Community

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(August 11, 2003) -- Part of the contemporary American psyche includes a clear longing for a sense of community. This is not satisfied by the so-called talent communities that are really direct-marketing schemes that are marketed as community.

A small but growing percentage of job boards feature incredibly personal and physical networking as a component of their approach to the game. Over the years, we've enthusiastically covered this trend and remain certain that it is a powerful and repeatable model. Combining digital information streams with physical gatherings, a community development technique pioneered by the Well, and utilized by Craig's List, Media Bistro and MBAFreeAgents, is a way of doing business that supercedes the old fashioned "job fair".

MediaBistro, whose tagline is "jobs, friends, smarts, love", is the brainchild of Laurel Touby, a Manhattan based gadfly and entrepreneur. She organizes parties for members of the media community in geographical niches around the company. It's not the parties, the forums or the job board by themselves. Rather, the synergy of on and offline experiences makes for a milieu in which it is easy to get to know new people and network.

Not all of us are great networkers and the media bistro model clearly isn't for everyone. If you wanted to develop this sort of event for highly technical people, you might use Border's instead of a bar and feature a speaker rather than Cosmopolitans. But, the idea of gathering like minded people into a physical group on a monthly basis while keeping them connected with web-based content is ripe for duplication. It's a job board strategy. It's an HR department strategy. It's all about maintaining and developing relationships.

Imagine knowing the right 100 people so that the next time an opening came up, you could reach the right person for it in a couple of phone calls. While the legwork and planning are at least as (if not more) expensive than traditional recruiting methods, the eliminated lag time is worth untold dollars in increased productivity and supervisory job satisfaction.

Maybe we should start selling bumper stickers that say "Computing is not Recruiting". It's not that the internet can't be helpful, it's just the technical part of a real strategic problem. The rest of the problem responds to investment in other than technical infrastructure. It needs and requires investment in people.

- John Sumser

Deploy Solutions delivers talent optimization software that helps large companies maximize staffing performance.

Deploy uniquely equips customers with applicant tracking, electronic recruiting and talent management technology to support exemplary user experiences for recruiters, HR executives, hiring managers and candidates.

The company draws upon flexible technology, deep domain experience and a comprehensive approach to HR metrics & analytics to drive measurable results for customers like Exult (also a distribution partner), Southwest Airlines, NASA's Jet Propulsion Labs, Advocate Healthcare, Bank of America, Prudential, British Petroleum, Bristol-Meyers Squibb, FedEx, FleetBoston Financial, Synopsys, Fresenius Medical Care N.A., Square D, and Zimmer.

Our solutions are facilitating unprecedented returns for visionary, multi-national corporations including slashing cost-per-hire by up to 70%, boosting retention by up to 10% and decreasing time-to-hire by up to 50%, and simultaneously improving quality of hire.

Recently recognized as the #2 best place to work in Massachusetts, our commitment to best practice is evident in the way we leverage our own solutions to recruit, hire and retain top-notch talent.

Register today for access to our web site's Knowledge Center to learn more about Deploy and to download free best-practice reports from industry luminaries like John Sumser, Dr. John Sullivan, and others.

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