You may have heard some noise about TRU London II which was held at the end of last week. Jobsite was Platinum Sponsor of it and I went along in my capacity as, well, ‘Head Geek’ I suppose, to gain and impart as much knowledge as possible from the engineering point of view. This was an Unconference so far more participant driven than a typical event like this. Perfect. (However, slightly more chaotic – see my pic of lunch below)

Lunch at TruLondon

A strong theme behind this event was social media. There is a lot of talk about this in the industry and a multitude of people self-labelling themselves as ‘Social Media Experts’. What technologies are being developed? Should we be Twittering, Facebooking, Linked-In-ing? Where are we going with all this?

Twitter was pervasive. For a start, pretty much everyone present was tweeting (including me)and they were being projected onto the wall as the event unfolded. Some businesses are streaming jobs into Twitter and claiming some success. We have our own targeted ‘Jobs By Twitter’ system which we were casually demonstrating.

Here at Jobsite we are embracing any new technologies and approaches that come along. However, our experience shows us that there is more to this than just flooding jobs into Twitter and seeing what happens next. Integration is key but has to be done in a way that REALLY benefits the end user. Note that the end user for us consists of both our candidates and the recruiters that pay to post jobs on our site!

Needless to say, video is particularly hot right now. It has been put to fantastic use by companies advertising their places of work (Microsoft and Google to name just two of the most obvious). But could they be a marketing method for jobseekers as well? There was a discussion here about possible discrimination through video as people often ‘judge a book by its cover’. Ultimately though, does it not just move the ‘personality test’ to be earlier in the recruitment chain? How do candidates feel about this?

“Always enable comments“. The idea being to keep on top of managing any negative publicity that emerges as a result. This naturally means always being on the ball when moderating the community or you are going to become very unstuck. Any company treating community additions as a bit of a side project is going to suffer. Hey, I’ve been using online communities since my Commodore 64 and howling modem so it has been great to see how things have changed… and stayed the same! On the blog front, it was deemed better to kill a blog rather than leave it badly looked after.

There was also the mantra of ‘Blogging is about content’ but I figured that one out all by myself, to be honest…

“Turn your privacy controls off“. (?!) This was a strong one and a little naive in my opinion. It is the sort of statement made by someone who has not had a Major Privacy Event happen in their life. Similar to “Well, I don’t need virus protection, I’ll never click on any dodgy links”. It is vital that we always retain control over our own privacy. Given users the option of projecting all their data into the cloud (metaphor for the internet) is a powerful tool. The key word is making it an OPTION.

The cloud is where we must look to in order to extract as much information as possible to assist recruiters in finding the right candidates. So we currently have a CV. How about we analyse it to automatically pull out, say, their last five blog entries? Elements of their LinkedIn profile? Last 50 tweets? Package that up all nicely; Job done.

On the CV front we were demonstrating the beta version of our new CV search engine. This introduces the concepts of Navigators: An initial search can be filtered down step by step by the likes of salary, types of positions being looked for… a whole range of things. However, we maintain our boolean system for the power users.

There was some interesting friction between recruiters and HR personnel. After this quote I was surprised not to see a large-scale brawl: “Recruiters are used because HR don’t really know how to do their jobs properly”. Would love to hear more about that love/hate relationship, I’m sure our Recruitment Manager Jay (who was also there), has something to say about this.

Wendy Jacob

Congratulations go to Wendy Jacob and Irina Shamaeva for winning the two Flip video cameras that we gave away for leaving feedback on the demos that we were running.

On a personal level I decided I had make my Twitter name more SEO-friendly after all this time (it used to be @mewcenary, but this meant i often found myself saying “No, it’s like mercenary, but with a W, Mew..cenary”) so you can now find me tweeting away at @TristanGreaves.

By the way, all this engagement by Twitter is cool, but today, just try phoning someone instead of emailing, texting or Twittering at them. Solid communication comes in many forms and isn’t that key to everything we are trying to do here?