Despite this being possibly one of the most coveted domain names in the industry, like one of the corpses laid to rest in a Varanasi gutter, Recruiting.com has become one of those things stepped over by most everyone.

Long forgotten for its contributions to humanity, the drama of blogging CEOs, the experimentation with formats, threats of lawsuits, Canadian headhunters, and assorted industry louts, Recruiting.com has been reduced to a shell with no soul.

But what’s this…did it move? My God! It moved!

Well, I’m not sure how I missed this but it appears that Recruiting.com is alive and well after all, useful even. Rising from the ashes of disaster Recruiting.com is now a resume-search-powered-by-Google-meta-engine-thingie with some interesting features, as described by Ryan Leary in this most instructive post, Free #Recruiting and #sourcing tool from Recruiting.com.

Of course, it would be easy to overlook the divine hand of Google in all of this, powering the search results for Recruiting.com as it does. Easy to overlook indeed.

1. U.K. blogger Katharine Robinson [aka The Sourceress] posts Performing Sourcery at The Recruiting Unconference. Hmmm…Nothwithstanding timezones, recruiting unconferences are so yesterday, don’t you know: Jeff Hunter’s Talent Unconference [2007]; John Sumser’s Recruiting Roadshow [2008]; Jason Davis’s RecruitFest [2008/09]; Susan Burns’ Talent Camp [2009] and some I’ve missed, I’m sure. Now, Bill Boorman’s The Recruitment Unconference taking place in London on 19th November…a sign of the times, no doubt.




2. In Feel Sorry for the Recruiter… Lisa Kaye laments that recruiters “worry if they will wind up on the other side of the desk, interviewing for jobs that well frankly are no longer in high demand.” Look on the bright side: if they ever make it back into recruiting they’ll have a better grasp of what “candidate experience” really means. That should make them better recruiters, don’t you think? [Counterpoint: My Future in Recruiting]




3. In his post It’s all about the message Michael Specht rightly notes: “…that clearly communicating the employment deal up front is a critical first step in having an engaged employee,” going on to say, “Employees who blog openly and honestly will allow prospective employees to see what it is really like in your workplace.”I guess shooting the messenger is out of the question then, eh, Michael?

Change happens in front of our very eyes but we often miss it. In so doing we miss out on developing a level of appreciation of things that should come as part of the pay-off. Somewhere in the over abundance of social media, participation, micro-blogging and chat we’re short-changing ourselves. It’s not sustainable.

John Sumser’s Digging into RecruitingBlogs.com post today was remarkable. Not so much for the content, but for its timing.

The significance of turning the page to open a new chapter [v 2.0] would not be lost on anyone who has been reading John’s recruiting annals for as long as some of us have. In his chronicling of Recruitopia particularly, John was articulating what RecruitingBlogs.com could become long before we had considered today’s nuisance in getting our email synced.

I was reflecting today that 2008 was the first in a few years that Jason Davis wasn’t hosting a Best Recruiting Blog Awards. It seemed to me as if in the raising of this barn, such things didn’t matter anymore. And perhaps they really don’t.

Happy Friday, Bloggers.

Kick it…The intrinsic value of Recruiting.com beyond it’s earlier googliciouness and rambunctiousness has been reworked by the Recruitosphere’s alchemist Jason Davis. The transfiguration of Recruiting.com in RecruitingBlogs.com has been more than a reinvention. With less emphasis on the blogging bit and dollops of slobber about “community,” Jason Davis has enhanced his reputation for being the guy in the right place at the right time. If nothing else, the passing of Recruiting.com and ascension of RecruitingBlogs.com, — Jason’s hand in both — reminds me that there is indeed a time and place for everything.

…see if moves! No doubt for some, Recruiting.com will continue to serve a purpose. One imagines that when Steven Rothberg, Andy Headworth,  Jason Buss and other longstanding posters stop submitting their articles we might observe the stillness of the corpse, and the decomposition can begin. While revolting to thinkabout blueflies and maggots doing their thing, without their feasting we could never get beyond the off-topic stink. Who knows, I might continue to post my occasional musings on Recruiting.com too, just to appease the SEO gods. On the other hand, continuing to share the love with a stiff Recruiting.com, well, that would be sick — wouldn’t it? Yeah, probably — sacrilegious too.

