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:
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:
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.
In the interests of fair play……here was the recent, positive statement from Apple….compared to Microsoft.
Best Quarterly Revenue and Earnings in Apple History, iPod Sales Set New Record
CUPERTINO, California—January 21, 2009—Apple® today announced financial results for its fiscal 2009 first quarter ended December 27, 2008. The Company posted record revenue of $10.17 billion and record net quarterly profit of $1.61 billion, or $1.78 per diluted share. These results compare to revenue of $9.6 billion and net quarterly profit of $1.58 billion, or $1.76 per diluted share, in the year-ago quarter. Gross margin was 34.7 percent, equal to the year-ago quarter. International sales accounted for 46 percent of the quarter’s revenue.
In accordance with the subscription accounting treatment required by GAAP, the Company recognizes revenue and cost of goods sold for iPhone™ and Apple TV® over their economic lives. Adjusting GAAP sales and product costs to eliminate the impact of subscription accounting, the corresponding non-GAAP measures* for the quarter are $11.8 billion of “Adjusted Sales” and $2.3 billion of “Adjusted Net Income.”
Apple sold 2,524,000 Macintosh® computers during the quarter, representing nine percent unit growth over the year-ago quarter. The Company sold a record 22,727,000 iPods during the quarter, representing three percent unit growth over the year-ago quarter. Quarterly iPhone units sold were 4,363,000, representing 88 percent unit growth over the year-ago quarter.
“Even in these economically challenging times, we are incredibly pleased to report our best quarterly revenue and earnings in Apple history—surpassing $10 billion in quarterly revenue for the first time ever,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO.
“Our outstanding results generated over $3.6 billion in cash during the quarter,” said Peter Oppenheimer, Apple’s CFO. “Looking ahead to the second fiscal quarter of 2009, we expect revenue in the range of about $7.6 billion to $8 billion and we expect diluted earnings per share in the range of about $.90 to $1.00.”
Seems like this lull in the recruitment industry is even taking the wind out of Google’s sails a tiny bit…..
The following entry was posted in Google’s blog a couple of days ago by their VP of People Operations…….
1/14/2009 03:01:00 PMAs we made clear during our last quarterly earnings call in October, Google is still hiring but at a reduced rate. Given the state of the economy, we recognized that we needed fewer people focused on hiring.
Our first step to address this was to wind down almost all our contracts with external contractors and vendors providing recruiting services for Google. However, after much consideration, we have with great regret decided that we need to go further and reduce the overall size of our recruiting organization by approximately 100 positions.
We know this change will be very difficult for the people concerned, and we hope that many of them will be able to find new roles at Google. They helped build this company, new hire by new hire, and we are enormously grateful for everything they have done.
Maybe they’ll be cutting back on Dodgeball time in the corridors next!
If you’ve been reading the press lately you’ll know that Monster have rebuilt their website. I found a marketing brochure describing their great undertaking. Here are a few quotes from the Monster literature:
When you invented the game, it’s okay to change the rules.
Today, we are reinventing the Monster Seeker and Employer experience, using patent-pending technologies to create new, never-before-seen products and services. In short, Monster is revolutionizing the way you recruit. Again.
That’s pretty big words from a pretty big company. So the BIG question is “How much of this is hype, how much is bells and whistles and how much is blind panic by the Monster money making machine?”
I’ll do an in-depth review of the new features in a later post, but at first glance their site is still very busy to they eye. There’s a lot of stuff that either has no relevance to me (the usual “career advice” and “how to write that perfect CV”) or, well just a lot of “job noise” that I’m never going to click on.
In their advance search, for example, they still stick to the rather dull splitting of industries into vertical segments and an old-fashioned list of click and select career checkboxes. That’s not innovation surely?
At first glance, this isn’t anything like a full body makeover but more of a facelift. Monster still looks ugly to me!
My top 8 topics of interest for the recruitment industry in 2009 and beyond are:
1. Personal Promotion (for want of a better phrase!). You own the data, you know what your skills are you know when you’re available. Who else is in a better position to know all this? Recruitment agencies - I think not!
2. Social Networking Sites - Can recruiters engage with candidates using social networking sites?
3. Video Branding - How can employers, agencies and individuals promote and develop their own brands?
4. Recruitment Blogs - How can recruiters utilise blogging within their career sites?
5. Personal Tagging - Forget scanning CVs or resumes, use data tags instead.
6. Aggregators - How aggregators are used in online recruiting (I have an instant aversion to aggregation - just smacks of poor quality output to me)!
7. Recruitment and Web 2.0 (+ Web 3.0)! - Nice words but is there any substance behind all this verbage? Do we really need to engage with Generation Y using these techniques?
8. Cloud Recruiting - The recruitment industry’s spin on cloud computing
I’m quite a fan of “Software as a Service” (SaaS). The idea of having access to everything from anywhere is pretty appealing to me and I’ll give you a practical example of what I mean:
A couple of months ago a friend had asked me to prepare a quiz for her birthday. Trying to plan things a little in advance for once, I wrote the quiz a week or so before the event and emailed it to her from my Gmail account asking her to get in touch if she had any problems with it. That’s where I went wrong!
A day before the quiz I was at the airport waiting to catch a flight to Barcelona to see my brother. I got a text message just as the flight was called……..”Hi. Hope you’re ok. Have you managed 2 sort out the quiz for 2moro?”
My heart sank for a second as I realised that she hadn’t received the email. I had let her down. If only I’d called her after I’d sent the email I wouldn’t be in this predicament!
I figured out that all was not lost as I strapped my seatbelt on. Of course! My email (and all its attachments) were in the cloud somewhere. All I had to do was get access to the Internet, logon to my Gmail account and I could sort it out.
If this had happened five years ago I couldn’t have fixed it but with SaaS email it was easy. Long live SaaS and Gmail!
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:
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.
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