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Recruiting? Turn Your Talent Hunt Into Competition With Student Competitions

Paula Marttila — Sat, 26 Mar 2011 22:53:12 +0000

Recruiting Disrupted: What’s Your Online Score?

Finding the needle in a haystack in search for the right talent is getting harder as the traditional recruitment models are being disrupted by social networks and increasing number of online services for professional resumes. True story: While professional social network LinkedIn just passed 100M members, growing at a rate of 1M new members per week, an executive recruiting agency just had a seminar on topics ”What is LinkedIn?” and “The difference between Twitter and a chat?”. They better hurry. The landscape is rapidly moving towards social recruiting services in verticals, good example being the newly launched Careers 2.0 by Stack Overflow, offering programmers create free online resume that weighs in their forum activity.

Niel Robertson, CEO of Trada, wisely explains the near future scenario:

“No longer will your resume be your own version of your work history; it will also include a data-driven third party’s assessment. You will also be judged by your network, online activity, level of contribution, all adding up to your online score. The next time you look for a job, don’t be surprised if someone asks you for your score.”

Or as Brian Solis, Principal Analyst at Altimeter Group, asks us:

“How much are you worth and would you opt-out from social scoring systems?”

If job candidates need to keep up with their online “score”, for a company looking for top talent, besides from always being recruiting, it’s no longer enough to scroll online resumes, social network presence and influence of potential candidates. To attract talent it must also dress up and become interesting: As Fred Wilson clearly points out; There’s a war for talent, especially developer talent. Would your company not be quite ready to go for an online game solution, like e.g. cosmetic brand L’Oreal with its virtual office Reveal, where job applicants go online to visit several workplaces to solve particular situations and problems, there’re still other options.

Student Competitions Harnessing World’s Top Students

According to UNESCO, number of tertiary students in the world has grown with 50% between 2000 and 2007, reaching approx 153 Million students in 2007. Much of this fast growth is due to changes in Asia. Interestingly, there are now more tertiary students in low- and middle-income countries. Targeting students addresses huge global market opportunity, thus many organizations and initiatives are aiming to engage students with help of competitions, challenges and networking opportunities.

Swedish startup Student Competitions siezed the opportunity in this growth, offering companies recruitment and innovation challenges targeted to students. It’s the world’s largest online platform for major global student competitions, hosting over 700 competitions and events for 35 000 subscribing students from all over the world. To its help Student Competitions has a network of over 300 student ambassadors in over 60 countries spreading the word and engaging with students locally.

Student Competitions was founded in January 2010 by four students, Gustav Borgefalk, Robert Lyngman, Zhu Chu and Niklas Jungegård, tired of spending hours searching the web to find the world’s best competitions. There had to be a better way; resulting Student Competitions too see the daylight. I got to know Gustav Borgefalk already back in 2009 when he was CEO of Filehill, a marketplace to trade digital content. Student Competitions is backed by entrepreneur and one of the Swedish Dragons’ Den investors Mats Gabrielsson, as has received initial seed funding from Vinnova, Swedish Governmental Innovation Agency. (Read more on Nordic seed stage funding and angel investors)

Quick Challenges Takes Away The Pain From Competition Administration

Organizing a competition requires extra administrative efforts by the organizer, resulting many companies hesitating to use competitions as a channel for communications and recruitment. Student Competitions is lowering that barrier to entry with help of Quick Challenges, a short video pitching format service, that offers help both to create, host and facilitate competitions to source candidates, make an initial screening and deliver matching global top talent. Besides from testing students on real-world problems, it’s a good employer branding tool to communicate company culture and values. Quick challenges, that can be both private and public, is also available as easy to embed and brand white label solution. Naturally, one doesn’t have to just target students, nor use it for recruiting purposes only.

Lund University Master Your Idea Challenge 2010 is a great use case of Quick Challenge. The competition was organized to increase Lund University brand awareness with one year free scholarship as the first prize. During the month of competition it received applications from over 30 countries across all continents. It’s first in line of actions taken by universities to attract international students to study in Sweden and positioning themselves as top institutions in their respective field. (Due to a new Swedish law, beginning of fall 2011 all international student outside EU and EEA are to pay an annual fee of approx. SEK 80K ($12.6K). With no system for scholarships in place, the drop of international students is estimated to devastating 95% (19 300 in 2008)).

