In the “cage match” post, there is one phrase that got me out of my silence because the ignorance was too much for me to hold my tongue… Eric Clemons said:

“Mr. Sullivan argues that in all his years thinking through and working through issues in internet advertising he has never heard any company or any individual complain about paid search. In contrast, I have been hearing this complaint from senior vice presidents in travel companies for years, and this year the chorus has been joined by retailers and manufacturers”

Dear Mr. Clemons,

Perhaps it’s time for you to get some new senior vice president’s to talk to? It’s time for a new breed of leaders who know how to truly lead and not whine about taking the easy way out using purely 100% paid search.  Someone at that level should understand content strategy, social media strategy, seo strategy (do you even know what SEO is Professor Clemons?) and paid search and should be managing them strategically in conjunction with each other. All too often, I see executives whose qualifications to be a senior leader in an Internet company or large ecommerce division amount to little more than they worked at an Internet company since 1999, they worked and some ‘elite‘ business strategy consulting company(where they never executed or implemented anything), they’ve been passively recruited from place to place and it hides that they can’t move the needle or that they were a brand marketing person a long, long time ago and still think in terms of campaign awards…sigh.

To manage customer acquisition via the Internet effectively and create an awesome customer experience using all of the tools in the tool box isn’t tough if you have the right leaders in place who understand that strategy is about incremental daily improvement not hiring a 20th century management consulting firm. As a top 10 MBA holder myself I can honestly say that the education in almost all programs is lacking relevancy to today’s Internet world. I discussed this with the heads of the a major marketing professor conference here in Chicago recently – I was pleased by their receptiveness to my outreach. It’s too bad Mr. Clemons wasn’t there to share the conversation with us. My experiences at BlackRock managing data structures, living offline social media, creating elite customer service via the web and driving standards that created competitive advantages that have lasted a decade. Due to BlackRock’s B2B nature, much is still not understood publicly, but the Internet world would be wise to learn from BlackRock’s lessons.

The combination of my experience BlackRock, my top 10 MBA (least important of these) and the wonderful experiences I’ve had immersing myself in search engine marketing when Danny Sullivan was kind enough to let me hold a microphone in lieu of registration fee at my first SES conference in December, 2005 had led to the amazing learning that followed over the last several years. My life has never been the same since! I now have an amazing and wonderful small circle of the world’s greatest search marketing minds whom I can pick up the phone and discuss how search marketing is creating the largest change in business since the Industrial Revolution two centuries ago! I’ll admit it’s challenging and frustrating some days to be part of a tiny group that understands the massive power of how pull marketing via search is changing organizational structures and profitability at their very foundation.

The paradox is most of the leaders of companies don’t have the right combination of old and new skills to lead this change and the number of people in the world truly qualified to lead the largest change management project in the history of the world. I can truly count on two hands at most at present – yet senior management and the world’s understanding of search marketing is so limited at this juncture that those people aren’t even coveted…yet. How can one hire the best leader or search marketing if they are still basically clueless about what they are buying? That’s right, they can’t effectively!

Retained marketing executive search consultants are still picking most CMO candidates based on 1989 standards and position specs and/or last job title held nonsense – oddly a side effect of the effect of search being used too heavily in candidate sourcing and job search. Worse, they are letting the roles be defined by the CEO, CFO and boards of directors who don’t know the first thing about how search engine optimization, content strategy and marketing are changing the world. This causes people with outdated skills to frequently be placed in leadership roles again and again with less than optimal financial results and creating an unpleasant working environment (and a high turnover rate) for the wonderful and hard working search marketers and social media folks that they manage.

It doesn’t have to be this way Professor Clemons. It’s about time you had some new senior vice presidents to talk to that understood search, understand the theory of exactly how and why they need to transform their new organizations and will test and learn their way to success – the kind of success that you can write case studies about and that I can one day come visit your class and share about. But for now, I’d challenge you to name the SVP’s that are complaining instead of performing…I’d love to consult for them and make them look good…or be their replacement if they’d like to continue to complain and not build a balanced (and profitable) traffic acquisition strategy.

