This week I’ve been looking (again) at the ideas behind digital identity 2.0 best described by Dick Hardt in his presentation at the next Web conference in 2007 (embed video) and have been thinking about how this can be applied to recruitment in general and specifically how it could affect graduate recruitment.
The first interesting point Dick makes is about ‘silos’ and what a website knows about you. In this case when a student goes through a graduate recruitment application process, the recruiters’ management system receives and stores lots of information about that student in their “Silo”.
Dick describes this process as “digital identity 1.0” and this ‘directory centric’ model applies to all sorts of consumer behaviour. E-bay, Amazon, Lastminute.com etc all have a little “CV” with some information about you.
“Digital Identity 2.0” effectively aims to turn this model on its head i.e. consumers have one profile (or online passport) that they use in all sorts of activity while surfing the web. The obvious benefits here are the reduced need of usernames and passwords to fill out and remember and a great amount of time saves in filling out different profiles for different ‘silos’.
So can this be applied to graduate recruitment?