Amitai Givertz’s Recruitomatic Blog

I was speaking the other day with Raghav Singh. Raghav knows about recruiting technology. We were catching up on his visit to HRTech in Chicago. He said one of the most impressive companies on show this year was Recruiting.com. My first reaction was, “Wha-wha?”

I see John Sumser strikes a similar tone to Raghav’s in his post 091018 Recruiting.com. John’s analysis leads me to affirm that while Recruiting.com might make a great case study for a start-up starting over, cool recruiting tools alone rarely, if ever, compensate for lousy internal processes, weak management and a decimated recruiting function.

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John Sumser’s controversial post Digging Into RecruitingBlogs.com v2.08: The Death of Sourcing has has inspired a great debate about the state of our industry and the area of specialization we call “Sourcing.”

John suggests that “Former sourcing luminaries will be familiarizing themselves with the alarm on the French fry machine and the relative difference between Rare, Medium and Well done.”

Oh, dear.

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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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I learned yesterday that John Sumser will be vacating the Editor’s desk at Recruiting.com. His going — timed for early May — will mark the closing of  another chapter in this seminal site’s interesting history, perhaps the closing of the book.

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?

I enjoyed listening to John Sumser in the Recruiters Lounge this week, stumping for the Recruiting Roadshow. I think the Recruiting Roadshow is a brilliant idea and all for a good cause. It will be interesting to watch how things roll out in 2008. I hope that I have been helpful in some small way getting the thing in motion.

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!