Rat Pack

This week I've been invited to contribute to a feature for the September issue of Director magazine on how directors effectively recruit good quality jobseekers without wasting precious time.

First thought, don't recruit through Facebook. Then, on reflection, perhaps you do want to know everything about your potential employee, if I were hiring, I would certainly have a dig around anyone's social media presence.

There are various routes to employees:

· Traditional recruiters;

· University channels;

· Purely online agencies;

· LinkedIn etc

Add to this the ever tempting ‘social media route'. A friend of mine high up in the echelons as a Managing Director will not even look at a CV unless the candidate has a higher Klout score than 50. Word on the wires is that there are numerous Klout 50 Clubs exclusive to people with the highest rated scores (mine is a mere point off 57 in case you're interested).

Professor Nigel Thrift, University of Warwick has described how software acts in often unseen and concealed ways in order to sort people, places and things... Like things, human agency is being rated, being sorted and assembled. I foresee a social media ‘knowledge economy' based on the accumulation of power from rated formulations of supposed influence.

And there must be business potential here as IBM targets the future of social analytics just launched ‘social' business and Edelman PR are running with a similar-to-Klout-but-not-Klout indexing via blog and tweet level scores.

Strangely I'm one point away from 50 on both. What does that tell you?...

The crucial point here is, of course, that of affect. How do these developments have the ‘power to affect professional formulations’?

Technology doesn't just create information, it holds onto it in new and unexpected ways.

Equally there's a movement towards a socila media hierarchy that divides the 'haves' - as in those who 'have it'; against the 'have nots' - those with a Klout less than 50 then. This is less digital divide, and more replication of some form of social hierarchy.

Is this a process of social media discrimination?, which occurs as practitioners increasingly use social media to generate ever-more-carefully defined 'professional' categories. Or are they just exploitable niche's?...

Either way your Klout has been recorded. You have been warned.