Archive for the ‘Social Networking’ Category
Ernie Feiteira hoists Ziv Eliraz’s, Zao’s CEO, arm in the air after announcing Zao as Pitch-off winner.
Zao was the winner of the 2013 Recruit Camp Pitch off Competition. Nearly 30 applications were submitted and four companies were selected to compete. The 2013 finalist were Hire an Esquire, Krow.com, Talentbox and Zao. All four companies got to present in front of over 60 in-house recruiting leaders. Zao won the bragging rights, free sponsorship of the next Recruit Camp NYC and RIDE (Recruitment Industry Dance Event) in Amsterdam, but more importantly access to network with the recruiting pros.
The finalist each did a 10 minutes presentation and demo at Recruit Camp in a head-to-head competition. Each company was then questioned (and sometimes grilled) for an additional five minutes. The attendees voted for the winner based on a $5,000 budget, so with a $5,000 budget which company would they spend it with. The pitch-off overlapped with lunch and the winner was announced at the RIDE NYC networking after party.
Last year four companies presented too. The winner in 2012 was Reschedge, since then they have added clients such as Foursquare, Dropbox, Rent The Runway, and others. Take the Interview has signed on clients like Zappos, Time Inc, Discovery Communications, Live Person and others. CareerCloud has since launched. FreshGrad has also launched and added thousands of college students to their database.
The 2013 finalists had to demonstrate they had the right stuff. Applicants were evaluated on various factors including some of the following:
- What existing need or want does the venture address?
- What is the problem you solve?
- Describe the product/service, how will it change the way people live, work or do business? Who are potential users and/or customers?
- What is the addressable market size (in $$$s)?
- What makes it unique and why will customers buy/use it?
- What are your sources of revenue?
- What’s your performance so far? How do you plan to grow/scale the business?
- Who are the existing and potential competitors?
- What is your competitive advantage?
Ten months ago Zao raised $1.3M as reported in TechCrunch. Zao is a SaaS employee referral program automation platform that helps companies hire well and fast by engaging the people who actually understand a company’s needs — i.e. its employees, business partners, vendors, and friends of employees – and by leveraging the data and connections in social media, takes referral hires to a whole new level. Ziv Eliraz, CEO of Zao, said after the winning announcement that “Winning Recruit Camp was fantastic, and means a lot to us for one important reason – the decision wasn’t made by a panel of “HR Influencers”, consultants or pundits – rather – the audience of HR professionals from major US companies, who are in the recruiting trenches day to day.” He went on to say that “for a startup, it doesn’t get better than talent acquisition leaders voting to spend their money with you. Winning is great confirmation to us that we have the right solution to help companies make great hires.”
Votes were done by secret ballot and like the Oscars we had the votes tallied by people from audit firms, however we had three firms review votes (Deloitte, KMPG and PwC, the Oscars only have one audit firm). Recruit Camp is a magnet for recruiting leaders form tax and audit firms 
.
More about the other companies:
Krow, which is ‘work’ backwards, debuted their service to the public for the first time at RC3. Krow bills itself a premiere service that allows recruiters to form their HR brand and push that brand through web and mobile to attract and entice the best candidates of the millennial generation. The product changes the scope of HR because it gives recruiters the resources that they never get, but are allowed to every aspect of the organization – especially marketing. this product allows for HR organizations to market their recruiting brand to attract top talent.
Krow has been incubated at Headhunter Lab (as were Take the Interview and CareerCloud from last year’s batch of pitch-off competitors).
Talentbox is a video enabled, digital interviewing platform that allows users to build their own interviews, share them with potential candidates, and review their responses remotely. It will change the way both in house & external recruiters approach the hiring process as it significantly reduces the overall time and cost currently involved. It will also change the way employers collaborate on the review process as it allows for greater transparency, coupled with remote review capabilities.
