Interview with Marissa Mayer, Google VP of Search and how early we are on search

Not sure if many of you follow Digg's Dialogg but there was a great interview on it recently with Marissa Mayer, Google’s VP Search Products & User Experience, who took some fairly direct questions on cloud computing, Google Wave and how Google feels about Microsoft Bing and Wolfram Alpha, and the biggest threats to Google’s survival which she calls ”complacency”.

Mayer, on the topic of Twitter makes an insightful response: “Things show up there first. And so we definitely think that including that in the world’s information, hopefully being able to search that and surface that for our users, with all those realtime updates coming in, is something that could complement our search engine for those types of queries.” She also asks the question which I like to dream about a little myself "What does the search engine or experience look like in 2020?"

Twitter looking for a director of recruitment

This must be one of the best recruitment jobs on the planet at the moment. JD can also be found here.

Director of World Wide Recruiting
San Francisco, CA

Job Description
Twitter is about helping people discover and share what’s happening right now. The Twitter platform and product continues to help people engage in new ways, changing the nature of mass communication while bringing people together. As the product continues to grow in usage, we at Twitter are very serious about preserving our culture while we grow our employee base.

The Director of Worldwide Recruiting will help us grow in a fast yet carefully considered pace. This person will ensure that the culture strengthens with each additional hire. He/She will build, guide and lead the recruiting efforts for Twitter globally, managing a team of recruiters, sourcers and schedulers. As a member of the Human Resources team, his/her focus will be to develop a stellar talent acquisition organization, recruit top talent at an aggressive pace and implement scalable recruiting processes and metrics.

Additional responsibilities include, but are not limited to:

• Providing innovative solutions to meet the staffing needs of the organization
• Developing a recruiting organization that is flexible enough to be able to quickly respond to the ever changing priorities, adapting and applying new approaches to different situations
• Establish and refine candidate sourcing strategies and execution
• Establish and run training programs to train the global team on Twitter’s culture
• Formulating and leading a sourcing strategy that cost effectively delivers world class talent across the organization
• Use culture as a leading filter to source and recruit
• Defining selection criteria for use in recruitment and development of potential candidates
• Develop cutting edge recruiting metrics that track success
• Ensuring cost effective recruitment and selection processes
• Meet/exceed business hiring targets in a timely and consistent fashion
• Collaborating with management HR colleagues to tailor recruitment strategy based on productivity and success metrics
• Ensure staffing and hiring practices are following all compliance and regulation guidelines
• Leveraging the use of IT applications and software within staffing
• Partnering with HR/Operations to determine and develop competitive compensation plans
Skills
• 10+ years of Human Resource experience as a generalist or specialist in a global organization, preferably within the technology industry
• At least 8 years of Recruiting/Staffing experience; with successful experience in building, leading and developing a high performing recruiting team
• Demonstrated knowledge of implanting a metrics driven recruiting process to ensure efficiency
• Must be technology and process savvy
• Proven track record in navigating through complex and high growth organizations
• Strong influencing skills to drive initiatives through to their successful conclusion
• Must have successfully scaled an organization and implemented recruiting best practices

Professional Attributes:

• Exhibits a key understanding of the importance of maintaining company culture during a key time of business and employee expansion
• Knowledge and understanding of nuances within labor markets and their subsequent impact on the recruiting function
• Has the ability to discuss strategic business issues and understands how they impact employees and organizational requirements
• Sought out for strategic business advice from an organizational/people perspective
• Must be technically sound and capable of streamlining processes in recruiting programs
• A change agent with experience in leading and successfully driving change, and working in best in class environments
• Open, candid and must have the ability to communicate good and bad news
• A results oriented focus
• Ability to manage the ambiguity and multiple priorities inherent in an entrepreneurial environment
• Natural leadership skills
• Effective team player abilities
• A commitment to inclusion/diversity
• Professional demeanor
• Monitors efficiency and effectiveness of others/processes and takes corrective action
• Inspires others to achieve high standards and adapt to change in order to reach the desired results
• Decisive; seizes opportunities and ensures fast implementations
• Ability to travel for business as needed

New Twitter Front Page Arrives - It's no longer just about you

Twitter has a new homepage. If you are a user of Twitter already you're not going to see a lot of it as you'll be already logged in but for all those people around the world who still have not logged into Twitter they will be greeted by this new home page which now has 23 topics covering the collective discussions of what is  happening on Google at any given time.  It's now the world's most powerful breaking news aggregator in real time. Contrasting the old page and the new page gives us some hints of the company's ambition.

