You may have heard of Glassdoor, the website where people can anonymously rate their employer, write reviews, and post salary information. Wired magazine described it as a "TripAdvisor" for the workplace when it launched back in the summer of 2008 and it now has nearly 3 million salaries and reviews. For example, Apple has 2,646 ratings at the time of writing (equivalent to 4.3% of their 60,000 staff) and 1,323 reviews. It's another example of how organisations ability to shape and control their image as an employer is eroding fast: after all which is more credible, what employer says about themselves on their website, or hundreds, or even thousands of anonymous employee ratings and reviews on Glassdoor?

Looking over ratings for Investment banks in the wake of the damaging resignation of Greg Smith from Goldman Sachs I was interested to see that there wasn't much difference. All but 2 of the FT's top 10 where in the 3.1 to 3.4 range (of a 5-point scale where 5 = very satisfied, 3=OK and 1=very dissatisfied) with Citi trailing on 2.9 and, ironically, Goldman Sachs ahead on 3.8.

It made me wonder what impact how a business was run might have on it's rating and so I took 24/7 Wall St.'s list of the Best and Worst Run Companies of 2011 and looked at the average rating for the top 10 and bottom 9. To my surprise there was only 0.3 or 6% difference between them - an average of 3.3 for the best run and 3.0 for the worst.

How can it be that employees of the worst run companies are not less satisfied? And the employees of the best run companies not more satisfied for that matter? Could it be that the experience of work is really that similar? Or is it that rating on a 5-point scale is too blunt a measure to provide much meaning?

Just as I started thinking about Pinterest recruiting applications for my #truLondon track I noticed that the emails Pinterest send me contain a recruiting message! From them. Makes sense that the people who built the system know how to recruit through it right?

And what it reminded me of was, some of the simpliest things can be the most powerful. Putting a weblink to your preferred recruitment funnel in regular customer communication is a smart thing to do and drives a steady flow of job applications from thoughtful people.

I'm going to blog more on Pinterest leading up to the track and I what I really want to know is - are you using Pinterest? For what purpose? Let me know in the Comments!

Follow the pre-track Pinterest board

http://pinterest.com/mpheywood/the-pinterest-puzzle-at-trulondon/

Announcing The Pinterest Puzzle: Are There Recruiting Applications? A #TruLondon track

http://mpheywood.posterous.com/the-pinterest-puzzle-could-recruiting-work-he

It’s beautiful, it’s addictive, and it's experiencing wild growth. ComScore data shows Pinterest just hit 11.7 million unique monthly U.S. visitors, crossing the 10 million mark faster than any other standalone site in history.

The Pinterest Puzzle puts #truLondon to the challenge at London's City Hotel February 22nd. Are you up for the challenge? Join us if have a ticket or just follow the hastag! Meantime check out the round up of blog posts on Pinterest below:

TECHCRUNCH: Pinterest Hits 10 Million U.S. Monthly Uniques Faster Than Any Standalone Site Ever

http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/07/pinterest-monthly-uniques/

ENTREPRENEUR: How Pinterest Is Becoming the Next Big Thing in Social Media for Business

http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/222740

MASABLE: How Pinterest Is Changing Website Design Forever

http://mashable.com/2012/02/07/pinterest-web-design/

XEEME: Pinterest killing Flickr

http://blog.xeeme.com/index.php/2012/02/pinterest-killing-flickr/ 

Take a look at the Pre-track Pinboard

http://pinterest.com/mpheywood/the-pinterest-puzzle-trulondon-pre-track/

I read an excellent blog post yesterday questioning LinkedIn's position as a social channel and suggesting that commenting in LinkedIn groups may not be worthwhile...

And then low and behold I get a good looking business lead from a comment I made in a group!

Personally I see a lot of upside still for LinkedIn. Yes they are a long way from achieving the kind of stickiness Facebook or Pinterest has, but the talent network LinkedIn have built up is rather juicy now. And who says there can't be room for a bunch of platforms anyway?

The LinkedIn Contradiction: A Social Channel?

http://recruitingunblog.wordpress.com/

LinkedIn group on Talent, Brand and Communicatons

http://www.linkedin.com/groups/Talent-Brand-Communications-2989131?gid=298913...

