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What Happened III
(March 02, 2007) Job scraping and aggregation slowly emerged as a
tool. Job Ad Distribution companies began to replace advertising agencies. Gen X
and Gen Y began to take center stage. Experiments matured and died. Friction
kept disappearing. Employers got more and more data.
The Washington Post has been a consistent and
stellar participant in the development of technology in our industry. Unlike all
of the other newspaper players, the Post has navigated the waters with a clear
and steady hand. While there were some failed experiments in Applicant Tracking
Systems, for instance, the Post has done well because their focus has been on
the market, not on the technology. Paradoxically, that makes them highly
successful tech innovators.
For example, in the very earliest days of job
boards, the Post used supported and (we think) funded a company called
Junglee. (Here's the
whole wayback.)
Junglee was the first operation to exploit what we now call
job scraping
(also see this and
this). In doing so, they set a theme for the industry that persists to this
day. Within 18 months, scrappy little
Careercast was on the streets with its Job Replicator technology that did
the same thing.
The fundamental idea was that job boards could
save employers time and energy by redistributing jobs that were already posted
elsewhere. The fundamental technology was "copy, paste, categorize". It was just
a variation on search engine indexing but, in most cases, the initial work was
manual and had to be updated every time the company employment site changed.
Today, a lot of what passes for job scraping is actually the indexing of feeds
received directly from the job boards.
Interestingly, the basic idea had been pioneered
and executed by Jim Gonyea and the team at
HelpWantedUSA..
In order to deliver content for the ever hungry AOL audience that they fed,
HelpWantedUSA staff often uploaded copies lifted directly from the newspapers
(typed by hand).
(One source says that when Bill Warren
called Jim Gonyea to see if the Online Career Center's postings could be placed
in the HelpWantedUSA lists, Gonyea said "It's too late, buddy. I own Electronic
Recruiting." Our industry is loaded with early incumbents who stopped watching
the ball, thinking that they owned the space. In fact, one way to tell the story
is as a succession of those mistakes by newspaper people, job board owners,
staffing firm managers, enterprise software companies and applicant tracking
system providers.)
In 1999,
Junglee was acquired by Amazon. Careercast became
Adicio. Job scraping morphed to become part
RSS, part HR-XML and part job scraping the old fashioned way.
Today's job aggregators (SimplyHired,
WorkZoo,
Indeed , Jobster (to some extent),
JobCentral) take their cues from this
early history. To date, no one has built a profitable business repurposing job
ads in a context different from the original source. Although the newspaper
industry used to get furious (and sue regularly), most job boards are happy to
have their material reused by other operations. It simply increases their
customers' bang for the buck.
Reveille and Hyperbole: Veritude, a leading provider of talent management services, announced the launch of its new websites, Veritude.com, their B2B site that focuses on prospective clients and VeritudeJobs.com, their B2C site for candidates and associates, which is dedicated to further strengthening the recruitment brand
Engenium,the recognized leader in conceptual search and clustering technologies and provider recently acquired by electronic discovery and computer forensics leader Kroll Ontrack, announced it was named one of KMWorld's "100 Companies that Matter in Knowledge Management.
Geebo.com Partners with Top Web Sites to Provide Job Recruiting Bargains.
Geebo.com founder, Greg Collier, explains, "Small business owners, government agencies, and recruiters love us for what we can deliver – especially to those who are on a tight budget." Less expensive than traditional advertising options, Geebo's postings across the Internet are a bargain.
Geebo.com got its start in January, 2000 as a small community site in Sacramento, California, and now serves many of the most heavily populated metropolitan areas in the United States including San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Miami, Chicago, Dallas, Austin, Phoenix, Washington DC, and
Deep Release:
Time Magazine's article on video resumes is an interesting look at the fast-developing role of online video sites and their application to online resumes. The large Vault site has just completed a video resume contest and YouTube itself carries around 1600 resumes, some of which are funny, some tragic and some . . well, they seem to work.
Time points to Jobster's link with social networker Facebook to feature online videos, while there are other sites like 62ndview, HireVue and ResumeVideo either up or being launched.
One problem is the issue of liability. Just as some offline resumes have names and identifying characteristics (like racial background) deleted to avoid liability issues, the video resume offers up a host more such potential liabilities that are scaring some employers into keeping their job submission process in the old format.
My guess is that video resumes will become a de rigeur method of job application in the not-so-distant future. Issues of liability will be like any other issue of liability - you operate within an environment that provides protection to both employer and potential employee.
Strategic E-HR Conference
Using Technology for Comprehensive Talent & Performance Management
February 28 – March 1, 2007
Coronado Island Marriott
San Diego, CA
$2,195
Agenda
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