Here’s the old description text:

“Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co-workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

And here’s the new text:

“Share and discover what’s happening right now, anywhere in the world”

They have moved away from the focus on your personal network and have now started focusing on real time news and discovery for world events.  Effectively for me anyway this is almost a step towards a more hybrid social networking/Google news type real-time platform.

This is an evolutionary change.  Twitter was first conceived as a place to update your friends and interested parties on your life. It was focused and very much about you. Now in its place the focus is now about the entire world.

Want to know how to translate your Twits

Recently, I've begun to write the odd Twit in Portuguese and Spanish. A useful tool that has come out to let me do this a little quicker and with less grammatical errors is Twinsalator. This could be a helpful tool when braodcasting to candidates that you are seeking to hire from other nationalities.

While you could (roughly) translate your Tweets by pasting them into Google Translate, new service Twinslator wants to make it even easier, allowing you to write a tweet, translate it into another language and (optionally) post both messages.

iCloud is what Google Chrome OS wants to be - but when will we see a recrutiment O/S

Following up from my blog post on Google Chrome's OS annuncement I decided today to go searching for small start ups that maybe already have created a OS in their browser. Often when companies are building innovative software they are faced with the classic "build or buy" scenario when deciding what to do. I was sure I’d unearth something or someone who had already build an O/S in a browser and low and behold iCloud appeared! Check out the video introduction:



Expect Google Chrome's OS to look something a long the same lines as this but with an even cleaner UI. The question for recruiters will be how to use it to benefit their cloud recruitment strategy? Well with a cloud drive as part of the offering synchronisation with your office hard drive will be important so you can work on the go. It will be interesting to see what other portability will be on offer to see if you can build ATS integration into the browser. Some of the open source ATS out there might be able to integrate with the platform which will make it easier for recruiters to work off their browsers which would be a nice piece of functionality to have if the security was tight enough when working from an airport for example.

The real question for me though is when will we see a recruitment O/S?

Aggregation is already becoming important as we head into the start of FY10. Expect a lot more desktop aggregation and clever desktop search tools popping up like Xobni, in the coming months as well as a continuing explosing of mobile apps. What I would be delighted to see would be a browser which allows me merge my RSS feeds, my facebook updates, my tweets and my hotmail, gmail and work emails in one place. Let me check my ATS feeds, have Skype imbedded and allow IMs from both Gmail and Messenger that would be great. Besides that integrations with a news aggregator like Newsgator would deserve a tip of the hat. Google Wave, meets iGoogle, meets Google Chrome OS, plus Google docs, plus Google News, plus Tweet deck, plus Messenger, plus LinkedIn integration and multiple utilities like Firefox have on offer would be a start.

Ever use toolbars, widgets or search engines to search in two languages

Well, if you do, then you'll like this.

2lingual,has a front page with two search boxes. Choose the language you want to search in from the drop-down boxes and start typing your query in the left box.

Today I was looking for a Brazilan recruitment blog from Sao Paulo and it helped a lot!

CPL acquires assets of Ecom Interaction Services

Not alot about this on the Net, but here is the update and a small section on it on one of the CPL employee blogs, here.

CPL picks up more distressed assets at bargin prices

CPL yesterday once again went on the acquisition trail by taking advantage ofrivals' problems as it bought two further units of Newcourt, the collapsed business support services provider. To learn more read the article here. Something tells me this is not the end of the bargain hunting and you can expect the company to also look for opportunities not only to diversify its portfolio but also expand its market reach into Europe.

