KCRecruiting

Learning To Blog As A Community

One of the demonstrations I use in training bloggers is an example of how important shared community is in creating excitement.

You start in a room, and ask one person to clap. The person claps a little, sheepishly looking around at their colleagues.  You ask a second person to clap, and to do it with gusto.  That person claps a lot louder, faster, and you tell them they did a good job, but that it sounded a little hollow.  You ask for volunteers, and let anyone else try.

You pause a beat, and then ask the first two people to clap together. They do so.   You encourage a third person to join in, and then you encourage all three to show a lot of energy.  The sound increases, and ultimately, someone adds a whoop or a shout into the mix, and the sound transforms from a few people clapping to a celebration.

Then you stop, and you begin clapping yourself, lightly, and without rhythm, and you say, "This is the essence of blogging."  Alone, your voice is hollow.  Combined with others, your voice is part of an explosion of excitement and energy.

Blogging Is Not About You
The first and most important rule of blogging is understanding that your blog is not about you - it's about the community.  It's about your readers.  It's about your industry. It's about anything other than your marketing pitch.

When communities grow, they grow because the shared conversatiin is greater than the individual conversation. An indidividual has a limit on what they know, a point where their expertise ceases to be worth listening to.  A group of people obviously has a much higher limit to when they cease to be effective, and using a blog, no one voice can drown out another.

Combine the level of expertise in a community with the excitement generated by numerous voices, and you have the advantages of community.

So how do we accomplish this?

Advertising and Marketing Niche Blog In St Louis

A St Louis advertising blogger is branching out and collating information about advertising and marketing jobs and meetings in the local area.  With a few simple google searches, the AdSaint has turned themselves into a destination for every marketing, advertising and PR employee to check weekly into for new places to go, new people to meet, and the occasional job search.

The key to the blog is the fact that's local and targeted. Traffic may be small, but it will certainly be targeted, and most important, the writers for the AdSaint blog will quickly become mini-celebrities in their community. 

How do I know?  Because my niche recruiting blogs have done the same for me.  If you want to know how to get into the newspaper, build a passive candidate management tool, and dominate the Google Search Results for your name (go aheard, search "Jim Durbin recruiter" in Google and count how far you go before you don't read something about me), you might consider hiring Durbin Media Group to teach you how to build a small community.

Or you could start it yourself, and get that sweet feeling of earned labor. Either way - if you're interested in growing your career or branding your company - copy Walt and Maeve at the Ad Saint.

Newspaper Recruiting Guru

Joe Grimm was one of the panelists at the ERExpo on the topic of Ask The Bloggers.  Joe is a newspaper recruiter for the Detroit Free Press.  His job is to find copy editors, reporters, and the other journalists that make up a big city newsroom.

Talk about specialization.

Joe, in addition to being one heck of a nice guy, knows just about everyone in the newspaper biz.  That was his job - to network with journalists.  So what did he do to improve his personal network?

Why, he blogs of course.  Ask the Recruiter, while defined by Joe as more of a Q and A,  uses blogginng software to run a column on recruiting questions.   Covering such issues as references, using printouts as clips (the question is whether a printout of a newsstory is acceptable instead of using the actual newspaper article - it's a news recruiting question we don't often get), and other journalist specific quetions, Joe has increased the reach of his network, the approachability of the Detroit Free Press as a newspaper, and his sourcing pool.

Not bad for a dead tree recruiter.  What can you do with your expertise?

RecruitingBlogs.com: A New Frontier for Jason Davis

My good friend Jason Davis is at it again.  Jason was the founder of Recruiting.com, the group recruiting blog that served as the focal point for the expanding world of recruiting blogs from 2004-2006.  After being purchased by Jobster, Jason stayed on for a year shepherding Recruiting.com into a Digg-like site for staffing and recruiting information.

With the contract about to expire and a new executive editor taking over, Jason is looking for new ways to keep himself occupied, and he has really created something interesting in Recruitingblogs.com. 

The site functions like a mash-up effortlessly combining audio, video, RSS, and Jason's own thoughts into what he calls, his view of the recruiting blogosphere.  Companies seeking to build their own portals would be well advised to take note - Jason is once again on the cutting edge, following his curiousity and discovering what works and what doesn't.

Two More Reasons To Start A Local Recruiting Blog

Are you or your company considering starting a recruiting blog?  Are you having problems measuring the value?  There are four main reasons to start a local recruiting blog, and I'm going to share them with you.  This post is the beginning of a speech Ill be delivering in May to the Recruiter's Roundtable in Kansas City.

Reason 1:  Local Recruiting Blogs Bring You Candidates
a) EliteIT Services:  This St Louis staffing firm has used their blog to find candidates for technology jobs.   
b) Minnesota Headhunter:  3 candidates placed (last time I checked, which was last summer).
c) StlRecruiting.com - I'm not even actively recruiting, and I know of two people placed because of my blog in St Louis.  I regularly get resumes from candidates asking if I know good recruiters.
d) Triangle At Work:  OOD diagram puzzles led to candidates for Rob Humphrey in North Carolina

What's unique about these numbers is they don't represent recruiters working full time on their blogs.   This is at most an hour or two a week.

Reason 2: Press Mentions:
Do you have a hankering to be in Time Magazine?  How about the Wall Street Journal?  National Recruiting Trade Publications?  Oracle's Profit Magazine, the magazine for CEO's?  The Small Business Review?

Blogging Your Way To Recruitment Success

Gretchen, Joel and Dave - three successful employment bloggers, are offering a session tomorrow on how to use blogs to improve your career and company.

All of the details are here at Dave's Blog.  Register now!

Some things you'll learn.

• Develop proper oversight of employee blogs (not recruiter blogs) to enhance (not hurt) a company’s reputation as a sought-after employer.
• Develop a corporate Blog to effectively attract passive candidates, and increase your company’s search rankings with heightened corporate brand awareness through search engine optimization strategies.
• Promote the candidate experience: educate prospective candidates on the application process (what to expect in an interview), and develop and identify your cultural brand.
• Enhance the employment brand of your business groups, market corporate events such as job fairs, Corporate Technology Forums, conferences, trade shows.
• Obtain better search engine rankings and attract passive candidates.

Who should attend:

New media folks
Marketing and PR
Executives
Recruiters interested in learning more about employment blogging.

The three people leading this series are all superstars in their own right.  It would do you well to listen in or buy the CD.

Uses of Recruiting Blogs

The Recruiting Blogosphere is a collection of about 200 bloggers who write on the topics of online employment and staffing.

In that list are many friends, noted speakers, columnists, managers, and line recruiters.

Here are two examples of how some people are using Recruiting Blogs to find candidates and improve their online profile:

1) But Less About Me...This Staffing blog is written by an Aquent employee, Tim Donnelly, and he's been covering a Rich Media conference he attended.  Rich Media as in Flash developers, Web Designers, and of course, multimedia experts.

Tim has fun with his blog, and uses it primarily for brand promotion.  Notice the links to the Aquent Staffing Sites.  Good for SEO and exposure.

2) MN Headhunter:  Paul DeBettignies is an independent recruiter in Minneapolis, MN, which is why MNHeadhunter.com is such a great name for his site.  He's been profiled in local magazines, has a good sense of the blogging community in Minnesota, and has made 3 1/2 placements from his blog. 

His blog is his website, a hybrid of a traditional site and several Typepad Blogs (We built it) that he uses to update content on his business, jobs he has available, and jobs for non-profits (his volunteer work).

His Google Page Rank is a 5, and he has over 100 people a day reading him.  Not bad for a one man shop without a marketing budget.