By Barbara Ling, RISE Seminars
Have you ever heard of user groups? Basically, these are collections of professionals who are brought together by love for a common "thing", that thing being technology. Unix user groups! NT user groups! Oracle user groups! Palmtop user groups!
User groups are very neat organizations. The good news is you are virtually assured of a quality, targeted audience, *if* you package your message in a winning, netiquette-friendly way.
The bad news is you can be spammed to hell and back if you use them inappropriately! The focus of this issue will teach you excellent methods of finding and contacting user groups that will help both sides of the equation.
As you might be aware, the Internet allows recruiters to contact thousands of people with job offers. Unfortunately, the cookie-cutter aspect of this mass emailing often results in instant deletion and negative reactions. How can you change the perception of your offer into a value-added service?
Whenever you want to contact a user group, instead of seeing your value-added service as "providing a new job," view it instead as "providing career transition solutions." Immediately, this moves you from a single usage resource to something that people will want to remember.
What's in it for them to consider you? Remember, you're only one recruiter out of zillions...user groups are often approached by members of our industry in ways that would make an elephant weep (subltlty-wise, that is).
What is the first thing to know about user groups? Netiquette! Netiquette, which is simply Internet good behavior, is a collection of rules that guide interactions online. For example, bad netiquette is posting your NJ job in a Texas newsgroup. Good netiquette is lurking first on professional mailing lists and getting a feel for the community, not to mention a quality reputation, before launching into what you have to offer.
Some great resources to learn about netiquette includeWhy is netiquette important, especially in regards to user groups? Remember, the Internet, contrary to popular belief, was not created as a way to make money or conduct ecommerce - it came into being *solely* for the sharing of information. But nowadays with the popularity of spam and unsolicited commercial email, many techies are fed up with the dozens and dozens of recruiter soliciations they receive daily. Thus, netiquette will give you an edge over your competitors.
Now that we've covered that extremely important aspect, how do you find user groups on the Internet? Very very simply! You can start at Ash Nallawalla's Master List of Computer User Groups at http://crm911.com/ugotw , The User Group News at http://www.ugn.com , and the User Group Connection at http://www.ugconnection.com. Yahoo! has a great collection at http://dir.yahoo.com/Computers_and_Internet/Organizations/User_Groups/ as does Microsoft at http://msdn.microsoft.com/resources/usergroup/find.asp .
And of course, you can use search engines too to locate your desired target niche. Let's say you want to find folks who love palmtops. Go to Google and merely search on
unix user groups
You'll see links to various and sundry unix user groups such as the Usenix list at http://www.usenix.org/membership/ugs.html , the St. Louis Users group at http://www.sluug.org/~newton/othr-uug.html and more.
Once you've found a user group you'd like to learn more about, approach the board *first*, preferably the president. Introduce yourself! Explain briefly the opportunities you could offer their members, such as personalized career guidance, resume-writing, and of course, specific career opportunities. :-) The goal here is to gain permission for your name to be listed as a reference or recommended by the president.
What are some of the other great benefits of user groups? Well, quite often you'll find the ability to post jobs or scan resumes! Simply search on Altavista for
post jobs on our user group
(yep, really!)
is what results - check it out.
By introducing yourself as a resource first, and a recruiter second, you'll make a much more sterling impression! Try it. It works.
-- Article courtesy of Barbara Ling. For more information, please go to RISE Seminars at http://www.riseway.com/ or The Internet Recruiting Edge at http://www.barbaraling.com/recruiting.html..
