Want good hires in 2007? Read Boothby’s Web Office whitepaper — today!

Rod Boothby at Innovation Creators has published a terrific paper on Web Office: the Next Wave in Productivity Tools. (The PDF looks far better).

Boothby notes that today's MBA students are used to using social media tools (blogs, wikis, IM, etc) for ease and productivity and that they will expect to have those tools at hand when they join your firm.

They are young. They are smart. And they are better connected than anyone you have ever met. In the summer of 2006, twenty-somethings will be busting out of graduate school powered by a brand new set of productivity tools. Think about the jump from typewriters to word processors. Think about how, in the 1980s, our parents had to struggle to learn to use spreadsheets like VisiCalc and Lotus 1-2-3. We are on the verge of experiencing a jump in the capabilities of office tools that is just as significant as the jump that occurred when the first PCs landed on people's desks. Why is this jump so big, and what does it have to do with the class of 2006? What are these people capable of? Well, to begin with, for most of them, the internet has been around since before they started high school.

The average MBA graduates in 2006 are not just knowledge workers. They are capable of being highly networked internal entrepreneurs and innovation creators. Their ability to connect is not just about email, BlackBerries, text messages and voice-mails. They are intimately familiar with all those tools, but ultimately, expertise with those one-to-one connectivity tools is just the price of admission.

What makes these new graduates so effective is their ability to work efficiently with large virtual teams and their amazing ability to maximize the power of their personal networks.He then covers the main tools and uses.

I'll go Boothby one further and predict that the graduates of 2007, 2008 and thereafter will expect and demand to use Web2.0 tools to do their jobs. If you don't have the tools, or have a corporate culture that looks askance at them, you won't get good hires. Period.

Related post: My five favorite clicks... what are yours?

Posted by Allan Jenkins on March 3, 2006 at 12:52 PM in Corporate Management | Permalink

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