Talking Talent

Around 77 per cent of recruiters use search engines to find background data on candidates (according to one survey).  Of those, 35 per cent have eliminated a candidate because of what they found online.

So how do you protect your personal brand?

Web strategist Jeremiah Owyang recently examined an online dispute between a photographer and an employee at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art recently.  While I won’t go into the details of the dispute, the upshot is that the photographer blogged about the incident, called the SF MOMA employee (Simon) an ‘a-hole’ and the story was soon circulating through cyberspace.  It became the number one story on Digg, and spread to Flickr, Zoomr, Friendfeed and Twitter.

A simple Google search will now uncover hundreds of results tied to Simon being an ‘a-hole’.  As Jeremiah Owyang says, Simon had very little online footprint to start with, and “now it will be dominated online by all of these social media elements” and his reputation will be forever linked to this incident.

… we know that many recruiters use the web to find candidates, and seeing several results like this could result in a recruiter passing up a candidate. If a recruiter doesn’t care, or doesn’t see this, hiring managers are likely to do Google searches on the individual finding this.

So, the key takeaways (courtesy of Jeremiah):

• For those that don’t already participate online, and have a small digital footprint, they don’t have a strong platform to stand from. 
• Anyone is susceptible to brand damage, even if you’re not in this space (and even emails can do damage – see the Dianna Abala saga and marvel!).
• Bloggers with large social media platforms are incredibly powerful, and must recognize the long-term impacts of their actions. 
• Businesses should assume every customer (and employee) is capable of impacting an individual or company’s online reputation.
• Simon may have to buy search ads to get his printed resume or story correctly positioned.

So, go Google yourself.  It’s not so much ego surfing as research!

If your company is finding it hard to attract the best and brightest talent, then look to Google as a guide.

Google has built an employment brand (not to mention its product brand) in just a few years, almost entirely through viral marketing.  The company has been named Fortune’s top company to work for in America and the result is more than 3,000 applications a day from people wanting to work from them.�
HR management guru, Dr John Sullivan, explains employment branding as a “viral-based perception management program designed to attract top-quality applicants is based on the premise that the organization is well-managed in the eyes of the target candidate population.”

It has many critical elements, only one of which pertains to getting the message out through awards programs, editorial content in target publications, presentations at conferences, and through viral marketing driven via the employee referral program. It is not the same as recruitment marketing, although recruitment marketing should be aligned with the employment branding effort.”

IBM, GE, Disney, Southwest Airlines and HP have adopted similar viral marketing efforts.  How do they do this?  “Their managers are sought-after speakers, their management practices are written up in business and professional journals, and they all have at least one best-selling book written about their management practices,” says Dr Sullivan. (See Dr Sullivan’s list of the many benefits of employment-branding).

While most corporate recruiting managers spend less than 5 per cent of their budgets on employment branding, the companies who adopt a long-term strategic strategies don’t have a problem attracting the right people – they have the enviable ‘sorting challenge’ of deciding which talent to choose.

New research reveals that half of all workers “fell into” their careers. 

A survey, commissioned by recruitment firm Chandler Macleod, finds half of all workers did not plan their careers, and instead left their career paths to chance.

Interestingly, the survey found three-in-four workers reported being pigeonholed by employers because of their current jobs or careers. The university-educated (86 per cent) were more likely to feel pigeonholed by their career than those without a tertiary degree (70 per cent).

The top three reasons why respondents chose their current jobs were:

• they felt ‘able’ to do the job
• the job was available at the time of their search
• the job was linked to subjects they were interested in at school.

Involving some 648 workers aged between 18 and 64 years, the study also found that 20 per cent were actively looking for a new job or career and 44 per cent were “keeping an eye out”.

So, not only do we have an escalating skills shortage, but we have millions of people who are unhappy, unsuited to their position and unsure of how to approach their next career move.

In What color is your parachute, the world’s best selling career hunting book, Richard Nelson Bolles says that finding a “life-changing” career involves:

• Wanting to basically put a sense of mission into your life
• Looking for a place where you (like a flower) can grow – even if it means you have to talk organisations in to creating a job for you
• Learning as much about yourself and what you want .

So, here’s my piece of advice: manage your career like you’d manage a project.  Think strategically about your strengths and weaknesses.  Ask yourself: what kind of work do I find both energising and challenging?  Analyse your skills gap and look for education or knowledge to close that gap.  And look for opportunities that complement your skill set, your values and your life ambitions.

Think before you post! 

Every time you write, video or podcast something online, you are leaving a digital fingerprint of ourselves for the whole world to see.

It’s timely advice for job seekers at a time when recruiters are looking up job applicants on social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, Xanga and Friendster, where they’ll often find risque photographs and provocative comments from candidates about drinking, recreational drug use and sexual exploits in what some mistakenly believe is relative privacy.

The New York Times cites the example of Tien Nguyen, a senior at the University of California, who was struggling to get job interviews after completing his studies.

A friend suggested that Nguyen research himself on Google. He found a link to a satirical essay, titled Lying Your Way to the Top, that he had published on a website for college students. He asked that the essay be removed. Soon, he began to be invited to job interviews.

“I never really considered that employers would do something like that,” he said. “I thought they would just look at your resume and grades.”

In the information age, the English language contains five times more words than it did during Shakespeare’s day, more than 3,000 new books are published each day and apparently a weekly selection of the New York Times contains more information than the average human being would have encountered during a lifetime in the eighteenth century.

While we all come to grips with a world in which information sharing is just a mouse click away, we must teach our children and teenagers to be selective with the information – both in what they absorb and what they transmit.

Web 2.0 is truly one of the greatest technology bubbles to come along in recent years, but with every Gen Yer so eager to become an Internet star, it’s important to remind young people of the consequences of their actions. Here are some tips to share with the young people in your lives:

• Your thoughts aren’t private!  It’s great to post an online blog and share your views on the world about anything and everything, but if you wouldn’t post something on you local community noticeboard, don’t post it on the Internet.  It’s not as anonymous as you may think. 
• Think before you write!  Paper diaries are a great way to vent your intimate feelings.  Something you post on the Internet that may be personal or ‘blowing off steam’ is traceable if someone searches hard enough.  If you wouldn’t say or do it in public, don’t do it online.  In all likelihood, it won’t come back to haunt you, but it still has the potential to. 
• Do your research.  If you feel passionate about something, make sure it’s an informed view.  Opinion carries weight when it can be backed up by fact, and not speculation. 

Knowledge is power, but it is also a Pandora’s Box.  At a time when so much information is readily available, people have the means and methods to formulate and share strong views and opinions.  While this is something that should be encouraged and nurtured, young Web 2.0 aficionados need to be reminded that Big Brother is watching!