Google Wave

There's been a lot of talk about Google Wave. It is a a real-time communication and collaboration system. It's open source and also a protocol.

Google have been trying to figure out "what would email look like if it was invented today"- this is what they've come up with. To me it looks like a live transmission hybrid email instant messenger all rolled into one

This is a long video so set some time aside for an hour before you check this out. When you go to 7 minutes, 30 seconds you start to get an idea of what the UI looks like.

As I mentioned in the Irish Recruiters conference Unified Communications is definitely going to be one of the main technological trends in FY10. Google Wave falls clearly into this category. Will be very interesting to see how the platform develops when it launches later this year.

Dreamjob.com.br - brillant ad!

For those of you that don't know me too well let me tell you that I have worked and lived in Brazil on many occassions and I consider it very much my second home after Ireland.

I like to monitor the job market in Brazil as much as possible and I've been paying attention of late to a lot of the pay for job searching services that job seekers need to use when searching on niche job boards in Brazil. An interesting business model that doesn't work in Ireland but is quite often the norm in Sao Paulo and Rio. A bit like a job seeker in Ireland having to pay 50 euros a month to use Irish Jobs and register their CV online.

In looking at some of this research I came across a really funny video for a new job board, that would give the big budgets of Monster and CareerBuilder a run for there money:www.dreamjob.com.br.

The Future of Recruitment is in the Cloud! (Utility Recruitment)

I love technology!

Ever since I got a Commodore 64 I've been hooked. One of the very cool things about working for Microsoft is I get a chance to collaborate with smart people in a very innovative environment that allows me glimpse over the edge of tomorrow's technological future and constantly reignite the curious little boy in me who loved to tap away at his computer in his bedroom for hours on end. In this environment I'm often trying to keep my personal knowledge base high by listening to a variety of tech podcasts such as Leo Leporte's Twit and blogs like TechCrunch and the prestigious Robert Cringley's blog as well as a huge internal database of sharepoints on a variety of technological gendres and flavours. And that's not even mentioning our very own Channel 9 or MSDN Blog Network.

I love recruitment!

I love trying to figure out how new improvements in technology can be used to make recruitment more efficent and effective. A lot of recruiters I know like to read other recruitment magazines or blogs or like to pick up the CIPD magazine, the Friday Irish Times or Sunday Business Post to keep up to date with the latest recruitment trends and techniques. I do this myself a lot and have benefited greatly from others. However, I much prefer following the technology geeks and then applying what I've learnt from them to recruitment rather than reading about it from other recruiters. That's where the fun is for me and that's when and where I enjoy my job the most.

Some of the greatest satisfaction I have had in my career is coining a technique and then passing it onto one of our recruiters in Dublin, Dubai or Hyderabad and learning in the future that they made a hire through it.

For quite some time Microsoft has been working at the concept of Software as a Service (SaaS) and has been one of the architectural leading netizens which such companies as Google, Salaeforce and Amazon when it comes to coining the phrase "Cloud Computing"! It's been very interesting to watch this from the inside and I believe that now more than ever a recruiter can be empowered by using technology correctly and creatively to be better at their job and more successful than their peers.

A lot of people may not know what cloud computing is? Sometimes you here people mention things such as: "on demand computing" or ""cluster computing" or "server virtualisation". For me it's simply the ability to access information over the internet from any device. It is a step towards less of a device centric, app centric world and more to an information centric model. Recruiters will need to know how to use social media to brand and contact technological savy individuals and the new generations. They'll need to sync better to increase speeds to facilitate the sharing and processing of information. It will be driven by mobility.

Some of my recent blog entries have been about vice technology, image teleportation and mobile syncing. Stay tuned for more in the future.

For those that are new to Cloud Computing check out  Christopher Barnett's great video!

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.

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.