---
Related Articles at Digital Business Strategy Marketing Management:

• Google’s Alan Eustace, Senior Vice President, Engineering & Research to Present at Morgan Stanley Technology Conference
• Google’s Omid Kordestani, Senior Vice President of Global Sales and Operations to Present at NASDAQ OMX 21st Investor Program in London
• Google to Present at Upcoming Investor Events

Forget about monetization, can Facebook survive without any useful customer service improvements? While 98% of the service works great on autopilot, there is absolutely zero customer service for the things where you do need help. I don’t mean bad customer service, I mean there is absolutely no customer service for certain issues.

Case #1 – Last month, I created a group called Interactive, Search Marketing and Social Media Change Managment in my haste to leave for a conference, you can see that I mispelled Management in the group name. This field is not editable by the group owner and after 7 weeks, I have had zero professional response from a real human at Facebook to resolve the issue.

Case #2 – Lack of ability to add Networks of former employers properly. As more people are using Facebook as a sourcing tool, the inability to update this for historical employers, in my case BlackRock, is not just an inconvenience, it could be costing me opportunities and monetization due to the lack of focus on data integrity of my profile to the level I’d like. On this matter I reached out to an executive of Facebook directly – they said they were sending it to customer service as “they should be able to rectify your issues”. Ten more days have passed without correction of my two data problems. I’m putting a deadline of October 30th on this for Facebook to fix this as this is a more than reasonable amount of time to do so.

Lastly, a necessary enhancement. How about a button on people’s profiles that says, take me to all the messages I have exchanged with this person? Thank you.

---
Related Articles at Digital Business Strategy Marketing Management:

• Open Question for SES San Jose Day 1- Facebook Internal Search Optimization
• How to Install a Facebook Blog Widget or Badge
• Facebook Spamming Your Identity To Drive Their Traffic

Let’s start an exploration of these issues in more detail:

- There is an almost total lack of imagination regarding potential emerging revenue streams – When I attend search engine conferences, I hear over and over how “63% of transactions occur offline after an online search (comScore 2006).” Tying together that transaction with it’s higher relevancy holds the key to a revenue stream potentially larger than Google’s Adwords product. Having once spent 6 months of my life trying to raise capital for a search advertising concept, I have to agree with Robert that there is lack of willingness to engage in serious funding conversations of this type – until half a dozen other people do it…that’s messed up!

- In large businesses, there is an obsession with basing business cases on expense savings rather than the potential for new revenue streams- Going back to that example above, financial services institutions could play a large role in this. However due to the lack of risk management processes that caused the housing crisis, they are risk adverse at this moment and risk removing themselves from this once in a lifetime opportunity. I saw 4 companies give presentations on their business cases on mobile retail banking and they all focused on the reduction of call center costs! Think about that a second, moving things from a PC to a phone will reduce call center volumes? Highly questionable at best form cost savings perspective, certainly missing the revenue opportunities completely.

- Everything in the world is converging, yet most companies have silos and are hiring specialists (set up for failure) – When banks are trying to become relevant in mobile and mobile is trying to get into advertising and payments, can you afford to hire people with one dimensional skill sets? The answer is no, not if you want to win.

- With increasingly rapid cycle times in technology, competitive benchmarking is becoming less useful – If none of your competitors has made a tough decision to reorganize a department, shift financial resources to new ways of doing things in marketing or customer service, how can you improve via benchmarking? Stated a different way, if your process is broken and all of your competitor’s processes are broken, you can’t possibly create market leadership by benchmarking. You have to hire the best and most brilliant people who hold little if any limiting beliefs and give them the authority to innovate based on what customers want. Serving those needs in the Peter Drucker fashion is the only way to create true market leadership. This does not mean that competitive analysis is dead. It does mean that the benchmarks you need to pay attention to are the breakthroughs regardless of industry.

