links for 2006-06-08

Jobster buy’s another site

Jobster has been very busy in the last little while trying to take over the recruiting online space, buying up WorkZoo, and GoJobby. Today they announced that they acquired Recruiting.com! Jason and his merry band of writers are joining the Jobster mothership.

Congratulations to them all.

You can read the official version of events at both Jobster blog and Recruiting.com, personally I like the Recruiting Animal’s version of events.
I wonder what it all will mean, in the short term I suspect nothing. Longer term I can see many changes. Owning the keyword/name of your industry as a domain is a very powerful marketing tool.

Will Recruiting.com become the entry point into Jobster’s services? If I had to guess yes it will, not tomorrow but over the long term.

Inside out, back to front and open recruiting

Rob Merrill over at GoodRecruits has a taken several ideas that are brewing across the blogosphere and produced an interesting business idea.

Jobster, but distributed…

Rob feel we all need to get into Microformats, Microformat Search engines, social networks, XFN (or would RapLeaf be just as good?) mash them all together and create a distributed referral network.

Great idea Rob!

Now all you need are a couple of programmers, a blog, hosting and some evangelists.

Microformats a trend to watch

Over the last year or so there has been a number of very clever people have been working on a concept called Microformats.  A couple of days ago Technorati released a Microformats Search engine, while not the first it certainly is the first open mainsteam search engine launched for microformats by an organisation.  The launch was posted by Tantek on his blog, :-

I’m very pleased to announce the technology preview of Technorati microformats search for contacts, events and reviews, and Pingerati, a microformats ping distributor to support and grow the microformats ecosystem. Microformats are the key building block, the lingua franca, that make structured information open and sharable on the Web.

Microformats enable any site to easily publish common data types such as tags, licenses, contacts, events, reviews, listings, etc. on any page on the Web, with only minor edits to their HTML. For me personally, this has meant enabling millions of people to take control of their own data, publish and update it wherever they want, whenever they want, and move it freely among services, without having it locked up behind a walled garden or trapped in a “roach motel”. 

Very interesting, and very Web 2.0.  Look for massive changes in the recruiting and learning areas.
If you are an HR Software vendor (or a large corporate) you really need to take note of this trend and ensure you are not left behind.  Couple this with software as a service, see this discussion, and we have a very interesting world to look forward to.

Your online reputation

There is a saying “on the internet no ones knows if you are a dog“, in other words you might be a trustworthy person however because of the anonymous nature of the internet it is very hard for others to judge.

In daily transactions, both business and personal, your reputation is a key component. In business it is very hard to know if the other person you are dealing with is genuine or not, let alone across the internet.

Blogs are helping but they have there limits as well, everyone is not going to get a blog. Even if they do you are not going to have enough time to read them all and participate in a conversation with the writer to determine where they stand. eBay have partially solved this problem with their feedback system. However this only works within the eBay ecosystem, what about all of the other ecommerce sites?

The recruitment process relies on reputation throughout. As an employer the reputation of the agency you go through is important. As a recruiter known the reputation of a candidate is very important, but so is the reputation of people referring other potential candidates to you.

Enter RapLeaf, an independent reputation system. RapLeaf allows you to build reputations on both a business and personal level based on feedback. One of the best features of the system is the person you are providing feedback on does not have to be a member of the service. Feedback is linked to either a phone number or email address, perfectly suited to both online and traditional transactions.

One of the founders was recently interviewed on the G’Day World podcast, and provides a good introduction to the service.

I have registered to give it a try, you can see my reputation here, or have a look on my side bar.

links for 2006-06-01

Some new tools to try out – Updated

I have begun playing with a couple of new tools that I thought I would share with you. Firstly Google Notebook is a new tool in Beta (surprised?) that Google released last week.  The notebook installs itself as a Toolbar but displays itself in the right hand corner of the Status bar, the bottom of you browser window.  A neat little notebook icon appears, when you click on it a AJAX window appears over the current web page allowing you to take notes, copy and paste into your notebook.  You can also directly add to the notebook by selecting some text and Right-Clicking and selecting “Note this”.  Notes can be organised into sections.  

The notebook is also accessible through the browser and is attached to your Google account so I expect it to be available from any PC.  A very cool addition to the Google family of products. 

It would be good to add some of these features to the Google Desktop Sidebar’s scratch pad Gadget, especially the sections as this is one reason I do not use the scratch pad.

(Update: I will post on the other tools over the next couple of days.)