Microsoft launches new career web site

Microsoft last Monday united over 150 career web sites, dozens of applicant tracking systems, and a lot of microsites that organically formed by businesses that felt the career site in the past wasn't telling their story as well as they wanted to. You can check it out here.

This is the culmination of two years work where we decided back then to re-invest in our talent management systems and update our Applicant Tracking System to a new SAP platform. The logical step after deciding to invest in a new ATS was to also invest in a new career site platform which is what we did. Over 10 full-time people worked on this project in addition to a validation team that was set up for project management and quality control. Margie Medd, Microsoft’s director of employment branding, spearheaded the project aided by one of our finest Recruitment Marketing Managers, Liz Frideman, and both have done a terrific job.  At Microsoft, in my opinion we have under invested across our businesses' portfolios including recruitment at telling our story. This is a great step forward in the right direction creating a one message platform that allows for more built in social media inclusion and tailorisation at the country level.

When we started our focus groups two years ago it became obvious that three things were critical for success: search and apply for jobs was number one. Knowing what to apply for in a company with 100,000 employees was next on the list and third was specific information on the company and the job.

That’s why the job search is ubiquitous on the site and that’s why the navigation bar is super simple with only three main channels: Apply Now, Find Your Fit, and Meet Microsoft. The content for the latter two channels will grow over the next several months, although the core pieces are in place. Microsoft’s most popular recruiting features - Hey Genius, View, and Microspotting — will stay and retain their own separate identification, though one or two might be folded into the career site over time. The irreverent “Day of Microsoft Perks” video was preserved and is a part of the channel that talks about the company’s benefits package.

We are already planning for more social media integration and more story telling in the coming months which should be exciting when launched. On the topic of media, also check out our Office 2010 trailer. There is a lot of cool things happening in Microsoft at the moment and its great to work with so many creative people now more than ever who are getting an opportunity to express themselves much more in the ideas they have and in the way they work. The future of recruitment is in the cloud!

IrishJobs says recruitment market more stable

Check out the small update from the Irish times here

CPL in the black and on the acquisition trail

I'm only catching up on my CPL news now but in a note last week Goodbody analyst Dan Cavanagh said he was expecting operating profit of €4.9m for CPL in the year to June 30.

CPL Resources,has warned in a trading statement that the outlook for the group for the remainder of 2009 remains uncertain."It is impossible to predict with any accuracy whether the markets in which the group operates will experience any significant improvement in the foreseeable future," the company said yesterday. Shares in CPL finished down over 2pc at €1.35 yesterday.

Also, the company has been on the acquisition trail by agreeing to buy the business and assets of Kenny Whelan & Associates from the receiver of Newcourt, David Carson of Deloitte. To learn more go here, and here.

Nice! Bing Tweet Integration

Microsoft's new Bing search engine was the first of the big search engines to integrate Twitter into results. Yesterday, Microsoft’s fledgling search tool has gone one step further with Twitter launching BingTweets, a separate site that combines Bing search with Twitter search and trending topics.

There will be more from the Bing team in terms of Twitter integration in the future, however. The Bing team writes, “many people share their thoughts on Twitter, and search engines don’t currently do a great job of capturing that real-time content. We designed Bing to help you make faster, more informed decisions, and, since people often turn to real-time content to help them make decisions, BingTweets was a logical next step.”

HireLabs - Next generation employment testing

TwittAround and Augmented Reality (AR)

A lot of people are calling Augmented Reality AR) the new mobile killer app. Certainly there has been a lot of debate about it of late and how it will revolutionising the way we live. Even Twitterland has caught onto this new emerging field and now there is a new beta augmented reality out for the new iPhone called TwittAround. Interessting to see that Apple has not opened up there full SDK for augmented reality yet, but there is plenty of folk petitioning them to do so. When this happens expect a flood of new AR apps on the market.