Offering a global platform that benefits and solves a problem for students comes with positive side effects, ie the power of meta data. With wide range of valuable data on preferences of the global students by both geography and nationality, Student Competitions can also offer targeted marketing communications and market research among students, especially in emerging markets. Note: This is where I see the service hitting the real gold mine.

Eat Your Own Dog Food, Stay Close To Your Community

Student Competitions eats its own dog food to prove its business model. By attending competitions itself, it also stays close to its community. Representing Stockholm School of Entrepreneurship, Student Competitions recently won Venture Challenge™, International MBA Business Plan Competition 2011, one of the biggest business plan competitions in the US.

As we all know, all great plans remain just great plans without great execution, timing and a twist of good luck. To keep its momentum and scale the initial traction, Student Competitions now needs an efficient online platform and communications strategy to drive its B2B sales. Considering the team lacks technical co-founder, as inhouse UX-competence, two major weaknesses when building an online service, I see this as the next big challenge for the team. By all means a ”Quick Challenge” I believe it’s ready to take on.

Congrats guys, keep crushing and competing!

Co-founders Gustav Borgefalk, Robert Lyngman and Zhu Chu. Missing Niklas Jungegård.

Ps. You might also want to keep your eyes on Contestification. More on that soon.

Paula is online strategist and startup advisor. She is startup mentor at Seedcamp and Springboard. She blogs at paulamarttila.com and here at Bub.blicio.us.
Connect with her on Twitter, LinkedIn,
Drop her email at paula.marttila[at]gmail[dot]com

ThisWeekIn On Everything Bubbling On The Social Web

Paula Marttila — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 08:40:22 +0000

What for a year ago started with This Week In Startups, a live podcast by Jason Calacanis to embrace entrepreneurship and help out startups, has now turned into a web television network ThisWeekIn, covering a wide range of topics from tech to entertainment. Together with co-founders Kevin Pollak and Mark Jeffrey, Jason is now airing 12 weekly shows from their Santa Monica studio. Whether you want to catch up with funny YouTube moments, Twitter trends, coolest Android and iPad apps, or get the latest Internet industry deals and juicy insights, there’s a show for that.

The latest edition to the schedule is This Week In Social Media with the highs and lows of the social web, hosted by Alana Joy and Sean Percival. The very first guest on the show was none other than Brian Solis himself, who got to give his view on the all time trending topic Internet privacy, as to reflect on the impact social media and social networking have on our very own behaviour.

Catch up with the entire interview and social media blunders of the week.

Broadcasting 2.0 – turn your audience into fans and co-producers

The statistics on the two-screen experience keep showing an increasing trend, at the same time more devices are being connected to the Internet. As Justin Kan of Justin.tv already pointed out at the LeWeb conference last year, two-screen experience also counts for 15% of the revenues of the traditional TV.

So, now that services like Justin.tv, Ustream, Bambuser, Qik and soon YouTube (?) are democratizing live broadcasting, and together with social networks making it possible for almost anyone to reach an audience, what is it that makes ones audience to turn into fans?

Include and Engage. I talk based on my own experience: This Week In Startups has managed to keep me engaged since the very first episode, because it stays relevant to its audience by refusing to become an echo chamber and a megaphone for marketing messages. It’s a show built together with its audience using all the interactive tools and possibilities of social media, both before, during, and after a show. The audience becomes the co-producer in choosing guests, topics and participating in the show in a sincere way.

I think Scooter Braun, manager of Justin Bieber, summarized it well in his advice regarding Justin’s engagement with his fans across social media:

“The moment you think you’re too big for your fans, they’re gonna abandon you”.

Which leaves us with one thing that’s certain: The future of broadcast media is social. #EngageOrDie

Paula is online strategist and startup evangelist. She blogs at paulamarttila.com and here at Bub.blicio.us.
Follow her on Twitter: @paulamarttila
Drop her email at paula.marttila[at]gmail[dot]com

Culture Shock: BigTwin Magazine Visits Silicon Valley

Brian Solis — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 14:01:06 +0000

by Brian Solis

Good friend Ephraim Schwartz not only writes for InfoWorld, but also moonlights for BigTwin magazine (also an IDG publication). He’s a fellow motorcycle enthusiast and he finally convinced me to participate in one of his features on custom bikes.

