Michael Specht

I have been debating in my head do or don’t I post about the new recruiting.com. If I post will I just add to the hype and if I don’t will I regret not getting my thoughts out. I also am a bit bitter about the whole thing as I had grand plans to do exactly the same thing, not just for the recruiters out there but for all HR professionals who blog. But I do not have the dollars in the bank to fund such an activity, and I am just a hack when it comes to code, so I stopped.

Anyway back to the new recruiting.com. There has also been good and bad comments made about the change even comments that we don’t need a site like this, these have come from outside the HR industry so they really don’t stand up. You just have to look at the quality of the content on careers.netscape.com to see that for the industry we do need something.

My personal thoughts are listed below. However let me preface them with the revamp looks like it has been completed by the very rich Jobster not Jason Davis the individual. Although Jason & Jason claim to only have a single part time dev working on the case, if this is true they are probably reusing existing Jobster infrastructure and they should be congratulated. However why only a part time dev, is Jobster not fully committed here? Anyway now for the list.

• It is a good start
• Make content more transparent what is Recruiting.com content and what comes from other bloggers. It is a difficult site to navigate, some really important parts are not easy to find, eg http://www.recruiting.com/tools-for-bloggers
• The old recruiting.com bloggers now seem to be the “Editors” but what do they edit? Are they now like the Netscape anchors or navigators? Will they step in an provide more details on certain events, highlight interesting submissions or was that the only name that fit?
• The colours are nice, very now’ish, ok Web 2.0 but I hate the term.
• The AJAX implementation ok, not as good as I would of liked. For example search, you get a completed page redraw when you switch between searching for content and users. The sign in is a page reload.

• Voting can be done without registering, WTF! This means people can vote multiple times.  (Update : Just to clarify, you could only vote twice, once with no account and then again once you have an account.)

How can the old articles from Recruiting.com have so many votes? Did Jobster seed the site to make it look like that there is more activity than there really is?

There does not seem to be a check for duplicate articles on submission

Where are the tags?

What is the algorithm to determine what is on the front page? The most votes, comments, date, what there seems to be no logic.

If Recruiting.com is going down the whole social news path, let me see who is voting on the stories, who is voting like me, who is linking to different stories. Let’s be social!

Why can’t I get an RSS feed of the top stories, separate to the Editor’s stories separate to the stories by Category?

Personally I like the idea of the recent comments but I feel it needs to be enhanced. How, indicate the story that the comment is from, highlight if it is an Editor’s story.

Divide the blogroll up by category!

In know some of the items are a bit picky but I do agree with Jason D’s recent comments:-

The vision of Recruiting.com is to make it a place so people can visit it and see what information is available in the industry and more importantly a place where the community judges what is good and worth promoting to others.

I just wished it was for the whole HR industry not just recruiting.

Jorge posts a follow up on my post about online job ads continuing to rise.   I really like his summary:-

My takeaways from this limping rant:
Large is not a problem per-se
Niche is not a panacea per-se
Database Quality drives a sustainable revenue/business model
Site functionality and Price are two tools to mould publisher behavior
Site Functionality and content – both contributing to improved searching and filtering , may get your visitors to stick around a bit longer

This follows a discussion I had last night at the TPN Dinner with Tony & Rich (the other Rich) and sorry guys about the rant online jobs can get me hot under the collar.

I would like to add a couple of items to Jorge’s list and create 10 Tips for Job Boards:-

1. Large job site are not necessarily bad
2. Niche job sites are not necessarily good (don’t you love a how gray the world is)
3. Quality of candidates helps drive a sustainable business model
4. Quality of jobs helps drive a sustainable business model
5. The value add your site provides can entice publisher to post more jobs
6. The price of a job posting can entice a publisher to post more jobs
7. Site functionality can contributing to improved searching and filtering for job seekers
8. Brand is a major draw card for both publishers and job seekers
9. Traditional print media is not dead when it comes to job advertising (think passive and senior candidates), recognise this fact and move on
10. Diversity of methods to find a candidate or a job, depending on which side of the fence you stand, is critical to your success

A bonus one:-

 11. The use of social networking sites/features are not going to solve all of you problems either

Jeremy Zawodny, Yahoo geek and blogger received an email from a recruiter inviting him to apply for jobs to work for their company.  The email had the exact opposite effect.

Where should I begin with this?

1. You “sourced” my resume? Is that lame recruiter speak for “I was punching buzzwords into Google when I ran across your resume…”?
2. You were impressed enough with my resume (found on my own web site) to send email (with an obvious typo in it, no less), yet you felt it necessary to warn me that cut and paste might be necessary to find your web site? How insulting!
3. Your jobs site sucks. I looked. Have you even tried it yourself?
4. Why do I have to do all the work? You’ve read my resume and contacted me. Yet I’m supposed to start from scratch, search your listings, create a profile, and then contact you. Are you kidding? You interrupted my day in an attempt to get me to switch jobs. You’ve certainly wasted no time trying to put me to work!
5. I never expressed an interest in Company X.

Recruiters you are doing yourself and the whole industry a disservice if you continue to act in the way highlighted by Jeremy.  Please follow Jeremy’s advice:-

Here’s a helpful hint to all Big Company recruiters out there. Before you contact someone, try putting yourself in their shoes first. Do your tactics even make sense?