Hello JobDeck! Plus–Twitter Productivity
February 4, 2010
I recently received this tweet from Skellie, one of my favorite idea sources:
Productivity in 11 words: One thing at a time. Most important thing first. Start now.
So–I promptly threw out my entire library of David Allen and Stephen Covey books, closed my Nozbe account, and trashed my Pomodoro.
Not really. But I do recognize that if I followed the 11-word formula faithfully, I would resolve a lot of productivity problems. And happily, this thought fit right in with a post I’d been planning on how to avoid the social media time trap. Then I got a tweet about JobDeck, and everything fell into place!
TweetDeck is just one of the several good tools available for managing Twitter, but it’s the one I know best. And it’s also the one that recently rolled out a special version for job-seekers. JobDeck is essentially TweetDeck enhanced with built-in job search functionality, a special column for recruiting news, and a desklike appearance. The New York Times Technology section offers a nice summary of the product.
In terms of productivity—having a dashboard like TweetDeck, where you can filter and organize many Twitter streams (as well as input from Facebook and LinkedIn), is a huge help if you really want to be involved in social media. But TweetDeck can also increase the seduction factor by making you aware of just how much is going on in the Twitterverse every minute. So you might want to browse Tim Ferriss’s article How to Use Twitter Without Twitter Owning You—5 Tips. One tip (“Set alerts or blocks on Twitter usage”) discusses productivity aids like RescueTime. I’m about to test-drive RescueTime and will review if it’s interesting.
I’m also trying out Mr.Tweet. Basically, Mr.Tweet looks at your own followers/followees and recommends other Twitterers you might want to consider. So far, Mr.Tweet has made some interesting suggestions—and the excellent interface shows how each one was derived, as well as providing individual profiles that include Twitter statistics and sample tweets. It’s free, and worth a look, especially if you have a focused Twitter agenda and would like to quickly find high-value tweeters.
A final thought about Twitter and productivity. I was a late adopter of Twitter, and I’m still figuring out how best to use it. One key (for me anyway) has been finding people whose tweets alert me to things I want to know about. Getting the most out of Twitter requires practice, but you can learn to scan various streams quickly and pick out just what’s relevant or intriguing, while letting the rest go by.
That’s from the perspective of using Twitter as an information source. Using Twitter as a search tool has a whole different set of considerations, and there is not a better overview than Boolean Blackbelt’s How to Search Twitter for Sourcing and Recruiting.
An Employer Resume?
February 2, 2010
The other day I heard a story on my local public radio station about the virtues of having a two minute verbal resume. It’s an interesting idea—especially because it derives from a very realistic observation: Very often, the interviewer has not read the candidate’s resume, or at least doesn’t remember much about it. Therefore, the recruiter will often invite the candidate to “tell me about yourself.”
Performance consultant Scott Peek recommends a formula for responding, which I’m summarizing this way:
- Restate your name (just in case).
- Spend 45 seconds recapping your relevant experience.
- Spend 45 seconds highlighting how your experience and abilities fit the company or position.
- Use the last 15 seconds to ask a question that will open a conversation with the interviewer.
Seems like a pretty good technique, speaking as one who has floundered through more than one interview. In a way, the verbal res is sort of an elevator speech for “Brand Me,” but it also has a nice tennis rhythm that delivers the ball back across the net.
What really struck me in thinking about resumes, however, is that candidates have them, but companies don’t. I suppose this practice reflects the presumed relationship between employer (superior) and employee (inferior) –but that view seems a bit antiquated in the days of “talent acquisition.” So I am going to float the idea of an employer resume.
After all, why not? The whole idea of the Careers site and the employer brand is to convey a value proposition. Condensing that proposition into a resume format might be a stellar strategy.
I think job-seekers would be very interested in a link or tab on the website labeled “Our Resume” or “Our CV.” The page could look just like a typical candidate resume, listing the company’s accomplishments, experience, objectives and vital statistics. The information would be presented from the viewpoint of what job-seekers want to know about prospective employers—which means including achievements in promoting employee satisfaction, diversity, career development, and so on. Then visitors could download a PDF copy.
The Employer Resume could also be put in recruitment packages, handed out at job fairs, emailed to prospects, and made available via the corporate weblog, Facebook page, et cetera. In short: An all-purpose PR piece that not only summarizes the employer brand but also signals a distinctive approach to candidate relationship management.
I haven’t seen any examples of corporations using this device, and a fairly thorough search came up with nothing. (There are some examples of “company resumes” used by small companies for business-to-business sales, but nothing oriented toward recruiting.) Perhaps there’s a perception that big companies are already well known to the public, or that their story is just too huge to be captured in a summary format. But most companies are not well-known as employers, and all stories can be presented effectively at a very high level—it just requires a little creative effort.