- Existing legacy cost centers in large corporations are creating barriers to innovation and efficiency both internally and externally – These cost centers prevent reallocation of budgets to adopting usage of superior and more efficient technology or Internet/mobile advertising due to their all or nothing nature – smooth and frequent shifting to most economical resources is the unfortunate rarity. There is a large number of reasons for this and this topic is worthy of a post of it’s own (please submit suggestions). Cost centers make the silo problem worse and hard to solve.

- Traditional management consulting needs to acknowledge proprietary technology and data models as strategic and gain an implementation focus – If you come in for 6 months and never implement anything and nobody does any of the suggestions, your net present value is actually negative.

- We need to take back control of companies to focus on the customer as priority #1 – 5 year plans with a stack of initiatives in year 4 are interesting, but no longer practical. Notice I say take back control. This is the way the world used to work before endless Powerpoint and overly large bureaucracy like 18 month committee approval cycles. In fact Tom Peters stated on February 3, 1998 on Charlie Rose show as saying “I got tired of the McKinsey bureaucracy”

- C-level management and boards of directors treat social media, search marketing and Internet advertising like an island instead of integrating it into one’s culture and redesigning processes from scratch to support it – This is disruptive to companies using these products and companies that provide these products alike due to the lack of growth and monetization. But guess what? You can’t redesign these processes without bringing in people with a combination of skills that include both traditional management and the new tools. Right now we have people at the extremes. This doesn’t work.

Carolyn Shelby and I will be giving a talk to c-level executives on these an other related subjects this Wednesday at the Gleacher Center in Chicago. You may RSVP here. It is my first in a series of talks I hope to engage the world in over the coming years as we embrace this great challenge together! I need everyone’s help to help shape this vision and create this reality and maybe some famous quotes around the way. It is the furthering of a conversation that started with my appearance discussing these issues on SEO 101 – it starts at the 13:30 mark. Brian Mark said he’d love to see a Search Engine Strategies session on this, we are still working on fulfilling Brian Mark’s dream (24 minute mark).

I’d like to hear others like John Furrier, Fred Wilson, Dick Costolo and Don Dodge to chime in on this issues first chapter…

---
Related Articles at Digital Business Strategy Marketing Management:

• Hire Dave To Speak
• Business Speaker | 2012 Keynote Speaking Topics

If you were recruiting in the traditional manner, you’d seek these attributes:
- college degree in music
- experience working for an orchestra or band
- experience in an educational institution as a music teacher

But if you were looking for a true leader and innovator these measures would miss the hidden gems. People who are self taught are often thought leaders and innovators who lead to breakthroughs because they lack certain limiting beliefs. Tommy Emmanuel is one such person. Let’s look at his unique attributes:
- Tommy is self-taught, having picked up a guitar at a young age
- Tommy has never had any formal training in music
- Tommy has never learned how to read sheet music, yet he knows how to play literally thousands of songs
- Tommy never uses a set list in his solo performances, the creativity flows from circumstance and audience participation
- Tommy constantly innovates and reworks his songs making incremental improvements

Yet, Tommy now plays 300+ nights a year on five continents!!! If you looked at his resume based on traditional measures, you’d likely pass him over. But in the scarce talent, post baby boomer generation we are now entering, people need to look beyond keywords and look into passion and self-taught competencies. Those who do will build industry leading companies. Others will rapidly fall behind and lag in relation to their peers.

I’m fortunate to see Tommy again this evening in Chicago! I had the great pleasure of interviewing Tommy Emmanuel in 2003. Such a remarkable and inspiring person. Here are some samples of his live work on Youtube, enjoy!

---
Related Articles at Digital Business Strategy Marketing Management:

• Andy McKee Featured on Youtube Front Page!
• Rick Rubin Doesn’t Read Music
• CES update

When I saw this description I knew I had to attend this session…

The HR systems at Lehman Brothers, the fourth-largest investment bank in the world, have traditionally been siloed, probably just like yours. But, competing with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, VP Heather Redderson knew she had to integrate them all so her 27,000 employees could collaborate around their careers and new opportunities for internal mobility. She’ll tell you how she aligns and compensates them and tries to leverage best practices, and fill you in on the internal community she’s created for employees with new tools and competitive intelligence on those other, bigger guys.

