Leinster will need the agreement of his side, the Fukuoka Sannix Blues.  They’ll need Eddie Wigglesworth and co. at the IRFU to give them the nod too.  Given what’s gone on in the last few weeks with the new rules about non-Irish qualified players you could see them knocking the request back just to spite Joe Schmidt.  Thorn is a bona fide rugby legend.  It would be an honour to have him play in the blue jersey.

They took remedial action, cut sponsorships and subscriptions to job boards, and stopped advertising in the local press.  They discovered that the only jobs that companies were willing to pay a fee for were those that were very difficult to fill.  Candidates for these roles were unlikely to use job boards or respond to newspaper ads.

Out of necessity Campbell, who has always had a keen interest in technology, started to experiment with LinkedIn and bit by bit he learned to find candidates using online technologies.

So what happened?

The economy forced us to change and we changed.  All of a sudden we realised that this worked.  We didn’t need our own database, we didn’t need to advertise, there was more than enough information online to help us to network, get a lead, and find somebody for a job.  We started making placements and we started surviving.

If things hadn’t gone south in 2008 do you think you would still be doing what you were doing?

Yes.

And you wouldn’t have eventually moved towards social recruiting?

No, I wouldn’t have needed to.  I may have dabbled in it perhaps but most recruiters and most business that are making money don’t change.  They’ll usually wait for something or someone to kick them in the arse.

You’re spending more time training other companies on how to use online technologies to recruit than actually recruiting.  How did that happen?

I enjoy networking and at various events and meetings I started telling other recruiters what we were doing as a business.   They listened to us because as an Irish company not recruiting in Ireland, and focusing only on the offshore market, they felt we weren’t a threat. At the time most of the agencies we were talking to were either letting staff go or closing down.  The market shrunk by 60% in Ireland alone during 2008 /2009.

As they realised that what we were doing was working they asked us to teach them how to do it.  When you’re a recruiter and running your own business you don’t have time to do anything else but place candidates.

In 2008 if someone had shown us how to do this as opposed to slowly learning over 2 years and making loads of mistakes before we finally got it right we’d have happily paid money for it.  In the end it was obvious that there was a business in training others how to use online tools to recruit and we decided to create Social Talent.

What is social recruiting?

Social recruiting is simply using online technologies to recruit more efficiently.  There are two components.

1.  Finding information online, using online tools that leads you to headhunt candidates at a very low cost.

2. Using the same online tools to brand and build an awareness of yourself as a recruiter within a market or niche so that you are known as the “go to guy” for legal jobs in say Toronto.

Previously most of that stuff would have been outsourced, you would have to slowly build your own database, or you would have had to hire your own marketing person. These were the kind of things that only rich companies could afford.

“Social” is the buzzword or “catch all” phrase  that is thrown about, but along with using LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter social recruiting also involves using webinar software, improving how email is used, better document storage, and better marketing techniques

 Are the days of traditional agency recruitment over?

No they’re not.  Mass advertising and marketing methods to attract candidates no longer work.  They have been on the wane over the last decade.  Putting an ad online gets applicants but the wrong ones.  In fact if you put an ad in a newspaper there’s a good chance you won’t get anyone.

10 years ago newspaper recruitment advertising died and we all moved to job boards.  Anybody could put an ad on a job board so agency clients all of a sudden could go to the exact same source, pay the same fee, and get the same candidates coming to them.  The benefit of an agency is not just the supply of those candidates.  It’s the supply of the right candidate at the right time, vetted with authority, and it’s also the networking that that person does in the industry and the knowledge that person builds up on that industry.

The big threat to the recruitment agency model at the moment is LinkedIn.   LinkedIn view agencies as a competitor.  They offer a completely different product set to corporates and have no interest in the agency model.  They sell services to agencies by telling them that they can save agency fees by doing it themselves.

