Today’s recruiters bear striking resemblance to desperate men trying to pick up someone in a bar — they pay little heed to their audience’s needs, and pin their hopes of success almost solely on the fact that someone, somewhere, is bound to be more desperate than them.

It’s not a pretty approach to recruitment, nor is it particularly smart, and more often than not leaves candidates disappointed and unimpressed. Companies are also losing faith in this spray-and-pray approach to employment, discouraged by the piles of only vaguely relevant CVs that cross their desk in response to any given job posting.

With the advent of social media, LinkedIn has now become the avenue of choice for commission-hungry recruiters, who now enjoy access to an even wider world of irrelevance from which to derive potential business. Rather than focusing on sourcing candidates perfectly suited for a job, recruiters have now taken to trawling LinkedIn, using various keywords and search terms to locate potential talent. Or potential income at any rate.

Below is an example of an email a friend of mine recently received from a roving recruiter, which perfectly sums up the approach to corporate match-making in the digital era.

From: “name redacted” <nameredacted@recruitmentcompany.co.za>
Date: May 13, 2013, 15:51:38 GMT+02:00
To: <irrelevantcandidate@gmail.com>
Subject: RECRUITMENT – Copywriter Opportunity

Dear Irrelevant Candidate,

Hope this email finds you well,

I wanted to network with yourself as I have an opportunity I would like to discuss with you. My client in the Marketing / Activations company is looking for a Copywriter. This position entails being a person that is interested in:

Are you passionate about creative thinking?

Do you have an interest in marketing strategy?

Are you a pitch-winner?

Are you an innovative thinker?

Can you turn the ordinary into the “wow”?

Are you looking for a challenge?

In return for some crazy ideas, some long hours and a fair amount of fun, you’ll get to work on the best blue-chip brands in South Africa.

I would like to chat further with you should you be interested. Please contact me should you wish to discuss this opportunity or know of any suitable candidate who might be in the market, at the number below.

Many thanks and looking forward to hearing from you.

Let’s break down what’s wrong with this situation.

First, said recruiter has no apparent investment in your wellbeing. ‘Hope this finds you well,’ is simply how unimaginative people start off emails. Presumably one never hopes to find the recipient of one’s email in poor health? This is indicative of the cold and callous approach taken on by members of an industry invested only in commission.

Secondly, the wording of ‘an opportunity to discuss with you’ indicates some sort of covert operation — a secret that the candidate shouldn’t let others in on. The fact that the employer’s name never appears at any point in the email further suggests that the role in question is a matter of national security.

This brazen recruiter then goes on to ask that the unfortunate recipient of their email advance supplythem with contact details of other potentially relevant candidates. Last time I checked this was the recruiter’s job? Not only are jobseekers apparently expected to vet themselves, but they’re also now being given the responsibility of building recruiters’ databases. There’s surely something wrong with this picture.

This type of hopeless ineptitude was again on display recently when a recruiter approached me about a position at a publishing house. As is customary, they refused to supply any further information with respect to the position itself or the remuneration package. Now given that I was employed elsewhere at the time, I think these little nuggets of information might have had some sort of impact on my decision.

After a lengthy back and forth, it was eventually established that the position required experience in print media — something that I do not possess given that I’ve worked the majority of my life in digital. For specialist positions of this nature, meeting 20% of the criteria simply isn’t going to cut it. One doesn’t just develop niche, specialist skills overnight in line with a brief. This approach of shoving square pegs into round holes is getting us nowhere fast, and it’s about time that recruiters start approaching these corporate manhunts with a little more finesse.

Here are my top three tips for recruiters:

1. Learn about the industry you’re servicing. Not understanding the difference between an SEM strategist and an ORM analyst is going to ensure that your attempts at corporate match making are unsuccessful time and again.
2. Understand your candidates. Take the time to establish their strengths and weaknesses, and an overall sense of their personality. At the end of the day you’ll need to supply a candidate that not only meets the criteria of the brief, but also one that gels with their employer.
3. Know your clients. Understand their expectations, their working conditions and their corporate ethos. You’ll find things far easier when there are fewer variables in play.

