28.2.07

Will every popular blog have a job board built in and has widget mania arrived!


It's interesting to pick up on some of the recent movement in recruitment product development that is being pushed by the blogosphere of late.

Indeed and Jobster recently came out with widgets which allow bloggers to host job advertisments on their blog. Also Monster widgets are appearing like this one in India. SimplyHired have come to the game with their impressive Jobs-O-Matic offering which allows bloggers to add a job board to their site and as such make some money for their hard spent hours of blogging!

The Irish Cyber Sleuth may have to try this on his own site one of these days!!!

Which all leads me to the question. When will the Irish market embrace some of these advances!?!?! So I wonder how long it will be before Irish Jobs bring out a widget for the job seeking community. If it takes as long as it did for them to embrace RSS capabilities on their site I won't be holding my breath. Maybe Stepstone or JobPilot may introduce something and start innovating in the heavily reactive European job board market.

20.2.07

Career Web Sites 2.0


This week Cisco announced that it was acquiring Five Across, a social networking “in-a-box” company designed for the corporate environment. Interesting. The news press states that:

"The Five Across platform, Connect Community Builder, empowers companies to easily augment their websites with full-featured communities and user-generated content such as audio/video/photo sharing, blogs, podcasts, and profiles. These user-interaction functions help companies improve the interaction with their customers and overall customer experience on their websites. Social networking functions are of unique interest to media companies, sports leagues, affinity groups and any organization wishing to increase its interaction with its online constituency."

Ok, so Cisco may be using this as a sales channel rather than a applicant contact conduit and repository however considering Cisco's reputation as a leader in recruitment practices I can't but help think they are going to use this for the latter.

8.2.07

Tag. You're Hired. Will this be the line that slays Monster!


Last September I went to my first ERE Exchange conference. It was the 2nd ERE Exchange International Conference and was in beautiful Amsterdam. At the conference I had the opportunity to as Jason Goldberg the CEO of Jobster a simple question at the end of his presentation.

"Hi Jason, Declan from Ireland, could you give me your opinion on when push and pull RSS technologies will meet?"
"2 years," he answered with the steadfast indubitable stare of a sniper locking in on a distant target.

I wondered quietly to myself, can he do it in 2 years!

If there is anyone that is going to teach Monster, the almost $7billion dollars, 1 billion profit generating job board, some manners, it's Jason and Jobster.

Seattle-based Jobster, which has put together $50 million in venture capital, used to have a similar business model to Monster - a pay and post advertising proposition. But late last year they made a decision to try something different. They handed out a lot of pink slips, announced redundancies and shifted their business model dramatically. As of yesterday they have made their jobs listings free and offered a wide range of new features including and most importantly profile tagging technology.

Jobster is like LinkedIn or Xing: a social network. It contains well thought out profiles which allow users host their CV. The super cool thing about the site is the user can also "super tag" their profile and Jobster using Jobby's tagging technology (a company they bought last year) will match up profiles and job specs. Goldberg has also decided to syndicate these listings out via RSS and other methods, so job search engines like Indeed will be able to add these to other listings from around the web.

This without doubt in my mind Monster's biggest competitor. Goldberg famously belittled Monster in a series of interviews recently saying that Monster was a "crap product". He is now impressively backing up his words with a dramatic shift in his business model. This can also hurt other social networks, especially the quickly growing LinkedIn. If people start putting their profiles up in Jobster instead of LinkedIn their popularity will erode. Isn't competition great?

Jobsters job posting is free. I know I will be first in queue from Ireland and getting my jobs posted their today.

So here I am thinking 2 years like Goldberg said was unrealistically optimistic. He mislead me and did it in 5 months. Great news for employer and job seeker alike. The sword has come out, the battlefield laid down; how long will it be before Google, Yahoo or Microsoft come to the battle or Monster starts to slowly turn the ship! LinkedIn while probably nervous are probably secretly rubbing their hands together going "ching ching" if one of the big boys want to get into the market they'll probably have to add an extra zero to the check book if they want to acquire rather than build the technology.

1.2.07

Google Base and XML

5 years ago to the day I wrote an article for Monster talking about how XML would change the way we post job descriptions. At the time I worked for a Web Services Security company that encrypted XML messages. Most of the people I talked to didn't know what XML was and even today 5 years on I don't really believe much has changed in the recruitment fraternity. Google know a lot about XML and how it can change the way we bulk post our jobs. At present they accept bulk uploads in five formats, including tab-delimited and four XML formats: RSS 2.0, RSS 1.0, Atom 1.0, and Atom 0.3. They even provide sample files to illustrate how your bulk upload file should be formatted. To learn more visit their Google Base where the following page goes into a little more detail.

What is even more interesting about this is you can include specific advertising attributes in your bulk upload file and then you can create a Google AdWords ad to help increase traffic to your Google Base items. This allows you create a very targeted advertising program that allows you to run highly targeted cost-per-click (CPC) regardless of your budget. Clever.