working in those industries, it works.

I’m tired of listening to people spout off about how social media is a waste of time when it comes to recruiting. Any resource that facilitates communication with people is going to be helpful to someone. I hope the day comes when recruiting professionals realize that social media tools are just another means of communication with their target audience and not some grand candidate databases contrived just for their perusal. You must ENGAGE. You can’t just sit back, spew forth YOUR agenda, and expect it to work. Would you attend a friend’s party, stand in the middle of the room, and shout your current job openings at everyone there? Didn’t think so.

These thoughts are just part of what I have planned for my pre-conference workshop, Incorporating Social Media Into Your Recruiting Plan, coming up at the Fordyce Forum on June 10th. If you’re going to be there, please let me know! If not, please follow my #VegasRG hashtag to see what’s going on. I’ve got some fun stuff planned!

The next date we’ll be co-working is Thursday, June 18th. Check out the Jelly Cincinnati Wiki page – we’ll post updates there as well as having event registration available through Eventbrite.

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 Jelly Cincinnati Tweetup here.

When: Thursday, June 18th
Where: Crossroads Community Church
3500 Madison Rd.
Cincinnati, OH 45209

A day late for my Cool Tool Alert of the week, but hey, yesterday was a holiday here in the States!

This cool tool alert will be very helpful for promoting webinars, concerts, networking events, etc. Calendar Tweet allows you to tweet out short links to events you create, promote them via Twitter, and gather lists of attendees. 

Created by Fredrickus Williford and launched about a week ago, this new Twitter service tool has potential! Some of the things you can do with it include:

• Tagging, sharing, and promoting events
• Use as a private Calendar or promotional event management tool for Twitter 
• Monitoring to see if your friends or followers will be attending an event

Calendar Tweet uses the Twitter oAuth System so you can login through twitter automatically without having to provide credentials.

A cool discovery is that when you create an event, the description area accepts HTML code, so you can post links and things in your description area. So, if you simply want to use Calendar Tweet as a quick service to re-direct people to an Eventbrite.com,  Evite.com, or Meetup.com site, you can do so.

You can also either publicly tweet out events or keep them private and then invite just a select group of people. Couple this with TweetParty and you’ve got a completely Twitter-ized event management process. For example:

Say I want to have a quick local geek get-together for lunch tomorrow. I don’t want to take the time to create a big production for invitations but I want to make sure I invite my tweeps. I set up a quick Calendar Tweet for lunch:

Notice I un-checked “Tweet Event” as I want it to be private – otherwise your event will automatically be sent out as a tweet through your Twitter account. When marked private, the link and event are still created, it is just not tweeted out through my account. It ends up looking like this on the Calendar Tweet page:

Once the event is created, you’ll want to go back into your event and edit it to make it publicly accessible, otherwise the link will not work when you send it to people (since it’s private):

Since I only want to send this to a few people, I can then access my TweetParty account and select which group I would like to invite. I have a group for lunchtime tweeters (it’s purposely small):

I then follow the directions for sending a group a private message, and copy/paste in the link to my Calendar Tweet event:

And as people decide to join me for this get-together, I will be able to see them on my calendar event page.

You can also add events directly from Twitter. Just send a direct message on Twitter to @cal_tweet (you must be following first). For example:.

“d cal_tweet Fordyce Forum social media session (follow #VegasRG) @ 6/10/09″

As an added bonus, Calendar Tweet will send out a reminder prior to the event to remind attendees and to help increase turnout.

A couple of things I noticed about Calendar Chat that I’d like to see fixed:

• The date/time selection seems to be a little glitchy; it doesn’t like activities scheduled for noon (changes them to 12am for the following day). You have to rig the actual date for a day early in order to get the correct date; at least this was the case at the time of this post being written.
• I would like an option to not tweet a public event automatically, or a link that can be sent to and actually viewed by select people for a private event.
• It would be great to have a place for people to leave comments when they decide to accept a calendar event invitation.
• I’d like to see the ability to quickly add a Calendar Tweet event to an Outlook / iCal / Google Calendar. Could we get some links on the site to do so?

Some other things you can use Calendar Tweet for:

• Promotional events
• Concerts
• Quick party invitations
• Contests

Give it a shot yourself and see how it works for you!

Wolfram|Alpha, a new search engine that just launched in Mid-May 2009 to the general public, is the talk of our industry right now. Some say that it’s going to be a Wikipedia- or a Google-killer. Others (including me) think it’s neat, but that it’s really just a big calculator at this point. Still others are enjoying playing with it and discovering ‘Easter eggs’ hidden within.

Wolfram|Alpha is “a computational knowledge engine: it generates output by doing computations from its own internal knowledge base, instead of searching the web and returning links.” It’s a fact-machine – you ask it a question, and it will do its best to spit back an answer for you.

When it comes to academia, there are plenty who sing its praises. This will be quite a handy tool when it comes to researching academic matters. For example: if you wanted some quick facts about Winston Churchill:

However, if you wanted to know who just won the most recent Dancing With The Stars, Wolfram|Alpha is going to tell you:

As with any tool of our trade, what you get out of it depends largely on what you put into it. In addition, with Wolfram|Alpha, what you’re looking for is a big factor too. If you’re looking for hard scientific, mathematical, or historical facts, chances are Wolfram|Alpha’s going to help you out. But if you’re looking for current events or assistance with your sourcing efforts, you’re going to be disappointed.

Now, researching companies within an industry – that’s a different story. The database does side-by-side in depth comparison of companies and provides details on # of employees, revenue, etc., and on an individual search basis will also provide you with some basic company information (website, location, industry):

This could prove to be helpful when conducting competitive research within an industry or beginning to build a list of companies to target.

From a sourcing perspective however, the information we seek isn’t contained in its extensive knowledge base – that is, where precisely to find certain types of people for potential candidacy for our open positions. I tested this out, just to make sure:

Nope – not what I was looking for, though this is interesting information, and I believe Wolfram|Alpha will give financial search engines such as Google Finance and Yahoo Finance a run for their money. Wolfram|Alpha will do detailed, side-by-side comparisons of stock symbols where the other two currently do not, at least in great detail.

My assessment is that Wolfram|Alpha isn’t going to make any waves when it comes to useful recruiting tools, at least from a candidate search standpoint. Furthermore, I do not think it will be replacing any major search engines or information sources in the near future. In fact, if you click on the Source Information link at the bottom of the Winston Churchill search, you’ll see that Wikipedia is listed amongst the information sources from which it frequently pulls:

Regardless, Steven Wolfram has come up with a great start to tackling the issue of pure semantic search. (interestingly, plugging ‘semantic search’ into Wolfram|Alpha produces no results) I think this will serve as a good jumping-off point for others to build upon. Check it out and give it a whirl yourself.