Every So Often, Ones' Faith in Humankind is Rekindled.
Welcome to Rewind 09 - this week on TotalPicture Radio, we’re replaying a few of the most memorable podcasts from 2009 - starting with an interview recorded at ERE Spring in San Diego, with Charee Klimek, chief marketing officer of JobAngels. -- Enjoy!
 Charee Klimek
The good folks at ERE gave Charee Klimek the main stage at ERE Expo in San Diego to tell the remarkable story of JobAngels - how one compassionate "Tweet" on Twitter gave birth to a national movement to help put people back to work. Simple, sincere, and profound. I was able to catch-up with Charee after her presentation to share her story in this Leadership podcast on Total Picture Radio.
Total Picture Radio's coverage of ERE Expo is sponsored by HRmarketer
NEW: INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT
TRANSCRIPT:
Total Picture Radio's coverage of the 9th Annual ERE Expo 2009 Spring Conference is brought to you in part by HR Marketer.
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This is Peter Clayton, welcome to an inside recruiting addition of Total Picture Radio. We are at the ERE Expo and Conference in San Diego, California and with me is Charee Klimek. She is the chief marketing officer for Job Angels.
Charee, welcome to Total Picture Radio.
Charee: Thank you so much for having me. Glad to be here.
Peter: I follow Job Angels on Twitter, so I know somewhat of what your organization is about, but it was very interesting hearing your presentation here at ERE today and I'd really appreciate it if you would kind of repeat some of the back story.
Charee: Absolutely. Job Angels began on the morning of January 29th when Mark Stelzner, who is an HR consultant out of Washington D.C. and principal for Inflexion Advisors, who was at the time helping another individual find employment, decided that morning to share and send out a call to action to his network, which was about 650 to 700 individuals. The tweet literally said, was thinking last night, wouldn't it be great if each one of us helped just one other person find a job, we could start making a dent in unemployment; are you game? I was sitting at breakfast as well and I saw the tweet along with many, many others who jumped in to say what a fantastic idea.
The idea then within an hour, a hashtag for Job Angels on Twitter was created so that people could begin to search and follow the conversation. Mark created a profile on the page and by the end of the day, we had between 200-300 followers. We jumped on the phone together, realized that this is something that people really need right now and it's obvious it's going to be viral, and it's going to go viral very quickly.
From that day forward, we have been structuring ourselves as an actual nonprofit organization so we have applied and are waiting for the 501(c)(3) status to be approved and for us to become a real organization. We are made up of all volunteers. We have a six member leadership volunteer team. Each one of us bringing different skill sets to the table but our goal is to create a community, both on and offline, where volunteers or "angels" can work with job seekers in any way, shape or form that they can and help them find a job. The simplicity of the mission is that it's all about just one person helping one other person and through that, we can make an impact on unemployment.
Peter: Charee, what is your background, how did you get involved with Job Angels?
Charee: My background is actually employer branding, and when Job Angels started to take flight that first week, I realized that if it was going to be something that was truly real, we needed to have a strong brand behind Job Angels. That weekend, I think I was up until 3 in the morning building our mission, vision, values as best I possibly could from something that was literally being created or coming to life as we were speaking and help to draft the creative brief and develop the value propositions for both the job seekers and the angels or volunteers involved and really from that, help create our identity, which is our logo is part of that.
My employment branding background I think plays into this because I also have a recruitment marketing/recruitment communications background, have been working on the agency side with recruiters and HR professionals for so long, I understand what it's like from the agency side, and Mark and his partners certainly understand what it's like to work on the other side, from the recruiting standpoint.
Peter: One of the reasons I think that this has been so successful and why I think so many people have embraced what you're doing, is there's no ulterior motive here, there's no big corporation in the background that is conspiring to get a lot of publicity out of this thing. It was really community based, it was really based on the need that exists out there.
