Paul DeBettignies In The New York Times And Business Journal

As posted on the MN Headhunter blog:

OK, it feels really weird to write my name in a blog post. Usually I say “MN Headhunter” but neither of the articles have anything to do with this blog.

The New York Times article from September 28, 2008, Turning to the TV for Explanations and Answers, is the first time in the paper and the second time on their web site. The first was in this blog post August 17, 2006 Northwest Workers May Strike, Judge Says.

The newspaper article came about of my watching CNBC coverage of the credit crisis, fledgling economy and particularly how this would impact national, regional and local employment.

I was contacted by Brian Stelter of the New York Times after he did (of all things) a search on Twitter for CNBC. He came across my MNHeadhunter profile and my many, many Tweets (as they are called).

He was a cool guy. Had a nice chat. And three days later I am in the paper.

A few hours into the day and into the next days I had quite a few cool email including old friends I had not seen/heard from in years including a guy I sat near in home room in high school for four years who now lives in Tennessee.

Some day I will be able to tell my kids (need a girlfriend and then wife to make that happen) one day about how I was named in an article with:

Who knows if my then kids will find this cool but for a couple of days I did.

The second article was September 26^th, 2008 in this Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal article Sites: not just for personal connections anymore. The article is about how social networking sites are not just for social purposes but also a business tool.

I am including my quotes below because I am not sure how long this link will work:

Recruiters, too, are increasingly turning to social-networking sites to find job candidates, said Paul DeBettignies, managing partner at Nerd Search, a Minneapolis-based tech recruiting firm. And they’re not just looking at LinkedIn; Twitter — a “micro-blogging” tool that lets people dispatch 140-character messages or “tweets” that can be shared with fellow users — is especially popular in the tech crowd, and fertile ground for IT recruiters.

“The idea is you should probably go where your talent pool is,” DeBettignies said. “If you’re an IT person, you want to go on Twitter. If you’re in marketing, get on Facebook.”

About 85 percent of employers use Facebook to either find candidates or do quick background searches on prospective hires, DeBettignies said. The technique is especially popular with recruiters who are competing for strong intern candidates.

And:

“The hard sell is dead,” Boardman said. “It doesn’t work door-to-door, and it doesn’t work on social networks.”

That’s a rule followed by many savvy recruiters, DeBettignies said. “What some recruiters do is become a bull in a China shop and start spamming people. Then it’s like fishing — they all scatter and don’t come back for a while.”