Building a Quality Network Takes Time

Ever since social networking moved into the mainstream, you constantly see people trying to obtain the greatest amount of contacts in the shortest period of time. The two tools I see this most prevalent in are Twitter and Linkedin. I even did it myself with Linkedin for a while by displaying my total number of connections before I realized I wasn't getting the point. We live in an impatient society where we want to acquire everything in our lives, including our professional network, as quickly as possible. Whatever happened to quality and value anyway? My point to this entry is to beware of falling prey to the twitterers and marketers who teach classes and write articles on how to expand your network and gain "x" number of followers in 2 months. To network successfully in your niche could take years and believe me it's well worth the wait and the hard work. At the end of the day I would rather have 5 followers or connections in my business social network that I've taken the time to meet and built a relationship with than have 1000 connections that I've never met. Plus, if you focus on providing quality in whatever your work may be, people will flock to you over time.

Day of Cloud

Day of Cloud has now come and gone and I have to say that I am quite pleased with how everything turned out. We had roughly 130 attendees and the feedback received from both twitter and the evaluation forms was positive overall. The best part about it from my perspective is that we saw java, .net, ruby and python developers all interacting with one another in the same room. One of the things that I would like to see accomplished through Tech in the Middle, aside from keeping the development community up to speed with cutting edge technologies, is to break down the walls that separate the different development communities. I think what we saw in the first event is that there are brilliant developers in all of the communities and if we can all network and co-exist with one another, the Chicago tech community will be all the better for it.

Tech in the Middle

Wow it's seems like it's been forever since I last blogged, but I'm back! Since my last post, I have started another venture with my partner Scott Seely called Tech in the Middle (www.techinthemiddle.com). SWI Consultants is and will always be my first priority, but Tech in the Middle is a supplementary effort to help keep the Chicagoland application development community competitive with the rest of the world when it comes to cutting edge technologies. Our premier event will actually take place this coming Friday at the ITA in Chicago's West Loop and we've named it a Day of Cloud (www.dayofcloud.com). At the core, we want to provide technology/language agnostic events that will be of interest to the entire development community and bring developers from different walks of life into the same room together. We will host a new event every 3 months culminating in a yearly conference which will cover multiple topics. Anyway, I'm off to bed for it's going to be a very long week for me, but I just wanted to let everyone know that I'm still alive. Until next week.

SWI's New Problem To Solution Hiring Approach

An Overview of Our Approach:

Typical recruitment processes (both internal and external) look to the resume as the first step to screen potential candidates. But isn't a resume really just a subjective viewpoint of one's own career and accomplishments? Aren't the supplied (pre-screened) references that they send you for that matter as well? What good is that to any employer? None at all in most cases. They still have to take time out of their day to either phone screen or meet you to determine if you would be a good fit, and in this economy, that significantly detracts from employee productivity because of the sheer number of people who are applying for jobs. So what if employers could objectively evaluate their job applicants by having them solve actual problems or projects that they are running into in every day business life? In all actuality, it's a simple turnaround of the hiring process. Typically, the white board session for application developers usually serves as a last step with the resume being the first. Our idea is to just flip it around. Whiteboard first, resume last. That way, when you bring your development team into an interview with a potential new hire, you at least know that they have demonstrated the skill level to perform the job. Thus the impact on employee productivity through having to interview many candidates who were not skill screened, is greatly reduced.

Our Process:

1. Help you formulate a problem that will adequately reflect the day to day responsibilities of your open position. During consultation, we will initially attempt to identify one of three problems: (1) Problem that you are already working on internally. (2) Problem that you are considering working on. (3) Problem that you have already solved - specifications are already created for this option and it is my recommended choice.
2. Based on the required skill sets needed, we will hand pick from our pool of quality application developers (we only staff application developers and our primary networking is done at the user groups and local events that the good ones attend - not the job boards) ones that are interested in new work and have the demonstrated the desire/capacity to solve the problem.
3. You view only the solutions that are submitted and bring in the most TALENTED developers in for the actual interview instead of the most EXPERIENCED.
4. We answer any intangible personality questions that you may have regarding the selected candidates and provide you with a resume that you can use as a talking point during the interview.


Benefits to Using Our Process:

1. Studies done by PWC and Brainbench found that anywhere from 50-75 hours is spent pre-screening and interviewing in process candidates. Our process eliminates much of the front end screening (semantic searches/resume parsing) and assures that you bring in the most skilled applicants for the job for the in-person interviews. Reducing your cost per hire.
2. Talented developers who don't necessary showcase their true skills adequately in their resume will be presented on a level playing field and won't be screened out against others who have listed their deep experience. I've found that experience doesn't necessarily equate to the most talented. There are people out there who can learn something in 2 years that someone else will take 8 years to learn. You will find that resumes that you would typically overlook in your screening process are sometimes perfect fits for what you are looking for.
3. Only qualified developers who can perform the task will submit an actual solution. While many may apply, you only will have to look at the submitted solutions.
4. By showcasing the types of problems you actually have on a day to day basis, you assure a higher rate of probability that your developers that decide to participate will be challenged and not be disappointed walking in the door. This will increase your probability of retaining your employees by giving them an actual window where they will see the type of work that they will be doing before they actually start.
5. It's completely free until you decide to hire one of our candidates. We work entirely on a contingency basis.
6. The candidate pool that we provide to solve the problem(s) will come from our deep understanding of the talent available within the application development community here in Chicago. All of our contacts have come from actually participating in the development community here locally. All of our candidates are local and a good majority of them are active in the community. None of them were poached off of the job boards, laden with active job seekers.
7. It will attract quality candidates who aren't currently looking because it's a unique approach that gives them an opportunity to improve upon their skill set. Candidates, especially the good ones, are always looking to advance their education (regardless of whether they are looking or not). They can give you great ideas and can even be pipelined for future reference.

Crowdsourcing is behind the next stage of human evolution

Have you ever wondered what it is about some of pop culture's super successes (American Idol, YouTube and Wikipedia as examples) that completely captivates all of us? Well the reason that we rant and rave about them is because they utilize a concept called Crowdsourcing. The word Crowdsourcing was coined in 2006 by Jeff Howe but has been utilized as a concept for quite a long time now. So what is it? Crowdsourcing is essentially allowing a large, diverse group to decide an outcome/create a product/solve a problem opposed to allowing a small group of experts make the decision(s). Statistics prove that 90% of the time, the group (who doesn't have any expertise in any one area) will outperform the experts in practically any situation. Let me quote an example from Jeff's book, "Crowdsourcing" to make it more clear:

The television show "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" rewards it's contestants with 1 million dollars if they can correctly answer 15 multiple choice questions. The contestants are given 3 lifelines to help them if they are stumped (1) 50/50 (2) Ask the Audience or (3) Ask an Expert or Phone a friend - who is considered to be an expert by the contestant. After going back and reviewing the outcomes from all of the episodes, it was determined that the experts gave the correct answer 65% of the time, while the audience was correct 91% of the time. Now let's take a specific question asked on the show to determine why that is:

Question: Whether sherpas and gerkas are native to:

A. Nepal
B. Ecuador
C. Morocco
D. Russia

For this particular question, only 4% of the audience knew the correct answer. So breaking that down even further by applying basic math and random guessing principles, 24% of the audience guessed (B), 24% guessed (C) and 24% guessed (D), but 28% guessed the correct answer, which is (A) (Nepal). The wrong answers will always cancel themselves out leaving that 4% to predict the correct answer the vast majority of the time.

Now that you understand what the basic concept behind Crowdsourcing is, let's look at the pop culture successes listed above and see how they have successfully applied the concept:

American Idol: The show has a panel of judges (Simon, Paula, Randy and a guest judge) to determine who makes it to Hollywood from the first round of contestants, but leaves the decision making up to the show's viewing audience from that point on until a winner is chosen. They use this method for two reasons: (1) Audience Empowerment. The audience can actually participate in the show by voting themselves, rather than just watching the subjective viewpoints of the panel to determine the outcome. Plus, as the example given above states, the crowd is almost always the better judge in determining which contestants should move on to the next round, thus creating quality content and keeping it's viewers coming back for more. (2) Exponentially greater revenues. Not only does the large viewing audience create revenue through advertising dollars, but it also assures that they continue to generate revenue after the show is over. They are assured a greater probability of success that the record deals that the top contestants receive (post show), to which American Idol receives a portion of, will generate the greatest revenues for them as well. After all, who better to determine what album that they would buy than the viewers themselves?

