Social Media Recruiting

I spent the last couple months really digging deep into the candidate side of Web 3.0 job hunting and I have to admit, I’m just not convinced that it’s ready for “prime time”. There is some great thinking and some great technology behind the existing players like Jobfox, Climber and Vitruva, but I’ve asked around, I’ve played with them and I’ve read some other blogs — I just can’t seem to find large numbers of individuals who have found success.

Now as much as people bash the “big boards” like Monster and Careerbuilder, I still think they’re an effective means of sourcing for internal corporate recruiters and a good way of finding jobs for job seekers. I work “on the inside” and the majority of our hires come from this method. I get an endless supply of emails and mailers about technologies that claim to “revolutionize” recruiting and I aim to check them all out because I have an open mind. My Agency connections tell me all this stuff is junk, but don’t kid yourself Agency Recruiters…that’s where you’re getting your candidates from too. I know this because I ask all my Agency candidates how they were found. I’ll address that in my next post on Open Market Recruiting.

Don’t get me wrong here, I’m not giving up on this technology. In fact, I have high hopes. The ideal situation would be a MERGER between the big boards and a provider of this 3.0 matching technology because the problem is not that the technology doesn’t work, there’s just not enough people using it. The sign-up takes too long and the number of companies putting their jobs on the site is too low. That’s a recipe for candidate and company abandonment.

So for now, I’ll leave this topic and move on to an area of Social Media Recruiting that I’ve been studying quite intensely for the last 3 months….Open Market Recruiting. I’ll take a look at BountyJobs.Com, Dayak.Com and if anyone else has any suggestions of other companies to review…please let me know. Thanks!

I’ve been on a bit of a Job Matching kick lately. After my initial reviews of Climber.com and Jobfox.com I became interested in what else was out there and who I would consider to be the leader in this small, but growing, space. At some point I’ll be taking a look at the “Employer” side of these sites, but for now I’m most interested in the job seeker experience. Over the next couple weeks I’ll be reviewing Itsbig.com, Trovix.com and today, Vitruva.com.

I was a little intrigued by the name of this company so I did a little digging and found out that it’s based on the iconic drawing made popular by Leonardo da Vinci – “Vitruvian Man”.

On their website, Vitruva explains it like this: “Leonardo da Vinci’s famous painting is a study of the proportions of the man and his relationship to the universe as a whole. Vitruva’s use of the name symbolizes our mission to free people of tedious job searching, by finding the best fit between the proportions (qualifications and preferences) of a job seeker and a job opportunity.”

Not sure I love the name but, in this business, technology talks. I mean…what the heck is a Twitter? Doesn’t matter, it’s a disruptive technology and people love it. Let’s see if I love Vitruva…

The main thing I noticed about this site is that they are claiming to simplify and speed up the candidate profiling process, which is typically long and intricate with other sites. This was music to my ears after logging some serious minutes on Climber and Jobfox.

The sign-up process starts out with a simple question – Public or Private – and some basic contact information, which I had to verify by retrieving an auto-generated email. Once I got the email, I clicked on a link and it took me to my dashboard within Vitruva. I selected “My Profile” and got right to work.

The profiling feature here was pretty smart. It didn’t look like much at first but as you answered each drop-down question, it triggered a new one, which surprisingly was relevant to all the other questions. There was also a little status bar across the top that let me know how far into the process I was and when I would be done. Big plus on that.

It took me only 8 minutes to complete my profile! A marked improvement over the other sites I reviewed. There were no psychological assessments or other frills that I had on Climber/Jobfox, but that wasn’t the original promise. The promise was a fast sign-up and an accurate job match. So how did it work?

When I finished my profile, I clicked on the moment of truth button and I got an error. I was in touch with the CEO who informed me that I got caught in the middle of some coding changes. Sure enough, the problem was resolved on it’s own when I logged in again, unfortunately though, there were no job matches for me….an issue that I had with Climber & JobFox as well with only 1 match each. I’m beginning to think I’m unemployable

I tried to make my profile as general as possible without too many location, travel, and salary requirements to increase my chances but my strategy backfired. I’ll keep an eye on my results to see if anything changes over the next few weeks.

Incidently there was a really cool feature that would allow you to populate your profile with your LinkedIn information. I always love a company that allows me to leverage the time I spent filling out general information on another site. I didn’t use this feature because I didn’t see it until it was too late, but in retro…it’s a great idea.