Nah, its a goner. Oh well, in blogging as in life I guess, all things must come to an end. Otherwise we would never know that it is time to begin again, would we?

At this point I have to ask: “Who cares?” John’s throw-away remark at the end of the Recruiting Animals’ Morning After Show referencing his exit suggests he may feel the same way. Who knows? For sure, for those who look within the Recruitosphere’s publishing clique for amusement it will be amusing in the coming weeks, no doubt.

To my own pathethic contribution…hmmm. Recruiting.com has been an interesting place for me to experiment with a number of ideas some of which fizzled out, some of which sputtered along and some of which remain open-ended.

Moving forward, I shall simply plug my Bunsen into the new mixture of gas and hot air on RecruitingBlogs.com, the combustible bloggy-ning thing where I now spend my early mornings. Like you perhaps?

Ah, Recruitopia…doesn’t it just make you sick?

Amitai offers a different take, predicting that early adopters of social media for recruiting will remain in the minority. Too few frontline recruiters will risk the perils of transparency in corporate environments that need to mitigate risk and innovation and apply bottom-line metrics instead. As the economics of recruiting come under closer scrutiny with a softening economy and an inability to quantify the ROI on social media, there will be a slowdown in the rate of adoption by recruiters.

As the competition in the Web 2.0 market intensifies Ami foresees a proliferation of new applications, platforms, widgets and whiz-bang technology along with increasing usability issues in existing social networks. What was once fun will turn into drudgery with multiple logins and communities of “friends” to manage — detracting from core recruiting activities.

Against this backdrop, Ami predicts a general backlash among the industry’s early adopters. They will increasingly default to using proven resources like online sourcing, direct recruiting and building their personal networks.

For the rest, the gap between those who “get it” and those who “don’t even know” will widen. The real opportunity that Ami sees for established vendors and service providers lies in helping close the gap as the front runners start to slow down and the early majority catches up.

And to be included with such luminaries as Gerry Crispin, Lou Adler, Jason Davis and Shally Steckerl! Mother would be pleased.

I like an industry that is defined by some really great class A players

Outgoing Chief Jobster Jason Goldberg on the same subject:

Crap product!

In the final analysis, money talks.

Hat tip:  Jason Davis, RecruitingBlogs.com

How ironic. In an attempt to free me from the walled gardens of the Web 1.0 internet I find that I am now trapped in the particulars of my online ID, technographic profile, group identity and now with projectstars, my “net worth” too.

projectstars claims to be an online business community for enterprise professionals. I don’t want to appear to be dim-witted but what is an enterprise professional exactly and do they/we really need another business community? And if the site’s purpose is indeed to “share expertise, build relationships, and find projects” one wonders if there have been problems with existing networks liked LinkedIn.

As to the boast that the projectstars network consists of over 300 communities covering enterprise departments, topics and issues, a casual glance suggests that that claim is in anticipation of what the network could possibly become rather than reflecting what it is today.

To projectstars’ admirable dedication to improving the careers of corporate professionals that begs the question: “Aren’t we all?” They say:

Professionals on projectstars have the opportunity to get their expertise discovered and propel their career forward. By participating in the community, their knowledge and experience is noticed by recruiters, executives, and business partners…

And goes on:

…With over 300 communities, projectstars is the most comprehensive network of business topics. If you are looking for advice on enterprise products and services, you have an entire community willing to help you.

Well, I hope so, that would be nice.

One thing did catch my attention and as being an interesting spin. Promoting a “blog for stock” teaser projectstars promises that every quarter they’ll reward the top contributors with shares in the company suggesting that those who participate in the community own it. While that might present some challenges down the road if the product is ever worth something for now it sure sounds like the stuff a network economy is made of, doesn’t it?

