This entry was posted on Friday, February 9th, 2007 at 12:55 and is filed under Business, Technology Bits. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
justdrew
Interactive musings from a creative technophile
Perceived effectiveness
Sometimes the things we do only seem to be effective. Recognizing what does and doesn’t work is critical to success.
One of my colleagues, Linda, had the funniest story about technology and people’s perceptions of how things ‘should’ work.
She was working with an auto parts company in the Midwest. This happened during the labor-intensive and sometimes painful transition of repair shops going from paper-based to electronic systems.
Her job included everything from transitioning records from masses of index card files into an electronic database to stringing up cat-5 cable to network a handful of machines in the office and shop floor.
Between climbing up and down ladders and dragging cables through drop ceilings, she had pinched one of the cable ends into one of the partly-open file drawers to hold the wiring in place so she could reach it once she got to the top of the ladder. Just then, one of the shop guys walks past and notices the cable dangling from the cabinet on one end and running across to the office computers at the other.
“Is that how you get the information into the computers?”, he conjectured.
I absolutely love this story; not because I’m laughing at the guy’s ignorance of early data entry techniques and technology. It’s funny because it is reasonable for him to suspect that since information can travel along a cable, and information is held in the card catalog, 1980′s computer technology could vacuum up data simply by dropping a cord into a file cabinet.
Of course, most of us know that you can’t suck up data by waiving a network cable over some hard-copy, there are some critical (deftly avoids using the pun word “key” here) steps missing.
Still, many people have replaced the job-hunt myth of combing over the classified ads with the more modern myth that posting to the big job boards is all you need do to secure your career’s next step.
Obviously, that’s not enough to increase your odds of finding the right best job opportunities when you’re looking, nor is it the best way to find excellent candidates when you’re hiring.
Working with a professional recruiter (of course, as a recruiter you would say that) is one way to dramatically increase your odds of success and increase the quality of the opportunity and the candidates you see.
Read more articles here for details on just how it helps to work with a top recruiter and what exactly makes one recruiter better than another.
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