For the first time in my staffing career, I’m working for a company that not only recognizes and values their employees, but gives those employees the tools to succeed in defining their mission, outreach, and activities. But what I am most proud of that Microsoft values diversity and a responsible corporate citizen that puts those values into practice. When I joined Microsoft, I asked a colleague whether there was a group for Gay and...
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About a month ago, I attended a management training course.  It is one of many enriching classes offered by Microsoft to help develop and grow our people.  During that three day course, I had the pleasure of meeting Jamie Wells, the Director of Global Trade Marketing for Microsoft Mobile Advertising.  As director of trade marketing, Jamie is responsible for defining Microsoft’s mobile advertising positioning, which...
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Twitter search is fairly straightforward. Because it is real time Boolean Searching String capable however, don’t expect to get number of results since that’s fairly pointless in this situation. Just expect to get results from the last few seconds back, and you get the full tweet. Twitter Search defaults to AND, and it recognizes the “OR” option, and assumes that “NOT” is a search term, although the minus...
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  1.     Be Real This is the first and foremost principle of advancing your blog karma. Being real involves not falsifying who you are, being transparent about who you are, and what you believe, and, most of all, sharing an honest voice.  Humans trust others that have an authentic voice.     2.     Respond Yes, tough as it is, when you have a high volume of unsolicited emails someone...
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I am LaShawn Morgan, a Staffing Consultant at Microsoft.  I’ve been in the recruiting industry now for 10 years.    I’ve often been asked, “why did you get into recruiting?” and “do you like what you do?”  I was certainly asked this question when I recently spoke to a group of students from a communications class & a student leadership conference at Western Washington University (WWU...
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SourceCon Conference 2010, San Diego California Recruiters are turning out in droves to the online space, making their marks with videoing, blogging, social networking and other creative outlets. I was observing at this year’s SourceCon Conference how the online venues have changed with the increasing prevalence of recruiters using blogs with photos, videos, social networks, etc. This raises interesting conversations around how we...
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Over the weekend I attended and was one of the Speakers at SourceCon 2010 Conference. What is SourceCon?   It was becoming an urgent need in the recruiting industry to have a conference that was focused on the art (some say science) of Sourcing and Researching – SourceCon was born and launched in 2007. In today’s challenges a growing need in specialization of identifying and attracting talent. This specialized skill is...
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This is part 2 of 2.  See the first 4 skills in yesterday’s post. 5. Transparency – Recruiters will ask straightforward questions, but are sometimes met with less-than-forthcoming answers. Why is this? Well, some say because candidates become shy about circumstances in their past that didn’t go so well. Here is some straight advice: better that the recruiter know what may have happened now, than having to do damage...
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1. Realism – Recruiters are one way to get into your choice company when looking for a new job. However, they are not nor should they be the only way you take. My advice is that you work multiple recruiters and be honest about it, because the recruiters will find out eventually. Get involved and build your social network, and be active in professional associations. As recruiters, we’ll do our very best to find the best match and create...
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This is part 3 of 3 on what you know know about writing and having a job-related blog or website.  Part 1 is located here.  Part 2 is located here. Smart BloggingBusinessWeek has information on how to blog safely and how to blog without getting fired.  The suggestions include blogging anonymously, making your blog not searchable, limiting who can read your blog, and, when employed, focusing your blog on limited topics which...
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