I’m sure you’ve seen enough predictions for the New Year, but I am going to sneak this in before the year truly gets underway with the first day of work. Here are 7 trends in recruitment & social media I think we are going to see in 2010.

1. Return of Recruitment, as the numbers of unemployed continue to rise
We are going to see more vacancies released and jobs advertised as managers look to restore equilibrium to their organisations damaged through the job cuts and recruitment freezes of the past 18 months. Recruitment agencies – newly streamlined in 2010 – will stage a mini recovery in Q1 and Q2. This will be in spite of rising unemployment, which according to the widely cited CIPD report of December 21 will peak at 2.8 million later in the year. What does this mean? Simply, that the jobs being created are going to be different from the ones being lost. Industries on the growth track include green tech, IT, social media & HR. Those continuing on the downturn include middle office, administration, old media, & soon, public sector.

2. The Rise & Rise of Flexible Working
Organisations will become increasingly innovative in the use of different types of employment contracts they offer as they aim to source labour on an ‘on demand’ basis. Expect to see this reflected in increasing numbers of interim, contract, fixed term, part time and flexi working vacancies – at the expense of the traditional permanent job market. This will have implications on job search strategy – more people are going to be working for shorter periods of time with more employers, possibly holding down multiple assignments with different employers simultaneously. Job applicants will learn the skills more typical of freelancers to compete in a complicated job market.

3. The Year of the Home Based Entrepreneur
Changing working patterns will present an unprecedented opportunity for a segment of the labour market long neglected – the stay-at-home. Social media becomes a true enabler of homebased working, initially as employees and increasingly, as entrepreneurs. Expect to see an explosion of entrepreneurial start ups spearheaded by individuals who no longer need to choose directly between work and home. The ‘mommy blogger’ phenomenon will hit the UK, as the nature of flexible work gives home based workers a competitive advantage against those still locked in the 9-5 regimen.

4. LinkedIn continues its dominance
LinkedIn will go from strength to strength. Breaking the 50 million user barrier in late 2009 has created an unstoppable momemtum for the professional networking platform and it is now entrenched in the mainstream as an online resource, networking & career management tool. Those with dormant accounts will reactivate them; those who have not signed up already will do so. Everyone who is serious about the jobsearch will be on board by the end of year.

5. Twitter will plateau
What you say? Yes, indeed. The story of 2009 will NOT be the story of 2010. There are tose who do not ‘get’ Twitter; now they may not need to do so, particularly as Facebook continues its real time challenge through implementation of FriendFeeder and Twitter-like services. Social media overload will prevent the platform from extending its reach to new users and the initiated will end up preaching to themselves. Twitter will continue to thrive, but its increasingly expert user community will further distance themselves from the rest through further innovation of platform, clients and 3rd party integration further raising the barrier for new user entry.

6. Personal Branding will become cliche
Already prevalent in US career management circles, ‘personal branding’ will become the job search cliche in 2010; the use of marketing concepts and terminology to the job search will become common place – reiterated ad nauseam by recruiters, career coaches and employment consultants. There’s merit to it too, as traditional job search techniques (reliance on job boards, agencies & adverts) increasingly give ground to new/old job search techniques (networking, social media promotion, direct application). Establishing and managing your personal brand will rank alongside writing your CV and polishing your interviewing skills in terms of importance to the job search

7. Social Media & Business
Businesses will bite the bullet and embrace social media, with widely variable degrees of success. Expect an explosion of company Twitter profiles, LinkedIn Groups & Facebook Fan Pages. However dormant most of these will end up being they will nevertheless be in place as companies make the effort not to be seen as behind the times. Some organisations will learn to use these platforms to communicate vacancies; individuals in turn will learn to use company profiles as places to go to find employment opportunities. Companies who have denial of service policies on social media platforms will relent as mobile devices render such policies redundant. Social media governance guidelines will follow by default & every company will have a policy in place by the end of the year.

Thats my 7, lets see how it turns out in 12 months time. Great to be back – best wishes for 2010.

