Recruiting.com

Jim Durbin is hosting a webinar on Facebook recruiting on May 21st. It's going to be an in-depth, live conversation using screenshots and walkthroughs of an actual job search, from sourcing to contact to referral generation. The webinar registration

Talent Drive launches the first in a series of video commercials for their talentfilter product.

Third Party Staffing Giant Teksystems, (really their parent company, Allegis Group) is making big strides in online recruitment marketing. A post the other day on TPR firms and adoption of new technologies led me to John Middlebrook, the Director of Web and Creative Design for Allegis Group, who has been very busy building a strong recruitment marketing campaign. Early Adopters win in the online world.

Here's a request for you - does anyone have information on corporate recruiting compensation plans. This if for internal recruiters. If you want to share your plan, or a plan you know of (wink*wink), or if you are a compensation person who does this for a living - leave a comment here at Recruiting.com - Jim

Joel Cheesman gets some WSJ press in the print edition today.  He's in the CareerJournal talking about being a professional blogger. - Jim

I received an e-mail from a PR Agent for Monster yesterday. I wonder how many of you also received this? It was pitching some game to play for Monster. The game was sub-par, and I would normally link it, but the e-mail I got was such a bad one that I felt the need to respond. I'm not a Monster basher, but this just wasted my time today. I appreciate good e-mails from PR folks - in fact I train people on how to pitch to bloggers. This is not an example you want to follow.

CM Russell, who writes Secrets of the Job Hunt and Recruiting Fly, is offering a recruiter's only auction for two of his web properties. He is offering it to us first, then to an eBay online auction if necessary. The names and descriptions are in link.

A Recruiting.com interview with Jim Fowler, the CEO of Jigsaw. Jim Durbin interviews.

While at the AACE conference this weekend, a

Jay Martin of Job Serf kindly acquiesced to an interview several months ago, and when the opportunity came for a contact of mine to look for work, I sent him over to Jay to see what Job Serf could do. Job Serf is a tool for managing your job hunt online, which differs in that most of the products we see are for companies to find people, not people to find companies.

The contact was mine, and I wanted to share his response on the JobSerf service.

I had the opportunity to sit in on a presentation on outsourcing cycles. Offshoring has a bad name, but it turns out that domestic outsourcing had the same problems - and it looks like the same solutions.

I recently had the opportunty to interview Alexandra Buytendijk of the WCC Group to discuss their search engine software, ELISE. The software is based on an idea called smart search, which matches content to the right people in a bi-directional search. Sound interesting? Read more. -Jim Durbin

John's column on the future of the online world lying in the local area is valuable advice - and I'm wholeheartedly agreeing with him, and using it to further my own ends. Local recruiting allows line recruiters to place candidates (the easiest measurable result). Everything else is subjective.

A reader left a comment on my StlRecruiting site asking about whether she should add the SAP module for an Applicant Tracking System. If you have used this module, please comment on this thread. The comment is listed below.

John Sumser writes a pretty stinging attack on vertical search engines, but I think he gets the analogy of cutting grass wrong. Vertical search is a positive for everyone involved. And how is what the vertical search engines do different than what John is doing on his own site?

Hireability and LinkedIn are joining forces for a mega-webinar featuring Career XRoads notables Gerry Crispin and Mark Mehler. This is a free webinar starring to employment gurus who discuss how best to attract jobseekers.

Jay Martin of Jobserf answered my e-mail questions on his service to help job-seekers find an apply to jobs online.

Information on the traffic effect of submitting articles to Recruiting.com. -Jim Durbin

An e-mail interview with Jibber Jobber owner, Jason Alba (yes, another Jason)

The recent article in CNN Money on the worst ways to get fired was pretty good. The new one on worst ways to quit - not so much.  Fish in the airducts?  Data-erasing viruses launching Monday morning?  Asking the boss's wife to dinner?  Some more bad ways to quit. 

Gautam Ghosh gets a mention in the largest English language newspaper in India, in an article on corporate blogging.

-Jim Durbin

Shannon from Exceler8ion posts a great story on an upcoming event in recruiting blogs, (all together now in a big, booming voice) The Fortune 500 Blog Review (review, review, review). 

Business Blog Wire is testing the blogs of Fortune 500 companies for how well they use blogs for recruiting, and it would be a darn shame if we all weren't in on the ride.

Shannon's take on the experiment:

"I firmly believe that the success of a corporation is heavilydetermined by the quality of the people they are able to recruit andretain. I would be interested in knowing what companies are using theirpublic blog to promote their employer brand and connect with talentedjob candidates."

Easton will be judging the blogs on talent, the interview, and of course, the bathing suit competition.  Get involved and get noticed. 

-Jim Durbin
Human Resource Executive Online has a column on the usefulness of blogging, pointing to some well-known recruiter blogs and focusing on the HR Space.

The author, Bill Kutik, is focused on big names and big companies, but seems to get that blogs at their best provide valuable information in a conversational format.  There is just one thing, though.

Atypical blog includes lots of personal remarks by the writer, interesting linksthey've found to other related material, and -- most importantly -- publishedresponses from readers. The best ones become public online conversations aboutimportant issues. So what you're reading now is a column, not a blog, becauseit's one-way. But feel free to e-mail me.

I know it's trendy to talk about blogs being conversations, and reader's comments enable a two-way dialogue, but the reality is most comments are facile and lack any real merit.  Comment sections, contrary to what we read all the time, rarely add to the discussion (they rarely did as a percentage of the posts, and only at the most erudite blogs).

Comments have a purpose, and they are welcomed because they let the author know when someone is reading - but the best conversations take place between blogs using links.  Every blogger has felt the pain of writing a brilliant piece of commentary that lies silent, while a column on socks get links, traffic, and two dozen comments.

Not that I want to be the cranky old guy - I'm glad the HR Tech conference is interested in blogs - but if you leave a comment on this post, it better be a good one (shakes fist).

Digital Formations:  IT and New Architectures in the Global Realm: Edited by Robert Latham and Saskia Sassen.

Digital Formations is a fascinating look into the growing world of online communities.  While we toil away in our corner of the blogosphere on the topic of employment, other groups are making their presence felt in the realsm of politics, social movements, finance, technology, disparate cultures and in some cases, revolution.

The book is a series of academic essays on the growth and nature of digital formations, which are defined as the network formed by online relationships.  A common criticism of online relationships is they lack the "realness" of face-to-face interactions.  What the books presents is examples of how these self-organizing communities are a natural outgrowth of a connected world, as people seek self-determination in whatever manner it is offered.

p.12

"Community, especially as thought about in electronic terms, is a complicated matter, but we take it to mean that  configurations of spcae, organization and interaction sustain a common identity around shared goals and reciprocal relations among participants, and that such identity, goals, and reciprocity are an important and substantive aspect of each of [the] participant's life, professional or personal."

In short, what it means is online community is not a fad, not a time-waster, and though internet polls and Friday joke videos may seem to lack the importance of say, booking business through cold-calls, they are important to the community members.

The importance of digital formations are financial markets, where electronic networks have created explosive growth in trading, but only as a result of the trust relationship of that network.

p.58

"Foreign exchange transactions were ten times as large as world trade in 1983, but seventy times larger in 1999, even though world trade also grew sharply over this period."

We wouldn't consider this volume of mone insignificant, but the underlying structure of the digital formation is similar to that of all online communities.  The digital relationship, in this case, enables trade at the speed electronic communication because virutal trust has been established.