When Heather arrived, Lehman Brothers systems appeared disorganized. How disorganized? A Summer intern gets to give a presentation to a C-level team during the first month she is there. The intern’s presentation? Two slides. One basically system mapped out the systems Lehman has. The second with all demonstrating how many don’t talk to each other. The intern stated that “this was a problem that needed to be fixed” and then sat down.

I don’t know if the intern got a full time job at Lehman upon graduation. If they didn’t I’d love to hire this person at the next company I work at. Why? People who can point out the root cause of problems and say this is what needs to be fixed are all too rare. The intern likely created the vital executive sponsorship for the magnitude of the changes that Heather is now making.

In reference to internal mobility, internal employees were frustrated as they were applying and never got hired. Hiring managers were frustrated with volumes of people applying for roles at the wrong level. Employees were frustrated with lack of execution.

Using Vurv and Congos there is now rule driven reports and drivers. They now focus on the relevancy of resumes and are trying to add other data elements to the mix.

$12 million dollar savings in just four months by reducing outside contingency recruiter fees! Put all new initiatives for 2008 on hold and reallocated budget money. Focused on utilizing what we have better.

Discovered that there were many people in roles with job descriptions that didn’t match. Fixing that through transparent conversations is occurring at a rapid rate.

Lehman HR mantra:
To recruit talent
To protect our employees
To gage our landscape

They are also creating an alumni site. (I wish that BlackRock would create an Alumni site, it would bring me joy in so many ways.

It’s clear that Heather’s efforts are not only transforming HR, they are transforming the process and way the whole organization operates. That’s what it’s all about effective execution with what you have. Develop a data strategy and process then iterate and improvement. I’ve always loved Lehman Brothers scrappy style when I worked on Wall Street, it’s good to see them laying a foundation for future transformation and differentiation.

More on this when I have time to elaborate on an element I saw that fascinates me. Soon.

---
Related Articles at Digital Business Strategy Marketing Management:

• Chicago GSB, Generation X and Some Changes Needed in Online Recruiting
• Hess Corporation Hopes to Strike Oil with a Talent Management Suite
• Cutting Edge Sourcing at Fox Interactive Media

“Jason has written a highly practical guide to Linkedin that will quickly allow a new user to understand and utilize Linkedin. It’s also a great guide to the Linkedin’s hidden gems – finding high quality people through endorsements and off Linkedin content such as groups and identifying thought leaders through blogs linked from profiles.”

I’m honored to have been asked by Jason to contribute ideas to the book as well as some Linkedin best practices at the end of some of the chapters. Jason is one of the people I’ve met via Linkedin and I know my life is much better for that as he always makes himself available to talk and help my goals in any way he can.

While certainly any Linkedin novice would benefit, Jason’s book most needs to be read by c-level executives, all HR executives and recruiters who don’t yet understand how to fully utilize Linkedin. There tools on Linkedin besides last company worked at and job title – the community would function better if people learned to use the community more wisely and this can happen quickly if people read Jason’s book.

---
Related Articles at Digital Business Strategy Marketing Management:

• Jason Alba Shares Blogging Secrets as Gifts
• Marc Freedman’s Linkedin Question
• Jason Palmer and Others Leave WebTrends…Professional Interim CEO Appointed

Your profile has been viewed by 9 people in the last 3 days, including:

Senior Associate at Heidrick & Struggles

---
Related Articles at Digital Business Strategy Marketing Management:

• Jason Alba Author – I’m on LinkedIn — Now What???
• Marc Freedman’s Linkedin Question
• Search Engine Journal Adwords Quality Score Scoop!

“Yahoo is reported to be working on a new social networking service that matches college students to employers.” (emphasis added)

This is not a knock on Yahoo!, but this is not solving the actual problem that the entire recruiting industry fails to address well – highly intelligent people with excellent life experiences that are applicable in many ways in the secondary market, what some people would call experienced hires. A marketplace that is badly broken and fails to hire the highest potential, most innovative candidates that are capable of creating new paradigms.