Another interesting feature is their ability to allow you to create multiple profiles. So if you’re not quite sure what you want to be when you grow up, you can be matched to multiple opportunities in different job categories. Maybe I should change my profile to be a JAVA programmer…then maybe I’ll get some matches. The only problem is, the closest I get to programming JAVA is when I program my coffee maker to turn on at 6 in the morning.

There was a Career Center section of the site in My Dashboard that I explored but didn’t find to be all that interesting or helpful. It was a collection of employment-related resources ie blogs, news, articles, etc matched to me based on my profile. Maybe I’m just overly sensitive to information overload but it seemed like a lot of information that is on just about any other career web site. I know all web sites want to be “sticky” and all that, but I’d recommend focusing more time on trying to provide more job matches and less time on information matches.

Overall, I think Vitruva delivered on 50% of their promise…it WAS a fast/easy sign-up but the job matches (for me) just didn’t happen. I would imagine if I was a part of an “in-demand” job category, the results would improve; however, the key thing to remember for all of the companies in this space is that they will be measured on their ability to deliver relevant job matches for their users across all categories – unless they focus on just one – like MyPerfectGig . Their success will hinge on whether or not they can sign up companies to provide the jobs available for matching. No jobs – No matches – No matches – No hires – No hires – No clients – No clients – No revenue.

The simplicity of this site provides an advantage over the other job matching sites as candidates become more pressed for time and they don’t want to invest 30+ minutes in filling out a job matching profile. As a recruiter too, it’s hard for me to be on too many sites at once so I can see myself picking maybe one of these companies and using it exclusively to try its Candidate Matching technology. I’ll need to test drive them from the other side of the desk first, but more on that later…stay tuned.

Yello Media has announced that they have created the “first” social networking site to offer referrals for the average Joe.  www.yellojobs.com  

The watered down concept:  Company posts job and a referral award amount.  You see job and tell your friend to apply.  You’re the referrer.  You get paid.

I guess now everyone can be an “Executive Recruiter”.

The only problem is.  YelloJobs released this press link and there’s only 3 jobs on their site.  AND, they’re not the first player in this space.  There are a couple others.  The first that comes to mind is H3.com .  I cover H3 in my eBooklet.

Here’s a link to the YelloJobs press release:

http://www.prweb.com/releases/2008/06/prweb1019534.htm

Every once in a while I come across a company who is serious about customer service. It doesn’t happen very often, but this morning when I got into the office, I had an email from JobFox’s VP of Sales & Client Services. The email was dated on Saturday, which was the same day I believe I had my sign-up issue. Oddly enough, she didn’t reference my helpdesk ticket, she was actually contacting me with regards to my Review of JobFox which I posted on Saturday as well. Pretty impressive.

So before 9am today (Monday) I received an email from customer service and by 3pm I had the issue resolved. I can’t tell you the last time that happened.

Now that I have a completed profile, I come to find out that there are no jobs that are a good match for me in my area. This doesn’t surprise me because I’m a good 90 minutes from Philadelphia and Baltimore, which typically have the types of jobs that would appeal to me in large companies. So I ended up playing around with the location radius feature and it pulled up some relevant jobs. Again, I think it outperformed Climber’s matching service.

A quick thanks to the JobFox team for a job well done. I’m told that I might get some information on a new release coming up so I’ll be glad to share this information when it becomes available. As always — stay tuned…

Today I’m reviewing another “Web 3.0″ site who claims to have an algorithm that can match me with jobs the same way that eHarmony.com matches people with their soul mates. I believe that algorithms work, but my first review in this space, Climber.Com, didn’t go too well so I was hoping JobFox would over-deliver. FYI…I logged onto both sites under an alias but used much of my actual information.

Overall, the whole “sign-up” experience at JobFox took me about 65 minutes. Seems like a lot of time to spend filling out a profile if you’re a passive candidate – but I guess active candidates will do whatever it takes.

The experience begins by JobFox offering you two methods to get your information into the system: upload a resume or manually build your work history. I chose to upload my resume to have my information extracted, which worked nicely. I would imagine the manual method adds about 20 more minutes to the sign-up process.

Once your information is extracted, JobFox creates what is essentially your own ‘You-Branded’ ‘Website-Slash-Resume’ that you can publish for all the world to see (or keep private). This ‘You-Site’ has a number of components: experience maps, your work type, your dream job description, links to your facebook/linkedin/myspace pages, work samples area, tags, work history, and resume. It’s pretty extensive and surely gives recruiters like me a better look at who a person is more so than a resume ever would. Here’s a quick breakdown of what each area of the You-Page is:

Experience Maps: these are like mind-maps. You answer questions about your work history and they plot out a map of what you’ve done and link your competencies together. The idea, I would guess, is to show areas of concentration (expertise) in visual form as opposed to a recruiter having to extract it from a resume. Pretty cool.

