canadian headhunter

Searching for Jeremy Wright

Some of you might have heard via the blogosphere that Jeremy over at Ensight had an adventure of sorts when he tried to cross the border from Canada to the US recently. Jeremy had landed a Blogging related job in New York and was off to start his job.

However he was stopped at the border and after a rather long ordeal not allowed to enter the US. Jeremy has removed some posts he did on the subject but his border adventure is not what interested me.

Mike had a cup of coffee with Jeremy today and he told him that he was approached by a consulting firm about this job. They were desperate. The client a large publishing company had been looking for someone to help them start a blog (or something like that) and wanted someone with blogging expertise (both content and technical). Not only that but this was the second firm they had tried another “consulting firm” had come up empty.

Now I don’t know if these consulting firms were actual recruiters or some other type of consultants but I am flabbergasted that someone would find it difficult to find someone to fill this position.

Remember there are about a billion bloggers (well not that much but close) out there and the technical blogs were the originators of the phenom in many respects.

Could it be that these people knew absolutely nothing about blogging??

But even if that was the case that shouldn’t have stopped them from finding someone qualified in a short period of time.

Incidentally I am not saying Jeremy is not qualified. I just think that the search should have been very easy.

If I were given this search and knew nothing about blogs the first thing I would do is learn about blogs.

I would hope that if these people are not Internet savvy then they would have at least noticed that Time and Fortune have both done cover stories about blogs and blogging recently?? Heck every local newspaper in every town has had some form of article about blogs in the past year.

Just Tuesday while driving to a meeting in Toronto I heard a local talk radio station talking about the woman who was fired for writing something negative about her employer on her own blog.

It’s not like these things are unknown at this point (although lots of people still don’t have a clue about them).

The first thing I would do is a Google search on blogs. Let me clarify I would first do a Google News search on them.

Why? If I don’t know squat about an industry I would like to see if there are any articles written that would give me a quick overview of the field.

I type in “blogging” into the Google News engine and come up with tons of hits. On the first page I find an article about “making money from blogging” this peaks my interest because it sounds like it might contain information about the people who are involved in blogging for a living – those are people I would like to target as candidates or referrals.

The link takes me to a blog called “Inside the Beltway” assuming I am new to blogging this person is my first potential target. So I click on the “about” link and find not one but 6 people listed. This is a jackpot for a recruiter. In one click I have found 6 names including the editor James Joyner.

Going back to the main page I read the article and discover that it is linking to another site with an interview done by a blogger with a guy from a company called “Blogads” that does advertising on blogs.

Pretty soon I have two more names:

John Hawkins who runs a blog called Right Wing News
And Henry Copeland from Blogads – the advertising company.

Now I want to check out Blogads. There is a link to the company provided. I click through. Ok Blogads at first doesn’t seem to have much but then I notice something on the right hand of the screen: testimonials!!

For example :

"Blogads makes it a snap to create and customize our campaigns, and the traffic they send to our book and author sites is significant. But the best part is being able to share space (mind-space, virtual-space, screen-space) with the bloggers who -- if they embrace our books and authors -- make all the difference."
- Farah Miller
Manager of New Media
The Knopf Publishing Group

WOW! The name of the manager of New Media for a Publishing group! Ya think she might be able to provide some referrals? Maybe she would be a candidate herself??

There are also 7 more names on the testimonials all from Bloggers.

From Google link I already have 16 names and I am just getting warmed up. I go back to Google News and after a couple of false starts with articles buried under subscription walls I find another article of interest. This one seems to be about by a journalist talking about blogs as some form of new media (remember I am trying to conduct this as if I don’t know anything about blogs).

He mentions some guy. A pioneer named Matt Drudge I make a note of it.

More importantly he mentions a company called “blogger” which apparently allows people to set up their own blogs. I check it out. Apparently it was founded by three people in San Francisco and they sold it to Google (lucky bastards). A link in their about section takes me to an article about the purchase. It gives the name of Evan Williams as one of the founders of blogger with a link to his sight which provides me with his email.

Additionally it mentions two other Blogging companies: Movable Type and Userland Radio

I am up to 18 names. Plust the names of some of the key companies who are playing in the blog space I have been barely searching for a half hour.

I could go on but you get my drift.

My next step would be to continue to build that list. Then when I had about 100 or so names I would begin contacting these people via email (since they all seem so willing to put their emails on their sites) and telling them about the search. I would ask them if they were interested and if not could they recommend someone.

Now let me ask you this. Do you think that I would generate some interest? Do you think that maybe this would start to percolate through the blogosphere and eventually turn up even more people that I never heard of.

I don’t know. Maybe the people who were conducting the search did this. The second company managed to find Jeremy. But they were desperate at this point.

Maybe this company in question should have hired real recruiters.