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.

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?

While Jobster still has employees on the payroll it would serve their brand — not to mention Recruitopians and the community at large – if someone took a moment to monitor who is submitting what on Recruiting.com. Today, Filipino Hot Babes, tomorrow what – incest, donkey-love?

Anyone who has a blog knows that there is some horrible stuff that seaps through the sewage pipes. Suppressing the spammers is a tiresome job but it comes with the territory. Sure, it starts with something innocuous but quickly spirals down from exotic teapots to erotic sex-pots, and from chai in Calcutta to tarts in Thailand.

Who is monitoring Recruiting.com’s content, Jobster’s brand?

For what it’s worth, my advice to the now faceless Recruiting.com suits: Keep it clean. Remember, no brand was served well by treating its audience with contempt any more than the cause of Web 2.0 and the values on which Jobster was supposedly built is served by turning over the space to new levels of wrecklessness.

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?

With the company’s likely implosion at hand, better to make hay while the sun shines, don’t ya fink?

But then again, hold on — I’m in stealth mode! Am I really ready to start drawing attention to myself?

And what about my beloved Recruiting.com, Jobster’s love-child? We don’t want to tick off the new sugar-daddy, do we?

I remember many years ago when subliminal advertising was being used for the first time, at least that we knew of, there was a hullabaloo about it in the U.K. when I was growing up. The concern was this Kremlin-inspired technique was nothing more than a cynical attempt to take over the minds of Coronation Street’s already gullible audience. Right, as if.

Around the same time there was a stink because James Bond [himself!] was kowtowing to big business buying into their latest subliminal ploy, product placement. James Bond as our poster boy for fast cars and hard liquor was consistent with the image of the cold-war lady-killer but pushing product? No, no — it was un-British.

I guess at some point someone should have pointed out that any form of advertising that works below our normal levels of consciousness runs the risk of being viewed by the unwitting as suspect. It hardly matters if the message comes and goes in the blink of an eye or is unobtrusive in other ways, the intent is the same — to influence the subject’s behavior whether they become aware of it or not. Outrageous, huh? The lengths we’ll go to…I mean, really!

Anyway, somewhere between the idea of being able to control feeble minds and getting blotto in the back of a Bentley I made the juvenile decision to enter into the glamorous world of advertising. It was either that or become an MI6 operative, working undercover.

Ahem…

Sharing stories about my life has little use without some context. I am neither famous or interesting nor ever likely to be the object of some biographer’s research. When it comes to documenting my unremarkable life, it is only natural then for me to assume that nobody cares very much about what I might be bloggin’ about, my underlying purpose. Well, other than Mother of course.

Intending my posts to be enough without having to click on a link to get the meaning of it all, if you do go there I hope to share something else that can only be achieved through the portal a link provides. At the very least, I hope if you do follow a link or two you might find a morsel you’ll enjoy enough to overlook my possible self-indulgence in putting it there in the first place, the weakest link.

Contrasting my possible overuse of links with a more deliberate tack, let’s consider their use on blogs where the business of blogging is business, the intended “reader” a machine, not you — the context commercial.

Whether it is linkbaiting, backlinking, backbiting or something else, the strategic use of links for [ultimately] driving traffic is a quite different from my humble sprinkling of breadcrumbs — yes, the Hansel and Gretel variety, Birdbrain! — should one link too many take us up the garden path, lost and unable to find our way back home.

Confused by the likes of Joel Cheesman and other SEO pundits, my pathetically clumsy efforts at improving my googliciousness fell short of expectations. And from there it was a downhill slide I can tell you! It wasn’t long before I all but abandoned my experiments — cross-posting, using keywords, driving my friends crackers, digesting and putzing around on Recruiting.com — realizing that one rarely gets to have their cake and eat it, whatever that nonsensical phrase means.

Instead my daily postings now serve some other purpose, or so I hope. But no, not now…that’s another post [-mortem?] for another time.

Prvious posts in the series:

• Google Juice
• Ripping Yarns
• Recursion Excursion
• The Man in the Know
• The Hungry Blogger

The Discovery Channel airs an interesting program called Man vs Wild. The star of the show is Bear Grylls, a real life Action Man who demonstrates techniques for surviving in the most inhospitable landscapes.

To accentuate the extreme nature of his adventures — and the diversity of what we eat on planet Earth perhaps — we are treated to the spectacle of watching iron-gut Grylls eat some particularly horrid things, or delicacies depending on your stomach.

Under normal circumstances, goats’ testicles or a wild boar’s fully loaded bowel [cooked of course] is hardly what a good TV dinner is made of. And, while it is fascinating to think you can make a brew from the water extracted from an elephant’s feces, one wonders how any kind of tea can taste good if it is not served in a china cup. I mean, really.

