Christopher Herot's Weblog: Social Media Breakfast 7

This morning the Boston Social Media Breakfast moved across the street to Ryles and filled the room with local entrepreneurs at Twitterati.

Today's topic was Hiring/Getting Hired in a 2.0 World. Stever Robbins led off with his Ten Great Cultural Career Lies (v3) and an admonition to use social media such as Twitter as a tool to make connections which can lead to a conversation rather than as a substitute for the conversation itself. (Video here.)

Aaron Strout described how he filled some recent positions at Mzinga by forsaking the usual resume/interview process and using social media to source and evaluate candidates. Of course he did end up bringing the finalists in for face-to-face meetings, but he found using Twitter, LinkedIn, etc to be much more productive than the old way of doing business, since it gave him more insight into the candidates than he could get through a prepared resume. He has more on his blog and there is video here

Todd Defren has been using a similar approach at SHIFT Communications. He said that for the most part the people they want to hire "are already known to them" through Twitter and other forms of social media. The last three hires came to them that way. [I have no video of his talk, since the combination of my Nokia N95/AT&T/Qik stopped working and I had to reboot my phone(!) but he has written about this at his blog.]

Chris Brogan gave an entertaining talk about how he got his first job at The Phone Company and how he left there (just in time) for a series of jobs where his reputation preceded him. (video)

During the Q&A (video, more video, even more video) I asked if hiring through social media branding applied equally well to positions outside of the marketing function. I've seen it work for PR people (Amanda Gravel at SHIFT, Amanda Mooney) and consultants (Stowe Boyd, Laura Fitton) but how well does it work for people whose jobs don't involve a market-facing role, such as engineering, IT, or accounting, or for companies who have not embraced social media. The answer from the speakers was that (1) al companies would need to embrace social media if they wanted to survive and (2) that if they didn't you wouldn't want to work there anyway. That was good advice for the assembled Faithful, but it may be a bit premature for the average job seeker. Certainly I favor putting my time and money into companies that practice transparent business practices and communicate well with their customers, including encouraging their employees to do the same, but how to explain the success of Apple which is one of the least transparent and social-media-aware companies in the industry. In the ensuing discussion, the best answer we could come up with is that if you are going to present an old-school, opaque interface to the world, you had better be damn good at it, like Steve Jobs. For the rest of us, Mark Twain had good advice: "If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything."