The Shift

...personal concierge services; on-site post office; on-campus running track, volleyball court and soccer field; an employee crisis hotline; a one-month sabbatical every six years of employment; on-site daycare; flex time; job sharing; telecommuting; stock options; bonuses; PalmPilots and Nerf toy wars.

Associated with these pieces is an overly short look at The Online Job Hunt that features the following notion:

...who has time to comb through all this career info (unless, of course, you're unemployed)?

It's (very slowly) dawning on us that the world now has a place for PR specialists who focus exclusively on our market. From where we sit, PR in the Electronic Recruiting Marketplace is a very mangled art. We're certainly deluged with half-baked notes from services who claim to be the biggest, the best, the newest and so on. Like most beginning entrepreneurial efforts, the announcements and bulk mail are timed to coincide with product launch.

Effective Public Relations isn't about writing and shipping great press releases (although that certainly is a fundamental skill). It's about developing relationships that make journalists successful (does this have a familiar ring?). The launch of your product is not noteworthy to someone reporting about this area. His or her deadline is much more interesting. How he or she gets the next raise, promotion or award is even more interesting

The ZD Net Career Rescue Kit (a part of the suite of articles described above) made us think about all of our friends and associates who must read pieces like this and begin the chant of sloppy PR people all over the world..."Those "big" guys have an unfair advantage." Well, of course they do. They were here first (for the most part). Writing that advantage off as a marketplace given is a sign of sloth.

The way solid PR works in other areas is that the person in charge of press relations builds relations with the press. When you have visible reporting landmarks like ZDNet, the trick is to have the editors and reporters owing you favors. Currently, most of the folks in our business play the game the other way around (and fail). A motivated manager of an online employment service, recruiting firm or HR department would see the opportunities missed as target definition. On the internal checklist would be the name of the editor; the name of the piece; the results of the phone call that asks "How often do you write these things?"; and, the plan to have the right information in the reporter's hands for the next article.

For a little more history: