Running the gauntlet of lazy recruitment agents

Anything but able

I want to believe that my LinkedIn profile is good enough and I would be the first to say any profile can be improved upon, but there is no perfect profile, we are just trying to project our best selves.

However, I get barraged with lots of emails from recruitment and talent acquisition specialists, though I am left wondering what the specialism is, as it is becoming obvious to me that they neither read nor assess my profile before proposing totally unsuitable roles that do not fit my experience, expertise, location, or remuneration requirements.

It would seem their professional acumen is vying for a world record in some sort of whack-a-mole exercise of flooding prospects in the hope that one or a few might be hit hard enough to be responsive.

Interest me, engage me

Too many times, I am asked to forward my CV on scant job information, they, thinking I would be interested when they have neither interested nor engaged me.

If you are contacting me, I would hope you have first read my profile and the embedded CV, your specialism coming to the fore by treating me as a professional, through reviewing my experience, roles, responsibilities, and broader profile, rather than as a mercenary for hire.

Then, interest me with a useful job profile along with the associated remuneration range - cut to the chase with the view that we do not want to waste each other's time.

If I am interested, you will get a response and we can have a discussion about the role and the prospects. Recruiters need to get better, the slap-dash approach is becoming an annoyance, hence this post.

It's never too late to commend an old colleague

Farm your social media wisely

Social Media is an intricate relationship and networking environment that needs nurturing much as it needs to be weeded and pruned like a vine so that it can bear much fruit for good wine.

Well over a decade ago, I attended an interview for the role of a technical specialist, it was going well and during that interview, I was promoted to the role of a technical architect. On the first day of work, it appeared everyone else who had been engaged thought I was one of the juniors in the team. It was no time to be a diva, these were people I needed to get the job done.

So, I mucked in with everyone, did and the simple and difficult whilst taking the time to teach, explain, mentor, educate as required. I was also on a postgraduate programme at the time.

Invisible acts for visible benefits

One particular young man, somewhat introverted and quiet stood out for the talent of being able to produce efficient, time and cost-saving tools that helped us a great deal. In my view, it was one of the most valuable members of the team, even if for whatever reason others did not recognise how his utilities considerably raised the productivity of the team.

After I left that the role, I never encountered someone who had significantly changed the team dynamic that way he did, and I did not seem to be presented with an opportunity to commend him and recommend him.

Never too late for a commendation

However, this evening, as I was reviewing my profile, I saw that he had visited and I could not have had a better chance to pen a few sentences down about our working relationship, because there had to be a record. That is what I did which initiated a conversation and a sanguine trip down memory lane.

If the opportunity presents itself, I will willingly work with him again, much as there are others I would love to be on my team. I have worked in many places in the last 20 years, encountered hundreds of people with various levels of expertise and camaraderie, but the few that stand out, do because they were good people first and good at what they do, and in doing what they were good at, helped everyone else get things done better, faster, and beautifully.

Of those people, we must when given the opportunity, speak up for them, support them, commend them, provide glowing references, and promote them. We can see the best of humanity in the work environment and celebrate it too.

A Decade on Twitter

A quarter of a century online

I review my life on social media that appears to go back 25 years when it was not a popular term. My first email address in 1994 and then a CompuServe subscription through which I participated in Usenet groups.

When I moved out to Ipswich in 1995, I found an Internet Service Provider (ISP) who I discovered unilaterally blocked adult websites. I paid him a visit and demanded that as an adult, my access to the Internet should be untrammelled, including the ability to view adult sites, as I am an adult and I do not intend to be policed if I am doing nothing illegal.

I guess he was embarrassed for the fact that I was unabashed, my request was granted that evening and he must have glad I did not have to visit him about anything again.

Throwing off and throwing down

Soon, we were on Internet Relay Chat (IRC), I think that was 1997, opening channels for all sorts of interests until people found ways to exploit vulnerabilities in the TCP/IP stack and knock you offline with DoS/DDoS attacks or those that broke IRC connections, called nuking. We had to implement countermeasures to prevent nukes and the takeovers of IRC channels.

