Google expanding quickly

Google confirms it will open operations center in Poland: Google plans to open an operations center in the Polish city of Wroclaw in 2007, creating 200 new jobs. The center's main task will be to support the advertising department. Google said in a statement it chose Wroclaw because of the “availability of highly qualified graduates, the country's economic stability and strong infrastructure.” Google also operates a research and development center in Krakow. Colm Long, a Google director, said, Google will begin hiring immediately. Said Long, “In the first phase, we plan to take on 50-100 people.”

Google expects to double its Brazilian team: CEO Eric Schmidt said Google expects to double the size of its Brazilian team to 200 employees in 2007. Google will focus its recruitment on Brazil's largest city, São Paulo.

Google opens Latin American headquarters in Argentina: Google opened an office in Buenos Aires which will be the headquarters of its Latin American operations. Gonzalo Alonso, Google's director general for Latin America's Spanish-speaking countries, said, “Argentina will be the third-largest headquarters for Google business development in the world, after those in California and Ireland.” The Buenos Aires office also will manage some clients of its operations in Spain. Alonso, who will head the Buenos Aires office, said Google chose Argentina as its regional headquarters for the Argentine people's entrepreneurial spirit, the high number of Internet users, and the good quality of Argentine software developers. He denied that the decision was based on Argentina's low costs resulting from the weak peso. CEO Eric Schmidt said the Argentine government has been “very supportive” of the company's entry in the country. Said Schmidt, “We are going to create many, many jobs.”

Google recruits at Wayne State University for Michigan offices: About 100 Wayne State University students and alumni attended a recent Google recruiting session on campus. Grady Burnett, head of Google's online sales operations in Ann Arbor, told applicants that Google wants an active role in Next Generation Mobile, the network for mobile electronic devices. Burnett said the new network will allow people to use their cell phones to do things like open garage doors, change the channels on televisions and more expansively browse the Internet. Burnett said he doesn't believe desktop and laptop computers will be pushed off the market by handheld devices, but said they could expand the electronics market even further. Google’s Ann Arbor headquarters caters mostly to customer service and AdWords. There also is a group of Google employees in Southfield who work with Michigan auto companies.

Italian job boards

For those of you who are trying to find technical talent in Italy I have been doing some research into the job market and the following 3 boards are my incumbents (in order of prefernce):

1. InfoJobs
2. Monster and
3. Corriere

New Microsoft Graduate Video

Innovative CV from French graduate

Here's a CV we received in Microsoft from a recent French graduate. Enjoy.

This week in recruitment - The fab 5

Experts say the Internet recruiting market in Russia is worth about $20 million per year maybe that's why Monster has just opened up there!. A new job board has just opened in Scotland called http://www.scottishjobsonthe.net/ And you thought that Microsoft didn't have its own job offering. My old colleague Rob McIntosh gives us an excellent defintion of the word sourcing in Wikipedia. An army recruiter goes to jail.

You can listen to it in Podcast form here,or you can listen to it in the podcast plug-in on the right hand side! Enjoy.

Want to fight poverty! Work for the richest man in the world as a Recruitment Manager!

On ERE this week the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation posted a spec looking for a Recruitment Operations Manager... if you think you have the skills needed it may be your chance to really help the world be a better place!

Hotjobs is not just your regular job board

Two interesting facts have unearthed themselves about Yahoo's hotjobs this week:

1. They are catching up ground on CareerBuilder and Monster, quickly, and
2. They have integrated their 'Answers' funtionality from their search engine into their job board thus giving them the gensis of some social networking functinality and allowing them push towards a vertical search engine niche.

It will be interesting to see if and when CareerBuilder and Monster make the move toward search engine like functionality. In my own backyard the present incumbent job board IrishJobs seems a million miles away from trying something in this space and is relying on it's push newsletter approach.

Could this job ad be the most innovative ever???

This ad is very cool and will give Mr Shackelton's ad on the right hand side of the screen a run for it's money. Check it out here.

Indeed and Zoominfo get it on!

This is a very interesting union. Maybe FY07 is going to be the year of strategic alliances!

I know that most people in Ireland in the recuitment world rarely refer to either of these companies but they are worth keeping an eye on. Interestingly ZoomInfo has agreed to use Indeed's job search engine this week.

Read the press release on Business Wire.

