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?

1. Save time by automating manual stuff, or taking advantage of work I’m already doing.

2. The tool or mashup has to be easy and quick to use. One or two clicks, less than 30 seconds.

3. Foster real connection, collaboration and participation.

Now Diigo has added another reason to love them, integration with Wordpress, (and other blogging platforms).

Why should you care?

In December I opened a group in Diigo as an offshoot of this blog. The group is open to anyone to join. Its purpose is to bookmark anything found on line related to sourcing, recruiting, staffing, talent management, employment branding, or tools for any of the above.

So as I do my usual work of discovery via Twitter, my RSS reader, alerts I’ve set up or just browsing, I’m bookmarking these things to the find+attract diigo group. I’ve set up Diigo to publish a draft to my blog of the weekly bookmarking activity in the group. On Mondays, I’ll review the draft post and publish it.

So if you’re an active Diigo user you can contribute to the content that gets posted on Find+Attract.

If you’re not an active user, but just want to browse the bookmarks of people in the sourcing and recruiting industry, just follow along on my blog.

Either way, I hope its useful to you. As always, tell me if its not.

Right now the “group” consists of myself and Charles Bretz. Thanks Charles!

If you want to join, just go to http://groups.diigo.com/groups/find_attract to do so.

Let me know via comments on this post if you have any questions.

Below are some bookmarks from the group so far.

• Dapp Factory

  Tags: rss, feed, tools, mashup

• All Facebook – The Unofficial Facebook Blog – Facebook News and More!

  Tags: facebook, allfacebook, social, news, blog

• Social Media Monitoring Tools | Online Reputation Monitoring | Trackur.com

  Tags: reputation, trackur, socialmedia, trackur.com, analytics, tracking, Tools

• Zapproved.com

  Tags: collaboration, workflow, zapproved, web2.0, approval

  • group decision making tool – By Joshua Kahn

• Twitter Grader | Score Your Profile

  Tags: social, twitter, web2.0, grader, twitter grader, tools

• cli.gs: Short URLs with analytics

  Tags: url, tools, web2.0, statistics, analytics, tracking

• The Customer is the Company — Threadless — User Innovation

  threadless is the epitome of the new business models that have a strong attract factor. Great example of crowd sourcing, innovation.

  Tags: threadless, attract, open, innovation

• Twitter Strategy | Social Media Strategy | Jesse Liebman

  Tags: liebman, twitter

  • great bit on using twitter – By Joshua Kahn

• Avature | Global Recruiting Services

  Tags: avature, crm

• 99 Awesome Adobe AIR Apps for Productivity

  Tags: productivity, apps

The rest of Find+Attract group favorite links are here.

The gist of his post was “be careful who you idolize” in the recruiting world. Definitely something to keep in mind if you’re an avid consumer of recruiting/sourcing (or any) blogs. I guess I just wanted to expand a bit on that theme with a related, if somewhat tangential topic.

The stuff I write about, and train people on internal to my company, or share externally at networking events is all my particular take on a given technique or approach to sourcing. I do my best to write from my experience and hopefully the stuff I put out is useful to you. If not, why are you here?! Unsubscribe right away! Well, tell me it stinks, then unsubscribe.

Too often a vendor, or individual or company will hail some sourcing doodad as the answer to all your problems. This is almost never the case. The myriad factors involved in sourcing are too varied to all be tamed by one thing.

The point of all the techniques, tactics and tools that are out there is to find the most appropriate use for them, and just as important the situations when they aren’t useful.

Take what you read and test it, try other versions of it, give it a workout on your sourcing or recruiting projects. Improve on it, make it fail, take it apart, try to get at why it works or doesn’t for you. Along the way you’ll not only learn something about the machinery behind the tools tactics and techniques being offered, you’ll also teach yourself to spot BS a mile away. Be it from a vendor or self described guru.

One big challenge we have as sourcers is that we’re not generally conversant in the lingo of the people we seek. Even if we have experience sourcing talented people in a certain industry we’re still not doing the work that they do. In other words, we’re not exactly speaking the language they speak. We may know a few words, or phrases, but we don’t have context, jargon, acronyms, and syntax down pat like the prospects we seek.

Here’s a thought at how to peek into real conversations happening that may allow you to both learn the professional language of the people you seek, and find some of those people to boot.

First off is a little Google app called Spy. This app was created by a colleague of mine at Best Buy, Ben Hedrington. Ben’s a smart guy, you should follow him on twitter @benhedrington. Spy tracks content posted via Twitter, Friendfeed, Flickr, Google Reader, Yahoo News, and Blogs (via friendfeed). In the snapshot below I entered ‘SQL’ as my keyword, and set it to look at the last 30 minutes.

Click Image to see Spy in Action

As I’m writing this its scrolling through all posts with SQL in it. I’m learning about journals, conferences, individuals, and other SQL related stuff. Oh, and I’m learning about the people that post too. A real nice way to quickly find and connect with people in an industry.

Another interesting way to use Spy is to project it on the wall during a conference or any large meeting. Assuming you have Twitter savvy people in the room and they all use a standard ‘hashtag‘ in their tweets about the meeting, you can watch the collective consciousness of the room (or anyone using the key term) displayed on the wall.

The second conversation watcher is called Monitter. I just learned of Monitter the other day from Thomas Knoll, community manager for Seesmic. Monitter allows you to watch three different keywords and their ’stream’ from Twitter, again, relatively real-time. One really cool feature of Monitter is focusing on location. The picture below shows three streams following ‘Oracle’, ‘DB2′, and ‘SQL’ within 40 miles of Reston.

Click Image to enlarge

This takes the conversation watching idea to a new level. Notice RSS is enabled here as well.

What tools are you using to understand your target industry better?

Sourcecon Challenge 1 winner!

Hello to anyone coming here from SourceCon’s announcement of me as the first winner of the 2008 sourcing challenges. Welcome to my wee blog such as it is. As you can see the previous post to this one was from August of 07 so I wouldn’t say I’ve been prolific with the content of late. All the same here hopefully there’s some content here you’ll find useful.

Thanks again to the SourceCon folks who did a phenomenal job of setting this thing up. I greatly look forward to the challenge at the conference and hope you’ll all be there.

In the meantime feel free to connect with me on Linkedin here

Cheers,

Josh