As the popularity of IRC began to wane in the early 2000s, I was in a Berlin hotel when decided to start blogging in December 2003. I hope to have written my 3,000^th blog sometime this year. It was not for another few years before I joined another social media platform. In my early blogging years, I formed significant and lasting friendships from which I began to grow a social network.

Along the line, I joined other niche social media networks, many of which have fallen out use, favour or are dead. Then came LinkedIn, which many did not consider social as in other forums we participated in, I guess, we compartmentalised, trying to keep our strictly professional lives separate from our lives outside work. I have been a member since the 16^th of March 2006.

Can you hear the chirping birds?

One morning just before I left for work, I created a Twitter account and waited for a confirmation. Meanwhile, I travelled to Arnhem where I was working, and it was there that I posted my first tweet on the 8^th of February 2009. Today is a decade since I joined Twitter. As I relayed in a blog, I wrote a couple of days ago, I had to change my mode of communication from long-form writing of a blog to the contextualised concision limited to 140-characters. It was a challenge I took on with relish.

Blog - Tweeting beautifully without apologising for it

I might have been more prolific on Twitter and somewhat become less so on my blog, I have tweeted just under 153,000 thousand times with a following just short of 6,000. I find it a very useful forum for sharing ideas and for getting a prompt and effective response for customer service issues.

A call from beyond

In December 2009, just a couple of days before my birthday, I joined Facebook. I probably resisted jumping on this bandwagon for years. My first invitation to join Facebook came almost two years before when I eventually joined the person who invited me had been dead just over 9 weeks. His Facebook page then became a memorial to lay wreaths and bouquets of thoughts and reminiscences at different times of the Facebook.

Facebook also upended the concept of social media, because the network not only exploited proximity, it allowed you to mine your past. By the time you put in names of your old schools and old friends, many long forgotten, you were caught in a time vortex from which you had little an inkling how to escape.

Mimes and rhymes

Until early last year, most of my Facebook activity came from my Twitter posts and that linked was broken. I would comment on things I find on Facebook, but it is more likely that new posts would come from Instagram or blogs that I have written. I joined Instagram on Christmas Eve of 2014.

Most of my Instagram posts are accompanied by bad poetry or musings about the things I have observed. I have not convinced myself that Pinterest or SnapChat would add any value to my social media landscape. My social media life is lively enough as it is.

This all because of my decade on Twitter and long may we have the opportunity to celebrate life, happiness, love, and the freedom of expression.

Thought Picnic: My Google+ Concerns

Google+ the new fad

The new Social Networking craze is Google+ which a lot of people are adopting and lauding as the next big thing in the online propagation of self, interest, interaction and fun.

Whilst it is a new perspective on the social networking landscape, for more practical reasons I have not found how this contributes significantly to my social networking experience yet.

I have read many reviews of the amazingly new things you can do with Google+, the circles, the hangouts, the granularity in sharing and probably it’s Facebook-killer prospects.

Carrying your users with change

My background in Information Technology is about implementing radical change in the enterprise without disrupting the business process by quantifying risk and benefit without leaving the critical business processes and users behind.

For all the amazing IT infrastructure that can be implemented in an organisation it is usually the users that are left behind and the support department left with the escalating costs of helping the users get to grips with the new environments and systems they have been presented with the IT management somewhat satisfied that the backend systems and successfully implemented and literally oblivious of the user complaints until some senior executive walks into the CIO’s office stating that the situation is untenable.

I root for the user and the many users of the organisation that make up the engine-room of the productivity gains the organisation intends to achieve by implementing any ideas or systems and it is not an easy job at all.

Exposure over experience

For instance, I remember the visual interface changes between Microsoft Office 2003 and Microsoft office 2007, whilst the later version appeared to expose the extensive usability of the product, in the process it left behind the experienced user-base of Microsoft Office products that either had to learn new ways of doing what they always knew or buying additional software that gave them the kinds of menus they were used to in earlier versions.

Eventually, Microsoft realised this that they created a usability website that allowed experienced users to put in their old ways of doing things to learn the new ways of how things are done.

I may have digressed but this is what I realised about Google+, at the moment it does not fit in into the social networking workflow that I have developed in the use of Twitter, Facebook, Blogging and Google Buzz.

