I’m leaving Accenture and joining Best Buy.  Feels weird to say that because I’ve been at Best Buy for 4.5 years or so.  Up until now, or at least until Sept. 28, I’ve been an Accenture employee.  So the location isn’t so different, same campus, different building.  One major  difference is that this new role is not in recruiting.  It’s a customer facing role, not candidate facing (although in many cases I’d argue they are the same thing).  The cool part is, the recruiting genes haven’t been erased from my DNA.  I plan to not forget about my friends in recruiting at Accenture, at Best Buy, and in the industry as you guys are some of the most savvy, intelligent, critical thinking, early adopters of social technology out there.

So the new gig is  Social Media Manager.  This is not to be confused with the Sr Manager of Emerging Media Marketing for which we did the crowdsourcing experiment.

The title says Social Media Manager.  I think what it will really be about is figuring out where social technology makes sense as a way to solve a business problem, or do something better for our customers, employees or partners.  I think it’ll involve figuring out where social tech doesn’t make sense too.  I think the day to day work will be about creative problem solving, collaborating with the already incredible group of people at Best Buy, and facilitating social tech with those who are interested in jumping into the fray.  I know it’ll be fun.  I expect assumptions to be challenged, sacred cows to be sacrificed, buttons to be pushed, and omelettes to be eaten.

More to come on the new role, just wanted to officially announce it to my friends and colleagues.

Ok, now that you’ve got the gist of it. Think about disintermediation when it comes to the recruiting industry. I’ve had a goal for a long time to reduce reliance on job boards. Not because they’re evil, not because I have a personal vendetta, but because the model is goofy to me. The analogy I use sometimes is that job boards are a bit like HMO’s. HMO’s stand between the patient and doctor. HMO’s have an undue influence on the choices of the patient, and ultimately the kind of connection they have with their doctor. HMO’s also have an enormous impact on the experience that a patient has in seeking care. I think the parallels with job boards are obvious.

Enter the force of disintermediation.

The internet has made it easier and easier for individuals (and companies) to have access to the things that before required an intermediary or middleman. Used to be we paid job boards for the posting, and they did the SEO work on the job so it showed up in results on Google. Now with vendors like jobs2web the job boards are suffering the effects of disintermediation. This is just one example among many of how disintermediation is affecting our industry.

What changes do you see or foresee as a result of disintermediation?

What are the implications of disintermediation for job boards, Agency recruiters, CRM vendors, ATS vendors, corporate recruiters, or anyone in the recruiting industry?

Even better, what will your response be when, not if, disintermediation starts to affect your world?

At some point in the near future there will be a much longer blog post/case study on this thing, but wanted to note a quick mention on this developing story. We’ve been doing some crowd-sourcing at Best Buy and its getting some crazy run right now. Here’s the story.

Stage 1: A few weeks ago, I tweeted about a job we have open, Sr Manager, Emerging Media Marketing. Basically the person who gets the role will lead all the marketing that is done using social media, mobile and video. Ok, nothing out of the ordinary so far.

Stage 2: I sent @ replies about the job via Twitter to Jason Falls and Barry Judge. Both of whom graciously re-tweeted it which generated a cascade of retweets from their followers.

Stage 3: I also sent an @ reply of the job via Twitter to Jeremiah Owyang. He also graciously retweeted it, with a major difference. He noticed among the qualifications for the job, 250+ followers on Twitter as a preferred qualification. The re-tweets went bananas from there. Blog posts were spawned, some were elated with the now infamous “250 twitter followers” qualification, some were dismissive and didn’t like it, many had alternate ideas for qualifications.

Stage 4: I went to Barry Judge with the idea that we should crowdsource the job description. He loved it, fully supported it, said go. We went.

Stage 5: People talked about it on Twitter, Friendfeed, on their blogs; online. They also submitted ideas for alternative job descriptions to Best Buy’s IdeaX site.

Stage 6: A lot of people blogged about it. Now the Associated Press picked it up. As did a dizzying amount of others.