Should you allow comments on your career site

Have you ever heard of Tim O'Reilly before? He's the guy who founded top publishing house O'Reilly Media and has written a number of forward looking articles on open source and the Web 2.0 phenomenon. He's also the same guy who brought his experience to bear in a number of savvy investments e.g. Bloggger which sold out to Google.

He now has turned his hand to the VC world where he has a $51 million fund called AlphaTech Ventures. It is not a big heavy wait fund but rather a small and nimble fund that looks at investing at a very early stage. Impressively, some of his investors include Jeff Bezos, who is the founder of Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN), and Pierre Omidyar , who is the founder of eBay (NASDAQ EBAY).

Of no suprise is the fund has gone to work already, the investments include: Instructables, Chumby, and Wesabe.

In particular I like the first company Instructables which is a search engine that gives you “step-by-step instructions for making things you never knew you wanted”. Like this lightbulb vase above. It's pretty cool! After a little more investigation I unearted on the jobs page of this company that they are allowing applicants comment their way around the open job descriptions, and the public are allowed to see what they say!It also openly advertises AdWords on the site! Do you think this is a novel idea that may catch on in career sites across the world!?! Or just a cash strapped start-up trying to make some quick advertisement revenue?!?

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.

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.

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.

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.

Are you looking for Russian sites to advertise on

Here are a few of the more obscure ones to look at:

http://job.biz.ua/cgi-bin/view.pl?page=2&razdel=48&tip=1®ion=-1&perpage=30

http://www.naim.ru/rcatalog-5.html

http://www.be1.ru/job/resumes/

http://job.ukr.net/searchres/view_IDres.php?id=273380

http://job.bigmir.net/search/?type=1&country=10000&subm=1&sub_cat=2221&cat=2200

http://www.alljob.com.ua/vacancies-ukraine-web-programmers/page13.htm

http://www.naim.ru/rcatalog1-7.html

http://www.bigmax.ru/Detailed/114059.html

http://www.ufarabota.ru/bank_resume/?filter_date=62&id_job=1407

Google Base gets better

While only available in English and German interfaces Google's recruitment offering Google Base is getting much more sophisticated. It's a matter of time before it becomes a real player in the job market. Maybe when push and pull RSS technologies meet, which maybe only 2 or 3 years away, Google will be at that point to make this product into a Monster slayer.

Do you know what this means:Zyciorys

Big browny points if you know what it is?

It's the word for 'Resume'in Polish. There are 6,912 living languages in the world. Here are the ones I've been able to figure out what the word resume is translated into:

German: Lebenslauf
French: Résumé
Spanish (EU): Currículo
Spanish: Resumen
Holland: samenvatting
Portuguese: Resumo
Swedish: återuppta
Polish: Zyciorys
Russian (Borat’s): Ðåçþìå
Russian Резюме
Greek: επαναλάβετε
Japanease: 概要
Chinese: 回复
Korean: 이력서
Arabic: سيرة ذاتية, خِصة

If you know any more or disagree with the above translations. Please let me know.

YouTube -Video CVs and ZunePhones

I read an interesting article on the ever informative and entertaining ERE web site that got me thinking. Make sure you read it and have a look at Aleksy Vayner’s video resume!!! Interesting young man!!! While not in vogue at the moment it will be interesting to see how this new application channel picks up. In 5 years time it may well be the norm to listen to candidates' podcast CVs and inspect their video resumes. At that stage we should able to port our ZunePhone or iPhones to our application tracking system to pull in our daily candidate RSS feeds which will allow us watch pre screened video resumes that match our search criteria on our train ride home.

The Nework expands to the Middle East

For those of you interested in recruiting from the Middle East, TotalJobs.com and Stepstone’s creation and Monster rival - The Network – keeps growing and has just expanded their recruitment capacity with their recent partnership with Bayt.com. To learn more read here. It’s interesting to see that Google are advertising some of their Irish client service jobs there already.

The Network is now the largest formal alliance of market leading recruitment websites globally offering coverage in 53 countries.

Apply for a job through your mobile phone

Mobiljob is a revolutionary new job board that gives every person who owns a mobile phone access to you current job openings.It is unique in that potential candidates can search, view and apply to your current vacancies all through their mobile phones, therefore taking the need for PC access out of the equation. Mobiljob is the only job board that sits on all the networks in Ireland and is the only recruitment solution of its kind in Europe. I'm not too sure if recruiters or job seekers will go for this... I personally wouldn't. I think RSS is still the new technology to beat. Mobile phones may act as an agregator for your feed in the future but forking out on a hefty priced text when you have free or low cost access to the Internet I don't think is the way the m-recruitment industry will take flight.