Have you noticed employers running recruitment ads alongside your Facebook profile?

I recently spied this Accenture ad on my profile and it struck me as interesting for three particular reasons:

First of all it's not advertising a specific job but a more general offer of "Work on innovative projects with global companies" so clearly Accenture's interest here is in building a pool of candidates that they can match to future vacancies.

What's clever about this is that Accenture can use Facebook's advertising platform to filter which profiles the ad is served on and therefore who might apply. For example Accenture in the UK could run the ad only on UK profiles that list a top 5 competitor as an employer - 3,100 people at the time of writing. Or they could target UK profiles that list education at a top 5 European Business School  - 7,800 people at the time of writing. Or they could target UK profiles that have expressed an interest, or 'liked', a hot topic such as 'sustainability' - 7,640 at the time of writing. Or some other interest common to the target group. Or some combination of these factors. The permutations are endless.

The second thing that interested me about the ad was that clicking it took me to a page on the Accenture Careers UK website not the Accenture Careers UK fanpage on Facebook. What's more, the Accenture website page I arrived at contained a profile of a particular Accenture recruiter, a link to her LinkedIn profile and an invitation to connect.

What's going on here? Accenture have a slew of country specific Careers fanpages on facebook representing what must be a significant investment and yet they are running recruiting ads directing candidates away from these pages into LinkedIn.

Well the answer is that Accenture Careers fanpages are orientated towards entry level talent, not the experienced professionals the ad was targeting. Accenture don't have Careers fanpages for experienced professionals, for good reason. A recent study by Millennial Branding and Identified.com found that two-thirds of Gen Y Facebook users do not include a single employer's name on their profiles, while only half of their Baby Boomer parents and some 53% of Generation Xers show where they work. How much harder is it for a recruiter to asses candidate suitability without this information?

When it comes to building talent pools of experienced professionals LinkedIn has some major advantages for a large corporation like Accenture. For a start the information presented by candidates is much richer, and is exactly what a recruiter needs for a quick assessment of suitability. Additionally if a recruiter is 'connected' with a prospective candidate they can quickly, easily, and privately, alert them to relevant vacancies. And if organiations buy into LinkedIn's professional tool their recruiters can access to all 135m+ users with an advanced search interface, message any member and organise their activity with folders. Better still they don't loose the network a recruiter has built up if that person leaves the organisation.

The third thing that interested me, delighted me even, was the visibility of Accenture recruiters. Their facebook ad encouraged me to "'connect with Michelle in our Talent Acquisition team about a future career". Michelle is a real person with real jobs. The Accenture page the ad linked to had a picture of her, a description of the job she does, the kind of people she is looking for, a list of open vacancies and an invitation to connect on LinkedIn.

This authentic and personal approach is so refreshing. One of the biggest gripes job seekers have about large organisations is that their recruitment operations are faceless machines, and that is certainly the case on the Careers pages of those top 5 competitors - McKinsey & Company, The Boston Consulting Group, Bain & Company (OK they publish one email address), Deloitte, PwC, Mercer, even social recruiting pioneer Ernst & Young! It's a genuine point of difference for Accenture and speaks of an organisation that not afraid to innovate and set the pace. Sign me up!

http://management.fortune.cnn.com/2012/01/13/why-gen-y-facebook-users-keep-career-info-out/

Welcome to Talent Acquisition at Accenture

http://careers.accenture.com/gb-en/careers/experienced/talent/Pages/index.aspx

Reviewing social media strategy presentations on slideshare recently I came across an excellent presentation by @jaybaer called Developing a Social Media Strategy in 7 Steps.

Jay has it that Marketing pre-social was like archery. It involved being at a distance from your target. It involved interruption to hurridly convince - think 30 second ad spots halfway through your favourite show. It was mass marketing and it involved more miss than hit. Sometimes the message got through, sometimes it didn't, it was hard to know.

Marketing post social is like ping pong. What's different is that it's up close with the target. There's still hit and miss of course but the game is all about conversation now. Out of the conversations comes understanding and trust and loyalty. What's also different is reach - imagine your game of ping pong played out in front of a big audience comprising the targets friends and your fans. 