Opportunity is not continuity

It does not feed into any of these environments neatly yet, though there are applications ready for that function, it does not channel any of the existing traffic nor does it aggregate any of what I do, it for now looks like a fancy gadget of excitable distraction.

I can understand that Google+ allows for people to develop the influx and categorisations of their social networking contact anew but this is at the expense of leaving behind the audience that has been built up in the various other social networking environments that have been nurtured over the years.

Whilst the connections of Twitter are asynchronous and can be managed with lists certain Twitter applications allow for the traffic to be filtered. On Facebook, fan profiles are asynchronous whilst friend profiles are synchronous, requiring acknowledgements to interact.

Multi-dimensional circles matter

With Google+ Circles linked to the Google+ Streams you can also filter your traffic but Circles are in terms monolithic, it would have been nice to have concentric circles, hierarchical trees or over-lapping circles like Venn diagrams that signify degrees of separation or closeness in terms of who you interact with and share information with because the contacts do not necessarily fall into one circle.

I probably want to put people in different circles as I determine which group of people I want to share information with like someone who is family that I can share the craziest things with that also belongs to my close circle of friends and we have similar interests and probably non-divergent career paths – clicking on that person should immediately show those relationships and hopefully what I have already disseminated.

Hard work or ease?

Another analogy can be found in the acquiring a new mobile phone; over years you build up a contact list on your mobile phone that you might occasionally prune but you would most likely want to electronically export to your new mobile phone without losing your data and its integrity.

There are terms and conditions from the various social networking platforms that might disallow the wholesale transfer of your existing user base to Google+, you find that you are manually recreating your network on Google+ which might be good for some but for others who do not need to exclude any of the existing social networking contact for being better at filtering their user base in the first instance, it becomes a chore that needs to be simplified a lot more in terms of seeing Google+ as a feeder, conduit or aggregator.

Google may not want Google+ to perform any of those functions but just like change can be a difficult process in well-established organisational structures, people might well stick with what they can use and use well retaining their user base that working in multi-various social-networking platforms that have not been usefully integrated for the user.

Hardly where it should be for the users

Google+ might well become the dominant social networking platform over time but the bridge to that seamless integration with existing social networking expression is for now a shaky rope-bridge over a river of very hungry crocodiles a la Indiana Jones.

Google Search might take the context of Google+ as a word rather than an advanced search function that concatenates the next word, I am not convinced it is the best name for this platform as it is or as words, it reminds me of software applications as Act, Clarify, Remedy, AIMS etc which were difficult to search for just because they had more predominant contexts in language than for their use as application names.

I can understand that many may not agree with my views as expressed here but I do not believe this is a concern to be dismissed out of hand, you might well want to leave your old use base behind, but if you a simple thought to your existing social networking contacts; if they are not as geeky as you are, do they want to lose contact with you and really cannot you afford to lose them just because you now have a new toy?

User-driven or developer-driven?

It is incumbent of Google to make Google+ work for you as you adapt it to your purposes with ease, it is time that the user really has a say in what software and applications should deliver rather than what the developer force feeds you just because they think they can read you mind.

Obviously, any new thinking about how to normalise the various data sets on Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, LinkedIn and other platforms is useful, maybe a good disruption to our monolithic considerations, it is left to the user to determine how high the price they want to pay for change in cost, time, process and usefulness.

You can join my Google+ network here.

Do you still Facebook from there?

Be my friend

An invitation to become a Facebook friend arrived the other day to one of my many email addresses not registered with Facebook, so this time I decided to add that address and another one to my profile just to get a view of the invitations I have once before ignored in trying to compartmentalise the different aspects of my life.

I learnt a bit late that Facebook was meant for friends in a social sense and LinkedIn for those from a professional life; that distinction is a bit clearer now, but I have made a few more friends on Facebook for the fact of being a tad opinionated.

We’ve been waiting for you

On the first email address, there were 6 pending invitations, including the one that prompted this amalgamation of email personalities. As I accepted the first, I saw a familiar name.

In fact, he had invited me on Facebook years ago when I was quite shy of the phenomenon; besides, our friendship had been on and off for years, so I never really got the opportunity to renew the acquaintance.

