ResearchGoddess

Flash drives are getting cheaper and cheaper, and are becoming more and more handy for making our work portable. Just a couple of common uses for flashdrives include:

• Resume storage for quick upload at a career fair, instead of carrying paper copies
• Backing up a presentation in case your laptop crashes or isn’t compatible with the A/V equipment
• Carrying all your recruiting tools with you so you can work from multiple locations
• Backing up entire hard drives

There is an increased need to secure these little devices as their storage capacity grows and grows. The more information you can store the more likely it is that security will be needed. Many people store personal articles and work articles together and if it were to be misplaced or stolen, it could be disastrous.

Fortunately, Ennova Direct was recently granted a patent for a new biometrical secure flash drive. Pure coolness!

“The flash drive features an OLED screen that acts as a fingerprint scanner for data security and has a retractable flip cover that keeps the screen safe and retracts the USB connector. The OLED screen is interactive as well as being a fingerprint reader and allows the user to choose specific files from the drive to access.”

Ennova Direct will plan to launch the flash drive under the ION Technologies brand at the beginning of 2010. Sign me up for one once they’re available!

When most people notify their Twitter networks that they’ve been laid off or are looking for work, they’re not very specific:

This obviously doesn’t help much in the job search. You must be specific about what you’re looking for if others are going to be able to help you. In the same breath, it’s good to have a strategy when you are using a social media communication tool to assist in your job search. The trouble is that most people just simply don’t know where to start. This post should offer some hope!

My friend Colin is an IT professional. He’s not really big on social media, because he works with technology all day long and wants to take a break from it when he is through with work. He was laid off from his job several months ago and has been applying for positions and attending local networking events, trying to meet as many people in the IT field and in the recruiting industry as he possibly can. He surprised me about a month ago when he told me he’d signed up for a Twitter account.

After I caught my breath and mentioned something about hell and frozen, I began thinking about how he could use this to assist in his job search, and at the same time how I could prove to him that he hadn’t ‘crossed over to the dark side’ by registering. I started formulating a strategy in my head, and when I shared it with him, he said ‘Let’s give it a shot!’

The following is a sort of case study of what we did to get Colin prepared for using his Twitter account appropriately, and exclusively, for a job search.

1. Choosing a Username: as Colin was a brand new user, he was a blank slate. We tried to come up with a username that would help him to achieve the objective he had for signing up in the first place, which was to help him find work. We chose Colin4Hire. Colin admitted that he thought it was a little cheesy, but there is little doubt as to what his purpose in being on Twitter is. Besides, you’re allowed to change your username without losing your followers, so he will be able to change this if he chooses to continue twittering once he’s found work.
2. Uploading an online resume: we decided to use the Website line on Colin’s Twitter profile to display a link to an online resume. A couple of great options for doing this include VisualCV and Emurse. We chose to go with Emurse because of the ease of tracking traffic to the resume.
3. Tracking: I told Colin we should track as much traffic as possible, since he was going to Twitter with the sole purpose of trying to find work. Here are the things we chose to track:
   1. Resume: we selected Emurse as the resume-hosting site in order to track resume views and downloads.
   2. URL: We chose to track the actual resume link using cli.gs. This allowed us to monitor at an extra level.
   3. Email: Colin signed up for a new Google email address that was used exclusively for this study. That way we could also observe who was reading his Twitter profile and following the contact instructions we outlined in his tweets.
4. Planning the message: As you saw above, many people using Twitter to search for work don’t really plan out how they’re going to share that message with others. We chose to make six simple tweets with basic information about Colin’s work skills and most recent employment, ending with his email and the URL to his resume (offering two ways for Colin to be reached). We also decided to control this study by not having Colin tweet out any other messages other than the ones we pre-planned. We chose to use keywords describing his abilities to make his profile more searchable, and we also used two popular job-seeker phrases (“new job” and “new opportunities”) which many recruiters have set up as search agents to find potential candidates.
5. Planning for responses: I would normally never advise someone to auto-DM new followers, but as Colin had a very specific objective for his use of Twitter, I suggested that he set up an auto-DM using Twitterfeed to respond to anyone who decided to follow him. The reason for this is because Colin did not plan to monitor or use Twitter for anything other than trying to help him find a new job, and he wanted to make sure any followers knew this. His DM said something to the effect of “Tnx for the connection! I am using Twitter to find work, so plz check out my resume: [link]”
6. Planning the promotion: At the time of this study, I personally had about 2,900 followers, many of whom are recruiters. I decided to leverage my network to get the message out for Colin. I requested several local recruiters and recruiters across the country to help re-tweet my message:

My friend @colin4hire is new 2 Twitter. He’s using Twitter just 2 find a new job – check out his profile & plz RT this note 2 help him out!

