Mike de Block

Dream-job perspective - Recruitment agencies WAKE UP!

The consequence of social media for every type of business is:

This phenomena roughly explains the initiatives in the current job market, like Annemarie Appelman (dutch) and Rene Boender’s experiment with 4 American student in their search for a job. In short, each student launched a blog and within 4 weeks they were hired by their desired companies, in which the highest investment was $ 10,00. I was flabbergasted, but immediately realized that this trend would soon become mainstream. Especially, if you take the picture above into account, in which stories like these would be spread around the world with a rapid pace. In short, the trend that job seekers can distinguish themselves by creating an online personal brand is innovative, but certainly not lasting.

Take for example the search I did on twitter for my dream-job  “social media specialist”. 

Off course this is a “hyped” position within a company (it’s no coincidence that this is my dream job;), but the applications are accessible for every twitter user. So let’s be honest, as an aspiring social media specialist, it’s becomes harder to position yourself as a specialist. Even if the adoption cycle of social media would be an roll’s royce engine, it still would be overheated.

The point I am trying to make is that the number 1 need for every job seeker is to stand out of the crowd. Nevertheless, none of the recruitment agencies offer online job seeding campaigns.  Recruitment agency are slacking really hard and I hope you see as a recruiter the money that is lying in front of you. Still unsure what the hell mister Mike is talking about? Oke here it comes.

Social media campaigns from companies are seeded in order to trigger blogger’s to discuss a specific topic and create an online buzz. However, individuals are becoming online brands as well. In search for your dream-job you thus should not solely focus on your blog, but hire an recruitment agency that is seeding your personal brand on the web. However, I do not know whether a recruitment agency is offering this. Mmmm maybe I just found the market were I could lay out my expertise and leverage it into a nice 6 sum ROI;) Oh what the hell, let’s make use of the momentum, who would like to become a partner;)

Update 12-10-10: 8:19: Mashable wrote an article about the same topic. However, they have reversed the whole discussion, in which the job seeker should be aware how companies are posting jobs in this fast paced competitive world. Click on this link to read the whole article How job seekers may use social media in the future.