The Semper International Blog

There is a tremendous amount of buzz (as there needs to be) about the talent issue the Print industry is facing. There are many passionate people out there trying to create ways to address this. The general concensous is that it needs to be an industry wide effort and I agree with that logic.

I recently left the below post in response to this post found on the PrintCEO Blog. The specific blog post was titled Industry recruitment: why “cool” come-ons have a chilling effect.

At Semper International we are always encounting the effects of the lack of talent. While it is heartening to know that it is not just the print industry, we still need to focus resources and energy on getting our fair share of the talent supply.

My response.

I disagree in some ways with this post. While I agree that the industry needs solid, strong work ethic and bright people, it is rather arrogant to suggest that the attractiuon process be scoffed at in any creative form. The object is to create a buzz and gain excitemnt to create a pool of interested people.

Once you have a pool you can then thin it out based on skill requirments, work ethic and other primary needs of the industry. The object is not to create a situation where you scare most young people away before the industry is able to explain it self to them and dare I say RECRUIT the good ones. We need to make sure we have a healthy amount of talented young people in print related college courses and taking advantage of the scholarships that are out there.

The other issue that you did not address is the parents. It amazes me that printing people drive their own children away from the industry. I am proud of my print back ground and the values it has given me. I would not change it for anything. If anyone needs to be recruited to help its the parents. Your print executive many not be cool to the younger people, but they will sure resonate with the parents. Lets not forget them in this issue or its solutions. This issue not just about the young people coming in, but a multi-tiered approach.

Brian Regan
President
Semper International
Printing Jobs

One of our Chicago recruiters took things to the next level this evening. She scheduled a mass presentation and prescreening event in Second Life. She targeted Boston and Chicago Game Developers we had received response from or had recruited ourselves and invited them to meet on our Island. They were the right group, game developers, designers and programmers would obviously have no issue with the interface and likely have the needed computers to handle it…she was right.

We had 20 people during the presentation and it went off quite well. We had a pre-scripted text presentation she simply cut and pasted into the dialog chat boxes and it worked perfectly. She had excellent control and everyones attention. We had her presenting, a person backing up things and managing what happened, a security person, an usher and another Semper recruiter.

We had two issues that the security person handled quickly. We had a good response and were able to cherry pick people from the group to interview in real life. We have confirmed interviews in Chicago at this time. It was an effective prescreening tool. You can tell a lot about a person from their ability to write and the types of questions they ask. By watching how they interacted with us and each other before and after the presentation we could really see what levels various people were at and even glimpses into the natural behaviors.

This was a good event for Semper, what we got from it was a sense of success, quality applicants and many notes on enhancements that will lead to much better presentations in the future.

The Boston Second Life Meetup group was asked to host an event this week that put together BlackBoard developers and Linden Lab developers in a social setting. This event was sponsored by Semper International. Along with the BB and LL developers could be found educators from schools such as Princeton, UMass, Duke and an assortment of Second Life business people and enthusiasts. The event was held near where the BlackBoard Developers Conference was being held.

The interesting parts of the dialog were around the how, why and should Second Life and an LMS (Learning Management System) like BlackBoard be combined into a blended system. What Second Life lacks is an easy way to track and contain data in an easily accessible way. Along side the inefficiencies of 3D for reading text begs for a more robust data tracking application. As Jeremy Kemp discusses in his piece “Putting a Second Life “metaverse” skin on Learning Management Systems, “MUVE’s including SL are very poor document repositories. The note cards used used with SL are simple text documents which can support only very limited formatting.” A must needed tool for searching these documents and categorizing them would greatly enhance the process.

It was also interesting to hear some of the complaints aired by BlackBoard users about the lack of reporting capabilities. That while a great product BlackBoard had a lot of limitations. My discussion with one of the BB dev’s was cut short by hosting duties, but I am very interested in talking with him more.

One interesting benefit of a combined SL/LMS is on practical testing. If you are teaching specific skills such as Architecture and wanted to test the proficiency of a person it makes sense that using SL as the test and having a LMS connected to it that tracks things like time per action, keyboard shortcuts used and other specific abilities would be of great value to an educator in understanding their students understand of certain tools and programs. This is just one example of the benefits of this type of integration.

The interface could be an interesting project as well. Would it be as simple as a SL client wrapped in the LMS skin, with interactive tabs along the outer edges for navigation. Or a full 3D immersed solution where you interact with objects “in world” that lead one to the desired functionality. My guess is that the former is a better path.

This dialog has some interesting potential and I would love to see it continued and flushed out. The energy at this event was positive and there seemed to be good dialog happening between LL and BB developers. The others at the event should take with them a sense of commitment to let let it be know they are interested in this discussion moving forward and will push for it.

Brian Regan
COO
Semper International

Been spending a fair amount of time researching Second Life as a recruitment vehicle. I must say it has been quite interesting. From hanging out at live music events, to posting help wanted ads on the in world search function. All in all the experience has been quite satisfying. At the same time I have been building up my Jobster network and using it to engage people in the recruitment industry for possible internal Semper positions. That experience has been some what rewarding as well.

Second Life has been a lot more engaging out of the two. The dynamic of walking up to someone and engaging them is a lot more powerful than simply exchanging contacts and sending an email or leaving a note. The SL experience is more real and a lot more immediate. However, an important note at this point, the Jobster contacts are a lot more serious about business at hand, whereas the SL people are more interested in having fun and hanging out and I can not forget dancing, dance is very important in SL.

The odd part of what I call “passive recruiting” in SL is that you actually gain a tremendous amount of insight on the person(s) you interact with and in some cases end up having new and interesting friends. My friends list has grown quite large through this process and many of these people I keep in contact with. Some have moved onto becoming either recruits or clients and yet other vendors. A vast majority have become friends.

In reading some of the comments being shared about recruiting in SL I still feel people are missing the mark. In a recent Wall Street Journal article, they talk about how people recruiting avatars to engage with corporate recruiters. Yet, the essence of the SL project should be to draw the people from SL and not simply bring interested parties to SL. This leaves the next part of the article ringing the most truth, SL is still being used as a PR machine. That these firms have yet to uncover how to properly interact with SL residence and thus us it as a tool to generate buzz. This is unfortunate as it seems a simple matter of having highly social tech savvy people staff SL and interact with the many residents.

Jobster did not quite live up to my expectations as much as I had hoped. However, I did come to realize that while it is not the best place to locate talent in general, it is a great place to uncover talent Semper may want to hire internally. See, Jobster is filled with people in the sales and recruitment industry amongst other things. What I was disappointed to uncover about its lack of reach in the general markets, I was pleasantly surprised to find and connect with people we could hire. In fact, I am in open dialog with quite a few people taht are interested in internal Semper International openings.

I am still researching both these tools, but feel both have uses for what Semper needs. SL drives creative talent, programmers and some marketing people and jobster connects us to recruiters and sales people. However, I must say, I certainly enjoy SL a lot more.