I blog when I am inspired and I blog when I am mad
Today I am mad… and I figured I would give an education to those people who just don’t get it. Listen up oh ye job posting spammers.
Here is the problem: 10-15 years ago, someone profited from sending mass emails to every contact they had an email for. What did they send? A job posting or a candidate.
This was not a common thing, “back in the day”. So it worked, and a handful of people made a bunch of placements due to an enhanced network reach and the wonders of email.
Please be a student of history here. Follow this logic
Things change. New technology usage of any type tends to be simple and adopted by the few. Next, the technology gets wider adoption and it gets more specialized, due to changing needs. So sending 1000 people your candidate or job posting (henceforth “blasting”) worked 10 years ago, but today it adds to noise and has reduced impact.
Today, I got “twitter spammed”. Someone I added to my network, posted a bunch of job postings to their account. I was following them so the entire first page on my iPhone was filled with their postings.
I am no-longer following him. In fact, I removed just about everyone I was following, and will only adding people that don’t do the “pizza post”. What is a pizza post? It is when someone has nothing better to do than tell every detail of their life. Even if they have great thoughts sometimes, I refuse to follow anyone who used the medium for the drab and uninteresting… give me ideas and make me think!
Back to job order sharing and candidate blasting. The problem is that if you do this despicable act, you are part of the problem, creating noise, creating spam, LinkedIN spam, twitterSpam, etc.
Here is how to do blasting right.
Build a solid network of OPTS-IN that want to accept candidates or open Job Orders.
Build a strong network of people in your field, you will have better luck sending to a targeted group of 25 than a mass spam of 1000.
DO NOT assume that because someone is connected to you on a social network (ie LinkedIN) that they want to get blasts from you. THIS IS NOT OK.
If you want to use Twitter, create a separate account for blasting.
Use a network that is highly specialized for blasting. Don’t use a medium like LinkedIN unless you are in a group specifically for sharing of Jobs and Candidates.
Actually TALK to people that are in your network. If you are to do business with them, adding that human element sooner rather than later will help make you a better partner.
If you are one of the people that gets a blast and did not opt-in. Remove them from your social network
There is so much possibility in candidate and job order splits, if done right.
For vendors creating new offerings in this space (taking advantage of existing social networks)
Think your model through so you don’t add more noise for all of us
Understand that people are best served if they can separate the blasting from their social network personas
Give your users the tools to be targeted.
Above all, make sure your venue has some sort of opt-in
A few months ago, I suggested to Reid Hoffman, Founder of LinkedIN to create a “flag” in LinkedIN that told you when a message was mass-mailed. This should be very simple for them to implement. If someone sends THE SAME message out to over 50 people on LinkedIN, the “mass-mailed” flag is set. This would give LinkedIN users the ability to immediately (1) delete the offending email and (2) remove that person from your network
Reid replied that they were looking at such an option already. Sure. I’m still getting spam Reid. Spam is good for LinkedIN, I would be surprised and impressed if they added the feature.
So here is an idea for someone to build a useful service:
-Create a system that you can forward a linkedIN (or any social network) spam message to
-Pick some reasonable threshold. If any one person is reported over that threshold they go on a “block list”
-Create a LinkedIN application that automatically deletes those messages
SocialSpam.com domain is available;)
I will give a $10,000 coupon/bounty, good for any Broadlook software, to anyone who builds this application.
Getting a good domain that is a real word or combination of real words is almost impossible these days. Now, for someone like me that has a new product idea every week or so, this poses a problem. Sometimes I get “stuck” when I can’t either name a creation or get a good domain to put it on.
I’m done with picking real words.
I am one of those people that *refuse* to pay more than 7 bucks to GoDaddy to get a domain. I won’t do it. Paying for a domain that someone else squatted on it simply against my DNA.
Now I have no problem with domain farmers…that’s what I call them. These people take a domain, build it to have some valuable content, and then sell it. The squatters are the ones that do nothing, create nothing, they scarf up someones (trademark) in some cases and hope to play leech until they get blood (yes this happened to me). He lost.
Sometimes, paying a squatter good coin is just unavoidable, however, many companies have simply avoided this trap by making up words.
Look to the future.
What is the equivalent of domain squatting now? Where is the wide open frontier? Here are some things on the horizon.
Username SEO: What happens if you create a username of wwwgooglecom? or RecruitingSoftware? Try it.
URL shorteners: most of us have seen http://tinyur.com and http://tr.im. Both of these services are used widely in services like twitter, where cutting down a long URL can be important. Both of these services now offer vanity URL’s. For example try these:
Yes, I made sure I got these before someone else did. I used each of these in a twitter post where cutting the URL to a reasonable size was important. Am I saying that tr.im is the next big thing? No. I am simply making a point.
Forum names:
Think about it. What is the value of having the username BarackObama on facebook?