Charee: Exactly and I couldn't have said it better. There is no motive at all, we are all volunteering hundreds of hours to this effort and the community in and of itself, is making this work. We're providing platforms to bring people together and it's the people that are part of the community that are embracing it and talking to one another and reaching out to others to say, I can help or someone will send a message asking for help. Right now, that's the best that we can do, I guess I could say, until our online community is up and running and we're able to match volunteers to job seekers in a much better way through technology and different matching platforms, but we're also looking to take it offline and localize and have Job Angels meet ups or provide Job Angels in a box-type possibilities and opportunities for people to get together locally and network one on one or with larger groups and intimate groups.
Peter: What I consider to be an amazing part of this story is Twitter and how powerful Twitter has become as a social medium for being able to really bring a huge and a diverse group of people together for a common cause.
Charee: Exactly. Twitter is, and continues to be, our absolute best platform. The fundamentals of Twitter and the fundamentals of social networking in and of themselves, it's all about bringing people together. So Twitter was a natural when Mark sent out that message just to get a message to his network that so many people responded to that and that message was tweeted and re-tweeted and forwarded, and the idea really took shape throughout the power of social networking. So bringing that over to LinkedIn, bringing that over to Facebook, the media attention has drawn people that have never been part of Twitter before, joined Twitter for the first time, follow us and we're getting questions about how do I use Twitter? I've joined, now what do I do? So we're finding that we're giving some Twitter one on one in the meantime.
But I hope that companies, especially in the recruiting industry, see the power of the people connections, the authenticity, the openness of these environments and that there are real people behind these profiles and with real lives and real needs that need to be met. Job Angels is one of the ways that we can help to fulfill through a good cause, finding people work.
Peter: What are the goals for the organization over the next few months? You mentioned that you've submitted the application to become a 501(c)(3) and that you're building your own platform. What are some of the things that you're looking to accomplish?
Charee: First and foremost, obviously the 501(c)(3) status and actually formulating our company, and we're beginning to organize that as we speak. The online community is critical, obviously taking that offline, is just as important to us as well.
The goals are I think, (1) we want to see more people placed into positions. We're thrilled to have success stories that are both small. Leslie, who we presented today, was a huge success for Job Angels.
I think ultimately, we'd like to bring in employers into the mix, offer various sponsorship opportunities, fund the organization is a real big goal and a big challenge for us so that we can actually keep it up and running.
Peter: Step number one is to get this 501(c)(3) status so that you can be a legitimate organization and you can accept donations and you can start doing fundraising and thing like that.
Charee: Exactly and then we can also opportunities to companies that want to have Job Angels as part of perhaps their social responsibility aspect. I mean, it aligns very much with the goals of many organizations who are doing good will efforts and all of these other areas but why not also do good will for job seekers and the Job Angels community. Today's example was perfect. So many recruiters and HR professionals are in the room, so this is the ideal audience to literally spread the word and reach out and do what they do best and help one another.
Peter: In addition to yourself and Mark, who is involved with Job Angels?
Charee: We have a fantastic team and I'm glad that you asked.
Mark is our founder and he's our head angel, if you will. I'm the chief marketing officer and I also wear the chief operational officer hat as well.
Deirdre Honner, who is an HR associate director of recruiting for a college in Michigan, she's our chief connection officer, so very responsible for connecting people in the content that we deliver to our population.
Mark Cummuta is our chief information officer, who's helping with the development of our community online.
Chris Bailey, who is our chief community manager out of Austin, and he is going to be managing the online communities behind the scenes and helping to build up that effort.
We also have a new business developer that we brought on, Chris Connolly, who's also based out of Washington D.C.
We have all of these individuals, including myself, who are partnering. We have a weekly phone call, we have goals and objectives that we try to meet on a weekly basis and again, we're all volunteering and dedicated to moving this thing forward.
Peter: That's really fantastic. So you had mentioned Leslie, tell us Leslie's story.
Charee: Leslie's story is basically, Deirdre Honner had contact with Leslie, and Deirdre had helped her to open up her connections and help her to work on her resume and get that in order and ultimately, that landed her her position.
