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.

Among the hints of separation anxiety from his tens of thousands of online followers and signs of creeping inboxaphobia, this one thing stood out in particular: Scoble’s laptop is adorned in much the same way as my 11 year-old daughter has hers plastered with stickers.

More than personalization I think, stickering up your big-boy’s laptop strikes me as another oddball thing for Scoble to do. It’s obvious from some the shabby ones that the wear and tear on the machine has become part of the symbolism, emblematic of time passing and dues paid.

Not wanting to jump to the conclusions of an amateur psych, or to be accused of suffering from my own web-induced flights of fancy, I looked hard for the Pennzoil sticker hoping I could use  the NASCAR defense to explain the sticker thing. But alas, no. No Pennzoil stickers. Not even one from GoDaddy.com.

I guess an ologist of some sort could explain the correlation between the behavior of prepubescent girls, a devotee’s irrational worship of inanimate objects, the eccentricities of industry icons or the foibles of genius. I can’t, can you?

Possibly there is no correlation at all. Perhaps Scoble has simply been exposed to too much social computing over the years. One day, maybe we’ll recognize that a missing DLL where the DNA used to be is an occupational hazard to be expected when one is exposed to years of tinkering around with life-affirming micro-blogging.

Last, and most bothersome of all, was the complete absence of good manners on Scoble’s part. I ask you — to be interviewing the likes of Mark Bernstein, obviously not paying attention and twittering away, how else could that be construed as anything but very, very rude. Watching as Scoble’s eye was drawn to his webcam rather make contact with his subject, I was reminded of Mother who used to say, “New money is so vulgar!”

Ironic then, Shel Israel struggling to have a conversation and Robert Scoble, tethered by a wireless device, hardly able to cope with the contrivance of a TV-show format, itself a product of Fast Company’s magazine-mired thinking.

You might see it altogether differently, who knows? The show has a good premise and perhaps it will improve as Scoble becomes more comfortable with a medium that normally lacks authenticity but, as seen in this episode, can be just as revealing without the required rehearsal.

Well, you can bookmark the site for future programs and decide for yourself. I may be jaded by a touch of anticapointment.

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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?

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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.

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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?

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Is Twitter naff?

Now, c’mon kids, how hard was that?

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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?

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I am answering some of the questions from attendees here, in the comments. Feel free to chip in.

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Don’t miss Jim Durbin and his webcast Talent Scouting and Social Networking: The New Employee Referral Program on Tuesday, February 19th, also for HCI. Register here…

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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

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I know I shouldn’t generalize but I can’t help myself in pointing out that readers of online recruiting stuff fall into one of three categories:

• The first are those who scan the content, hardly pay attention to it and leave feeling that they have just made an earnest attempt to improve their effectiveness as recruiters. In so doing, they believe they actually have;
• The second are those who read the content and decide as a result to act on it — invariably doing nothing;
• Third are those who mean to read their favorite gurus, get distracted and never come back, missing something that might help them become more successful — like understanding why we get distracted in the first place.

Interesting thing number one: Thought leaders cannot only get away with reposting stuff they published months ago but I see now that we should encourage them to do it:

• The readers in category one can reflect — just for a minute now — on what they have achieved in real terms since their first reading and go on with their accelerated development toward top-performerdom, unphased;
• The readers in category two either a) congratulate themselves for having had the exact same idea ages ago, deciding to finally take some action now it is being popularized, or b) acknowledge that they didn’t do what they were supposed to do and reaffirm to take action on this second reading. Again, invariably, nothing happens.
• The readers in category three see the article published for the first time, scan it and leave feeling they have made an earnest attempt to improve their effectiveness as recruiters. In so doing, they believe they actually have — or — they read the content and decide as a result to act on it, well, you know the rest…it’s the insanity defense.

I can’t think of a better reason to start writing stuff that I can repost at a later date. I will start doing it tomorrow.

Interesting thing number two: As one who reads a lot of what gets published in our space — and straddling all three categories of reader, I admit it — I get confused about what I read, when I read it and even who the blazes wrote it, had the idea before me.

Bothered by my befuddlement with Lou Adler’s repost I started digging around. I resurfaced Jeff Hunter’s gem Job Descriptions are Part of What is Killing Recruiting. Comparing Jeff Hunter’s point of view with Lou Adler’s I realize that I could synthesize the two and come up with something “original,” something that would make me look like a veritable genius!

Interesting thing number three: We should not overlook the huge number of places where sample job descriptions are available for plug-and-play recruiters the world over. There is obviously a huge appetite out there for job descriptions that come ready-made, requiring little or no thought, work or accountability.

This lazy approach to working with job descriptions suggests to me that while the thought leadership provided by Lou Adler [tactical] and Jeff Hunter [strategic] is compelling it could be one of the underlying reasons why so many readers end up falling into categories one and two to start with, left behind from one post to the next.

I think if we are to serve the causes of recruiting talent, managing a lean process, and for the abandonment of job descriptions too, the industry would be better served by arguing that job descriptions should be properly understood and managed from the get-go. You know, from the unglamorous task analysis to the one-dimensional candidate profile.

With the same passion Lou Adler and Jeff Hunter express in their posts insisting that everything is done by the book, as opposed to not doing it all — and reposting about it every six months — that should work like a charm if you want to get rid of job descriptions and those pesky one-size-fits-all job description sites, don’t you think?

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On the same day Jim Stroud posted his interview with Sumser, Shally Steckerl posted his reflections on his year doing the conference thing, linking to one of the posts I wrote on the subject: From the Frontlines to the Home Front: A Different Kind of Conference!

The lessons learned form all this? Well, altogether too many for a quick missive but the most important lesson was maybe this:

Those of “us” who are bound by the niceties of political association, cliquey affiliation, fat-cat business, product to push, thought-bleedership, social status, blogebrity or whatever — those of us who collectively make up the industry’s self-appointed infrastructure — need to get out more. There is nothing quite like seeing 98% of a Roadshow audience — representative of the local recruiting community — bemused by talk of the social networks, blogging and search engine stuff to put things in perspective. Video resumes? Give me a break! Skype? Isn’t that a skin disease?

In a hard, hard world where people still run help-wanted classifieds and equate sourcing with Monster page views some of us could do a lot worse than get to know the people who we are supposed to be serving, then actually serve them — why not?

Lesson learned? Hit the road, Jack — or whatever your name is!

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