What is your brand or trademark? Do you have the tinyURL, tr.im, facebook, etc for at least the important ones?
Spend 1 hour and secure them. Don Ramer and his company Arbita does a great job in reversing the “brand highjacking” that happens when a company’s job postings start showing up first on aggregator sites like Indeed. For the large corporations that are unhappy when a google search with “Jobs” + “your company” does not yield search results to your company… you need to call Don or George LaRocque, head of sales.
This is the large scale stuff… What about smaller stuff like a product name or trademark?
Perhaps there is an entirely new business model here to protect clients important product names. For a fee:
-Secure the major trademark names & product names for all the major social media sites
-Wrap them up and turn them over to the user via a single-sign on interface
-Facilitate cross posting across all sites (in many cases, you must keep accounts active to keep them)
This may exist already, but probably not in the form I am thinking here. There was a company called NameProtect. From what I remember, they are reactionary to protecting a brand or trademark once a violation has occurred. I’m talking more about a proactive approach to registering your brand under every major site, forum, etc. This would be too hard for anyone to do themselves. Ahh the wonders of automation.
Among my 12,000 readers… I can hear the vendors running to http://tr.im
Hopefully they are really running now. Take this to the next level. Shut eyes and think (after you read this senario):
1. Someone correctly secures a tr.im vanity URL and correctly assigns it to salesforce.com. So http://tr.im/salesforce points to http://www.salesforce.com
2. He starts using twitter and does real tweets about salesforce, using the tr.im/salesforce URL
3. Others using twitter start using that URL to shorten their messages
4. Remember, someone controls that URL, not salesforce. After that shortened link gets very popular, the one who controls it, changes it to point to netsuite.com (a salesforce competitor)
5. Brand highjacked!
Is your brand safe?
*Note: as to not have someone misuse salesforce.com brand in any way thinking I was suggesting it, I registered salesforce to point to the correct location of salesforce.com.
Here is an experiment to help develop taxonomies of keywords.
First engine is http://keywords.broadlook.com. The focus of this engine is the keywords and metatags within websites and build a list of (1) keyword extensions of your input. Example: if you type in the word “research”, the engine will return the top results in 1000’s of phrases that start with “research”, like “research and development”, “research papers” and “research triangle”. In addition, engine 1 returns a list of keywords in closest proximity to your input term.
Second engine is http://keywords2.broadlook.com. This engine does the same as engine #1, except it works with the BODY of html pages vs. keywords and meta tags.
Building a ultra-fast proximity engine with entity recognition could yield some interesting results.
Examples:
-Who are the top 10 people on the web that are mentioned in closest proximity to Bill Gates or Barack Obama? How does that compare to the month previous?
-What are the top 10 companies mentioned near Broadlook or Salesforce.com?
-Who are the top 10 people mentioned in conjuntion with an event, company or date?
The combinations are endless. What applications can be developed from this type of information? I can think of many in the research and analytics space. The 2 main components are the entity recognition and proximity indexing. For questions about the engines email to donato dot diorio at gmail com with subject “keyword engine”
Please keep in mind that this is pure research and we are not even sure ourselves of the uses of the core technology.
It’s Saturday, I’m in at the office and I have 350+ emails in my in-box. Arghhh. I took a 1/2 day off on Friday to be the helper at my daughters school…so I got behind. However, 350 emails is just crazy.
Here is approximately how the numbers broken down.
The Good
50 legitimate business emails. These are client, partners and prospects that I want to communicate with
5 personal emails.
10 alerts from various services
120 LinkedIN invitations. No problem here, but I don’t need to see these in my inbox.
The Bad
30 invites to various webinars. Most of these are from legitimate business connections that somehow decided I should go on a general distribution list.
The Ugly
50 requests from other social networks.
75 absolute unwanted spam messages.
Somehow I let my in-box get away from me. I lost track of best practices. Anyone with some ideas on managing an out-of-control inbox, I want to hear from you. This blog is part 1. In part 2, I post the solutions & suggestions that I gather over the coming weeks. Part 2 will only be posted once I get back control of my email inbox.
For those about to send me suggestions. I already make good use of filters and I have a professional email spam-blocking service that I am happy with. The spams I am getting are from contacts that somehow make the conceptual leap from being a business connection to putting me on their distribution lists.
Idea: wouldn’t it be nice to have a program that took all webinars and events emails and only shows you ones that fit your schedule? hmmm
I just came back from the Kennedy conference in Orlando, FL. The most important thing I learned is that Broadlook needs to buy more headphones. Anyone who has been to a conference and seen the Broadlook booth, knows that we get lines backed up to get a peek at our wares. In order to reach more people, we created a 4 minute video, that concisely describes what Broadlook does. So, even though we did not have enough headphones for everyone… I want to thank the great attendees at the Kennedy show for sharing. Next time, we will have more headphones!