With Twitter and LinkedIn launching their synchronisation love-in last week, there is a growing sense of inevitability about the deepening integration taking place between social networking platforms. As Scott Monty surmised in his social marketing blog, this is already leading to interesting developments when very different audiences collide, particularly when the language used is distinct and often unintelligible to the other user community. This is especially true of Twitter, where technical restrictions of the platform combined with the 140 character limit of the service has led to the creation of a language with its own terminology, grammar and social mores. Its not difficult to imagine the irritation non twitterers might feel when status updates start to resemble schoolyard SMS with a few random abbreviations thrown in.

So before we have a fall out, have a quick look at this: A Survival Phrasebook on the 5 most commonly used Twitter terms.

1. Tw___.
Yes, thats right tweeps, Twitter pioneers have shown their true geek colours by rebranding old words by the simple device of adding the prefix ‘Tw’ or ‘Twitter’ to any English word that will take it. Examples include:

twitterverse – the sum total of everyone on twitter
twitterati - active users of twitter
tweeple – people
twestival – a twitter organised festival
tweetflash – a breaking news item on twitter

You get the picture. Thankfully, the semantics haven’t changed, only the spelling.

2. RT.
An abbreviation of another twitter coined term, the Retweet. Many people think the real point of Twitter is the ease and speed with which information can become viral. If your update is sufficiently interesting or important, your followers may be inclined to forward it to their followers who in turn may do the same. Within moments your post could be reaching an audience of thousands. ‘RT’ has become the Twitterati’s method of indicating forwarded content – the letters themselves don’t have a technical function (you can forward any tweet without them just as well) so its really a method of attribution, giving credit for the original tweeters tweet, so to speak. It has also come to be used as an appeal to spread the message – significantly used during emergency or disaster situations, such as the Mumbai bombings of 2008 and the Iranian Presidential elections in 2009.

3. # or hashtag.
A user driven agreement to collect tweets on a particular topic to make it easier for people to search for and contribute to a conversation. Agreement is reached simply through hitting a tipping point in usage – users insert the # in front of the topic title and tweet away. If enough people agree to use the hashtag, the topic can ‘trend’ – more about this later. In this way news can spread, almost always faster than traditional distribution channels. Social action (or reaction) can be seen in the #trafigura and #janmoir, where controversial legal and editorial decisions by the oil trading company Trafigura and The Daily Mail led to a widespread outpouring of anger, creating ‘trending’ topics which at one moment had both Trafigura and Jan Moir as the most tweeted about topics worldwide. The negative publicity generated was such that the Trafigura ruling was overturned, whilst the Daily Mail lost most of its online sponsors, with Jan Moir having to post an apology 24 hours later.

4. Trending topics.
A subject of conversation that is popular enough to ranked by Twitter. The subject itself could be anything – a football result, a political summit or the return of Elvis – its the users who decide by tweeting about it. This is the reason why Twitter founder Biz Stone thinks the platform has potential to become a ‘Virtual Water Cooler’ – by tracking trending topics on twitter or 3rd party application like Twitscoop or Trendmaps anyone with an account can swiftly see what people are generally talking about at any point in time, anywhere in the world and contribute to it. It is also a great way to get scoop – trending has proven to be a much faster way of a receiving news – now classic examples include NBA star Shaquille O’Neal’s trade to the Cleveland Cavaliers (Shaq himself found out through a twitter user telling him the deal had been done) and the Continental Airlines 737 crash in Denver when the plane slid off the runway during take-off on Dec 21. Passenger Mike Wilson famously tweeted. “Holy f**king s**t – I was just in a plane crash!”

5. @.
When used in tweets, or in a search, it will look for a user profile rather than the content of that users tweets. For instance, a search on @iran will bring up results of individuals who have the word ‘iran’ in their username, rather than any tweets about the Islamic Republic of Iran. In many respect ‘@’ is the opposite to ‘#’ in the twitterspeak – @ for users, # for content. It is used as a method of attribution and of messaging – the users who’ve been ‘mentioned’ this way can check what is being said about them and who is saying it. For companies and individuals alike, its a great way to monitor brand reputation and even to address customer service issues before they build momentum. Facebook liked it enough to lift the entire concept lock, stock & barrel with its new tagging feature.

