online recruitment, cloud recruitment, social media and what not. It is the generation now tools and the future of most if not all industry BUT how confusing can this be for people who arent experts or have no idea of how to measure the value from all these sources. I was listening to a lecturer from stanford talking online recently and he raised some interesting issues about the amount of info and data consumers and have to assimilate with the daily development of new applications and tools available online at the moment. This made me think of a few years back when I went for a job interview in Dublin and was telling the owner of the agency about my source strategy and how I find the candidates online and what not, he stared at me for about 20mins before telling me I was reaching for the stars now in his own words. Roll on two years and things have changed organisations are talking bout SEO's, recuiters, agencies and companies are talking bout online source tools and social media networking etc. I follow the updates on what google will do next, what Microsoft will try to achieve and how other media networks are going to come out with new solutions that will blow the market open once more. But as times flies and I remember my experience from two years ago and the change that has taken place in the job market in Ireland I put on my predictive intelligence hat and try to look into my crystal ball at what the future will bring for the internet enthusiast.
Recently I had the opportunity to advice some young and upcoming recruiters about how to use the pletora of online information and tools available to them and they managed to drag me into the conversation about the death of the job board! do I think job boards are dead? certainly not, what I see if job boards reinventing themselves with technology and becoming more visual in their approach to the industry, thats the advice I gave to a job board recently anway. But my advice to the recruiters I was talking to was to simplify and learn the basics of what they need, while using different tools on a needs basis as well. Information is key to everything but how we manage or use that information is the recipe that will determine success or failure.
Staying on that conversation we talked about search strings, new metasearch engines, micro search engines and other creative forms of internet sourcing. I took a lot out of that conversation and their enthusiasm for the journey of discovery ahead for them, but for me it was more about finding a balance between the present and the future. You hear about companies creating jobs that I think from a strategy perspective are not sustainable because nobody really thought about the relevance of the positions to the future of the organisation. Most are thinking about now and getting on the train of what the internet has to offer, hiring young intelligent people and paying top dollar for now, without thinking much about sustainability. So my quest is not just about improving my Talent Acquistion, strategy or development skills but also looking into the world of Talent management and re-engineering.
I will tell you what I discover in my next blog, am off to prepare for my next training program on sourcing strategy.

John Kamara
Talent/Strategy Manager