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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.

Here are a couple of direct snippets from our mailbag.

"...And future tools are not job boards. In the last few weeks I have endured a steady increase in marketing from the fee charging service providers while seeing more free to both sides services entering the playing field. At the same time, I think we're starting to see a (negative) change in our results from them. The quantity is about the same but the quality is starting to decline. We're starting to hear from prospective candidates that these cumbersome profiling systems are not popular. Sure, if they are unemployed they got lots of time to play those games, but if they're just taking a look to see what out's there, we ain't going to hear from them."

"Good thing your colleague is trying to find a cat, because there are far too many dogs out there just waiting to get snatched up..."

"Anyway, the worm has turned with the Internet. It was simpler before, you knew it was going in Sunday paper, so you didn't have to analyze and make a decision on the venue. You just concentrated on doing a productive ad. Now recruiters have more decisions to make. They have to decide among a bewildering array of jobsites where the best recruiting value is. Right now I find it a very complex analysis bordering on a crapshoot: respective costs, niche vs. full spectrum, regional vs. national players, reality vs. hype behind each site's pitch on features and statistics, etc. Then, only after making these decisions can you start to write the ad."

We found him, curled in a fetal position, snoring through his lunch. Looking through his email, as long as he was sleeping, we noticed a folder called "Do Something With This Stuff". Opening it, we discovered hundreds of incoming emails that had a variety of messages that said "If you are not interested in receiving any more mail like this, complete the following instructions." Apparently, he wasn't interested enough to complete the instructions.

Since lunch was ending, we jiggled his arm to wake him.

"You're not my boss", he said accusingly. For a moment, we were worried that we'd found a passive-aggressive job hunter by mistake.

"No, no, we we're told that you were a passive job hunter."

"Well, my boss seems to wish that I were a more active one", he mumbled in reply. "I don't usually wake up until a half hour after lunch. What's so important?"

"We're doing field research into what it takes to recruit a passive job hunter", we said.

"Oh, that's nice", he replied.

"What do you think makes you a passive job hunter", we inquired.

"Uh, I dunno", he opined.

"Well, what kind of job would you like", we interrogated.

"This one's not so bad", he articulated.

"Well, tell us about your dreams", we urged.

"Uh, I wish I had a job where my sleep wouldn't get interrupted. Then I could have more dreams", he slurred.

"Hmmm", we gurgled knowingly, "did you know there's a whole conference devoted to finding passive people like you?"

"Oh", he slurped, "That's nice. Are we done yet?"

"One last question", we assured him, "What's your favorite job board?"

"Huh?", he asked drifting back to sleep, "What's a job board?"

Somewhat unusual in her preparations, she has everything required to have a cat except the cat itself. Bed, brush, litter box, food, toy mouse, collar and other kitty goodies are neatly organized in one corner of her small living room. She knows that the cat must be friendly, even tempered, short haired, blue eyed, dark, responsive and somewhat doglike. She wants the high end of a registered litter.

Okay, maybe she's a little more than somewhat unusual.

But, we think her experience in the search for a cat parallels many recruiter's searches for the right employee. And, although cat breeding sites are even more primitive than most recruiting websites, we think that she is more likely to discover a good fit in her hunt for a cat than she would in a similar hunt for an employee.

Temperament, behavioral learning and other soft qualities have been elusive components in the online recruiting game. By focusing on already existing data, the industry has done itself a disservice. While you'd expect that there would be an instant and interesting relationship between the solidly established selection and assessment testing industry and the job board crowd, science simply doesn't seem to be the issue. There are companies out there who provide well established cultural fit assessments and clear 'soft quality' screening with 30 years of scientific validation. They simply aren't part of our universe just yet.

Our cat fancier friend, who will spend about $1,000 on the right candidate, is likely to get a good fit. Our recruiting friends will have to do weeks worth of extra work to achieve the same recruiting results.

As we adjust to the fact that labor shortages are a permanent phenomenon, major shifts in mindset will begin to dominate the market. Unfortunately, those changes will be driven by painful public failures of companies whose labor shortages drive poor economic performance. It's simple ... growth is driven by the number of available people. We know of a number of companies who have 20% of their desks unfilled. In the short term, staffing problems create a very negative spiral of morale problems that lead to attrition increases followed by more staffing problems.

It was easier in the old days.

In the late 1970's, the old Personnel Department (long a bastard stepchild of accounting) was renamed "Human Resources". The theory was that people were a company's ultimate capital resource and should be managed accordingly. In retrospect, nothing hurt the profession more than the name change.

During that time, the baby boom was entering the workforce with the usual repercussions of a large population wave. The boomers trampled down existing boundaries and occupied every available crevice in the organization. HR became the complaint department, the training department, payroll and benefits, recruiting and organizational development all rolled into one unwieldy organism.

It really didn't matter that the very organization of HR forced it to mismanage Human Resources. There were so many people willing to do just about anything that mistakes were easily covered. No one ever suggested that HR be measured against typical business metrics (like opportunity cost for missed hires, sunk cost for bad hires or return on investment for screening quality). The most basic financial element of recruiting, cost-per-hire, is a fluff number without a full recognition of the value of company time and expense.

All of these excesses were possible because labor was in a surplus position.

In order to manage shortages effectively, very different thinking is required. In spite of the damage done to the concept, people really are the organization's most important asset. The tools that mine, cultivate, repackage, maintain, refresh, identify, track, lubricate and retain these assets are just starting to be developed.

They don't look much like Job Boards.