The problem is that as an in-house recruiter who has to recruit sales, legal, technology, and engineering people, having a million names doesn’t get the perfect shortlist of five people who will come and interview with you, and crucially the one person who is going to take that job.  The recruiter’s job is to disseminate down to that perfect shortlist, knowing who to look for, knowing the skills, and the right questions to ask.  Those fundamentals aren’t going to go away and will still be here in twenty years’ time.

 What are your views on social media and privacy?

Privacy on the web is a myth.  You can modify your Facebook or Twitter settings as much as you like but someone out there will always find a way to bypass them and get your data.  Rather than worrying about your privacy you should be worrying about the quality of the information that’s online.  If you have a Facebook profile that only shows you drunk at the weekend that’s your choice but make sure you also show photos of you in a business context and include information about your success at work.  When someone does eventually find your drunken photos they will hopefully be only a tiny part of your overall digital profile, the majority of which is you being a really good professional talking about what you do and networking within your industry.  I see online profiling as an opportunity and privacy is a myth.

Even if you don’t have an online profile?

Everybody has an online profile whether they like it or not.  A friend of mine who doesn’t have a Facebook account and barely returns texts wagered me that I couldn’t find him online.  I found his photograph online on a trade magazine website.  He was at a golfing event with one of his clients.  His name, job title, and employer were listed at the bottom of the photo.  That’s enough for me as a recruiter to say “that’s a guy who could do this job as his title is right, his industry is right, and I know his name.”  That’s enough for me to track him down, contact him, and ask him if he’s interested in the job.  So whether you like it or not you are online, your profile is out there.

 How is Ireland as a place to do business in 2012?

Ireland infrastructurally isn’t bad but it needs a big improvement in the area of wireless access to the internet.  It’s not as ubiquitous as it should be.   People should be able to get high speed access to the internet everywhere in Dublin.  Time magazine cited it as the one big let-down of Dublin as a city to visit.

Otherwise Ireland is fantastic.  We have a bustling venture capital sector that we never had before and Dublin is almost unique among European cities in that it has this culture.  Some of the world’s most successful business people now have venture capital operations based in Cork, Kerry, or Dublin and are willing to invest heavily in Irish companies that could be the next big start up.

It’s the home of Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, Twitter, PayPal, and Microsoft.   You can rub shoulders with senior executives from these companies at local conferences; people that you would usually only be able to rub shoulders with in Silicon Valley.  In fact it’s the Silicon Valley of Europe.  On Monday we met with an organisation about funding our international expansion.  We were able to have an informal chat over coffee with three successful entrepreneurs who gladly gave us great advice for free.  You can’t do that in many other European cities.

That’s a different take on the landscape to what we’re fed by the media.

The newspapers are always talking about what the government are doing.  Who cares what the government are doing.  It’s what people are doing that matters.  Who can we talk to?  What knowledge can we get?  You can do more yourself because you can talk to somebody who has set up a €200m company from scratch who’s the same age as you over a pint of Guinness.  You don’t get that anywhere else.  There are loads of these people in Dublin.

Any views on the recent Netflix launch?

It’s great that for €6.99 a month you can theoretically watch unlimited movies and TV shows.   It’s a low enough price for people who usually illegally download movies to pay out.   I‘ll happily pay it and feel comfortable that I’m not infringing any copyright law.

I strongly object to having to give out my credit card details for the free trial.  I don’t like giving out my credit card details unless I’m definitely paying for something.  Also they have very poor content on the site.  I went on the other night and found a load of 8 year old movies.  If you are going to launch a product you have to make sure it’s ready and offer the best service possible.  It’s a missed opportunity as many people won’t come back to the site for another year because of the poor content.

What are you listening to at the moment?

I listen to very fast dance music – HedKandi compilations and anything by Groove Armada – when I’m working, which drives my colleagues up the wall.  Florence and the Machine’s new album, Ceremonials, is excellent and I love Wasting Light by the Foo Fighters.

Reading?