The job isn’t even posted yet.

Cost = zero dollars.

Perhaps, there might be something to this crowd-sourcing, social media ballyhoo after all? Granted, this is lightning in a bottle, but there are some lessons to be learned here methinks; a lot of them. Stay tuned to this blog here and Barry Judge’s blog for updates, and the case study coming once we’ve made the hire.

So yesterday this Twitter conversation happened between myself and Jerry Albright, The Recruiting Animal, Adele Vogel, Janice Worthington, Stephanie Lloyd,Bill McCabe, Sheree Van Vreede, and Stephen Van Vreede.

The topic was posting jobs on Twitter. Jerry said its basically a waste of time, I sort of agreed, with the caveat “unless you do it right”. Which prompted the response from Animal and Adele “what the hell does that mean? ‘Do it right?’” So then I promised to write an extended post on the topic to provide a place for the discussion to expand a bit.

Let me just say, I’m not the purveyor of all things right and wrong, but I am opinionated, and I have tried enough things with social media as to have some actual results (good and bad) that inform said opinions. Also, I think its tough to put absolute statements on this question. I think “it depends” works a lot better as a starting point. Provided of course you can fathom on what, exactly, “it” depends.

Let’s get a few obvious points out of the way.

The most obvious of obvious points. So obvious it doesn’t get a number.
If your sector of people you’re looking to hire aren’t typically twitter users; (ahem) don’t use twitter to post those jobs. Painful to even write it, that was so obvious.

Obvious point #1: If you have very few followers (less than 100) and you are posting jobs to Twitter and posting nothing else, you may as well go to the end of your driveway, cup your hands around your mouth and start yelling “I’m hiring, I’m hiring!” You’ll get about the same results. Mea Culpa; we’ve all done it, right? When we first started playing with Twitter, we thought “ooh, a new place to post jobs!” Our enthusiasm waned as we discovered the ineffectiveness of that approach. We discovered maybe its a bit more complicated than that. Maybe Twitter is not just another distribution channel? Maybe its more than that. So the first consideration is how many followers you have. If the number is low, unless its really concentrated with people in the sector in which you recruit, work on those follower numbers.

Obvious point #2 ‘Who’ is following you is probably important.
If you’re recruiting underwater welders, yet you haven’t found groups of them on Twitter, and likewise they haven’t found you, how in the world is it going to work to start tweeting about your underwater welding jobs? Aren’t the people you’re looking for probably underwater right now? You know, welding? This one seems REALLY obvious, and yet, I’ve witnessed it frequently.

Obvious point #3 Timing and frequency.
The other thing people seem to forget is that their legions of followers are probably following tons of other people as well. Likely, they are not just watching twitter all the live long day waiting for nuggets of wisdom from you or me. They don’t see every post by every person they are following. Sorry to burst your bubble, but even your followers don’t hang on every tweet. In fact if they are using Tweetdeck, Twhirl, Peoplebrowsr or something else that relies on a limited number of API calls (connections) to Twitter, they’re only seeing some of the posts from some of the people they follow. So if you tweet your job just once, you’re not likely to get a lot of response. Likewise if you tweet your job opening at 10 pm, you may not get the run you’re looking for either. Post during higher traffic times for twitter, post it more than once.

Obvious point #4 Measure your results.
So you’ve tweeted your job, you even got a few retweets of that bad boy from some of your BFFs on Twitter. You’re feeling good, but yet you still aren’t seeing people apply for the job. In fact, when you stop and think about it, beyond a few retweets, you have no idea how many people are paying attention to that tweet. Seems obvious to find a way to track responses right? However, I see it often that people don’t use an url shortener that does this for them. Hootsuite and Bit.ly come to mind. My favorite lately is Bit.ly. Makes it easy to post something online with the bit.ly sidebar, and allows easy tracking of clicks. If you really want to get funky, hopefully you’ve set up your career site to track who actually hit the site from a given source, and then took further action like clicked apply. Another blog post for another time.

Ok, that covers the obvious points I think. Now for some less than obvious things to consider about posting jobs to twitter.

#jobs
The # is a hashtag. Its used when you want to associate a keyword or tag to your tweet. Just like tagging a bookmark or a blog post, same idea. When you use the hashtag you associate your post with any other post that also uses that hashtag. In this case if its a job, it certainly makes sense you should associate your post with other jobs. In this way you are displaying your post to people who may be searching on the hashtag #jobs. I’m not entirely sure how effective this really is. Its really applying a job board approach to Twitter isn’t it? You kind of suffer from the same dynamics as job boards do don’t you? Your job is mixed in with a bunch of other company’s jobs. You’re not necessarily targeting people with relevant skill set either. I still use the #jobs hashtag anyway, its cheap, only costs me 5 characters, plus I capitalize on any retweets that leave the #jobs hashtag in there. Do you have to use it? No. Should you use it? It depends.

Its not about the jobs I say this fully realizing it will make some people’s minds seize up. This one probably could go under Obvious Point #5, but for many, oddly, I don’t think this one is very obvious. Social Networks and Social Media are about people, people. It isn’t just another distribution channel for your kitten calendars, your smurf mugs, your male enhancement pills, or your jobs for that matter. If that is all you are using your twitter handle for, you are missing out on 95% of the goodness out there. Even if your twitter handle is @abccompany_jobs it still isn’t just about the jobs. You have a unique opportunity here to interact with your potential prospect, and potential candidate community. You have an opportunity to tell a much richer story about what it’s like to work for your company, or your client’s company. This is unique, and not previously really possible in the job board era, because all you could talk about on job boards was your job description. It made sense there because a job board is expressly about jobs. Twitter is not. Twitter is not a job board. I think its shortsighted to take a job board mentality and apply it to any social network. You’ve missed the point. I predict your results will suffer if you limit your thinking this way.

Don’t just add your jobs to Twitter, add Twitter to your jobs.
Say what? There are a number of ways to do this, but the essence is to allow anyone looking at your jobs to share them via twitter. Who in the world would want to share your jobs via twitter? Your hiring managers for starters, non-hiring manager employees in that department, other recruiters who may work in that same department. Even your BFFs on Twitter may feel magnanimous enough to help. If you’ve established some cred in the networks of people in your target sector, you may even get people to share your job who aren’t interested in or invested in filling the job themselves.

So how to do this if you’re website isn’t enabled for web 2.0 tech? Add a link like this to your job descriptions on your career site or wherever you post your job.

http://twitter.com/home/?status=RT+@(your twitter handle)+cool+job+-+http://your_shortened_jobURL.com

So maybe at the end of your job description it looks like this…(click it to see how it works)

Share This Job on Twitter

Under that link is the following…

http://twitter.com/home/?status=RT+@bestbuy+cool+job+click+here+to+see+more+-+http://bit.ly/19B7gv

Basically it starts with http://twitter.com/home/?status= then you follow with your message with words separated by + signs. End with a shortened URL (track-able please) to your posting. That’s it. Use it whether you are posting to a niche board, a forum, Facebook, or your own job site. Now you’ve expanded the ability for your jobs to be part of the social stream of things. Sure its a manual process, but thats the only way I know of to do it if you’re career site isn’t enabled with web 2.0 doodads.

Enable others who have a vested interest in your jobs.
Filling a role isn’t just about that role. Its about the hiring managers, the employees above and below the role that’s open, the HR generalist, the C level and management people in some cases, the vendor partners related to that role, and last but not least its about the local community of people in that industry. Moreover, its about the culture of the company, the employment brand, the brand of that department even. So what if you could enable this group, intimately connected and invested in getting the right person, to participate via Twitter? One way to start this, is to use Connecttweet to create a shared twitter channel. This is a channel through which multiple people can send twitter messages. The @bestbuy handle is such a channel. Its not some PR dude, its multiple Best Buy employees, as many that want to be involved, that provide the content for the channel. You can do the same thing on your own using Connecttweet. It allows you as the admin to determine who you want to allow to post through that handle. Members of that handle just use a special hashtag to push selected messages through this shared channel. Imagine if you had hiring managers posting through it, and department employees posting through it, not jobs necessarily, just everyday stuff. You begin to paint a picture of the culture surrounding that job, or category of jobs. Then of course you mix in some job conversation when appropriate, and everything else happens naturally. You’ve attracted a targeted crowd, you have help posting content about not just jobs, but also other things. You start to create some sense of community around your employment experience.

