Mark Samuels » LinkedIn

How CIOs are hiring and engaging with staff

mark — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 13:32:46 +0000

Whether blogging about their area of expertise or tweeting about business best practice, more CIOs are choosing to express their views through collaborative technology. Here’s my latest feature for silicon.com about the use of social media by IT leaders:

More senior IT leaders are beginning to dabble in social media and are finding new ways to help the business. So, where will social CIOs go next? Do IT leaders use social media to attract potential employees and do they use collaborative tools to keep new workers engaged?

Kcom Group started to use social media for recruitment in 2010, establishing a Twitter account for potential openings. Dean Branton, director of customer operations and group CIO at the telecoms specialist, said the organisation’s LinkedIn recruitment pages launched earlier this year and are focused on building a network of contacts.

“We have a full recruiter seat on LinkedIn, which allows us to proactively search for candidates, whose information can be imported into a PDF for hiring managers to review,” Branton said. The group’s Kcom recruitment page also provides links to relevant web sites and testimonials from current employees.

To read the rest of the feature, please click here.

Social networks blur CIOs’ work and outside lives

mark — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 14:45:21 +0000

The consumerisation of IT is pushing social media onto the business agenda and blurring links between CIOs and their external lives, according to my latest feature for silicon.com:

JLT Group CIO Ian Cohen is a social media fan who has encouraging words for IT leaders wondering how to straddle the gap between personal and business identities to make the most of online collaboration tools.

“Try it,” Cohen said. “Give it a go, based on the type of things that interest you. The CIO needs to lead the debate on social media for the chief executive, so it makes sense to develop your position.” Finance CIO Cohen is a prolific user of social media, tweeting about business, football and music from his @coe62 account.

He is also a fan of LinkedIn and Facebook, and has taken steps to test enterprise-ready social tools behind the JLT firewall. When it comes to the divide between business and personal life on social media, Cohen suggests the links between work and external lives are blurring at an executive level.

To read the rest of the feature, please click here.

The LinkedIn Premier League of New Economy Job Titles

mark — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 20:39:55 +0000

The nature of work has changed. Want proof? Search LinkedIn and see how many people choose to define their job role with what might previously have been seen as non-traditional, even esoteric, terms:

4,475,626 results for owner
3,677,739 results for consultant
1,911,106 results for specialist
537,068 results for advisor
469,201 results for founder
468,044 results for expert
405,901 results for freelance
398,420 results for contractor
365,215 results for writer
138,506 results for speaker
84,840 results for strategist
61,032 results for ambassador
50,013 results for thinker
45,848 results for visionary
42,614 results for guru
20,318 results for blogger
16,270 results for evangelist
4,582 results for entreprenuer
3,094 results for gatekeeper
1,637 results for futurist

Old favourites – like freelance and contractor – are still popular. At the start of the last decade, such descriptions were seen as being catch-all phrases for individuals operating at the fringes of the formal economy and providing an outsourced service to larger businesses.

Twenty years ago, futurologists predicted something called ‘the internet’ would allow us to all work flexibly. Now, in a new economy driven by collaborative technologies, freelancing has become the mainstream. A global economy of contractors is fast-developing, with individuals selling their expertise on-demand.

Old monikers – such as freelance and contractor – do not necessarily encapsulate the act of work. The result is a collection of meaningful/meaningless terms that are used to describe what people actually do, or would like to do.

I wonder how the table will develop as the economy changes? Feel free to suggest other esoteric descriptions.

The new rules of social networking

mark — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 20:45:24 +0000

Social networking is great. You can use Facebook to see photos of people you lost touch with years ago, celebrating the birthday of someone you don’t actually know. You can use LinkedIn to hype yourself up as the latest, greatest ‘social media guru’. And you can use Twitter to find out that loads of people got up this morning, ate some food, listened to a bit of music, were busy at work, went home, watched TV and went to bed.

But social networking is also a bit odd. I was watching the news on TV earlier and there was a lot of coverage of Peter Harvey, the teacher from Mansfield who has been charged with attempted murder. After I’d finished my fix of retro information gathering (news on the TV), I went all Web 2.0-tastic and did a search for the teacher on Facebook. And there was quite a bit of stuff, some of which surprised me – names, alleged actions, etc. You know, the kind of stuff the retro media aren’t mean to print in case of prejudicing a trial.

But all that stuff is fair game in the world of social networking. Isn’t it?