Interview with a Blogger - Alastair Cartwright

Alastair is an online recruitment specialist.   He entereted the recruitment industry in 1998 as a Consultant with Price Jamieson and then two years later joined Workthing as a Business Development Manager.  Then in 2001 Alastair co-founded Enhance Media with Tim Elkington.  Alastair has worked with a number of start-up online recruitment businesses; identifying profitable revenue streams and helping to develop effective sales and marketing strategies.  Alastair is responsible for the Enhance Media blog (Tim has his own at http://timelkington.typepad.com/)

How long have you been blogging?
About a year…

Why did you start?
A range of reasons, including:
1. It seemed a good way to communicate with users of our site
2. It gives me an opportunity to talk about other industry related topics I am interested in
3. Blogging seemed to be a bandwagon worth jumping on
4. Our SEO expert told me to

What do you do, work related, when you aren't blogging?
I am responsible for developing the business commercially, identifying key clients and building successful long term business relationships.

I also get involved in training, speaking at conferences and generally droning on incessantly about online recruitment to anyone within earshot.

Do you think blogging has helped your business?
I think so. The blog on our site is written in a different style to the rest of the site. It’s less formal, more personal; hopefully we come across as being thinkers. We have also tried to get the right balance between posts blatantly selling our services and posts sharing information / expertise.

What do you feel is the biggest challenge about writing a blog?
I think anyone will tell you that the biggest challenge is finding the time and posting at least once a week. The top 10 series I did was great because I had something to post about every day for 2 weeks. I read a lot of articles, blogs and research pieces on the online recruitment industry, if you want to blog about a recent piece of news, you have to be quick, and there are a lot of other bloggers out there reading the same articles!

What's another blog that you read and why do you recommend it?
Well I couldn’t be on here and not plug Tim’s blog, which I think I would read even if I didn’t work with him.  I am also a big fan of Peter Gold’s blog, if only for the controversial debate it sparks!  Your blog is obviously in my top 4, it is a fantastic source of information (no honestly) and I admire the relentless consistency of your posts. Do you realize that in the 21 working days of November (so far) you have blogged 23 times!  I am starting to warm to the digitalrecruiting blog, it’s a great source of amusing and irreverent videos from Youtube

What do you want your reader's to know about you?
I am really approachable and don’t believe in the hard sell, so get in touch if you want to talk about online recruitment.

If you knew someone was thinking about starting a recruitment related blog, what advice would you want to give them?
Don’t do it unless you enjoy writing and you are passionate about recruitment.

Is there a question you wished I asked you?
What’s next for Enhance Media? We have a whole load of exciting developments going on…  We have just launched our annual conference, with some great speakers looking at what’s next for online recruitment in 2008.  Nearly 12,500 people have completed our www.howeru.com survey, so we will have some really interesting data on what people are doing online to share with everyone.