So, obviously this last bit takes some work. If its reasonable to assume that your targeted industry is represented on Twitter it might be worth it. If you’re hiring for that underwater welder job, you may want to consider other options.

Hastags + Conferences
The last thing is something I talked about at the Social Recruiting Summit at Google. Its about using the hashtag functionality as it relates to conferences. Its common practice to associate a hashtag with a conference. Recently in the Twin Cities there was a Social Media Breakfast conference. They used the hashtag #smbmsp (msp = Minneapolis/St. Paul). I did not attend, but while the conference was happening, someone asked me if I knew a good WordPress designer/coder. I don’t, but I figured there had to be someone at the social media breakfast who did. So I tweeted my question, including the hashtag #smbmsp, and within 5 minutes had a referral. My friend has reached out to that person already. Not sure what has happened since, but a useful connection was made in a very short period of time.

1,919 words so far, and I feel like I’ve just scratched the surface, what ideas do you have? What works? What doesn’t?

Discuss.

Be ready to discuss this and more at the Social Recruiting Summit at 2:30 PST next Monday.  If you can’t be there in person, you can still follow and contribute to the discussion, use this;  Spy.

Yep, no results.  Now try this, “Community Manager“.

You get 3.37 million results.   Why is that?

Is there really no one with the Talent Community Manager job title?  Or even talking about it?  Apparently not.  Even if you change the phrase to “talent community management” you only get 5 results.

So I tried this the other day and it just didn’t sit right.  Seems like one of the hot topics these days is “building talent communities”, “talent networks”, etc.   Is there no one managing them?  I’ll grant you, the results above are subject to the specificity of the term in quotes.  But even so, Zero results?  This didn’t jive for me.  I have a theory on why this is, and I also took a stab at a job description for a “Talent Community Manager”.

Here’s my theory on why you don’t see “talent community manager” together anywhere (beyond the fact that there may actually be some people managing networks of talent with a different title).

Reason 1:

By and large no one has talent community management as their stated job, such that it deserves the title, Talent Community Manager. Yes, good recruiters and sourcers do this already, but its ancillary to other work, sourcing and recruiting, and they aren’t solely dedicated to Community Management in the way I’m thinking.  Also, they’re aren’t provided with a technology or platform specifically dedicated to that cause in a way that other community managers are.

Reason 2:

The use of the terms “community” and “network” attached to “talent” by and large aren’t really networks or communities in the proper sense of the word.  They’re really just lists of people, with a certain background or common interest.  Thing is, they don’t interact with each other or even know who else is in the “community” as such.  Even on LinkedIN, when you see these “Talent Networks”, they’re often filled with recruiters trying to recruit the talent they thought would be in that network.

Reason 3:

Recruiting is still seen as a cost-center.  Stay with me here, its not as much of stretch as it seems.  3.3 million results for ‘community manager’, zero when you add ‘talent’ in there; community managers are largely deployed, at least in the corporate sense, to manage customer issues of one form or another, a direct tie to profit centers.   Recruiting and hiring is still seen as a cost center, so when it comes time to dole out budgets and resources, the profit centers come first in line.  If its in line at all, hiring and recruiting gets the crumbs.  I’m generalizing here, this is not always the case, but more often than not, I think it is.

Reason 4:

Despite all the hubbub about social networks, social media, and the pervasiveness of applications, platforms, and sites, and gazillions of users; most HR departments are still squeamish and unsure about what it all means to recruiting.  Much less are they sure about how to proceed.

Job Description: Talent Community Manager

Basic Qualifications:

Education: bachelors or additional 4 years experience in recruiting industry

Experience: 4+ years in a recruiting or sourcing function.

some familiarity and experience with blogging, social media usage, web 2.0 tools, online collaboration, web analytics, or web development.

2 + years experience in a community management role (online forum administrator, social network administrator or customer serving portal)

Responsibilities:

The Talent Community Manager is responsible for all aspects of online interaction with the Acme Co talent community. This position is responsible for outreach to the community using social media, directly interacting with the community on internal and external blogs and forums, and for providing the recruiting, HR, and business teams with input from the talent community. The Acme Co Talent Community Manager also acts as a resource for other Acme teams in learning about social media and talent community appropriate to their businesses.  Strong written communications skills required – this position is responsible for directly interacting with the public via email, blog posts and other forms of written communication.

Its a weird area to think about your “applicants” starting to interact with each other isn’t it?   So let’s think about it differently. Its not your applicants that are interacting, its people who have an affinity with your employment brand who would be interacting, sort of a pre-applicant group.

What would be the purpose of that? Lots of things.  A true talent community would have these ingredients.

people interested in jobs at your company + people at your company + recruiters + hiring managers + Talent Community Managers (someone to direct and moderate the discussions)

What kind of good stuff would you lay on this group?

jobs (duh) + projects (that they could work on) + initiatives + questions (about anything related to your company) + crowdsourcing + webinars + meetups + live chat + video + executive presence + contests etc….

What are the goals?

Leverage the interest in your employment brand, to get potential people closer to your employment brand and company. Let them ask questions, let them participate in real work for your company via contests, let them give feedback, let them refer others for a reward, and let them filter themselves in or out of your opportunities.

So I’m sure I’ve missed some things in the description, and no doubt my theory has holes.

So what do you think?

We’re up to 14 members at the moment including recent and notable additions; Glenn Gutmacher, Michael Marlatt, Marvin Smith, Amitai Givertz, Ritesh Nair, Julian Sanchez, Barry Deutsch, Kumar App and Mark Grey.

See the link at the bottom to join.

Maltego
The evolution of people search. Maltego takes people search and information graphing to a new level. This one feels like one of those tools thats on or leading the edge of the next big thing.
Bookmarked by Joshua Kahn

Tools to analyze Del.icio.us Tags
Search Engine Journal article on tools for Delicious tags.
Bookmarked by Charles Bretz

The Conversation Prism on Flickr – Photo Sharing!
Web 2.0 Conversation Prism by Brian Solis
Bookmarked by Charles Bretz

Social Networks Site Usage: Visitors, Members, Page Views, and Engagement by the Numbers in 2008
Ton’s of usage statistics relating to some of the most popular social sites for 2008.
Bookmarked by Joshua Kahn

Flickr Photo Download: Social Media Landscape
Social Media Landscape Map by Fred Cavazza.
Bookmarked by Charles Bretz

Interactive Applicant
InteractiveApplicant.com – a better way to recruit, or more of the same?
Bookmarked by Michael Marlatt

List of Social News Sites by TechCruch – 3/2007
Bookmarked by Charles Bretz

Facebook shares some stats….check it out:
By Michael Marlatt

Cool Social Web 2.0 Tools & Applications
Web 2.0 tools and reviews
Bookmarked by Charles Bretz

Who do you implu? – www.implu.com
IMPLU aggregates news and announcements relative to executive talent. Looks to be a good resource for research on this topic.
Bookmarked by Joshua Kahn

JibberJobber Blog » Blog Archive » 10 Free Job Search Resources Online
Top 10 Frees Job Search Resources. From a different perspective than recruiting but still interesting.
Bookmarked by Robert Hoefer

Now You’ve Seen Everything | Shannon Whitley
Twitter client in Excel. No kidding. Picture Tweetdeck or Twhirl, but in excel. I wonder if this would help in tracking twitter topics or people?
Bookmarked by Joshua Kahn