And now in Facebook….

There’s plenty more. For those who wish to do more research on how Twitter works, you can do worse than check out the leading social media guide online, Mashable.com. Alternatively, you can always just sign up and get using it. www.twitter.com

LinkedIn. Social media for grown-ups, the job seekers best friend and the end of the road for the Curriculum Vitae as we know it. Following Dan Schawbel’s excellent piece Predict the End of the Traditional Resume Here in Personal Branding Blog last week, here are 5 more reasons why LinkedIn will prove to be the ultimate CV killer.

1. DATA CURRENCY
CV’s get out of date, fast. As a static file it does a passable job of capturing a snapshot of your achievements, but it begins running out of currency the moment it leaves the safe confines of your desktop. You click send, it instantly becomes a historical document; the longer it’s out there, the more remote it becomes to your reality and the less relevance it has to you and your job search. Legacy CV’s – documents you sent several job searches ago – can sit on recruiter databases and online job boards for years after your original submission. These documents are so far out of date, they constitute misinformation on your professional status and are a significant threat to the message you are communicating to the employer market, never mind the negative connotation it delivers to your personal brand.

HOW DOES LINKEDIN CHANGE THINGS?
Like all social networking sites, LinkedIn gives you the opportunity to amend your profile any time you are log into your account. Got a new qualification? Add it to the Education section. Got a new job? Simply Add A New Position. Looking for a job? Update your status to that effect. There are no files to upload, no documents to rewrite, no rogue files to chase down and delete. LinkedIn can be as near to a real time depiction of your current professional status as you need it to be, removing the need for anyone to ask the first question of any recruitment process – ‘are you looking for work?’

2. DATA ACCURACY
CV’s are marketing documents and they typically contain….embellishments on the truth. Lets face it, when you need a job, you’ll do what it takes to get one and that often means telling people about the time when you were the James Bond of company X or business Y. The more subtle may prefer the technique of claiming credit for stuff you never did. Sure, you knocked out a few spreadsheets, and they looked really good but doesn’t mean that you delivered the £100 million business critical project, buddy. Some even go right ahead and tell outright lies – dates, job titles, employers, responsibilities or whatever else comes to mind. I should know. I’ve hired a few of those guys.

Why do people feel free to lie on the CV?

The temptation is there because there’s a good chance that you won’t be contradicted until after you’ve been offered the job. Due diligence in the recruitment process generally takes place after the fact – remember the ‘offer conditional upon satisfactory references’ line? As crazy as it sounds, this is how we do it – interview, offer, then check whether the guy is crazy or not. References were invented precisely because employers wanted a system to assure themselves that the Richard Branson they’ve just offered the job to is just precisely who he says he is. It’s just never been a very good system.

HOW DOES LINKEDIN CHANGE THINGS?
Of course, there is nothing stopping you from lying on your LinkedIn profile; however, it would be one of the most unwise and career limiting mistakes you could make. The information you put out there is public, it is open to challenge, and the people you are connected with are the very people who know you best – your work colleagues. Lying on LinkedIn affects them by their association with you and you’ll either see a mass departure of your soon-to-be ex connections or a complete lack of recommendations from the very people from whom you need it most. What’s more, the visibility of your connections allows a preliminary reference to be easily taken by any employer foolish enough to contemplate hiring you – without your knowledge or say so. Anybody still think this is a good idea?


