Kevin Wheeler: the more things change, the more they stay the same

Since the video is in English, I’ll write this post in English as well. On the Global Recruitment Event I had the honor to talk to Kevin Wheeler for about 5 minutes on camera. The video you can watch here. He had some interesting remarks:

The more things change, the more they stay the same. It’s all about relationships, as it has always been. And we’ve never lost ’the path’, like I said. We just take a twisty path. If you try and go in a straight line, you won’t be succesfull. We need to make mistakes to learn, but we do need to learn from those mistakes.

As an international traveller he sees differences between parts of the world. It’s in part because of demografics, since the population of Europe en the US is much older then in for example Asia.

If you want to know where we are in 5 tot 10 years, you need to go to China or India and see what they are doing. Just reading about it doesn’t cut it. The trends are clear, but we do need to look at cultural differences as well. Sharing is much more common in these countries and they do not have such a work-private seperation. So you cannot ’translate’ what’s happening there to what’s going to happen here. But the main trends will stay the same.

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3 Comments
  • Michel Rijnders
    says:

    @Doron: it is like Bas says indeed about the perspective. In China the front-runners aren’t the companies in most cases but the new generation of employees. Most of them for example just wanna have a one click videochat about a job, where here we are still at the point (of no return) that we make solliciting via an online form easier and easier. In China you won’t get any reaction if you use a form.

    In that way I strongly believe that the problems that online recruitment in China is facing are the problems in our nearby future and that makes it important to look at China.

  • Bas van de Haterd
    says:

    @Doron: I guess it’s about perspective. According to Kevin (and I’m no party in this, never been to China), China is 5 years ahead of us. Not the masses, but the front runners. And to be honest, that’s what I hear about China in new media a lot. So I can’t imagine using new media in online recruitment is any different. Not for the big mass, but if you are talking about innovation, you need to look at the front runners. And because they skipped a few steps online, they started using different things earlier on.

  • Doron
    says:

    “If you want to know where we are in 5 tot 10 years, you need to go to China or India and see what they are doing.”

    China is around 10 years behind in terms of online recruitment so i don’t exactly understand what mr Wheeler is trying to say here.