JohnSumser.com

June 12th, 2008

080612 Daily Links (June 12, 2008)

Thought For The Day: All Recruiting Is Local
Schmidt: It’s Google’s duty to help fix ad business Google’s CEO believes that his company has a moral obligation to help newspapers stay in business. “The goal of the company isn’t to monetize everything. The goal is to change the world.” Could you pin that down a little? Sure: “For the better,“
“Playing video games for hours on end may be bad for your health, but, according to an Australian study, it doesn’t mean you are a lonely nerd and won’t damage your social skills.” Video Game Addicts Are Not Shy Nerds
When Micro-blogging Grows Up “more people are using Twitter instead of blogs, following links from trusted sources essentially using Twitter as a highly filtered blog reader.“
“In this video, shot during the Fordyce Forum in Las Vegas, Bartos channels his inner advice guru to teach us all how to open our eyes to tapping the best talent despite generational differences in the workplace.” Relationships for Dummies
Many Tech Workers Would Accept Pay Cut To Telecommute

June 10th, 2008

080610 Daily Links (June 10, 2008)

Thought For The Day: The Job Of Technology is To Increase The Number of Choices
What Magazines Still Don’t Understand About The Web It’s about right now, immediacy. Magazines are winter, the web is summer.
Looks Like a Million To Me: How I Realized that Amazon’s Kindle and Sony’s E-Reader Were Exceeding Sales Estimates Is Anyone Thinking About eBooks as Sourcing tools? Smart market segmentation, good candidate pool development potential. They are bigger than you think. (6% of Amazon’s book revenues?)
Better Recruiting Through Social Networks? Wubs discusses the Jobvite survey. Hmm. Who did they survey? Note to Wubs..when surveys are self-serving, ask how they corrected for bias.
Concerning Linkedin Endorsements - Authenticity is Key Master Dave on the etiquette of endorsements
The Applicant Experience: Happy Campers? It’s hard to reconcile the Jobvite survey (see Wubs) with this: “I believe that there are those savvy recruiters and lines managers and HR who get the power of social networking tools when it comes to attracting, hiring, and retaining talent, but the majority still doesn’t. In fact I’ve heard from ATS vendors that many companies in manufacturing, retail, hospitality and healthcare don’t know what an ATS is.”

June 9th, 2008

080609 Daily Links (June 09, 2008)

Thought For The Day: Culture Is A Storage Place For Ideas
Michael Homula is writing a great series on Creating The Ultimate Candidate Experience. Current Installment: L is for Listen
Data chart of the week: forums, ratings, and reviews around the world Is participation in online community a function of culture? Here’s another slice of data.
Adapting Websites to Users Adjusting quickly to a user’s cognitive style may increase results by 20%
YouTube: You Created the Content, Now Sell the Ads According to this, YouTube splits ad revenue with content providers on a 50/50 basis. The cash flow from any online advertising is hardly standardized. What if job board content providers (employers) were given 50% of revenue?
How to “rig” Your Resume for Careerbuilder and other job boards New term of art: Resume Search Optimization

June 6th, 2008

080606 Daily Links (June 06, 2008)

Thought For The Day: Technologies Do Not Die
U.S. Payrolls Fall, Unemployment Rate Climbs to 5.5% Still, the rate is below the 30 year average of 6%. And, a national average does not begin to tell the regional story.
Tens of thousands of highly skilled workers turned away Google explains its view of the H1B process. Scan the Google Policy Blog Workforce articles to see how highbrow our industry can be.
Tribune Co. Plans Sharp Cutbacks at Papers “the struggling company has looked at the column inches of news produced by each reporter, and by each paper’s news staff. Finding wide variation, they said, they have concluded that it could do without a large number of news employees and not lose much content.” The downward spiral accelerates.
JobDig Starts New Blog About JobDig Toby Dayton introduces a blog that is more tightly coupled with Job Dig’s business needs. It’s an interesting move that is echoed by Eric Shannon’s short posting on Job Boarders, What Should a Job Board Blog Focus On?
Jobs, Businesses, and The Leisure Economy Reach Branding Club is offering a very interesting webinar on a sea change in the economy.

June 5th, 2008

080605 Daily Links (June 5, 2008)

Thought For The Day: The US has 8 cities with over 1 Million population. China has 180
Every Company Needs a Director of First Impressions Liz Bailey at Monster has a great business card.
Mozilla Firefox 3.0 Is the Best Browser For Web — For Now It’s big news when Walt Mossberg says something like this. Making sure that your message reaches across browsers has never been more important.
What Newspapers Still Don’t Understand About The Web It’s not paper. “And what’s the root cause problem? The useless article with no real-time data and no links was written for the PRINT newspaper. And the homepage is edited to match what will be important in the PRINT newspaper. And the navigation assumes I think like I do when I’m reading the PRINT newspaper.”
GINA signed into law…did anybody notice? the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA) prohibits a wide range of discrimination based on the results of genetic testing. Manpower offers a nice review. (The Job Ad Words Survey is a really interesting attempt to sort the clutter in the highly repetitive jargon of Job Postings.)
Did You Party in College? No Need to Apply. From Steven Rothberg, “Bowling Green’s newspaper has an interesting article on how some employers admit to using social networking sites such as Facebook as part of their background checking efforts.“

