Alison Doyle is a great lady that I was fortunate to meet through Jason Alba at JibberJobber (JibberJobber by the way is one of the best employment and career management tools around). She wrote a great article about video interviews and the process of video interviewing. Great article Allison!

Here is a link to the article – Video Interviewing for Employment

Over the years I have seen so many articles about preparing for Video conference interviews, face to face interviews and phone interviews it is so exciting (almost like sending a kid to kindergarten) to see an article on how to prepare for a recorded video interview.

Thanks again Alison!

–Mark

Kristin Grassaro from NAS Communication gave the following scenario:

Scenario: A HR Director told me she had a parent call and harass her about why her child did not get a specific job. The HR Director politely told the parent that she’d be more than happy to discuss with the applicant if they wanted to give her a call. The parent insisted on knowing why and that they would pass the information on to their child. How would you handle it from here?

How would I respond? No hire, No way – Frankly, I’m ashamed -

There can’t be any playing into it – what happens when the person has a bad day at work? What about when they don’t do their job well and think they are going to get fired? What about if a boss yells at them for something? Is there parent going to call? Is there going to be a parent-boss-child conference?

I’m not far removed from this age group (I was pretty fortunate to graduate when I was 20) and I wouldn’t ever expect anyone to do this. I would never hire and will never hire someone who’s parents call me to check in because obviously that is someone who must be questioned as to their effectiveness and I firmly believe that. I believe it shows zero accountability, zero independence, zero initiative and a lack of maturity.

Let me give you an example – I am a Boy Scout leader and a number of Scouts each year decide to do Eagle Projects to achieve the highest rank. We have a firm policy that the Scout needs to be the one who takes a initiative and is the one who makes the phone calls they need to make, do what they need to do and take the leadership position in getting their project signed off and completed. If a parent calls for anything (we don’t care that the Scouts are 13-16), no deal and we don’t do anything for them. People know this now and part of preparation and growing up is doing things for yourself and we hope our Scouts are learning something in that regard.

In other countries a job choice is a family decision – China, India – you spend as much time conveying information (hopefully just through the candidate) to the family about why they should work with your firm but in the U.S. it’s not a family choice or decision it’s babysitting, spoiling and what you call “special” I call ridiculous (and a few other words). I guess the safe thing to do is say “this is confidential information between us and (name) so have them call me” but I think the best thing to do is not hire the person period.

I seem to be getting flack for this – what do you think? What would you do? Am I way off base here?

Fortune had a very interesting article today in regards to the P in the A’s my generation is. (Thanks Todd Raphael)

–Mark Newman

I’ve seen the same presentation too many times.

Watch out for web 2.0 where your candidates are found in the most zany of places and somehow companies have coughed up hundreds of thousands of dollars for “Worlds” in SecondLife to attract candidates – I think there are too many “Recruiting Gurus” who make way too much money spreading the crap about this being a good idea. The “I’m Cool, I’m Down With IT, THIS IS THE FUTURE” lines are old and I’m tired of hearing about them in presentations. As a matter of fact, do you know people actually call themselves “Futurists”?

To put the “Find your candidates on SecondLife” idea to rest I ask you to look at two posts:

from Linden Labs but to summarize

Of the only 252,284 who actually have logged after a month – how many quality candidates do you have? How many people are in there not even thinking of a job (do some research on the most common activities in SecondLife)? How many are in your target demographics?

Techcrunch weighed in recently:

“If Web 2.0 is a bubble of hype, then surely Linden Lab’s Second Life is the shiniest bubble of them all. Companies from IBM, CNet, Reuters, American Apparel, Coldwell Banker and many more have established their presence in the metaverse, but a new study of Second Life finds that the expenditure may be wasted.”

But sure enough “virtual job fairs” a la TMP Worldwide are now sucking in the money of companies around the globe and there is plenty of fodder (you know who you are) who say “Secondlife is the place to be”. You never know, 1 company may make 1 hire in Secondlife but quit hyping it. The companies that signed up originally have got a boost not in Secondlife but because they have been attached to all the press releases about the “new trend” what happens to the companies who sign up but are outside of the cool hall?

This is not just swipe at SecondLife but moreso at the “Gurus” of the space who are piping in on items because they think “it’s the cool thing to do”. I’m tired of it. It’s the same article or presentation every time. There is hype, there are bandwagons and there are money drainers – be aware when it comes to sucking dry your sourcing dollars.

-Mark Newman