Hire an Esquire’s mission is to change the way professionals work and give people control over their careers. Hire an Esquire is an industry-specific enterprise SaaS staffing service & marketplace. Our first vertical is the legal market – we help law firms and in-house legal counsel to find, manage and pay a top team of contract attorneys. Our SaaS-based system includes conflict management, secure document exchange, time-tracking, paperless invoicing, escrow and payment systems in one user-friendly dashboard. This allows law firms to reduce costs, and attorneys to make more money and have more flexibility and control over their careers.
Check out picture from Recruit Camp III and Networking After Party.
I’m getting excited about the Garden State Council SHRM Conference on Nov. 1-2. I’ll be talking about how video and social media has become a game changer for recruitment. Below is the full description of the presentation. I’ve also posted the presentation time, location and some other information.
Presentation Description: Video, combined with the Internet, is a game-changer for recruiting. Used together they create a better candidate experience and raise the likelihood of a better hire. Video is effective for employment marketing many types of candidates, from hourly to campus, and even experienced hires (especially showing them the firms excellent management practices).
We live in a world of pictures, movies, and sound. The printed word is being replaced and expanded by cheap, easy access to video websites like YouTube, Veoh.com and others. Video can be used in about a dozen different ways in recruitment, come learn how-to, best practices and next practices.
Learning Objectives:
Describe the benefits to be gained by participants in your session. Be as specific as possible. Indicate at least two skills, knowledge, or procedures that attendees will take away from the session. You can list objectives as endings to the following sentence: At the end of this session, participants will be able to…
- Examine how employers can use video in 12 different ways in campus recruitment.
- Explore common mistakes to avoid.
- Develop ways to engage candidates in your company with video. .
- Design video recruitment strategy that fits into any budget (even zilch!)
- Develop ways to measure the ROI of your time and investment.
Presentation Details:
- Date: Tuesday, November 02, 2010
- Time: 9:30
- Session:Session F
Approved for Strategic Credit
SAMPLE EXAMPLE that will be in my presentation:
Company: Schlumberger, an 80,000 employee oilfield services company.
Their Challenge: Getting and finding hard to fill Field Engineers to apply.
Solution: Schlumberger distributed their career videos and optimized them for search engines. Click on these links to see several of the sites that videos are on: (prior to this strategy, a search for “field engineer” on search engines and our video network produced NO Schlumberger results).
- http://careers.slb.com/en/recentgraduates.aspx (Schlumberger Career Fields and Their People)
- http://www.blinkx.com/videos/field+engineer (video search engine, results from many different sites)
- http://tinyurl.com/kvfx96 (YouTube search)
- http://tinyurl.com/ns9ldj (Metacafe search)
- http://tinyurl.com/m9h95d (Google search)
- http://tinyurl.com/l3xcfo (Bing Search)
- http://tinyurl.com/mmmwzn (Yahoo search)
- http://studentcenter.ja.org/Careers/JobVideos (do a search for Field Engineer)
- http://shaleblog.com/category/videos-about-shale/ (example of video being shared and embedded “virally”)
Results: SLB field engineers profiles have been views over 90,000 times and are now the #1 search result and we are getting around an 11% click through rate (Engineers are being sent to http://www.tinyurl.com/SLBengineers apply for jobs).
I was at NYU on Monday where Linkedin launched a new tool for college jobseekers called “Career Explorer.” The launch was sponsored by PriceWaterhouseCoopers, the Big 4 accounting firm, PwC hires many college student and their involvement in this initiative was surely and attempt to stand out from the rest of the Big 4 competitors. According to The Wall Street Journal, PwC paid millions to have the first shot at the students that use the new tool. I received a demo of the tool first hand demo (that’s me on the far right in the photo below).
While the Linkedin “Career Explorer” tool has some interesting potential, it’s more of Career “Pathing” or mapping tool than a “career exploration” tool as it’s called. Typically “career explorer” products focus on showing/teaching candidates/students about the career (day in the life, required education, future outlook, demand, etc), LinkedIn’s product does not do this. Student and Jobseekers can sign up for a “Jobseeker” account and pay $24.95 to $49.95 per month.