YouTube: I personally can't think of a more successful Web 2.0 application myself. YouTube allows it's users to submit their own videos to it's website and let's them determine which ones are the most popular by displaying a view count. The most viewed videos are typically the ones held in the highest level of value by the aggregate community, propelling some of it's users to an almost rockstar status. Think about it, you don't have to have a degree or any level of experience whatsoever to submit a video. Just a computer and a video camera. You are judged not by your credentials, but by the quality of your content. Anyone can become an overnight sensation with simply a great idea. I have even recently heard that YouTube shares it's advertising revenues with users whose videos have generated 1 million or more views. Again we come back to another example of an entity enabling it's community and driving the highest quality content as a result.

Wikipedia: Simply put, it's a crowdsourced encyclopedia created by the world. Not only does the community submit the topics, they also help to improve upon existing topics by submitting their own content to compliment what is already there (Open Source in it's truest form). Anyone can learn about practically any topic without having to look too hard. Wikipedia has done wonders for non institutional education and will continue to revolutionize and evolve over time. Just like the two examples above, we slowly beginning to see a trend arising at an alarming rate which is taking the power away from small groups of experts and putting decision making and innovation in the hands of the community itself.

These are just a few examples of the many crowdsourcing projects currently going on in the world around us. The concept can be applied to practically any situation in life and it's time to start educating people about how it will change the world (both how we do business and live in general). There is still much we have to learn in regards to best practices, but that will come through trial and error. I want to challenge anyone who is reading this blog to attempt to apply this concept to some area of your life (community organization, new product development or even the betterment of humanity - I saw one group using the concept to address world hunger). I am working on a project myself and I will continue to blog on this topic as I learn more and develop my own set of best practices.

Making yourself marketable in any economy

In my last two blog entries I discussed creating a personal value proposition for yourself using Twitter. In this blog entry, I want to dig a little deeper into the topic outside of using any one particular tool or method. I believe that one of the greatest lessons that we can all take from this recession is that we are all dispensable when it comes to our employment within a company to which we do not own ourselves. Knowing this, how could we all have better prepared ourselves for this recession looking back? In my opinion, the answer lies in focusing only on the factors which you can control, and that is your growth and continuing education within your market niche. You can't control if your company lets you go or the economy takes a deep dive, but you can control your ability to easily react to market conditions by means of your ongoing education. What you will start to find is that the more you begin to see the lay of the landscape within your community, the more you will begin to see how your community works and how to make it better.

Now the question becomes how do you begin your education if you haven't already (or how do you supplement what you are already doing). Here are 2 effective first steps for you to take:

1. Search for local user groups/associations/conferences specific to your niche/industry. Utilize search engines, Facebook, Meetup.com, Twitter (Twitter calls it's groups Twibes) and Google Groups to identify which ones to join. You can also find groups on Linkedin, and while I recommend joining them, they often don't meet in person because members are often located in different cities. I feel that it's important to meet other members in person, because that is how the most mutually beneficial business relationships and friendships develop. Find out who the president of the group is and who are some of the speakers that have presented over the past few months and write them down. Now register to become a member of the group so that you receive updates on conversation threads and future meetings via email. Once, you have done this, move on to the next step.
2. Identify both local and general industry news sites/blogs and subscribe to their RSS Feeds. Some of the presidents and speakers, who you have already identified in the previous step, will typically have blogs and personal websites that you can subscribe to. If you are unfamiliar with RSS feeds, visit www.whatisrss.com for an easy to understand instructions on both what they are and how to use them. Essentially RSS Feeds will notify you when any content is added to any of your favorite blogs or websites (it's almost as if you are creating your own industry specific newspaper that updates itself in real time). A good way to identify quality blogs is to utilize blog search engines (www.icerocket.com or www.technorati.com) and social bookmarking sites such as Delicous and Digg. The social bookmarking sites will allow you to determine which websites and blogs are attracting the most attention.