Are you ready to play?

<div style="width:425px" id="__ss_1870079"> <strong style="display:block;margin:12px 0 4px">Developing a Social Media Strategy in 7 Steps</strong> <div style="padding:5px 0 12px"> View more presentations from Jay Baer </div> </div>

Do you know how to perform a well-executed search on Google? 

Competent use of search engines is an increasingly important skillset for recruiters. According to a Lou Adler/LinkedIn study only 18% of the fully-employed professional workforce are actively looking for and applying to company’s job postings. This means traditional job board-based sourcing programs are failing to reach the majority of candidates. And there's much more competition for active candidates. And they don't stay as long when they move employers.

To reach the rest of the labour market (60% of whom are open to discussing opportunities) recruiters need to go looking, and that's where search skills come into play. There are now more than two billion social profiles on the web - from LinkedIn, Google and Twitter, to Blogs, Facebook and beyond - and with nothing more than an internet browser and a well built search string it's now possible to find hundreds of great candidates for any job, any where in the world, in seconds. This is a game changer.

Leading recrutiment services provider Social Talent teach recruiters to use these techniques in their excellent Blue Belt in Internet Recruitment training course. I sat in on a session last week building searches with four keyword layers - what the role is, the desired experience, the role location and preferred competitor targets. The goal is to generate a long list of search keywords and then string them together with Boolean operators (AND, OR and NOT) and modifiers (parenthesis, brackets, wildcards and tilde) to generate your results. Then you use reductions (removal of unwanted terms) to filter out any noise. Sounds complicated but really it's not.

The course also covers advanced search best practice for LinkedIn, how to obtain and verify candidate contact details, how to approach candidates with opportunities and much much more - if you're looking to get your team up to speed with direct sourcing I highly recommend it!

Blue Belt in Internet Recruitment [TRAINING]

http://www.socialtalent.co/resources/?page_id=871

Lou Adler/LinkedIn [WHITEPAPER]

http://talent.linkedin.com/node/731

How to Use Google Search More Effectively [INFOGRAPHIC]

http://mashable.com/2011/11/24/google-search-infographic/

Organisations ability to shape and control their image as an employer is eroding fast.

According to a recent study of 9,027 people in 35 countries by InSites Consulting upwards of 1 in 5 social network users talk about the company they work for online. 

Considering that there are now 1 billion+ people using social networks worldwide, what we have here is an unprecedented ocean of unauthorised, unchecked and unapproved commentaries on daily life in companies large and small. So what are people posting?

• 50% share information on (new) products and services
• 50% announce company events
• 37% share information on sales and marketing campaigns
• 37% share job vacancies
• 37% tell stories about company culture
• 36% announce promotions
• 21% share news about new hired employees

The good news is that 61% are proud of the company they work for, so you would expect commentaries to be mostly positive. And the spontaneous, authentic and individual nature of their posts makes them much more useful to prospective hires than the standard pre-prepared 'we are great' puff.

Do you know what people are saying about your employer?

Check out InSites Consulting slideshare presentation of the study results below.

<div style="width:425px" id="__ss_9249498"> <strong style="display:block;margin:12px 0 4px">Social media around the world 2011</strong> <div style="padding:5px 0 12px"> View more presentations from steven van belleghem </div> </div>

Photocredit: @petitelinds

Anyone else get a queasy feeling when they see this kind of thing on Twitter?

I'm a big fan of Infographics. I rate Econsultancy. The subject matter looks fascinating.

Only problem is, it's the 5th must click link today, and I just don't think I could absorb it right now. And tomorrow more clicks arrive. On and on they come.

Welcome to the new world of Big Data. Pretty soon, if not already, each of us will face more data than we can possibly comprehend. At this point, being able to find stuff is much better than knowing it. Beyond that, what will count is how well information can find us.

What does this mean for Recruiting? Check out Kevin Wheeler on Big Data from TruLondon4.

http://trulondon4.posterous.com/big-data-for-recruiters

Original article - 10 amazing Twitter infographics

http://econsultancy.com/uk/blog/8049-10-twitter-infographics