ResearchGoddess

This seems to be a great tool to find common connections between you and someone you follow or want to follow on Twitter. If you’re looking for a tool to help find great people to follow, give Twiangulate a shot.

“Twiangulate is a tool for discovering hidden tweeters, friends of friends (or friends of enemies), micro-influentials who only insiders follow… or sometimes just friends you haven’t yet realized are tweeting.” So basically, this is an automated discovery version of Twitter lists. But unlike lists, these groupings aren’t generated subjectively by individuals – the results are generated by algorithms and other complicated tech things designed by Henry Copeland, Kaley Krause, and Jessica Siracusa among others.

Here’s how it works: you can auto-authenticate your Twitter account to get started, and then enter up to 3 usernames of people whom you follow or would like to explore. I chose to start with just one person whom I highly respect for this example:

Caution: if you choose people who are popular, you may have to run them one at a time or else you’ll get an error message.

As a result, this is what was returned – three people who are mutual connections of ours, as well as a long list of others that Twiangulate found to be the most influential people whom these folks follow. The provided list may be sorted by # of followers, # of people whom they follow, or by location as well:

While this is certainly a fun tool for finding new, interesting people to follow – think about it from a sourcing or recruiting standpoint. What if you were to plug in the Twitter account for say, an alumni group, or a professional association that tweets? You could then get a list of the most influential Twitter accounts followed by those people…

Example: @NACEorg- not a huge account, but one of interest to me, because according to the bio, “The National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) is the leading source of information on the employment of the college educated.” So I plugged it into Twiangulate and here’s what I got – some pretty interesting new accounts that I should be following and interacting with:

Go ahead and give it a shot yourself. You might be surprised at the individuals who come up that you should have been following all along!

Lots of competition for jobs these days, with the economy on the repair. Have you found yourself in a situation like this recently?

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It’s tough out there today! Instead of resorting to sabotage of your fellow job-seekers and risking bringing bad karma on yourself, try making yourself memorable instead. As a recruiting professional and also the occasional job seeker myself, here are some things that I think will help you out:

• Dress conservatively for your interview, but wear just a hint of flair – ladies, a bright colored collared shirt under your skirt- or pants-suit, and guys, a colorful or interesting tie. Caution: make sure it’s interesting without being tacky/inappropriate.
• Find out a little about the people with whom you’ll be interviewing before you meet them, and write down some interesting facts about them that you can use in your interview. I’d caution against making direct connections with them until after your interview though (i.e. LinkedIn)
• Bring a notepad to your interview pre-loaded with questions about the company. Take notes during your interview and ask questions related to the things you discuss with your interviewer.
• Following your interview, send a hand-written thank-you note to the people with whom you interviewed, in addition to a quick thank-you email. Hand-written notes are not common any more, and people remember them.
• Tip: always be pleasant to the receptionist. That’s your opportunity to make a great first impression, and a lot of interviewers ask them how they are treated by those who come in to interview.

If you have other interviewing tips, please leave them in a comment below. Wishing you the best of luck on your interviews!

When you ask recruiters how they measure their success, most of them will tell you that it is related in some way to their placements. Notice I didn’t say NUMBER of placements, because that is going to vary depending on the kind of positions for which you recruit. Examples:

• A recruiter who only recruits C-level executives might view success as making one placement every 6 months, if those placements are worth six or seven figures a pop.
• In contrast, a high-volume recruiter who places candidates in call center environments wouldn’t be able to put food on the table with one placement every 6 months. They might view success as making 10 placements per month. For the C-level executive recruiter, this is simply an unrealistic expectation, given the nature of their work.

One size never fits all, so generalizing success in recruiting will always yield you inaccurate data. We all have different amounts of experience, different approaches to client and candidate management, different methods (and tools!) for sourcing, and let’s face it, we each have our own biases to our own way of doing things.

What this means is that you don’t need to go running off signing up for every new resource just because it worked for someone else, or changing the entire way you work just because one of your peers found success with a new method. But in the same breath, just because a particular method or tool doesn’t work for you, this doesn’t mean it will not work for anyone. Each situation is unique.

Define your own success and don’t measure your results against anyone but yourself. You don’t know other people’s stories, what their focus is, what tools they are using, what their fees are, and what their cost of living is.

Several of my friends and colleagues have been setting New Year resolutions and predictions, and reflecting upon the last year, as well as the last decade. I was sitting at Starbucks over the weekend with one of my AT&T coworkers and we were talking about the last 10 years and the ups and downs that have happened. For me – 10 years ago I was a senior in college ringing in the new year in Gainesville, FL, and discovering that my desired career path wasn’t, in fact, what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. 2 1/2 years later, I landed my first job in an industry that has allowed me to discover a passion in social media.

Between the years 2000 – 2009, I’ve had ups and downs just like everyone else. I’ve been hired and fired, recruited and laid off, in and out of love, and I’ve welcomed new family members to the world and said sad good-bye’s to loved ones. I’ve built beautiful new friendships and cried as old ones soured, I’ve left familiar places for the complete unknown (several times!), I’ve taken risks that turned out to be bad decisions, and I’ve tried new things that ended up being the best decisions of my life. I have started businesses that were lucrative for a season, and learned that it’s OK to move on to new things without considering yourself a quitter. I’ve read books, blogs, magazines, published articles, spoken at conferences, shook hands, laughed, cried, hugged, and loved freely because that’s what life is all about. It’s about living and enjoying everything around you.

In thinking about the last 10 years, even the worst days carried valuable lessons. I learned how not to do something, how not to act, how not to conduct business from these low points. In the high points I learned how awesome real friendship is, how wonderful family can be (even when they’re irritating!) and how luck is non-existent because opportunities come by us every day – we just have to learn to recognize and embrace them. For all its ups and downs, the first decade of the new millennium I think was pretty great.

I am reminded of an old movie from the 80s called Parenthood. In the movie, the old grandmother talks about a roller coaster and a merry-go-round at a carnival. She says how the roller coaster was frightening and exhilarating all at the same time, with all the ups and downs and the incredible speed at which it runs. She then talks about the merry-go-round and how some prefer it to the roller coaster because it’s closer to the ground, and it feels safer. She then shares how she prefers the roller coaster because the merry-go-round just goes around and around, never getting anywhere. Such is life, in my personal opinion.

I think the last decade, and in particular the last year, had to happen in order for us to really appreciate all the wonderful things in life. You cannot know love without knowing loss. You cannot know true success without knowing what it feels like to fail. You cannot appreciate good friendships without knowing what bad ones look like. We must take the bad with the good to understand everything that life has to offer. And so, I feel thankful for 2009, 2008, 2007, and so forth because of all the amazing learning opportunities I’ve had and how enriched I feel my life is because of them.

I think the perfect ending to 2009 and the ideal beginning to 2010 can be described in the words of Jason Mraz‘s song, Life Is Wonderful. Because it truly is. The good moments as well as the bad moments shape each of our individual life experiences and make us into who we are. By learning from each one, we make the choice to turn the good into bad, or the bad into good. The only time we fail is when we fail to dust ourselves off and keep making progress.

Happy 2010 to you – may your year be Wonderful.

“It takes a thought to make a word
And it takes some words to make an action
And it takes some work to make it work
It takes some good to make it hurt
It takes some bad for satisfaction.” ~Jason Mraz

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