The PlanetRecruit Blog

“Do more followers on Twitter make you more employable?"

"Not necessarily", writes Andrew Grill ....

Andrew Grill is CEO of PeopleBrowsr UK, a high-tech social media analytic company.  He is also a regular, and sought after conference presenter on social media, and digital strategy and is the editor of one of the world's leading websites on social & mobile networking LondonCalling.co. 

"Twitter is not a popularity competition", says Andrew Grill, CEO of social media analytics company PeopleBrowsr UK.  

Using Twitter can be a secret weapon in the hunt for a new job in IT but like any job hunt it needs to be part of a wider recruitment strategy. 

I generally look at a candidate’s twitter profile (via their LinkedIn profile)  when making a decision about inviting them in for an interview.  Of interest to me are the number of followers, how many and who they follow, as well as the number of lists people have added them to. A well written twitter biography also tells me they really get social media and how it can work for them. When analysing a candidate’s follower vs following count, an equal number of followers compared to the number they are following says to me that they aren’t really using Twitter in the best possible way. 

A higher number of followers than friends says to me that the candidate has something to say and people want to hear what they are saying. Keeping the following count to a manageable number means being selective about who you follow, and this can pay dividends.

Industry Event: Women in IT Advantage Session

As part of its commitment to encouraging more women to work within the IT industry, FDM Group will be holding a “Women in IT Advantage Session” on 17th August at its London Bridge office.
 
The free event will give female graduates and students the opportunity to learn more about the different career options and support available to them, should they wish to pursue a career in the field.
 
FDM Chief Operating Officer Sheila Flavell said, “We are delighted to be holding this event with the aim of promoting the lucrative world of IT to this latest generation of female graduates.”
 
Representatives from key organisations such as the UKRC and Women in Technology will be delivering presentations to give graduates an insight into how their organisations operate and benefit women in IT.
 

Find a Job Through Your Social Network

In such a competitive job market, job seekers, employers and employment agencies are continually looking for means to gain an advantage. Consequently, the methods and tools by which new talent is sourced and acquired are constantly evolving.

Following the emergence of social media giants like Facebook and Twitter, social networking has become an integral part of both our personal and professional lives. So what impact has the increased popularity of social networking sites made on those involved in the recruitment industry?

For those looking for work, social networking can provide a useful tool with which to market themselves to would-be employers.

The Social Limitations of Twitter

You could be forgiven for never having heard of the Dunbar Number, not least because it isn’t a specific number. But in 1998 the British anthropologist Robin Dunbar published ‘The Social Brain Hypothesis’, which suggested that human brains can only keep up with about 150 people at a time. That’s the Dunbar Number – about 150.

This number is consistently proven throughout history: Stone Age villages averaged about 150 inhabitants, just as modern villages do. The latest social model shown to follow the Dunbar number theory is Twitter.

Twitter users can easily build up a following of thousands and follow a similar number themselves; the social model places no limits on our social networks, enabling them to grow exponentially. But it would appear that the human brain is the bottleneck for this new technology.

The Hargreaves Report and the Challenges of New Technologies

The recent Hargreaves report responds to the government’s instruction last autumn to look at whether current copyright laws are hindering innovation in this country. The short answer is, as Hargreaves succinctly puts it, “yes”; reform is needed (p1).

His reflection on the existing Digital Economy Act is that strong online enforcement should be carefully monitored. He suggests a tough approach on enforcement of copyright balanced with education.

In his 10 recommendations he advocates, among other things, that the UK align its laws more with EU laws to make full use of existing exceptions, such as for format shifting, non-commercial research, parodies and library archiving. His ambition is to create the “world’s first Digital Copyright Exchange”, allowing rights owners to sell licences in their work and to make market transactions faster.

Making niche technology mainstream

Apple could be about to do for the cloud what it did for the MP3 player and the tablet computer – make previously niche technology mainstream.

