At its root, the traditional job fair creates an "us and them" marketplace with little visible room for the middle ground. On the whole, the assumption underlying traditional job fairs is that the carney mentality ("marks" strolling by booths) works for all participants. Although sophisticated job fair producers will assure you that the real business of a job fair is competitive intelligence (and therefore a third category of player), it's a well kept secret. Most carnival goers are oblivious to the deeper possibilities on the midway.

For the most part, job fairs sell hope to candidates and recruiters. Recruiters pay with money and candidates pay with time. Everyone invests hope. In that way, job fairs are very similar to most job boards and free agent markets.

To counter this underlying dynamic, Talent Labs is selling skills, interactions and possibilities to candidates and recruiters. Like many experiments, the underlying thesis is intuitive. Like many event development prospects, the process will be evolutionary. In its first iteration this fall, the event will be a pragmatic attempt to find out what works and what doesn't.

You've got to envy Fast Company's position. Rather than having to push towards an IPO under the stringent scrutiny of investors, the operation is harvesting an audience they've built for adjacent reasons. That gives them an extraordinary edge in the process.

Although we can rant for hours with cynicism about the Fast Company audience, the truth is that they all identify themselves as free agents or change agents. One of the magazine's constant themes is the development of "Me, Inc.". Focused on proactive and hard charging professionals and managers, the magazine provides hope and encouragement as a component of an annual subscription. This leaves them positioned to cover other things in the Talent Labs. It creates an environment for Silicon Valley Recruiters that is significantly higher quality than Craigslist (or its Boston equivalent). They appear to be able to execute the experiment profitably while learning how to improve the process over time.

It's interesting, we think, to have a non-participant in our industry point out the fact that the local Recruiting market can be very nicely segmented along quality lines. From the way that most analysts cover the space, you'd have to think that one job board would dominate a region or industry segment. Really, we think that profitable candidate pools can be built in numbers that look more like 10,000. Talent Labs is trying to show that it can be done in lots of 2,000.

Normally, we like to see businesses that want to make customers happy. We get a comfortable feeling from offices located in working neighborhoods. We're reassured by an executive who wants to make his customers successful.

That's not to say that experimentation or "out of the box" thinking isn't important. In today's employment environment, it takes a combination of pure devotion to customers and a willingness to take calibrated risks on their behalf. The question is, at the root, who owns the risk.

Some things need a desperate fix and customers are excited about the prospect.

If you haven't seen Fast Company magazine, it's probably because you haven't been in an airport, at a newsstand or in the reception area of most players in our industry. Founded by an ex Harvard Business Review managing editor, Fast Company is a highly influential business magazine targeted at new generation leaders and professionals. The goal of the operation is:

to chronicle how changing companies create and compete, to highlight new business practices, and to showcase the teams and individuals who are inventing the future and reinventing business.

Built on the hard work of Paul Burrowes and the early team at Westech (now BrassRing), job fairs have traditionally been high-energy networking, intelligence gathering and job interview events designed to keep the candidates who attend them in the know. With a cattle-call feeling, the center of the game was always the vendor booths. On a heavy day, it was like walking down the old Las Vegas strip with hawkers at each booth trying to persuade passers-by to come visit.

The Fast Company Alternative, Talent Labs, is designed to get all of the players into the center of the event. Conceptually, the recruiters' booths are at the fringes of the event while the "main court" is designed to create an environment in which a new form of peer-to-peer recruiting can emerge. The idea behind "Talent Labs" goes something like this:

In a labor scarcity in which free-agent style mechanisms are becoming the dominant way that leaders and professionals acquire the next assignment, recruiting is a peer-to-peer transaction.

For that reason, the events appear to make the interesting assumption that recruiters are also looking for their next gig. The goal of Talent Labs seems to be to create a momentary marketplace in which skills can be polished, connections can be made and deals can be initiated. That's why the attendee list includes CEOs, recruiters, vendors from our industry, Fast Company readers and job hunters. By experimenting with the traditional definitions of the job market (you know, it's no more than buyers, sellers and vendors), Talent Labs is all about finding the next level of effectiveness for Fast Company's range of customers.

We think it's a lot more than a simple experiment and plan to be there. If you can squeeze it into your schedule, you ought to.

We plan to fill you in further as the event approaches.

- John Sumser