There are a few challenges:

• Which top platforms are small businesses and owners using on social?
• How do business engage with other business over these platforms?
• What should we measure against?

I’m going to touch on each of these below.

Before we understand where a business can employ their tactics, we need to remember that all businesses – be they large or small – are run by people. These people are probably on social in their own right, for example Richard Branson in his own right is an entrepreneur and businessman, and the various Virgin properties have their own profiles on social. Yes, an external company might connect with him directly or with his business, but both still exist. We are not representative of the business alone, but a sum of all of the parts.

The obvious first choice of platform, taking the abovementioned scenario into consideration, is the business-focused network, LinkedIn.

Using LinkedIn, a businesses can represent itself, but people take the core focus as top management use the tool to enable business, middle management for networking and lower level staff search or are targeted for jobs. The audience and platform is more conducive to the conversation, but discussions and interactions are still done through people. For example where groups of similar interest/business or life stage discuss and share content around similar problems or questions. It’s important to share content that talks to the life stage of the business, whether it be slideshare or video. One can’t just jump in and sell in an environment where you are building trust.

The head of social media at Cisco stated at SXSW 2013 that video content is going to be the biggest driver for social media engagement in the B2B space going forward, and this makes sense, as people want to see people, not just the business.

Facebook is still a strong driver for traffic, but interaction will be significantly lower because the network is inherently about people, not business. Facebook does however show higher click-through rates to content elsewhere when it comes to direct business targeting.

Twitter, although stronger from an engagement point of view, is harder to engage between two businesses. There are however tactical steps, such as listening for leads. By jumping into conversations and converting on these, (something Xerox is doing to much success in the US) they drive actual ROI.

Google+, albeit the joke of all the social networks, has amazing targeting ability to “fans”, as well as the ability to create and jump into existing communities created around topics. The strong link between small businesses that use Gmail accounts and that then opened up and trade in their business name on Google+ is astonishing.

SimplyBiz, a property of South African bank Nedbank, created its own network of small business owners where it shares content, deals and enable better decision-making through networks. Thus creating your own community is also an option, and using the rest as drivers to yours.

At the end of the day, your objectives and measurement needs to be kept top of mind in everything you do. Generally, B2B objectives consists of:

• Driving traffic to the website (for sign ups and leads)
• Leads, database, sign-ups themselves through channel
• Thought leadership and content downloads – positioning in the market
• Customer feedback and service (reverse savings can be driven from these)

Ironically, at the end of the day, B2B in social media will become more personal as humans learn to trust, and want to engage with humans.

When businesses build trust in this space, they will in turn gain customers, but these businesses also want to talk to people, whether we provide the platform for them to connect to other businesses, or connect to us. Keep it personal, keep it focused and keep giving value.

FRAMINGHAM, Mass.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–May. 3, 2013– Staples, the world’s largest office products company and second largest e-commerce company, today became the first major U.S. retailer to announce the availability of 3D printers. The Cube® 3D Printer from 3D Systems, a leading global provider of 3D content-to-print solutions, is immediately available on Staples.com for $1299.99 and will be available in a limited number of Staples stores by the end of June.

The Cube® 3D Printer, ready to use right out of the box, features Wi-Fi, is compatible with Mac or Windows, and comes with 25 free 3D templates designed by professional artists, withadditional templates available online. With its ultra portable design, the Cube® fits easily in the office, classroom or living room, making it the perfect 3D printing device for designers, small businesses, students and kids.

“Staples is excited to bring the power of 3D printing to our customers, by being the first major U.S. retailer to announce the availability of this innovative technology that lets you create fully formed objects in your home or small business,” saidMike Edwards, Staplesexecutive vice president, merchandising. “Staples is known for carrying the latest technology and 3D printers are the most recent example of our commitment to offering every product your business needs to succeed.”

