Globe and Mail Launches New Grad Network in Linkedin!

Great news on the personal branding front. The Globe and Mail launched The globecampus New Grad Network within Linkedin this month. Their message is, be found amongst a large base of employers that are poking around inside Linkedin.  By joining, one can get access to weekly career advice and job opportunities. I am pleased to see others encouraging students to put their resumes, passions and interests on line and to be scanning for jobs that will pop up inside the Linkedin! network.

Since we started our first WhyHire.Me pilot in February, our message has been to embrace as much online promotion you can manage. Joining Linkedin! is another great way to extend one’s reach into the job market.

What has made WhyHire.Me so engaging? It boils down to focus and brand.

Linkedin offers itself as a large network capable of delivering on a multitude of requirements – making deals, getting in touch, searching for a partner, finding a contractor, getting a job or getting an unofficial reference on a prospect. Linkedin is the Swiss Army Knife of social networking in business – something I call stakeholder networking.

Our students and working professionals tell us that WhyHire.Me offers a highly declarative purpose – giving students and young working professionals the means to develop their brand and highlight their potential.  We offer our students and working professionals a highly declarative URL. My personal address is www.whyhire.me/andy_church.  When our students promote their URLs in web sites, on paper and in email messages, it sends a very explicit message to the reader. I am pitching you and I believe I have demonstrable experiences and engagement in industry subject matter you should check out.

WhyHire.me also offers a set of third party interfaces to other social media sites that ultimately help enhance the brand of our users and play a role in improving search engine ranking. Check out my delicious links at the bottom of my profile:)

Is WhyHire.Me a Swiss Army Knife? Absolutely not. We offer a very sharp and to the point paring knife that helps students and young professionals develop their online brand and help reveal their potential to land their first job, or that next job down the line.

Our second institutional pilot project is starting next week – we expect to have more lessons learned and great insight from a tremendous batch of students.

Getting into the Game with Sport Business Management Students

The winter term at Algonquin is over, marks are in, and next week we launch into the spring term with a group of 27 Sport Business Management students.

These students will be graduating this August after completing a 12 month intensive program which is preparing them for careers in the Sport Industry. They have finished 2 terms and next week will be entering their final term.  We will be teaching them about personal branding and how to use social media tools and methods that are built into WhyHire.me.

We are really looking forward to working with this group of mature students – they all have a degree behind them. We expect them to be motivated after making a considerable investment in an intensive program. Our goal is to help them develop a professional digital presence which will act as a catalyst for their new careers. This digital presence is all about helping them demonstrate they are “tuned-in” to their chosen field of study. By integrating project experience and engagement with online subject matter and external stakeholders, we know WhyHire.Me users will stand out, and be recognized by potential employers.

We will coach them towards developing a powerful personal brand and walk them through select social media tools that are integrated into WhyHire.me (Flickr, Vimeo, blogging, linking, Twitter and more). The integration of  their story and the tools within WhyHire.me nets great ‘Google’ juice. Remember – the goal is to be found and to stand out.

These students need to put some skin in the game to make an impact and see the results.  They need to create a powerful story about themselves and make the commitment to use the media to help convey it on a sustained basis. Much like exercise, personal branding needs a regular commitment that takes little time, but produces great long term results. Without making the commitment, their profile will be nothing more than a two page resume…

The reality is that these students will be Googled by potential employers.  I read today on Twitter that 86% of employers now Google new recruits.  We want to help these grads stack the ‘net’ in their favor.  But they have to commit to getting in the game, interacting with people and industry specific news and launch their professional digital presence.

We’re looking forward to creating some great personal brands with this next set of students!

A special thanks to Dave Best, Sport Business Management Program Coordinator, and Jim Kyte, Acting-Chair, School of Business, along with Dave Donaldson, Executive Dean, School of Business and Hospitality & Tourism, and Wayne McIntryre, Director of Student Services, for allowing us to continue to work with these Algonquin Students on this pilot project.

Class is Over – Off they Go!

The WhyHire.me profiles are completed, marked and class is over.  The graduating Business/Marketing class of 2009 is in the middle of exams and interviews.

At the end of the term, we conducted an online survey with the class.  Our goal was to find out if they saw value in the process of teaching personal branding and introducing social media tools plus did they see value in the tool itself, WhyHire.me. There is no question that our ‘beta’ was very beta and sometimes frustrating for the students.  There were a few that did not see the value at all but for the most part the majority felt that the process and system had real merit.  They made lots of specific recommendations on what features of the product they would like to see changed as well as where to emphasize the learning.

When asked ‘if they were planning on actively promoting their WhyHire.me address on resumes, emails, in conversations, Facebook, blogs, etc”, 75% of the respondents answered ‘yes’. Seventy percent of the respondents claimed that they had already told friends, family and classmates about the system.

