tfpl blog

Interview for Engagement

Just got passed a great article from People Management magazine about “How to interview for engagement”, they are suggesting that by doing the right things for existing employees, engagement will increase and this will have a knock on effect on productivity, however it is important to have chosen right people in the first place!

Here engagement is defined as "the extent to which people enjoy and believe in what they do, and feel valued for doing it". So automatically I turned to my colleagues in recruitment and asked them if they enjoyed and believed in what they did, of which most of them said yes they did (I can’t predict how many of those responses were simply fear of what I would write about them), and I must say that we do have an unusually high employee retention rate, so therefore we must be doing something right.

So I cornered Darron who has hired most of these people and asked him if his staff being happy, fulfilled and valued in their role was something he had taken into consideration when hiring. “I definitely look for staff that are going to be happy and fulfilled, nothing altruistic about it. This way they project a genuine passion and excitement about their work to both clients and candidates in a natural unforced way – there is no better PR!”

Where do you want to go?

Following the focus group we ran last week we have been using the results to prepare a preliminary draft information architecture for the site. Our client was disappointed with the turnout at the focus group. However, from our perspective it was a success; we were able to gain many insights into how the audience uses the site and what they really want when they visit the site. These nuggets are invaluable in adding meaning to the survey and interview research we have already completed. The interaction between participants gives a perspective that doesn’t come from speaking with individuals.

It takes the emphasis away from the “clever” information architecture and taxonomy ideas and puts it firmly on the content itself.  There are some recent posts exploring this theme.

In his post on goal based retrieval, Joe Lamantia discusses common goals of information retrieval (e.g. reviewing summaries of items, understanding contexts and situations) and the different modes of retrieval or interaction that would meet these goals.

Maish Nichani has written about the idea of focussing on the users’ target content in his excellent post “Taming your target content”.

This approach is helping to define the vague content types mentioned by the audience e.g. “news”, “updates” to something more specific, with the surrounding context to add deeper meaning to a single piece of information.

Tell us how you really feel

Working as a consultant, one of the my favourite activities is running workshops and focus groups. Listening to people discussing thier work, their likes and dislikes and ideas is always fascinating.

Yesterday we ran a focus group for a client which involved a card sorting exercise. The objective was to obtain feedback from the organisation's members about their information expectations and use of the website. Before the exercise we had an in depth discussion about the current home page, talked about the navigation and content. When we came to the card sorting the participants were completely floored by four of the terms.  "environment".... what does that mean? "property" ...huh??!!

Interestingly, these four words were smack bang in the middle of the main navigation that we had just looked at in detail. They had said the navigation made sense to them and they used it regularly, yet the words out of context meant absolutely nothing to them.

User-centered design - 1: Guesstimating - 0

TFPL's international roles

TFPL are widely known as specialist recruiters in information and knowledge management, library, records management and web and content management in the UK.

We also recruit internationally - here are details of some of our current vacancies.

A Records Manager is required in Frankfurt, Germany to play an integral role in supporting several records management initiatives. £25k. Ref: 19470LS

A leading provider of business and knowledge management solutions is looking for a Taxonomy Consultant to join their team in Paris, France. c.€57-64k Ref: 19837CV

A New Business Development sales professional with a background in the library, publishing or information marketplace is required in Singapore. £26-32k + bonus Ref: 19970LR

A leading international law firm in Tortola based in the The British Virgin Islands require an experienced Law Librarian. £Neg Ref: 20295PA

A leading international aid organisation requires an experienced Information Strategist in South East, UK for a 6 month fixed term contract. There is an element of international travel. £40-43k Ref: 20352LJ

If you are interested in any of our international roles, email your CV to recruitment@tfpl.com

Best of both worlds

A folksonomy is an information retreival tool created by allowing users to 'tag' information resources with whatever words they want to remember them by.

The folksonomy approach is very different from the controlled vocabulary approach (taxonomies, classifications, thesauri, ontologies).  The debate between advocates of the two approaches has, unsuprisingly, been polarised.

For the views of people on both sides of the debate see Clay Shirky's Ontology is overrated  and the robust response of Peter Merholz  Clay Shirky's viewpoints are overrated

The Librarians Guide to Etiquette has put a humorous spin on this polarisation.  It told librarians that they could induce panic into their library committees by making  the following suggestion:

''What if we eliminated the use of costly Library of Congress Subject headings in favour of patron-initiated tagging and social bookmarking in our catalogue?''

The Penn Tags project at the Library of the University of Pennsylvania (Penn) gives an interesting way out of this divide.   The library is allowing their users to add their own tags to catalogue entries, and thus generate their own reading lists.

The result is that searchers have two new ways into the catalogue:  as well as the classification and search routes offered by the catalogue itself you now can search on:

• the words that fellow readers have tagged catalogue entries with
• the reading lists of fellow readers, students or lecturers.

This combination of classification and folksonomy could have powerful applications within organisations.   We do need classification structures in our intranets and record systems.  But folksonomies are good at two things that classifications are not good at, namely:

• coping with the diversity of language used by different people in the organisation
• incorporating emerging subjects and new areas of interest

At Penn library the tags that users apply to catalogue entries will have a similar relationship to classification terms in the catalogue as do non-preffered terms to preffered terms in a thesaurus.  They will link the language(s) that people actually use in the University to the necessarily artificial language of the classification.

And when new topics emerge that are of interest to people in the University, these topics will be reflected in the words that students and lecturers use when they tag those resources in the library that are relevant to that topic.

The Silent Interview

I just had to share a fantastic post called “The Silent Interview” by Michael Dragone , where he reminds us that “that during every step of the recruitment process there is always a silent interview being conducted.” Employers will look at  MySpace, LinkedIn and ZoomInfo. He makes some great points that we may be overlooking and the only thing I would like to add is that for those of you who have not done this already, it is worth not only googling your name, but also doing quite an exhaustive online search for yourself so you are aware of what potential employees are finding out about you. Skeletons may stay in closets but they don’t fare so well on the internet!

TFPL Recruitment bridges blurring boundaries

TFPL’s latest market research on the development of “e-roles” in organisations in all sectors reinforces the belief that the boundaries between a range of information related disciplines are blurring – and especially between information management, content management and information technology.

“TFPL Recruitment is responding to this dynamic environment by expanding the breadth of our core offering” says Darron Chapman, Director of TFPL’s Recruitment Services.  “Peter Phillips, an experienced IT Recruiter, has recently joined the team to enable us to provide specialist recruitment services in IT disciplines aligned to IM.  We believe that it is no longer possible or sensible to maintain artificial barriers between IM and IT specialists”.

In-house training

For those who wish to run a TFPL in-house training course during the month of August, we are offering the use of the training rooms, at our offices in Blackfriars EC4, free of charge.

For details, please contact Val Skelton on 020 7332 6000.

Get out of the library

Sir Muir Gray, Director of the National Library for Health, highlighted the opportunities for librarians in the launch this week of the parntership between Bournemouth University and Partnerships in Health Information.  Every organisation needs, he said, a CKO and each CKO needs to be supported by a librarian.  "Knowledge needs to be managed better than we manage money".  Sandra Ward from TFPL explored with other delelgates , over a glass of wine, why librarians should 'support' the CKO rather than 'be' the CKO.   While some delegates felt that librarians need more skills in order to take those roles, Sandra and I feel that librarians have those skills - they just need to do it.

RMS announces dates for 2007 Annual Conference

The Records Management Society have announced that their Annual Conference for 2007 will take place between 29 April - 2 May 2007.

The 2007 event will be held at the Hilton Metropole Hotel in Brighton.

RMS members are encouraged to provide ideas for content.