Well, well, well. What do we have here? Recruiting.com 2.0, eh?
Having a strong sense that recruiting bloggers are unwittingly making Jason Goldberg and Jason Davis fabulously rich simply by thinking about their blogs, I shall start to suppress conscious thought and coherent writing on mine. I have no problem with Jasons Goldberg and Davis becoming fat-wallet media tycoons – I aspire to being one myself – but, if I am going to work hard to create original content, they are going to have to work just as hard to understand it, capitalize on it. Oh, I know, the favors of communal love are reciprocated if I want to attract more readers and/or monetize my driveling blog. But I don’t. It seems the more I want the privacy of my very own weblog the more people want to see what I’m up to. I think it must be the Recruitomatic-Lavatory- Webcam syndrome. For some reason there are people – but not you of course – who want to observe me struggle with a thing, like making sense of what this new-fangled Recruiting.com is really all about. How odd.
The unfortunate part of this struggling with issues – words as art not currency; content for reading and analysis not syndication, incorporation, blending and bludgeoning to death; struggling with correspondents parroting each other instead of posting original work, fact blurred with fiction; individual voices versus corporate mash-up; the issue here – is that you, my reader, will no longer be able to make any sense of what I’m writing. I’m terribly sorry. Really, I am.
But, I see it now: as part of my survival strategy for autonomous thought, my writing will change into a random cut-up, a montage of repurposed content, rehashed thinking, rumination of original rubbish. Meaningless words will take on momentary meaning –“diggolicious,” “jasonotize,” “contentragious,” “popsidasical,” “blogrollable,” “ballotable” – and yet, the words will mean nothing in reality. My posts will celebrate nihilistic gobbledygook, Dada-blah-blah. So, there you have it. You might as well switch off now. Gorge on the live feeds, nothing here but a snake charming sideshow. Oh, dear. What’s happening? Has it started already? Bloated with tautological pleonasms and constipated with word-play, squeezing out another contentragious post for my buddies Mssrs. Goldberg, Davis, Reed and Elsevier, and you – my victimized reader! Going, going, going…
Plop! Gone are the days of Jason Davis’s blog, gone forever.
My first experience of Recruiting.com was not as a blog as such. I had just discovered NewsGator as part of an earlier – and ongoing – wrestling with how RSS and all that stuff was going to enhance my ability to communicate with an undiscerning audience who I anticipate will abandon their inboxes one day soon, or maybe not, who really knows. As I look back on it, it’s ironic that I should have bought the Outlook plug-in where eventually the steady stream of posts got ignored like spam.
Anyway, in my search for feeds I typed in “recruiting” and Recruiting.com came up so I subscribed. The Canadian Headhunter – who has since left the building, but continues to throw pebbles at the window as if to catch the attention of his Juliet – was particularly confusing to me, Pythonesque, obnoxious, foreign. Jason Davis was, well, ordinary, but he was the glue, so it seemed to me. Personable too. Anthony Meaney, the correspondent blogger, confused the hell out of me. Hard to tell who is who with the Canadians. What with one thing and another, I hardly paid attention to Recruiting.com and the coming and goings. As a casual bystander – as the majority are now – I was disengaged and uninspired by a medium too hard to manage, comprehend and digest. Electronic Recruiters News and Electronic Recruiters Exchange were easier for me to follow. Morning fare, mature content and bookmarked on my browser.
In November, I think, 2005 for sure, I saw that Recruiting.com was having a best of the blogs contest. I was being invited to cast a vote, enfranchised at last. “Hold on.” I thought, “Isn’t this new-age democratization a mash-up of augmented social networking and good ol’ black-flag ideology?” As I began to look more closely, and now with a critical eye, I realized Recruiting.com was the hub of a vibrant community of people – recruiting bloggers blogging about the stuff recruiting bloggers blog about – honestly, much as I am doing now. [Insert cutesy winking smiley emoticon here, make this post more ballotable on the new Recruiting.com, wink-wink.] I found myself rather intrigued, glued to the keyhole. Who was going to win? Who should I vote for? Should I vote at all? Well, at least I was thinking now, asking questions, aroused.