Once we’d registered for all of the appropriate services and got Colin’s actual profile taken care of, I had Colin tweet his messages:

Then we settled upon a good time for me to begin promoting. We chose to tweet on a Tuesday at approximately 1pm EDT. The reason for this time selection is that many folks working on the East Coast would be coming back from lunch, while others across other US time zones would be at least at work and possibly monitoring their Twitter accounts. Starting too early in Eastern time would have prevented some of the West Coast folks from seeing the message. Once I sent out my initial promo tweet, I DM’ed approximately 20 of my colleagues and asked them if they would kindly re-tweet my message.

I set up a search on my own TweetDeck to monitor the re-tweets of my message, and others who were reaching out to Colin. My original message introducing Colin to Twitter was re-tweeted 44 times, and within the first 24 hours, Colin had about 23 followers – all earned through word-of-mouth and not through any obligatory follow-back services.

Below are the stats and some screen shots with which Colin provided me – the information is current as of the publishing of this post:

• 30 Twitter Followers
• 266 Resume Views
• 2 E-mails on G-Mail
• 1 Meeting with Erin Schreyer on May 1st 2009
• 1 Interview with Ray Attiyah on May 4th 2009
• 2 Potential Job Leads with one of Ray’s companies

Cli.gs stats:

Emurse stats:

ANALYSIS:

• Colin was a great subject for this – I have been warming him up to the business use of social media for the past few months and trying to convince him that it’s not just for play. Having seen such immediate results of this little study, he admitted to me that he was pleasantly surprised at what he saw happening and might be changing his tune on what he thinks of social media. (score!!!)
• We tried to set up a SiteMeter account to monitor the actual views of Colin’s Twitter account but were unsuccessful in being able to do so before we ran this experiment. This data would have provided some insight as to a profile view:resume view ratio.
• The ratio of resume views:downloads is approximately 44:1. At first glance this doesn’t seem significant but if you consider the fact that he has two job opportunities in the works as a result of 24 hours of real activity, that’s not too shabby.
• The percentage of humans vs. the percentage of bots to hit the cli.gs link to Colin’s resume is remarkable.
• There were no hate-filled messages regarding Colin’s auto-DM to new followers. This might suggest that people are OK with it when you’re honest about your intentions of being on Twitter. It’s important to note here that Colin did NOT auto-follow anyone.
• The promotional power of the re-tweets was quite evident. Over 2x the number of people I originally DM’ed and requested to re-tweet my message actually helped to promote this message.

CONCLUSIONS:

This type of a case study won’t work in every situation. You must individually evaluate your use of Twitter and if this is the right place for you to be looking for work. But one of the big take-aways here I think is planning. If you have a specific objective you’re trying to achieve in using a social media communication tool such as Twitter, it pays to put some strategic thought into the message you want to send. Otherwise, you really are just throwing stuff against the wall and seeing what sticks. Think about what kind of an outcome you want, and then backtrack from there to craft your message. Be specific in your message and don’t leave any guess-work for your audience. Especially when you are looking for a job, a simple “I’m looking for a job” doesn’t give anyone any idea of what you’re looking for – what job functions are you interested in, where are you located, would you be willing to move, how many years’ experience do you have, etc.

I’ll end with three things:

1. Please still feel free to reach out to Colin if you’re interested in his skillset. His resume can be found here, and you can also take a look at his Twitter profile.
2. Searching for a job using social media isn’t a haphazard task. It’s obvious that planning ahead pays off in the end. Take some time to consider what you want to achieve before you dive in head-first, and track your results.
3. Your network is your ally. It’s always good to have others who will support your endeavors and help you accomplish something. Never take your network for granted. Special thanks to everyone who assisted in this experiment!

I hope this has provided some of you with some pointers on how to begin a job search using Twitter. For your convenience, I’ve made a PDF document of the case study available for you to download and save for future reference. If this was helpful for you, please let me know by leaving a comment below!

John Sumser recently posted a call for nominations for the Recruiting industry’s key influencers. He calls out a few specific categories:

1. Some people go to a lot of conferences and exert their influence through pure networking.
2. Another group of people spend a lot of time giving talks at conferences and publishing their work online.
3. There’s a third group of people who, for some reason, have the industry at heart.
4. The last group of influencers…are customers and practitioners who make the whole thing go around. 
5. John also specifically called out for female influencers, citing that he “really want[s] to understand why the leadership of our industry is predominantly male while the trench level workers are predominantly female. Of all the places in the world, our business is the last place you’d expect to see that sort of inequity.”

