Influence or Gaming The System?

I have gotten a large kick out of the onslaught of buzz, blogs etc hitting the boards about influence, influencers on social media for recruiting and measurement of same.

The human condition being what it is, the minute anybody starts trying to measure anything related to influence we can take out the word influence and drop in the words "importance" and "ego" and in my opinion the game is on. Sometimes on purpose and sometimes accidentally.

Sumser used a new method this year called SocialEars or something like that. As I understand it,it's based on keywords related to Internet activity and some of the other bizarre things like klout, blah, blah. The results are interesting to say the least when it came to influence in recruiting. Keywords measure "influence, importance". Are you kidding me? Who posted, tweeted and generally wrote the keywords on the list the most? Answer: writers who write about recruiting news on boards echoing news reports, marketers who are selling software, promoting web sites, selling talent communities, selling employee testing psycologial styff, those are the accidentals who doing their jobs selling marketing and promoting their products naturally use the keywords. They spend all day on the net getting the keywords out.
Does the marketer with the most keywords sell anything, make any money or influence anyone and are they important in our space. I don't know. Some of them irritate me because they clutter up othwise interesting sites with their thinly disguised sales pitches. They kind of remind me of people who go to every meeting, social event or any gathering of more than three people to pass out business cards ,selling insurance or real estate. I don't know about you but I am more inclined to buy insurance from the guy who really likes the symphony and buys an ad in the program rather than the guy who stands at the concession stand shoving his business card at everybody and doesn't know the difference between B's 5th and a bottle of Jim beam.

Now let's talk about the "gamers" and ego builders. There have been volumes written about keywords on resumes so the system will pick up a candidate's resume. We have all seen them. We do a search and a list of keywords show up. Are they relevant to the job or the candidates experience. Nope just a list of keywords that wasted our time having to look at a resume of a warehouse manager who put the name of every technology ever used in a warehouse he worked for that he touched only as a user. The keyword game in it's finest form that didn't help him or us other than to delete the resume forever because it's a data dump of keywords. One of the "influencers" on john's list has posted log after blog advising candidates to go so far as to change the color of type on their resume to white, then type in a whole paragraph of keywords that the human eye can not see but the system will pick up so their resume will show up in a search even if the keywords have nothing to do with their background. Gaming the system in it's finest form. Maybe he does the same with his blogs and tweets so social eyes picked up all those keywords typed over and over that nobody could see. He writes blog after blog defining recruiters, sourcers, etc. using the keywords over and over. I wish I had enough time to sit around doing nothing but tweeting, retweeting and blogging the same old tired keywords but I don't think much of lists and I'm too busy making placements in the real world to waste my life trying to influence anybody online or anyplace else.

I know who is important in the recruiting space just as I know who likes the symphony and horses in the real world. I can read their blogs, tweets and questions, look at their profiles and know because I know
recruiting ,who is and has been and will be making money and influencing lives and I know because I wasn't born at night or at least last night who is full of shit and gaming the system or accidentally showing up because it's their job to use those keywords.

Here's a keyword for you. #sillyMeasurementsProduceGoofyResults.

Comment by Paul Alfred on January 13, 2012 at 2:45pm: Happy New Year Sandra ... You are right about one thing ... Ok a few things ... : -) Ego is a big factor in Social Media. True influence however needs to be authentic. If not you will get called out really quickly ...

Comment by Sandra McCartt on January 13, 2012 at 3:07pm: Happy New Year to you my sweet friend. And you are right on all counts. I think ego is what happens when fools think seeing their name in print means something. Confidence is an ego that has earned their spurs and doesn't care about something like a knout score because they know it can and has been gamed like a house cat. I cringe every time I see somebody seriously giving knout scores and laugh every time I see somebody giving someone else some knout score for coffee. Cause I know enough of that crap will let somebody show up on lust someplace. Sort of like a person who is a map hobbyist named Hiawatha, showing up above some experienced recruiting people on the recruiting influencers list because she constantly tweeted the keyword "sourcing" when referring to sourcing for maps. One of the funnier accidents or perhaps unintended consequences of thinking that keywords without relevance or substance are anything more than a series of letters that can have a lot of different meanings.

Comment by Sandra McCartt on January 13, 2012 at 3:11pm: Typo on purpose. I deleted my klout account and don't want any link to that silliness so when the iPad autocorrects to knout. I leave it for grins.

Comment by Paul Alfred on January 13, 2012 at 3:43pm: You're too funny Sandra .. Indeed ... One could have a ton of conversations follow all the right people Tweet and Retweet a ton and with some consistency build up an artificial Klout Score worth talking about ... But history can come back to bite you in the you know where ... You know in that last little conversation going back and forth - Jerry did not realize that as soon as he jumped in on the post he influenced others to home in making the blog more interesting based on the responders "Jerry in this case was an influencer". As when you jump in on a post conversation Sandra it spurs others to chime in .. " That is a powerful example of influence" ... Influence can be used in different ways. So who are you gonna Klout over the head this weekend ... :)

Comment by Sandra McCartt on January 13, 2012 at 4:33pm: Lol. Depends on who sticks their snout up for me to ponk with my knout. However we all need to understand the difference between influence and just making a lot of noise with opinions and stirring up conversation on Friday afternoon.

In my case I don't influence anybody other than to open my mouth and say crap that a Lot of folks are thinking but aren't bitchy enough to say. Think of me as the "Maxine" of the recruiting world. One of the joys of being old enough to know the difference between shit and shinola and irreverent enough to say so. If you are too young to know what shinola is, it was a brand of shoe polish and or floor wax. Somewhat like social media, it was whatever one wanted it to be. ;)

Comment by Amy Ala Miller on January 13, 2012 at 5:04pm: Love it Sandra - I looked at that list after all the noise and hadn't heard of most of the people on it. Then I realized none of them were Software Purchasing Managers, Project Managers, Pre-sales Engineers, or anything else I need to hire right now so why in the hell am I wasting my time trying to figure this out? lol Knout indeed....

Comment by Sandra McCartt on January 13, 2012 at 5:53pm: Excellent point Amy. Like my secretary says, "in the whole big scheme of things it doesn't affect our bottom line so ,no shit, so what ,who cares". Very pragmatic guy, my secretary, keeps me focused on what matters. I asked him once if he would rather have the title recruiting assistant. He laughed and said, "unless my title affects our bottom line, no shit, so what, who cares unless my paycheck bounces.". Knout is knout.

Heather bussing refers to a lot of it as "Internet droppings". I prefer "social scat".
The only droppings/scat that influence me are the ones in my backyard or the stalls at the barn. I spend enough time getting rid of that to want to shovel more in the play like world of the internet.

Comment by Sylvia Dahlby on January 16, 2012 at 3:01pm: Klout = Koolaid

Comment by Sandra McCartt on January 16, 2012 at 3:21pm: Maybe just change the name and call it what it is.. Keyword flavored koolaid. The flavor ot the week is the one who can use the most keywords. I had one of those McCartt kind of thoughts about all of this. Didn't see any of the Brits or Aussies on that list - may have been and i didn't pay that much attention but if "recruitment" was not one of the keywords they would be toast for ever being influencial.

Klout= Grade School Narcissim. Every time i tweet i vote for myself to be somebody = promotion which is what the unwashed tapping away on their puters call "branding".

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