Starting in 1989, Ross Clennett, APRCSA, worked for 15 years as a recruiter in London, Sydney, Adelaide and Melbourne. He has been a regular writer about recruitment and the Australian recruitment scene since 2001. He runs Australia’s only online training and professional development membership site for recruitment company owners and managers.

1) Believing the claims that technology vendors make and undertaking few, if any, background checks of these claims with other recruiters who are actively using the vendor’s product

2) Charging into an online community and participating without first observing the community etiquette

3) Using social media networks such as Twitter and Facebook without a strategy and then stopping after 2 weeks declaring ‘it doesn’t work’

4) Thinking that technology that enables them to ‘find more candidates’ is automatically going to solve their ‘candidate shortage’ problems

5) Using a social media network or technology product and only learning 10%-15% of what there is to know about using that network or product

6) Not being aware of what information is listed under their own name when a simple Google search is conducted using that name

7) That all candidates and clients use technology and the Internet the way they do

8 ) If it’s free it must be crap

9) If it’s expensive it must be good

10) Thinking that it’s all a fad and nothing’s really changed from the way recruitment was in 1993

Smart recruiters understand that using social media networks and technology effectively enhances their overall productivity, enabling them to accomplish more each day, leading to more jobs generated, more placements made, more invoices sent and more income earned.

Successfully assisting more clients find better employees and more candidates find better jobs and in the process, enjoying your work more and making more money – what could be better?

For more information or to subscribe to Ross’ weekly newsletter, Insight, please visit www.rossclennett.com

Over the weekend, the number of my followers on Twitter passed the 1000 mark.

In social media speak, I am now popular. In fact, according to Sysomos I belong to an exclusive club (only 0.68% of users have more than 1,000 followers).

But what does this digital milestone mean? It certainly doesn’t mean 1000 customers. In fact, I do not have close relationship with majority of my followers, yet. This isn’t a rant. I certainly am not against having more fans on Twitter (thanks for following). The point is getting attention is good, whether its on Twitter or elsewhere, but it doesn’t means much if  it doesn’t translate to results.

What’s important is having true fans. Followers who care, will engage and open to long-term relationship.  It’s probably better to have a few highly engaged followers than have a fickle relationship with thousands of pseudo fans.

As Seth puts it:

So much time and effort is now put into finding followers, accumulating comments and generating controversy… all so that people will notice you. People say and do things that don’t benefit them, just because they’re hooked on attention. Attention is fine, as long as you have a goal that is reached in exchange for all this effort. 

Nevertheless, 1000 is a good number. In fact, Kevin Kelly thinks in a long tail world, all you need to flourish is to have 1000 true fans. The beauty of the long tail is 1000 true fans are within the reach of anyone. 

In a world where attention can come and go easily, the real focus should be to win true fans. And if you can get to 1000, that’s all you need to thrive.

Economy
National Unemployment rate hits 5.8%. An additional 21,400 jobs were lost, most of it in permanent roles. It’s interesting that part-time roles continue to increase (400 jobs added in June).  While regional differences remains, the pain is likely to continue.

CEO speak
John Chambers, CEO and chairman of Cisco Systems, talks to McKinsey on a range of issues, including leadership and management. “Instead of 10 people running the company, with a very heavy leaning toward the command, we have moved to a structure with the top 500 people running it today

Posting jobs on Twitter
Is posting jobs on Twitter effective? Joshua Kahn dissects what works and doesn’t work on Twitter.  The Job Board Doctor is not entirely impressed with Twitter as a job advertising platform. One thing is for sure, there’s still a lot to learn about Twitter.

FREE is free
In line with the theme of his new new book ‘FREE’ Chris Anderson made the book available for free. I have not read the whole book yet (Malcolm Gladwell thinks the book’s main premise is faulty. Seth Godin thinks Malcolm is wrong), but the basic argument is we are heading into a future where ‘free’ rules. There are obvious implications for our industry. I look forward to digesting it over the weekend. It’s 288 pages long and the audio version can be downloaded here.

Monitoring social media
What are job seekers saying about your employment brand? What are your customers or suppliers talking about? Monitoring the social media landscape is becoming an essential activity. Here’s a useful primer on how to make sense of the ever growing social media landscape.

The growth of Twitter & other social networks
Statistics after statistics indicates Australians are quick adopters of social networking tools. Australia is the fourth largest user of Twitter, after Canada, UK and US. Fascinating statistics on Twitter adoption.  Meanwhile Techcrunch attempted to measure the  value of various social networks.  Australia ranked second ($145 on average) after the UK in per capita spending on Internet advertising. 

Social media marketing
All you can eat case studies on social media marketing.

Social media is punk rock
David Merman Scott points us to an analogy on social media using punk rock

Earning trust: Besides maintaining a lively blog, every week the team at Sixfigures quietly produce two newsletters for employers and executives. They are one of the few players taking a long term view of the market; building relationship and earning ‘trust’ one audience at a time.

Whitepaper: Regularly producing useful content, Taleo continues to be a leader in research. Here’s their take on reducing recruitment cost (includes a whitepaper)

Twitter (that word again): Finding a job using twitter – Perspective from a job seeker. Here’s a counter view. Experience varies widely. Nothing in social media is set in stone, yet.

Google Wave: Google continues to innovate, launched Wave (video below). Which players in our industry are under threat, as a result?