Recently two people I have great respect for, Matthew Jeffrey and Kevin Wheeler, stated two total opposite things in their ERE articles. While Kevin asked if internal recruiters were usefull and came to the conclusion that outsourcing recruitment is the way of the future, Matthew made a point of declaring the agencies dead.

So who’s right? Who’s vision is most likely? They can’t both be right? Or can they?

I recently heard a very interesting thought by a philosopher. With almost every vision, if you state the exact opposite, it usually seems just as likely. So I guess they can both be right… or wrong depending on the point of view.

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My good recruitmentbuddy Matthew Jeffery recently published his recruitment 4.0 vision on ERE. Since I love a man with a genuine vision, I will advice everybody in the industry to read it and believe it. Well, most of it anyway.

Usually I don’t like responding to a blog with a blog, since you’ve got comments for that. However, in this case his article is so long I fear my response will be too long for the ERE site to handle. Since many websites do have limits on the number of characters you can post in a reply. Hence a blog reply, with some nuances to his vision.

He starts with the fact that recruitment could be a profit centre within a company and I totally agree. Personally, I think recruitment already is a profit centre, yet the accounting is wrong. Why do I say that? Simple: if the people that are recruited didn’t bring profit to the company, the company wouldn’t be profitable, would it? The primairy asset of most companies are people now, specially in the western world. So getting in these people is profitable, hence recruitment might be the greatest profit centre every company has.

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Last week I visited the Social Recruitment Conference in London. The line-up promised a glimpse into the international world of social media and recruitment. With companies like Unilever (global resourcing director), Accenture (UK), Intel (Europe), Pepsico (UK, Ireland, South Africa) and Societe Generale Group (France) I hoped to see some of the international developments in the field.

The short summary of the whole thing is that it was a slight disappointment. Perhaps the most positive surprise is “the challenge group”. The corporates, however, did not really amount to much and had hardly any concepts we have not seen in the Netherlands. We are certainly not running behind as Dutch, although there are slight differences are great and there are a few ‘ah ha’ moments for me were.

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Seth Godin’s Linchpin is about becoming irreplaceable. It starts with the fact that everybody is brilliant. Everybody is brilliant, just not all the time. Albert Einstein for exmple, one of the most brilliant people the earth has ever seen, could often not find his way home. He was brilliant some of the time, like many people. It’s all about doing something amazing with these moments of insight and becoming irreplaceable.

Richard Branson is also mentioned in the book. 95% of the time he does normal work that everybody could do, many probably better then he does. It’s about those 5% of his time when he does something only he seems to be able to. He connects the dots, he sees opportunity that nobody else sees and takes decisions that nobody else dares. That’s what makes Virgin one of the most successful organizations in the world. Lees verder »

As a media partner of the Social Recruiting Conference we had a chance to interview Stéphane Le Viet, the CEO of Work4 Labs, the company behind Facebook recruiting tool Work for Us.

We recently reviewd this app here on Rectec (Dutch only) so we are very happy to be able to ask him some background about the app and some ambitions.

Stéphane, with Work4 Labs (www.work4labs.com) you’ve built the ‘Work for Us’ app in Facebook, giving big companies the chance to build an easy way give Facebook visitors of Fanpages the option to apply. Can you give us some numbers about the success of your company? How many companies are using this? How many applicants does your system process during a month or year?

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RecTec is proud media partner of the Social Recruiting Conference in London, june 30th. In the weeks going to this conference we post short interviews with different speakers. Last week we spoke with Matthew Jeffery, Head of talent acquisition EMEA at Autodesk. TodayPaul Maxin, Global Resourcing Director @ Unilever.

An interview about the worldwide strategy of Unilever on graduate recruitment and the position of social media in it.

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Last week we announced that we are a partner of The Social Recruiting Conference, june 30th in London. As a media partner we have some access to the speakers and going onwards to the event we will publish some interviews with the speakers of the conference.

Today some Q&A with Matthew Jeffery,  Head of EMEA Talent Acquistion at Autodesk. Some might know him from Digitaal-Werven last year, when he was still the head of global talent acquisition ot Electronic Arts.

We asked Matthew some questions about his move, the differences between the two jobs and of course if he believes he can achieve at software maker Autodesk what he did at games developer EA: 65% hires trough social media.

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Not to long ago the world had three centre’s of knowledge: Europa, America and Japan. Only there could you find decent universities. That’s where the knowledge was. I met a man recently who went to Malaysia arround 1970. He said: it was England’s plantation. Nothing more. Now Kuala Lumpur is a thriving capital with high rises all round.

The west and Japan lost it’s monopoly on knowledge. In 2008 the university of Hong Kong was ranked 26 and that of Singapore 30 in the best universities arround the world. In total there are 5 universities from China or Hong Kon, 2 from South Korea and 2 from Singapore in the Top 100 of the Times Higer Education. And we’ve even seen some decline already, since the university of Being was once top 20 and the Indian institute of technology has dropped out of the top 100 and was once top 50 (in 2004).

This worldwide spread of knowledge had several implications, also for recruitment.

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Of course it’s no suprise that Forrester knows how to use social media. But the fact that they actually do it themselves for hiring a new senrio social media analyst and execute it nearly perfect makes it worth blogging about.

A couple of days ago Jememiah Owyang announced that he would be leaving Forrester after two years on his own blog. He didn’t yet say where he is going, but he thanked Forrester for a great adventure.

Four days later a guest post from the hiring manager at Forrester, regarding the position that will become vacant. Now why is this so perfectly done?

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As Totaljobs is one of the largest UK jobboards, they have interesting figures you can do analysis on. And with the Totaljobs barometer you can go trough some figues yourself. I like it, because you don’t get to see the numbers some marketeer thought you’d like, but you can look at them yourself.

So let’s go trough some figures and see what they tell us.

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