Along with the spectacle of watching Whitie chomping on gonads and piggie-poo we are introduced to a diverse sampling of endogenous people who eat that stuff like it were sushi-grade tuna loins. Remarkable in so many ways, these assorted nomads and savages forage and hunt everything imaginable – or unimaginable, again, depending on your point of view.

The significance of this is threefold:

• Watching our hero gagging on something entirely ghastly while the scrappy looking natives giggle with delight helps me reconcile the extremes of one man’s [extraordinary] struggle for survival and another man’s [commonplace] daily existence – a metaphor for life in the bubble?
• From the relatively simple activities of primitive Bushmen to our own supposedly sophisticated tribal affiliations online, the social way we share the burden and benefits of gathering, distributing and consuming food [read: information] are remarkably similar.
• There is no accounting for “good taste,” not even in the genteel world of recruiting blogs.

I never understood Optimal Foraging Theory which was first proposed in 1966 by Robert MacArthur and Eric Pianka, and may not even now. However, watching our host pick maggots out of a rotting carcass it might just boil down to this:

If the time and energy spent on tracking, stalking, chasing, killing and prepping a zebra is going to be greater than the calorific value of a single rump-steak dinner — factoring into the equation the risk of having your head kicked in on the hunt — one has to consider the alternative of a protein rich aboriginal picnic as not being so bad after all.

Certainly, a dinner of maggots and dung-flavored coffee is no more disgusting than what some in polite society would pay top-dollar for.

Bear Grylls and his assorted homies demonstrate that — like most animals — we humans have a foraging mechanism hardwired in our brains. Knowing how to grub out an existence is good for surviving as a species as well as in the cutthroat business of multichannel advertising, don’t you know. Hey, and knowing the best techniques for hunting and gathering never stopped a good salesman or a hardworking recruiter from making a living either!

On the show, traipsing over Africa for example, we see that the optimal diet model — describing how foragers make choices about which prey to go for, bucking zebra or wiggly maggots — and patch selection theory which describes the behavior of a forager whose prey is concentrated in areas where there is some commute involved, are easier to spot on Man vs Wild than to read about in scholarly tomes, even if you “cherry pick.”

Although watching our hero eat his food as he trips over it — or in the case of rotting flesh, sniffs out — makes for better television, we do see on occasion examples of the prey being carried back dutifully to the show’s toothless and potbellied extras. I guess that illustrates central place foraging theory, right?

Building on the basic premise of foraging theory PARC researchers, Messrs. Peter Pirolli and Stuart Card — prolific and terrific — stepped it up a notch with the publication of their paper, Information Foraging. The theories developed in this research and the work of their contemporaries has become central to Web design and usability best practice, optimization too.

In information foraging theory our academic heroes Pirolli and Card put their own spin on OFT describing how our primal hardwiring is manifest in our online behavior, proposing strategies for modern-day competitive advantage.

I guess if we spend more time searching for information online than we do on the hoof searching for food then describing ourselves as “informavores” is fair. And if we have migrated to the machine as a source of feeding why wouldn’t we default to the same types of instinctive behavior for getting our needs met here that we might otherwise exhibit in the wild? It makes sense to me.

But what are we getting ourselves into here, have I learned nothing?

Talk of information patches and information scents and information diet is just as dry as OFT blabber, not something I can relate to as easily as Bear Grylls and his ripping yarns.

No, no more. I just want to watch Whitie disembowel a camel, scoop out the poop, climb inside the carcass and adopt the fetal position as the elements outside make life impossible to endure anywhere else but in the belly of a beast. Now, that I can relate to!

The series so far:

• The Hungry Blogger
• The Man in the Know
• Recursion Excursion

Like most short posts a quick read can leave one happy that one’s brain has not been taxed too much — blah-blah-blah, click-click-click and move on. After all, its only blogging…junk food.

Sometimes — depending on your mood or interests perhaps — short posts can leave you hungry for more. Some posts may even show you were to find something chunkier, albeit on a self-serve basis. Whatever, empty calories — however delicious — will leave you malnourished if that’s all you digest.

Today, my present to you is the gift of choosing what you want to do with this little morsel. You can click-click-click and move on. If you like you can bookmark this page, bury it like a bone and dig it up later. Maybe you’ll enjoy the joke tucked away behind one of the links, even if it’s on you! You pick, it’s your post now.

The series so far…

• The Hungry Blogger
• The Man in the Know
• Recursion Excursion

Chew ‘em over again. I’m told my blogging is an acquired taste.

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.