So, here I was given the opportunity to become friends again, and I would have jumped at it, and I hoped and wished that was really possible.

Do you still Facebook?

He hadn’t updated his status for a while, but that did mean there was no traffic on his page, birthday greetings, invitations to events, jokes and the kind of fare that makes Facebook what it is.

The most interesting one was a message of regret about not being able to attend a very important function arranged in honour of my friend, eerily, his burial.

I could at least confirm exactly when he died and that he was well loved by all of us who had the pleasure of his company – he remains a friend on Facebook and a fond memory.

Sometimes you have to ask yourself, am I ready for Facebook? The more bizarre question being, do you still Facebook from there?

Beware of deceptive LinkedIn recommendations

Professional social networking

LinkedIn* is more or less the professional networking site that allows for people to keep tabs with people one has somewhat interacted with in professional life.

For a person who has been self-employed most of my working life and has worked in many organisations, LinkedIn offers a forum to keep tabs with people I have worked with and also allows one to keep abreast of the careers of those same people.

Most recently, I tapped this professional network for job opportunities after having been out of work for almost a year and that mostly due to serious illness. I was glad to find that many of my ex-colleagues responded with sympathy and help which eventually lead to a job.

Self-referencing resource

I have also found that the LinkedIn profile can serve as an adjunct to a curriculum vitae (CV) because it can contain information that would not necessarily appear on a CV for instance, it can be a self-referencing portal if an employer reviews the profile finds people you have worked with and probably knows those people or organisations and make qualified assumptions or deductions of the prospect.

A slightly more subjective but useful function in LinkedIn is the recommendation feature, it can be interesting and indicative of the views ex-colleagues have of a person, hence, it is important that the writer and recipient pay particular attention to the construction, content, context, intent and import of the recommendation.

The recipient is given the opportunity to edit and recommend to the writer changes that would reflect better in order not to have the opinions misconstrued by other readers.

Understand before acceptance

Where English is used but not the mother-tongue, it is even more pertinent that the matter be reviewed by an English speaker before publication. I have at least in a number of cases had to decline recommendations that were subject to unfavourable interpretation even though the intentions were noble and generous – such however should not be enough to allow a recommendation or it would be the equivalent of shooting oneself in the foot.

I was completely mortified when I read a recommendation posted on a LinkedIn profile, I was half persuaded to highlight that the intention and the meaning were at complete variance. However, on reflection, the writer might well have meant what he wrote and the recipient none the wiser about the nuances and pitfalls of the gentle English putdown has proudly published this damning assessment of abilities sandwiched in passable praise.

The short recommendation

“Person is a great consultant with a lot of knowledge from everything. Doesn't bother helping you with all sort of things. Really a great team worker and a nice colleague.”

Three short sentences that speak volumes that are either lost in translation from a Dutch context or are a good excuse to use language as a deficiency to castigate in the most unfair light.

Person is a great consultant with a lot of knowledge from of everything. Either way, the knowledge from or more correctly, the knowledge of everything could easily read as a Jack of all trades and a master of none. The more charitable turn of phrase would probably have been a very broad knowledge of technical concepts – giving it a more specific frame of context. Whilst Dutch allows for verbosity and generalisations that could be easily contextualised, English is not that forgiving.

Does he bother or does he mind?

Doesn't bother helping you with all sort of things. This is the damning part because it reads like he doesn’t mind helping you in every way but it says he is the most unhelpful person you can find regardless of the situation presented to him.

It might be that the writer thought bother was synonymous with mind; in some contexts ‘Are you bothered?’ or ‘Do you mind?’ could be interchangeable but definitely not here. With Google Translate to Dutch the meaning did not carry as well until I modified the sentence to read as “He doesn't bother helping you with all sort of things.”

Dutch requires that the object and subject are very explicit in a sentence, it is not that good with implicit references and so this passed the censorship of the recipient when it should not have gone any further.

Can he really be?

Really a great team worker and a nice colleague. This would leave one almost wondering what the writer was trying to say after the first two sentences and it might well allow one to consider the possibility of a Freudian slip. Malevolently, this was the sweetener to the bait, obfuscating the intentions in the second sentence.

