director of recruiting

My Global Career

I had a great conversation the other day with Rusty Weston, chief blogger of a new blog called MyGlobalCareer. It can be tough to toe the line between providing content for candidates and employers. But Weston, an experienced journalist, seems to be succeeding at doing just that with content targeted towards global workers and those affected by changing workforce trends.

If you want to stay informed and on top of global hiring, Weston's site is definitely worth being on your list of regular reads.

The walls are falling

I published an article earlier this week in ERE about hiring bloggers. Not hiring people just to blog, but hiring people who happen to blog. A great example of a blogger that I would hire in a heartbeat (and referenced in the article): SystematicHR. Today's post is just another great example of the deep level and subject matter expertise he has in the HR technology space, and demonstrates a passion for his or her job that is difficult to find.

Related to blogs, I've had a few interesting experiences lately talking about blogs with employees of traditional media companies (one a major publisher, one a major newspaper chain and one a regional paper). It seems that the walls they have erected are quickly falling. They seem to be coming around to the idea that blogs have become opportunities to extend their message, and are very rapidly trying to evolve into platform-independent content providers.

According to TechCrunch, the NY Times is still the most linked to content publication on the web - which would go up even further if they would eliminate the registration process. You can see other cracks forming in the wall as newspapers have started to link to each other and are partnering with companies like Monster and Yahoo HotJobs that, up until recently, made it their mission in life to eat the newspapers' lunches.

This means that there's a definite shift in the types of talent that these companies are looking for - "We need digital!" is a common refrain. If they can get the digital generation to believe in what they're doing and jump on board, there will be a ripple effect felt by everyone, including the wall crashers.

Let's see which way the pendulum swings next.

New website

In February, I left Jobster to form talentspark, a consulting firm. Essentially, I've been laying low for the last few month or so, figuring out my next move. A good friend suggested that I shouldn't be in any rush to figure everything out and should just take some time off. Yet those who know me well know that I get restless - my natural inclination is to take risks and go after really big opportunities. It's hard to sit on the sidelines when there are just TONS of untapped opportunities out there.

In the meantime, I've taken on a number of strategic consulting assignments, which have given me the opportunity to work with hiring organizations and vendors in the human capital industry on everything from improving the measurements associated with human capital; helping a technology company "own the market" for top talent in a critical discipline; optimizing the technologies of a national retailer; working with a couple of vendors in the human capital space to identify new market opportunities and build stronger partnerships in the industry; and done a keynote speech at a global recruiting leadership conference for a major media company. So much for time off!

To get to the point, I just launched phase I of the talentspark website at www.talentsparkconsulting.com. Who knows what the future will hold, but I really do feel like some of the services I have been providing seem to have hit a nerve in the human capital industry. I welcome your feedback, thoughts and ideas at dave@talentsparkconsulting.com.

Even better virtual career fairs

Thanks to WaggEd's Steve Fogarty for pointing me to PR Week's recent virtual career fair. There's a good writeup of the PR Week event (yes, they are good at getting the word out to other publications) here for anyone that's interested:

http://www.btobonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070402/FREE/70330018&SearchID=73276850279146

Also a novel approach. Provide content that the audience is interested in, screen people for qualifications before they enter your virtual "booth," and engage and personally interact with people once they're in there with virtual chat. In addition, anonynimity provided a safe environment for people - just imagine how uncomfortable seeing one of your coworkers there would be! - while funneling relevant candidates to recruiters and hiring managers by skill and industry.

The event was hosted by a company called Unisfair, which appears to have some very cool virtual-world type of technology similar in many ways to Second Life - not sure what the economics are on an event like this, but at the very least there's an opportunity for job boards, recruitment advertising agencies and niche publications to pool several employers together at one of these events. Absolutely worth checking out!