It’s Throng’s design guy, David Seaver again. Let’s start with a photo I took recently at a professional talk held in Palo Alto, CA:
These stickers could be worn on one’s lapel or shirt, to indicate interests in hiring or in being hired. At least one man wore both—I have no idea what the story was, there, but I’m sure it was an interesting one.
However, these stickers, from the viewpoint of the Throng developer team, represent a series of missed opportunities, at least thus far.
To begin with, many of the attendees had gone to a pre-event dinner. A good time to chat, and maybe angle for work, but...well, yeah, who wants to show up at the restaurant wearing a sticker that says they need a job?
This is exactly the sort of interaction where Throng can make everyone’s day a bit simpler. If, prior to the evening’s events, attendees who were job-hunting or hiring had loaded their wants list with statements such as “What I want is a job as a game designer” or “What I want is to hire a game designer,” then even as people got to the restaurant, they would have received appropriate alerts from Throng. And this would have continued at the main event. Better yet, since every Throng alert can turn into a chat, it’s possible to open a chat thread, exchange a few words, even from opposite ends of the room, and arrange a proper meeting for later.
Better still, because of the patented technology behind Throng, someone who wanted to talk to potential hires wouldn’t have to settle for the pool of people who were actively looking for work. By using the Search function to find members of a specific profession, and saving the search as an Alert, they could locate any matching Throng-using professional attendee. And let’s face it, sometimes the person you absolutely want to hire is already working. Hint: offer them a more interesting job and more money. That often works.
As a bit of icing on the cupcake, this initial meeting can be arranged by the actual hiring manager or someone from the manager’s department, who actually knows the field, rather than having to wrangle someone from HR into attending the event, so it may be possible to get a couple of pre-interviews done on the spot!
So, there’s another set of reasons to use Throng. By taking advantage of mobile technology, we can help our careers and lives go a little more smoothly, while saving valuable lapel space for important things, like vintage “Chicken Inspector No. 23” badges.