The high value problem is the getting the productive utilization of underutilized assets in the US economy in the roles they should be in already. These can be people with resume gaps due to the events of September 11th, the increasing usage of temporary workers using checklists of keywords who aren’t truly qualified to do the screening based on what matters education and competencies, suffer from an out of favor job title due to a reorganization in their company or increasingly can be subject matter experts who research extensively on their own and often write blogs. Or the fact that position searches simply take too long. I’ve been told of companies with some roles that have been open for three years and they’ve been interviewing people all of that time. I have personally have been involved in search that is over 9 months old.

If Yahoo! (or anyone else for that matter) wants to be a hero by building a hiring application, I highly suggest building an application that reduces the insane amounts of friction and dysfunction in the experienced hire marketplace that reduces cycle times. I’m working on a few ideas of my own with some amazing people. It would be a pleasure to be a part of creating the solution in this arena.

---
Related Articles at Digital Business Strategy Marketing Management:

• Biggest Threats Google Faces – Adding to Rand Fishkin’s Post
• Latest Google Recruiting “Error”, Day 14
• Google Recruiting “Error” – “Fixed”

Google held an event with several senior executives last night in Chicago. Eric Olson told me about the event, I recently spent a fun day serving as a volunteer website judge with Eric at the annual FBLA-PBL convention – you can read those details here.

I was told by one source that they wish to personalize the recruiting process more and make it less about numbers, keywords and passive candidate recruiting and more about soft skills, knowledge and passion. Time will tell if they succeed in this attempt at change but even stating this shows that they are listening to numerous types of stakeholder feedback and innovating from that. It’s a positive sign. So I have to acknowledge these communicated goals as they suggest that change is a priority.

---
Related Articles at Digital Business Strategy Marketing Management:

• Google Recruiting “Error” – “Fixed”
• Latest Google Recruiting “Error”
• Latest Google Recruiting “Error”, Day 14

Below is a screen shot, I wish Yahoo! good luck with the new system!

---
Related Articles at Digital Business Strategy Marketing Management:

• Illinois Traffic Alert System Launches
• My Yahoo! Suggestion Board Launched
• Yahoo! Soft Launches Shopping Blog

I’ve heard some of their Reach Branding Club seminars and while I’ve made a ton of progress using their concepts and other related ideas, I think the major lesson is that we all can improve our personal brands and to ignore the issue is a risk that one should not take!

One great lesson of the book is unintentional. In the Preface, there is a discussion of William’s and Kirsten’s life journey. I learned many things about them that I did not know that personalized their brands for me in a new way. Don’t be afraid to discuss your struggles they are likely critical areas that define you. You should definitely check out this book.

---
Related Articles at Digital Business Strategy Marketing Management:

• Management Consulting
• Hess Corporation Hopes to Strike Oil with a Talent Management Suite
• An Indeed.com Alternative

Thanks for dropping by via your search engine of choice.

Comments on this post are now closed due to job spam. You may contact David with your MBA level jobs and he’s happy to talk to you about them.

---
Related Articles at Digital Business Strategy Marketing Management:

• My Main Computer Died – RIP
• Career Distinction : Stand Out by Building Your Brand
• Management Consulting

---
Related Articles at Digital Business Strategy Marketing Management:

• Internet Retailer 2006 Workshop Summary: Site Search
• KickStart Solves the Wrong Recruiting Problem
• Chicago GSB, Generation X and Some Changes Needed in Online Recruiting

It says:

“Maybe an infusion of new thinking, new experiences, and fresh perspectives would be good for Yahoo.”

Then later:

“Maybe employees who weren’t yet ingrained with Yahoo’s past ways of doing things would be able to breathe new, renewed life into the one-time Internet king. “

Time will tell if they wisely chose this path.

---
Related Articles at Digital Business Strategy Marketing Management:

• Jumptap Gets Injection from WPP Group
• MyBlogLog Migrates to Yahoo ID’s
• Flickr to Live on, Yahoo! Photos to be Shut Down

What examples have you seen of putting resumes online and them effectively seen by sourcers? What did and didn’t work with your online resume? I’d like to hear your ideas and learn from the best practices that are developing out there. How do the sourcers out there select to search or use university alumni resume books?