List of true career exploration services:
- Career Explorer
- VirtualJobShadow.com
- FFA
- Defined Learning
- WOIS
- Kuder
- Discover from ACT
- Career Path Finder
Monster has a Career Mapping tool, that is “patent pending,” so that’s probably why LinkedIn didn’t call their product something more relevant, Career Path Explorer would be more fitting.
Burning Glass offers similar, if not better, career mapping/pathing technology. Several months ago at the NACE 2010 conference I spoke with Kevin Burgess from Burning Glass about its career path mapping technology, after comparing the two tools, I’d say Burning Glass is 2-3 generations ahead of Linkedin.
The PwC initiative is being rolled to students at 60 universities across the United States as a beta program. I’ve toyed with the tool and got some odd results. Beside if I input that I’m an economics major, and get results for “Analyst,” “Intern” etc.., as a college student I still have little to no idea of what does jobs are like….
Nonetheless, here are some key features of “Career Explorer:”
Explore different career paths: Career Explorer offers career path recommendations based three data points: major, degree, and industry. The results are of four “likely” jobs that you could consider. I got some weird suggestion, the algorithm used for this will need to be improved.
After the career path is set, Linkedin suggests people to network with.
There’s also some demographic info that is displayed.
The job openings are recommended. I’d recommend that candidate take titles of these jobs and in career path and enter them into Indeed.com, many many more jobs listed there.
Things like parks are considered a public good. Public goods cost society money to maintain and abuse by a couple could result in the public good being ruined for the rest. So as I think about the debate of net neutrality and think about the recent Google and Verizon pact as reported by The New York Times, I wonder, is the Internet a public good? Who should be able to make money from the Internet?
The internet (especially the TCIP protocol) was developed as a government project with hundreds of millions, if not billions, of taxpayer dollars. Wouldn’t this make the Net a public good? Yes it does. Verizon is seeking tiered pricing for website owners. Verizon already makes money by offering different data speed plans to consumers and would like to do the same for website owners like Google, Yahoo, maybe even NYU.edu. If Verizon and other ISPs are given permission to charge website owners, those with money could buy their way to the top of “natural” search results. Wealthy website owners could perhaps even pay to have competitive websites blocked (or website experience to be substantially downgraded). The Internet, a public good, would eventually be limited in content (websites) from anyone anywhere. This limitation would result in the “tragedy of the commons.”
ISPs do and should be able to charge for consumption. Verizon customer that are ‘bandwidth hog’ (some one that watched a lot of video, downloads music, movies and other large files), could and probably should be charged on tiered plans based on data consumption or based on download/upload speed plans. If not, bandwidth hogs would themselves pass on an externality to the rest of the internet users.
It seems to me that Verizon is seeking to create a positive externality for itself by passing the cost of maintaining its network on to website owners, but it’s the end user that determines the websites she visits, it she that should be responsible for the data that is consumed. Verizon wants to pass the cost of providing bandwidth streaming video, peer-to-peer sharing and other “heavy” data activities to website owners. This would prove to be profitable for Verizon. But the real cost would really be to the society, in the form of less choice to content on the internet. Website owners don’t have a free ride now, it very hard to generate substantial sales the web in addition, website owners must pay hosting fees and bandwidth transfer fees to CDN (Content Delivery Networks). To this day, even the super popular YouTube website is not profitable because of the hosting and CDN fees.
Verizon’s plan would create additional barriers to entry for content providers. Barriers to entry slow innovation on the web for new comers, since new consumers would need more capital to pay ISP for “real estate” and access to the ISPs users. Eliminating net neutrality serves only the interests of the ISPs and large profitable website owners. Government regulation would provide political and legal cover for Verizon and Google. This would result in greater profits for both those organizations. Google could pay Verizon to give YouTube, a Google property, preference on the Verizon service. Verizon might even be incentivized to reduce, even, block access to YouTube competitives sites like Hulu, Dailymotion, Vimeo and other video site.
