Years after doing my part at TMP Worldwide and scurrying in the monolithic entity now known as Monster.com, I’m amazed to see an industry such as recruiting really hasn’t seen the options available to it as a whole. Some recruiters have developed a personal insight to online strategies that work for them, however the industry has not grasped the online world yet.
A few companies are trying to change this by developing new ways to sift through the resume spam and offer methods of uniting unique individuals with the right opportunities. For the longest time this has been the task of recruiters and headhunters who fought over high percentages for mid and senior level candidates. This was a high stakes game with some professional headhunters asking 20-40% of the salary they were recruiting for.
The latest competitor is Jobster- a growing technology company in Seattle that is trying to motivate the recruiting world into a new method of online recruiting. They have an extremely easy to use system that allows people to spread buzz about an open position, allowing recruiters to map out and identify individuals in a social network that act as focal points for skilled candidates (the so called “people who know people”). The system fills the exact need to target the social network and gain access to quality candidates, but ultimately the high pay-off found in headhunting and corporate recruiting is lacking. Whether or not the Jobster system will flourish or not depends on if they can provide a benefit to each person in the chain to forward the opportunity to someone further down the line. You can read more about them on the Jobster blog.
Bloggeropoly is another site that is trying to define a niche. In relation to only professional bloggers, they are defining a niche market and providing a way for those individuals to find opportunities. Other blogging sites have targeted other recruiting markets, however Bloggeropoly is the first I have seen that is trying to define a market and then grow it. As new career fields emerge revolving around the online world, such niche sites will be absorbed and restructured into larger markets that bring similar markets together.
Going back to Monster.com- they too have established a blog to test the waters and see how far the blogging market can take them. By reviewing the Monster.com site in total you can quickly see that they are quickly fishing into new creative markets as the old model leans more and more towards resume spam. I would typically commend this type of creative thinking, however Monster seemingly has taken the shotgun approach at venturing into a whole line of affiliated business strategies for it’s future plans.