Seth Godin’s blog has a very simple guide on how to send a personal email. Yes, we know this is all common sense BUT how often today with all that is going on around us do we forget to do the simple things well.

Seth’s starting point is avoiding being seen as a spammer or worse still having your emails deleted before being read or just plain ignored. Something of course we don’t want to happen with our personal emails or with our “business related messages.”

“The thing is” as Seth points out “email reduces friction. Greedy, lazy organizations have embraced this and tried to figure out how to blast as many emails as they can as cheaply as they can, relying on the law of large numbers. The real law of large numbers is, "using large numbers is against the law."

Seth suggests that we “add some fiction back into our communication”.  He also points out that “to be seen as being personal, the best strategy is to be personal, which is slow and expensive.”

After reading his tips (see below), our thought is that although he is discussing email, much of this advice could apply to our communications and messaging to candidates. Whether it is your response to a candidate email application or the messaging on your career site or even how you use email signature file, Seth’s advice is both a good call to action and a good recruiting mantra.

We will be digging out our very sensible list of “things to do to improve your recruitment communications”  as a follow up to this article.  Why? Do help us all remember that doing as many of the basics as possible delivers a real ROI on our investment in candidate communications.

Seth’s 14 tips are:

1.    Don't send the same email to large numbers of people.
2.    If you have more than a few people to contact, you'll be tempted to copy and paste or mail merge. Don't. You'll get caught. It shows. If it's important enough for someone to read, it's important enough for you to rewrite.
3.    Careful with the salutation. Don't write, "Dear Claudia," if you don't usually write "Dear" at the beginning of all your emails.
4.    Don't mush the salutation together with the rest of the note. If I had a dollar for every email that started, "Joe, When experts come together..." That's not personal. That's lazy merging. See rule 1.
5.    Don't send HTML or pictures. Personal email doesn't, why are you?
6.    Don't talk like a press release. Talk like a person. A person is reading this, so why are you talking like that?
7.    Be short. The purpose of an email is not to sell the person on anything other than writing back. If you don't have a personal, interesting way to start a conversation, don't write.
8.    Don't send an email only when you really need something. That's not personal, that's selfish.
9.    Do you have a sig with a phone number in it? Your phone number? If you don't trust me enough to give me your real phone number, I don't trust you enough to read your mail.
10.    Don't mark your email urgent. Urgent to you is not urgent to me.
11.    Don't lie in your subject line, and don't be cute. You're not clever enough to be cute. Just be honest.
12.    Following up on an impersonal spam email is twice as dumb as sending the first one. Invest the time to do it right the first time.
13.    Anticipated, personal and relevant permission mail will always dramatically outperform greedy short-term spam. I promise.
14.    Just because you have someone's email address doesn't mean you have the right to email them.

This was a question posed today on the UK Recruiter Group on LinkedIn.

Naturally, as RCE will be launching a series of national and international events in 2009, and we will be highlighting and covering other events across the recruitment spectrum (such as Enhance Media’s Online Recruitment 2009 - The Year Ahead Conference on 29 January in London, I felt I had to step up and defend the well run conference, on behalf of all participants.

Ricky Wheeler of Broadbean presented a very good analysis of some of the decision making that vendors should be utilising before committing to a conference. He highlighted benefits that Broadbean has seen over the past couple of years and also some of the reasons that many vendors may take on less events in 2009.

One of the other comments essentially stated that conferences were of no real value, as any information you needed to find could all be found on the Web or directly from the vendors.

For conference attendees, I find the "I can get the information free" argument to be essentially self defeating. I have spent many years on all sides of the conference spectrum - vendor/sponsor, speaker/chairman, delegate and conference organiser. (and not just in recruitment, but in such diverse areas as financial services and decision support technologies).

So, here is my two cents: First and foremost, there is nothing like meeting people in person, having both direct and group discussions. No amount of web research, reading brochures or even telephone calls can replace the learning experience from conversations that you have at a well attended and run event - with the speakers, other delegates and the exhibitors.

Why should you attend a recruitment conference?