3D printing has been hailed as a revolutionary method and an efficient technology for manufacturing, allowing for the creation of shapes or objects using digital technology. For companies creating new products, 3D printing can make it easier to design and test new concepts, and decrease the time to market.

“We are absolutely thrilled that a leader and innovator of the caliber of Staples is making it easy to get our award winning Cube 3D Printer family on-line and in their stores,” said Avi Reichental, 3D Systems’ President and Chief Executive Officer. “Staples is the ideal partner to deliver the only true plug and play 3D Printer to offices, living rooms, classrooms and hobby shops, extending our reach and consumer access.”

The Cube® 3D printer can print items up to 5.5″ x 5.5″ x 5.5”, using material cartridges in 16 different colors including metallic silver, glow in the dark and vibrant and neutral colors. Users can either print from a template or create a design using Cube’s own software, Cubify Invent™, sold separately. Staples makes printing with the Cube® easy, by offering all of the essential accessories, including recyclable ABS and compostable PLA plastic cartridge refills, replenishmentCubeSticks, which are used to stabilize the object being printed, and replacement Cube Print Pads.

About Staples

Staples is the world’s largest office products company and second largest internet retailer. For 26 years, Staples has served the needs of business customers and its vision is to provide every product businesses need to succeed. Through its world-class retail, online and delivery capabilities, Staples offers office supplies, technology products and services, facilities and breakroom supplies, furniture, copy and print services and a wide range of other product categories. With thousands of associates worldwide dedicated to making it easy for businesses of all sizes, Staples operates throughoutNorth and South America, Europe, Asia, Australia and New Zealand. The company is headquartered outside Boston. More information about Staples (Nasdaq: SPLS) is available at www.staples.com.

About 3D Systems Corporation

3D Systems is a leading global provider of 3D content-to-print solutions including 3D printers, print materials and on-demand custom parts services for professionals and consumers alike. The company also provides CAD modeling, reverse engineering and inspection software tools and consumer 3D printers, apps and services. Its expertly integrated solutions replace and complement traditional methods and reduce the time and cost of designing and manufacturing new products. 3D Systems products and services are used to rapidly design, communicate, prototype or produce real functional parts, empowering customers to create and make with confidence.

More information on the company is available at www.3DSystems.com.

Staples
Mark Cautela, 508-253-3832
Mark.Cautela@Staples.com

Well, spring has sprung for much of the country. The giant metaphorical puzzle known as “Mad Men” is back on TV, I’m putting off watching the last two episodes of “House of Cards” because I don’t want it to end, and we’ve got the first quarter sales results under our belt. How did you or your company do?

On the job front, Monster says that 2013 should be bright for marketing jobs. By all accounts, we should be well done with the “what’s coming in 2013″ articles. But I say it’s time to throw tradition a curve ball by discussing the hot job front. Am I early? Late? Make no mistake — the time for these roles on the front of digital marketing is now.

These are five hot and emerging roles you’ll want to learn more about, whether you’re a recent graduate tracking down that first job, a young professional anxious to prove your mettle, or a seasoned industry veteran determined to remain relevant.

What is responsive web design and what is it about?

Responsive web design is a front-end development approach aimed at crafting device agnostic sites. What this means is that it provides easy reading and navigation with a minimum of resizing, panning, and scrolling, across a wide range of devices. Basically it eliminates the need for separate sites for different devices, an approach generally accepted in years before.

It’s about automatically delivering the content your audience wants, on the device they have, regardless of screen size. It’s about moving with the times and accommodating the industry as it evolves and moves forward.

Do I need a responsive site?

Consumer behavior is changing. For the first time PC sales are predicted to be lower than the year before and tablets and smartphones are becoming extremely popular for business and pleasure alike. These devices have different screen sizes which is a nightmare for web developers and designers. What this means is that all of a sudden people are viewing your content on thousands of oddly shaped and different sized screens. Responsive web design is the web development industry’s answer to these problems.