Peter: That's great. Are you looking for volunteers at this particular time and if so, what skill sets are you trying to attract?
Charee: Since we're formalizing our organization, we are looking for volunteers to help with our Twitter communities, our LinkedIn communities or our group and our Facebook group, so that we can maintain the high touch, caring, communicative responsiveness that we've been upholding on those platforms as we move our goals to bigger and better things. So we are looking for volunteers to help in that aspect. The call for volunteers to help job seekers is enormous, just can't put enough emphasis on that and they can help in any way, shape or form that they can. Like I talked about today, it can literally be just lending an ear. If they happen to be in recruiting and have resume background information or how to prep for an interview or offer coaching skills – a number of things. Basically every little bit of help matters to the job seeker.
To my point earlier, just being on the phone with someone and helping them to, giving them some positive advice or some motivation or just simply lifting their spirits, can really be all that they need to go to that next level. There are so many people that are in this job market right now for the first time in 20 years and they don't know social media, they don't know how to write that resume, they don't know what steps to take or where to start and I think that's part of what we can offer in terms of our volunteers that are experts in certain areas.
Peter: For those who would be interested in volunteering for your organization to help out job seekers, what's the best way to get in contact with you?
Charee: They can contact me directly, they can contact us through Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, or they can send me an email, which is charee.klimek AT Job Angels DOT org and I'd be happy to help them.
Peter: One other thing that I found fascinating with what you have started this grassroots effort, is you've been able to attract mainstream media, CNN, all of the networks in publicizing what you're up to; how were you able to do that?
Charee: I think that the mainstream media has been so flooded with negative news, with layoffs, with the economic derailment, with just so much negative information that when people started talking about Job Angels, it's such a feel good story that, wait a minute, as individuals we can do something about this. There are jobs out there.
What we have to do is step up and take action and actually do something. I think that the media really just latched onto that because it was (#1), Twitter was involved, I'll say that for sure, Twitter is very popular now among celebrities and it's all the rage and the media right now. So I think that that was a big attention grabber for the media. But I think truly the fundamentals of what we're doing and what we're trying to accomplish and bringing people together to help one another is a good story for a change rather than talking about so many being laid off, we're talking about getting people back to work.
Peter: Well, I think it is an excellent story, and I really appreciate the work that you and the other members of Job Angels are doing. It's so needed and I know it's so appreciated by people out there.
Charee: The world needs Job Angels and lots more of them.
Peter: Is there anything I didn't ask you that you think would be important for the listeners of this show to know about Job Angels and your mission and what you're doing?
Charee: I think the one thing to keep in mind is that all it takes is helping just one person and that our mission is just so simple and literally to reach out to a friend or family member or past coworker or colleague and say, hey, I know you've been affected, what can I do to help? All you have to do is ask what can I do to help.
Peter: Great. Charee, thank you so much for taking time to speak with us on Total Picture Radio.
Charee: Thank you for having us.
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 Charee Klimek on stage at ERE Expo Charee Klimek Biography
Source: Linkedin
Utilizing 16 years experience in employer branding, employee communications, and recruitment marketing, I partner with small and medium sized businesses to help them research, articulate and communicate their employer brand from the inside out. My vision is to enable companies to sustain and grow by leveraging the power that exists in the voices of their greatest asset'their people.
Throughout my career I have consulted with premier organizations including UnitedHealth Group, sanofi-aventis, T-Mobile, CB Richard Ellis, 3Com, Wyeth Pharmaceuticals, Hospira, Motorola, Discover Financial Services and many others. I take great pride in doing what's best for my clients in order to achieve the greatest return on their strategic investments.
My belief is that success is based on respect for people, integrity, teamwork, dedication and a long-term commitment to shared goals and objectives.
Charee Klimek's Specialties:
' Employer Brand Research, Development
' Internal and External Communication Strategy
' Brand Asset Management
' Client Relationship Management
' Project and Vendor Management
Resources:
JobAngels.org
HR Maven
Mark Stelzner's company blog
Chris Bailey's blog
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