Plateau

Hey Everyone,

Sorry I have been MIA for sometime. I'm excited to dive back and learn more about HR Technology. Today, I started off with learning about Plateau Systems. Plateau, is a SAAS based Talent Management System. Looking at the Plateau 6.1 Interactive Tour was extremely informative in getting to know this product. I can definitely see a large company or fast paced company benefiting from this type of SAAS. The four elements in their package include performance, compensation, career&succession, and learning.

Plateau along with others out there are focusing on shifting from an on-premise to being a SAAS based company. You can definitely get that vibe from surfing on Plateau's website. They emphasize the benefits of being a SAAS talent management provider. Bill Kutik's podcast featuring Paul Sparta the Chairman & CEO of Plateau was a great podcast to listen to if you want to hear more about SAAS vs. On-premise. A few of the companies he discussed were Taleo, Workday, Verve,Plateau and more. I believe SAAS is the way to go, being a web 2.0 country this type of software is more efficient, streamlined and easy to pick-up. The Workday presentation yesterday in class was a great example of how SAAS is taking over.

Watching this video was similar to reading the article "What is Web 2.0?". The difference, this article focuses more on the back end of websites. I liked watching it to see the differences between HTML and XML. Learning about the format in which sites are written is a whole new world to me. I sometimes wish I could grasp this topic a lot better. Reading how XML separates form and content doesn't make complete sense, I get the gist but its not completely clear. Watching this video definitely helped to give some clarity.
I love blogs and think they are a great source of sharing information. Except I'm really bad in checking my google reader or my blogger dashboard to keep up with new items. I wish there was some type of push notification or an application where you can glance easily. I'm sure you can keep your google reader/blogger dashboard open in your window but you still have to manually check it.
Web 2.0 is definitely changing society and the way we should think. Taking this class seems to be the first step since we're all communicating in the cloud.

The Machine is Us/ing Us YouTube video

Having a background in online media and being pretty internet savvy I thought I would breeze through this article but I was wrong. I definitely got the gist of what web 2.0 is but all the computer babble kept making me re-think what I read.
Being part of the Generation X crowd I witnessed the move from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0. In the section about RSS feeds I realized how convenient web 2.0 has made things. In the past I would have to go to 10 different websites just to get all my news and now I can use an RSS feeder or Google reader. Web 2.0 has definitely made things more efficient and easily accessible.
My husband always talks about how Perl is starting to get outdated and his company currently uses it. At first it was just a foreign language to me but now I get what he is talking about. He mentions how his company is trying to move into Ruby on Rails. He told about the site Tiobe which tells the current rankings for programming languages.
Soooo, I've heard over the term VOIP(VOICE OVER IP) but never really truly understood what it meant. But after reading this article I realized I use it every single day through my house phone line OOMA. Ooma lets you make free U.S. calls over the Internet with your existing home phone.
And the last item I want to mention is AJAX. Allowing pages to update without reloading makes the user experience extremely seamless. After reading about AJAX, I noticed how many sites that I use on a daily basis use this function. Some examples are Flickr, Facebook, Googlemaps, Twitter, and ESPN.

I'm really lucky Jun introduced me to Bill Kutik's podcasts. After listening to just one podcast I think I'm HOOKED! I selected at random Bill Kutik's interview with Doug Berg, the Founder and Chief Innovation Officer at Jobs2web. And let me just say, I think everyone should listen to this one. It was the perfect first podcast.

Bill and Doug Berg discussed the movement of companies from standard traditional recruiting to a more social recruiting outlook along with that competitor advantage. Doug states how companies are currently playing the field with social media recruiting.
He discussed how companies are tapping into Twitter and Facebook with a company page to gain interest in potential candidates. As a whole these companies are trying to be more socially accepted. For example, if I applied to three jobs and one of them was on twitter and facebook, I would lean towards the social one vs. the corporate. I feel that my decision is based on the generation that I am in. The Boomers may look towards the social site but would probably prefer a more standard approach. The older generation looks at facebook and twitter as an open site. A place where everything is publicly visible and known. They prefer to keep their social networking and corporate network seperate. For example, my husband and I are part of LinkedIN but our parents don't want a part of it. My dad does look daily at job boards to see what is out there, but gets hesitant to e-mail out his resume. He prefers a fax or phone call. In relating back to the podcast I can definitely see Twitter & Facebook as a new tool for recruiting but it will take some time for the Boomers to get on board.

Interesting Facts in the Podcast:

* Currently, 300 Million searches on google for job related information per month (not unique)
* Top Time to Search for a job Wednesday 1pm CST. 8-10pm for Executives.

The Bill Kutik Radio Show

Wow, I didn't know how far we've come in Technology after watching this clip. Things have become simplified but yet are still so complicated. For example, when my daughter was born, having technology to help in those first few months was essential. Something as simple as curing diaper rashes or how to figure out if the baby had gas was right at my fingertips. For the older generation, it was a lot more difficult. They had to go through pages and pages in outdated books to see what they needed. Whenever their was a situation, I would search on google however my parents would discuss old home remedies and suggest to call the doctor. Sometimes we didn't need to call the doctor all we needed was to see what other parents did in the same situation. And sometimes when we would call the doctor they would mention the exact same thing we found online. Using technology was fast, easy and the majority of the time relevant.

http://www.nytimes.com/external/gigaom/2010/04/02/02gigaom-10-simple-google-search-tricks-58674.html

This was extremely helpful to me, so thought I'd share :)

Taking a Big Girl Pill to Succeed in Business & Life

This has to be one of my favorite articles. Yes, the points she makes are pretty obvious but its so vital. Diving into HR some of the points she points out are so important to me. For example #1, its so easy to lose yourself in that one candidate who you thought was perfect for a position and didn't get it. And #2, Learn from everything is so true. I realize that more and more in the UC Berkley program. I've already met so many individuals with such diverse corporate backgrounds. Each person brings something new to the class and to think about. These are just some examples in this article I found interesting. I really think this article is a keeper for my future endeavors.