LatinOcean – Digital Marketing Consulting

As the job market heats up, interest in online business networking is starting to soar — turning a one-time novelty into a necessity for millions of business professionals in search of jobs or business contacts.

Article from the courier post online, mainly focused on LinkedIn and the rise of the professional network as a source of jobs and candidates

Give me a hoy if you want to find out more about LinkedIn and how you can use it today to source candidates that may have stopped visiting job boards by now

I was talking to a couple of friends who were interviewing for tech jobs in the financial services industry (two separate companies). These are firms that are very successful, well known, decent community stand, pay on market – I think; in other words they have a pretty good employer brand, or at least that is my perception of them

Interestingly enough, the interviewing experience for my mates had not been that crash-hot: one was kept waiting for almost an hour in the first meet, the other one had a change of time when he was on his way for the second meet, and both had core members of their interview panels rushing to get on with their day.

My first reaction was to think that they were overreacting. Then, I kind of understood why the interview experience was not aligned with the employer brand perception. More to the point, the brand perception created high expectations about the entire recruitment experience from the word go.

I guess the point is that you as a hiring company (or agency) are going to interview many more people than those you are actually going to employ or make an employment offer. That tells you that there’s stacks of individuals roaming the streets whose only experience with your company was the interview. Therefore, in the interest of preserving your brand as an employer, you may also want to pay attention to your reputation as an interviewer, which in turns means that all your hiring managers and interviewers need to get on board re. your employer brand. Logical huh.

…recruiters need to ask themselves: “What do you offer your clients that they can’t do themselves?”

… as a minimum:

* be a rapid provider of high quality candidates;

* be able to fill hard-to-fill positions; and

* provide access to inaccessible candidates.

Read the full article from Recruiter Daily (sign up whilst you’re there too)

I came across Ning a few days back. Unlike the usual thoughtless tests I usually run on the many services and tools I stomp into online these days, for this one I stopped and wondered: what if we’re able to get a few people connected and finding common ground on how to take the recruitment practice forward, in line with the thoughts at LatinOcean? What if?

And then I let it go, because you know, I think: shivers! what other things do I need to do before I indulge in a community building exercise? come one man! back to the real world! ….

And then Maria from T2 comes knocking, and she wants to join in; and she doesn’t know that she’s the first recruiter to want in….

And then I let go again, because you – like me – may be able to kick off a community online, but that does not mean that its destiny is in your hands.

Welcome to Aussie Recruiters; this is your patch.

When you are no longer aligned with your customers is when the company starts getting into trouble. When you start saying your gizmo is great and your customers are telling everybody it sucks, then you have (a) serious misalignment.

So how do you keep misalignment from happening?

The answer lies (in) the cultural (corporate) membrane that separates you (the company) from them (your customers). The more porous the membrane, the easier it is for conversations between you and them, the internal and external, to happen. The easier for the conversations on both sides to adjust to the other, to become like the other.

And nothing pokes holes in the membrane better than blogging.

read the rest of Hugh MacLeod’s notes of his presentation to UK PR outfit Edelman, via Seth

I am not sure how frequently you send or come up against unwieldy and un-clickable web links that you need to paste onto a browser to get to the destination, In either case you might want to use or see a tinyurl. Just translate your link to tiny and send the new one around. Might reduce the broken link incidence stats. Anyone out there using it already in mailers, etc?

Despite the candidate shortage, the majority of employers in Australia remain reluctant to recruit long-term unemployed candidates, believing in stereotypes that they are lazy and out of work by choice.

A 4% unemployment rate means s**t to a lot of people. Individuals that have been consistently out of work face a 100% unemployment rate, that’s the number that matters to them. Unemployment, just like national savings, birth rates, etc are all personal experiences disguised as macroeconomic variables.

Read the rest of the piece at recruiter daily

Fire half your salesforce. Then, give the remainder, the top people, a big raise, and use the money left over to steal the best salespeole you can find from other industries or even from your competition. You’ll end up with fewer salespeople. But all of them will be great.

read the whole post from Seth

This is our new ‘what we do page’. In the same way that it’s better to leave the title of an article for last after you’ve finished the whole piece, it feels that to write about what your company does is better articulated once you’ve hit the road. I don’t plan to spend to much time with company blurbs or vision statements, but it is a good thing to remind people and yourself as to why and for whom you are in business for.

A series of articles from John Sullivan on ere got me on this rant

- For a few years already, organisations have bought and continue to buy stacks of laptops, pdas, phones; to hand out to their mobile sales teams. Obviously the idea is to have them on the client’s site more than in the office. Often, the client site will be an individual’s home: yes, we have people selling to us in our own houses;

* real estate agents, wanting in on your buying or selling transaction
* financial planners, when u are checking out more sophisticated investment products
* lending officers, estimating your borrowing capacity in your dining table

- I wonder who will be the first corporate or agency recruiter to visit candidates to interview them at home.

* Will the candidate’s home always be too disruptive a place to have an interview with no distractions?
* Will the interview format adjust to the new environment?
* What is the pre-sales work needed for candidates to open their doors to a recruiter? will the consultant need a well known -online- reputation? will an employer brand help open the door?

Let me know if there’s anyone doing home interviews already, or if you think that this format will never fly