At least that’s what I take away from Lauren’s latest post in Wired and Hired. When comparing her female candidate interactions with male counterparts, Lauren had this to say.

Unexpectedly, I find men are more difficult to deal with when it comes to the prospect of leaving their “homeland”…I have a male candidate telling me he can’t move because he needs to be around people who understand him and that he can’t go anywhere where he doesn’t have friends.

I’m not actually surprised that this is what she finds as a recruiter. I’ve seen plenty of guys who cling to friends as their source of identity and comfort. Similarly, with wanting to be near your family, hometown, favorite sports team - whatever, men often struggle with leaving the comfort zone to get ahead.

Lauren’s got some harsh words for us more sensitive types. Get a load of this riff:

…I don’t even want to send you to my agencies at this point because I get the feeling you are going to try and make them have cry circles after work where you discuss your feelings. Weird. You should have known when you got into this business that it would require moving at some point. However, don’t call me telling me you really want a job, anywhere, and then when the client is interested start pouting and giving me your stream of consciousness over the phone about all of your insecurities. I do not specialize in breathing exercises and co-dependency management. What I do specialize in is getting you a job that translates to a promotion and more money…

Wow Lauren! When it comes to being a recruiter, if you have to read a guy’s ‘feelings journal’ and get them to leave it on the night stand before an interview, you should do it. Good luck finding candidates that need no counsel when making a job change.

To the male job seeking masses, the tough love should be a point well taken. We are competing against strong candidates who will do whatever it takes to get ahead. So, take off your diapers and stop your whimpering when it comes to moving. If you’ve made the decision to change your life to get a new job, what’s the big deal about changing your location?

HELP! I’ve decided to open up my blog development inadequacies with posts that help me get little annoyances on my WordPress blog fixed. I’m not a web developer and never will be one. I like to tinker with a lot of things and I get backed into corners that I don’t know how to get out of. Sure I can Google with the best of them, but there are times when you just want answers.

So, I’m going to make posts that spell out the issues I’m having, then link back to the post from development forums so that potential helpers (be it smart marketers, developers, garage-bound computer nerds, whomever) can get all of the detail they need. I’ll be happy to post the solution to the issue and give the fixer link adoration.

Today’s Problem: No descriptions beneath my page listings on Google.
I’m using the All in One SEO plugin on WordPress. Currently the All In One SEO plugin is version 1.4.6.7 (just upgraded from 1.4.2, would that fix it?), and the WordPress install is 2.2.2. I don’t understand why there are no Google descriptions as they do show up in the meta description of blog entries and even the static homepage of my site (View Source on them to see what I mean). Is it that there is something messed up with my code, some kind of plugin conflict, or perhaps Google is not creating a description for some other reason? I know Google doesn’t rely just on the meta description.

Have a look at a nice example of a job ad that reflects very well on the staffing industry. Jim Durbin posted this ad on his blog and tweeted it out to his network.

VP Marketing Role In St Louis

The job ad has the following things that all staffing firm recruiters could do:

1. Admit right up front the relationship between the recruiter and the client. For seekers really naive about recruiters, it might even be good to link to a definition of contingent search.
2. Make a short statement about the company in your own words instead of some marketing boilerplate about ’startup with IPO potential’. Jim really builds trust that he has a relationship with the client and has internalized it enough to boil it down to a meaningful synopsis for his candidate audience
3. Contrary to conventional wisdom, Jim doesn’t bother with what’s in it for the candidate. He goes right in to ‘What I’m Looking For’. It actually better reflects the fact that recruiters are acting as candidate agents with a responsibility to present the best/right fit for the job. You get the feeling that what he’s looking for isn’t from some internal job description that lists one hundred requirements and ‘desired skills’. He has crafted three profiles from his candidate research that he can effectively sell into the client.

Perhaps if Jim were working for a large staffing firm, or if this weren’t a VP level job, his approach may have been different. Maybe he wouldn’t have had as much knowledge of the client. Had this not been for a marketing job would he have taken the same approach? I’m not sure. It does strike me as a much stronger case for working with a recruiter than the majority of the schlock out there.

This work-from-home guy’s birthday is coming up April 2nd. If anyone at Hudson actually reads this blog, you might want to watch this lovely vignette from our friends at CareerBuilder. My Workplace Worth suggests that I should ‘cut my losses’. Not that I want the stripper to bust out of a five layer cake with a gold plated watch, but c’mon people. Chocolate Fountain!