How to dent Monster and Irish Jobs Revenue streams

Recently, we saw IrishDev introduce RSS feeds into their growing site. Kudos to the boys. But let's be honest, we still are light years away from the new technologies and pricing models being used by some of the most pioneering sites in the US. I for one am a big fan of Indeed.com. For quite some time I was curious about how they made their money. Now I know. Check out the following article on their blog. And also listen to their CEO Paul Foster talking about the subject on MarteingMonger's Podcast #22

Key words and Recruitment 2.0

So what can we say about key words…??? Don’t underestimate their power and don’t underestimate how they are changing the recruitment industry. Owning, advertising, optimising and linking to keywords will be from 2015 onwards as important as creating a careers web site and posting your openings on a job boards was in 1995. Understanding how key words work in search engines, how the right choice of key words is instrumental at driving candidates to your job descriptions and how RSS is changing the way in which job seekers search for opportunities are essential lessons that need to be understood if you want to have a thorough understanding of how new technology is making the hunt for technical talent more sophisticated. Just as the Internet has moved into its Web 2.0 phase, likewise, Internet recruitment has moved into its 2.0 phase and is rapidly moving towards 3.0. Key word selection and advertising and how they interact with search technologies and social/ service engineering are leading the evolution. Let me draw some lines in the sand for illustrative purposes. I could go back to critical moments like the invention of paper and the phone but I won't :)

Pre 1996: (Pre Web):
Advertising on newspapers. Use of recruitment agencies.

1996-2004: (Web 1.0)
Monster was born. Career sites began to flourish and evolve. Search engines began to make their mark. Email, newsletters and online forums of varying hues and diversity flourish. AdSense created.

Pre 2004 > 2007 (Web 2.0).
Indeed.com created ( the first company offering an RSS job aggregator thus signalling the birth of Web 2.0). Google first major company to use its own search engine to advertise its careers pages off a large spectrum of prominent key words in multiple geographies and in multiple languages. Podcasts being used as JobCasts to advertise roles. The dot jobs domain (.jobs) begins to gather momentum. Blogs beginning to advertise jobs and top talent constantly referring to their sites in addition to their CVs.

2007 > 2015 (Web 2.0 evolves)
Maturing of present technologies: more niche job forums, niche job boards with RSS feeders, jobcasts and a further iteration of XML job schemas. Communities liked LinkedIn become more prominent to connect job seekers together. ZoomInfo providing sourcing channels and MSN and Google providing more intelligent search facilities for recruiters to contact passive candidates.

2015 > (Web 3.0)
Cohesion technologies mature. The job description key word profile is standardised by XML.org to integrate with hardware devices like Microsoft’s Zune devices and Apple’s iPod dual phone/mpeg players. Google or MSN launch a profile matching key word repository service that signals a new revolution and kills Monster. Skype Jobs set up to allow recruiters bid for access to candidates who are on-line, pre–qualified and are prepared to join your job opening WebFair

How do key words work?
The best person to ask this question is George Boole. He is the founder of the Boolean language which is the alphabet for using key words. I would suggest reading some of the following artciles to understand more:

1. Simple Tutorial
2. For more detail browse the Wiki on George:

Candidates are beginning to connect themselves on the Internet more and more. People are beginning to receive a plethora of newsbytes in their life. The bites will come in a huge variety of formats. Our next generation will be the news bite generation. Understanding how to use keywords to swim in this new newsbyte society is crucial to ensuring that Microsoft stay at the bleeding edge of pioneering recruitment strategies. Presently you can fill out a profile form in Monster, a recruiter can purchase access to the database and candidates who match a job description can be contacted. This will change. Companies like Microsoft and Google will allow you fill out a profile in MSN jobs or Google jobs. Employers will pay to advertise their job profiles and using RSS and XML job posting and matching formats employers and job hunters will be consummated together in sacred cyber matrimony! Ahh…isn’t that lovely!!!

Well done IrishDev.com for embracing RSS feeds!!!

So at last we are seeing some RSS functionality coming into the Irish Job Boards market!!! Irish Dev.com is a cool site that I have long admired for its well designed GUI, very relevant quick search categories, solid blog content and its pioneering embracing of RSS feeds! Well done. In a sea of recruitment stagnation finally a job board in Ireland has embraced a new technology that will create an exciting wave for job seekers to ride to easier job hunting.

