by Francisco Marco-SerranoPosted on Posted in Autoritas, recruitment, social media — No Comments ↓

Along these years I have been both sides of the labour market frontline, both supply and demand, looking for jobs and offering them. Further, being a researcher and an economist I have always being interested in gaining more knowledge on how this market worked, which were the procedures and policies that companies, agencies and headhunters followed, and how was the way job-seekers looked for jobs, acted behind the lines to create and craft their resumés, and performed during the interviews. Inter alia.

Being mad about social media you should think what the reality is for me: recruitment mixes with recruitment as well. That’s right! I consider that as part of your digital life, social media interactions can be of great value to you… do you think so? Well, that’s a real truth, although the very best value can be obtained by recruiters: yeah!!!

There is a wealth of information on the internet that can help the recruitment industry to leverage social knowledge:

  1. Passive candidate searching; nowadays, your recruitment agency or internal HR department is receiving loads of resumés, even as spontaneous candidacies. Did you know that your best candidate might actually be unknowledgeable of your company or open job positions? As part of your talent acquisition policies you should embed the usage of social networks monitoring in your procedures in order to spot the influencers in your recruitment areas.
  2. Candidate profiling; your candidates will have sent you their resumé, but is on it the actual truth? Besides, you can apply a psychometric test or other techniques in order to get the most of what’s inside your candidate’s mind. What if social media could tell you more about him/her? I think that’s possible.
  3. Industry monitoring; this, actually, is the usual suspect application for Cosmos: consider within your strategy looking at the trends of the recruitment sector, your clients’ sectors, main players in the arena, etc. With Cosmos you can even set up alerts!
  4. Job board aggregator.

And maybe I’m missing some more. Would you like me to come and present you a demo? Let me know through this form.

 

by Francisco Marco-SerranoPosted on Posted in data, operations research, social media, social sciences, statistics — No Comments ↓

Don’t, this is not a probability post where I shall be explaining the odds of getting one of the faces of the dice… and where I could consider that the odds might be constrained by the fact a good thrower could adjust them. Let me know your views in the comments section, anyway.

What I wanted to say is that after a long period off the hook I am rolling again. Since October 2012, when I migrated from Spain escaping the bloody economic crises, I have been lecturing Economics at a private college in London. It has been fun lecturing micro theory, economics of government policies, applied economics, econometrics, and economics of the EU. However, I had stopped with my research to focus on pursuing my career in academia.

Hopefully, this is changing, and I’m moving on: firstly, trying to get back to my PhD thesis (cultural economics); second, working on methodologies for making good use of Big Data. While the former may be a little boring to explain at the moment (find here the briefing), the later I’m quite excited about.

Last January I read from Laura’s blog (Punk Rock OR) she had started to have a look at it. In March I was helping a colleague to proceed with some conventional hypotesis testing with data gathered from the social networks to sadly find after some deceptive results and basic literature review that big samples made these tests useless (even, it seems Pharma tests use bigger samples on purpouse to get higher likelihood of approval rates); a Professor friend of mine recommended Bayesian statistics, while my colleague thinks machine learning might be a better path to follow. We’ll analyse both, though. Further… ops, I’m talking too much: give some months before I can say a word. Cheers! 😉

by Francisco Marco-SerranoPosted on Posted in economics, Matter of BIZ — No Comments ↓

As an economist that has been a freelance for the last five years, I had very much in mind that making project proposals was much of a puzzle with regards to pricing my services. Actually, sometimes pricing your services is more an art rather than a science, due to the fact that you need to ‘guesstimate’ the value the client is going to obtain (and perceive) from the project, and how much budget they have available to proceed with it.

This turns even more complicated for the smaller projects, and even mission impossible when we are talking about ‘micro advice’. How much should you charge for 15 minutes of your time? Will anyone be willing to pay 50 pounds for getting your advice being delivered in a quarter of an hour? Further, if you don’t ask them to hire you for such short assignments, they won’t hire you (one of the rules of closing a sale!).

Hopefully, for the last year I had been using a Social CRM solution called CubeSocial. Why ‘hopefully’? Hey, because thanks to being an avid CubeSocial blog reader I bumped into the perfect solution to sort out the problem above: honestyboxx. Serendipity led me to  confuse ‘Ask a question’ with a ‘Comments’ box, which allowed me to realise a new plugin was being tested on CubeSocial’s website. Got’cha! I contacted Linda & Mark, CubeSocial co-founders, to happily find out they were starting up (again) with this new venture. By the way, I kindly appreciate they allowed me to beta-test the service, which is already on!

Would I recommend the service? Seriously!? That’s the ideal widget for your website or blog:

  1. Works better than a contact form, since the person contacting you is already aware that you are giving advice for a fee (not for free, notice the R).
  2. You get to extract the willingness-to-pay of the prospective client (you can always reject the question if you find the suggested price does not meet your reserve fee).
  3. Engagement works neatly, or as the service name suggests, honestly. So, I would say this is a service that helps you be more transparent and socially responsible (yes, that’s CSR as well).

So, shall I recommend it? Of course, and I’m using it too 😉