I’m growing weary of reading information created by the entire marketing consulting world. From self-pronounced social media experts, to agencies, to marketing vendors who blog, to the hundreds of marketing newsletters offering ‘5 ways to energize your online, social media marketing, personal branding spend, strategy ROI’, to mainstream magazines. It’s becoming overload. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll continue to find and follow more pundits. What I find myself searching for are people like me.

I want to find some people who attend conferences, not speak at them. People who read books, not write them. People who are building interactive marketing strategy for their company, not giving advice to others. This is an open call to all internal marketers to connect with me. Why? I just want to read your tweets and your blogs as you build your strategy. I just haven’t found you very easily on the social networks - especially Twitter, Facebook, and the blogosphere. But, I haven’t really been looking that hard either. All of the consultants flood the airwaves with their self-promotion so you haven’t been served to me on an over-tweeted platter.

So, today I started with a simple Google on ‘CMO Blogs’. I found this article from 2006 (*now that’s old news*) by Mario Sundar on Top 10 CMO Blogs. So now I follow Mario - the online Community manager at LinkedIn who writes an excellent blog. This led me to Eric Kintz who blogs about his work as a marketer at HP. He also wrote an informative post on why blogging as a marketer matters. That led me to dig into the work of David Churbuck, who blogs about his marketing efforts at Lenovo. He kindly outlined his thought process into his online strategy for the Lenovo 2008 Olympics sponsorship. He built a bold athlete 2.0 strategy that has value at its core, rather than overt company sponsorship.

Well, that’s my web wandering for the day. If you are out there, I’d love to connect with you, oh Internal Marketer. Here’s my criteria for the best connections.

Apparently the future of customer relationships is empowering the rank-and-file to act as a conduit of the brand message within the online socialscape. This is suggested in a Wall Street Journal piece via Scott Monty. If that be the case, and we also agree that the job is less about ‘managing the message’ and more about interacting in the community on behalf of the company, then marketers better get into the education game quickly. We need to become fluent in online community and social media to the point of being able to teach it to the rest of our organizations.

Here’s a case in point. My wife wrote a scathing rant on her blog about an awful experience with our local Sears retailer. She followed up that missile with the typical phone runaround with varying levels of drones and retail managers until the issue was resolved. It is likely that this heated piece of prose will sit in net space for a long period of time, in all of it’s Google-optimized glory just waiting for other outlets to pick it up. Were the marketing team within the Sears hierarchy able to train every employee to use Google Alerts to find these gems, the response could be swift and genuine. We need to train our people to fight the company’s battles on the customers’ turf, out in the open. Those that do so, ultimately are going to win. There is a HUGE opportunity out there for new tools and new roles in teaching every employee to do social-media marketing. The content must shift from ‘What is Facebook, blogs, wikis, etc’ to ‘How to respond to a negative blog post about our company’.

I could not help but be drawn into the story line of this viral campaign. You have got to see this and try it for yourself. I sent the piece to myself so you could see it in action here:

Dead Man Blogging

Let me know what you think (beside how disturbing the actual message is).

People work for bosses not companies. Today, that sentiment is more true for me than ever before. When the leadership team asked Rick Gray to emcee the annual Sales Awards conference I bet they thought he would have a humorous quip or two. Or maybe he would throw squishy balls with the Hudson logo into the audience (we are from the marketing department you know). I doubt that ANYONE would have expected this. Take a look at what someone caught on their camera phone.

While the song certainly has no chance for American Idol, it does show me a person willing to be creative, gutsy, and unafraid to shake things up. How could others in the crowd not be motivated by a fellow employee on fire for his company like that? That’s exactly the kind of person I like to work for. Nice job Rick!

This post also has me asking the inevitable question about whether or not to blog about my boss. This same question arose for Tiffany Monhollon in her post titled Is Your Boss Reading Your Blog?. She covered my sentiments very well:

I will also tell you that if I didn’t have a great relationship with my boss and know that he fully supports me as a person as well as the entirety of my career, I probably would have had a bit more pause in my decision. But in the end, it turned out to be the best move.

Learning about social media has been a good time for both of us. It has been one of the most challenging projects in my career. Why not blog my boss’s first public appearance on YouTube? We haven’t figured out the power of that medium yet, so we’re going to start now! If you like his song pass it on.