Love to hear comments!
The January Wrap-up
January 29, 2010
I had so much fun doing the end-of-year posts that I want to repeat the experience regularly. So the Monthly Wrap will (a) cover short things that didn’t fit elswhere, and (b) update things that did. Here’s the debut:
An update on “the Twitter experiment.” A couple of months ago, in the post HR Superstars: A Handy Guide, I promised to follow everyone on the iCMS list of “21 HR Leaders in Web 2.0 You Must Follow” and report on the experiment. I duly created a Twitter account and set up a TwitterDeck column to show every superstar tweet. However, after a couple of days I decided that only 16 of them offered enough substantive content (as opposed to personality chat) to be relevant, so I trimmed a bit. I did not tweet from this account at all for the first six weeks, but it was found by a few other tweeters, and I’ve followed back those that seem to offer interesting content.
The interim findings: Quality and quantity are not mutually exclusive, but they often do not go together. A couple of frequent tweeters are consistently interesting, a couple are not. On the other hand, tweeting infrequently does not necessarily lead to better tweets! And on the third hand—I realize even more than ever that everyone’s personal filter is set to a different version of what’s meaningful/interesting/useful. So I’m still working on how to draw general conclusions from the HR/Recruiting Twitter stream. Next step in the experiment is to go beyond the original list and see who else is rippling this particular pool.
Unintended Messaging stikes again. I’m expecting this to be a monthly feature! In January, the most striking example I encountered was on the website of a mid-sized professional services company. I think the page was labeled “Executive Leadership” but it could have been some close variant of same. Photographs of the leadership folks were arranged in three columns and (let’s say) eight rows. On the bottom row were three women. You guessed it—the only three women. Title-wise, they were indeed at the lowest level of the leadership hierarchy, which was arranged from President/CEO/Etc. down to Director of Marketing/HR/Whatever.
How to avoid this unfortunate image, in which women appear to be crushed under a heavy stack of men? My first thought is alphabetical arrangement. Second would be some type of grouping that would allow the women to be scattered in among the men. For example, put the top four guys in a C-level group, then break up the others into functional groups such as operational, people, or whatever would work. I’ll bet there’s a way . . .
What are they thinking at Kashi? It’s nothing to do with Careers directly—but a gaffe in corporate communications will eventually rub off on the employer brand. Short version: Those of us longing for Kashi waffles, and finding none at the store for several weeks, went to the Kashi website for insight. Buried on a deep page was a small note saying: “We are experiencing delays in production due to repairs and equipment upgrades at our waffle facility. We expect to be fully stocked in early 2011 . . .”
Yes, you read that right: 2011. And insult is added to injury by another post from the company describing this year+ gap as a “temporary shortage.”
A year’s lapse in the availability of a popular product line is really huge from a business perspective. But even more problematic is letting people wonder for weeks (and maybe forever) about the missing waffles, because the automatic assumption when a product line disappears is either “unpopular product” or “troubled company.” A little more research discovered no signs of clarification via press release or Facebook page. (In case you think I shouldn’t be scolding a small-but-earnest natural foods company—let us not forget that super-giant Kellogg bought Kashi in 2000. And Kellogg can’t help out with these waffle woes???)
That’s it for January. Another Monthly Wrap feature: The illustration is just for visual enjoyment. See more ice wonders at EnglishRussia.
Notes from a Pretty Good Webinar!
January 28, 2010
A couple of months ago, I posted about my disappointment with a webinar I’d attended, and added a few thoughts about webinars in general. The gist was “execution is key,” and that proposition has been nicely confirmed by my most recent webinar experience.
The topic this time: Introductory Twitter for Recruiters: How to Minimize Your Time and Maximize ROI. Presented by “Arbita ACES’s master cybersleuth, Glenn Gutmacher,” the webinar was informative, interesting, and smoothly run. A conversational style and well-organized PowerPoint deck made for a good flow–and although the deck was mainly text, with just a few screenshots, that worked okay for the topic. Attendees received a PDF of the presentation deck, plus a party favor in the form of Arbita’s nifty Twitter GuruGuide (aka “cheat sheet”).
If you want to see/hear the webinar for yourself—Arbita provides free access to a recording of the webinar for a “limited time” via a link near the top of this page.
For those who don’t know much about Twitter, this presentation offers an outstanding introduction. And if you do know something, or even much, about Twitter, you’ll probably still find out something new, especially in terms of using Twitter for recruiting. The presentation is filled with information, and there’s no useful way to summarize the content. But here are a few highlights that have standalone usefulness:
- From the slide “How to Optimize Your Profile, a link to this overview at twitter how to.
