Day 21 - James' Top 10

Day 21 and who is behind this door?  The social media recruitment whizz James Mayes.  What James doesn’t know about social media and recruitment isn’t worth knowing and today he kindly shares his top 10 sites and apps that will help greatly those of us still learning the medium.

James’ Top 10

I’ve followed Ed on Twitter for some time – and he recently responded to an invite for a guest post with a cracker on LinkedIn LIONS, which you’ll find here.  He’s kindly offered me the opportunity to reciprocate.

If we’ve not met before, I sit mostly on the intersection of recruitment and technology.  I’m a geek, I admit it.  I jump in on new apps and tools whenever I see them and I try to blog reviews of those I really like.  As we wind in to the year-end though, it seems appropriate to look back over the year and see what actually had staying power.  What delivered on-going value.  What’s still in use? So, in no particularly order, I offer you my geeklist for 2011.

• Ifttt – Sets up social rules. Too many different profiles to manage? Ifttt can help. Blogged a review of this one here. 
• CoTweet – I use this as a desktop client for Twitter.  Most of the functions are not dissimilar to other players in the market, but there’s one differentiator I love – the conversations. I bring up Ed’s profile, I can see our Twitter history. That conversation we had about keyword spam back in May. What other app for Twitter gives you that? 
• Xydo – news curation and delivery service. Part automated, but influenced by the networks you build as an individual. Best personalised news service I’ve found, blogged here! 
• Evernote – The ultimate note taker.  I use it to hoard favourite tweets (delivered here automatically by Ifttt), to make meeting notes, to hold photos as part of a mobile project stream. Brilliant. 
• Buffer – rather than flood your followers with all the articles you read on the train each morning, space them through the day. Combine with Xydo for excellent results! Review here. 
• WordPress – my blog platform of choice. My needs are simple, so I stay with the hosted version – I’ve checked out others and not yet seen a reason to consider moving. 
• DropBox – My files, anywhere. Backed up in the cloud, backed up to each machine I install it on, deletion controls (which I only found after this episode!!). Ace service. 
• Zovo – bigger cloud backup. I use DropBox for working files, Zovo for long-term cloud synchronised automatic backups. 
• Bit.ly – always was good, but the enhancements this year allow for custom short-links. Instructions here. 
• Aerolatte – just because I’m working at home, doesn’t mean I put up with crap coffee. This helps. A lot.

I hope you see something new to enjoy. Likewise, if you want to offer up suggestions of your own, please do! Personal recommendation is my favourite form of discovery.  If you have questions for me, or just want to see what I find next, Twitter’s best. You’ll find me here.

You can find James’ Twitter profile above and his LinkedIn profile here. 

It’s the final countdown of irrelevant clips and here’s another cracker

*****

Ed Scrivener is an experienced HR recruiter.  He writes, tweets, praises and moans about his passions – HR, recruitment and social media... except for in December when he is being lazy and getting everyone else to do it!