Recruiting Technology Is Not Flat
While reading Thomas Friedman's best-seller, The World Is Flat, this past week, I came across a passage that I found to be very relevant to the recent emergence of new recruiting tools and technology. According to Friedman, "Introducing new technology alone is never enough. The big spurts in productivity come when a new technology is combined with new ways of doing business."( @6 x' `9 L" U- C
I'm a recruiting technology geek, and have been an early adopter of new and exciting tools such as Jobster, ZoomInfo, LinkedIn, Simply Hired, Indeed, and others. For the uninitiated, here's a rundown of these: 1 \1 h8 i5 m+ ~2 `( ?9 B
) _6 p$ t7 t8 |4 ^Jobster: a constantly evolving tool that allows recruiters to deliver job information to targeted audiences via a variety of means. Its job board aggregator allows job seekers to find jobs posted across the Web and use the Jobster service to connect with people they know in Jobster's client base.
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! f' J( J: k" w8 Q( P1 `! mZoomInfo: Google for recruiters. ZoomInfo scrapes the Internet to create profiles of people who are referred to on websites, press releases, etc., and often includes their contact information. Anyone can create and update his or her own ZoomInfo summary.
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LinkedIn: allows users to create profiles (which are searchable) and virtual networks with people they know and people they would like to connect with. These networks allow users to connect with users divided by degrees of separation. LinkedIn also has job-posting capability.
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Simply Hired/Indeed: job board aggregators. These websites not only pull job search results from job boards across the Internet, but they also offer the opportunity for companies to wrap their jobs directly into these aggregators at no cost. Jobster, HotJobs, and Google Base also fit into this category, but Simply Hired and Indeed are primarily focused on aggregator functionality.
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2 A; j5 Y. Q7 h3 v: L4 h( ~7 UAfter using these tools for some time however, I've come to realize that what Friedman said is directly relevant to what is preventing the broader adoption of these new recruiting tools. And, I'm not referring to adoption by recruiters like myself