It is better
to not be on
the web than
to be on and
not know why
John Sumser

Reality
is more
complex
than
it seems.
John Gall

It's better to
do a few things
really well than
than to do
a lot of things
badly.
If you can't
make the necessary
commitments of
time and energy
to your
electronic
marketing
efforts
scale back
your plan.
John Sumser

OUR HOME

We wear it like a badge of honor, one of the deepest symptoms of institutionalized repression. Our little backwater, in spite of its powerful potential contribution to revenue, retains the same status it had when paper recruitment ads were the main source of kitty-litter liners and fish wrappers. (the only good news is that most people don't place their monitors under their cats or birds).The Employment Industry Ghetto, responsible for a huge component of web profitability, innovation and progress, remains relegated to a low status position (perhaps someone will notice, like Tony Soprano, that the low status games have the highest margins).

Bitching aside, many of the next waves of innovation in our universe will come from a concentrated effort to move out of the ghetto.

Some of our favorite industry leaders (like all entrenched politicians) see the move as unlikely. They say "the industry has its place and should be thankful for it". Over the years, we've suggested, time and again, that our content needs to be next to the "other" content in order to really explode our value. The narrow minded incumbents are happier in a world that is familiar and predictable. They'd better start getting ready for the change.

Adjacency, like human moves from the ghetto to the suburbs, is all about living next door to what used to be understood as superior content. It's a sort of "fair housing" movement for internet content. Simply put, a recruitment ad is much more likely to work when it is next door to a subject of clearer interest to a reader. Our current model, which focuses on the reinvention of the unemployment office, leaves other content alone.

In some corners of the newspaper world, the very notion that an ad could be linked to the text in a story is a sort of heresy that assumes that post watergate journalism is the only way to play the sport.

In other corners, however, the idea that an ad should be close to a related topic, as a service to the reader, is gaining ground. The newspaper operations that are stuck in networks (like our story on CareerCast and CareerBuilder last week). As a technology, Job Scraping (as we've also mentioned) tends to perpetuate ghettoization.

Obviously, while there are several very smart, non-networked shops in the newspaper industry, the initial innovations will come from elsewhere. Take a look, for example, at Salary.com's initial entrance into the arena. By making access to jobs a straightforward question of adjacency to salary information, the company has made the subtle shift that makes a profound difference. Jobs are located in the salary report based on the user's definition of their occupation and zip code. Take a look at a search for salary information for a Web Developer in San Francisco. At the moment that salary information is presented, openings are defined as well.

Yes, it's primitive. But, as you'd expect, an industry outsider is defining the terrain. What's really interesting is that Salary.com instantaneously became the fourth largest Job Board when it opened this service. And, whether you see the importance of the change or not, they have redefined the way that people gain access to employment data. It's a powerful and very important step.

Clearly, Salary.com is the first one to move out of the ghetto.

Resumes are not Candidates!

Finally, there's an online recruiter who understands the difference between resumes and candidates.

EmployOn has developed new technology to deliver qualified candidates to the employer's desktop…people who have signaled their interest in pursuing the job opportunity. Here's how it works. Using a proprietary concept-based search engine, EmployOn will search its resume database of over 2 million to identify the best matches.

An exclusive "find more like these" feature automatically refines the search. Then the employer contacts up to 100 potential candidates with one click, to identify people who are genuinely interested in the job. It's an enormous time saver, allowing employers to review only the resumes of people who have declared themselves active.

EmployOn, already the third largest database, is adding over 100,000 resumes a month. And if an employer cannot find the right candidate in the EmployOn database, the company will search the entire Web until the client is satisfied.

Check it out at www.employon.com and EmployOn's sister job site, www.grassisgreener.com.

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