ITKAN in Chicago

What a crazy busy week! This was taken at the third (?) meeting of the new Professionals with Disabilities meeting in Chicago on Wednesday night. As part of my involvement in my company's nAblement business unit (we find jobs for Information Technology professionals who happen to have a disability), I was invited to come and speak to the group about building online communities.

The Professionals with Disabilities Special Interest Group, now named ITKAN (IT Knowledge Abilities Network) is a new organization supported by the Illinois I.T. Association. They meet once a month and are just now getting their group off the ground. As part of my involvement, I volunteered to help them build out their as-yet private SharePoint site. And because of my experience with fostering online communities through my game design experience while working with Skotos Tech, I had some thoughts about directions in which they might go and tools they might use.

What an incredibly welcoming and passionate community they were to address. I look forward to further involvement with them and am sure they will do great things. At the end of the night, I had an amazing conversation with Dan, who has some brilliant ideas about assistive technologies available for the blind. He provided me with several links to existing products. I came across a few others myself and can't wait to speak with him again.

AbilITy Connection Spring Forum - Finding Jobs for People with Disabilities in IT

This week, I attended the Spring Forum for AbilITy Connection, hosted by Quad Graphics in Sussex. AbilITy Connection is a non-profit group supported by Goodwill Industries of South East Wisconsin and is dedicated to finding jobs in Information Technology for people with disabilities. Many of the proteges participating in the program are either students or are adults in a career transition. AbilITy Connection provides support in the form of mentoring, training scholarships, counseling, and job placement help.

The organization is has been around for about ten years--I've been involved for the past few on the Placement Committee. What keeps me coming back is getting the chance to work with a great group of highly talented people who have not been getting a fair shake in the job market.

This was my first opportunity to get a tour of the plant at Quad Graphics, too. It's a truly amazing shop and was a great chance for the program's proteges hear first hand during the tours about the jobs available to them when they complete their educations. The people at Quad were uniformly enthusiastic about what they do and they were great at explaining how they got into their respective IT jobs.

Incidentally, we heard from a couple of the proteges in the program and I was really impressed with what great speakers they were. In fact this guy was particularly good in front of the crowd--and I am trying to help him find work in the Milwaukee area. Give me a nudge if you have a lead for him!

Social Media Talk at DePaul University

This week, I have been invited to give a talk to students in the Information Technology programs at DePaul University's Loop campus. I'll be talking about leveraging Social Media in the job search.

I thought I'd take a reverse engineering approach. As a recruiter, I try a lot of different sorts of new tools and online media to see if they will yield some results for candidates. So I started thinking about how I'd position myself to be found by recruiters and other hiring managers were I to be in the position of conducting a hunt as a soon-to-be or recent graduate. I was forced to make some assumptions about what your average undergrad IT student knows about basic networking skills.

In short, I think that most of the students out there are pretty darned savvy about the tools and techniques surrounding social networking online. But when it comes to leveraging them for a job search... cleaning up your online profiles, positioning yourself effectively, making the most of every real-life meeting and locking in that relationship by using LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter efficiently... that's where I'll be focusing my talking points. LinkedIn is a critical one, of course, and one which, when I've given talks on social networks to university students in the past, I've found is underutilized. However, given its continuous growth, I expect to be pleasantly surprised when I ask how many have filled out a profile there this time around.

But I'm hoping just as much that by getting in front of a group of current IT students and recent grads that I'll learn just as much from them, maybe more. It's definitely getting easier to find and track social relationships online, but it's also just as easy to get lost in all of the noise. Learning to tune in on what's relevant to the job hunt is the key.

Web414

This week, I finally got the chance to check out the Milwaukee-based Web414. The group meets regularly at Bucketworks and, is a great place to learn lots of stuff about teh technology. The purpose of the group? It's a place for amateurs and professionals alike who have an interest in web technologies. They are actively involved in our local BarCamp event as well as MilwaukeeDevHouse.

Here's a short video from the event that they put together on the fly.

Web414 Meeting 4-10-08 from David Overbeck on Vimeo.

It was a very welcoming group and I very much appreciated the invite from Mike Rohde.

CAUTION: Backdoor References

The practice of performing 'backdoor' references on candidates is seldom spoken of but usually employed by hiring managers and recruiters who want to get at the "truth" about whether a candidate can really perform or just happens to be a good interviewer.

A backdoor reference for those of you who might not recognize the term is a reference check performed by calling someone the recruiter or hiring manager knows that used to work with the candidate somewhere, or maybe still does currently, and is a friend or close professional acquaintance. It is usually not someone that a job seeker would provide as a listed reference when requested.

The idea is to talk to someone behind the scenes who really knows what is going on at a company or what the candidate did.

Backdoor references do have their place. Sometimes, a candidate may just seem too good to be true and you get a sense of it from interviews, etc. At times, a reference of this nature can mean the difference between a good or bad hiring decision.

Too often, however, a backdoor reference is used to torpedo an otherwise strong, perhaps even superior, candidate without giving him or her a fair shake through the interview process.

To put it another way, a poor backdoor reference is used way too often to justify rejecting a candidate and stopping an accepted and standard interview and candidate vetting process rather than being used as just one piece of an investigation into whether a candidate would make a good hire.

The risks of engaging in backdoor references to the exclusion of the rest of the recruiting process are many:

• An injudicious backdoor reference can tip off a candidate's current employer that he or she is in an active job search. Do you really want to be responsible for damaging someone's livelihood?
  
• There is no good way to tell if the person providing the backdoor reference was threatened by, had a run-in with, or simply did not like the candidate (personality clash).
• How is it possible to tell whether the person providing the reference really worked closely with the candidate or was just parroting the candidate's reputation heard from others during idle gossip?
• How can you know whether the reference checker is not being misled by a reference who may be trying to ingratiate him or herself, at the cost of the candidate?

A backdoor reference is tantamount to an invitation to talk trash about a candidate. Because they are, to borrow from journalism, off the record and on deep background, it's such a temptation to not hold anything back and really blast somebody, whether they happen to deserve it or not.

But even (responsible) journalism takes these sorts of sources with a grain of salt. They help to paint a picture, especially if multiple sources corroborate that picture.

In the business world, though, we have used backdoor references as a way to destroy someone's career on the basis of what just one person says anonymously! Just ask anyone who has ever moderated an online forum on the Internet what kinds of trash you get when anonymous postings are allowed. Do you think that if the recruiter or hiring manager, while talking to the backdoor reference, insisted that the reference put what he or she said into writing that it would happen? Would the reference speak so ill of someone to his or her own grandmother? No?

It's time to clean up the weight of this selection criteria from the recruiting process. It is one opinion and one way of looking at a candidate among many selection criteria and it is certainly not the most important one or a justification for short circuiting the rest of a well-designed and thought-out recruiting method.

(Thank you to gananarama for use of Creative Commons licensed photo with attribution)