Matt Adler - Posts

 

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Why Job Boards need to innovate or die

First of all this isn’t another generic all job boards are doomed blog post. I wanted to put some recent thoughts I’ve had in writing that I truly believe represent the issues job boards are facing or about to face. My credentials to do this are 12 years experience of working with job boards in the UK market as opposed to mere speculative opinion!

This post starts about 10 years ago. Back then I was one of the few professional buyers of job board space in the UK and my day was always a whirlwind of presentations from new job board launches. Some of sites don’t exist anymore; many more of them are now mainstays of the UK market. The one thing they all had in common though was innovation. Everyone was going to change recruitment for good, everyone had a new and interesting model, everyone was a disruptive force in a recruitment space that was over priced, old fashioned and out of touch with jobseeker and client needs.

Business models and market share were established and the job boards did indeed change recruitment, not as quickly or by as much as the initial optimism suggested but they were a truly disruptive force. However the dot com bubble bursting, a ...

My new training course partnership with Emarketeers

A quick blog post to announce that I’ve formed a partnership with Emarketeers to offer digital and social recruiting courses. There are a growing number of fantastic knowledge sharing days, unconferences and workshops out there at the moment in our space and I fully intend to keep participating in them as I think they are [...]

The unthinkable today is reality tomorrow

Very interesting to see the lack of comment on, (or indeed in most places lack of any mention of) Personnel Today’s recent announcement that it is shutting the print version of the publication and going online only. A few years ago I was brain storming with some of my then colleagues about what changes we [...]

The Social Recruiting Debate – Why I’m leaving it

Well the debate is well and truly up and running now. You can’t open Twitter these days without seeing the full range of opinion…”everyone must implement social recruiting now”,” social recruiting is a dangerous fad”,” social recruiting doesn’t exist”, “lets just call it recruiting”, “ get your recruiters off twitter and back on the phone”, “get your recruiters off the phone and on Twitter”, “Job boards are dead”, “job boards aren’t dead” etc etc etc.

Now while this debate can be interesting it is just that, debate and speculation. It is also debate that deals almost exclusively in generalisations and exists in an echo chamber that still hasn’t reached the mainstream although it is edging ever closer.

I’m bored with it and I’m not playing anymore

So what am I focusing on?

Well you only have to look at the utterly astonishing rate of social media adoption across diverse demographics to see that we are living through a communication and networking revolution, if you want to debate that then I’m sorry I’m not listening just have another look at the figures. The real question for me is how this revolution is actually being felt in the parts of recruitment space it ...

The UK’s first corporate social recruiting job?

Although there are now some great social recruiting case studies coming through from the US I’m still surprised that more companies in the UK still aren’t leveraging the enormous audience of the social web. However earlier in the week I had brief chat with Colin Minto (@colinminto) the Head of Resourcing for G4S Plc and [...]

Expert Interview – Jessica Lee on Social Recruiting

Although I’ve been writing about various social recruiting cases studies for a while, I’ve been very aware that everything I’ve covered has been somewhat tactical and campaign based. With this in mind it was a pleasure to catch up with someone at the Social Recruiting Summit last week who has embedded social recruiting methodologies right [...]

Social Recruiting is dead, long live Social Recruiting

I’m writing this at thirty thousand feet somewhere between Minneapolis and Chicago on my way back from the Social Recruiting Summit.  This is third summit ERE have run in just under 12 months and I’ve attended all of them.

As at previous events a large number of the presentations were live streamed and, no doubt with this in mind, a lot of the people back in the UK have asked me why I have bothered to attend in person again. The answer is a simple one, it’s because the value for me is having the chance to discuss mutual experiences and ideas face to face with fellow “experimenters” from all over the world. This is something particularly exciting at such an early stage of the development of recruitment’s social future. Add in the world class speakers that ERE assembled and you have, what are for me, the best three recruitment / HR events I’ve ever been to.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of all though is how the content and discussions at the summit have moved on in such a short space of time, reflecting an industry in the midst of rapid change. First time out last June everything was still theoretical and speculative but it was only a few short months ...

A Golden Age of referral recruitment?

Earlier in the year I wrote a post underlining my strong belief that we’re entering a golden age of referral recruiting as improving technology makes it possible to unlock the power of people’s social graphs. This is all very well in theory but I thought it was time I found some [...]

Social Recruiting around the world – Part 4: A “conversation” from the UK

When I started this blog series I really struggled to find any decent UK Social Recruiting case studies worthy of inclusion.  I was therefore delighted when yet another of my former colleagues, Mark Beavan, agreed to write a guest post about his recent campaign for The National Trust. I really liked working with Mark when [...]

Why Social Recruiting needs to fail

I was going through some old folders on my laptop the other day and I happened to come across my very first digital recruitment media plan which I wrote for a client way back in 1999. Even though a lot has happened in the last 11 years I still remember this particular project fondly. This might seem quite strange when I tell you that it was an abject failure from both mine and the client’s point of view!

The client needed to recruit four permanent software engineers and was keen to try something a bit different. The Internet seemed the perfect solution and we enthusiastically recommended a campaign microsite and online “traffic driving campaign”. After five weeks the client had received two applications both of which were unsuitable.

Once everyone had got past the initial and somewhat hysterical “the internet doesn’t work” reaction, we were able to unpick what had gone wrong with the campaign. Rather than give up on digital the client worked with us to adapt the site and the media plan. After some considerable effort and a bit more trial and error, results improved and some (but not all) of the roles were filled. However more importantly the learnings the ...