Online Recruitment company lists

It seems Seek had a reasonable first day in the Australian Stock Market, which is good considering the overall market went south.

In the long term I wonder how they will perform and what impact being a public company will have on their day to day operations. Seek has been a leader in the Australian market around online recruitment for many years and has pushed the big US vendors around a bit.

Messaging and workflow

Dub’s has continued his thoughts on workflow and extended on my post around messaging (aren’t blogs great!) and simplified my thoughts into an easy to read summary.

However I don’t agree with his comments on HR-XML being the “new” model and savior to our messaging needs. (Again a great thing about blogs is we can all express our opinion and push forward to a combined understanding.) While HR-XML is going in the right direction the latest specifications are getting very very complex.

The other area where I disagree is XML is not always synchronous, look at RSS. It is through the implementation of web services (which communicate in XML) that we get a synchronous environment. XML (even HR-XML) by itself does not get us there. I do understand that Dub’s is trying to simplify things and many of the XML implementations are synchronous however it would be wrong to assume that if your vendor says things are in XML format that you have a synchronous messaging environment.

Personally I don’t see that we need synchronous messaging to fully exploit agent based computing, however it does help. A combination of synchronous and asynchronous messages overlaid with an effective workflow engine that automates forms processing will provide significant benefits to an HR department.

White paper registration!

Ok this is just a rant and I am picking on Hire Desk only because they are the most recent company to do this.

Many technology focused companies require you to register before you can download their white papers, this gives them some great lead data, which I support. But WHY WHY WHY do I have to do it everytime! Have they not heard of a cookie?

Even worse is HireDesk I recently subscribed to a email newsletter which I thought was going to give me access to some great content, lets not even start as to why they do not have an RSS feed. I got a email today around measuring the quality of new hires, I thought it was interesting so I clicked to download the white paper. Guess What! I have to register with them, again!

Now I am a subscriber to their email list they should know this and automatically allow me access to the white paper without me having to fill in the forms yet again!

There’s more to life than just technology

I touched on the subject during my quick Jobster review last week and previously, technology alone will not save you. Well, today I noticed that the Jobster Blog provides a great overview as to what else needs to be done when trying to track down passive candidates.

Many a time I have sat with end users who start off a conversation by explaining the solution that they want, not the business problem that they have. The difference here is critical if you start with a solution in mind you are looking at technology as the answer, however if you start with the business problem and then look at solutions your solution has a greater chance of being balanced and addressing both the technical and non technical aspects.

Related to this is if you cannot implement your business process with paper then there is no point in trying to implement technology, because you have not yet clearly defined the business process. Implementing a technology solution without clearly defined business processes just does not work. Look at the recent discussions on workflow and messaging technology. These solutions have wonderful potential for any business, but if you don’t clearly understand your process and clearly define how you are going to use the technology you will not be successful.

Just updated my Blogroll

I have just changed my blogroll to more accurately reflect who I am reading. I was using BlogRolling but found it very difficult to keep in sync with Newsgator Online and as such as I added feeds I was not keeping the BlogRoll listing up to date.

I was also using BlogRolling to track static/news style sites that I read in more a bookmark fashion. Over the last month or so I have begun to play around with del.icio.us to manage these types of links. If you are interested, or just a voyeuristic soul then my links can be found at http://del.icio.us/mspecht

Over the weekend I notice that Newsgator allowed me to create a blogroll based on my feeds. I rarely read a blog that does not have a feed, at least more than once, I switched. Now my blogroll accurately reflects what I am reading, including the PubSub and Technorati watchlists. The only downside is the links displayed in the Blogroll go to the feed files, ie XML files and do not really display that well in the browser, I hope this does not detract from the over listing. The other thing I have done is to expose my Blogroll/feed listing view OPML, if you are interested.

Something I did learn as just because a Blogger site does not display a feed icon or link they might site have one. By default Blogger seems to create an atom.xml file in the root of a blog, for example careerxroadsannex.blogspot.com, did not seem to have a feed link so I subscribed to http://careerxroadsannex.blogspot.com/atom.xml.

A final thought I must compare my listing against the listing of HR blogs that is being circulated at the moment.