Of course — and ahead of his time perhaps — the maverick Michael Kelemen had the exact same deal when he invited a few of us to participate on RecruitingBloggers.com, survived now by the real stalwarts who keep the lights on. With Jason Davis perfecting his alternate model of “community” on RecruitingBlogs.com I imagine if the two approaches could be reconciled — blended in the way projectstars seems to want to — then the Recruitosphere might have a center of gravity as was the case when the two Canadians collaborated in bringing RecruitingBlogs.com to fore.

So, setting aside projectstars’ “oh-we’re-in-beta-so-everything-is-impossibly-clunky-and-slow” mode — freezing up my machine with every other click — I would like to think that there might be something here worth coming back for.

For all its primitive ugliness I think there is an underlying sophistication to the projectstars’ model that is being missed in the recruiting space. More, having just noticed that members can login using OpenID, it really can’t be all bad can it? I just have to find someone willing to invite me to join.

Hmmm…I shall have to check my own network and see who I can get to usher me in,

Well, it is rather late and I really should be tucking the children into bed and making cocoa for my long-suffering missus. But I have the notion that I can dash off a quick post, by way of an update on my Recruiting.com-in-transition thingie. I did promise I would be home before whatever-o’clock and I still have a minute or two, don’t I?

9:48pm: Recruiting.com

Parts three, four, five, six, seven and eight and nine and ten of my hypothesis on the future of Recruiting.com will not be published after all. Although it has subsided now, I’m afraid two or three weeks ago when I started the communal histrionics surrounding the outgoing Jason Davis and incoming John Sumser combined with my running out of emotional pocket-change left me uninspired, counting pennies.

I will say, having spoken at length to the now-gone and now-here bloggers-laureate I am convinced that my theories about Jason Goldberg’s strategic positioning of Recruiting.com as some kind of money-making proposition to rival David Manaster’s ERE (formerly Electronic Recruiters’ Exchange) may have exaggerated:

a) Jason Goldberg’s commercial interest in the so-called “Recruiting Community Portal” and in providing value-added content (read: profitable) to the market;

b) His tolerance for an unwise crowd of yahoos – or a vocal minority depending on the generosity of your point of view — enfranchising one minute and disenfranchised the next; and

c) Any interest in making good on his “endowment” to what must seem to him now to be a bunch of ungrateful link-gluttons, myself included.

I also think in comparing the two I might have unwittingly understated David Manaster’s ability to quietly get on with his affairs without drawing the ire of a whole genre. Certainly there is more to contrast Jason Goldberg and David Manaster. I wonder how the two men really view each other as movers-and-shakers, authentic and transparent. Much in the same way as a mirror reflects the reverse image to the observer I suspect a close scrutiny in the looking glass would leave David Manaster the only one of the pair able to distinguish the realities of online publishing and community from delusions of grandeur.

So there you have it, broken promise, number one. Or, is it two?

9:54pm: “Emailsification”

There has been some talk about the Recruiting.com community being portable. Hmmm, I don’t get it. What I am getting is so many requests to be someone or others’ friend on Jason Davis’ latest blogescapade — RecruitingBlogs.com — that new invites are getting junked in my mail folder. How ironic. My initial interest in social media came from the idea that email “spamming” and blogging mixed like oil and water, one being the antithesis of the other. Rather like screaming “Roll-up! Roll-up!” at an audience doesn’t quite jive with whispering a confidence to a “friend,” does it?

I guess finding a way to mix oil and water would be some kind of alchemy, would it not?

10:03pm: A contemplative moment

Oh, I get it! Sweet epiphany! I better start inviting everyone I know – and don’t know of course – to be my friend on RecruitingBlogs.com too. It will be like a boyhood adventure, playing childish games, Chinese Whispers, better still! Yes, I see it now. Reinventing the Recruitosphere, how marvelous! I wonder if Jason Davis will remember our dinner in Grand Central Station when we ourselves whispered in the others’ ear about such things. Who could have known that from a dinner of oysters one could find such pearls!

1:07am: Cold cocoa

I can hear it now, “Amitai, the children expect you to keep your promises and so do I. All this blogging — staying in the office until who-knows-when — is fine and dandy but don’t you think you could have sent us an email at least?

Daggit! I’ll send her flowers instead.