So what is RSS?
RSS (Rich Site Summary) is a format for delivering regularly changing web content. Many news-related sites, weblogs and other online publishers syndicate their content as an RSS Feed to whoever wants it. RSS solves a problem for people who regularly use the web. It allows you to easily stay informed by retrieving summaries of the latest content from the sites you are interested in. You save time by not needing to visit each site individually. You ensure your privacy, by not needing to join each site's email newsletter. The number of sites offering RSS feeds is growing rapidly and includes big names like Yahoo News and Amazon.com.

How can it be used for recruitment?
In multiple ways. You just have to be creative. The two obvious ways are string searchs and advertising jobs... For example, check out Indeed.com and you'll see the power of RSS feeds. Also check out about the 5 million dollars the company raised to start growing. Also, check out two of the recent blog posts on Tom Raferty's excellent IT blog which addresses the subject back in March and follows the topic up again in May. Tom, quite rightly talks about the loss of fist mover advantage for Irihjob.ie and RecruitIreland the two job board behemoths in Ireland and how they will need to start thinking quickly about how to bring this functionality into their products if they are not to loose market share to Irishdev.com.

The technology has also got me thinking. It begs a big, big, big question to all recruitment managers. Why don't you build RSS feeds into your career sites.It seems like an obvious evolution in e-recruitment. It will allow interested applicants tag the category of jobs they are interested in and every time a new job is posted they get an alert. Cool! It will save the recruiter hours of mining for candidates and place the onus of contact on the job seeker. Which should translate into dollars saved on the ground.

It's going to be interesting to see how RSS feeds change the recruitment landscape... with the ever increasing seamless integration of technologies across multiple platforms the day is not to far away where you will get a quick text to your mobile if a new job in Microsoft comes up that you have expressed and interest in!!!!

The flat CV revisited

I've just read a good article on ERE Exchange which related to a previous blog I posted about the future of recruitment and how we may have a flat CV recruitment process that will bring the recruiter and the applicant together in far more sophisticated fashion than we have today... obviously, other people have been pondering the same thought across the pond and investigating the concept in their own way...check out this article

So give me a boolean string I can use in Germany

Here's two to keep you thinking:

intitle:cv OR inurl:cv "software ingenieur" -job -bewerben

intitle:lebenslauf C++ "software ingenieur" -job -stellenausschreibung -bewerben

Happy Hunting (Glückliche Jagd)!!!

Alas poor Teoma i knew him well

Teoma is gone or should i say integrated with Ask.com! It used to be that i used 4 search engines when searching for candidates now we are down to three: see article
:(

Microsoft gets better at search

Today I came across Microsoft's new Window's Live beta search site. It's a vast improvement on the old MSN UI and the new toolbar albeit it Beta version has some new tools worth checking out like the Onfolio tab, phishing filter and the ability to subscribe to RSS feeds directly from search results. While the raw horse power is not in the backend to compete with the present incumbent search champions it is a significant step in the right direction to win back some market ground. In particular, for recruitment purposes the new macro functionality and feeder functionality may help with complex string searches. I've tried it and like it. The UI is impressive and the integration work with the other bundled Live services provide for interesting debate in the Google Pack versus Windows Live Bundle debate. Try it.

Using Google News to recruit more effectively

Any self respecting cyber recruiter keeps an eye on all the main search engine labs and subscribes to their newsletters to hear what new products are coming out, or in the case of Google, what new beta release they have up their sleeve. Last week after many years in Beta Google News finally grew up (despite the disdain of the newspaper publishers) and became a fully grown product. About time I hear you say! Here! Here! What's cool about this is it's one more evolutionary step down the road to personalised information on the Cloud! A very powerful tool if thought about carefully and used right.

To date when using Google News you select from a drop down box of countries and a set number of categories. That's changed. Now you can impressively choose what categories you want, from a large list of countries, and, you can create your own categories and apply your own keywords to them. This is great if you want to keep up with cutting edge news on the recruitment market. And if that's not enough, they also have a RSS feeder on it which pulls the information to you. Excellent. I've been waiting for this for along time and now it's here. The future is quickly becoming the present.

