This is your blog. If you’re speaking at the Expo in Hollywood and want to get thoughts from attendees as to what’s on their minds, post here. If you’re an attendee and are looking for people to network with at the Expo, post here. It’ll be a great conference.

Wednesday, April 2, 3:15. Rob McIntosh will be answering your sourcing questions — most any questions you have so long as they don’t contain any of George Carlin’s no-no words. If you want to make sure you get your question asked, post it here and Rob’ll tackle the questions from this blog first.

Tell us how things went, so we can make it better next time.

Paul Hughes:
“Once you invest in a global citizen like myself, I will give everything I can to give back to you.”

On online applications: “It’s such a time-consuming process.”

On what his career center says: “Get yourself off of Facebook.” Also: “LinkedIn gives off more of a professional feel.”

Francisco Gomez:
On the impression he got from one consulting company at a career fair/conference: “Here’s a wall between you and me. We’re already consultants for this firm, and we’re big shots.”

On people who visit campus but are just representatives, but are not actually hiring: “I don’t like dealing with people who are not decision-makers.”

Also: “I don’t want to join a company to leave in a year.”

Jason D’Olier:
On what feeling he wants to get from companies: “Being able to give someone the flexibility or communicate the information they need to know in an upfront manner, so as not to be seen as playing games.”

On email: “Send specific emails to students saying we’ve seen your resume [and] we’re interested … not a mass e-mail to the whole class, but the people whose resumes stand out to you.”

Also: “Having fun on your job is important, but it’s definitely not the top criteria.”

Wesley Alexander:
“One of the best experiences I had was with Intel. … they were very honest with me and very forthcoming … ”

On recruiters: “If the recruiter knows as much about the business as they can … that’s very important to us.”

Christine Schwaninger:
(On what she likes in companies) — “A recruiter who’s really responsive … [where] I don’t feel like my resume has just been left to the ether … some recruiters don’t understand the value yet of evening MBA students.”

On work/life balance: “I work very hard, but I feel that there should be a rational balance.”

Also: “Be honest, sell the actual culture.”

… that an attendee just said during the q-and-a during Daniel Pink’s session.
“Luck favors the well-prepared.”

From Maureen Sharib’s sourcing (particularly phone sourcing) workshop …

Studies show “the average recruiter spends less than 10% of their time sourcing, and I’d suggest [the reality is] even less … I promise you if you can make the time to do it one day a week, within two months you will have very strong pipelines.”

Good sourcers may be quiet, and good listeners. Twenty-five percent of the population are introverts — and these tend to make the best telephone names sourcers. These are people, she says, who can engage socially and are good conversationalists, but need some alone time to recharge.

Good sourcers “dream of ways to get into companies.”

She likes Hoovers, but seems wary of ZoomInfo because of accuracy issues (an attendee disagrees, saying that she feels that ZoomInfo is about 95% accurate).

Suggests *67 if needed to block numbers when calling, or purchasing “call block” from a phone company.

Out of 10 names:
–1-2 will be looking now,
–3-5 will listen to you immediately,
–3-5 will be interested in listening to you later
–1 won’t be interested.

Some of her favorite sites and sources:

LinkedIn’s “Answers” section (see tab at top of LinkedIn)
411.com
keyhole.com
archive.org

We’ve started putting up videos from the conference sessions. Check them out. More will be added … so stay tuned.

From the blue-ribbon panel of recruiting bloggers Heather Hamilton (Microsoft), Dennis Smith (T-Mobile) and Joe Grimm (Detroit Free Press), hosted by Jim Durbin of Durbin Media:

Smith: “I’m searching for candidates today, and I’m searching for candidates five years from now.”

Hamilton: “You’re not going to change your corporate culture. If your culture is not tolerant of blogging, don’t do it.”

Durbin, on Heather Hamilton: “If she was ever fired, she could find a job in half an hour. There’s a point when [it’s OK to take risks].”

Smith: “It’s a great way to share your opinion of the world and brand yourself as an expert. … the problem is, it is a threat, because blogs tend to level hierarchies.”

Grimm, on companies that are reluctant to have blogs: “Try to think of a name [other than a “blog”] that is less scary to your bosses … it doesn’t matter what you call it …”

Hamilton: “I knew my blog was going to be successful when the Wall Street Journal called me … I’m not a big fan of … metrics … I didn’t go into blogging with a budget … where’s my name getting out, who’s calling me, being invited to speak on panels, anecdotal emails, things like that … for me it has never been about the numbers.”

Smith: “I spend very little time … it’s really not very much time every day … if you get involved with the community, if you participate, you’re going to see some kind of return, I think … I don’t have to look too far today to see the return. If you’re a recruiter and don’t like exposure, don’t blog. If you don’t want people to find out who you are, don’t blog.”

Smith: “I want you to walk away [from my blog] feeling like you know me.”

Grimm: “I want you to be reading stuff that I’ve written about journalism careers every day so that when the day comes that you’re looking for a job you say, ‘I think I’m going to email Joe.’”

Hamilton: “You want to think about that person who might have been doing research about your company and is ready to apply for a job now … one thing I do is promise to acknowledge every resume I receive [and pass it along].”

Grimm, on social interaction: “I can’t write an answer until I get a question. … I don’t think a blog should be a one way thing at all.”

Durbin: “Blogs are great for search engines.”

Grimm, on people sometimes being more comfortable asking questions through a blog than in person: “Someone I work with sent a question to the blog. … I emailed her back, [saying], ‘you’re serious, right?’ The next week, someone said, ‘I have to ask you a question, but is that OK, or should I email it in? … If I didn’t have the blog, she might not have thought of asking the question.”

Hamilton: “I’m not saying on the blog, ‘hey, send me your resume’ — people will do that if they want.”

The Net Generation is doing it their way, says Kevin Wheeler. And in the next two to five years, social networking is going to be the backbone of recruiting, he promises.

Wheeler also predicts he is “almost 100% certain people will be designing their own jobs” in the coming years.

Yet another reason that companies desperately need to fix their corporate career sites to catch on to future talent. But why are so few companies getting it right, he wonders.

Wheeler thinks the answer is that most companies don’t even have the right corporate career site to begin with. (And still other dinosaur companies don’t even have a corporate career site — another issue entirely.)

“This generation has the best bullshit meter on earth; they can sense any kind of PR crap in two seconds. Let me tell you: these career sites are terrible,” he says.

Companies need to avoid saying they are the best because “every single company says they’re the greatest. How can you all be the greatest? These kids just completely ignore it,” he says.

Think about the message and what you are really saying on your career sites. Wheeler says to communicate with integrity and total honesty.

“No hype, no crap. Give me the straight scoop,” he says, explaining how today’s new generation of workers prefer to find out about your company.

This is the fun generation, he reminds recruiters.

“Stodgy is really bad,” advises Wheeler.

CareerBuilder says the most-often area of inquiry this conference was about how to reach more minorities, as well as other diversity questions. The company has partnerships with BET and other diversity sites.

ZoomInfo says it got more decision-makers/recruiting leaders at its booth this year than in the past.

TheLadders’ Jennifer Machiaverna and her colleagues (cool people from the top down) say their booth was “mobbed” yesterday, the first day of the conference. Recently, Jennifer has been traveling more than a fugitive. She was just in Japan for customer-service training. From here, she’s headed to New Orleans for the EMA conference.

MadDash will soon announce a partnership with one of the big three job boards so that employers will be better able to show videos describing their culture and their jobs (it’s probably Monster or HotJobs, not CareerBuilder, as CareerBuilder recently announced what it’s up to with video).

Kevin Wheeler loves Ning. “This is the future,” he says.