In April 2012 James Swift will be taking part in the Greater Manchester Marathon for the charity, Freedom from Torture.
Freedom from Torture (formerly the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture) is a human rights organisation that exists to support survivors of torture and organised violence. They provide medical and social care, practical assistance, and psychological and physical therapy.
This will be James’s 5th Marathon in total and he will be aiming for a sub 4.30hr time.
Please sponsor him by visiting: www.justgiving.com/jamesswiftmanchester
We all operate in tough times, none more so than Job Boards. There are far too many of them for starters and with social media thrown into the mix and traditionally press advertising, there’s less money to go around. That said; I find the attitude of certain media sales people absolutely appalling.
The other day I asked a regional job board for a proposal which was responded with immediate negativity and accusations of us not giving them feedback on previous proposals. What’s more, apparently sending us proposals is “becoming mundane.” After pointing out that I’d be happy to lift the burden and take our business elsewhere, I got a further accusation of being “rude.” As someone that sold Job Boards to Ad Agencies for around 7 years or so, I totally understand people’s frustrations. However, there are ways of doing business and frankly, this is totally unacceptable! Emailing us with “any news on that proposal?” isn’t asking for feedback. It’s lazy and gets answered with “no” if there isn’t any news. The same media owner sees fit to then get other people in their business phone me, have a right go, point out that they know someone that works for our client and basically piss me off to high heaven. All this for just asking for a proposal!
All this has been going on for years but in these tough times, it’s the really smart and professional operators that will succeed. You don’t need to be an ass-kisser, just behave in a professional way and you’ll be treated this way in return. Becoming aggressive just makes you look desperate and extremely unprofessional!
Will I do business with this site again? Yes, probably, but will I think of them as one of our partners? Definitely not!
Feedback on the above more than welcome!
For those that don’t know #TruManchester, it was event run on the 8th/9th September 2010 which differed greatly from your typical conference. No name badges, no suits (apart from a couple of guys that looked like KGB operatives that seemed to be lurking around each corner), no waiting aroud to ask your questions, no sales pitches or blatant self-promotion from companies flogging you advertising or products.
I really liked the idea of having track-topics running simultaneously with the flexibility to dip in and out of each one. I felt a bit rude doing this at first but if something was clearly not to my interest/benefit, it gave me the flexibility to just move on to the next one. A slight criticism is the tracks were positioned a little bit close to each other so if you were sat in the wrong place, it was quite easy to become a bit distracted and I found myself listening to two tracks at once (well that probably says more about my attention span than a criticism)! Everyone tweeting in real-time made it really easy to see which tracks were of most interest and by simply following the #TruManchester hashtag, I could make a decision on which was seemed right for me.
The tracks could’ve been defined a bit clearer. For example, Social Media Circus could’ve been anything from the theory of Social Media, from a client’s perspective or candidate experiences. I personally wanted to know more about ROI from other like-minded people but it tended to lean towards whether or not Facebook is suitable for recruitment at all and one or two seemed to dominate this particular track.
The really big plus point for me was that you actually got to meet and engage with people all the way through the day. There was none of the usual just sitting there being sold to by a job board, a social media provider or whoever else is flavour of the month. It got me thinking about how everything can benefit my business and most importantly, how it can help with our client’s people strategies. What’s more, it was clear from the start that both the track-leaders and attendees were genuinely passionate about improving our market.
I left the day feeling really positive about the whole experience and although most of us probably stayed out a little later than we should’ve done in the evening/early hours, I finally got the opportunity to meet people I’ve been communicating with on Twitter. I found it fascinating that people travelled from all over the world to attend too! I will definitely be attending future events and if you want to learn new experiences about all aspects of recruitment communications from genuine experts, then they are not to be missed!
Big thanks to Bill Boorman for organising and Jobsite for bringing me along. Top effort!
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12 of the Best #truManchester sounds – I’d have New Order and 808 state on there too but a decent list none the less!
Really looking forward to the event, see some old and new faces and hopefully gain some insight into what’s going on in the social media / rec comms market.
http://trumanchester.wordpress.com/