Work-Type: this is nothing more than a personality/psycho assessment…but it’s pretty good…and it’s free. It’s conducted by Saville Consulting’s “Wave” People and Task type model. Basically you answer a bunch of questions and they tell you your tendencies at work and what type of cultures you fit in best. Mine was pretty accurate and I’ve taken a few of these before. They even give you a free profile on yourself and then display your “Work-Type” on your You-Page so recruiters know exactly who they’re messing with. For example, if you look at mine, you’ll know right away that I’m a nice guy to work with, I like to spend time creating new ideas, I have strong leadership tendencies and you can rely on me to deliver results.

Dream Job: by selecting 5 keywords that describe your ideal job, JobFox provides a visual of your ideal job. Not real impressed with this function – I’d rather state my dream job in my words I think.

The other areas of the You-Page are pretty self-explanatory. They’re basically links that you can add to provide further insight into who you are and what you’ve done, but I definitely think they add value. I didn’t add links…net savings…10 minutes.

There are two other areas in JobFox that make all this hard-work of profiling worthwhile: the Tracking Center and the My Jobs pages. Tracking Center allows you to see who sees you. In other words, if Microsoft looked at your You-Page, you’ll know. I thought that was pretty cool. Doesn’t tell you what Microsoft thought of you, but at least you know they saw you, which is more than the traditional job boards will reveal.

“My Jobs” is an area where you can see, at last, how good JobFox is at matching you to employers and jobs who fit “YOU” as defined on your You-Page. THE ONLY PROBLEM IS, AFTER THREE DAYS, I STILL CAN’T GET THIS SECTION TO WORK! Very frustrating. Basically, you have to complete ALL the information that they ask you, which is okay, but when the website isn’t working properly and doesn’t allow you to save your information (THREE TIMES) I get a little frustrated.

So for right now, I have no idea if JobFox does a better job at matching me to jobs than Climber.com does because my profile isn’t complete. I put a ticket into their helpdesk on Friday, so we’ll see how good their customer service is.

Overall, I’d say the experience is much better with JobFox. Seems more robust. Seems like JobFox actually thought about what they were doing and invested more into it’s creation. I’m confident that there’s an algorithm somewhere in this site that will do a decent job of matching me up with suitable positions.

Both sites essentially do the same thing, but I would explain it this way: JobFox is like flying first class and Climber is like riding the jump seat on a FedEx carrier. User-experience-wise that is. I’ll report on my findings about the matching capabilities when I finally get to see my matches on JobFox. Stay tuned…

I finally got around to signing up on Climber.Com .  It’s one of the new Web 3.0 destinations claiming to be able to tell me what jobs are good for me and subsequently matching me up with recruiters who are looking for people just like me.  Sort of like an eHarmony for job hunters.

So you log in and give up some personal information like how much you make, how you would describe yourself (Tiger Woods of Recruiting), where you live, phone number, etc.  It says it’s completely confidential but I was a little hesitant to give up all my information because, first of all, I’m not really signing up to find a job, and second, I get enough weird calls as it is.  I went with my usual alias and filled out the profile as best I could, including information that I thought would get me some hits. 

The product of all this information is a new-age resume that includes more information than the standard “Education, Work History and Objective”.  Personally, I like where this is going because I think recruiters miss a lot of good people over badly written resumes.  Profiles like these make it difficult to sell yourself short.

After that you fill out some of your accomplishments and head to a new section where you create a “Career Fingerprint”.  This is where the Web 3.0 kicks in.   By asking a few questions about your preferences for work situations, an algorithm predicts what jobs and companies would be good for you.  They ask you to rank statements like, “I prefer companies with casual dress codes” or “telecommuting must be an option” or “most employees take equity instead of salary”.    Then they provide you a little graph that tells you who you are and a big write up on what matters to you and what you can do without.  Sort of like a Predictive Index test. 

Sorry to say, my write up was dead wrong for “Things that matter to me” but a little better for “Things that don’t matter to me”.    I’ve taken a couple of similar tests before and I’ve definitely seen some that are more accurate.  Some are down right scary.

There is also a function that allows you to tell your friends to check you out/join Climber and be in your network.  Another social networking opportunity.  Not sure I’ll keep up with this one…I just have too many others that I follow and I’d hate to bother my network by asking them to join me at Climber…in addition to linkedin, facebook, twitter, etc, etc.