Once you have attended a few group meetings, created your own industry specific newspaper and developed relationships with other members of your community, you will begin to notice a few things:

1. Who the industry leaders are. They are often the most active participants community and the ones who are innovating and moving the community forward. They are also the ones who speak at the user groups/events and can be great mentors to you in the long run (Especially if you are able to meet them in person - which is why I recommend joining groups that actively meet). Speakers are always the most intriguing to me because typically if they speak at one event, they have more than likely spoken at another. They are the sought after experts who will increase your market intelligence significantly.
2. Who the local companies that are associated with your industry are and how active they are within the community.
3. How certain teams and companies utilize various best practices and industry trends.
4. How companies treat their employees and how likely they are to embrace change. Are they staying on the cutting/bleeding edge or are do they lag behind in the adoption of new proccesses and technology.
5. Who the hiring managers are at companies that may be of interest to you in the future.

All of a sudden you'll find that you have a completely different view of your community, and as I mentioned previously, areas for improvement and opportunity can be more easily identified. You can either take an entrepreneruial route and start a business focusing on an industry need (possibly with a group member that you have befriended), or leverage the relationships that you build to help you find employment when you want to make a career move. It's important to note that when a company determines that they need to hire, they first ask their team members whether or not they know anyone who would be a good fit. If you regularly attend meetings and engage in meaningful industry related discussions with the other members, not only will you make new friends, you will also be first on their list of recommendations when their boss asks them if they know anyone.

Lastly, you may want to know what to do if there aren't any groups or associations to join. My answer to you simply is to start one yourself. Use some of the groups websites that I listed above to setup your new group and try to get other members of your community to help you out. I find that more gets accomplished when you are working with a team.

Using Twitter effectively to attract potential employers - Part 2 of 2

In my last post I gave you some guidelines on getting started with Twitter, and if you are feeling comfortable enough with the tool (filled out your profile, followed a few people and posted a few tweets), let's move on to the next step. When I first got started with Twitter, I used twitter.com to manage all of my activities because I didn't know that any applications existed to make it more efficient and user friendly. Through following people of value, I was introduced to tools such as Tweetdeck, Twhirl and Tweetbeep. I will focus on Tweetdeck and Tweetbeep in this particular post since they are the tools I use the most.

Tweetdeck and Twhirl essentially allow you to more efficiently manage incoming tweets and manage your account in real time in a very organized fashion. Now this is a personal opinion, but Tweetdeck is the tool to go with unless you are managing two separate Twitter accounts. I'm assuming that since you are just getting started, that you only have one account so I will just talk about Tweetdeck. Go to www.tweetdeck.com and install the application on your Mac/PC (you will also be prompted to install Adobe Air before you can install Tweetdeck, so install that as well). I am a visual person, so instead of putting step by step instructions in this post on how to use Tweetdeck, I have embedded a youtube tutorial video to get you acclimated (there are a ton of tutorials out there but this guy not only talks on the most recent version of Tweetdeck, but also does it in a very clear and concise manner).



Now that you have fallen even more in love with Twitter, let's add just one more tool to your arsenal called Tweetbeep. Go to www.tweetbeep.com and set up a user account (keep in mind that the email address that you specify in your account creation will be the one that Tweepbeep sends out emails to). Once you are logged into the system, click on the option to create a "New Keyword Alert". Now perform the following:

1. Give your Alert a name.
2. Specify if you want to receive notifications once per day, or hourly.
3. Specify the keywords that you want Tweetbeep to keep an eye out for. For instance, if you want to be notified when anyone uses the words "technology" and "conference", put them in the "all of these words" field. If you want to be notified when either is mentioned, include them in "any of these words" field
4. If you want to search within a specific radius of your location, specify the city and state, as well as how many miles from that location you want to include in your search.
5. Save the alert.

Now you will receive email notifications every time a tweet occurs that matches your conditions (hyperlinks will be included in the emails that allow you to access the twitter user account that you were notified of). You can set up multiple keyword alerts but I would recommend just starting with a few because you don't want to have to sort through 200 tweetbeeps per day. Also, I set up a filter within my email client that puts all my incoming messages from Tweetbeep.com into a Tweetbeep folder so my inbox doesn't get flooded. Now you are really off and running.

It seems as if new Twitter applications are released daily, so one site I always like to keep my eye on is http://twitter.pbworks.com/Apps. This site lists ALL of the Twitter applications readily available to the public, so if you ever have some free time, it's always an interesting read. I hope some of you found these posts useful and are at least somewhat less intimidated with Twitter than you were before you read them.

Feel free to contact me at gabe@swiconsultants.com if you have any questions.