Think of the possibilities here. If you want to study a specific competitor just stick in their name and store the feed. On a daily basis you'll be able to see from thousands of news feeds around the world any information that has come out about them in the public domain or discussions that are being held about them. Something I've set up is 'redundancies +Ireland'. I check Google News daily. Usually in the morning when I come to work. When a redundancy announcement happens in the market that may result in new skilled staff coming into the readily available labour pool -the quicker I know about this the quicker I can pounce on them if they have the relevant skills for any of my open reqs. The possibilities are limitless. Track your favourite recruitment agencies, job boards and newspapers. Scour for white papers, blogs, or appointments. Hunt for legal, system and economic updates.

Google has come out with another interesting tool, that if applied right will make you a better recruiter. You should invest your time in learning how to use it.

And if that's not enough, they've also come out with their new toolbar update. I wonder how I can use that to hunt for candidates. Any ideas?

Articles

Here are a few arcticles i've liked of late:

[1] The Guerrllia Guide to Interviewing. This is a good one to give a new hiring manager who is conducting techncial interviews. I like the premise around the idea, that interviewing is more an art than a system - and that finding SMART PEPOPLE, that GET THINGS DONE - is essentially the name of the game. Read it here.

[2] Don't miss the next strategic turn. This is an interesting arcticle worth scanning over. Yves Lermusiaux, president of Taleo X, talks about some of the recent trends surrounding coporate career sites for Fortune 500 companies in the US, he also poses some interesting questions around designing an integrated talented management system - a subject which we must master in Microsoft if we are to be applicant driven rather than systems driven.

I had a look at Yve's personal blog and it's good. If you look at the right hand column he has some interesting articles like: Accenture Finds Four of the Top Ten Executive Issues Fall Within HR. I like the way he has somw articles from AMR Research and Gartner and co. Some good credible research units.

The Recruiter as we know it is a walkin' fossil!: The Flat CV

My generation is the last of a dieing race. Recruiters as we know them will be extinct very soon. Maybe 30 years! Caput.....boom....gone, or should I say transformed into some kind of 1/4 man 3/4 computer grotesque humanoid. Recruitment will be an end to end automated process. XML is changing the way the world interoperates. As groups like Oasis, RosettaNet and The Word Wide Web Consortium (W3C) try to mediate the peace and wrestle the trenchantly vested subjective proprietary focuses away from the 20 stone A-pex Microsoft, IBM, Amazon, Oracle, SAP's of the world, they usher in a new age of shared information. System to system business will flourish. Call it what you will - I call it S2S; not sure if that acronym exists already but if it doesn't -it should!!! With the publishing of the recent XML Resume format back in August of last year we've come one big step further to realising this. I've been nattering on about this for a while. I even wrote a brief article about it 4 years ago which was published on our domestic business paper, Sunday Business Post, on Monster and also on the Irish HR magazine called People Focus. However, not all recruitment will be automated. It will be piecemeal. It will be by osmosis. Like most revolutions it's an evolution. The fluffy-bunny-cuchie-wuchy- hold your hand-look them-in-the-eye interview will always exist. An eye ball staring at an eye ball (let's call it i2i It will be around for a long time [ it needs a name too ] ). It's the quintessential screening differentiator. The point being though, staring us in the eye is we should stay ahead of the creative curve to constantly reinvent our sourcing, screening and closing techniques to ensure we can connect to talent niches as effectively as possible.

What we will see in a super-flat recruitment model is a very carefully laid out schematic which breaks down each segment of a candidates skill-set and each section of the screening process and probably also all the semantics involved in offering and closing positions to a granular, infinitesimal, scalpel level. Ultra precise screening will exist ( just look at the XML resume and you'll see what I mean). A lot of this may happen with a few simple clicks of a button. And who knows even one day with one magical click. Someday there may be ubiquitous, universal agreement on what this schematic should look like. It may be different for individual job categories and even individual jobs but in my opinion due to the cost savings, time savings and increase in quality, companies will come round, set their subjectivity aside and make this happen. If companies don't do it job seekers will do it. XML can make this possible in conjunction with the merging of RSS feeds, Wi-Fi transmissions, and God knows what else is around the corner.etc. It's hard to explain the way I see it happening. I reckon it might look a little like this, let me paint a scene, it's easier:

INT. ATRIUM 3 (IRELAND) -DAY- 2024

A young hiring manager called BOB, wearing a U2, let's go play on the moon t-shirt, has just received a message while driving. His rear view mirror turns into an LCD panel and begins to beep. It sends a signal to his one-piece nano ear plug controlled by his car COMPUTER.

BOB
......Ok. I'll take it.....!!!

Bob hears a incoming message from John Crammer (his software lead).

