Ok, now that you’ve got the gist of it. Think about disintermediation when it comes to the recruiting industry. I’ve had a goal for a long time to reduce reliance on job boards. Not because they’re evil, not because I have a personal vendetta, but because the model is goofy to me. The analogy I use sometimes is that job boards are a bit like HMO’s. HMO’s stand between the patient and doctor. HMO’s have an undue influence on the choices of the patient, and ultimately the kind of connection they have with their doctor. HMO’s also have an enormous impact on the experience that a patient has in seeking care. I think the parallels with job boards are obvious.

Enter the force of disintermediation.

The internet has made it easier and easier for individuals (and companies) to have access to the things that before required an intermediary or middleman. Used to be we paid job boards for the posting, and they did the SEO work on the job so it showed up in results on Google. Now with vendors like jobs2web the job boards are suffering the effects of disintermediation. This is just one example among many of how disintermediation is affecting our industry.

What changes do you see or foresee as a result of disintermediation?

What are the implications of disintermediation for job boards, Agency recruiters, CRM vendors, ATS vendors, corporate recruiters, or anyone in the recruiting industry?

Even better, what will your response be when, not if, disintermediation starts to affect your world?

At some point in the near future there will be a much longer blog post/case study on this thing, but wanted to note a quick mention on this developing story. We’ve been doing some crowd-sourcing at Best Buy and its getting some crazy run right now. Here’s the story.

Stage 1: A few weeks ago, I tweeted about a job we have open, Sr Manager, Emerging Media Marketing. Basically the person who gets the role will lead all the marketing that is done using social media, mobile and video. Ok, nothing out of the ordinary so far.

Stage 2: I sent @ replies about the job via Twitter to Jason Falls and Barry Judge. Both of whom graciously re-tweeted it which generated a cascade of retweets from their followers.

Stage 3: I also sent an @ reply of the job via Twitter to Jeremiah Owyang. He also graciously retweeted it, with a major difference. He noticed among the qualifications for the job, 250+ followers on Twitter as a preferred qualification. The re-tweets went bananas from there. Blog posts were spawned, some were elated with the now infamous “250 twitter followers” qualification, some were dismissive and didn’t like it, many had alternate ideas for qualifications.

Stage 4: I went to Barry Judge with the idea that we should crowdsource the job description. He loved it, fully supported it, said go. We went.

Stage 5: People talked about it on Twitter, Friendfeed, on their blogs; online. They also submitted ideas for alternative job descriptions to Best Buy’s IdeaX site.

Stage 6: A lot of people blogged about it. Now the Associated Press picked it up. As did a dizzying amount of others.

The job isn’t even posted yet.

Cost = zero dollars.

Perhaps, there might be something to this crowd-sourcing, social media ballyhoo after all? Granted, this is lightning in a bottle, but there are some lessons to be learned here methinks; a lot of them. Stay tuned to this blog here and Barry Judge’s blog for updates, and the case study coming once we’ve made the hire.

As a little fairness in competition, here’s the blog post I’m up against HR Observations, and here’s the post I submitted to the competition . Would I like to win? sure. Will I be crushed if I don’t? no. Above all, do take some time and investigate all of the competitors.

If you’ve been wondering what HR, recruiting, sourcing, talent management etc blogs you should follow, there are some worthy ones in the bunch. To see the full list of original competitors, with links to their blog posts, go to FOT’s original post.

Vote below via the widget.

March is here and my friends over at FOT, Fistful of Talent are conducting a blog contest March Madness style. They’ve set up a bracket of 64 different HR, Recruiting, Sourcing, and Talent themed blogs. The contest will run for 10 days, 2 days per round, winners determined by your votes.

Great idea, with some great blogs competing. Take a minute to go through the survey below and vote for your favorites. If you can, take some time to go to the blogs, check them out, subscribe to them, etcetera.

Its not as much about popularity as it is discovery.

Update:  voting has closed and I won this round!  Thanks to all those who voted for me.  You’ll notice the widget below isn’t active anymore, but I wanted to keep a little clip up of the final totals. (Evernote clipping rocks for grabbing images quickly by the way – hat tip to Shally for that one)  Thanks to FOT, and those who voted.

Ok, Chatcatcher hasn’t gotten the same publicity as the first two. Also, Shannon Whitley, (@swhitley) Chatcatcher’s creator isn’t an online giant on the order of the first two. However, stay with me here, there’s a good reason I include Chatcatcher in the same sentence.

The first two facilitate site integration with two of the most popular platforms for a person’s online identity, Facebook and Google. Chatcatcher facilitates integration with a third, Twitter (and actually a fourth and fifth because it works with FriendFeed and Identi.ca too.) I would say Twitter, and microblogs in general are fast becoming as relevant as the first two, and probably in some ways more relevant than Google profiles. Up until now, there wasn’t a good way to integrate the microblogging community with your blog or site. Sure you could push your own Twitter updates to a widget on your site, but really couldn’t allow for Twitter-user initiated interaction.

This brings us to Chatcatcher. For my recruiting and sourcing friends, bear with me this is relevant to you.

Here’s the gist. Someone posts a tweet about a blog post or site article of yours. They include a link to that post, either the full URL, or a shortened version. Chatcatcher sees it, and auto-magically posts it as a comment or trackback to that post on your site.

Here’s the rub.

1. Chatcatcher provides a clickable link to the twitter handle of the person tweeting about your post.

2. No matter what URL shortening service is used, Chatcatcher grabs it.

3. Chatcatcher is compatible with one of the best comments plugins Disqus.

4. Avatars are present in the Chatcatcher comments.

5. Chatcatcher also provides you the ability to track Chatcatcher comment totals and grab an RSS feed of all the people referencing your site in twitter.

