links for 2009-09-16

Posted on September 16, 2009 by Michael Clarke

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Video CVs. Just say no.

Posted on September 15, 2009 by Michael Clarke

A sceptic writes:

I had a preview about how ‘future recruitment’ might work some years ago when I was part of a panel reviewing some 1600 video clips of would-be online video stars.  Let’s just say that the process was both intensely wearisome and less than rigorous – I mean SIXTEEN HUNDRED VIDEO CLIPS!  You try evaluating that little lot fairly.

Now imagine you work for A Gigantic Investment Bank and some snake oil salesmen has managed to convince your Head of Recruitment that video CVs are the The Future.  You’re the CV sifter.  Now go and watch this sixteen hundred times.

Look, I’m not saying that the video CV format won’t one day evolve into something useful but in the meantime

  1. They’re a discriminatory nightmare waiting to happen (“I didn’t get an interview because I wear a headscarf/beard/am clinically obese/female/male”).  There’s a reason why first round trawls of CVs/application forms are anonymized in big organisations and that reason is the mitigation of the risk of discrimination or victimisation.  And actually, that’s a good, appropriate thing – the best of us struggle with some level of unconscious prejudice and applying discriminatory little hermeneutic shortcuts is all too easy when dealing with this much information
  2. This brings me to my next point – videos provide too much information about a candidate, most of it has to be processed ‘intuitively’ and very little of it is germane to the role in question.  Free-form interviews are notoriously bad at predicting job success (as opposed to the relative discipline offered by structured interviews) and a video CV is a one-sided free-form interview where the recruiter gets to concentrate in detail on considering exactly why the applicant chose that awful shirt (see secondary discrimination again, above).
  3. Video interviews offer an infinite amount of opportunities to show you, the candidate, in the worst possible light.  See “shirt”, above.
  4. Life’s too short.  A few weeks back I waded through ninety CVs.  I can’t imagine ever wanting to watch ninety videos.

In the interests of fairness, there are a number of things which might make video CVs useful:

  1. Video search technology that sifts videos automatically in the same way soft copies of CVs can be sifted, looking for keywords, concrete expressions and so on.  A video equivalent of the kind of software that does buzz monitoring on social media networks, perhaps.
  2. Very well formed enterprise platforms for recruiters to manage and review video resumes
  3. A lot of training in schools and universities on how to present yourself on camera and how to edit ‘talking head’ videos

Or perhaps we could invest all that time and effort in something more useful.

Filed under: graduate recruitment | Tagged: , , | Leave a Comment »

links for 2009-09-11

Posted on September 11, 2009 by Michael Clarke

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Just how are graduates using social networks for careers development?

Posted on August 4, 2009 by Michael Clarke

I just sent this out as a reply to an email.   The question had to do with whether graduates really use social networks for career developement or whether it’s only about, well,  social networking.  The context was this article for Onrec.com which (correctly) discusses the importance reputation management but incorrectly supposes that everyone will defect from Facebook et al and head off to specialist recruitment planning sites to do so.

The article is inevitably slanted by not being based on any actual research – it’s a description of the business of Careers Site Advisor. At The Careers Group, we’ve found no evidence whatsoever that employers are at all interested in video CVs, for example, in a serious way.

As to use of social media by students for careers development, the qualitative research I’m doing suggests the same on the surface BUT each interview subject (a small but detailed sample using unstructured interviews and discourse analysis) talks about how they manage their identities and structure and how a lot of the ‘following’ or ‘friending’ they do to support their longer term career goals, implicitly or explicitly. What’s interesting is that NO-ONE I’ve spoken to uses any of the tools mentioned in the article (who are the people registering for these sites?) – people only have so much bandwidth for identity management and whilst they may look at these sites or even fill out a registration, I’m not convinced any of them ever go back (that’s hearsay and conjecture, by the way – but one major careers networking site, for example, boasts of 3000 members – that’s nothing if you think of Facebook or Twitter with tens or hundreds of millions of active participants).

And the other thing is that the use of existing ‘default’ networking sites for careers development would be perfectly in line with how people have networked to manage their careers for a very long time. Agencies or start-ups who’ll do well out of ‘passive jobseekers’ (perhaps ‘active digital reputation managers’ is more accurate) will be the ones who can work within the Facebook/LinkedIn/Twitter ecosystem, rather than trying to reinvent and drag people out of it. Social media marketers already know only too well that dragging people out of Facebook to interact is very, very challenging – best to get the required outcome from where people already are…

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My Reboot Britain Lego model of innovation

Posted on July 11, 2009 by Michael Clarke

Or something like that. I’ll get around to a proper review of my day at Reboot Britain when the smoke clears (and I’ve got a lot of smoke at the moment!). Meanwhile, here’s my model from the Lego Serious Play programme table from D.Gauntlett’s Flickr stream.

It was the end of a long, long day. Maybe the open gate was more significant than I imagined.

It was the end of a long, long day. Maybe the open gate was more significant than I imagined.

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Tribe-sourcing tagging data

Posted on July 3, 2009 by Michael Clarke

We’ve been working on a project (can’t say with whom) to mash together a whole bunch of the data we’ve been amassing (in terms of graduate destinations, careers resources, generic careers information) in the form of a webservice delivering facts and figures and suggestions about the jobs graduates in particular degrees do, the average wage, some of the employers and the best resources to start looking for information about those particular careers.  It’s all wrapped up with a series of our articles on application forms, networking etc etc…

I’m very excited about it – the deadlines have been horrendous but we should have it out in the open later this month.

