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Employment Social Networking-

While there are some limited aspects of social networking online, the tools available to the business professional are slowly moving towards a unique toolset of marketing who you are. Yet learning to grow a social network online can be a difficult thing.

 

Dating and personal related matching systems have become the foundation of  online matchmaking systems. The growing trend in online networking is pushing the toolset to smaller companies and skilled professionals who have skills and experience that is marketable, individuals who would find significant gains in each addition to the social network.

 

Why are these tools so popular?

 

Most of these services are free. LinkedIn, Ryze, Ziggs, Friendster, Tribe.net are all free services for basic sign-up. They allow you to take a social network and exponentially grow it to connect to five other similar networks.

 

What is the “next step” of social networking?

 

Blogging is a natural tool for growing a social network online. Most of the blogging tools available have limited functionality for finding similar professional interests or themes in writing styles, but they do allow you to establish a “virtual you” and connect with individuals through intellectual exchange of information.

 

What are they missing?

 

Social networking sites and blogging services are missing the creative element to effectively establish “virtual you”. Most of us are not natural writers and relatively few of us have useful things to say on a daily basis. Writing our thoughts down or creating a visually appealing entry is a task that is often difficult for an experienced writer, yet there are many “virtual people” out there that are creating and establishing huge networks on a daily basis.

 

The solution?

 

Moving to the next step. Integration of social networking tools, blogging systems, and creative services will become a key factor in establishing true online identities for people to share information.

Debates over meta-search and the online world.

I know there are many people in the recruiting world who feel that meta-search is okay and is an acceptable usage of the internet. The debate has been going on for years- I have even included two links below regarding conversations about it in 2000 and 2003.

 

2000 - Internet World

 

2003 - Gigalaw.com

 

2005- Scroogle.com

 

Here is a favorite of mine that goes to the exact point of whether or not the whole thing needs to be thrown into court. Scroogle.com has been operating a Google search aggregator for a few years now, asking that they be taken to court. Why? In essence they want Google to shut itself down. If Google takes Scroogle to court they would effectively be leveraging Google's own lawyers to define what Google and many other search engines are currently doing online. Currently the search industry is operating in a huge gray area of the law and is unwilling to define it's own legal boundaries that would severely impact the advertising media model they operate under. The courts have been lenient in the guise of the term "search", but the damage to advertising media models for pre-existing businesses is slowly, yet strongly being infringed upon.

 

As search sites become more targeted to specific industries such as Workzoo, jobs.Just-Posted and Simplyhired are with recruiting, the impact these vertical search engines have on the original content holder will become more severe.

 

Now most web browsers don't really read the fine print. It has been a long time since most of us had read the fine print of any site we visited, however I love to read the fine print sometimes. Craigslist and Monster have both clearly identified that while scraping may be accepted amongst the online community, that it is clearly against the terms of service on both sites.

 

http://www.craigslist.com/about/terms.of.use.html   8. Access to the Service craigslist grants you a limited, revocable, nonexclusive license to access the Service for your own personal use of the Service, and not to download (other than page caching) or modify it, or any portion of it, or any Content made available via the Service (except for your own Content), without the express written consent of craigslist. This license does not include any collection, aggregation, copying, duplication, display or derivative use of the Service nor any use of data mining, robots, spiders, or similar data gathering and extraction tools for any purpose unless expressly permitted by craigslist. A limited exception is provided to general purpose internet search engines and non-commercial public archives that use such tools to gather information for the sole purpose of displaying hyperlinks to the Service, provided they each do so from a stable IP address or range of IP addresses using an easily identifiable agent and comply with our robots.txt file. "General purpose internet search engine" does not include a website or search engine or other service that specializes in classified listings or in any subset of classifieds listings such as jobs, housing, for sale, services, or personals, or which is in the business of providing classified ad listing services.   craigslist permits you to display on your website, or create a hyperlink on your website to, individual postings on the Service so long as such use is for noncommercial and/or news reporting purposes only (e.g., for use in personal web blogs or personal online media). If the total number of such postings displayed or linked to on your website exceeds one hundred (100) postings, your use will be presumed to be in violation of these Terms, absent express permission granted by craigslist to do so. You may also create a hyperlink to the home page of craigslist sites so long as the link does not portray craigslist, its employees, or its affiliates in a false, misleading, derogatory, or otherwise offensive matter.