In the end, the grand finale was for me to get my list of jobs and companies that are matched just for me.  I eagerly clicked on my “Dashboard” to see all my dream jobs lined up in a row, but my only match was for a low-level recruiting job 60 miles away for a company I would never work for.  And the job was just pulled off of Indeed.Com using keywords no doubt.  There didn’t seem to be any “matching technology” going on at all.  I could surely find many more jobs that fit exactly what I want on my own doing my own keyword searches.

To test the theory that I’m my best search agent, I used Climber’s job search functionality and it produced some strange results.  I typed in “Staffing Manager” and it returned some strange “Climber Exlcusive” jobs unrelated to staffing and a bunch of somewhat relevant jobs pulled from Indeed.com.  My guess is part of the revenue model involves getting paid on click-throughs from Indeed.  There were also Google ads at the top of pages too.

The whole process took about 30 minutes to complete which I thought was lengthy, but this was my first experience with a matching site.   A friend told me that he signed up for eHarmony, invested 60 minutes and was told that he wasn’t compatible with anyone….that’s pretty brutal.  At least Climber gave me one job to chew on.

I’m going to continue to monitor my profile over the next few weeks to see if anything changes but as for now, I’m not sold on Climber as a Web 3.0  “Predictive Web” concept but it’s early in the game.  I’m sure they’re planning improvements.  Stay tuned…I’ll be reviewing some other Web 3.0 companies shortly.

I put together a 30 page white paper together titled: “Recruiting 2.0 – A Beginners Guide to Using Social Media Tools For Recruiting”. It’s an informative walk through the current methodologies and vendors making Recruiting 2.0 such a hot topic today. UPDATE 5/1/09 — I’M WORKING ON AN UPDATE TO THIS DOCUMENT AS IT’S ALREADY A BIT OUT OF DATE! The industry is just moving too fast!!! Feel free to request this doc and I’ll get you on the list for the next version.

If you’d like a copy, simply send me an EMAIL including your name, title and company and I’ll send you get a copy. Just as a heads up, I’ll probably email you about a week later just to get some feedback on the document and to see where you are in terms of your Social Media Strategy. Ultimately, I’d like to post an overview of “The State of Social Media Recruiting” on this blog (without mentioning names or companies) because I’m finding that everyone wants to play in this space, but no one really knows enough about it to justify spending money on a strategy.

So request your copy today and take the first step toward putting your Social Media Recruitment Strategy in place! Click Here To Receive Your Copy

As technology accelerates it only seems natural that some companies attempt to predict what’s next.

As it stands now, employers are just starting to explore ways to leverage Web 2.0 applications for recruiting. “Recruiting 2.0″ hasn’t even hit mainstream and yet there are a handful of companies already placing big bets on their ability to own the Web 3.0 space.

Now most outspoken Social Media gurus will cringe when they see the term Web 3.0 because they never really liked the term Web 2.0…but what else can we use to describe it? How about “Predictive Web” or “Predictive Media”?

Since these companies are creating applications that Predict “what people want”, and embedding it into Social Media environments, it would be a logical name. Let’s look at an example that illustrates how “Predictive Web” applications work.

So I’m a member of Blockbuster Online. I’m on the bare-bones plan because – who has time to watch more than two movies per month? Anyway, each time I rent a movie, I give it a rating on scale of 5 stars. Blockbuster’s software application records my preferences and then sends me an email a couple times a month telling me what movies I would like based on my previous rental history and ratings.

I have to be honest here…I’ve been a member for about 2 years and Blockbuster still has no idea what kind of movies I want to watch. They know what category of movies I typically enjoy, but I don’t think their software is “intelligent” enough to dig deeper into the content, theme, characters, outcome, soundtrack, mood, or genre to really understand what makes me like or dislike a movie.

Intelligent software or algorithms are what will drive the future of these Web 3.0 or “Predictive Web” applications and make them better predictors of our preferences. But for now…stop telling me what I want until you really understand what makes me tick!

In terms of Recruiting, there have been a couple entries into this Predictive Web space. The ones that come to mind are: Itzbig, JobFox and Climber. If you’re familiar with a company called eHarmony.com – a Predictive Web dating service – then you understand what these companies do at a very basic level:

You enter your skills and what kind of job, company, career, etc. you want and they match you with employers who have requested someone with your skills and aspirations.

Seems simple, but how well can a software application predict what kind of job would be a perfect fit for both me and my employer? Well, I have an open mind so I’m going to try each of these services over the next month or so and report back on my experience with each. As always…stay tuned.