I was browsing through cyberspace and had to highlight something that just drove the marketing and graphic designer in me bonky. I was looking at the career section of a fairly well known company in the recruiting space, and found the below graphic there. Keep in mind, that the description going along with this is “a fun, energetic startup company with a passion for building great technology”

If I was a candidate, is the brutal honesty that I’ll be living my life in a 72 square foot space that looks like a sterilized cage something that I want to highlight on the career section of my company?

More importantly, this was on the Simply-Hired site. A modern, Web 2.0, tech company who should know not to highlight the bad points of working in a corporate office setting. It could be a joke taken in a tongue-in-cheek fashion, but the theme and general design of the site indicates that it is probably the cold hard truth. In any case, it probably shouldn’t be the graphic of choice for a company claiming to be “fun & energetic”.

As social networking online becomes more invasive, I’m seeing good amounts of data about individuals I’m considering working with that are key indicators that open the door for an experienced recruiter to reach out and contact them. This is a good thing for the recruiting world as a tool for reaching out to passive candidates, but what happens when the ‘evil’ of technology goes down the dark side?

What if, a major corporation used the same exact services to track employees satisfaction with a current role? While sites like Myspace and Livejournal may not have a specific employment theme, places liked Linked-in and Jobster do. As a manager, if I come across your profile that indicates you are passively wandering around the jobscape, what does that tell me about you? would it be in my best interest to keep my top producers from posting “I’ll take an offer” sign on a profile?

What are the methods a company could retaliate against job seekers, both active and passive? Will there be a point that a legal or HR team will be implemented to monitor and track current employees in the major systems? Will it identify them for replacement or potential downsizing?

I could definitely see some competitive companies entering recruiting wars, with HR teams designated to recruit and to defend employees. As job markets tighten in specific industries, maybe we’ll see some of this fighting in the trenches…

I guess we’ll all just have to wait and see.

Laughingly, I’ll have to go to the trademark office and think up some terms like ‘headkeeper’ and register them now.

I may be a little crazy. I know the average job seeker isn’t going to go through job boards, recruitment sites, and various HR sources and think about the ramifications of all the ‘behind the scenes’ things… but I do.
Where does my resume go? Who to? How many people see it? Will I see recruiting spam? Is the database I’m working in properly searchable for my key search terms? What SEO system is the recruiter using to filter 100,000 resumes?

I’ll admit it, I tend to think a few layers down, a few steps sideways, and sometimes even question the basic preface of the recruiting system I’m working in. From a candidate perspective I’m amazed with some of the real world junk mail I’ve received from the marketing arm of companies I’ve shown an interest in, and more specifically I’m amused that I know what ones they are because of the wording of my name and address.

Even in the interview process, I’m amazed by the number of people who are clueless about the process of wasted energy they have. Recruiters who fail to network with someone who is close to a skillset, or even inquire about other likely candidates they may be searching for. In the past week alone I’ve ran into at least three recruiters where I told them I wasn’t the man they were looking for, but gave them a referral to someone who is probably right on target.

To the Business Blog Summit here in Seattle? It is on the Oct 25 thru 27th weekend. I’m thinking about going just to meet some like-minded business idealists and to hopefully strike up a conversation or two with some interesting spirits. If you are coming in from out of the area, feel free to drop me a line and I’ll set aside time to have a cup of coffee with you and make some personal introductions.

I’ve been playing around with Real Estate Blogsites for the past few months and I’m somewhat dissapointed in the general behavior and usability of the various product offerings on the net. From a product offering standpoint, real estate professionals seem to have a lack of options. This is really the same crisis that many industries are facing in the online media world- they simply are having a problem adopting the mindset of the new generation (however there are some great examples of forward thinking individuals in each)

I am also amazed by the number of ‘websites’ out there that are utilizing blog technology really from an SEO or marketing standpoint and fail to realize the power of online social media abilities. The craze about ‘blogging’ in the past twelve months doesn’t have anything to do with the basics of blog technology… it has to do with the basics of social networking.

Perhaps this is an obvious lesson for me having been in the recruiting and online world for so long, but it really does make me wonder how much longer some of these old-school marketing thoughts will survive in the online market place. The idea ‘if we build it, they will come’ no longer applies anymore.

This era of online networking is about buzz, conversation, and collaboration. People want to be part of something. They don’t want to sit back and get smacked in the face with meaningless information about how real estate blogsites can do something amazing in the real estate arena. They want the ‘interaction’ that interactive media has been claiming to provide over the past decade.

In the past few weeks I’ve taken a different perspective in the recruiting process. It has been a long time, but now I’m looking at things from the candidate perspective and updating my resume to explore the possibilities out there.

I have always been a proud support and innovator on any project I have been a part of, but actually ‘being in the trenches’ provides a level of desire and honesty that is hard to adopt. – Browsing through contacts, taking a look at interesting positions, pondering whether Company A or Organization B would be a better cultural fit…

The data is complex not only because there is a variety of information, but that information is for the most part poorly organized, badly presented, and tweaked with a marketing spin that has been rolled flat by a dozen lawyers. Starting at the employer level, the structure of presenting an online recruiting presence is typically under-funded and sometimes even contradicts the branding of the company.

As you take a step into the recruiting process, the first step is to figure out what the position actually is. The writing for a majority of open positions leaves you asking if the entire purpose of the job posting was to leave you asking more questions, rather than actually telling you anything pertinent about the position or the company.

Whether finely written or abruptly slapped together, the next step is to get the ‘word’ out there about an open position. Most often that includes an online method of advertising, that is again broken into a horrible conglomeration of make-shift job advertisements that have been corrupted by unknown numbers of scams.

Once a position reaches the online world, it quickly finds it’s way into a variety of databases and job forums it was never intended to go. Sometimes this is good, sometimes this is bad, but it happens regardless.

As a candidate begins to search for the ‘ideal position’, they are dumb-founded by user interfaces and e-mail marketing options that seem to be designed to be obstacles rather than user benefits. Upon entering even the most advanced Boolean search phrase, candidates are still inundated by search results for work-at-home offers and insurance companies resorting to e-mail spamming to find people who will believe the marketing hype.

So…

My recruiting ideas are definitely wrapping themselves around the solution end of the candidate problem. There are so many sections of the puzzle that can be modified to create streamlined and functional online recruiting improvements that I’m going to dedicate some of my writing specifically with that in mind.