A lot of it draws on our careers resource Careers Tagged, which has turned out to have a way too complicated user interface (though a lot of people feed back that they still find it very useful) but the data and tagging engine for which is driving a lot of our current projects, including this one and our new Job Online, which uses Careers Tagged.  Careers Tagged’s engine looks at a job selected by a user and suggests other relevant vacancies, along with a set of online resources to find out more about the background to a particular sector.  The tagging behind it is crowd-sourced but from a very select crowd – the careers information offices and advisers who work for us.  So the relevancy of the hits is surprisingly high.  Not so much crowd-sourcing, perhaps, as tribe-sourcing, to loosely adapt a concept from the Tuttle peeps.

The trouble with crowd-sourcing seems to me to lie in two areas – face-validity and subject expertise.  Whilst there are a lot of great community driven resources for careers information (e.g. Wikijobs), a lot of the information is patchy or biased.  Specialties tend to be under-represented, for example.  So for Careers Tagged, we worked on the assumption that if we had enough careers information professionals involved, we’d be able to broadly cover covers period with a fair certainty that individual biases would be averaged out and that the information/resources highlighted would be of a consistently high standard.    Tribe-sourcing, then, is using a group of loosely affiliated people to generate a product from their combined common interest – the assumption is that each person in the tribe either knows something about the subject or work area and has no ego about being corrected.  If we ever manage to finish anything around these parts, it’s generally due to tribe sourcing.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m a great believer in the Wikipedia concept and users can already add their own tags to Careers Tagged if they want.  But without that core tribe of contributors, we wouldn’t have anything.

There’s probably another post to be written about the relation of tribes to our organisational habits, good and bad, at some point, though any number of bloggers (e.g. Michael Bauwens at P2P, the inevitable Seth Godin, Joe McKendrick at FastForward) have written far more authoritatively on this.

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links for 2009-07-01

Posted on July 1, 2009 by Michael Clarke

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links for 2009-06-30

Posted on June 30, 2009 by Michael Clarke

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Virtual fairs – why bother?

Posted on June 16, 2009 by Michael Clarke

Or, more positively, why do people persist in thinking that virtual recruitment fairs are a good idea?

I’m writing this from the organisers’ office of our summer recruitment fair (http://www.londongradfair.co.uk) where our marvellous sales team have managed to pull in 81 exhibitors and over the next 2 days, we expect 6000 or so students to troop in and meet them.  So perhaps I’m a little biased.  But why on earth would anyone register for an online event as opposed to, say, a really good jobs site or a responsive community site.  You could argue that ‘virtual fairs’ pull everything together in one handy package, yet they don’t.  The user experience in invariably clunky, hard to navigate and comprehensively bogged down a clumsey attempts to emmulate the real world experience.  Think late nineties Flash ‘immersive’ shopping sites (if you don’t know, don’t ask – clients actually paid places I worked to build those things once upon a time) but worse.

And the tumbleweed factor!  I know of one event which actually had to pay students to hang out in the ’seminar rooms’ (chatrooms) to give the employers the impression that something was actually going on.

Note that I am NOT saying that there’s no place for integrating online interactions with employers and events – quite the opposite.  But an event is a time, place and population dependent experience with crowds, noise, frustration, conversation, clasped hands, bumped shoulders, queues and (in our case) quite reasonable coffee.  Online is, well, ongoing.  Streams of communication and interaction independent of all the above.  You can embed an event in such a stream but an ‘online’ event with employers where you ’show up’?  Why?  Wouldn’t a webpage with a list of employers, jobs they have on offer and a Twitter handle for each one do just as good, if not better, a job? And much more cheaply?

Anyway, there are some contrary views, mostly from people selling virtual careers fair solutions.  Funny, that.

Filed under: authenticity, community, event | Tagged: , , , , , | 3 Comments »

Why you shouldn’t brand yourself as an expert on why there are no social media experts

Posted on June 12, 2009 by Michael Clarke

OK, that was a long title.  But Dan Schwabel’s reasonably interesting post on problems with trying to be an expert in social media inadvertently highlighted the ongoing issue with trying to make any kind of definitive pronouncement on the scene.  One might have a degree of sympathy with most of his points but he’s way off in terms of point five questioning the earning power of social media, especially on a day when Dell attributed $3 million of revenue to Twitter.  Laurel Papworth also has a formidable list of companies who’ve exploited the social in media to earn revenue and highlights Craig’s List in particular as a success story.  Still, he’s highlighted an interesting issue – what are social media experts for – and generated a fair bit of soul searching in the process, though some people seem pretty confident about their expertise (and perhaps others should come clean about their actual capabilities in personal-self-publicising and power-networking rather than delivering good practice).

Of course, part of the problem with the role of the social media ‘expert’ is the ongoing conundrum of how exactly one measures the effect.  The other is Dan’s point about the necessity of “everyone in the world” being forced to learn about social media, something I completely agree with.  I’m not saying we’ve had universal buy-in but we’re working hard at The Careers Group to see that everyone has a degree of training in some area of social media endeavour and is willing to engage.  That doesn’t mean, however, that everyone is an ‘expert’ and that there isn’t a role for ‘experts’ whose specialism lies in ‘being an expert’.

Perhaps we need to rehabilitate the word ‘consultant’ – if I hire in a third party, if or someone uses our particular expertise for something, they’re buying not only knowledge but an informed second opinion – and I think it’s the informed – expert, even – outside view that’s the key.  I’ve worked in plenty of situations where we could have done something ourselves but have chosen to bring in (or hire) an outside party as either a consultant or someone from a totally different culture.  In either case, it’s been about ideas about seeing things in a way that isn’t always possible from the inside of something.

What’s a social media expert? Someone who has great ideas about social media, ideas you haven’t had.  And I utterly agree with Benjamin Ellis when he asserts that (and I’m paraphrasing here) one key benchmark of such a person is their willingness to describe what they’ve learned from their mistakes.

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