Underlying photo by Giant Ginkgo.

Marketers in almost every industry today are turning to blogs as a channel to augment their interactive marketing strategy. Marketers of staffing firms are no different. We’ve read much of the advice (and hype) on corporate blogging and I’m sure a good majority of us are coming to grips with what that means for our staffing firms. The charter (I think) is to evolve our slick, brochure-ware website approach into content heavy “blogchures” that demonstrate our expertise, build trust with clients and candidates, assist our SEO, and give our companies personality.

There are a few staffing firms giving it a whirl already. They get kudos for entering the fray and learning from their mistakes. I’ve got their feeds nourishing my reader every day with tidbits of advice on resumes, quips on the industry they focus on, and in rare cases insightful new ideas on the Talent ratrace we all live and work in. Over the next few months I will follow the “Staffosphere” closely as I learn from my peers, and attempt to take Hudson into Blogland.

For now, here’s a short list of the staffing firm blogs I’m tracking (also included in my blogroll).

Candidate Focused Blogs

• Aquent Talent Blog
• Spherion Career Blog
• The Recruiter (Yoh)
• Wired & Hired (TalentZoo)
• Volt Insider

Client Focused Blogs

• Hiring Revolution (Talent Zoo)
• Vedior HR Blog

If you have a site to add I’d love to hear about it in the comments. I’ll provide my analysis on some of these sites in the coming days.

Catching up on my HR Marketer reading, I found their post, Promoting Solar Toasters which touted this PR Web in Plain English video. It’s not often that my overtaxed brain gets enlightened thrice in one post, but today was such an occasion.

1. HR Marketer’s RSS Feed contained a little video icon next to the post in my Yahoo RSS Reader. I want to know how they did that. It seems to be a function only of the fact that the post had a video linked within it. This certainly caught my eye, and is something I’d like to have with my posts containing embedded video. I’ll have to look into it.

   

2. The lesson within the video of how PR Web works and the best way to spread PR online was enlightening. The fishing in the stream metaphor is brilliant.

   I’m definitely going to forward the video to our PR manager.

3. Which leads me to my third insight – the beauty of the work being created by commoncraft. They are the company behind all of these ‘paperworks‘ videos. Their seemingly simple technique to illustrate complex ideas is very cool. I’m sure this style of video is here to stay, and we’ll be seeing a lot more of them. I predict their viral factor will be inversely related to the number of times the technique is applied. For instance, I appreciate the illustration of new lightbulbs below especially because my wife just made me change over all the bulbs in our house. However, the technique loses impact in comparison to the illustrations of highly complex internet concepts.

Anyway, I consider myself enlightened today by the strong technique of a few good internet marketers. It’s time to go make icons show on my RSS feeds, send Hudson releases to PR Web, and make videos from scraps of paper and hand gestures.

I’m not necessarily big on the “recruito-sphere” as a place for interactive marketers of staffing firms to hang out every minute of their spare time. I prefer to try to find resources from marketers in other industries and apply them to ours. This helps bring a more innovative approach to everything we do. For instance, find out what Coke’s latest technique in loyalty marketing is, and figure out how it could apply to an online consultant retention program within your staffing firm.

On occasion however, I do pull nuggets of value from recruiter-focused blogs. Today, it was a resource on the basics of SEO from RecruitingFly.com. Essentially he took advice from free and paid SEO consulting resources out there, and made them applicable to the savvy recruiting firm marketer. He packaged it nicely into a guide that quite honestly I’m surprised he isn’t asking people to pay for. However, I think RecruitingFly is deriving much more SEO value from making the content free (after all his guide DOES mention that content is king) than he would get from coaxing 25 bucks from people to buy it. I’m going to consume the content and implement some of the recommendations (especially those on link building for recruiting firms) as fast as I can.

Sometimes media hits the target market so squarely that you just can’t help but listen. Recruiting Animal interviewed Louis Vong on the ins-and-outs of TMP’s SecondLife Strategy. Animal’s Howard Stern meets Jim Rome style coupled with discussion by former mates at TMP about a new technology that I find fascinating made for the perfect way to blow an hour.

Here are my takeaways

• Companies are poking around virtual worlds for recruitment with the help of people who already understand it
• SL is at most the next generation internet and at least a cool virtual meeting place to conduct business similarly to Real Life
• People are noticing that staffing firms have also decided to set up shop in SL
• The learning curve on everything virtual is going to take a couple of more years to become mainstream, but the wheels are already in motion. As the ease of use gets greater so too will adoption.
• TMP Labs is a catchy name for the folks that get to think out of the box without revenue targets. I’m not convinced that it is R&D in the Xerox Parc sense

I admire the team at TMP for pulling us all into conversations about SecondLife. From the same group that built a business explaining to people what this internet thing was in the mid 90’s, now they have a whole new technology to keep people mystified and spending recruitment ad dollars.

Marketing Profs has some interesting views. What strikes me is how many conversations about staffing firm marketing turn down the road of things an interactive marketer can’t do much about (easily). From the cold call approach used, to long-held beliefs that relationships begin and end with the recruiter, much of the discussion centers on fundamental staffing firm values and delivery process.

I do think that how our core delivery process is exposed online has the most potential to deliver a unique brand experience. For instance, I fundamentally believe online recruitment techniques that harness the power of online social/professional networks are a key to long term competitve advantage. The techniques are so much more advanced than what had been done in the apply-online based web 1.0 worlds, that it requires re-thought of the core recruiting process and values of the firm. The technology exists to reveal the rich intertwining of social and professional connections living within a staffing firm. It’s just that the process and comfort with the new realities do not. While there are many projects I’d like to implement that require intense change management. It is best to take the advice of many in this forum and balance those projects with a good dose of quick-hitters. I think I’ll call on Haley Marketing Group just to see what they bring to the table.

I don’t know when it showed up on the bottom of the Monster home page, but there is now a link there for “patrons of Monster cable”. I’m surprised that Monster acknowledged another Monster. I wonder how many support calls they had received from customers looking for a new S-Video cable.