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Government Recruiting and Social Network Systems

"Jobs Search Process Frustrates Many Young Recruits"

This is from an article in the Washington post on federal job recruitment. 

This is from John Husband's blog. "They are your future employees".  His post is based on an FT article by Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet and Life Project,  "They are the future - and they’re coming to a workplace near you." ($ reg req)

"As consultant Marc Prensky calculates it, the life arc of a typical 21-year-old entering the workforce today has, on average, included 5,000 hours of video game playing, exchange of 250,000 e-mails, instant messages, and phone text messages, 10,000 hours of mobile phone use. To that you can add 3,500 hours of time online.

"Today’s 21-year-old was born in 1985 - 10 years after the first
consumer computers went on sale. When this young worker entered public school in 1990, Tim Berners-Lee wrote a computer program called the World Wide Web. Our worker’s college career saw the rise of blogs,
Wikipedia, MySpace,, Skype, podcasts, and YouTube."

Now, this 21-year-old and his peers are showing up in human resources offices as digital natives in a world dominated by digital immigrants - elders who often feel less at ease with new technologies. Here are five realities of the digital natives’ lives that must be understood by their new employers:

Reality 1: They are video gamers with different expectations about how to learn, work, and pursue careers.

Reality 2: They are technologically literate, but that does not necessarily make them media literate.

Reality 3: They are content creators and that shapes their notions about privacy and property.

Reality 4: They are product and people rankers and that informs their notions of propriety.

Reality 5: They are multi-taskers often living in a state of
“continuous partial attention”, where the boundary between work and leisure is quite permeable."

My point is that the federal government recruitment efforts would be better served if they started adopting some of the new net technologies (social networking software and tools) and using some of the free services (craigslist,, youtube.)

I know the fed gov is gigantic but they could easily have several social networking software systems (they talk to each other) on a department or agency basis to recruit and manage talent. This kind of stuff is not much different from what we are providing other organizations.     

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