COMPUTER
Text. Audio or Left Eye Visual?

BOB
Audio.

The transmission takes place.

JOHN
Bob, after careful consideration, and God knows it hasn't been easy - I've decided to leave the company. I had a chat with the wife and kids and we've decided as a family it makes a lot of sense if I leave the company to set up that restaurant we always talked about. It's the right time. And I won't be changing my mind. The thought has been in my mind since Easter and now that we've launched XP Seamless 2.0. It's time to go. I'd like to see out my 3 month termination clause but I'll understand if you want me to leave earlier. I'll talk to you in the office when I get in. Thanks Bob.

Bob hits the horn on his steering WHEEL. Shouts. Calm's down. Gathers his thoughts.........

BOB
Computer, switch on DVB-S link to home computer.

COMPUTER
Done.

BOB
Find the recruitment folder on my floating drive. Select job specs. XP Seamless division. Software lead. Have you got it?

COMPUTER
Got it. What next?

BOB
Send it to my left eye visual and also to my iPod. Also please read it to me.

The computer turns off the music and he listens to the job description being read out to him. he thinks for a moment before responding....

BOB (ctd)
Computer. Please add an extra 10,000 euros to the base salary and increase the car allowance to level 65. Please call in SU-XSIO [his PA]

Su-Xsio's voice can be heard. A Chinese twang comes on the phone. She's at home. Her babies can be heard screaming in the background.

SU-XSIO
Yes Bob. Sorry about the noise. They'll be quite in a moment. I just turned the fish bowl screen saver on the TV. They love that. It works all the time...Shssss there.....

BOB
(wearily)

I had a resignation today of one of my lead engineers. He's probably told some of the team already. I want some new candidate profiles before I arrive to the building in 15 minutes. Who are we partnering with at the moment. It's been a while since I had to do this. What is our number one source for someone from the XP Seamless division.

SU-XSIO
Google.

BOB
What about Yahoo?

SU-XSIO
We've partnered with all the top 4 search engines as well as using our own internal system. There is also the Seamless Elite Community in Ireland and Europe, and there is the XML Resume Bank Forum which we can access for free. Also there is the Lead Software's in MS podcast which we automated last year which we can use. It sends out an hourly feed to pre screened candidates. It's updated every two hours. You can also turn on your own personal community site to take CVs for the role. I'll also put it on your next blog. Have you revised the spec.

BOB
(angrily)

Ok let's use them all. I'll pay for the cost. Course I have. Computer send new job spec to Su-Xsio. By the way what will it cost?

SU-XSIO
It depends what price model you want to use. Do you want to see 1-3-5-10-15-25 or all the candidate profiles that qualify.Or do you want a pay the time to hire price? It's 500 euros a day to offer stage. And a once off 3,000 on hire.

BOB
I'll go for the first option and give me all the qualified candidates you can find. There won't be that many. I want to see what's out there and John is going to hang around for a month so I have a little breathing space.

COMPUTER
Done

SU-XSIO
Ok. I have the spec. I'll have the final price for you before your meeting.

BOB
Great. Please add the relevant screening schema to the RSS feeds that go out. Level 4 screen. Also I want you to add to add to the feed that I will only be taking video link interview with the best 4 candidates. Have the candidates' acceptance criteria and questions sent to me before the interviews. I'll take them on my laptop. Also send a message to the Seamless Leadership alias saying what has happened. And do the usual to let payroll and whoever needs to know, know. When do I have a free 2 hour slot?.

COMPUTER
This Friday at 6pm.

BOB
Ok. I'll do one in the car and the rest at home. Let's go for that. Su-Xsio I want the candidates' profiles on my IPod so I can listen to them when I walk from the car park to the meeting. Hopefully there won't be too many. I only have 20 minutes to listen to them. Sorry I barked a little early. It's just he's a really good guy. I went to college with him

SU-XSIO
No problem. Will that be all?

BOB
Yeah. That's it. If I think of anything else I'll ping you.

SU-XSIO
Tooty butty... See you later.

BOB
....yeah...yeah... see ya.

Bob turns back his music and turns up the volume....as BEAUTIFUL DAY by U2 kicks in...BOB is a little more relaxed and begins to join in the song...

BOB (ctd)
F*ck that, I never really like him anyway...he wanted my job from day one.....................oh yeah....computer....have my Jacuzzi on when I get home at 9pm and open a can of Guinness for me when the car is 5minutes from home.

COMPUTER
You've got it.