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What do you suppose they're going to think about your website when you try to recruit them? Oh look at these primitive fuddy-duddies (well, the military jargon might be a little stronger and more streetwise). They think technology is a static website.

As you may know, we've been building a new business. We'll be talking about it at the ERExpo this week. We're learning a lot as we go.

There's a new-ish product called Groove. Our rapidly growing team is spread out around the bay area. Groove allows us to share files, develop and review presentations, chat, conduct meetings, draw together, manage projects, create outlines and a thousand other things. Rather than build a discrete network, Groove handles everything and fosters collaboration. We just do the work. From here it looks like Groove is an essential component of the future. It's peer to peer file sharing applied to a knowledge work environment.

We bet that it's the shape of resumes to come.

After all, a resume as a static document is pretty flawed. If you are the kind of person we want in the new company, we want samples of your work. We want you included in our evaluation process. If we were EA, Boeing or some other company dependent on the strength of our creatives and engineers, we'd want a rich recruitment process that sped through a conversation. Hiring would be the result of the conversation getting deeper and deeper.

It takes something that looks like Groove to accomplish this. Resumes are a start. Profiles can be better (if they include a qualifications process). But, a conversation is what it's all about. Peer to peer networking encourages communication in ways that simple data management can not hope to accomplish.

We hope you'll download Groove and try it out. That will take an act of collaboration with someone else. The real trick is understanding the power of collaboration in the hiring process. The technology just facilitates it.

- John Sumser © TwoColorHat. All Rights Reserved.