Amitai Givertz’s Recruitomatic Blog

Remember the Sabbath Day and keep it holy…

Google! Google! The end is nigh, the end is nigh! Prepare to meet thy Maker. Can I get an Amen, [Big] Brother?
Sat 31 Jan 10:25 via web

Hey, y’all. Do you get this when you run a Google search: “This site may harm your computer?” Or am I doomed…
Sat 31 Jan 10:28 via web

I can Google! I can Google! Yes, People, there is a God! Can I get another ‘Amen’ Brother? Halla-freakin’-lujah!
Sat 31 Jan 10:42 via web

Sorry, God. I couldn’t resist.

It seems the politicos at The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) have teamed up with JobTarget marketeers and are set to publish a 2009 Job Board Savings Book.

Apparently, you can use the coupons at over 1,000 niche, diversity and regional job boards that are slashing up to half the price on their job postings, all to help make the world go round. Think of it as cross between an economic stimulus package and a licked-to-go Green Shield Stamps program.

In times of economic collapse it is only natural that the industry’s leadership should bandy together and step up to the plate. Rewarding good behavior [buying postings] and facilitating commerce [direct marketing] is not a bad thing. To the contrary, it is a good thing. And programs like this are quintessentially American, aren’t they?

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A year is not a very long time in the overall scheme of things. Online, time seems to be compressed in ways that defy imagination. We measure our time and attention span in the language of machines. We live at such a frenetic pace that rarely do we stop to pause and reflect.

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.

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Before I go off ranting, in the interests of full disclosure, I have been in cahoots with Net evangelist Michael Marlatt since our first conversations about cahootin’ this year at SourceCon. Our chats since have covered topics as diverse as data portability, gizmos and gadgets and supernumerary nipples.

I am also part of Michael’s reverse brain drain on CloudRecruiting.net and couldn’t be more flattered to have my name in lights with the likes of his other Think Tank members — Amybeth Hale, Dan Harris, Eric Jaquith, Geoff Peterson, Jeremy Langhans, Jim Stroud, Josh Kahn, Leslie O’Connor, Rithesh Nair, Suzy Tonini, and Tim O’Connor. I cannot say how they feel about being similarly associated with me but three out of the eleven follow me on Twitter. That say’s something doesn’t it?

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Some time ago my wife was suffering from a persistent abdominal pain.  A kind neighbor who learned that medical science had failed us for years came over to lay hands on my missus and pray with the family.

Our apostolic neighbor got to work and in no time was possessed. She began uttering some unknown prayer that was only coherent to God and herself.

While it seemed quite possible that everyone else in the room was being transported to a higher place, I found myself being teleported to the Appalachian foothills where one imagines spirits of a different sort give voice to an equally unintelligible, if not distilled, form of incantation.

Somehow, in my befuddled Hebraic interpretation of what was going on I confused the “charismatic church” with the “charismatic me” and foolishly decided to apply the lessons of the day to some healing of my own.

Without going in to the pathetic details of my amorous overtures — or my completely missing the point with the snake metaphor — suffice it to say, getting lickered up, and my own very clumsy “laying on of hands,” resulted in my waking up the next day with a thick head and a lip to match. Go figure.

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Over recent weeks it would seem that RecruitingBloggers.com has fallen by the wayside. Based on the original “by-the-sweat-of-your-brow-vested-in-me” model for cross-posting it looks like Maureen Sharib might be nearing complete saturation. 

On the other hand, the brains behind the group blog – the Recruiting Animal — has picked himself up and dusted himself off, posting on his name-sake blog like the truthiest renaissance man he really is.

Ah, life in the Recruitosphere — where every post counts for something. What perspective!

I was in conversation with a client the other day.  We were talking about low-impact blogging as a possible way to reconcile the “wanna blog but don’t have time” and “yeah, I wanna optimize my site” disconnect.

As part of my illustration that the disconnect can be reconciled with relatively little effort we jumped online to look at ways I had addressed this problem in the past. We looked at my Quote for the Day, On the Radar, Recruiting by Numbers and other experiments, managing to cover everything from SEO blah-blah-blah to reputation yada-yada-yada in the space of about 20 minutes.

I’m sure the conversation would have been more fruitful had many of  my illustrations not been frustrated by a series of recently vandalized pages, courtsey of Jobster. Clicking through a series of blank pages is hardly a good first step in getting a reticent client to part with more money, is it?

Ho-hum…

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John Sumser has taken up bird-spotting. In a pastoral post aptly titled Idealization John shares what he has learned about the fowl and the foul in his circumnavigation of Schollenberger Park.  Not to be outdone I too have been walking off the pounds around the lake where I live, similarly musing on bird life and the nature of recruiting, the idealized and the real.

Bringing a couple of threads together…

It seems to me that the perennial crowing about the so-called War for Talent is starting to wear a little thin.  Perhaps like other well worn marketing glibbery we’ll never quite shake the phrase from our collective consciousness. Among industry old-timers one imagines the phrase will take on the same iconographic status as “go to work on an egg.” Who knows?

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I logged on to watch Robert Scoble’s WorkFast TV full of excitement. Joined by social media superstar Shel Israel and modern day Leonardo Mark Bernstein the lineup would have been enough to compel anyone to tune in. But the topic for this premier — technology and the future of work –  that was the clincher.

All the more for being full of anticipation at the beginning, by the end I felt deflated and annoyed.

Particularly disappointing was Scoble’s self-confessed, web-enabled obsessive-compulsiveness and apparent delight at finding new ways to feed it. Rather than seek help for what most would consider a disorder it appears he finds all the solace he needs in a similarly unhealthy physical attachment to his computer. I could be wrong but it just struck me that way, very odd.

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I believe Recruiting.com has fulfilled its purpose for me and is about to give up the ghost.  The so-called recruiting community portal serves no strategic purpose and drives all but no traffic. There is no interesting content that I couldn’t get somewhere else. There are no pictures of Filipino hot babes after all and, quite frankly, the site has turned into a useless waste of blogroll, more irritation than anything else.

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