This is all great to know and makes for great conversation with your tech buddies, but how do you know if you need to take the plunge? The best way to answer this is to do some research. Use the Google Analytics Mobile Overview report feature on your site to identify the percentage of your audience that use mobile devices. If mobile users are more than 5% of your total audience you should seriously consider catering for them.

One thing to remember, the industry is sprinting away from desktops and conventional screen sizes. Rather acknowledge and accommodate the shift as it is happening, instead of playing catch up later on and missing out on exposure and conversions along the way.

The challenges faced:

Responsive web design is in its infancy and just like you did, it is experiencing some teething problems before it reaches maturity.

• Advertising is an issue. Ads will have to shift with the sites, something that will wreak havoc with advertisers who want guaranteed placements on sites.
• Information architecture can be an issue. It needs to be carefully considered and should be hierarchically structured.
• Loading times. This can be an issue on mobile devices if not taken into consideration beforehand. This is really due bad planning from the developer’s side, but a challenge none the less.
• Educating the market. Explaining the benefits of responsive web design and justifying the added costs will prove difficult at first.
• Inconsistent support across devises.

Benefits:

The benefits are pretty obvious, one site for all platforms and devices. This is great for maintenance as one update affects all of your platforms. It also has positive SEO implications for usability, non-duplicate content (you don’t have the same content on your main site and on your mobile site) and cross-platform link building (a link to your standard site is a link to your mobile site).

When should you use it?

• If you can afford it. Responsive web design is cutting edge at the moment and will most likely be more expensive than conventional web formats. It also takes longer to develop.
• When your audience uses tablets or smartphones on a regular basis (take note publishers) to view your content.
• If you wish to have a consistent digital brand.
• If you want to stay at the forefront of what is digitally possible.

While the benefits of responsive web design are clear for all to see, there are cases where the traditional blend of separate mobile and desktop site is the better option. To ensure that you get what is best for your brand, commission the services of a web developer or agency that has your best interests at heart, rather than an eye on your wallet.

The list was especially tech-heavy, with names like Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, Minecraft developers Markus Persson and Jens Bergensten, OkCupid co-founder and Match.com CEO Sam Yagan, Apple designer Jonathan Ive, Kickstarter CEO Perry Chen, Google Ideas founder Jared Cohen, Samsung CEO Oh-Hyun Kwon, tech incubator Kai-Fu Lee, and Huawei CEO Ren Zhengfei.

Other notables from the media world included Netflix COO Ted Sarandos, late-night hosts Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Kimmel, Grey’s Anatomy and Scandal creator Shonda Rhimes, and talent manager Scooter Braun.

As always, the writers behind the list were equally prominent. This year, they included Arianna Huffington (who wrote the bio for Kai-Fu Lee), Michael Bloomberg (for Jay-Z), Eric Schmidt (for Marissa Mayer), Jack Dorsey (for UNICEF’s Christopher Fabian and Erica Kochi) and Jon Stewart (for Egyptian satirist Bassem Youssef).

Tweetables

• 61% of UK email marketers rate their campaign performance poor or average. Only 35% good, 4% excellent
  

• 62% of UK email marketers spend 2 or more hrs on campaign design and content, 18% >8 hrs
  

• 12% of UK marketers report they spend NO TIME on email strategy. 27% spend no time on email optimization
  

• 43% of UK marketers feel lack of email marketing strategy is a problem
  

• 71% of UK email marketers have basic to non-existent email optimization for mobile
  

David Lieb is co-founder and CEO of Bump, creators of the popular app that lets people share contact information, photos, and other content by bumping their phones together. Bump has been downloaded more than 130 million times.

It’s been hard to ignore the massive shift in the last decade toward simple products. The minimalist design aesthetic pioneered by Dieter Rams in the 1960s on alarm clocks and toasters was popularized by Apple and Google in the 2000s on iPods and search boxes. Soon after, Web 2.0 took over, yielding big buttons, less text, more images, and happier users. Startup accelerators and design gurus popped up proselytizing “simplicity!” and the rapid growth of mobile in the last five years has created an almost strict requirement for simple products that work on our new small screens and increasingly small attention spans. Some of the most popular products today (Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram) all have simplicity of design and experience at their core.