 

Monster.com http://about.monster.com/terms/ 4. Specific Prohibited Uses. (l) attempt to decipher, decompile, disassemble or reverse engineer any of the software comprising or in any way making up a part of any Monster Site; (m) aggregate, copy or duplicate in any manner any of the Monster Content or information available from any Monster Site; or (n) frame or link to any of Monster Content or information available from any Monster Site.

 

Perhaps Monster.com is a monolithic corporate entity, but back in 2004 Craigslist was an enterprise operated by a paid staff of 14 (I'm sure a few heads have come on since then). I am usually very supportive of the small businesses of the world and I find it discouraging that larger companies scrape content from them. 

 

At what point do we, the recruiting community (and the general public) ask ourselves if it is okay to walk on top of the little guy? Having been a writer and a graphic designer myself, parsing my site for information without my permission is very violating if not damaging to my efforts to create and nuture a product that I control.

 

I've heard arguements saying "but site X does it", but I haven't seen any real proof that site X is performing ethically either. As a designer, I've paid for content from both visual artists and copywriters before... so exactly how does "search" make intellectual property theft more excusable?

I'm writing in other places too...

I was invited by Jason over at Recruiting.com to contribute to the efforts there on producing innovative ideas for online recruiting. Aside from writing here you will occasionally see some articles by me over there as well.

If you haven't taken a moment to browse through there, I suggest you give the articles a good read. All of the contributors have a varied background and bring a lot of common sense ideology and creative thought to the online world.

Last night I had the privilege of having an in-depth conversation with the founders of HeadlessHunter.com. You can read some about them here on the HeadlessHunter blog. Overall- two very smart guys with a vision and a knack for what they see happening in the online world.

An entrepreneur myself, I found that many of the ideas they had regarding where they needed to go as a company were right where I like them- right between common sense workability and visionary innovation.

As forward thinkers go they hadn't formed that mental barrier about technical systems or what does and doesn't work. They were willing to hear all ideas, brainstorm them, apply some great creative thought, and move forward. In addition to innovation, it takes motivation and desire to do something. Judging from my conversation with them, I think we will be hearing more about these guys in the news when they decide to take action.

Innovation, Evolution & Acquisitions

For the past few months there has been a buzz around the recruiting world about "the next big step" and how some of the players in the industry would be making moves.

Talk about moves- Jobster made it's name in the social networking arena, Yahoo Jobs went vertical, YorZ and HeadlessHunter appeared, SimplyHired made some technical advancements, and I think that Google leaked a rumor or two about some career competition. There are also a list of other giants such as Monster.com and MSN Career who have dedicated career motivations- are they waiting to play a secret card? The playing field is being redefined and new players are coming from the shadows. 

In what I feel is the first of many- some players in this race are going to be absorbed, some will be destroyed, and some will redefine who they are. Recently Jobster was the first company to challenge the marketplace and set some benchmarks for forward thinking evolution when they went public. Now they are the first to integrate another company with the acquisition of WorkZoo.

As compared to other online markets- the key to keeping a market happy is to provide a rich number of tools that provide value added services and benefit to the client. Companies that are constantly reviewing new technology, reviewing how things work, and are willing to toss away ideology from six months ago are going to be the ones who eventually end up on top.

While Jobster may only have been public for a few months now, they are showing that they are going to embrace technology and evolve into something new. In five years Monster.com remained fairly constant, in five months Jobster is continuing to define itself.

With this move Jobster is clearly stepping into the job seeker aspect of recruiting as well as including value added services to the employer side they launched from.

Isn't evolution great?

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