After many years, Verizon may be finally getting its wish by having Google buy into Tiered Pricing. So the question becomes, why did Google have a change in policy? Well, Google has branched out from it core search engine business and now offers services and products that rely on Verizon carriage, for example Google’s mobile operation system Android, as well on the Google phone (hardware that need to be carried Verizon). Google feels like it needs to give a little to get its other products carried by Verizon.
It’s clear that Verizon is doing a good job creating externalities for itself. What’s not clear is whether the FCC and the public at large understand the ramifications? While Verizon is making legal and political head way, I presume that ultimately website owners will continue to be free to launch and operate without barriers from ISPs. Net neutrality should pertain to any device (computer, portable devices like mobile phones, TV sets, etc) that uses TCIP internet technology.
Socially and ethically I cannot see society allowing net neutrally to be eliminated, that pressure from society lead to political and legal failure for Verizon and Google.
Truveo has introduced a video search application for Facebook that will allow users to browse its database of more than 500 million videos and share clips with friends. The app will also allow people to find relevant content through recommendations from Facebook friends.
The Truveo app could help make Facebook even more of a video hub.
Thought Trueveo I fould my friends were watching a video on girl that’s was feared lost sailing around the world and a funny video about the oil spill.
Via NewTeeVee, Facebook is increasingly becoming a hub for online video viewing, with more than 20 million videos being uploaded to the social network each month — and more than 2 billion videos being watched. Those two stats, given exclusively to NewTeeVee by a Facebook spokesperson, underscore the growing importance of video as a communications medium on the social networking site.
The number of uploads, in particular, has grown pretty substantially over the past year. Last March, Facebook said that it received on average 415,000 video uploads a day, or about 12 million a month, 40 percent of which came directly from webcams. And as more mobile devices that are video-ready enter the market, we can expect the number of mobile videos to increase. Last summer, for instance, Facebook released an update to its iPhone app enabling users to directly upload video to the site.
The social networking site crept into comScore’s Video Metrix top five sites for video viewers in April, with 41.3 million U.S. uniques over the course of the month. While it still lags industry heavyweight YouTube in terms of viewers, the number of users watching video on the site rank it alongside Vevo and Fox Interactive — and ahead of Hulu. But while it ranks favorably in terms of the number of users watching video on the site, the average number of videos watched per viewer — 5.6, according to comScore — is still pretty low compared to YouTube (96) or Hulu (24.7).
Facebook already has 500 million users worldwide, but as more users join and settle in, we can expect the number of users watching video on the site to grow. And as more of those users come armed with inexpensive digital video cameras and mobile devices — like the new iPhone 4 — that can shoot HD video, we can expect the number uploading video to the site to increase even further.
I’m getting excited about the NACE National Conference next week. I’ll be talking about how video and social media has become a game changer for recruitment. Below is the full description of the presentation. I’ve also posted the presentaition time, location and some other information.
Presenation Description: Video, combined with the Internet, is a game-changer for recruiting. Used together they create a better candidate experience and raise the likelihood of a better hire. Video is particularly effective in campus recruitment and attractive to Gen Y (and soon Gen Z).
Gen Y is an avid user of video and expects to be marketed to, taught, entertained, and recruited by video. Camille D., a recent grad said it best “Video gave me a look inside the job before I actually started, it was SO effective. I just graduated from college in May 09, and that is definitely something I liked to see on my employer’s career page when I applied.”
We live in a world of pictures, movies, and sound. The printed word is being replaced and expanded by cheap, easy access to video websites like YouTube, Veoh.com and others.
