Wendy Weber on Executive Recruiting

Have you heard of the concept of Twitter Influence?

We generally think that the most-followed people on Twitter are the most influential…but there is a better way to measure Twitter influence.

According to Twitter’s co-founder, Evan Williams, someone with millions of followers may no longer post messages frequently…while someone with many fewer followers may be a prolific poster whose messages are amplified by others.

Independent research firm Twitalyzer has created an Influence Index. It doesn’t simply measure activity on Twitter, it measures the number of times somebody’s Twitter name is mentioned by other users (including “retweets,” which occur when one user rebroadcasts another’s message). So while Britney Spears is the 3rd “most-followed” person on Twitter, Conan O’Brien is the 3rd “most-influential” person. While Oprah Winfrey is the 10th most followed person on Twitter, Luciano Huck, a Brazilian television star, is the 10th most influential person.

Taken from David Leonhardt’s piece on this in today’s NY Times: click here.

As coupon sites like Groupon gain in popularity, retailers are becoming more sophisticated about how they structure their offers.

According to Elizabeth Baron in yesterday’s WSJ, merchants are carefully negotiating better revenue splits than they previously had, and tweaking their offerings to make deals work in their favor.

In typical deals, a retailer splits the revenue of a deal with a site like Groupon. For instance, a merchant might let buyers pay $25 for $50 worth of goods. Half of that $25 goes to the deal site.

More and more companies, burned by what they feel is a very expensive marketing cost, are negotiating to increase their share of the revenue split. Although some retailers lament that even with widespread purchase of their “deal” they were unable to make money, others laud these sites as “working wonders” for their business.

According to a January survey of 380 recruiters by online networking site and job board ExecuNet, the job market is heating up! About 51% of search firms agreed that the high-level candidates they work with often receive more than one job offer. That is up from 2010, when only 35% of search firms said that their candidates were entertaining multiple offers.

(To be fair, though competition for candidates is certainly intensifying, we have seen that candidates often confuse being in the interview process with actually receiving an offer. I don’t necessarily think they are trying to intentionally misrepresent themselves, but having 3 offers in hand is different than being at the point of a 3rd interview with 3 different companies.)

We are seeing more of a competitive marketplace, as well as more flexibility on the part of our clients in order to secure the best talent. Two years ago, we encountered more of a “take it or leave it” attitude on the part of employers extending an offer. The prevalent attitude was that if the candidate did not accept the offer “as is”, there would be others that would. The tides have turned, and now employers realize that now job seekers have other employment options.

The Wall Street Journal reports that businesses including Sprint Nextel Corp., Levi Strauss & Co. and Mattel Inc. are sponsoring college classes and graduate-level research to get help with their online marketing from college students. Sprint, for example, supplies a class at Boston’s Emerson College with smartphones and unlimited service in exchange for students working gratis on the company’s local Internet push.

Universities may receive funding or proprietary consumer data from companies for their research. Students get experience they can display on their resumes, and add lively classes to the usual mix of lectures and written exams.

This is also of interest to me as a recruiter, because from what I see in terms of the social marketers I know professionally and personally (my daughter is in her first year at Smith College), college students are big Facebook users, but don’t Tweet. This article has given me reason to reconsider that opinion.

To read the article in its entirety, click here.

Today’s Wall Street Journal printed an interesting piece which articulates the frustration of many executive recruiters: click here.

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Positions that typically took two months to fill before the recession are sometimes taking four times longer, recruiters say, as hiring managers are holding out for better candidates.

This becomes especially frustrating for us when the hiring manager comes to the conclusion, months into the search, that one of the candidates initially presented was the one they would like to hire. Since the job market has picked up that candidate may have already settled into a new position, and now additional candidates presented must fill the shoes of “the one that got away”.