Interesting career networking site: resu.me

The folks at Resu.me asked me to check out their website, which they are launching to become a job and career networking site for the Millenium generation.

So I checked it out.

Here are the good parts:

• The focus is on helping people get started quickly. So they enable sign on using facebook connect – no long winded registrations needed.
• The site makes it possible to import your Linkedin profile – so no need to build a resume . And you get a vanity URL. Mine is http://gautam.resu.me
• There’s a tab which I think is a cooliris app- so if you are a photographer or other visual artist you can show off your videos and pictures there.
• It builds an activity stream – which shows what you do on the site, and you can add your blog posts/status updates to that also. It also imports your existing blogs from Blogger, Tumblr, WordPress and Posterous.
• There’s a stats chart – which promises to be interesting (or depressing, if you find that people are not viewing your profile) 🙂

Things I didn’t quite like or what didn’t work for me:

• The Reader tab is to enable you to import your OPML file of RSS feeds or one feed at a time. Tried doing that – but it’s not working. The larger question is why would you read your feeds on a career networking site. This is one example of over-engineering features
• The UI is quite dull and doesn’t engage me.
• The Jobs section is US centric. There’s no other country mentioned there. Which is quite useless for folks from India. I don’t know why they invited me to check out the site.

So overall I think it needs to focus on getting the job search process done well, and let go of the blogging/reader aspects – or at least tuck it away and not make it so prominent.

Will it become a linkedin competitor? I doubt it. Even millenials have linkedin profiles and networks in place. Getting them to move – even as Linkedin focuses more and more towards being a service focused on jobs – would be tough.

The site also needs to think about how to attract recruiters – and showing them a value that they may not be getting at Linkedin.

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Building Trust: Experts are back in vogue

Steve Rubel of Edelman Digital blogs about Edelman’s latest Trust barometer study and it’s getting more and more complex. Authority, trust and expertise are influencing. Take a look”

Amplify’d from www.steverubel.com

First, over the last several years there’s been a decline in trust in “a person like myself.” It’s down four percent in the last 12 months. Some 47% said they trust this group, which is down from 68% in 2006. An analysis: I believe the reason for this is that, as more of us join social networks, there’s been a devaluation in the entire concept of “friendship.” A separate survey found that people don’t know 20 percent of their Facebook friends. Consider that “unfriend” was Oxford’s word of the year for 2009. Second, the Trust Barometer revealed rising confidence in credentialed experts (70%, an increase of 8%). This is a trend that began last year. In addition, for the first time we looked at the credibility of technical specialists inside a company. Trust in this group is off the charts (64%). This hits home the need to identify those with expertise inside a company who can engage across different channels, many of which today are digital – or will be soon. Note that this differs from trust in a regular employee, which is down to 34% from 42% in 2006. View Slideshow Finally, our Strategy One research team looked at what’s required to effect a behavior change in a cluttered media world. It’s not pretty.  The data found that informed publics (media consumers) need to hear things three to five times from just as many sources before it sinks in. In the most developed countries like the US and UK it’s even higher – a staggering nine times or more. This means organizations must secure multiple impressions across a diverse array of media sources, some that we don’t control, others that we increasingly do. Advertising won’t cut it. It’s the least trusted form of communication, according to the study. View Slideshow Embedded below and on Scribd is a mini white paper that outlines the findings. I dig into this ever Read more at www.steverubel.com

 

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Social Media as a Career?

Interesting article in Fortune about the rise of the Social Media Manager and social media careers in the US.

I agree that in the future it will be a skill-set rather than a career

Amplify’d from management.fortune.cnn.com

The demand for social media jobs has exploded, even as overall unemployment hovers around 10%. A recent study published by SocialMediaInfluence.com showed that 59 of the Fortune 100 companies have at least one employee who works full time in social media, and that job postings directly related to social media have soared 600% in the last five years.

As social media hiring has picked up, the pool of qualified talent has failed to keep pace. The resulting imbalance of supply and demand, says Curtis Hougland, founder of the New York-based marketing and social media firm Attention, is the surest sign of hiring inflation.

Demand for social media skills in the corporate world has outstripped the supply of candidates with training in communications and the analytical skills to track the effectiveness of a media campaign. The void, Houghland says, has been filled by a burgeoning workforce of self-proclaimed social media experts — qualified and not so qualified.

It’s all part of an effort to get in on a hiring spree that shows no immediate signs of slowing, says Jim Durbin, a social media headhunter and entrepreneur.

“This next year,” Durbin says, “is when it will really start to explode.”

There are several levels of expertise within the social media profession. Most commonly, there’s the community manager – the feet on the ground, so to speak, who oversee a company’s online communities; the analyst or strategist — who builds and monitors social media campaigns; the product developer – who is responsible for keeping the company’s software up to date; the editor or publisher — who oversees content and the brand; and the executive — a rare position, usually filled by a public relations professional.

Typically, companies hire some combination of these positions. The field also dances along the edges of customer service, IT, public relations, marketing and sales, according to the Social Media Influence report.

But even for the most qualified social media wizards, pure social media careers may not exist 10 years down the line. As it becomes more ubiquitous, social media is evolving into a skill set, not a profession.

But that doesn’t spell a life of poverty for tech-smart, well-spoken social media managers. The Community Managers Meetup, a group of social media professionals started by Mashable.com social media strategist Vadim Lavrusik, counts more than 300 people in its membership. And Lavrusik says they aren’t worried. Read more at management.fortune.cnn.com

 

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Internship Application Via Twitter

This is an interesting experiment that an advertising agency in the US is trying. It makes sense if the interns who are going to be recruited will be focusing on Twitter and other social media related roles.

Amplify’d from wallblog.co.uk

According to Debbie Fischer, vice president and human resources manager for the agency: “Submitting an application via Twitter supports the digital and creative nature of our business. We anticipate a lively and interesting social-media exchange.”

Minneapolis ad agency Campbell Mithun is to select its next bunch of interns based on their tweets. This is so bound to catch on.

It plans to hire  13 summer interns based on an application of “13 Career-Launching Tweets” sent between the dates of February 13 – 25, 2011.  Read more at wallblog.co.uk

 

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Goldman Sachs still bans Facebook at work

This news item makes it clear that the focus of Goldman Sachs is not the business of Facebook but the valuation of Facebook

Amplify’d from www.fastcompany.com

Investment bank behemoth Goldman Sachs is used to coaching its employees on proper online behavior. The company caused howls from media outlets this year after instructing its workers not to use expletives in emails (as if they wouldn’t have known pushing “shitty” deals was inappropriate). It has blocked employees from commenting on popular Wall Street tabloid Dealbreaker. And most significantly, it has banned the use of Facebook and other social networks.

This wouldn’t come as too much of a surprise–other big finance firms such as Morgan Stanley block social networking sites too–except for the fact that Goldman Sachs just invested $450 million in Facebook, a service its 35,400 employees are discouraged from using. Could that soon change? Read more at www.fastcompany.com

 

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