Video can be used in about a dozen different ways in recruitment, come learn how-to, best practices and next practices.
| Learning Objectives: | Describe the benefits to be gained by participants in your session. Be as specific as possible. Indicate at least two skills, knowledge, or procedures that attendees will take away from the session. You can list objectives as endings to the following sentence: At the end of this session, participants will be able to…
|
SAMPLE EXAMPLE that will be in my presentation:
Company: Schlumberger, an 80,000 employee oilfield services company.
Their Challenge: Getting and finding hard to fill Field Engineers to apply.
Solution: Schlumberger distributed their career videos and optimized them for search engines. Click on these links to see several of the sites that videos are on: (prior to this strategy, a search for “field engineer” on search engines and our video network produced NO Schlumberger results).
- http://careers.slb.com/en/recentgraduates.aspx (Schlumberger Career Fields and Their People)
- http://www.blinkx.com/videos/field+engineer (video search engine, results from many different sites)
- http://tinyurl.com/kvfx96 (YouTube search)
- http://tinyurl.com/ns9ldj (Metacafe search)
- http://tinyurl.com/m9h95d (Google search)
- http://tinyurl.com/l3xcfo (Bing Search)
- http://tinyurl.com/mmmwzn (Yahoo search)
- http://studentcenter.ja.org/Careers/JobVideos (do a search for Field Engineer)
- http://shaleblog.com/category/videos-about-shale/ (example of video being shared and embedded “virally”)
Results: SLB field engineers profiles have been views over 90,000 times and are now the #1 search result and we are getting around an 11% click through rate (Engineers are being sent to http://www.tinyurl.com/SLBengineers apply for jobs).
Presnation Details:
- Date: Wednesday, June 02, 2010
- Time: 10:30-11:45am
- Room: Crystal Ballroom C
New at the Conference: Career Corner Digital will be unvieling in private beta just for NACE attendees a new social recruitng career exploration and social job search site for college recruitment. Career Corner will be at Booth # 720 in the Exhibit Hall.
Learning Showcase: If you can’t make it to the booth, Career Corner will be running a product learning showcase on Wednesday June 2nd at 5:30 pm in Room: Crystal E. Check teh conference program book for more details.
I recently attended a meeting of the GATEWAY SHRM Chapter in Jersey City, NJ. As the organization’s Social Media Chair, it is my duty to develop and execute on our social media strategy for the chapter. I say this because it ties into the presentation given by Steve Levy at the meeting– ”Social Media Isn’t Voodoo: Fast and Practical Ways to Use Blogging, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter to Amp Up Your Recruiting or Job Search.”
Part of my social media strategy for this particular event included video and blogging (which you are reading now), there will be tweets sent out too and hopefully you will share this post and video.
Steve Levy’s approach to social media is not as a series of website to use, but rather in the manner we all should approach social media, as an extension of our conversation and communication with each other, target audience and the world.
For those dipping their toes into social media, Steve recommends these sites as a good starting point:
- Linkedin.com
- Facebook.com
- WordPress.com – blogging
- Twitter.com – microblogging
- Del.icio.us (Social Bookmarking)
- Flickr (Photo Sharing, etc..)
- ERE.net (Recruiting Community)
- YouTube.com – video
With social media you will have colleagues, friends, and “unknowns” asking to join your network or follow you. Quality is more important than quantity, but I believe we all can get too a couple hundred quality connections. Steven recommends calling people to say thank you for “connecting” / “following.” He states it’ll differentiate you and help strengthen the relationship. I found that advice to be a simple but brilliant. People too often hide behind email and social media and don’t strengthen relationship by talking or meeting the person face-to-face.
I’m a big believer in face-to-face, attending events like the GATEWAY chapter meeting is a way I accomplish that. If you are interested in face-to-face too, take a look at Meetup.com. I currently lead the NYC Recruiting Meetup Group on that site, it’s my was of bringing people face-to-face in a somewhat informal way to discuss best practice and “next practices” in recruitment.
Here’s part of the presentation.
