Archive
Archive for the 'IT' Category

My first memory of IT at school was an old beaten up BBC Computer, all green screen, dusty key board and floppy discs.

At home, my brothers and I would bust out computer games on cassettes through our Atari ‘games console’ at a speed slower than it would take a frog to flash its way across a busy intersection.

I am Generation X and it was the mid 1980’s. Computer games were boarder-line cool and computers were almost certainly not cool.

Time progressed. Schools in the UK replaced BBC with Nimbus. I remember my dad joyousness upgrading from a 386 to a 486. Over the moon that we could now play Wolfenstein 3D in 16-bit technicolour with our state of the art VGA graphics card, two megabytes of RAM and joy stick.

Information Technology was merely an idea, a potential. It was certainly not life changing. Faxes and microfiche, pagers, Walkmans and Speak and Spells. The advances were slow and each new step forward was a slight nudge compared to the exponential bounds that we see in today’s world.

Then Personal Technology started to make an impact. It was the early 1990’s and email was beginning to appear. In the workplace, you could actually send someone a message from your keyboard, without getting up out of your chair and it would arrive at the sender almost instantly. The mobile phone. You could make plans on the move, keep track of one another, be connected and more spontaneous. Discmans meant that you could carry around your music on something smaller than a brick and skip through tracks at will. The internet was just around the corner. People began to get actual games consoles at home, with games so fast that you no longer needed to get up and have a real game of football down the park with your friends, while you were waiting for your football computer game to load on screen. Read more…

In the past week alone I’ve been approached online by no less than 30 or so different connections who want to connect to me and my network.

So in the words of Derrick Zoolander, I must be really, really ridiculously popular right?

Well I suspect I’m not as popular as I’d like to think; so why are these professionals reaching out to connect with me and my network?

The answer lies in the as yet, largely un-fathomable Return on Investment (ROI) that everyone believes they can achieve through growing their social and business networks. Surely the more people I know the more likely I am of selling my product, getting that new job or building my client list. But the reality is far from that simple with perhaps only the most astute recognising that the key to working any network, online or off, is to connect with people from whom you can deride a benefit and importantly who may also deride a benefit from you.

‘Influence’ appropriate to your desired outcome in growing a network is the key to a successful network, more so than the number of connections and tenuous friends that you can lay claim to.

As the year comes to a close now is the time to re-assess your goals and objectives for the year ahead; what type of people would be useful for you to know and how can you assist those people? The deluge of social media driven connection opportunities that have grown in the past year alone are staggering and there are no signs of it relenting. At the risk of having to hire an assistant to manage my ‘friends and connections’ I’m going back to the old adage of ‘quality over quantity’. Don’t be offended if I don’t accept your LinkedIn invitation, If I’m doing my job correctly I’m probably saving us both some time if our mutual interests aren’t similar. On the flip side, if you see a connection I don’t see, spell out your intentions clearly and I’m likely to look more favourably on the approach.

 At the end of the day it may not be; ‘what you know, but who you know’ but it’s also now “why you know them’.

Perhaps one of the more pertinent reasons recruitment professionals are scorned lies in the nature of the business model under which they operate, Sales. It’s intrinsic in any sales business that the art of influence and persuasion are required in reasonably heavy doses for anyone who wants to be successful and it’s these attributes that are perhaps not best bed-fellows with the concept of trust. When a job seeker is looking to move in to a new position he/she must feel that they are doing the right thing at the right time, and if the process is being managed by a third party then that trust element, separate from any sales bias, is critical to the success of that process.

In today’s global economy job hunting has never been more paradoxical; on the one hand roles are more complex and specific than ever before whilst on the contrary are often sourced through mass managed, automated technological solutions which fail to address these significant intricacies.

The role of professional recruiter one might argue, has never been more needed. But the trust and altruism of finding someone the right job, at the right time and for the right reasons is essential to maintain professional and industry integrity.