I’m reading Free by Chris Anderson.  Meatball Sundae by Seth Godin is dated but it blew my mind.  It took a recession for people to take notice that marketing has changed irrevocably.

Watching?

I’ve just finished the first series of Homeland which was great.  I thought Drive was fantastic, very artistic looking with a great soundtrack.

Thank you Jonathan.

You’re welcome.

In 2004 U2 appeared in an iTunes commercial to promote their album How To Dismantle an Atomic Bomb.  In response to a suggestion from the Chicago Tribune’s music critic Greg Kot about whether U2’s association with a technology company like Apple was akin to selling the band’s soul to the devil Bono made the statement that “the ‘devil’ here is a bunch of creative minds, more creative than a lot of people in rock bands.  The lead singer is Steve Jobs.  These men have helped design the most beautiful art object in music culture since the electric guitar.  That’s the iPod.  The job of art is to chase ugliness away.”  

Jobs was heavily influenced by the counterculture movement of the sixties which was unfolding right in front of him in San Francisco.  As a vegan he embraced diets which left him whippet thin, and with very bad b.o.  An early job with Atari led to him being moved to the night shift after one co-worker complained that he was a “goddamn hippie with b.o…and impossible to deal with.”

The love for counterculture  didn’t just stop at going to Grateful Dead concerts, he was an active participant in sampling the delights of drugs, LSD in particular. According to Isaacson in an interview with John Markoff of the New York Times Jobs revealed that “taking LSD was one of the two or three most important things he’d done in his life…People who had never taken acid would never fully –understand him.”

The seventies photos of Jobs and Steve Wosniak, the brains behind the first two Apple computers, are eerily similar to early photos of Donald Fagan and Walter Becker of Steely Dan.  Both partnerships flourished in California in the mid to late seventies and had an uncompromising approach to producing great work.  A scene in a documentary about the making of their classic album Aja (1977) shows Becker and Fagen running through old takes of the song Peg and offering withering appraisals of the numerous attempts made by an army of session guitarists to nail the guitar solo.   In the end Jay Graydon produced the take that they eventually used.  Jobs had a similar approach to perfection, to the extent that even unseen parts inside a computer had to be crafted perfectly.  Over the years Steely Dan built up a reputation for hiring only the finest session musicians, which Jobs emulated by hiring only what he called “A players” as opposed to “bozos.”

There’s no evidence in the book that Jobs was a fan of Neil Young.  None of Young’s music appears in the chapter devoted to what was on Jobs’s iPod.  Young himself had no time for iTunes and was quoted as saying that Jobs “had a lot to answer for” and that “putting on a headphone and listening to an MP3 was like hell.”  That said both had a lot in common.  Young’s view, shared in an interview last year with The Sunday Times’s Rod Liddle, that “you never, ever listen to your fan base…the last thing you should do is follow your fan base…that’s all they are – a fan base” would have definitely resonated with Jobs.  He never did market research for any Apple product as he felt that “customers don’t know what they want till we’ve shown them…great art stretches the taste, it doesn’t follow tastes.”

Jobs’s great musical love was Bob Dylan, with the Beatles a close second.  He regarded Dylan’s early career from his eponymous debut in 1962 to Blood on the Tracks in 1975 with awe.  He draws parallels between Dylan breaking the mould and finally going electric in 1965 with that of his own career and a need to keep “evolving, moving, refining.”  Going electric led to Dylan hitting three consecutive creative home runs with Bringing it All Back Home (1965), Highway 61 Revisited (1965), and Blonde on Blonde (1966).  With the exception of Blood on the Tracks (1975) they are easily his most compelling albums and while they were recorded close to the beginning of his career Jobs can point to a similar ground breaking achievement towards the end of his own career with the production of the iPod, iPhone, and iPad.