THIS AIN’T IS YOUR GRANDMA’S INTERNET

So why did this happen, and why mostly in the last 10 years? Some say that good design simply lags behind technology and that design has finally caught up. Others point to the evolution of our devices and our environments — definitely a major factor.

But I believe the high-order bit is even more straightforward: It’s only been in the last 10 years that technology products have reached the mass market. The market size of the entire broadband Internet in 2000 was 50 million people; today it is 2 billion people; in a few short years with the shift to mobile it will be more than 5 billion people. This mass market is comprised mostly of people who sit in the middle of the tech-adopter bell curve, and since they aren’t product designers, computer programmers, and tech bloggers, they require an even higher degree of simplicity.

“SIMPLE” ISN’T WHAT YOU THINK

But “simplicity” comes in many flavors. We can make products simpler by optimizing along a number of vectors:

• minimize number of steps in the flow
• minimize time required
• minimize number of features
• minimize elements on each page
• ….

But the most important, and often most overlooked, is Cognitive Simplicity. This is an idea that slowly emerged as my company, Bump, tried to understand exactly why Bump is so popular, especially in the non-tech crowd. We believe product builders should first and foremost minimize the Cognitive Overhead of their products, even though it often comes at the cost of simplicity in other areas.

COGNITIVE OVERHEAD

There isn’t yet much written about cognitive overhead in our field. The best definition on the web comes from a web designer and engineer in Chicago named David Demaree:

Cognitive Overhead — “how many logical connections or jumps your brain has to make in order to understand or contextualize the thing you’re looking at.”

Minimizing cognitive overhead is imperative when designing for the mass market. Why? Because most people haven’t developed the pattern matching machinery in their brains to quickly convert what they see in your product (app design, messaging, what they heard from friends, etc.) into meaning and purpose. We, the product builders, take our ability to cut through cognitive overhead for granted; our mental circuits for our products’ patterns are well practiced.

This is especially pronounced for mass market mobile products. Normal people already have to use more of their mental horsepower to cut through cognitive overhead. Now imagine the added burden of having to do that while on a crowded bus, or in line at Starbucks, or while opening your app for the first time while eating dinner with a friend and texting another. This isn’t 1999 when your users were sitting in their quiet bedrooms checking out your website on a large monitor while waiting for their Napster downloads to finish; they are out in the real world being bombarded with distractions.

MY, WHAT BIG COGNITIVE OVERHEAD YOU HAVE 

To illustrate the difference between generic simplicity and cognitive simplicity, let’s look at a couple products that, on the surface, might be regarded as being simple to use, but rank in my book as some of the most cognitively complex products of late.

QR Codes – Designed to check the simplicity boxes of speed, ubiquity, and small number of steps, QR codes really dropped the ball on cognitive overhead. “So it’s a barcode? No? It’s a website? Ok. But I open websites with my web browser, not my camera. So I take a picture of it? No, I take a picture of it with an app? Which app?”

iCloud / PhotoStream – When we heard Steve Jobs preach the utopian future where all of our photos and data would be seamlessly synchronized among all our devices, we smelled the Apple simplicity we’d all grown to love. But in practice, iCloud is rife with cognitive overhead — it only backs up your most recent photos, it works on certain select apps but not others, you have to create an icloud.com email account for it to sync your mail and notes but not everything else. Oh, and it works on new iPhone and iPads and Macs running OS X v10.7.4 or later, but not your PC or Android tablet. Try explaining that to your mother.

COGNITIVE SIMPLICITY WINNERS

So which products really nail cognitive simplicity? Here are a couple examples:

Shazam — An app that magically hears what song is playing and tells you what it is? Seems pretty complex, and what’s happening under the covers actually is. But Shazam does a phenomenal job keeping the user’s cognitive burden low. They force people to press a button to “start listening,” show real-time feedback that shows the app is hearing the sounds, and it buzzes when a result is found. Shazam could have made the flow faster or fewer taps, but it would come at the cost of cognitive simplicity.

