Start by Digging Deep – Values, Passions and Strengths

Yesterday, my class of Algonquin PR students and I started the process of digging deep.  Many people think that our program is centered around social media tools.  There is no question that technology is a large part of getting your personal brand online but first you have to develop a clear message.

We start the process of self-discovery by looking into several key issues including; personal values, personality, strengths, achievements, passions, the opinions of others and finally, we take a brief look at weaknesses. To many this seems to be a little far from the original expectations of developing an online presence but you have to start at the heart of the matter.

People don’t give enough thought to what they are all about, what they can offer the world, and what they want to offer the world. We’re all so busy, overworked and overwhelmed to give ourselves the time we deserve. It’s easier to think about stuff, to-do lists, tasks, technology, friends, ….. We all need to take the time to think about what’s important to us, what we have to give to others and how we want to continue to develop and grow.

Do you know what your values, passions and strengths are? I hope my PR students now have a better handle on these big issues and now know what their keywords and phrases are, we will see next class.

Into Four Digits

We cross into the 1000 user territory this week. Its going to be interesting to watch students learn from each other and start cross-connecting across schools. Into the breach!

Go…..

The Winter 2010 version of WhyHire.me is up and classes are underway.

With every new version we take 3 steps forward and one step back. The beauty of software development, I suppose. With our enhancements comes the need for refamiliarization. With new features there is always some regression. Like I said a few posts ago, life is beta and software is a part of all of our lives now.

I introduced the second year Algonquin College Public Relations students (the graduates of 2010) to WhyHire.me today. I’m thrilled to be working with them to develop their personal branding using WhyHire.me. They are getting ready to enter the working world and have considerable real world experience for us to work with. They are familiar with social media tools because they have used several in classes already and they are trained communicators that are open and eager.  Couldn’t ask for a better combination.

I asked them to rate what they experienced today in class.  I gave them three options for evaluation – thumbs up, middle thumbs or sideways thumbs, and thumbs down. I think all evaluations should be so simple. This was their answer!

Social media comes to class at Centennial College

In September of 2009, the WhyHire.me learning resources and software were incorporated into a third term course called Career Explorations at Centennial College in Toronto. In November, I dropped in on David Johnson, Dean of the School of Business, for a post mid-term update. This short video covers the background on why the materials and learning platform were used and it offers David’s views on the feedback from students and faculty.

The most interest part of getting WhyHire.me incorporated into a course or entire program is curriculum mapping. Life-to-date, we have incorporated WhyHire.me materials and software into public relations,  e-commerce, technology in business, transition to professional and business skills courses. Stay tuned for a detailed blog post from Patti Church, our Chief Learning Architect. Patti will layout several alternative ways to leverage the software, offline and online course materials, worksheets and additional learning resources.

Creativity Unleashed in the Whyhire.me Program

One of our students, who is privately developing her online personal brand within WhyHire.me, elected to poke something onto Youtube. I have to admit, I was impressed with the message, visuals and authenticity. It was fun to watch!

We were so thrilled to find this piece and see proof that our teachers are igniting passion within their classrooms. Keep up the great work – we truly do look forward to seeing more profiles turned public and shared across the web!

Starting our Co-Op

Amber Naslund, community manager at Radian6 and blogger at Altitude Branding, shared a post today, Social Media is a Co-op.  I like her way of thinking.

Two hours earlier, we were the discussing how our learning content at WhyHire.me has to evolve and develop through collaborative partnerships.  We do not claim to be experts in everything related to our program.  Our team offers great experience in teaching, marketing, coaching, communication tools & approaches and technology development but there are many other pieces to our training that we want to continue to develop and evolve, and we are looking for partners to assist.

So, from Amber’s perspective, I’m starting my co-op.  Over the past few weeks, I have been anxiously awaiting Sue Murphy’s eBook, Creating Video for the Web: Tips, tricks and tools for telling amazing stories.  Sue had been thinking of developing an eBook and we have been looking for some fresh and insightful content to share with our students on the subject of producing video for their profiles.  Sue is making the content of her eBook available on her website at no charge.

This eBook will be a great new resource for our students.  We hope to work with Sue in upcoming months to develop some customized content for our specific application and I will be putting together some new video assignments based on Sue’s content.  The co-op starts.

As Amber Naslund states in her post;

“They’ll build social media like a co-op. Driven by a team united voluntarily, toward common goals, and equally invested in the outcomes.

Collaboration is not just a feel-good buzzword. It’s the idea that our business is built more efficiently through shared knowledge, and shared responsibility.”

I look forward to more collaborative work with Sue Murphy and others with specialties and knowledge that will make the teaching and approach of WhyHire.me more powerful and engaging for our students.  We can’t do it alone.  Well, I guess we could, but like Amber, I don’t think that makes the best product, service or experience for our customers.

Top Twitter Recuiter Talks to WhyHire.me

Just before Halloween, I connected with Dawn Mular, the world’s top recruiter on Twitter and CEO of the Helping Friends Career Network. Dawn was very easy to connect and interact with, given the nature of what she does. She takes a genuine interest in people, collaborative technologies and helping put people to work.

Many times over, school administrators and HR professionals ask why students should be coming out of school with an online brand. I was keen to get Dawn’s perspective on how social media has changed recruiting and how her clients react to seeing more than a traditional 2-page resume about a candidate.  For those that are interested in downloading the entire 10-minute podcast, simply click here.