3. DATA PRESENTATION
How many times do career coaches/advisors/your wife tell you to distinguish yourself from the hordes of CV sending maniacs by increasing your font size and inserting a few nice tables? And you know what? they do have a point – it is good to be different. Career expert Alison Doyle always gives great tips on CV writing. But being different brings its own set of problems, principally by making it a serious pain-in-the-ass for recruiters and hiring managers to compare candidates on a like-for-like basis. Having different looking CV’s means that recruiters are actually going to have to go to the trouble of reading them. This is why the application form was invented, basically an attempt to standardise the presentation of applicant data to increase human and computer efficiency. Some institutions like, anything to do with Her Majesty’s Government don’t actually accept job applications in any other way. But of course, every employer has a different application form, passing on the pain to the applicants who have to go through the rigmarole of completing different sets of forms for every single job they apply for – its difficult to think of a bigger waste of time for an already time stressed job seeker.

Why can’t there just be one standard template for presenting your professional experience….?

HOW DOES LINKEDIN CHANGE THINGS?
Regardless of the content you input or applications you add, the basic template for every one of LinkedIn 40 million plus users remains the same. Recruiters have long since become familiar with the information architecture of LinkedIn profiles and their ability to conduct comparative assessments has consequently become much more efficient. LinkedIn makes it easier for recruiters and hiring managers to make decisions – this is a good thing for everyone involved in the recruitment process, leading to quicker decisions, fewer dead ends and less time wasted.

4. DATA PROTECTION
We already know you lose control over your CV when you submit to somebody or somewhere else. What we haven’t talked about is how you’ve also lose control over the content within the document. Your carefully crafted two page masterpiece? Oh, you mean the one that’s about to be mangled by the incompatible technology stack of the job board you’ve sent it to? Or perhaps you mean the one that’s about to be deliberately altered by the recruiter who thinks its not quite fit for his particular purpose? If you think you have only have one version of your CV out there in cyberspace, then think again. If you’ve ever applied to an online advert, or uploaded one to a job board, the chances are you have many, many more.

HOW DOES LINKEDIN CHANGE THINGS?
LinkedIn is a network of password protected profiles, where the owner has sole authority to create, edit, manage and delete information on his or her account. It is not a file that can be doctored or reproduced, nor is there a requirement for it be compatible with this reader or that database. Furthermore, any duplicate accounts can be easily located and removed by the owner. The security of the data on a LinkedIn profile is one of the primary reasons why it is so popular as a recruiting tool – it serves as a method of validating information found on CV’s. It has become the single most authentic representation of an individuals professional experience; its only a natural extension of the logic to see it replace the CV entirely once we get comfortable with information that is managed this way.

5. DATA DISINTERMEDIATION
Data disinterwhat? Yeah, that’s right. Data disintermediation. Or cutting out the middle man if you prefer English to recruiterspeak. It is not a stretch to say that the flaws inherent within the CV is one the central reasons why recruitment agents – and filing cabinets – actually exist. As CV aggregators, the recruiters grew an industry to fulfill an essential service for job seekers and employers alike – storing and managing CV information. So long as the CV was currency of the job market, the recruiters had a real value added role to play, playing match maker between those who had the labour and those who held the vacancies.

HOW DOES LINKEDIN CHANGE THINGS?
LinkedIn has enabled job seekers and employers to reach each other directly, without the need for intermediaries or the documents they monopolise. Recruiters have lost control of the information on which the industry is based, not because they’ve lost control over CV’s, but because CV’s themselves have been superceded by another way of presenting records of professional achievement. The implication is obvious – if job seekers and employers find each other through the information they exchange on LinkedIn, the need to produce a document replicating much of that information will increasingly be seen as inane.

SO, IS THE CV REALLY DEAD?
Culture lags behind technology. And when cultural change comes, there is no reason to assume that it will uniform across all sectors of the society. Indeed if we review the inconsistent adoption of what we now accept as standard tools, we can anticipate variance we what we’ll find in different sectors of the economy. Only last year, I worked with one public sector client where staff still shared one PC in order to send emails – this in 2008. So the CV will be around for at least a while, certainly as a backup document ‘for the records’ (those filing cabinets again) but it will be increasingly marginalised in the recruitment process in favour of more efficient, more accurate and more authentic media. And as Gen Y enters the workforce in real numbers, the erosion of its value will continue, until one day – soon – employers will simply stop asking for them.