This is an excellent presentation by Jake McKee, a former LEGO employee who currently runs a social media consultancy. He relates the work of interacting with the adult consumer community of LEGO to the tenets of the Cluetrain Manifesto. I was riveted to the content, one because it was about LEGO, and 2 because it touches on so many of the new and challenging principles of marketing that must be grapsed. To me, it is crystal clear that marketing is fast becoming the art of managing the community not controlling the message.

Hat tip to Jeremiah Owyang via Twitter.

There is so much in the marketing world about the interaction between customers in the blogosphere and the companies that make products or services for those customers. From the iPhone, to the Dodge Challenger there are robust communities all over the web making or breaking products through the power of word-of-mouth stimulated by social media. Very little of this interaction is sponsored by the makers of the products, but these voices no doubt affect the direction of the products, and future marketing decisions.

Jobs and labor are no different. In fact, one could argue that the transparency of company and consumer attitudes toward labor, from the advent of labor unions, to the existence of F*ed Company has a far more rich history than some contentious discourse about your crappy computing device.

Transparency is Coming to Legal Staffing
In the past year, this issue has come to the forefront for more legal staffing firms. Employees are not so afraid anymore of getting fired for blogging, even though this, this, and this suggest they should think otherwise. While online conversation had been the perview of IT workers since Usenet, it seems fairly recent that legal professionals have taken to blogging en force.

I first started to look into the online presence of legal professionals in 2005 when I noticed a small website, paralegalgateway.com sending a bit of traffic to Hudson’s websites. Upon further review I found that it was Jeannie Johnston’s site (a Hudson employee at the time) who through a small link in a blog post, had driven some traffic toward us. I was very curious to see one of our own interacting in a very meaningful way with a targeted talent pool from which she would recruit. This sparked more curiosity in me as to where blogging and online community were taking place within the world of our legal staffing practice. I knew that entry level legal professionals were hanging around the Monster Legal channel that we helped to establish in 2007. Still, there didn’t seem to be a voice of the practicing temporary attorney who was doing the large-scale document review which was becoming common.

The Awakening of 2007
With the exception of “Tom the Temp” who started his blog in late 2005, it seems that in mid-2007 the temporary attorney blogosphere became more populated and interesting. Joe Miller posted his first JD Wired entry in August of 2007, as did another anonymous temporary attorney in Washington DC. All of these blogs bring a very real voice to the marketplace that is useful market intelligence for legal staffing firms.

The good (from Tom the Temp):

Anonymous said…
reality check has the right of it. I’m an attorney working at the Newark site, and the original post couldn’t be a bigger bunch of bs. The Hudson people are courteous, pay on time, treat us like professionals, and have made the environment as pleasant as possibly given some constraints by the client (i.e. no phone use in the coding room). Whoever gave you the info for the original post either was fired on the first day for being a slobbering idiot, or needs to work on his fiction.

I’ve only been to this blog for a few weeks, but I already can see it’s just a bunch of WATBs. You cry babies have probably never worked a single day of your pampered lives at a real job. Whah whah whah.

$35 an hour plus time an half for coding isn’t good enough for you? Go get a “real” job then. Most firms aren’t looking to bring on board pouty, bitchy juveniles who think the world owes them, but hey, you might get lucky.

The bad (from Tom the Temp)

I really hope this is true. It’s time for some structure, people. The firms, temp agencies, predatory banks, and TTT law schools are continuing to eat us alive. How much more non-dischargeable law school debt will they be allowed to pile on top us? For the fifth straight year, will you just sit back and allow them to yet again “deflate your rate”? Will you lose yet another P.T.O. (not just any P.T.O, but one belonging to Dr. King), while profits per partner continue to soar? I hope not.

The ugly (from my attorney blog):

John Smith Says:

December 13th, 2007 at 11:00 am
Hudson totally screwed me out of referral fee because I was not staffed with them at the time. What a joke! I will never refer anyone to that agency again.

While marketers base their reputation on being publicly accountable for their thoughts, it appears that temporary attorneys see the opposite. Much of the commentary on these blogs as well as message boards like JDUnderground is anonymous and incendiary. To some extent this helps you get a pulse of the industry better than any employee survey could. Salaries and benefits are down, demand is less than supply, and work conditions are sometimes less than ideal.

I will admit that reading the content is entertaining, although somewhat like watching a car wreck. Hudson has put hundreds of satisfied people to work that are already speaking on our behalf within these social media. So far, my role is to know what is being said - to listen. Not only that, but Hudson’s front-line staff are listening. The real question for an interactive marketer then is how to join the conversation in a meaningful and beneficial way.

photo by mr oji