---
Related Articles at Digital Business Strategy Marketing Management:

• Recruting Best Practice : Brightcove
• Microsoft Strategic Account Summit 2007
• Is Your Resume Going Into Spam Oblivion?

When are the majority of recruiting departments going to realize that compliance based hiring doesn’t build best of breed companies?  They should try competency and potential based hiring as the magic formula?

---
Related Articles at Digital Business Strategy Marketing Management:

• New York Times Article Andy Rubin Google Gadget Guru
• Rick Klau from Chicago to Honorary Engineer at the Google Dance
• Online Passive Resume

It’s interdisciplinary combinations-design and technology, mathematics and art-”that produce Youtube and Google” , says Thomas Friedman, the best selling author of The World Is Flat.

Yet human resources, hiring managers, executive recruiters, candidate sourcers, chief marketing officers and  chief financial officers haven’t yet mastered the art of finding this skill set of thought leaders seeing big picture patterns and seek out one dimensional candidates with “experience”.

What has to happen to integrate these skills into a recruiting and hiring mindset of what is this person capable of rather than a limiting belief frame of compliance? A discussion of how to recruit these types of skills more proactively is certainly welcome in 2007!

---
Related Articles at Digital Business Strategy Marketing Management:

• Unethical Hiring Practices: Job Search Sites Serve Up Ads With No Intent to Hire US Workers
• Nissan Pulls New Zealand Ad, Loses Opportunities for Buzz
• The Great Debate: Content Versus Distribution – CTIA MEL 2007

It’s a great post and it relates to a lot of problems in the business world in terms of having innovative customer service. Let’s hope her post prompted some people to realize that operating in this manner is a mistake.

Congrats!

---
Related Articles at Digital Business Strategy Marketing Management:

• Lee Odden – an Interview by Neil Patel
• A Simply Beautiful Blog Post…Perhaps Best of 2006
• ReadWriteWeb’s 2008 Web Predictions

One of Andy’s videos “Drifting” made it onto the front page of Youtube this week and has now received over 700,000 views! While it’s great that this occurred, it’s a sad reminder of a broken music industry that categorizes people much the same limiting way online recruiting does, not being seen by all of the people who might be interested in the competencies and skill set that a person offers! It’s great when you start to see these barriers and limiting beliefs starting to be broken, hopefully 2007 will be the year we see this happen in not only music, but also recruiting as well. If you like this video be sure to check out his remake of Toto’s “Africa”.

---
Related Articles at Digital Business Strategy Marketing Management:

• How To Do YouTube Video View Optimization Part 1
• Google Desktop Migrates to Google Front Page
• Comcasted – Issues Almost Closed Out Now

In this case it’s inexcusable because it’s all one zip code that would be easy to surpress: 10048.

Whether it’s mail, e-mail, web pages, web 2.0 social networks and/or social media, the value creation foundation starts with data integrity. To build the superior ideas of the future, this area will play a pivotal role. Unfortunately, all too many people do not properly value data integrity or value not been blessed enough to be immersed in a culture who is obsessed with it as I have been in the past.

Consider whether you have a good enterprise data strategy before you launch your next project!   

---
Related Articles at Digital Business Strategy Marketing Management:

• Ebay Spoof Emails Pouring Into My Yahoo! Mail
• Virgina Tech Shooting Tragedy – Potential Mobile Implications
• Internet Retailer 2006 Workshop Summary: E-mail Marketing

---
Related Articles at Digital Business Strategy Marketing Management:

• Thought for the Day
• Chicago Midway Airport Security Tip
• Brent Hill of Feedburner Interviewed on Google Implications

What I’m not certain about:

- Mr. Amato states, ”Most employers don’t post ALL of their openings on traditional job sites because it would be cost prohibitive, but they do post them to their own corporate career center, which costs nothing, we help jobseekers find these hidden jobs.” This is not 100% true – for some reason many employers do not post all open jobs, choosing to keep senior jobs private and undisclosed. This is most unfortunate as many qualified and passionate seekers are not enabled to be looked at and more employers need to look at becoming fully transparent.

