Future Thoughts

I had a chance to watch a webinar hosted by a company called Broadlook Technologies focused on the future of recruiting. The webinar was presented to an audience of recruiters, both agency and corporate, and was well attended with more than 600 participants. If you are a candidate, most of what was covered might bore you to tears, but there were some tidbits I thought I might share. Number one: the way recruiters find candidates, and the way candidates will find jobs will continue to evolve. No earth-shaking news there, but some of the detail might get you to thinking. Donato Diorio, the founder and CEO of Broadlook is a very forward-thinking guy who's not afraid to make some predictions. He's already thinking in terms of Web 5.0 while most of us are still trying to wrap our minds around Web 2.0, and he makes the year 2020 sound as if it were tomorrow.

Many of us in Human Resources are still trying to figure out the business role of things like Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc. If Donato's thoughts come true to any extent, we're all going to have some catching up to do!

Here are some of his insights, at least as I understood them...

• Social Network Apathy: As people become more and more connected to more and more 'friends' they will become desensitized to what this expanded network is really up to. As more and more social networks evolve, messaging, from companies and individuals alike, will tend to get lost in the noise. I can attest that this is already occurring - Donato challenged us to add up all the networks we are in - not just things like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, but sub-groups on LinkedIn, usergroups, newsfeeds, message boards, etc. Like Donato, my count was in the 40's, and I've come to realize there is no way to humanly keep up with them all. The result may be that people will move from sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn in favor of micro-network sites, where only the people you really care about can access you and your information. 
• Literacy and Communication will make a comeback in terms of importance. As more companies and candidates move their data to the web it will be real communication, rather than simple information transmittal, between the two that will become critical.
• Social Sentiment: what's being said about companies, and candidates on the web. This is a subset of business and personal branding, now sometimes referred to as reputation management. Donato has a key insight for candidates: while it usually takes many, many impressions to change the social sentiment of a company, for a candidate a single poorly-worded, or ill-advised posting on someone's Facebook page can potentially ruin an individual's on-line reputation. While you can't judge a company like Coca-Cola or Microsoft by one solitary tweet, individual's often are judged that quickly.
• Social Intuition: As candidates develop more and more of a web-based presence, companies will use this information about candidates to tailor their employment offerings to the specific candidate. For example, companies that see on Facebook that you love dogs may emphasize that they offer pet insurance as a benefit.
• The importance of LinkedIn connections will be more and more important, at least in the short-term. Donato pointed out that he has more than 10,000 connections via LinkedIn. He can't really know all those people, but if he is looking for someone, he can connect with them directly whereas many of us on LinkedIn still rely on reaching out through our connections for introductions to others. While I may be waiting for my connection to introduce me to someone, Donato's already talking to them directly. More than 50 percent of the webinar participants indicated they were actively trying to grow their LinkedIn connections as large as possible in order to directly connect.
• The world is going mobile and there is no turning back - there will be no need for desktop computers save for some very specialized types of computing. The smartphone and increasingly the tablet will contain everything we will need as more and more data moves to 'the cloud' and the device in your hands contains all the apps necessary to access that data. The flow of information will become permission-based and you will have more control over what information you share and what information you receive.

I don't profess to know if all these things will happen the way Donato predicts, but I'd hazard a guess that if we re-read this posting in 5 years we'll all be amazed at what will have changed.