Jobs was a brilliant salesman and showed all the instincts of a rock star whenever he was called on to pitch for business or launch a new product.  When he presenting the strengths of the NeXT operating system to the Apple board in 1996 – Jobs set up NeXT after he left Apple in 1985 – the then Apple CEO, Gil Amelio, was moved to remark that “Steve’s sales pitch on the NeXT operating system was dazzling…He praised the virtues and strengths as though he was describing a performance of Olivier as Macbeth.”

Jobs treated attendees at Macworld conferences with virtuoso performances at every meaningful product launch.  Jobs would spend days rehearsing and perfecting the synchronicity of the words, music, and images of a presentation.  According to Lee Clow, Jobs’s favoured advertising creative “he wanted to be sure that an image hit at the exact moment as a beat of the music.”  It reminds me of a recent interview with Bob Mould where he extolled the excellence and importance of his one-time drummer Anton Fier by saying that “Anton will throw a house at you if you try to speed up.”  Fier may have had a reputation for snapping viciously at people in the studio but he was the only white man to ever play the drums for Miles Davis.

As wealthy as he was, and despite his love for well-engineered cars, Jobs was not overly driven to rock ‘n’ roll style consumption, unlike his friend Larry Ellison, who one of Jobs’s children revealingly described as “our rich friend.”  Heavily influenced by Buddhism when he was younger he led a relatively simple life, eschewing materialism, in an open Palo Alto residential area and unlike most high profile executives shunned the use of private security.

Many rock stars have the reputation for being difficult and Jobs was no different.  In fact he was probably worse than most.  His nastiness was legendary and Isaacson’s entire tome is littered with examples.  Some people put it down to him being abandoned at birth and put up for adoption.  Jobs also abandoned his first- born, Lisa, who he ignored for the first few years of her life.  Chrisann Brennan, Lisa’s mother was moved to remark that “he was an elightened human being who was cruel…that’s a strange combination.”  Jobs tirades and outbursts at work were astonishing and at times left people feeling brutalised and burned out.  Some were able to cope though and saw it as his way of improving things.

Nobody was immune from his temper.  His Apple soul mate, the designer Jony Ive, recounted a different kind of virtuoso performance when the iMac production process had slowed: “He did one of his displays of awesome fury and the fury was absolutely pure.”  Tina Redse, a former girlfriend, put his manner down to Narcissistic Personality Disorder.  She said that “it explained some of the choices he’d made about his daughter Lisa at that time.  I think the issue is empathy – the capacity for empathy is lacking.”

Towards the end of the book Isaacson remarks that the “nasty edge to his personality was not necessary.  It hindered him more than helped him.  But it did, at times, serve a purpose.”  Indeed former Sony CEO Andy Lack described him as pathological, and then commented that it was a very useful trait to have in negotiations.

There’s no doubt that Jobs had an elevated sense of taste which was reflected in his marvellous intuitive products.  People who didn’t measure up in this regard were dismissed out of hand.  When preparing for her wedding to Jobs, Laurene Powell invited a woman who was going to do the calligraphy for the invitations to the house to show some samples.  In the middle of the visit Jobs left the room and didn’t return.  When Powell found him skulking in another room Jobs told her to “get rid of her…I can’t look at her stuff it’s shit.”  He once cut a cruise holiday short because he didn’t like the design of the boat.  The high water mark of his difficult behaviour regarding design sensibility came when he was in hospital recovering from his liver transplant.

“At one point the pulmonologist tried to put a mask over his face when he was deeply sedated.  Jobs ripped it off and mumbled that he hated the design and refused to wear it.  Though barely able to speak, he ordered them to bring five different options for the mask and he would pick a design he liked.”

Neil Young’s music may not have made it on to Steve Jobs iPod but it’s fair to assume that the most charismatic, creative, and successful CEO of the last decade would agree with his best known lyric:

“It’s better to burn out than to fade away.”

A few years back the former Wallaby coach Bob Dwyer commented that Earls was potentially the most natural number 13 he’d seen emerge since Jason Little.  I wonder what he’d say now.

