Seminar In A Box takes our Advanced Searching and Sourcing Techniques Seminar and puts it squarely on 5 CDs. Full audio, video, interactivity and a regular Recruiting Software mine. Four of the five CDs include:

• A Full Video Presentation
• A Full Audio Presentation
• An Interactive, Narrated, Web-Linked, Self-Paced Seminar
• Hot Linked Handouts
• An MP3 Audio Version (for RIO players)
• Printable handouts in PDF format

We've organized the material to take a Recruiter from cradle to grave, from basic terminology to the fundamentals of online Recruiting Strategy.

If you'd like to order a copy, call our offices at or click here for more details and a currently running special offer.

Keep The Brand In Front Of The Customer (from our vault)

Why do you suppose that the major web players are pushing the "instant messaging" issue so hard? It's not because they have a soft, mushy feeling that standards improve the value of your life. It's certainly not because they want to find something else to give away. We have a hard time believing that our family relationships are at the root of the issue. If they can't build easy to use software, why would they care about instant communications?

It's a branding play, period, end of question. The object of the web game has become brand awareness, for the time being. With large portal strategies at the end of their useful life, the majors have moved on to bigger, better and more expensive tactics. Just this morning, Sun announced a plan to give away office software over the web? Why? To boost sales of their servers by keeping the brand name in front of users on a moment to moment basis.

In case you missed it in the last paragraph, we'll say it again:

The large portal strategy is at the end of its useful life.

In our business, there is a decided uptick in the volume of press releases flying around. Taken from a distance, it looks like typical 'mine is bigger than yours' macho posturing. Tiny bits of news are shredded and spun to make a particular service seem bigger, better, more widely recognized.

Some of the players in our industry are responding in interesting ways:

• By being the first of the talent auction companies (there are now at least a dozen including a rumored entry from The Learning Company), Monster extended its branding influence well beyond the media saturation bombing campaign of the first half of the year.
• Net Temps has established an interesting partnership with the GoNetwork that places a search engine on your desktop.
• CareerBuilder's MegaSearch Technology (which simultaneously searches a variety of job sites) is driving the company's traffic to significant highs. Coupled with network traffic, CareerBuilder may well be the second most visited careersite.
• HotJobs, Jobs.com, CareerPath, InfoWorks (the Works), CareerSite, CareerCast, WebHire and Resumix have all embarked on next generation advertising campaigns (many coupled with road show visits to major analysts including IBN)

- John Sumser

There appear to be two broad streams: profiling and text search databases. Slowly emerging is a class of analytical tool (Peoplesoft and Icarian) that act as a strategic overlay on the profiling/resume management tools. Unfortunately, profiles, analytics and resume databases are just enough to tell you how bad the problem is. We can't find anyone who is working on the next generation of the problem.

With deeply committed technical groups working furiously in the dark air-conditioned development rooms, it's surprising that there's no intra industry collaborative forum. After all, the distinctions between 'platforms' are nearly inconsequential. Once the 'perfect' profiling, analytics, and database management tools are complete, we'll have just enough tooling to understand that we're in trouble. We ought to hurry up and get there (and, no, this doesn't mean that HRXML is a good idea).

At its roots, the problem isn't technical. And, that's the rub. All of the current development efforts are so profoundly rooted in history that the possibility of real innovation is slim. No matter how hard you try to improve on the classified advertising model, it requires candidates who are in the market for jobs. No matter how much data you extract from benefits systems and payroll, it's still all about traditional definitions of the firewall.

No matter how hard you try to reshape a candle, it will never become a light bulb.

Increasingly, we see a broad market opportunity from someone who comes in from left field. Large scale, data mining, direct marketing companies are, in some ways, closer to the solution than anyone in our space. Attracting and maintaining ready pools of potential talent involves touching lots of people who are not in our current systems. It means delivering real value to that group and building their loyalty in the way that traditional (non-internet) networks are built. It means knowing each individual in the network well enough to anticipate their moves. It requires experiments that take longer than a job board transaction.

Recruiting has become a strategic differentiator. As long as our industry only offers reactive tools, we will be guilty of dragging our customers to their extinction. What's required is intense Research and Development in areas that currently get no investment.

- John Sumser