So, there is a not so new phenomena: job podcasting, in which we hear interviews with representatives of a hiring company. There's also video interviews, sometimes with little mini-documentaries of companies, showing images of corporate campuses and offices. Hail the Googleplex in San Francisco. Anyway, let's refer to this family of items as jobcasts, shall we?
Pundits will extol jobcasts for utilizing a new medium to break out of the old corporate PR propoganda stream; viewers and listeners can really get inside of the company now. I think this is a bit unfounded. From what I've seen so far, a jobcast is about the equivalent of a first round phone interview with HR, and in the best case, inclusive of a tour around the building. I've partaken of various jobcasts, and that's about what I get out of it. Yes, there is value, but no, this is not what we're discussing when we talk about Bi-directional flow of information. This is an improvement in the efficiency of the current job hiring process.
So, there are sites like Career TV and blogs like Jobs In Pods, where companies have little interviews -- usually between their HR representative and a softball throwing interviewer who asks what seem to be pretty scripted, standardized questions. Again, this is better than a job ad on a website, but it really isn't getting a candidate any more information than they would have gotten in a standard corporate interviewing process.
The problem is that Jobcasts don't break into measured and qualified corporate culture information, or prospects for career improvement. They don't expose much beyond the standard corporate message. They don't reciprocate the candidate for his or her CV, psychometric profile, work portfolio, professional references, and performance history against targets. They don't yield what I call a "Corporate CV" (Go ahead, click here if you dare) - the reciprocation required for the Bi Directional flow of information.
Even if you allowed lots of employees (rather than HR representatives) to jobcast, the medium itself -- broadcast videos and podcasts -- would be too exposing for employees to say anything meaningful. Employees would need a safer structure; almost like an accounting standard -- where, for instance, corporate culture could be measured, along with job satisfaction, progression against career goals, etc.
So, we'll keep cracking on, searching for the answer. "Jobcasting" is an incremental improvement.
Recent Comments