- How does one know that these companies actually utilize posted resumes and not primarily from recruiters?

- Mr. Fulton then states, “This allows jobseekers to read the entire job description and apply for the job using the companies preferred application method. It is believed that resumes passed directly through a company career site are more visible than those transmitted through a third-party site.” Based on what?

- Not having a searchable resume database is interesting, but it’s very time consuming to fill out things with an uncertain outcome.

Overall, I appreciate Bob Etheridge for calling me and informing me about the service, with a few tweaks, I could see it becoming a strong player in the marketplace.

---
Related Articles at Digital Business Strategy Marketing Management:

• How To Triple Your Current Adsense Income – Max Davis
• “CTA riders are in for a rail mess” per Chicago Tribune
• Techcrunch Announces Tech President Poll

---
Related Articles at Digital Business Strategy Marketing Management:

• Online Passive Resume
• Email crisis!!!
• Email From Gmail Blocked As Spam on Many Networks

Personal stationery makes you feel like you’ve arrived. For the person on the receiving end, opening the envelope is like opening a gift.

The ladies of the Personalized Stationery Team were like fairy godmothers. They knew their products, their manners and what was appropriate for every occasion. They helped customers create a first impression that made a statement before the recipient read a single word.

It could easily take hours to choose stationery, which is nothing when you consider it can take years to use it up. A few weeks after placing an order, the stationery arrived in the mail, appropriately. Inside the cardboard mailing boxes were the stationery boxes themselves, sturdy, tasteful yet fancy. The stationery fit perfectly inside its box. The paper was bundled with a sealed paper ring, the envelopes underneath neatly stacked like folded laundry.

It then goes on to say:

The online stationery shopping experience promises the full dose of isolation and frustration. There we’ll be, staring at the computer screen, clicking down endless selections of paper, trying to discern on a flickering screen the true texture and weight of paper, wondering what color it will it be in real life. No one will be there to suggest the perfect color of ink, or a squiggle or flourish or icon that will turn mere paper and ink into a personal trademark.

Sounds to me like an exact replica of what is happening in online recruiting, a working process has been replaced with and isolating and frustrating process that doesn’t bring true thought leaders into leadership roles. What is the quality of the paper and sentence structure – who is this person? We need to put the most talented hiring managers back into the final selection of sourced resumes before recruiters call.

---
Related Articles at Digital Business Strategy Marketing Management:

• Downtown Chicago Marshall Field’s Rally Sunday
• Banana Republic
• Speaking at SMX Toronto April 8th & April 9th

Let me repeat, a real live person was reading my resume and physically at 11:10PM!!! Wow!!!

This tells me some things:

1) The odds of Brightcove beign a long-term success just rose significantly in my view by the way they conduct business

2) They might find and hire thought leaders and not drones hired from keywords. Good for them.

3) My desire to be a part of this organization is stronger than it was before this interaction.

Thanks for the reply…I look forward to the next step in the conversation when appropriate. Jeremy Allaire should be proud.

---
Related Articles at Digital Business Strategy Marketing Management:

• Why You Should Make Your Photos Public Use – Example 1
• Ragan PR Pre-Conference Media Training
• Online E-mail Service Reliability Needs Improvement

It’s interesting to see a few companies starting to change here, but it is too slow! It would be *great* to see a conversation on the solution to this issue.

---
Related Articles at Digital Business Strategy Marketing Management:

• Best Blog Post of 2006 (non-search engine related)
• Being Responsive
• US Air / America West

Virtual Edge Software: Roger Coker – VE Pilot:
- Zero-Talent Outages
- Succession not Replacement
- 360 view of talent pipeline

Fox Interactive Media: Conrad McGinnis

50% Professional
35% College
15% Other

FIM Talent Sources
35% Employee Referral Program
25% Direct Sourcing
15% Job Boards
25% Our Career Website

1400 Employees based in the US currently

Traditional Sourcing Method
- Old Media Mentality
- Dated and geared to film and TV
- Limited to local universities

