Monthly Archives: August 2009

How I Made 3 Hires with Twitter in 6 Weeks

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Megan_Hopkins_Loves_TwitterArticle by Megan Hopkins

Let’s get one thing out in the open very quickly. I’m a very stubborn person and I like to learn things on my own…even if it is painfully obvious to others.

Confessions of a Twitter Hater…

My relationship with Twitter started out very slowly and much like my relationship with my ex-husband – I was not a fan. At all. In fact, whenever Twitter was mentioned around me I cringed (much like I do when I hear “Steve Jobs” or “Apple”) and immediately tuned out.  You see, not only am I stubborn, I am also all knowing…just ask my parents…and I am NEVER wrong.  Ok, so to be fair, “never” is a bit of a stretch… In any event, I associated Twitter with all things stupid that did not catch my fancy (though I’m sure Ashton Kutcher is a very nice person) and I preferred to stick to my tried and true recruiting ways.  Experimentation is not my thing.  Continue reading →

How to Search Spoke, ZoomInfo, and Jigsaw for Free

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Search smallSpoke, Zoominfo, and Jigsaw are websites that contain information on 10’s of millions of people and millions of companies. Each site has their own special method of capturing information on people and businesses. What they all have in common, however, is that while you can register and in some cases even run a few searches for free, you have to pay to really dig into their information.

So – would you like to know how to search these sites for free? 

Yes? Well you’re in luck – that’s exactly what I’m going to show you in this post. Continue reading →

Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook July 2009 Traffic Data

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Twitter_Facebook_LinkedIn_Traffic_Data_July_2009I’m always interested in the traffic for the “Big Three” social media sites (Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn), and I discovered today that  www.compete.com just released July’s data. 

And here it is!

Facebook

While Facebook’s been on a tear of growth as it passed the 250M member mark, Facebook only added 117,142 unique U.S. visitors in July 2009 . That seems like a large number – but with how large Facebook has grown to,  that’s only 0.1%, which is the lowest growth rate Facebook’s posted in the last 12 months.

Could we see a drop in August?

We cannot overlook, however, that Facebook saw 2,103,776,022 visits July. Yes, 2.1 Billion – which is nearly an 11% increase from the 1,898,910,472 visits logged to Facebook from the U.S. in June. So while monthly unique visitors has stagnated, those who are visiting are visiting more.  Continue reading →

LinkedIn by the Numbers – Searching by Title and Clearance

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LinkedIn_Why_Join_LinkedIn2 from www.linkedin.comEver wonder how many executives are on LinkedIn?

How about accountants, software engineers, “Big 4” employees, or people with TS/SCI clearances? 

Well I did. So I decided to run a number of searches for common titles in information technology, finance and accounting, recruiting and human resources, business development, social media, and administrative support and publish the results for the world to see.  I also searched for “Big 4” employees, people that mention specific security clearances, and executives of all types to see how many results would be returned, and I broke the results down by global/U.S. totals.

Method

Unless otherwise noted, I searched specifically for current titles while using LinkedIn’s advanced search interface. When I created the searches below, I was not trying to be totally exhaustive – I chose to target a sample of some of the most common titles.  Continue reading →

What Happens When Twitter is Down?

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Sometime in the mid-morning I was trying to send a quick Direct Message via TweetDeck to one of my valued network contacts and it didn’t go through. I waited and tried a few more times, and after further failures – I headed directly to Twitter.

My Internet connection was good – I could navigate other sites, but when I tried visiting Twitter, I got a “network timeout” message stating that the server at Twitter.com was taking too long to respond.

Then I went to Google and searched for: [Twitter down]

I uncovered Twitter’s status blog and another helpful site appropriately named downforeveryoneorjustme and found out that Twitter was defending against a denial-of-service attack.

Ouch. Well, since it was obvious I wasn’t going to get my Direct Message through to my contact, you know what I did?

Yep – I picked up the phone and I called her.

Imagine that!

Candidate – Recruiter Relationships: Overrated?

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What is the ultimate value you provide to candidates as a recruiter?

I want you to really think about that question before proceeding. In this post, there will be more questions raised than answers provided. Please take a moment to ensure that you have your thinking cap on and that your mind is open. 

Who Defines Value?

From the candidate’s perspective, what do you think the real value provided by a recruiter is? There are countless recruiting articles and blog posts (such as this one referencing Guanxi) that will tell you that the relationship is more important than the transaction itself. But for the majority of candidates, is it? Really?

I’m a little bit of a Lean freak. One of the core principles of Lean philosophy is Value – every activity in a business should be scrutinized for how it adds value to the final product or service provided to the customer. A lot of activities previously thought to be essential in a business turn out to be non-value adding when evaluated from the perspective of the customer. Continue reading →