“Voicemail Surfing” A Comprehensive Guide on Using Voicemail to Circumvent Gatekeepers
By Amitai Givertz

Bookmark & Share – The Power of the Button™ | OnlyWire
Another step towards “write once, post everywhere”, helping to cure SNF, one service at a time. I guess the question is, do too many distribution services start to contribute to SNF? Nice irony there.
Bookmarked by Joshua Kahn

WidSets -get your favorite web content straight to your mobile phone…

Michael Marlatt

The rest of Find+Attract group favorite links are here. The group is open so anyone can join from there.

If you like this article twitter it with this URL:

http://budurl.com/l92j

and your message will be automagically added as a comment below.

As a little fairness in competition, here’s the blog post I’m up against HR Observations, and here’s the post I submitted to the competition . Would I like to win? sure. Will I be crushed if I don’t? no. Above all, do take some time and investigate all of the competitors.

If you’ve been wondering what HR, recruiting, sourcing, talent management etc blogs you should follow, there are some worthy ones in the bunch. To see the full list of original competitors, with links to their blog posts, go to FOT’s original post.

Vote below via the widget.

Ok, Chatcatcher hasn’t gotten the same publicity as the first two. Also, Shannon Whitley, (@swhitley) Chatcatcher’s creator isn’t an online giant on the order of the first two. However, stay with me here, there’s a good reason I include Chatcatcher in the same sentence.

The first two facilitate site integration with two of the most popular platforms for a person’s online identity, Facebook and Google. Chatcatcher facilitates integration with a third, Twitter (and actually a fourth and fifth because it works with FriendFeed and Identi.ca too.) I would say Twitter, and microblogs in general are fast becoming as relevant as the first two, and probably in some ways more relevant than Google profiles. Up until now, there wasn’t a good way to integrate the microblogging community with your blog or site. Sure you could push your own Twitter updates to a widget on your site, but really couldn’t allow for Twitter-user initiated interaction.

This brings us to Chatcatcher. For my recruiting and sourcing friends, bear with me this is relevant to you.

Here’s the gist. Someone posts a tweet about a blog post or site article of yours. They include a link to that post, either the full URL, or a shortened version. Chatcatcher sees it, and auto-magically posts it as a comment or trackback to that post on your site.

Here’s the rub.

1. Chatcatcher provides a clickable link to the twitter handle of the person tweeting about your post.

2. No matter what URL shortening service is used, Chatcatcher grabs it.

3. Chatcatcher is compatible with one of the best comments plugins Disqus.

4. Avatars are present in the Chatcatcher comments.

5. Chatcatcher also provides you the ability to track Chatcatcher comment totals and grab an RSS feed of all the people referencing your site in twitter.

6. Chatcatcher works with FriendFeed (and now Identi.ca) as well.

7. Setting up Chatcatcher is fairly simple. Trust me on this, I’m no developer and I got it figured out. Plus, Shannon Whitley is extremely responsive and helpful. He created a wordpress plug-in for us Wordpress users, and also a script for non-wordpress sites. (Quick tidbit: I knew this guy was smart when I found out he created a Twitter client in MS Excel. No kidding.)

Here’s why all of the above is good.

1. Previously, Tweets about your site were not connected to your site in any way, unless you somehow manually did it.

2. Now, the folks who tweet about your site, and ReTweet about your site, and the regular commenters on your posts can see each other, on your post. This is the really cool part.

Simply put, it re-connects the conversation to the source of the topic, and facilitates connection amongst the people discussing. Put another way, it brings the twitter, friendfeed, or Identi.ca conversation and co-locates it on your site, which is what stimulated the discussion in the first place.

There are other apps that attempt the same thing as Chatcatcher, but Chatcatcher is the best for all the reasons I mention above. See below for how it works.

So, recruiting and sourcing friends. Tell me your thoughts, why is this relevant to what we do? I have my own ideas, but I’d prefer to hear yours.