Nintendo Wii — In most ways, the Wii was far more complicated than its game console peers in 2006. It used accelerometers and IR blasters and detectors that required setup and calibration, and it was a departure from the mental model most people had for video games. But the payoff was a system with low cognitive overhead — you swing the controller to the left, and the little avatar on screen swings his racquet to the left. And voila, toddlers and grandparents alike suddenly became gamers.

COULD GO EITHER WAY?

Finally, a couple of my personal favorite daily-use products that could be argued either way. What do you think?

Dropbox — I love Dropbox. All of my stuff is in my Dropbox; Dropbox is on all my devices; so all my stuff is on all my devices. Pretty cognitively simple. But there are certainly some potential cognitive hurdles, or, perhaps better put, cognitive activation energy required before reaching the low cognitive overhead state. Is Dropbox a folder on your desktop or a cloud-storage website? Oh and it’s a program to install on my computer, too? When do things get backed up? Did it work?

Facebook — Facebook started out with very low cognitive overhead — it was a digital version of the paper Facebooks that already commanded high engagement and retention of college kids. Question: Has Facebook’s cognitive overhead increased or decreased as it has expanded to the mass market? What cognitive hurdles have arisen recently that weren’t present in the past? Should this worry Facebook?

HOW TO MAKE COGNITIVELY SIMPLE PRODUCTS 

Make people work more, not less.

Put your user in the middle of your flow. Make them press an extra button, make them provide some inputs, let them be part of the service-providing, rather than a bystander to it. If they are part of the flow, they have a better vantage point to see what’s going on. Automation is great, but it’s a layer of cognitive complexity that should be used carefully. (Bump puts the user in the middle of the flow quite physically. While there were other ways to build a scalable solution without the physical bump, it’s very effective for helping people internalize exactly what’s going on.)

GIVE PEOPLE REAL-TIME FEEDBACK.

If your user has to wonder, “So, did it work?” you’ve failed. Walk people through using your product like a magician leads the audience through an illusion. Point out the steps along the way, or whatever magic your product is providing could be lost to the user.

SLOW DOWN YOUR PRODUCT.

We’ve all heard stories of Google’s relentless quest for search-result speed, but sometimes you need to let your user understand and appreciate what your service is doing for them. Studies have shown that intentionally slowing down results on travel search websites can actually increase perceived user value — people realize and appreciate that the service is doing a lot of work searching all the different travel options on their behalf.

HOW TO KNOW IF YOU’VE SUCCEEDED

TEST ON THE YOUNG, OLD … AND DRUNK.

The very young and the very old are even more sensitive to cognitive overhead, as their brains aren’t accustomed to the sort of logical leaps our products sometimes require. Grandparents and children make great cognitive overhead detectors.

When you can’t find old or young people, drunk people are a good approximation. In fact, while building Bump 3.0, we took teams of designers and engineers to bars in San Francisco and Palo Alto and watched people use Bump, tweaking the product to accommodate.

ASK YOUR USERS/CUSTOMERS TO REPEAT WHAT YOUR PRODUCT DOES AND HOW IT WORKS.

Let people use your product, and then ask them to tell you what it does. They’ll think you are crazy for not knowing already, but what you hear can point to cognitive hurdles you’ve missed. One technique that scales that we use at Bump is to show a one question survey to a small fraction of users inside the app right after they are done bumping, asking “What is Bump for?” or “How do you use Bump?” The answers help us eliminate cognitive hurdles that remain.

There’s never been a time when cognitive simplicity matters more. As the mobile wave continues over the next five years, the world will see arguably the most rapid deployment of any new technology in our history. Products that are truly mass market will need to simultaneously target the Silicon Valley early adopter and the kid riding on the back of a motor scooter in Thailand. Which products will win, and which will lose? My money is on those that focus on cognitive simplicity.