For those interested in key sections, you can download and listen to key extracts:

Part 1

• How the Helping Friends Career Network got started
• The secret to her success becoming the top Twitter recruiter

Part 2

• Client reaction to social media in the recruiting world
• Stepping outside the traditional recruiting box – how and why
• Important employment trend – green businesses will mean more job / project opportunities

Part 3

• Advice to Educators and Leaders – become part of the movement
• Bring transparency and authenticity to the classroom

Over the Hump & Playing in Their New Sandbox

It’s the end of October and also the middle of midterms for college and university students across the country.  I guess you could say we are over the ‘hump’ of the first term.  Getting over the hump means that we have activity in the WhyHire.me portal.  Most students are 60-75% finished their learning modules.  We are starting to see new photos uploaded, pitches being written, blog posts going up and videos being loaded.  And for the most part, unless you are in one of our classes, you can’t see any of it.

You can’t see anything because you are not in a class that has adopted WhyHire.me as a program and learning environment for personal branding.  Those that have chosen to use the program have closed the doors to the public while they learn and explore the world of social networking for personal branding.  Yes, this generation is very aware of social networks because of Facebook, MySpace and YouTube but they are not familiar or comfortable with using social networks for developing a professional presence.  That’s why we have developed a place where they can learn and experiment with their classmates and professors.  We’re also playing with them in their new sandbox.  We have 14 classrooms involved in business programs at Algonquin College, Centennial College and Carleton University.

I spoke to a few classes recently and here are a few comments from students in the class:

“The presentation was great, I really enjoyed it even though it was pretty early on a Friday morning. I can say it was very inspiring for me, gave me new ideas on to what I can do with me as a brand.”

“After your talk today (which very much inspired me), I was thinking I would film an introduction video of myself for the profile. A sort of visual media piece to make me stand out and inform people of what I’m about.”

“I think the lessons and system are very educational. The creativity and thought put into this system is very much appreciated. It’s about time we started stepping away from just the traditional resumes and use technology to help promote ourselves. Congratulations to you and your team for being so innovative and allowing a new perspective into the education system.”

I’m looking forward to the second part of the term, as more students play, experiment and start to understand the power of the developing their own personal brand.

Patti Church, co-founder of WhyHire.me puts her passion out there!

I proudly listened to Patti on the CFRA morning show as I ventured down the 401 to Toronto on Tuesday. She is an amazing teacher and partner. Check out her interview and hear her first hand account of what drove her to help bring WhyHire.me to life!

Great Positioning Discussion

Today, I had an email exchange with a recent post-secondary graduate. When I introduced him to WhyHire.Me, the following Q and A ensued. It was fascinating. I had internalized so much, I finally got the change to jot down some differentiating points about WhyHire.me.

His questions in BOLD, my answers in italics.

What is the biggest difference between WhyHire.Me and having an open and searchable profile on facebook?

We have presented WhyHire.Me as a place for upcoming graduates to share their professional brand that should be developed and shaped through post-secondary education. Our students have been given the opportunity to present their profiles, experiences and engagement in social media around their course of study and professional interests. Mixing social with professional posts can be a risky endeavor…since personal posts, photos or comments can be out of context…and on occasion, not something you would share with a prospective employer. My Facebook updates contain inside jokes…or items of a personal nature that I would only share with friends.

Our V1 product is a push model – students can post, publish and email their PURL as they start looking for work or getting feedback and comments from peers, clients and summer job bosses. That being said, one of our students, Ashley Ferguson got found by a Toronto firm via a google search and was hired. Check out the kudos from her at this link.

Your online digital assets are impressive, but spread out across several sites and links. Imagine being able to shape it through one unified interface…that speaks to WHY someone should hire you? By packaging this up in WhyHire.Me, you would be in a better position to ask your senior level contacts to comment and offer testimonials on various blog entries that speak to your accomplishments. Can you count on these people having Facebook accounts…or an interest in setting one up just to make a comment or offer a living, in context reference?

What is the incentive for students to create a profile? (vs facebook which is already established)
We have a highly declarative URL – whyhire.me/andy_church is pretty much to the point. Think of whyhire.me as the paring knife for job search outreach…Facebook, Linkedin have great uses for a wide range of applications. The free-agent model of employment has arrived. WhyHire.Me is an open rhetorical question that speaks very specifically to future employers or clients.

Educators have the opportnunity to help guide and mentor students by weaving WhyHire.Me into their course of study – professional branding requires thought, strategy and sustained execution. Much like how athletes have coaches, we believe WhyHire.Me needs mentoring through post-secondary education. FYI – one’s profile can be private until the student is good and ready to start promoting their PURL through social media outreach.

We also get great search results because we leverage SEVERAL other sites (Flickr, Vimeo, Twitter, any site with RSS feeds). Check out Jennifer Spruit at this link!
What is the incentive for prospective employers to browse this site? or is the hope that they will use a search engine and whyhire.me will be one of the top results?
Right now, if a student embeds their purl into a cover letter, or blog post that get’s searched, it creates an inbound click into the student profile. At some point, we expect to have a critical mass of students and make WhyHire.Me a destination end-point for employers.

What is the next step for whyhire.me?

Keep following me at Twitter goandychurch or bookmark my purl – whyhire.me/andy_church