For most, the first MP3 player was the first generation iPod, released in 2002 – when in fact they had been around since 1998. Most recently, since the release of the iPad manufacturers and people alike are falling over themselves to release and buy tablet computers. However, the concept of tablet computing has been around for some time, with Microsoft trying it as far back as 2001.

These innovations have hugely changed the way we think about and consumer media. Take music, for example. Many swore never to give up their CD collections and to continue buying CDs after the iPod release. Compressed music doesn't sound as good – true – and nothing beats owning a real CD or record, yet most music lovers will now have extensive digital collections. The same holds true for books, with research indicating more digital books than paper copies were purchased last year.

Video Killed the Interview Star

I posted on PlanetRecruit previously about Google Books now containing over five million books, which is pretty impressive. But even more impressive are YouTube’s growth figures, which have reached frankly terrifying levels. Every single day, YouTube receives and hosts another six years' worth of video. That’s 36.5 hours of video added every minute.

Start watching nothing but YouTube videos today and you’ll be five years, eleven months and 30 days behind before the end of the day. Tomorrow, you’ll be 12 years behind; the next day, 18 years. So perhaps we can all be forgiven for having missed the latest must-see viral sensation.

Video is everywhere on the web these days, in all kinds of formats and places. For instance, if you’re reading this then you’re probably a user of Skype or Oovoo or one of the many other VoIP (Voice-over Internet Protocol) services on the web. However, as the parent of two small children whose relatives live some on the other side of the world, I can personally vouch for the value of these services. VoIP joins the family together like no other technology I’ve seen before. Children today are growing up seeing nothing unusual in talking to real-time moving images of people on a screen when it’s late at night, even though it’s early morning here.

Copyright and Linking, Post-Meltwater

Linking has always been a fundamental part of the internet. People think nothing of publishing a link to anything they please and would not consider it necessary to ask permission first. However, the courts have struggled to balance the interests of the public to freely link with the news industry’s economic interests to exploit their intellectual property rights. The decision in Meltwater has now tipped the balance in favour of the news media industry.

Background: The Meltwater Decision

Meltwater provide an electronic press cuttings service, notifying PR agencies whenever their clients are in the news. The question that arose in the case was whether Meltwater’s End User License authorised its customers to access the links to articles which they received.

The judge decided it did not, ruling that merely by clicking on the links provided by Meltwater, end users had infringed the original publisher’s content. She refused to accept that receiving a link and clicking on it was merely incidental copying, exempt from copyright infringement. Simply to receive the links would require each user to have their own license.

Navigating the technology and applications market

Making sure that we meet the needs of our clients means that we are constantly keeping an eye on emerging technologies, staying on top of demand, so that when a new type of requirement materialises, we are in a position to respond and offer expert assistance. This does involve an element of guesswork and sometimes when you call heads it will come up tails from time to time.

We recently took such a plunge when we began providing specialist services to those looking to hire mobile application developers, specifically the development of new applications using the Android platform. Entering a new market takes time and money so it was with some satisfaction this week that I learnt that the number of Android mobiles has passed the number of iphones for the first time. Gartner research predicts that Android will account for almost 50 per cent of the smartphone market by the end of 2012, giving it an enormous lead on its competitors.

The market is ever more steadily moving towards applications and devices that can be used on the move. While we don’t yet have a credible rival to the iPad tablet, we are surely only a few upgrades away from having an iPad killer on the market, most likely running on Google's honeycomb platform.

Digital Fame

Google Books reportedly now contains over five million books. That’s 500 billion words covering over 500 years: a seriously impressive figure. But even more impressive is what you can do with 500 billion words – as long as they’re digitised.

The big change doesn’t come from the sheer mass of words and numbers but from the fact the text is stored in a computer, enabling quick and easy searches for words or phrases you’re interested in. If you’ve ever tried to find a particular quote in, say, ‘The Complete Works of Shakespeare’, then you’ll understand why this is a big deal. 

But digital books aren’t just a useful toy for English Literature students. Researchers have studied these five million books and counted the number of times words appear in them from 1800 to the year 2000, tracking how our use of word usage has changed in that period. So far, so academic.