Crank the handle, fast forward, and here we are today. I still find myself more interested in the society of bloggers than in the content – with some blogrollable exceptions, naturally – musing again about voting, participation, community and what citizen-centric blogging means. This leads me to wonder, for example:
1. If so many people voted for my submission on Recruiting.com – Jason Davis made me do it, I swear – how is that that didn’t translate into page views on my blog? What are people voting for – the content, the submission or the blogger? Or, are we just flipping the bird at one another, collectively empowered, so to speak.
2. Aren’t the comments left on a post the most authentic type of endorsement or rejection, a real vote of participation? I notice that some people have started to comment on the Recruiting.com article submissions and not on the actual work referenced. So, is Recruiting.com going to suck the comments out of our posts too? Is this another form of unbridled blog post jasonotization? Oh, well. We shall find a way to buck the system too. That’s part of the fun isn’t it, sticking it to the man?
3. If Recruiting.com is so web 2.0 now, where are the tags? Digg it? Friggit! Tag it, daggit! And no tag clouds, what’s that? No matter. All this content, layered on layers of layered mish-mash will compress over time to form the bedrock of Recruiting.com 3.0 and the semantic web along with super-relevancy search engines, Jobster mindshare and more popsidasical invention from minds that can only imagine job search at the speed of light. By the time Jobster has finished with the Recruitosphere it will be nothing more than an obscure Wikipedia entry. Blog posts will be auto generated. We will all be born, already retired. And all from such humble beginnings.
On Recruiting.com’s cosmetic surgery I am going to resist the temptation of poking and proding. The bandages are hardly off and we need some time for healing. Not all facelifts are simple procedures, are they? These things take time to get comfortable with as do realigned teeth and accentuated cheek bones and cookies and code and favelets and registering and posting and commenting and making mint tea to sip through a straw while possibly reading something from beginning to end! So, please, let’s not jump to any farfetched conclusions here about the new Recruiting.com or what it might end up looking like. Only time will tell.
As to the entrepreneurial scheming and plotting in Jobster’s camp, I have to wonder what is behind this “strategic” move with Recruiting.com, and why now. What’s Jason Goldberg up to? With $50 million in the bank he could have bought Digg if he was so inclined and added value to Jobster’s five hundred or so subscribers by expanding the universe of passive candidates with one stroke of the pen and six degrees of separation. I know, I know. Not all capital-injected new media/social networking ventures should be tarred with the same brush as Rupert Murdoch’s acquisition of MySpace and Jason Goldberg seems altogether too nice for that kind of thing. After all, the man worked for the first Black U.S. President so he must be on the up-and-up, wouldn’t you say? And Reed Elsevier, they’re nice people, I’m sure, not at all like the spammy NewsCorp riffraff. So, this whole Recruiting.com 2.0 thing must be an altruistic move designed to promote humanity and democracy among the countless potential Recruiting.com readers. What was I thinking? That the enhancements were made for a couple of thousand googling job-seekers and still fewer recruiting bloggers? I must be mad.
For sure, I cannot begin to understand it all but I know that I am witnessing something marvelously entertaining, drawn into the action like some wretched fellow who only wanted to observe that to which he is now committed to participate in. It seems to me, that Recruiting.com is turning into a mutoscope of sorts where we can flick through the article submissions and posts and feeds adding more and more content as we go, somehow making the Jobster machine tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, ourselves being drawn in – one coin, one post at a time. And yet, somewhere along the way, I have nagging doubts. Who is watching who? Am I really alone? Where did you come from?
Amitai
We all seem to have become virtual voyeurs courtesy of readers, viewers, customised homepages etc etc. Am I not the most voyeuristic today by being the first to comment on this post?! Or are we kindred spirits being exploited by the aggregators of this web?
What if we blocked Recruiting Fly, Recruiting.com and instead said ‘Only those with real eyes and ears may venture forth onto our blog’, but how would we really feel if nobody came? Why do we blog? Is it real or not? We can already see how blogs can be used to fill more space on search engine results so your site comes up when your target is searched for. But some blogs tell you something, some leave crumbs of spam and cookie, trying to follow you across the web so they know, well, whatever they think they want to know.