I found a really nice article written by Tony Wanless of BCB Businessonline titled 'Working the Crowd" about a Canadian retailer, Future Shop Ltd who have adopted a simple but effective hiring strategy to overcome a common problem in the retail industry, the need to hire additional staff to handle the traditionally anticipated Christmas and post Christmas sales boom.

Many major European retailers will hire additional 100s if not 1000s of staff and each has a story to tell. At RCE, we want to hear from those in the retail sector who can share their own experiences.

In the case of Future Shop Ltd. they had run the traditional pre Christmas hiring campaigns for many years and been successful. But Future Shop had create a great new brand promise, “that all it’s employees are expert in the wares it sells”. A powerful retail promise, but it meant that to fulfill that promise it didn’t just have to hire and train up to 6000 part-timer staff quickly but that those they hired would have to deliver on the brand promise.

As background, unlike the US economy, Canada has not experienced the same economic downturn and in many Canadian cites there are skill and people shortages, particularly amongst the group that Future Shop wanted to target.
How they did this is a great example of linking marketing, human resources and technology with social-media thinking.

Their conclusions/lessons after their first campaign also make good reading:
• Find opportunity in the problem. Overwhelmed by recruiting, Future Shop created a specialized and disciplined process to tackle the problem. This process can now be applied elsewhere in the operation.
• Narrow your scope to achieve volume. Sounds oxymoronic, but it isn’t. By aiming directly at specific groups and working them, you have a better chance of generating the volume you need.
• Recognize the broader impacts. Simply taking all comers would impact the Future Shop marketing promise of knowledge and expertise. So the system ensured that those chosen fit the philosophy.

Take a look at their career site

Keith Robinson

Happy Birthday to You, Happy Birthday dear world wide web…Happy Birthday to you.

The article below comes from Tech News World, written by Alexander G Higgins.

But it got me thinking about the last 20 years; it hasn't been an evolution it really has been in our recruitment industry a revolution.

So read and enjoy a fine article and tomorrow I will look at just how far we have come and the true impact of www. on our world.

Article:

Scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, celebrated the 20th anniversary of the World Wide Web. The concept of combining hyptertext with the Internet to allow physicists to browse from page to page, share images and click on links to access other sites was pioneered by Tim Berners-Lee, who remembers having to work on the project quietly because it was never formally approved..

Some two decades after the creation of the World Wide Web, its inventor says the work is far from over.

Tim Berners-Lee encouraged fellow scientists at his former particle physics laboratory in Switzerland to look to the future.

"The rate of development and innovation on the Web is actually getting faster and faster all the time," Berners-Lee said at a ceremony at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as "CERN." "The Web is not all done. It's just the tip of the iceberg."

The ceremony Friday marked the Web's 20th anniversary, though it's an early celebration of sorts.

Berners-Lee first proposed the Web 20 years ago, in 1989, while developing ways to control computers remotely at CERN. He didn't begin writing software until October 1990, and his browser wasn't working until later that year.

In fact, Berners-Lee isn't even sure when exactly he wrote his first proposal for using the Internet , already two decades old at that point, to allow physicists to browse from page to page, share images and click on links to access other sites.

"The exact date, I'll have to admit, is sort of a created one because I can't remember which day it was I actually wrote the darn thing," Berners-Lee said. "I probably was thinking of it all through February."

He said it took a while to get an adequate computer and make the idea work, but that by December of 1990 the Web was up and running -- even if only between two computers at CERN.

He had to do all of that quietly: He never got the project formally approved, but his boss suggested he quietly tinker with it anyway.

Internet + Hypertext = Web

Essentially, the Web combines two concepts that date to the 1960s: the Internet and hypertext, which is a way of presenting information nonsequentially. Though the two concepts were well known among engineers, Berners-Lee saw the value of marrying them.

The Web has since expanded rapidly.

"You think it's a great change to society that you can look things up on the Web," said Berners-Lee. But changes that are yet to come "are going to rock the boat even more."

"People use the Web to invent things, all kinds of things which you never would have imagined."

The celebration took place as scientists at CERN, near Geneva, were waiting for the completion of repairs to the laboratory's particle accelerator -- the world's largest atom smasher that was sideline by an electrical