- From the slide “Posting (Tweeting) and ReTweeting (RT),” this excellent reminder: “Follow the 90/10 rule: 90% of your tweets are giving (adding value for those that follow you) and 10% are taking (shameless self-promotion).”
- From the slide “Searching with Twellow,” a link to Ryan Leary’s helpful post on that topic.
- From the slide “Twitter Lists,” a good idea: “Create topical lists (e.g., competitors, all your teammates/colleagues, experts in your favorite hobbies, etc.), and create a feed of that list for your LinkedIn Group, Facebook Page, Blog, or RSS reader.”
- From the slide “Best Uses of Twitter for Recruiters,” this tip: “Write an ongoing series of tweets that showcase your expertise. Make sure to include a link to more details.”
- From the slide “Get a Third Party Dashboard,” a look at how programs like TweetDeck can help to manage Twitter more productively.
I’m signed up for another webinar soon—this one from Vocus, the PR people, on 2010 State of the Media. Don’t forget that understanding public relations is important for successful employer branding! No time for the webinar? Download the white paper. Highlight:
Good advice for capturing the attention of viewers and the media is to create your own blog. According to the Society for New Communications Research, less than 20 percent of Fortune 500 Companies publish corporate blogs. Meanwhile, PR organizations that are active in social media and create enough buzz about company news may attract the attention of the traditional media.
Starbucks: Full Court Press!
January 26, 2010
Okay—pun intended. But blame the New York Times for introducing basketball in its recent story titled Now at Starbucks: A Rebound. In its Q1 earnings report, SBUX showed a net income of $241.5 million (up from $64.3 million in the year-ago quarter), revenue up 4%, and same-store sales up 4%. After several quarters of steady declines, the new view must look just like heaven.
So what has Starbucks done right? First let’s consider how this connects with the subject of Careers.
Back in May of 2008, when Starbucks was still assumed to be bullet-proof, HR guru Kevin Wheeler wrote an article about employer branding titled Why Google or Starbucks? In it he wonders what makes people especially eager to work at certain companies, and decides: “More people are attracted to causes than things.”
We could argue whether this is still true in times (like now) of high unemployment. But let’s say for the moment that Wheeler’s proposition is at least basically true. He sees Google’s “cause” as free information, and asserts that:
Starbucks’ cause is community. It’s a place, like in the old television show Cheers, where everybody knows your name. It feels good to go into your local Starbucks every morning, be greeted by a smiling barista who knows your name and your favorite drink, and to meet some friends.
That is indeed the role Starbucks plays in my life, and in spite of corporate ups and downs, my local barristas are always warmly waiting when I walk in the door—and I regard every Starbucks location as a remote office plus home-away-from-home. But even when Wheeler was writing, SBUX was in trouble. That same year saw the beginning of extensive store closings and layoffs, along with a barrage of downside publicity.
To the extent that their reinvention campaign is succeeding, it’s not only because of streamlining or process improvements. There has also been a focus on reenergizing employees—and Starbucks has joined the new culture of customer engagement: lots of social networking, a listening campaign, special offers, and even an affiliation with MSNBC’s feisty AM talk show, Morning Joe.
The Starbucks Career Center website now reads like an excerpt from Wheeler’s article. The headline: “It’s a lot like working with friends.” And the pitch:
We call each other “partners”. We respect our customers and each other. We’re dedicated to serving ethically sourced coffee, caring for the environment and giving back to the communities where we do business. And we’re still small enough to remember your name when you walk in the door.
Reinforcing the message is a festoon of employer awards, from the trusty Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For to Forbes 100 Best Corporate Citizens and Best Places to Work for LGBT Equality. So the “cause factor” is definitely full court press.
Not that everything is perking perfectly in the inner world of Starbucks. There are employee complaints—and because Starbucks is big, and actively represents itself as a responsible employer, those complaints get coverage. But the percentage of unhappy workers seems proportional, and there is definitely no lack of barrista wannabes.
Now for the punch line. If you compare Keven Wheeler’s prescription for establishing a strong employer brand with NYT’s account of what’s behind the Starbucks rebound . . . there is a very strong similarity. Wheeler’s five steps to “Make Your Company Memorable”:
- Gain perspective and know yourself.
- Define the promise.
- Develop a strategy.
- Create a “buzz” to communicate your brand.
- Measure your progress.
In short—what works for getting and keeping employees works for getting and keeping customers. And vice versa.
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