You might call it pedantic but recommendations are read with a greater attention to the detail rather than the general idea of what the writer is trying to convey – this recommendation has in my opinion torn the professional reputation of an otherwise knowledgeable and great consultant who is a nice colleague to shreds.

To think this recommendation has been published for over 2 years might well mean the damage is already done.

As for my opinions of the recipient, I could not possibly comment any further. The advice is, never accept wholesale a recommendation you do not fully understand and comprehend regardless of the good intentions of the benevolent writer.

* LinkedIn - Wikipedia

Tapping my network for work

Tapping my network

Over 20 years of work experience, I have done many things and worked with people. Today, I decided to tap on the network of people I have met in my working life and ask for their assistance in finding a job.

Some of them I have not spoken to in a very long time, but somehow, I felt seeing my message might remind them of their experiences of my expertise, work ethic and abilities and hopefully, they might just rekindle that with offering me a job or recommending me to other recruiters in their network.

The text of the letter follows and I just thought, if I could not use my professional contacts, my blog, my social networks and any other connections to find work too, what are those networks for if they are not also part of life itself?

The letter

I have overcome adversity and now I seek opportunity, opportunities I hope and believe you all as ex-colleagues at work or at school, who I have worked for, worked with or helped at work can offer – I address you all.

I do have an extensive curriculum vitae but that only contains some basic truths of my work experience and maybe what I have achieved before, I definitely cannot put in another section talking about how I fought cancer or how you liked or hated working with me, those are life experiences of a different significance.

However, having come out of that situation, I need to get back to work and want to get back to work – I am speculating and hoping that with the recall of experiences you have had working with me you can help me with assignments or know people who have assignments that you believe I can tackle with the ability, expertise and professionalism you remember me for.

I know this is an unusual message to send to you all but if I cannot tap on the wonderful experiences and network I have had in the last 20 years in this critical but necessary time, then I might have failed to have any impact in all the workplaces where I have been given the opportunity to work, serve and maybe change for the better, all with your help.

I have attached my resume [My LinkedIn Profile here] for your perusal and hope that very soon occasion will warrant being at your service again, I can also be contacted on number provided.

Thank you and the very kindest of regards,

Yours faithfully,

Akin Akintayo

So, all I have to do now is wait and I will keep you posted as to how it all turned out.

Twitter and my other social networks

Online on long

For someone who first went online some 15 years ago with a CompuServe [1] account and having been online literally non-stop since June 2000, I am not particularly enamoured by the many social networking fads and there are quite a few.

I started blogging over 5 and half years ago and did because I felt I ruminated a lot about events and issues around me but never really have a forum in which to express myself or air my views.

Probably, I should have been political, but after a brutal encounter with student union politics where the authorities interfered with anyone who dared have independent thoughts, I felt the game was just too dirty for my sensibilities – however, when I did politics, people knew I was in politics that was 25 years ago.

Links to strange places

There are so many social networks they are as comforting as a scratch to a rash, but one does really wonder what real purpose they serve, but each to their own.

The only mainstream social networking site I am registered to is LinkedIn [2], this is a professional setting for networking with people you have associated with in your career.

As I entered details of my work life, I began to make connections with people I had worked with over the years, we commended and recommended each other based on memories of our experiences and before you know it, you have a self-referencing career profile.

Someone comes across your LinkedIn profile and finds that you are connected to other well known persons, that can be taken at face value or more inquiries can be made – before you know it, you are connected if not working through the connections made within the LinkedIn network.

Though, I have not yet secured an opportunity yet with LinkedIn, I know as a self-employed consultant that in the last 10 years, all projects I have been on have come about through undocumented networks, LinkedIn in my view can take that further sometime in the future, I think.

A commitment to Blogs flagging

Blogs can be difficult to write and it could take time to incubate and then appear as an opinion, I have held issues for months at times before I felt the time was ripe to write with inspired fervour.

Somehow, my blogs are not short, they are fully referenced, attributed and painstakingly researched, well, I try, it might not be as thorough as one would like it but my write-ups are not academic treatises.

