Or how to keep your best people as the job market opens back up…

Award Winning Management Consultancy recruitment specialists BLT use video effectively to  not just  engage & attract candidates, but also to socialise and seed their client-focussed activities.

This film captures the recent client event hosted at BLT Towers on  Talent Retention. Read more on the BLTog

So, what do we all think of the new website Unvarnished? Described as a cross between LinkedIn and Yelp it allows anonymous reviews of your personal professional reputation.

For those who have decided to keep their ‘personal’ social networking profiles (Facebook, MySpace etc) separate from their professional profiles (LinkedIn, Xing etc) this will make it increasingly hard.

What’s interesting is that anyone can add a profile about themselves or anyone else (you can go in and ‘claim’ your profile if one already exists).

We’ve had quite a bit of debate on this blog in the past about how potential and current employers use Facebook but this throws up so many more issues.

I’d love to know your opinion.

Would you use this to create your own profile?

How would you respond if someone posted something negative about you?

Would you post comments about people you’ve worked with in the past?

Would you use it to research a potential employee?

I recently had the pleasure of presenting to the APSCo meeting in Manchester, where we presented ideas around online reputation for recruiters, or “Reputation 2.0″.

Prompted by the good people at Chinwag, we are now recruiting our very own twintern for the Summer. Graduates,  start sending your CVs to Adelaide@carveconsulting.com . We can’t wait to have the next social media expert on board for a few weeks!

Here is what our offer looks like:

You are passionate about all things social media, and are actively participating in a wide variety of web 2.0 activities such as blogging, social bookmarking, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. You would like to learn how to translate your passion into coherent and cutting-edge strategies for corporate organisations.

Carve Consulting is a digital engagement practice specialising in Corporate Social Networks, Online PR, Social Media Monitoring and Search Engine Marketing. With offices in the UK and Australia, the practice has developed corporate social networking strategies, social media marketing and social recruiting programmes for a range of private, public and not-for-profit organisations, including VisitBritain, Yell Adworks, The Audit Commission, Fairtrade, Wine Australia, Hays, ANZ Bank, and the NHS.  The practice offers strategy, advisory, research, training and managed services.

We can offer you a two month-internship in July and August where you’ll be thrown into the deep end to work on accounts with our consultants. Your day-to-day tasks will vary but will definitely include the following at some point:

-    Account management (including “whatever needs to be done to service the accounts”)
-    Client training
-    Client research
-    Report writing
-    Proactively participating in social media events

Our ideal intern looks a bit like this:
-    Passionate about social media with an appetite to learn
-    Up to date web 2.0 industry knowledge
-    Exceptional traditional writing and grammatical skills
-    Excellent verbal communication skills with ability to present  complex ideas clearly
-    Attention to detail and outstanding organisation skills
-    Ability to work to tight deadlines and be calm under pressure

We can’t offer you a full salary but will cover your travel and lunch expenses, as well as a discretionary bonus at the end of the internship. We are currently looking at expanding so there is potentially scope for developing this internship into a permanent paid position.

I look forward to hearing from you!

Carve was asked last year to contribute a chapter to the Social Media in Recruitment guide, following a well received presentation I made on Corporate Social Networking ( where ‘Social Media meets Business’ ) at the British Library.

Our chapter is focused on ‘Developing an Effective Corporate Social Networking Strategy‘ and draws on our experiences of doing just that with organisations inside and outside of the recruitment world.

The result is published by the REC Industry Research Unit and has some thought provoking contributions from the likes of Matt Alder and Bill Boorman

We’ve made the report accessible for free download via this link - socialmediainrecruitment

As always, we’re interested in your feedback / thoughts.

On Thursday and Friday this week I’ll be leading two tracks at TruLondon (http://thetruconferences.com/) that we hope will turn into something pretty special.

We’ve been operating LiveLABS for a while now as part of our active facilitation / corporate social networking programmes, where we use our tools and best practice frameworks to address real social media / social recruiting challenges. But we’re hoping that Tru London will take live problem solving to a new level with – we hope – a cast of 1000s.
Live LABS problem-solving was really borne out of the evident frustration that many people feel when approaching social media, and – specifically – when attending social media  / social recruiting events. There is a lot of theory and a number of well-known social media case studies that tend to be trotted out at these events but they often mean little if you’re not managing a brand that’s not already in possession of bags of money and /or residual awareness.  Live LABS is all about realising the value in social media for your organisation / brand.

When is Live LABS Tru London taking place?

