One of the points I tend to make when asked to futurecast about where the recruitment industry is headed is that entire process of recruitment needs revisiting. There tends to be a lot of focus on innovation in the channels that are used to reach candidates, as well as engaging new approaches to communicating brand messages. We hear a lot of talk about the creation of “talent pools or puddles” to manage candidate data more effectively and the development of “mid-term candidate recruitment strategies” to ensure that organisations are using those talent pools to reduce the time to hire. However, the end point of all these process still results in the requirement to fill in long and unwieldy application forms. Or submit a paper-based CV.
Given that one the one hand, the majority of what we do is being posted online in some shape or format (creating a sort of virtual portfolio) and on the other hand, there are an increasing number of tools that allow recruiters to trawl the web to find high quality candidates for free, what I would expect to see is some bright spark creating a system that continuously trawls the web to find candidates that match an organisations needs, and then track their progress, flagging up when the candidate achieves some pre-set goal. Like winning and award or gaining a particular accreditation. If you think about it, what I’m proposing is simply an extension of the process already adopted by many of the big consulting and law firms to identify top talent at key universities and graduate schools.
So this week’s mail is dedicated to highlighting different techniques that candidates are adopting to get themselves noticed.
The world’s first augmented reality CV?
Thanks to Craig who spotted this one. It had to happen sometime: the blending of new and old world technologies to create an immersive CV. David Wood (one of the top 100 most influential technologists), the co-founder of Symbian and television presenter Jason Bradbury teamed up with CWJobs to create the world’s first AR CV. Now, not all of us can afford to have a TV presenter to help walk people through our experiences, but given the rise in the number of people who are able to competently use video and web technology, it’s not such an onerous task as it initially seems.
Far from the madding crowd
A copywriter, Ed Hamilton, has come up with a creative way to stand out, while showing off his worldliness and tech skills, mapping his CV to Google Maps. Using Google Maps’ ‘My Maps’ feature, he created a custom map with text posted to personalized placemarkers. Alongside the standard information you would expect to discover about his skills, experience and capabilities, we discover that Ed is an “armchair Fiorentina fan”, who is “fascinated by Chilean geology” and was once tasked to write an HIV awareness commercial by the government of Trinidad and Tobago without using the words Sex, Condom or HIV. It’s an ingenious use of the channel and one that shows a clear understanding of the mechanics of search, web 2.0 and most importantly, communications.
Paint yourself pretty
There is a great moment in a film called Legally Blond where the fusty professors of Harvard come across the CV of our ditsy heroine, Elle Woods. Written on one side of A4 paper, her CV is bright pink and scented to “give it a little something extra”. It certainly stands out, promoting an amusing debate amongst the professors about the sort of candidate they are looking for, resulting in the acceptance of our heroine to the prestigious law school to “inject a little life”.
Now I’m not advocating that we all go and spray our CVs with perfume, or adopt the use of lurid backgrounds, but there are an increasing number of tools that are being created online that allow candidates to customise their CVs to help them stand out. I’ve mentioned Visual CV in previous mails and LinkedIn is another great example. Candidates could also use Google Profiles and the more inventive could even create an entry in Wikipedia. In this context Innovative Resume doesn’t really seem that innovative – for me it’s the online equivalent of the CV template in Word. But it represents something more fundamental: an acceptance of the need for a customised brand presence for individuals. Expect to see more such offerings.
Epic win or epic fail?
With a stated aim of injecting “the adventure back into your life,” EpicWin is an iPhone app that converts a to-do list into a game in which each completed task advances the player in an ongoing quest to level up, gain riches and develop skills. The game can be downloaded from the App store, and users select an avatar and then upload their daily tasks. As tasks are completed over the course of the day, the avatar develops skills and moves ahead on a quest map, with rewards each time they level up. Tasks that become overdue, meanwhile, are shown on opening the app. Players can share their progress via Facebook and Twitter.
It’s an intriguing combination of incentivisation schemes, geo-location, mobile technology and task management. Part of me can’t help but feel a little sad that our focus an human beings appears to have diminished to the point that we need to be incentivised to complete mundane tasks but hey, I can easily imagine some bright spark extending this to Outlook.