But, we all get dragged into myspace, blogspace, adspace …. and whatever. We cannot help but be enticed and whilst we are, the big boys make money. But isn’t this long tail thing going to change all that? Are we not all going to revolt, refuse to pay our blog taxes, block the spiders, keep the ball, you can’t come to my party unless I invite you, no more gatecrashers…. but then it all starts again…….
Keep on keepin’ on….who knows what it all means but at least we get a place to vent our angst at the issues that face us! :>) (low tech smiley thing)
Hey Ami, I would love to see a post written in a way I can understand.
Peter - I wouldn’t feel exploited in the slightest bit if I could work out how to leverage my position on the field. I know Jobster didn’t invent the game, nor have they made up the rules, but they have the ball. As for the blog as a destination in of itself, that I think is less important than the message being conveyed, delivered effectively, with a manageable noise to signal ratio. I could post directly on Recruiting.com as a contributing blogger - provided I did not have to tone down my lavatorial references, of course. And even then, it might be worth the compromise, right? There’s a time and a place for everything. Whatever, half the fun is working all this out. Where would we would we be if we just blogged without playing the game, playing to win?
Jason - simply put, if I can’t understand shit about what the implications are for this blogger with the new Recruiting.com strategy/platform I would hope you’d work as hard to read my thoughts trying to work it out as I am prepared to do in reading yours/Jobster’s strategic thinking. Don’t think of it as a post, Jason - it’s a love poem really.
Amitai
Jason, sometimes I feel the same but back we come!
Hey Amitai,
I like Poetry and that is why I like you. I have monitored some sites and I have seen is that a few of the posts that have gotten a number of votes seem to be getting more traffic than usual from Recruiting.com.
I suggest if you write something and you want the Recruiting.com visitors to see it, submit it to Recruiting.com. We will be hooking a blog tools section up shortly to make it quite easy to submit content.
I think the implications are based on what you want and expect from blogging.
Hey Jason,
If you don’t think the post is good enough to submit on Recruiting.com yourself, who am I to do it? ;0) I thought the point of article submission was “diversity of opinion” and “independence of members from one another” and peer/social validation. What am I missing?
As it happens, my page views are down a bit today but not by that much. It could be the weather. Certainly nothing unusual. I do want to see what happens without the Recruiting.com lift so that I can compare what happens when this post is eventually referenced there. It’s an experiment right, I’m in no hurry. [Do you know the story about the young bull and the old bull and the herd of cows?] I am seeing fewer referrals from Recruiting.com but I suspect with your new diggolicious front-page and feed/blogroll configuration that was to be expected. Also, the total potential Recruitosphere audience hasn’t expanded or contracted so any variance in traffic is probably as much to do with “things settling down” as with anything else. Don’t you think? And of course, not all my visitors are coming from Recruiting.com, far from it.
The site looks great and satisfies a lot of needs for blog-browsing. But I still have unanswered questions about what it’s all about and how to best take advantage. Like I said, one has to understand how something works before you can make it work for you. I also think community should come before self although I will post my own stuff on Recruiting.com if that becomes the modus operandi. I just think that somehow negates the spirit of the thing. Naive? Perhaps, but so what? Not too jaded to be an idealist, not too stupid to be pragmatic. I have time to play. It’s just good fun. No rush. Tomorrow’s another day, another post.
Amitai
I miss the pictures.
“I’m a simple girl myself
Grew up on Long Island…”
~ Alan Jackson, “Gone Country”
Maureen Sharib
Telephone Names Sourcer
513 899 9628
Yes, Maureen, most voyuers would…
Jason, to my point above “I also think community should come before self although I will post my own stuff on Recruiting.com if that becomes the modus operandi.” The Recruiting Animal comments with his post: Who Runs Recruiting.com?
And the answer is: ‘No son, don’t run, let’s walk and shag em all’. Maybe the rest of the story is needed, maybe with enough money you can run and do them all at the same time?
Amitai, a fantastic analysis, why you remain one of my favourite Recruiting bloggers!
Wow, Michael! Sincerely, I am very flattered. Thank you.