I think this is a great idea, especially to broaden the sphere of influence beyond strict recruiting because there are so many pieces of the puzzle that fit together to make our community a great one. So I encourage you to visit John’s post and leave a comment with your nominations. Here are a few of my own:

1. Category 1 – Networkers: I nominate Susan Kang Nam. She’s everywhere, and she seems to be well-liked. She’s also an up-and-comer and made quite an impact in a short period of time. 
2. Category 2 – Speaking/Publishing: I nominate Bill Vick. I love watching his Xtreme Recruiting TV interviews with various industry personalities. I believe he does this to help expose great skills of intelligent people who might otherwise not be recognized. 
3. Category 3 – Heart of the Industry: I can’t think of a better person to nominate than Susan Burns. She not only cares about our industry and making it great, but also the individual people who make it up. She’s like the industry mom  
4. Category 4 – Users: I will nominate Jason Davis here. He has given us so many valuable places to gather and glean knowledge from each other including the old www.recruiting.com, www.recruitingblogs.com and www.splits.org.
5. For industry female influencers, I would nominate Leslie O’Connor, she was listed as #89 on Inc. 500′s Fastest Growing Companies for 2008, as well as #4 in the HR Category and #5 in the Women-Led category. 
6. My own Category – Pure Recruiting: I’m going to nominate one of my all-time favorites Jordan Rayboy, the awesome RV Recruiter. Jordan started in this business as a young 20-something kid and work hard to rise in the ranks of MRI. He continued on to start his own recruitment company and is now living out a dream by working completely remotely from his RV with his wife Jeska. He’s going to be sharing his story at the Fordyce Forum this June.

There are so many others who deserve to be included, such as Amitai Givertz, Glenn Gutmacher, Ritesh Nair, Glenn Cathey, Traci Wicks, Jim Stroud, Suzy Tonini, Jennifer McClure, Michael Marlatt, Marvin Smith, Dan Harris, Dave Manaster, Kris Dunn, Shally Steckerl, and so many others that if I continue on I’ll hurt someone’s feelings by leaving them off.

Visit John’s blog post and leave your nomination today!

This is a great Cool Tool post because there is direct use for this tool in candidate interaction!

This week, I am featuring Tweetparty, a Twitter app which allows you to direct message multiple Twitter friends at the same time:

“Tweetparty lets you organize your twitter friends into parties and send direct messages to them…With tweetparty, when you login all of the people you are following are download to tweetparty. You can then create as many groups as you would like (ie. work, friends) and select the friends you would like in each group creating the party. Then through twitter you can send a direct message to any party – no setting up other twitter accounts.”

This is a fantastic tool especially for those of us using Twitter from a recruitment standpoint! Why, you may ask? Well, take for example if you have a new job that you’re sourcing for and you want to get the message out quickly, but only to a certain group of people. You can simply create a Tweetparty group of Twitter Friends whom you’d frequently notify about your new openings. Instead of having to individually send them a DM, you could get it all done at once.

To get started, all you have to do is create a group and populate it. Here are a few of the groups I’ve created for myself:

Say for example I want to ask some of my recruiting colleagues to help me promote this post. I would simply send a direct message (DM) to Tweetparty with a hashtag (#) in front of the group name, followed by my message:

Of course, I’m a firm believer in personalizing as much of your conversation as possible when dealing professionally with others, but I think this is a fantastic way for us as sourcers to keep any Twitter contacts who might be potential candidates someday informed of our opportunities. This can also be useful in asking a circle of friends to help promote a cause, or a blog post, or quickly inform members of a networking group of an upcoming event. The possibilities are endless.

Only a couple of complaints: I’ve noticed is that if you’re following a lot of people, Tweetparty disables the ability to view profile images. I would also like to see bio information for the Friends list as well; for those of us who are following a large number of people it would be easier to choose people to include in a group if we could quickly scan bios.

Over all, this would seem to be quite a helpful tool for communicating with a large number of people all at once. I suggest giving it a shot!

I recently read an article from The Economist titled “You’re hired—next year“. The article takes a look at some of the new direction recruiters and their companies are starting to move in when it comes to hiring during the recession period.

I’m so glad others have taken notice of this! About a month ago I was having a conversation with a colleague about this very topic, having noticed that lots of companies seem more interested in hiring contractors than permanent employees right now. My guess was that this is a sort of “test drive” option as well as not having the funds for full-time benefits and such. The article states:

“Most obviously, the hiring of freelancers and consultants has become more common, allowing companies to avoid spending on employee benefits and delay hiring decisions until the economy picks up.”

In addition, the article goes on to say that companies are marketing to candidates with different incentives than the usual sign-on bonuses and extra perks: “Their new selling points are sandwiches with the boss, opportunities for advancement, flexible working hours and more holiday time.” This sounds very much like companies are starting to understand the desires of the up-and-coming millennial generation, who tend to prefer incentives like more flexible work conditions and opportunity to further themselves.

The article also briefly touches on the fact that many companies are developing a social media presence as a low-cost way to reach potential new hires. This is apparently a topic in which companies are very interested and want to learn more about, as there are many who are offering webinars and training sessions on using these tools in a recruitment capacity. Even I’ve jumped on the bandwagon; I’ll be giving a presentation in June at the Fordyce Forum on incorporating social media tools into your recruitment strategy.

Please take the time to read the entire article here.

(hat-tip to Deborah Maggart for alerting me to this article, as well as David Simonds for the awesome illustration)