These soon to be grads are very busy right now but we are seeing some activity on the site.  They are blogging about personal branding, their personal job search experiences, and adding more depth to their profiles.  We continue to add advice and help them to make sure that when they are ‘googled’ in and around interview time, future employers see their professional profiles on WhyHire.me.

We look forward to encouraging them, assisting them, and sharing their stories as they launch their careers.

New profile interface coming soon! Comments are welcome.

Greetings beta users and upcoming users of WhyHire.Me. We are working on our next build that will clean up a number of irritants not to mention the most glaringly obvious usability issue – the length of the profile page.

Check out this screen shot from our development environment. Your profile will be viewed as a more interactive set of tabs instead of a long, scrolling screen. The tabs will let you present your profile elements in a more interactive fashion. If you elect to remove certain social media widgets from your profile, the tabs will disappear.

Feast your eyes and tell us what you think! Comments welcome.

Finding new segments in large markets

Since WhyHire.Me got underway, several initial users have come forward and congratulated us on our unique perspective on the market and underlying capabilities. We have learned a lot about additional requirements and expectations students have as they progress through college. People outside the realm of our target market look at other solutions such as Blogger, Linkedin or resume building tools and suggest these products can fit the bill. When I hear this, I quietly think of my father’s expression “if what you say is true, you may be right…”.

We are maintaining our focus on the total product offering and will continue to deliver on our main focus – helping students present their potential by teaching them personal branding techniques. Our tools, techniques and underlying software provide a platform to profile experiences gained through post-secondary education and demonstrate engagement with online subject matter. Seth Godin pointed out another truism about marketing on the web these days. Find your first 10 customers,  get them happy, then they will tell your next 10, and so on and so on.

From a comparative stand point, one could look at the online dating space as hugely saturated, hyper-competitive and not a great place to start another online service. Sometimes life is stranger than fiction, because someone came up with Seekingarrangement.com, an online match making service where “older moneyed men and cute young women engage in brutally frank transactions“. Is this another inside out, kitchen table idea not validated by the market? I doubt it. According to the New York Times story, it has built up a user base of 300,000 members…or 20% of the match.com user base. I can’t say I condone the underlying spirit of this form of dating, but it does make for a case in point about market segmentation.

Large, established offerings be they dating services, real-estate listings, online business networks, or ecommerce for small business can’t possibly serve each segment that is yearning for something different. Marketers take note – look for the underserved and make your case. Its something we are doing at WhyHire.Me. Stay tuned for the next 10!

Interview with Krista Maier at The Algonquin Times

I met with Krista Maier by phone last week and finally in person just yesterday.  I think she was a little surprised when I turned her photo shoot into an interview about her experiences with social media and her perspective of what skills are needed now in the world of journalism.  We will return to that later.

Krista found out about our pilot project by using Twitter Search.  Krista was first pointed in the direction of Twitter when a classmate gave her a lead on a story that came from Twitter.  After filing the story she then searched for the term “Algonquin College’  where she found out about our pilot project which I have been Tweeting about.  She was brand new to Twitter when she discovered us with just a few ‘Tweets’ to her account.  We had just introduced Twitter in class the week before so I was impressed and intrigued with a journalists perspective of this tool.

Through the course of our phone interview, Krista probed into our reasons for launching WHM, students perspectives, the learning process and the tool.  She has also interview Andy Church (partner in life and business), Wendy Threader (Professor & course lead of MKT2382), and Sarah Ormon (student extrodinaire).  The story will be in next weeks edition of the Algonquin Times.

Krista and I had a wonderful conversation, I guess I’m pushing my luck when I say I ‘interviewed’ her.  We talked about the need for students to manage their social persona and as Krista so eloquently put it, their need to also develop ‘a positive digital footprint’, a term she picked up from our blog it turns out. That’s where we plan to help with WhyHire.me.  I asked Krista for her input on why we keep seeing reluctance on the part of Generation Y in terms of embracing this technology.  Krista confirmed a recurring theme, ‘fear of the unknown’.  She pointed out that ‘no one is showing us how to use the tools and I would also like the theory’.  Krista has 2 years of Jounalism from Ottawa U behind her so she enjoys the theory side of learning as well as the practical which she is getting plenty of at Algonquin.

Overall, Krista sees the need for personal branding especially in her industry which is changing so quickly, as well as the need for understanding, learning and embracing new social media tools.

We’re thrilled that Krista found us and look forward to seeing her story in print.

Take a Peek at Algonquin’s Fresh Meet

The day has come!  Their WhyHire.me profiles are ready in time for Fresh Meet, tomorrow night at the Westin in Ottawa. The students have worked tirelessly to ensure that the networking event is a success for the sponsors, the industry participants and hopefully the students themselves.  Hope to see you there!

We would like to introduce you to some of Algonquin College’s impressive Business/Marketing Graduates;

There will be more profiles to come ……

We hope you enjoy their first launch into the world of developing their personal brand and engaging in the tools of today!

The WhyHire.me Team – Patti, Andy and Rob