Among the groups of people at Kennedy, there was a contingent of professional resume writers. One of them stopped by the Broadlook booth and I gave her a quick walk-through of Diver.
“Can you do a search for Chemical Engineer resumes?” She asked
Sure, I said.
I let her then type a search string into Diver, to let her put it through the paces. She pressed the SEARCH button. As Diver started extracting resumes from across the web, she spoke out loudly “There he is!” as she jumped up and down. This was good for me, as it drew additional people to the Broadlook booth.
She was loud, proud and rather giddy. One of her recent clients, for whom she wrote the resume, was pulled up with a large group of other resumes.
Then I scared her.
She asked me to show her how the filter function worked in Diver. In the filter box inside Diver, I typed in, at her request, “polymer clay”. Her candidate, her work, her resume was filtered out. Gone.
At first, she blamed Diver, telling me that she knew that she added “Polymer clay” into a skills list to help with search engine optimization (SEO). I then explained to her that Diver filters based on the significant parts of the resume. It was designed this way based on my years of being a recruiter. During my recruiter years, most systems, like job boards would search on text anywhere within the resume. A quasi-smart candidate could add a Über list of every tech skill imaginable to a resume. The intent being that is it would turn up in every search.
Those days are over. Diver ignores the skills section of a resume and applies it’s filter to the education and experience blocks of the resume. This way, Diver is looking for skills listed within the language of the job history. Basically, Diver is doing exactly what a smart recruiter does; Ignore the big skill list and read through the job history and look for a direct correlation or inference for the desired skill set.
Keep in mind that most job boards still perform a “stupid” search. If you are looking for a keyword it doesn’t matter if your first name is Java, you list a skill as Java, or you write about Java in your work history. All keywords, at all places, are equivalent. The same can be said for searching Job Postings. Think about it… a job posting can have multiple sections, the actual job description, a section about what the company does, information on how to apply, benefits, etc. Most Internet search is poor.
I didn’t really want to spend much time on Diver, but it is a glimpse of how things will be done in the future. Eventually, the job boards will catch up. A friend of mine, a CEO of search technology company points out that the job boards may never want to do this. Why? “Because it will significantly reduce the resumes that match your query and people will realize how few candidates job boards really have”. Interesting point.
So, for those resume writers out there, personal or professional. Here are some tips on how to develop your resume so that it will have greater impact within “search”.
Before doing this, I read up on many resume writing services. The fact that most of site (not all) that I visited reminded me of web 1.0 tells me that most of the writers have no conception of SEO. They may be good writers, but they do not understand technology. They are writing for the reader and that is the cardinal mistake.
1. Write your final resume for the searcher, not the reader.
This is the biggest mistake made. It is a frame of mind. If you can “grok” this, you don’t need to read any further. The searcher is not just a person. The searcher is a person combined with the capabilities (or inabilities) of the search mechanism being used.
2. Use permutations to your advantage. Leverage it in work history, education and anywhere
Work history line:
BAD 2001-2008 CEO, Broadlook
GOOD 2001-2008 Chief Executive Officer / CEO, Broadlook Technologies Inc. / BTI / Broadlook.com / Pewaukee, WI 53072
Broadlook has never been referred to as BTI, but think of the ways that IBM could be search for: IBM, IBM CORP, International Business Machines, etc.
3. Put your most important skills within the description of the job history. As discussed earlier, technology will improve over the next few years. More and more search tools will allow the targeting of specific sections of a resume.
4. Post your resume on your own site as well as the job boards. Get a free hosted blog via wordpress.com and add a resume section to it. This is something that resume writers could do for free, it does not cost anything. It would even be the delivery mechanism vs. a WORD or PDF file.
5. If you do post on the job boards, include a link back to your own resume site.
6. Post your resume now, even if you are not looking for a job. Why? The longer something is online, the more chance that it will get indexed. Make it an anonymous resume if you don’t want your contact information out there right now.
7. Make sure that some part of your resume page has dynamic content. Search engines like pages and sites that change. It is easy to find free plug-ins to add content and feeds.
8. Lastly, do make sure that you have a well-written resume. Having all the SEO in the world with a bunch of spelling mistakes won’t endear you to a recruiter or employer.
There is a tremendous GAP in what could be done as a service for job seekers and what is being done. What this means is that some entrepreneur is working on that problem already or someone should. I surely don’t have the time for it.
