Is this the future of remote interviewing?

Maybe the hologramatic interview is not too far away!!!

CV Videos revisited

OK - We're all well versed about Video CVs at this stage... and God knows I've seen a few in my day. But for those of you who haven't caught up with the marketplace to get up to speed check out sites like: www.lookfirst.net, www.talkingcv.com, www.visualcv.com and tecopeople.com. And also check out some of my previous posts on the subject in the categories section to the right.

To add to the sites already out there an Irish company called www.CVizz.com and has got in the game. Started last year as an Enterprise Ireland high-potential start up it links graduates and employers in a innovative medium that is only going to get stronger in the years ahead. Hats off to Marie Carroll, CEO of CVizz and I wish her and the company every success in the future.

YouTube meets IrishJobs.ie

Corporate adoption of social media to both recruit and retain is becoming very popular in the US at the moment and this phenomenon is beginning to seep into Irish waters as well. This week i had the chance to look at two sites which are leading the charge around video recruiting: VideoJobShop and CareerTV.

In Microsoft Ireland we've been playing with the concept of social recruitment for quite some time and it works. I'm not privy to share any juicy stats on how it works but trust me when I say that the time investment has been worth while. What has worked quite well from a branding point has been a blog I've been running for over a year called Microsoft International Tech Jobs. What has pleasantly surprised me with the site is the number of people who subscribe to the rss feeds and the percentage of visitors that come to the site from organic search listings purely because of the carefully chosen keywords I use in the title or article main page that the search engines indexed. What also is worth noting is the videos themselves also can have a hit count which allows you understand what videos were visited the most or the least and as such can give you some ideas of what to do better to fine tune your content, subject matter and directorial approach.

What we are begining to see is the creation of a new type of recruiter in the HR/Recruitment team of large corporations. Let's call it the social recruitment marketeer. This persons's job is to design and build content for your recruitment brand. To research and locate high-traffic locations where your target audience exists and design sounds bites, video bites or text bites to try lure your target markets attention. This individual also needs to be technically astute and must be prepared to learn new technologies, tinker and play with them and then draw some conclusions about how these can be used to improve your company's sourcing strategies. Whether it be forming a group on Facebook, learning how to write search in iTunes podcast directory, how to optimise your web site for higher visibility or how to automate searches on the web. There is a lot happening out their that needs attention. Those who want to professional cybersleuths and reap the benefits of social computing need to understand that there is a need for an up front investment in resources to get this right. And there is a need to let people test and play with these technologies in order for them to find out what will and will not work for you.

Vlog your Job and Facebook indexing in Google

For those who don't know I am working from Barcelona these days and am settling into life in the very nice Microsoft sales sub based down in the very trendy Daigonal Del Mar on the sea front.I've been 10 days here and have settled in sufficiently enough to start catching up on my neglected stream of recruitment blog updates and newsbytes... here's two of the things out there are the moment that caught my eye:

1. Video Blogs: Somthing that caught my attention straight off the bath that I wanted to share was a new UK company that has come on the scene called Vlog Your Job. It's a WordPress blog masked as a professional site. While I like it's something we have been doing in Microsoft for some time now. It's not rocket science simply record a video of a hiring manager discussing their opportunity talking about their culture, benfits, etc. When I went on the site I tried to open a video and got tired of waiting so I left, I also tried to leave an encouraging comment on the site but I was brought to the WordPress username and password section which meant having to login in which I wasn't prepare to hang around for. Check it out and see what you think. It might encourage to finally get out the camcorder and start advertising some of your own jobs. And as I said it's not a new idea. Check out Jobs2view for another slant on the offering.

2. Facebook thinking of embedding in Google.It seems like Facebook is going from strength to strength and it is quickly gathering loyal followers away from MySpace, Orkut, LinkedIn and the rest. Last month 3 high profile Google engineers who had realised their magic 4 years stock options and made a fortune left and joined FaceBook which is a sign of real potential and a sign of a potential flotation in my mind. Anyhow last week facebook conducted a poll asking 'Would you care if someone could search Google and find a Facebook page with your name and a small profile photo?' This ads some more interesting spice to whether a recruiter would use social networks to fing d qualify a candidates suitability to a role based on their social network profile and what they have been saying in some of their scraps. I wonder has anyone in Ireland been disqualified for a role based on what their social footprint looks like on the Internet? But let's have a reality check here about FaceBook before you all start racing off into the sun set and start hunting candidates on it. LinkedIn is still my number one choice. It has by far for me much more relevant European profiles. If you are looking to hire from the US i'd probably go for Facebook but on the internation scene LinkedIn is still number 1.

New Microsoft Graduate Video

YouTube -Video CVs and ZunePhones

I read an interesting article on the ever informative and entertaining ERE web site that got me thinking. Make sure you read it and have a look at Aleksy Vayner’s video resume!!! Interesting young man!!! While not in vogue at the moment it will be interesting to see how this new application channel picks up. In 5 years time it may well be the norm to listen to candidates' podcast CVs and inspect their video resumes. At that stage we should able to port our ZunePhone or iPhones to our application tracking system to pull in our daily candidate RSS feeds which will allow us watch pre screened video resumes that match our search criteria on our train ride home.