In the absence of O’ Driscoll, Tommy Bowe is the best all-round footballer in the Irish backline.  He has played outside centre frequently for the Ospreys and Ian McGeechan trusted him enough to play him there in the third Lions test against South Africa in 2009.

If Declan Kidney is to get the Lions coaching job for 2013 he’ll need to show those making the appointment that he’s a good selector. At times his conservatism has got the better of him, e.g. ignoring Mike Ross for Tony Buckley and John Hayes, favouring Denis Leamy over Sean O’Brien in the 2010 November internationals, and picking O’Gara over Sexton against Wales in the 2011 World Cup quarter final.  Successful Lions tours hinge on bullseye selection.  Sorting out the conundrum at number 13 would be a step in the right direction.

Start it Up: Why running your own business is easier than you think

Since the beginning of the downturn I’ve largely sworn off buying newspapers which are overly downbeat.  Johnson has an interesting take on the source of the pessimism prevalent in journalism.  Ever wonder why most Irish newspapers apart from their sports pages are unreadable these days?

“When I give speeches to groups of entrepreneurs, I am invariably asked why the media is so gloomy.  I usually reply that journalists  believe bad news sells.  But I think there is an added, more desperate and personal  element to the pessimism: journalists are petrified that their very livelihoods are under threat…Their business models are broken…No wonder journalists are miserable…The authors are probably expecting the sack.”

If you are a frequent traveller to the UK you’ve probably eaten in one of the many ventures that made Johnson a multi-millionaire.  He was responsible for growing PizzaExpress in the 1990s from 12 branches to over 250.  I picked up the bookmark I was using as I read in one of his Giraffe restaraunts in Soho, and I usually pop into the Heathrow branch anytime I’m in transit through terminal 1.

It’s described as a How- to book on the cover but I’d go as far as saying that it’s more of a “this is what typically can happen, this is why, and this is how to cope” approach.  He’s up front about his own mistakes, has an interesting take on the business cycle and the current downturn, i.e. downturns are there for a reason and they keep things fresh so accept it and get on with it.

If anything Johnson gives the reader a different way of looking at the current recession as well as the opportunities that it presents, and his description of the late Robert Maxwell is almost worth the price alone.

“He really was evil; I imagine that perhaps Beelzebub himself reached out from the watery depths, plucked Maxwell from the deck of his yacht Lady Ghislaine and spirited him off to hell.  For Captain Bob had surely sold his soul to the devil many years before.”

“Hi Eddie, Joe Schmidt here, I’ve been trying to get through to you for the last five minutes”

“Ah Joe, you know how bad the mobile network is around Lansdowne Road on Heineken Cup semi-final day”

“Yes I do Eddie, yes I do. Listen Rob has done his knee in and we need to move Nacewa across to cover full back.”

“Did we register him to play there Joe?”

“No we didn’t but he’s the only player left who can play there.”

“What about McFadden?”

“He’s never played full-back in his life Eddie.”

“Well Ruddock is Irish qualified, what about him?”

“Ah Eddie, he’s a flanker”

“He’s a what? I can barely hear you with the noise.”

“He’s a FLANKER.”

“Oh right yeah, well let me have a quick chat with Philip Browne and see if that’s all right with him.”

“Ok but hurry up we’re struggling out there and there are only ten minutes left.”

Two long minutes pass

“Joe are you there?”

“Yes”

“Philip says it’s ok to do it, but just the once.” 

A ridiculous scenario and hopefully one that will never come to pass.  Irish Times rugby correspondent Gerry Thornley described the new IRFU foreign players regulations as “half-arsed” on the radio the other day.   They smack as having been designed by a bunch of accountants and are completely impractical.  Why they needed to explicitly outline these guidelines is anyone’s guess when the Player Advisory Group has veto over potential overseas signings in any event.  By doing so they have opened themselves up to ridicule.  Time to go back to the drawing board and carry out some genuine and meaningful consultation with all four provinces.