Donato Diorio is the Chief Executive Officer for Broadlook Technologies, an award winning blogger and a contributing author for the upcoming Guerrilla Marketing for Job Hunters 2.0
Companies and the minds within them evolve over time. I have experienced it firsthand in founding Broadlook Technologies and steering its growth over the last 6 years. Core competencies change, competitive landscapes change, opportunities come and go and through all this there is your corporate identity and messaging. There is internal messaging, external messaging and…
THE ELEVATOR PITCH
While internal messaging may be something like “don’t complain about the 150 lbs slobbering behemoth of a dog the CEO brings in with him” (if they do, I bring in her soon to be 200 lb offspring), I am not focusing on that here. Today I am concerned (sometimes, up at night) about external messaging; that which is projected outwards to the marketplace. What brought this to my attention was my wandering around the booths at the recent Onrec conference in Chicago. Innately, I a very curious person; I want to understand. So I made the rounds to each vendor booth and simply asked them.
“So what do you do”?
For the most part, I was horrified with the experience.
Why? It was NOT because what I heard was awful. In fact, many pitches were excellent. I was horrified because it made me question and run to the Broadlook booth. Was my team excellent, or not so excellent?
Let me digress…Understand this is an area of pride for me, Dan Hughes (one of Broadlook’s co-founders) and I rock at the trade shows. People line up to get a peek at our latest solutions. We have well crafted pitches, regardless if we are talking to a recruiter, recruiting manager, sales rep or CEO.
How did my team at Broadlook Technologies do with their pitches?
Mixed results. Some were very good and some were poor. Next step, I called each of my reps that were not attending the show.
“This is Donato, I want you to call my cell phone back ASAP. I won’t pick up my cell phone. Leave me a message as if I was a prospect at a trade show and I asked you.”
“So what do you do?”
Armed with a larger sample size, it was hard for me to accept that Broadlook Technologies was, as it relates to elevator pitches…average. We filled out all sectors of the bell curve. That hurt. The blame was solely mine and I needed to do something about it. Average sucks.
Fast forward. Today Broadlook Technologies rocks the pitch.
How did Broadlook get there?
I did a deep dive into researching elevator pitch. Most of the research, materials and advice I found was related to making a pitch to get financing. In reality, this type of elevator pitch is 2-3 minutes long and is too lengthy for a trade show pitch. I needed techniques for a 20-30 second pitch, not 2-3 minutes.
Most of what I learned is that people have mastered copying each other. Like almost all writing in all industries, industry “experts” are copying 5 of the top 10 something’s from one place or another to build their top 10 list of something else.
I’ve never been good at that.
So it was time for fieldwork. Thus, for those that saw me in October conferences with my camera, I was learning. At the first conference, I was in not helping with the pitches; I recorded them as-is. The camera was cheap, and the audio quality was lack-luster. At the second conference, I had a new Sony HD camera. Video was great but the audio was poor with all the background noise. By the 3rd conference, I added directional microphone. By the 4th conference in October, I learned what made a great pitch and I was able to coach the people I was recording. After the 4th conference, I was confident enough to put together a 60-minute webinar: “The Art of the Elevator Pitch”. It went over very well for the vendors attending the Kennedy conference. In the webinar, I talked about elements of a good pitch as well as how to measure and coach a pitch. Info on measuring and coaching was absolutely void, so I feel I made a break-through contribution. What good is teaching something if you don’t have the tools to measure effectiveness and coach the topic?
This was a fun experience. In total I did about 60 recordings. 38 of the recordings made it into this blog entry. The ones I cut out were either very bad, or the video/audio quality was poor. I am not a videographer, some pitches were fantastic, but my camera skills were not and the end result was unusable. My end goal was to (1) share what I learned about pitches and (2) give the vendors that spent time with me a venue to get them some exposure.
If anyone that I excluded wants to be included, contact me and we can record your pitch via Skype and I will post it on a future blog. I’ll be adding an “elevator pitch” section to my blog, as I intend on continuing my research.
Much of the existing literature on the Internet about elevator pitches included 8-10 points to remember. Trying to remember 8-10 concepts at the same time can be paralyzing. I wanted to bring the whole process down a few, simple, memorable steps that anyone can implement. After my research and fieldwork I can up with a three-step process to build your elevator pitch. Enjoy the videos!
1. Talk about a problem. What is the problem in the market that caused you to create your product or service?
Sales reps spend 30% of their time prospecting. They use the Internet inefficiently. They are manually picking through web sites… cutting & pasting contact information. They do this because the leads they are getting are stale and overused.
2. How do you solve that problem? Be concise and clear.
Broadlook provides solutions that harness names, titles, emails, phone numbers and bio’s from the Internet. You choose the sectors or companies to target. The data is fresh. The data is actionable. Think about it: The most powerful list is the one no-one else has. We can help you build that list.
3. What makes you unique? Don’t use generic terms like the “best”, craft a something that truly differentiates you in the market.
We automate the entire process of Internet research from finding the data to moving it seamlessly into your CRM. We can change 8 hours of research into 15 minutes.
Lastly, for those interested in the powerpoint for the Art of the Elevator Pitch webinar. Get it here.