June 4th, 2008

080604 Daily Links for June 04, 2008

The Current Invitation for the Portland Recruiting Roadshow (June 20th, you’re invited)
Celebrity MySpace Hacking - Paris Hilton & Lindsay Lohan’s Private Pics Really. This little piece highlights the ease with which myspace profiles can be compromised. Interesting for sourcers and background checkers. Interesting for people who think the web is a safe place to publish personal information.
Reinventing online advertising: Exploiting the Achilles’ heel of the agency-media complex Good reminders about the fact that most online media involves generals who are fighting the last war.
Another Dimension To The Talent Market Susan Burns is everywhere these days. “It is quite important for companies to understand where certain types of talent clusters tend to form and grow as they look at business decisions that are uniquely dependent on human capital. Chances are, however, that not every company can be, will be, or move to where the talent is. The choices are either spend a lot more trying to get the talent needed, spend a lot more on developing the talent you have, or celebrate what makes the talent you desire successful and work with them wherever they may be.“
Does MySpace jobs have better SEO juice than CareerBuilder? From the comments, “I’ve been seeing MySpace Jobs results come up for all kinds of job related searches- often when the page has no relevant content. I thought Google didn’t like to index search results, but apparently they do for MySpace Jobs. Typically the results are low quality and have no business ranking where they do.
By the way, my search results for this query are totally different. I made sure to turn off Personalized Search.“

June 3rd, 2008

080603 Daily Links (June 03, 2008)

Starbucks offers new flavor: Free Wi-Fi The international offices of all recruiters now have free wireless!!!
Take time out - gain perspective. “The further you drift away from the conversation the harder it is to become enthusiastic about the direction it takes and this is the curse of social media: it is addictive in the sense that you need to keep an involvement in order to maintain an overview and monitor the breadth of conversation rather than trying to control it in one location. Conversations will occur wherever there are people - this is not going to change so people just have to get used to it. This distribution of the discussion is what’s really important; you are exposing a potentially greater audience to the conversation and allowing it to take twists that otherwise it wouldn’t take.“
Google lets admins control site search In the area where sourcing and SEO/SEM intersect, this is big news. Paying customers of Google’s Custom Search Business Edition can control what does and doesn’t get searched on their sites. The possibilities for blocking unintended searches (sourcing) and modifying rankings are significant.
Ramer and Sumser in Vegas A video interview by Dave Mendoza
The Current Invitation for the Portland Roadshow (June 20th, you’re invited)

June 2nd, 2008

080602 Daily Links

The Future Of Social Isn’t Content Spewing (I Hope) Arrington gels the arguments in recent conversations about the future of Social Media. In one utopian view it’s “every single human being posting their thoughts and experiences in any number of ways to the Internet.” Arrington says, “The future of social media, I hope, isn’t in more tools to help us spew more content. Instead, we need ideas and technology that can leverage all this available online content (including status and activity streams) to enhance real world social interactions.” He must be reading about the Recruiting Roadshow experiments.
The Future of Mobile Social Networking MIT’s Technology Review speculates about Steve Jobs next product introduction wave on June 9th “using the iPhone’s map and self-location features, as well as information about the prior activities of the user’s friends, Whrr proposes new places to explore or activities to try.”
TrendWatch: Comparing MicroMemes, Network Feeds, and MacroMemes Jeremiah Owyang provides food for thought about making sense of the various kinds of information available in social networks.
Job Boards Are Restaurants, Databases Are Home Cooking From Alex Cantu comes the Talent Drive view of the universe.
Recruiting Slow? The Problem’s Not Your Tools… “If the recruiter isn’t doing well enough to afford their own iPhone, they probably can’t afford your system..”. So says Maren Hogan “What dismays me is this massive array of tools available for those of us in the talent acquisition and management spaces. Holy shitake! You’d think that with enough vendors to fill a football stadium, our issues as recruiters would be solved by now.”

May 30th, 2008

080530 Daily Links

Digging Into Recruitingblogs.com V 1.7 Advanced LinkedIn user abandons service.
Twitter: Don’t blame Ruby, blame Scoble In the spirit of LinkedIn being passive aggressive with Recruiters, Twitter joins the fray by blaming its users for its problems. Truth is, power users cause technology to fail while communications companies are inherently technical. Part of the risk in radical transparency (as Twitter is learning to practice) is that when you are wrong, that’s transparent, too. This is a nice look at some of the isues.
Naveen Jain’s Latest Scam: Intelius Infospace founder is giving a bad name to background checking. It’s hard to be slimier than the rest of the “guilty until proven innocent” crowd.
Web Technology Trends for 2008 and Beyond Pointer and instructions for short useful presentation.
NotHired Real, now.

May 29th, 2008

080529 Daily Links

Akamai Releases State of the Internet Report South Korea has the fastest internet in the world
The Fork in the Road for Social Media “Down one road is adding more features to a walled garden and opening up just enough, so that users seldom need to leave. Most sites are going down this yellow brick road and the prize is clearly a big one. But they may end up back in Kansas. Down the other road, lies a future of being the primary repository for your connections (aka the social graph), but with this data available via open APIs to anybody who needs it. That is a utility type model, and as with any utility, it can be hugely valuable at scale.”
The career site 2.0 As people with specific skill sets become harder to find will we start to see more and more microsites?
The Resume is Alive and Kickin’ “I haven’t retired,” cried The Resume. “I’m working but I’m under-employed and unappreciated.”
Ups & Downs of China’s Labor Shortages “On a recent trip overseas I struggled to explain shortages for both professionals and workers in a land of 1.3 billion people, with the added contradiction of a shortage of jobs for Chinese graduates.“