New Strategic Sourcing Strategy
- Targeted to Tech
- Tech tools for better communication
- Global versus local
- Recruiting structure – Personnel
- CRM – VE Pilot

Search Engine Marketing – overall has found Google to be most effective

Why Search Engine Marketing?
- Reach Active and Passive Candidates
- Inclusive and Broad Approach
- Pay for Performance
- Workforce Planning
- VE Pilot

Other Tools:
- Fox Careers Site
- Myspace Careers Site

Reference Checker and Sourcer are separate

Frees up recruiter to build relationships with hiring manager and candidates

Training and Networking Events:
- Recruiters must know the business
- Recruiters need to spend more time in front of the desk than behind it
- Recruiting teams are true partners in moving the business forward

Employee Referral Program
- Myspace friend branded
- Ticket themed logo for concert – B.Y.O.F.
- Increased cash incentives
- Teaser campaign

Tracking Referrals
- Keeping track of individual job referrals
- Link track (like affiliate marketing campaign

---
Related Articles at Digital Business Strategy Marketing Management:

• Comcast – Poor Interactive Ad Targeting Leads to Low Satisfaction
• Land of Link’in Association (LOLA) – Chicago Internet Leaders to Gather
• Patrick Keane Leaves Google For CBS

A fabulous introduction of Maggie Rubey Lynch, Corporate VP, Worldwide Recruitment & Executive Search, Time Warner by Deb Besner, CEO of Brassring opened the session (Time Warner uses Brassring for their employment/jobs portal), Lauren Levine a member of Maggie’s team also participated in the session.

Areas of best practice:
- Time Warner has an in house executive search practice
- Operate on a business unit basis, country specific candidate experience
- Outstanding partnership between IT and HR – a model for any other company

270 recruiters globally, no centralization prior to 2003

TM Divisional Feedback re Recruitment Needs:
- Quality Candidates
- Fast Fills
- Superior Service
- Ease of Process
- Client Group Ownership
- Strategic vs. Reactive
- Cost Savings
- Ability to Identify / Move Internal Talent
- Ability to Identify Top Tier Diverse Talent

Spend time on the front end selling and partnering with people to make it work

Business & Recruitment Feedback:
- Recruitment support at more levels that just senior
- Research support at more levels than just senior
- Diverse Slates
- Internal Mobility
- Tough to fill discipline specific

The mission:
- Create holistic recruitment team
- Leverage in-house expertise

Deeper Dive:
Attrition by Division
Types of roles by Division
Volume of Recruitment Efforts
Structure of Recruitment Teams
Expenses – Internally / Externally
Recruitment Systems

Action Steps:
Design and build scalable infrastructure
Identify top Recruitment Professionals to move the recruitment objectives
Streamline Processes and create efficiencies
Understand where investments are producing a return
Be true business partners
Know our business and identify growth areas to anticipate recruitment needs

Four Critical Areas:
Executive Search
Strategic Sourcing
Research
Recruitment Operations

Integrated Recruitment Teams
Recruitment Director (headquarters)
Client Group Recruiters (anchored in Operating Units)

“Beyond the resume” – transferable skills, diversity or experience – it’s about process and having a conversation about where you want the position to go. (Stated a different way, why use an ancient job specification?)

Results:
100% Utilization by all Divisions
1,496 Search / Research Assignments
Cost Savings of $48 Million
48% Females Hires
41% Diverse Hires
Increased internal mobility from 2% to 35%
Created a first time external revenue stream by conducting external search

Getting legal team to agree across divisions was the biggest challenge

(Human Capital Management, HR Technology Conference 2006 #9, Time Warner – TWX)

---
Related Articles at Digital Business Strategy Marketing Management:

• TiE Global Chairman Apurv Bagri Interviewed on Podtech
• Is Google Starting to Change Recruiting Methods?
• Latest Google Recruiting “Error”, Day 14

---
Related Articles at Digital Business Strategy Marketing Management:

• SES San Jose 2007 Day 1 – Earning Money From Contextual Ads