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.

While technology continues to envision a promising future I wonder how many employers can translate any of it beyond the reordered acronyms of a fancy, near historic sales pitch.

After all, who will the marketers and salespeople target for the progressive solutions like Recruiting.com’s new whiz-bang offering? Why, companies with lousy internal processes, weak management and a decimated recruiting function of course. At best, it’s Methadone for an industry long stupefied by vendors’ peddling the things dreams are made of.

On the bright side, Raghav had no idea that Recruiting.com was a reinvention of  “i-love-me-some-disruptor” Jason Goldberg’s Jobster. The disassociation is a  branding coup for CEO Jeff Seely and his team I think. For those of us who have been around long enough to remember Goldberg’s shenanigans and/or Recruiting.com’s humble beginnings as a trend-setting blog — that is remarkable indeed.

Perhaps Recruiting.com is, as my buddies-in-the-know suggest, deserving of a second look. You decide.

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.

I imagine in years to come when the names of those “sourcing luminaries” have been long forgotten there will still be those recruiters who would like to know how to find leads and resumes online. Poor souls, who will teach them?

It pains me to think of the years of hard graft that these forgotten fry cooks have put into researching search syntax and Boolean strings to advance the profession, all for naught. So sad that they are gone now, forgotten.

In the hours of my darkest depression, lamenting the impending death of so many beautiful minds, my own demise too perhaps, I decided I would erect a monument to the “Unkown Cybersleuth.”

In so doing I hope that for generations to come, recruiters every would add job titles like “Accountant” or skill sets like “Java” to the etched names memorialized there and click “Keywords” to miraculously find code left by the masters to cut and paste directly into their browsers.

Long after punditry has gone the way of sourcing, I imagine recruiters everywhere thumbing their noses at Mr. Sumser saying:

Sourcing is Dead! Long Live Google!

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.

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?

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!