6. Chatcatcher works with FriendFeed (and now Identi.ca) as well.

7. Setting up Chatcatcher is fairly simple. Trust me on this, I’m no developer and I got it figured out. Plus, Shannon Whitley is extremely responsive and helpful. He created a wordpress plug-in for us Wordpress users, and also a script for non-wordpress sites. (Quick tidbit: I knew this guy was smart when I found out he created a Twitter client in MS Excel. No kidding.)

Here’s why all of the above is good.

1. Previously, Tweets about your site were not connected to your site in any way, unless you somehow manually did it.

2. Now, the folks who tweet about your site, and ReTweet about your site, and the regular commenters on your posts can see each other, on your post. This is the really cool part.

Simply put, it re-connects the conversation to the source of the topic, and facilitates connection amongst the people discussing. Put another way, it brings the twitter, friendfeed, or Identi.ca conversation and co-locates it on your site, which is what stimulated the discussion in the first place.

There are other apps that attempt the same thing as Chatcatcher, but Chatcatcher is the best for all the reasons I mention above. See below for how it works.

So, recruiting and sourcing friends. Tell me your thoughts, why is this relevant to what we do? I have my own ideas, but I’d prefer to hear yours.

Embedded Video

Parts 2-4 can be found on Best Buy’s Youtube channel.

Since I first discovered what RSS is and began using it I’ve thought it was one of the most essential technologies for anyone trying to stay informed on news from the web. Since that time a few years ago I’ve become even more convinced that if you aren’t using RSS you’re either wasting a lot of time bouncing around the web, or you’ve chosen to remain less informed about your industry than you could be with RSS. The best basic explanation of what RSS is comes from Common Craft:

Subscribing to blogs and news sites is only the very beginning. Here’s a sample of what else is possible using RSS:

1. Get candidates delivered to you daily

2. Promote your company’s jobs

3. Share your personal content anywhere that accepts a feed.

4. Competitive intelligence

5. Be notified of layoffs, or plant closings in relevant industries.

6. Create a scrolling email signature that rolls through the content of your choice (jobs perhaps?)

7. Take advantage of time stuck in traffic, lines for Apple Products or waiting to vote.

There’s a whole lot more, but lets not get ahead of ourselves.

I realize the difficulty for some folks is maybe fear of technology, change, quixotic acronyms, or simply taking the time to learn something new. I’m here to help. To this end I’ll be posting a series here on how to use RSS if you’re a recruiter or sourcer specifically. I won’t explain the basics since common craft has done it as good as it can be done already. I’ll be focusing on intermediate RSS ninja and higher uses of RSS.

The first step for you is to go get an RSS reader. Don’t pay for one, there are many that are free and do all that you’ll need them to do. Basically an RSS reader is where you’ll plug in your feeds once you figure out how to find them or create them. Its also where you’ll read, save, browse, share, categorize, the content you plug in there.

Just go get a Google Reader by the time you get your Google phone you’ll have RSS licked and can get your feeds on the run. The Common Craft folks have a video about the Google Reader- yay! So if you were digging the ‘plain english’ vibe from the video above, check this video on the basics of the Google Reader.

Thats your homework for now.

Extra credit: take your favorite resume search string from Google and go to Feedmysearch to create an RSS feed from your resume search. More on this later.

Of course this is a lot of hooey.

Allow me to state the obvious reasons why.

You can’t join and consistently use every network

You can’t use every tool, all the time ( I know, I’ve tried)

Real Value doesn’t come from more (necessarily)

The irony is that by trying to do it all, without some discrimination and mindfulness, leads to less quality connections, and less productivity, less of what you were striving for in the first place.

So if you’re job and interests require that you use these tools to be productive and effective, or if you simply want to use these tools to accomplish your goals, you end up feeling a bit stuck.

In short, you suffer from Social Network Fatigue.

If this describes you then I hope you’ll see some value in the series of posts I’m working on to solve this problem. I’ll be tailoring the content to sourcing and recruiting people specifically, but the underlying principles will be applicable regardless of industry or purpose. By the end of the series I’ll have a simple, clear list of principles and specific tactics to follow.

Step One: map out all the places the digital you exists right now. Above is an interactive example of what I mean. It’s a mindmap that I’ve created using Mindomo, a web-based, free tool. There are many other mindmapping tools out there, but I wouldn’t recommend spending a lot of time looking unless you are going to be a heavy mind-mapper. For this particular use, this one is just right.

Simply start entering nodes for all the places you are or want to be on line. Categorize your places if that helps you, and also show the ways these places are connected. This one isn’t the complete picture for me personally, but it illustrates the idea. Visualizing it this way accomplishes a couple things…

1. you can see in one space all the places you are, you might be surprised.

2. you can use the connector tools to visualize how your places interact with each other and how your content flows through your network. This will be key in later steps as you start to be a bit more intentional about how things are connected and how you personally interact with these sites, push your content, and connect with people.

Personally, I’m using this map on my ‘Connect‘ page here on my blog to help people decide where they’d like to connect with me. Since not everyone uses the same sites and networks, it gives them options. More on this later. For now play with the map above a bit, its interactive. You can drag it around, zoom in/out, expand/contract the branches and the links are live beneath the icons. To see the full screen, click the red M in the middle.

…as part of a small, rapid software prototyping team charged with the design and programming of small “alpha” and “beta” level software proof of concepts?

Have you participated in any or all of the following:
WoW
LAN parties
Topcoder competitions
MMPORGs?
Do you speak C++ OR Java OR AJAX OR .NET?
Are you comfortable with Penguins and Windows?
Do you know what UI is and how it relates to the above?
Want to get paid for these qualities? Know someone who does?

Just submit a comment to this post and we’ll talk…

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