That's why we registered jobmarley.com. Featuring Job-Rasta-Fair-I and beach-level recruiting, we expect that our naming prowess will soon make us billionaires. We are ready to guarantee that jobmarley.com will consistently produce the most passive candidates of any known vendor in the Industry. Our motto is simple: "Got a pulse, get a job; don't apply, just be".

If our candidates aren't passive enough, we'll bet that they know several who are even more passive.

The really good thing about the name is its dual nature. If times get tough, we can switch from a Reggae theme to a Dickensian mood at will. Imagine JobMarley, the ghost of Christmas past, meeting Bob Cratchit and Tiny Tim saying "Welcome to the job board for those who are willing to work for a turkey."

Now that we think of it, we could have a Tiny Tim in either setting.

Doug, a lanky well-spoken graduate of the Oracle sales team, Anderson consulting and Patrol Software, is a unique combination of smooth salesman and industry pioneer. After a steady diet of technologists turned entrepreneurs, he's a refreshing change. The idea behind the Icarian product line is that HR, Recruiting and workforce optimization can be executed using the tools of inventory management.

It wasn't all that long ago that you would get thrown out of an HR conference if you dared to suggest that Human Capital should be managed just like any other form of Capital asset. The touchy-feely '80s left us with the monicker "Human Resources" and little in the way of solving the implied problem. Somehow, people as inventory is an overly manipulative concept in the current market. It's a shame that the remarkable tools used around the rest of the organization have gone unnoticed in HR because of this semantics question.

Icarian aims to solve the problem. Merrit is the kind of guy you'd bet on. While research intensive, the technology isn't rocket science anymore.

So, we said, in our usually provocative way, "There's no such thing as the Internet, Doug". Quick on the uptake he replied, "I think you mean that domain expertise makes vertical markets so different from each other that they don't really overlap." Good answer.

Then we tried to stump him with our normal question about highly ambitious HR systems..."How do you figure out that someone can fit into the job without any of the top level skills required by the stupid requisition?" Doug told us about the inventory screening processes and "analystics" that are at the core of a fully deployed suite of Icarian tools. We were tremendously impressed.

The nutshell? If you have a complex workforce optimization task and are scrambling for answers that could be proactive, talk to Icarian. They are asking the right questions.

As Dorothy said to Toto, "We're not in Kansas anymore."

According to Reuters:

Shares of Atlanta-based Coca-Cola have tumbled 10 percent since the world's largest beverage company announced on Wednesday it would cut about 6,000 jobs from its operations worldwide -- 2,500 of which will occur at the company's headquarters. The job cuts are intended to help the beverage giant trim its annual expenses by about $300 million.

The market, in its patient, bottom line way, is telling Coke that there is a labor shortage. Performance problems in a labor shortage are caused by one of two things: bad management or decaying markets. People, the only meaningful asset that companies have to play with, are becoming increasingly valuable. So, if you get rid of a bunch of them, your value drops.

Coke was the first company to get blindsided by this change in reality. There will be more. The next wave of management attempts to solve flagging stock price performance will concentrate on Recruiting and workforce optimization. It will mark the ascension of the next round of corporate leadership.

Oh, and Delta Airlines is doing it for their 70,000 employees.

While the programs could be executed as typical company giveaways, we're most excited about their potential as recruiting and retention applications. With 80% penetration, the company will begin to have the momentum required to really harvest the capacities of their workforce. In a single move, Ford and Delta have extended the definition of the corporate boundary to include friends and family, the basic referral network.

We hope that the announcement serves as an industry wakeup call for our narrowly conceived ERecruiting universe.

While our tools and techniques focus on channeling the flow of material from outside sources into the internal resume database, a radical new market is emerging as companies transform themselves into communities. The companies, in the process, create large new markets for recruiting and workforce optimization. While we've never believed that lexicon based systems (Leaders Online, Eployment, Resumix) have any intelligent place in the public markets, we're certain that they have a long life ahead of them as a component part of these emerging universes.

Right before our eyes, the time honored definitions of what is and isn't a company are changing. Driven, at their root, by demographic shifts that seriously threaten the long term viability of the core enterprise, our customers are, as usual, changing faster than we are. That's a surprising statement, given the Internet speeds of change we hear so much about.

The race has hardly begun. In the process of trying to explain to customers how well products will serve them, we've begun to lose sight of their changing requirements.

So, what does a company like Ford need in the "Intranet" that reaches all 350,000 employees?

• An automated referral system that includes a tie into payroll for accounting purposes and a module that can be placed on each of the 300,000 or so websites that will emerge as employees become web savvy.
• A method for delivering job postings to employees who have indicated a desire to grow.
• Training distribution that monitors performance and completion.
• Hosted outsourcing services (in the event that plant shutdowns become a financial necessity).
• Supply chain integration for recruiting purposes.
• At-home access to recruiting tools for employees of the various staffing organizations around the company.
• Among others