• Thursday, 18th February:  13.00 – 14.00 GMT (Track 6)
• Friday, 19th February 2010: 13.30 – 14.30 ( Track 23)

How do I get involved?
Live LABS Tru London is going to be live in every sense of the word: participants to the Live LABS will be able to both SUBMIT  questions and challenges, or CONTRIBUTE with ideas and solutions.

• During the event, you can submit using “#TruLondon Q [and then your question]” ( you can also email your questions in advance to LiveLABS@CarveConsulting.com paul@carveconsulting.com)  In LiveLABS we attempt to solve problems in context, so please give as much detail as you can.

As the questions flood in (we hope) from you the twitterati and the individual tracks and participants at the event,  we will be showing the questions on the big TwitterJobSearch screen, and of course you can track them via your favorite Twitter tool ( we think http://twitterfall.com/trulondon is a good one, we’ll also be hosting a widget on the Carve Blog).

• And here’s where you come in. To contribute your ideas and solutions, just tweet using “#TruLondon A [and then your ideas ]”

We will be mashing the whole Twitter/Live participation thing up into something we hope that is great fun to participate in, but also:

•    …will provide some crowd-sourced insights to your social media / social recruiting problems and questions
•    ….and bring together – Live -  some of the planet’s leading recruitment thinkers
For more information, and tickets to TruLondon please visit http://thetruconferences.com/

Let’s make it trend on Twitter

I was researching something else when I came across the below  employee guide  explaining why employers might want to use Facebook - certainly one of the clearest and right-headed descriptions I’ve come across:

Before discussing how to use Facebook to find a job, you need to be aware of how and why employers are using it as a source for finding potential employees. Once you know, you’ll be better able to use it to your advantage. Below are just a few of the reasons why employers are using Facebook to find and get to know you.

• Facebook offers employers specific search opportunities and parameters.
• A person’s profile provides an accurate depiction of their personality and interests.
• People who are new to the workforce don’t have an employment history to show potential employers. Facebook gives these companies a new way to get to know young workers.

Facebook has the potential to become what could be called a “personal branding tool.” Instead of having a private profile, try making yours public but use it strategically…

Well put TD Bank - full content here on the TD Bank careers site , including a guide for candidates to using Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn - all of which is good stuff.   (And no we are not working for them)

Great little film this,  put together by the  Career Player team, looking at “Careers 3.0″ (with a rare sighting of me wearing a suit near the end).

I would have loved to have this to hand at the recent KNOWHOW Graduates  skills event we organised with London Borough of Tower Hamlets.  What was really quite scary was how little the attendees (all recent graduates) knew about job seeking online  -  very very few had heard of LinkedIn, and none that I spoke to were aware of sites like WikiJob.

It begs the question - what the heck are university careers officers playing at? The answer, one supposes, is that careers offices are now (like everything else) ‘profit centres’ - meaning lots of sponsored emails from fee paying corporates to select students, very little grounding in the core online networking and brand building capabilities 21C Graduates will need to survive and thrive.

Very much looking forward to speaking at the Capita breakfast event tomorrow this morning alongside Jon from  Google and Patricia from Capita Resourcing. The event is entitled: Deciphering social media:  The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

I am going to be taking a different perspective on social networks tomorrow, focusing specifically on the changing role of search (defined increasingly by social search and real-time search [think Twitter]) , UGC [user generated content] and the impact on brand / employer brand.

As you may know, our view is that a brand’s home page is not [companyname.com] but in fact the Google first page of results for a branded search.  Already social sites / reviews are highly placed in these results but - with the advent of Google Social Search , Side Wiki, Twitter and  so on, every site / brand will become “socialized” - and those brands, like it or not, will be defined by individuals external to the enterprise.  The path in travel (meta search > social search > branded search ) will / is unquestioningly happening beyond that space.

How do brands / employer brands manage this? Well (obviously) seeking to provide the best service / products is the first step, but the key is in building effective advocacy / influencer programmes, and encouraging reviews / feedback - using positive choice architecture- at every turn.  The pres I’ll be working from is below.  See you there (or not.)

Details of the event on Personnel Today

Paul Harrison, Managing Partner of Carve Consulting, will be speaking at the ONREC Kennedy Recruiting HR Summit on Wednesday, Nov 4: 9:30 AM - 10:15 AM in Concurrent 3.

Paul, one of just a handful of international speakers at the event and a regular participant in European Social Media conferences, is delighted to be able to present on the recently launched Google Social Search.

As part of his broader look at the characteristics and top 10 take aways of an effective corproate social networking strategy, Paul will take a specific look at the implications of social search, realtime search and user generated content on social recruiting.

We will update this page with the presentation, but in the interim, please find some background on Google Social Search, plus dynamic Google insights.