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The number of opportunities to engage in somewhat anonymous communications are exploding. As a species, we have little to no idea how to use these tools effectively. They range from Yahoo!s chat rooms to ListBot's free discussion lists; from Usenet Newsgroups to disciplined conference boards. Chat describes a wide variety of tools with a wide variety of implications and consequences.

A recent visit to the Yahoo "Career Board" produced the following lovely snippet of "conversation":

KittyCat123: who's here?
Luvernotfiter: tak
Luvernotfiter: oh yeah!
Mo_Hammered: Any Hot Wimmen from Nebraska here?
SaraFinaluv: hehehe
Moneyclimber: Does anyone talk about careers here

Meanwhile, several large staffing companies are using "free" discussion lists to address issues that fall somewhat outside of traditional organizational boundaries. The "postings" are articulate and serve to increase the flow of knowledge through these large very distributed companies.

We've seen acquisition negotiations, conducted by conference call, that feature a simultaneous communication between players using AOL's Instant messages. The deals are more secure and the participants more successful because the negotiations get expanded to include real participation from all of the right people.

We've heard of employment negotiations that have instant participation from the candidate's spouse and the hiring manager even though the only people in the room are the candidate and the recruiter. The other players "chat" with the Principles. It makes for better, more secure deals.

Still, most of the uses of these new tools remain limited. It's going to take a while for them to really enter the mainstream. The opportunity is a radical increase in synergy. The learning curve involves overcoming shyness and learning to use more complex descriptions than the overly simple "chat". It also involves learning to distinguish the relative appropriateness of one forum over another for a particular purpose.

- John Sumser, © TwoColorHat. All Rights Reserved.

Marketing vs Technology

Said another way, being the "best" is not inherently tied to profitability or longevity. Finding a need, filling it, developing a brand reputation and growing based on marketing investment is more likely to produce profits. Technical solutions (which apparently have infinite room for improvement) end up being a cash drain. The easiest way to control technical costs is to set a limit and stick to it.

Given a choice, it's better to have a brand and no technology than the reverse.

Having a brand simply means that a potential client knows who you are in advance of direct personal contact. The whole point of brand development is to shorten the sales process by increasing your credibility. The single largest change facing recruiters in the 21st Century is the growing requirement for brand marketing to candidates.

For third party firms, this boils down to a market driven demand for specialty focus. For HR Departments, it means a greater integration with the marketing function. In either case, budgets are going up as a part of the competition for scarce workers. It is smarter to spend on marketing than technology.

Non-web direct marketing tactics (phones and faxes) require a base of technical competence. You have to be able to dial it. You have to understand the techniques of verbal persuasion. There has to be paper in the fax. You have to be able to change the print cartridge.

Web marketing requires a similar baseline. If you are moving your operation online, it's more important to have core web usage competence than it is to have a hyper-effective-gee-whizz database.

- John Sumser, © TwoColorHat. All Rights Reserved.

What's An IPO?

An IPO, as you probably know, is the initial public offering of stock by a company. The web generates extremely surprising set of results for investors and employees when stock comes tumbling out of an entrepreneurial venture (going public). Anyone who is really trying to make large, short term bucks in online Recruiting is considering the process.

The pressure to "go public" explains a great deal of the weirdness you see in various services. There are a large number of well heeled ventures, soon to open their doors for service, whose essential gambit is...make a splash, go public, get rich. The dynamics of dealing with Venture Capitalists (VCs: the people who finance IPOs) drive these ambitious teams to create services that generally miss the mark.

Online Recruiting is essentially different from most other ECommerce businesses. Most of the successful ecommerce ventures focus very clearly on targeted subsets of the consumer market. Their sales are driven by those consumers and ad sales constitute a minor subset of the transaction. Current Electronic Recruiting Offerings broadly target both sides of the equation and derive no revenue from consumers.

VCs like to invest in special technologies. Knowing that most of their investments fail, they want a salable asset after the bankruptcy. The trouble is that most recruiting processes are very standard. What passes for "technology" is relatively simple execution of relatively simple searching. So, the VCs often accept a "name brand" as an alternative to technology.

What separates Headhunter.net from all of this noise is Warren Bare. He appears to be persistent in his dedication to defining new financial models (check out their pricing) and the development of key services. We're beginning to bet that the eventual Headhunter.net IPO will be the first big splash.

- John Sumser, © TwoColorHat. All Rights Reserved.

Gooey

Over the Thanksgiving break, we took a tour of websites that serve similar functions to those in our industry. Focusing on the web's vast storehouse of automotive classified advertising, we stumbled on the cars.com operation. Serving new and used car dealers, individual sellers and individual buyers, the operation faces a chore with similar complexity to the jobs business.

The most meaningful difference between cars and jobs is that there are only about 10,000 car models in the market at any point in time. There are a nearly infinite variety of jobs available. Cars have models, manufacturers and model years. Jobs are somewhat harder to quantify. The difference is neither insurmountable nor critical.

Take a close look at the cars.com "GUI" when it covers it most complex transaction...selling used cars between individuals. (Click on the "used" tab on the screen).

Over 600,000 cars are available through a choice of five variables: Make, Model, Zipcode, Distance from Zipcode. Once a search is set (try Acuras, 50 miles from our zipcode), the service sends a user a package including data and an "applet". (An applet is a piece of software).

Here's where it gets interesting.

Each of the fields in the data are instantly sortable by clicking on the top of the respective column (including price). A search can be narrowed by simply sliding a bar for price, model year or search radius. Clicking on individual listings gives a summary level look at the actual listing (and contact information). Rather than spending hours poking through repetitive searches, a cars.com user gets the ability to manage his or her own data. A single operation downloads all of the necessary "stuff".

We think the model ought to be applied in our end of the web business. The applet is simple enough. Searches by geography, profession and job title are straightforward. An item marking "posting date" would help everyone assess the currency of an offering.

For the most part, an emphasis that focuses on improving the "gooey", ends up with skewed results. Too many managers in our industry think that the interface problem has to do with goofy (friendly) graphics. The really important issues (helping users speed their way through decisions) are better handled with interfaces like this one on cars.com. As long as the usability question continues to occupy a minor role in the backwaters, even high visibility players are subject to market erosion from teams who focus on the end user.

- John Sumser, © TwoColorHat. All Rights Reserved.

New: Customized Onsite Consulting

We've recently added Nicky Gordon to our staff. Nicky is a seasoned recruiting research professional and an acclaimed trainer. She will be delivering these customized training programs in which:

• We will explain how to make a clean move to web recruiting as the principal source of your income.
• You will receive the tools needed to search the Internet effectively including A CD with over 30 Software Tools to get you started.
• You get the full benefit of our "Advanced Searching And Sourcing Seminar" without having to leave the office.
• You gain the knowledge needed to use Spiders and Robots, advanced Search Engine Techniques, Candidate Pool Access and the development of Just-In-Time Sourcing techniques. We'll teach you the skills and tools used by visionary recruiters.
• You will get a detailed course of action; we will walk you through the steps involved in going from Job Order to Placement.
• All Examples are done Online specifically tailored for your operation.