Sunshine from the rain

I was getting depressed earlier this week. Things were getting tough at work, the recession was knocking on the door, I had a proper look at my taxes coming due, I was tired and I read a few disturbing articles.



One, I must say I was pretty late on. It was an article from November which reported on the fact that an employee in Sydney for global giant EDS attempted suicide after finding out he was being made redundant. See more of article here. This if nothing else made the stark reality of our current times hit home for me.

Then as if on cue an article appeared in our local news paper about one of Australia's leading banks, spending half a million dollars on an Executive getaway, just before laying off 500 people. (More here). I must say, this made me question a few things too.... Maybe it was well deserved? If nothing else it smacks of an arrogance in an unsure market, and something that has to put a poor taste in the mouths of those who were let go, and perhaps the public in general. In truth, I read and re-read a few times to ensure I got it.

Then this morning happened. Nothing unusual really, woke up late... train on time (things looking up), got a free up sized coffee (things looking really up!) then as I cross the road to my office I see something pro-active and positive happening.

I see the good people of sixfigures.com.au camped outside a major ANZ bank building (and I must note a Telstra building, 2 of the major employers in Australia, who have announced lay offs recently) offering pamphlets and career advice for people who want it. They took the mountain to Mohammed. Awesome stuff guys. A great idea, not sure what the results will be or even what you wanted to get out of it, but it inspired me, and took a bit of the gloom and doom of the preceding days away to see companies out there doing something. Congratulations! Read more about this here and here. It's kind of funny... an online job board, burgeoning on Recruitment 2.0, here in downtown Melbourne going old school, hitting the bricks and making a big impression. And put some sunshine in my day

Back to the #HRFutures 2 - Post Morning Tea

This is part II of a series dedicated to the #HRFutures conference held in Melbourne recently. It has been a busy time of late in the office, so unfortunately it has taken me a little while to get to the next part in my series.

Just to recap for those just joining me here.

While Sean Lew introduced us to the ideas of WIKI's and how applied to a business, next up were a couple of guys from Atlassian, namely Joris Luijke and Matt Hodges, to talk about the provision of HR solutions through the use of WIKIs.

HR solutions through a wiki

View more presentations from mattnhodges. (tags: atlassian wiki)

I hope the people at Atlassian don't mind me posting this, if so, let me know and it'll be gone :)

I had not (embarrassingly enough) heard of this product before, and it did seem like I was the only one in the room. (FYI to further add a tinge of redness to my face, I later found out my company uses this product, just no-one had told me, or the rest of the Recruitment HR team. It seems it was implemented in a cunningly quiet way for some interesting strategic reasons I'd best not go into).

Now these guys, whilst skilled presenters were the best ambassadors for a company I have seen in a while, I really hope when I speak about my company I can speak as passionately. Surprisingly it didn't seem too salesy, which I must admit was a concern at the start for me. Again this presentation raised lots of questions and brought out lots of ideas for me which were quickly scribbled on my note pad as I didn't want to miss anything. My eyes were really starting to be opened to the possibilities of deploying anything 2.0 into an organisation. Also, some pride etched its way into me, hearing about the success of such a great "little" Australian company, how hadn't I heard of this earlier. Note to self, get your head out of the sand!


Thomas Shaw was next up, with a presentation around the idea of Recruitment in the Web2.0 world. I was prepared for this, a) I'd met Thomas the previous week at another briefing, b) we'd been Twittering and blogging over a number of sites and c) I'd had a quick look at the presentation the previous night after he'd twittered it was up on slideshare already. Sorry Thomas :) It didn't spoil the ending though. Thomas is a deep thinker about this area, and is very serious in its application, some of the things he finds on the web on a daily basis astound me.

Thomas spoke gave me more things to think about (again a great sign in a conference for me, I don't go for answers, I go to help open me up mentally). He spoke of things like the growing amount of Aggregators in the Australian job market space and that the time of job boards is coming to an end. I learned however about a number of tools and uses for Twitter, I had no idea about some of the secret Twitter language, ie #HAJ (signifies that you have a job for someone) and #NAJ (signifies that you need a job) and the ability to add an RSS feed into Twitter (OK I am technically challenged, I only learned about the old RSS feed about a year ago), using FlickR for recruitment purposes, and of course the importance of having your companies website, the landing website if you push traffic somewhere, needing to be top notch and tailoring to the job seeker. (using tech like Buzznumbers to find it as to ensure it is working you need to be able to measure and manage the data coming in). You can see the slides from Thomas' presentation here.

Web 2.0 in Recruitment

View more presentations from Thomas Shaw. (tags: hrfutures australia)

I hope Thomas doesn't mind me doing this... Thomas? OK?

He also had a pretty tough time to present as he was the last cab off the rank before lunch, a notoriously tough time to present, just under the presentation at the end of the day which could be keeping people from their beverage of choice. I've consistently enjoyed watching Thomas' thoughts via blog and his passion about the industry via Twitter, he didn't disappoint when presenting live!

I definitely went to lunch, wrapped at what I had heard in the morning, aching to see what post lunch dished up!