Believe it or not, I do ride. And, I actually spent several years transforming this 1989 Harley Davidson Softail into something truly unique. I just wish I had more time to enjoy it…

It features the original frame, tank, and engine, but everything else is either custom or sourced from Arlen Ness, Performance Machine (PM), and Jesse James.

Here are a few pictures from the magazine:

For more pictures, please visit BigTwin.

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FriendFilter Improves the Signal to Noise Ratio on Twitter

Brian Solis — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 01:40:19 +0000

by Brian Solis, via PR 2.0

Good friend and developer extraordinaire Christopher Peri and I proudly introduce FriendFilter in Beta. I’ve collaborated with Peri in the past to develop @microPR (along with Stowe Boyd), MicroJobs, and other apps soon to be released. His vision and technical prowess are ahead of many and I’m lucky to know him.

FriendFilter improves the signal to noise ratio on Twitter by providing you with the intelligence necessary to effectively curate the content and the people that appear in your Twitter timeline.

While there are many tools that facilitate the proactive discovery of individuals who share similar interests and passions such as Mr. Tweet, TweepSearch, Twellow, Twubble, and WhoShouldIFollow, none provide a matchmaking system at the point of follow. This is an important distinction as Twitter sends an auto-notifier every time someone follows you with nothing more than a link to the person’s page in the micro community.

Without meaningful guidance, you’re following people back as a generous act of reciprocity, which generates goodwill, but not necessarily because you believe their content or updates in the statusphere are relevant and worth following. It is this goodwill that is forcing many power users to create a secondary account simply to follow the voices whom they must follow to stay current and motivated.

FriendFilter complements your notification message from twitter via email with detailed information about each person following you so that you can make an informed decision on the spot as to whether or not to follow back.

The stats and data provided by FriendFilter include:
- Number of friends
- Number followers
- Average posts per day
- Friends we both follow
- Messages to tweets I know
- Average number of hours between posts
- Followers to Friends ratio
- Ranking (in Thousands)
- Average Follower growth
- Friends who follow both of you

If someone seems interesting, you can simply click on their user name to see their last 20 updates, a TweetCloud, as well as a direct link to friend that person.

You control the volume of emails you receive from FriendFilter by adjusting the threshold of inbound alerts. For example, I have set my minimum score to “3″ which qualifies followers based on a cumulative score that represents how close we align within the Twitterverse.

FriendFilter also provides you with an email update each time your username is mentioned on Twitter, which is helpful for personal and professional brand managers for up-to-the-minute online reputation management (ORM).

Of course there’s more to FriendFilter, but we’ll save those gems for later. Remember it’s a early Beta, so please be kind and let @pervision know if you have any issues or ideas.

In the meantime, please sign up for FriendFilter to increase the signal to noise ratio on Twitter and invest in a more meaningful and rewarding social graph.

For more about how Twitter is ushering in a new era of Social CRM, sCRM, please read this post…

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Happy 3rd Birthday Twitter

Brian Solis — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 18:39:15 +0000

by Brian Solis

Source

Twitter turns three today and in that short amount of time, it has completely transformed the way 6 million (and growing) people communicate with each other.

Here’s a screenshot of an early tweet from Founding CEO jack Dorsey…(h/t TechCrunch)

I joined November 4th, 2006 according to Twitterholic and wrote my first in-depth post on Twitter in March 2007 (although I’m sure if I had more time, I’d find my first official post).

According Nielson, Twitter grew by 1,382% from February 2008 to February 2009.

Perhaps most interestingly, Nielson documented something that I’ve been observing for quite some time, Twitter’s largest adoption is stemming from adults, not primarily via teens or college students as you might expect. In February the largest age group on Twitter was 35-49; with nearly 3 million unique visitors, comprising almost 42 percent of the site’s audience.

For a deeper discussion on the impact of Twitter, please read, “Twitter and Social Networks Usher in a New Era of Social CRM” on PR 2.0.

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Diigo Acquires Furl

Michelle Lentz — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 20:20:41 +0000

by Michelle Lentz

Diigo, a research and knowledge sharing tool (social bookmarking and annotations), has acquired Furl from LookSmart. Furl is a web page clipping and archiving service, so it seems like a good fit and, because the deal is being pitched as a partnership in exchange for equity, no one is laying out too much cash right now.

According to Ted West, chief executive officer and president of LookSmart, they are “pleased to know that Furl’s loyal user base will benefit from a reliable platform run by a team highly focused on bringing users the most advanced features and functionality in the marketplace. The combination drastically changes the social bookmarking landscape and we look forward to being a part of it.” Brian Solis has worked with Diigo to help increase awareness for the company and its array of curation tools and contextual network.

Diigo offers a popular Twitter This feature, which allows you to easily share things to Twitter while browsing and bookmarking.

Diigo's TwitterThis option

It also allows you to easily add highlights and sticky notes to any webpage, and then share the annotated page to your twitter followers. They will just see an ordinary link in the Twitter message; but when clicking on the link, they can also see your highlights and sticky notes on the webpage.

Diigo is about to launch Diigo 4.0, which, when combined with Furl, will aim to “take social bookmarking/annotation to a new height.”

Contact Michelle with news, stories, events, and more.
Email: michelle[at]writetech[dot]net
Twitter: @writetechnology, Friendfeed: michellel
Blogs: Write Technology, Wine-Girl.net

A Passenger’s View of the World – Part One of an Ongoing Series

Brian Solis — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 16:30:22 +0000

by Brian Solis

I’ve been traveling quite a bit lately and will continue to do so as I hit the road in support of the new book written with Deirdre Breakenridge, Putting the Public Back in Public Relations.

The views that I’ve enjoyed are captivating and inspiring. I’ve started a new series of photographs as I travel in planes, trains, and automobiles to share those views with you. Enjoy.

A Passenger’s View of the World…

Somewhere over Nevada

Nevada

East Bay, Bay Area, California

Sunrise, Bay Area, California

San Francisco Bay Area

The Peninsula, San Francisco Bay Area

Los Angeles

Northern California, Highway 101

San Francisco Bay Area

For additional views, please visit my album on flickr.

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Microsoft and TechSet Wrap-up Startup Tour in San Francisco

Brian Solis — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 14:52:05 +0000

by Brian Solis

Microsoft Startup Zone, in partnership with Stephanie Agresta and yours truly of The TechSet, hosted a special event for tech innovators in Silicon Valley and San Francisco to celebrate the launch of BizSpark, a new program designed specifically for those who contribute to a dynamic ecosystem that helps startups flourish.

While glamorous and absolutely one of the best stops on our four city tour, it was also bitter sweet. San Francisco was the last Ignition event of the current series that spotlighted and introduced us to amazing entrepreneurs, founders, leaders, and influencers in Austin, New York and Los Angeles.

Ignition-San Francisco was hosted 52 floors above San Francisco at The Carnelian Room. The view and the company was nothing less than incredible.

I’ll let the pictures tell the rest of the story…

Transamerica Building

Stowe Boyd and Jeremiah Owyang

Krystal Ariel

Karl Long

Shobeir Shobeiri

Nick Starr

Carl Heiney and Scott Beale of Laughing Squid

Dan’l Lewin

Kedric Van De Carr

Scott Stanfield

Shaherose Charania

Anand Ayer

Daniel Riveong

Jackie Danicki

Cathy Brooks

Anthony Ha of VentureBeat

Oren Michels of Mashery

Chris Heuer

Karen Hartline

Tara Hunt

Arad Rostampour, Brian Solis, Rebecca Woodcock

Stephanie Agresta and Jacob Mullins

Christopher Peri

Adam Jackson and Marissa Louie

Kristin Kueter and Cathy Brooks

Arad Rostampour, Anand Iyer, Jacob Mullins

Dale Larson & Adam Jackson

Dave Mathews of Boxee

For more pictures from Ignition-San Francisco, visit my album on flickr.

If you’ve missed our previous events, you can relive the experiences below:

New York

Austin

Los Angeles

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