More on Steve and his presentation:
Social Media isn’t voodoo: Build your brand, build your team, build your
future – (AKA One-Minute Social Media Solutions for Recruiting)
Overview of social media for Recruiting
Defining Social Media goals for Recruiting
The Big Five (Blogging, Career Page, Facebook, LinkedIn,
Twitter) and their individual roles in recruiting
Deconstructing the Big Five: Strategies and tactics to make each
effective without breaking the clock
Reconstructing the Big Five into a dynamic strategy
Use specific jobs from the audience as examples
Speaker: Steve Levy is a Recruiter and Organizational Development consultant with 20 years of diverse experiences in Recruiting, OD, Human Resources, Patent Law, Management Science, and Information Technology (yes, he HAS had a career roadmap – it just hasn’t been conventionally HR). His company profile has covered all the bases – start-ups, growth, mature, and turnarounds – and his sector experience is equally diverse. Steve is a well-respected recruiting, HR and business blogger who is known for his outside-the-box analyses and solutions to quagmire “people” problems. He is presently a very senior recruiter with MTM Technologies, a national IT consulting firm focused on virtualization, unified communication, and managed services solutions.
Lorne Epstein, CEO/Founder at Inside Job, demonstrates the Inside Job Facebook app. InSide Job connects jobseeekers to helpful people who have interviewed, worked, or are currently employed at the places the jobseeker wants to work at next. Employers can post jobs and leverage their work force as ambassadors of their organization.
This presentation was done at a NYC Recruiting Meetup.
Video I
Video II
About The NY Recruiting Meetup Network:
http://www.meetup.com/NYCRecruiting The NY Recruiting Meetup Network believes in face-to-face meetups to learn from each other, network/socialize, and have a little fun. That’s why people love our brief 5-10 minute demos/presentation from our speakers.
Meet other local recruiters, HR professionals, ERE.net members, and hiring managers. Discuss topics including recruiting tactics, eRecruitment, social media, web 2.0/recruitment 2.0, talent management, best & next practices, and building business relationships.
Jack Wagner, @jackwagner54, is a mobile app strategist at DefinedLogic, shares insight on developing a mobile app strategy and some of the key questions prior to employers recruiting via the cell phone. This presentation was done at a NYC Recruiting Meetup. (With cameo from me on what is a widget and gadget)
About The NY Recruiting Meetup Network:
http://www.meetup.com/NYCRecruiting The NY Recruiting Meetup Network believes in face-to-face meetups to learn from each other, network/socialize, and have a little fun. That’s why people love our brief 5-10 minute demos/presentation from our speakers.
Meet other local recruiters, HR professionals, ERE.net members, and hiring managers. Discuss topics including recruiting tactics, eRecruitment, social media, web 2.0/recruitment 2.0, talent management, best & next practices, and building business relationships.
Allen Ackerman, Founder/CEO, The Hire Syndicate, demostrates their iPhone app and desktop widget for real-time recruiting at the January NYC Recruiting Meetup. The video is a little raw, but the content provides a overview of their app and widget. The Hire Syndicate is a third-paaty recruiter split network that gives third-party recruiters a desktop widget and iPhone app that constantly updates new placements and enables quick access to the jobs and candidates.
First five minutes is the demo, the second 5 minutes is Q&A from NY Recruiting Meetup members. At the Meetup there were several other presentaions, those videos will be posted soon too…
About The NY Recruiting Meetup Network:
http://www.meetup.com/NYCRecruiting The NY Recruiting Meetup Network believes in face-to-face meetups to learn from each other, network/socialize, and have a little fun. That’s why people love our brief 5-10 minute demos/presentation from our speakers.
Meet other local recruiters, HR professionals, ERE.net members, and hiring managers. Discuss topics including recruiting tactics, eRecruitment, social media, web 2.0/recruitment 2.0, talent management, best & next practices, and building business relationships.
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