Making these talent tags free format opens up the “door” to a whole lot more uses……….for example, why not have your name as a talent tag?  That way, anyone can look you up, check your availability and see what you’re doing now.

We’ve made some interesting (we hope) changes to the KK website recently…. we’ve added a new concept called “Talent Tags”.

For those of you that are using the site to promote yourselves, this is really good news.  You can now describe your talents, skills or whatever yourselves using key words or phrases that YOU think describe yourselves.  Just login to My KK and select your portfolio.  You’ll see 2 fields that you can use.

1) Display Tag

This is the tag that gets displayed on your door.  Normally your job title, but it’s free form.

2) Talent Tags

Keywords about YOU… about your job, skills you have, or a particular talent.  These keywords are used by people searching for your skills.  Again it’s free form…just separate your phrases with commas.

Hope you like this new feature.  Please feel free to feedback any comments as usual!

Sometimes when “something” becomes popular and successful for a long time it becomes a defacto standard, something that is just accepted, no questions asked.  Over time, other people and organisations try to catch hold of the coat tails of this success by copying (sometimes with slight variations, often with none) the original idea.

Often, everyone is too busy admiring this “something” to notice that times have changed and the world has moved on.  Such is the case of the ubiquitous job board.

There have been many massive market shifts by inventors and free-thinking people in history.  Think of the first automatically sliced loaf, a buzzer when you leave your car lights on, Dyson and the vacuum cleaner industry.  All were big revelations…the kind that make you think….well that’s obvious!

Well, it’s the same in the recruitment industry.  The job board market is lazily jogging along (fat from its profits) unaware that its nemesis the “people board” is about to sprint past it and leave it for dead (quite literally).

You see, times have changed.  The Internet is now much more people focused.  People/users demand more from Internet services and they want these services to be free.  Any Internet service that is going to succeed in a massive way must focus on the benefits for its users.

Job boards simply do not focus on their users.  What they do is in fact the reverse.  Many job boards focus on two areas; job advertising and a CV (resume) database.

For job advertising, they charge a lot of money for employers (or agencies) that wish to advertise their job vacancies.  The other side of the job board website, the CV database, is a little odd.  Essentially users can send their CV (free of charge) to the job board.  At first this sounds like a reasonable deal until you realise that the CV database is locked down.  Only employers who register with the job board and pay (far too much money) will be able to search for your CV.

There are three fundamentally bad things here:

1. The job boards are selling YOUR data and you gave them it for free!
2. The job board has effectively restricted access to companies who can afford to pay for the service. 
3. Your data is only visible for those periods of time when companies pay for it and actively search for some skills.

 People boards are the reverse of this and bring benefits for those actively looking for work, those not actively looking for work, employers and even agencies.

So what is a people board?

Here’s my definition:

A people board:

1. enables people to promote their skills
2. enables people to publish their availability and references
3. enables people to control how their data is presented and how they can be contacted
4. allows employers to search for people
5. 1-4 MUST be free of charge

We don’t need to overcomplicate the recruitment business.  There should only be two sides to it; employers seeking candiddates and candidates looking for roles in business. 

The objective of a people board is to make it much easier to put both sides of the recruitment equation in touch with each other, no matter what the business, no matter what skills the person has.

The people board is a simple concept, but then the best ideas usually are.

We’vee been working on various promotional videos for our site using Animoto.  This is our favourite at the moment:

Who do YOU think YOU are? on YouTube

We call it “Who Do YOU think YOU are?”.  We’re trying to get across the message that everyone should promote their skills and not rely on job boards or agencies……..

Here at KK we’re big fans of the Animoto website (www.animoto.com).  We wanted to make quick, snappy promotional videos for our site that we could put on YouTube and also add to our site.

The Animoto service makes the production of this kind of video extremely easy.  All you need to do is upload some images, put them in the order you want them displayed, add some text, choose a soundtrack and then send it all to the Animoto guys where is is rendered.  After a few minutes the video is ready to play with various effects that have been added automatically.

There are then options to remix the video, post to YouTube or produce a higher quality video.

Take a look at some of our efforts at the following links:

KnokKnok Short

…and another one

…last one…

Enjoy….

Following the not too painful birth of the knokknok business and website we take a long collective deep breath and wondered “What now?”.  We weren’t so naive as to expect thousands of people to flock to our new baby and knew we needed to promote and advertise our site.  

Without having a massive budget for TV advertising, or a wealth of creative talent we still believed that if we put certain “plans” in place we could generate more traffic.

So what should we try?

Here’s a short-list:

1. Write articles about the recruitment business and publish them on the web.  These needed to have a clear view point and if possible have some controversy to spark some debate.

2. You’re reading it…..yes a blogful of our thoughts on the recruitment industry, employers, agencies as well as our KK business and vaguely amusing things that happen to us on a day to day business.

3. Promotional videos which we could re-use, post on our website, post on YouTube …..

4. Anything else that doesn’t cost much but reaches lots of people.

All this in the vague hope of zooming up the search engine rankings……. more detail to follow.