Interviews about Facebook and UX recruitment

I’ve featured in a couple of interviews published over the last few days.

“The Guardian thrives in Facebook’s walled garden” - Josh Sternberg

Josh Sternberg of Digiday got in touch to ask me a few questions about the Guardian’s Facebook app. The result is “The Guardian thrives in Facebook’s walled garden.”

“Belam subscribes to the ‘fish where the fish are’ theory when it comes to building within the Facebook environs rather than attempting only to lure Facebookers to The Guardian’s site.”

I fumbled the stats though when quoting Ken Doctor’s “Newsonomics of f8”. He actually said:

“You work with Facebook because that’s where the audience is. In the U.S., Facebook claims as much as seven hours of average monthly usage; globally, that number is four hours plus...The comparative average monthly usage of news sites runs five to 20 minutes per month.”

“How To Recruit A UX Designer” - Matthew Ogston

Smashing Magazine have featured some quotes from me in a piece by Matthew Ogston entitled “How To Recruit A UX Designer”.

I talk about Mags Hanley, Lorna Leddon and Karen Loasby being role models for me having interviewed alongside them, my favourite question to ask, and how I expect candidates to have a highly visible web presence. Other people giving their views include Kara Pernice of Nielsen Norman Group, Peter Merholz of Adaptive Path and Tom Wood from Foolproof.

Annie Drynan pointed out on Twitter that she hoped I had been misquoted, and had actually said “less experienced” rather than “younger” at one point. My chief defence for careless ageism is that at my age, I very seldom meet anybody doing this - experienced or inexperienced - older than me.

I’m not recruiting for UX people at the moment, but the Guardian is looking to expand our digital department with roles for developers, technical architects and the websys team. You can view the roles here, and find out a bit more about what we look for in software developers in this blog post.