The advent of Twitter [3] has somehow changed my blogging perspective, as system whereby you condense a topic, a reference and your opinion into 140 characters must test anyone’s abilities in concision, precision, brevity and context, you bet, mine have been tested.

I have been quite a purist about Short Message Service (SMS) messages, I hate abbreviations and what is known as SMS English, I once received such a message from my kid sister, I politely told her I could not understand what she had written – it took my mother transcribing it to traditional English for the penny to drop.

The Twitter spirit is fabulous

Anyway, I do like Twitter, it makes you think about how to put it all together in one Tweet making allowances for a reply or a ReTweet. This means you Tweet must be at least 2 characters plus your Tweeter identity short of 140 characters. Sometimes, you have to rephrase a Tweet and still maintain the original context, but I wonder what this would make of communication.

Would we all become masters of the soundbite, earnest purveyors of the dramatic put-down or scribblers of putative one-liners?

I am not sure that Twitter would radically affect the seeming verbosity of my blogs but this outlet is very useful; in 140 characters, I could be serious, silly, salacious, sceptical, sanguine, sarcastic, probably scandalous but never seditious.

A toolbox of Twitter spanners

Beyond that, Twitter came in useful when I found myself the only passenger on a boat, I sent a Tweet announcing where I was and one announcing my arrival on terra firma – it offers public insurance with private assurance.

There are so many Twitter tools out there but I have selected three for their ease of use, basic functionality and follower management capabilities.

I use the PowerTwitter Add-on to Firefox [4], it automatically expands the shortened URL to the source and shows pictures and video links if the short URL points to those elements. I can immediately see who I am following and who is following me.

My Swiss-Army Twitter knife

Twhirl [5] is easy and portable, the reply, ReTweet, favourite and direct message icons are available when the mouse is moved over the image of the Tweeter. I use the http://is.gd URL shortener because it gives the shortest URL and only this weekend the sequentially generated part moved up from 4 characters to 5 characters.

Then suddenly I got all this following from lewd profiles, those I did block but I also ended up blocking some profiles I should have just stopped following – I found out how to better work the system over time.

Just like my blogs the general theme of my Tweets is also about things too concerning to ignore, so really, I am not interesting in some other get-rich- quick Internet money making idea – if the ideas were so good, the purveyors of such Twitter Spam would be serial entrepreneurs making money not part of the nuisance of online noise.

Between friends, acquaintances and hobos

Just like I learnt with ICQ over 10 years ago, in the first day, I was connected to 50 people who did not say more than “Hello”, I was so clueless about who they were, what their interests were and they had not bothered to fill in their profiles. I cleaned out everything and ended up with just 5 connections. The same logic has applied to all my other networks, I engage with people who engage me because there is no point taking traffic you cannot use. It is already a jungle out there.

So, this is where Tweepular [6] came in useful, it shows mutual follows, unrequited follows and followers – in fact, it is a crude tool I use every other day based on the last time a Tweet was published and the content of that last Tweet to decide whether to follow or not – so that the point in time when I check Tweepular my decision is a hammer and that momentary Tweet is a nail.

The developers of Tweepular are such fun loving crazy people, as it generates your data the progress bar has the Twitter bird moonwalking – makes me smile everytime.

What I would like

I would like to see a proper reference to Tweets I have replied to so the thread is consistent and if necessary one should be able to easy expose a thread to public viewing.

I have published my Tweets on my blog, on the left there is a full-colour Flash based record of recent Tweets and to the bottom right of my blog, you can find a list of my last 50 Tweets.

Tweepular intends to create a feature to show Recent Unfollowers, but really, are we that bothered? In the end, the ideal TwitterVerse is to be followed by just the same people you want to follow, we would never get that ideal but people are getting on my list the more their one-liners have content, context, sense and probably some humour too.

I am not on FaceBook, I am just not persuaded of its usefulness at all and Flickr handles my photographs efficiently, in fact, I have had a few published in forums, guides and journals.

Sources

[1] CompuServe - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[2] LinkedIn Home

[3] Twitter - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[4] Power Twitter : Add-ons for Firefox

[5] twhirl | the social software client

[6] Tweepular Login