New Home

Hi after several weeks of thought I have decided to move this blog to a new home. From now on I will be using WordPress and be based at www.specht.com.au. Each old post on this site will have a pointer to the new site, I have already updated the feed so you do not have to do anything.

Farewell Blogger, hello WordPress and my own domain.

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Podcasting in education

Great to see Anne Barlett-Brag caling for podcasting to enter education. Having seen the increase in productivity from my wife now she can download her lectures same day from Macquarie Uni there is huge potential.

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Success of your blog

Regina from BNet Blogs asks an interesting question. How do you measure the success of a blog strategy?

There are many items out there that can help you develop your measures. At the end of the day you need to have a clear measure for success, like when Jeremy Wright auctioned his blogging service on eBay.

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Vertical search

A couple of days ago Indeed announced a partnership with Info.com that will integrate the 100,000s of jobs that Indeed has into Info.com's aggregated search engine. (In Australia Sensis is doing a similar thing to Info.com). An interesting convergence of tools.

This got me thinking about comparing Indeed with SimplyHired, an interesting question. How does one judge the results returned by these meta search tools? Or is it just the results that are important, what about additional tools and services? So let's take a look.

I ran the same search on both tools, SAP Project Manager located in New York. Indeed returned 456 jobs, while SimplyHired had 705 jobs. An interesting result given Indeed has been in the market for several more months then SimplyHired. However looking closer SimplyHired looks within 25 miles of the location entered, I did not see the same for Indeed although their advance search sets the distance at 25 miles by default so I would guess that this is their default setting.

Indeed has several very useful features for a job seeker. Firstly they automatically prompt you to refine your search, I assume based on information they have gather from other searches. Indeed also provides several sets of statistics on the job market which might be of interest to a job seeker. They also provide a jobroll service via their published web services that allow several different uses.

SimplyHired also provides services and tools for job seekers. Firstly they are getting users to rate the quality of the results returned. While not being used now in the future could provide for some interesting personalised features. They also allow the job seeker to filter their results by company or different market segment, such as Fortune 100 Fastest Growing. Possibly the biggest feature is the recently announced partnership with LinkedIn. Which allows the job seeker to see who they know that might help them get the job. (I plan to post a bit more about LinkedIn later today.)

So then which results are best? Like the regular search engines it is hard to tell and a very personal choice. I would suggest that job seekers use both services so that they do not limit themselves.

Of course let's not forget RSSJobs, however RSSJobs seems to only search a single source and requires users to pay a subscription for usage.

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Japan, knives and GPS tracking

It seems the Japanese are getting very serious about the security of their children. They now have knife proof clothing, GPS tagged bags and personal alarm systems.

However I have to wonder about the privacy impacts and long term psychological changes with the culture based on these types of changes.

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Another vertical search tool

simplyhired is another vertical search tool that has entered the market in the last few weeks. They will be taking on Indeed.

Interestingly they already have a linkage/partnership with LinkedIn.

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Online Recruitment company lists

It seems Seek had a reasonable first day in the Australian Stock Market, which is good considering the overall market went south.

In the long term I wonder how they will perform and what impact being a public company will have on their day to day operations. Seek has been a leader in the Australian market around online recruitment for many years and has pushed the big US vendors around a bit.

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New Visa arrangements in Australia

Just noticed that DIMIA (Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs) in Australia have released changes to the infamous 457 Visa's.

I wonder if it will have an impact on the offshoring process that is happening within Australia? Or even the whole skills shortage issue.

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Lenn leaving Microsoft to join Skype

I found this interesting piece of news this morning. Lenn Pryor, Robert Scoble's boss is off to the UK to join Skype. He leaves Microsoft after almost 8 years.

Interesting, I wonder long term what this means?

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Messaging and workflow

Dub's has continued his thoughts on workflow and extended on my post around messaging (aren't blogs great!) and simplified my thoughts into an easy to read summary.

However I don't agree with his comments on HR-XML being the "new" model and savior to our messaging needs. (Again a great thing about blogs is we can all express our opinion and push forward to a combined understanding.) While HR-XML is going in the right direction the latest specifications are getting very very complex.

The other area where I disagree is XML is not always synchronous, look at RSS. It is through the implementation of web services (which communicate in XML) that we get a synchronous environment. XML (even HR-XML) by itself does not get us there. I do understand that Dub's is trying to simplify things and many of the XML implementations are synchronous however it would be wrong to assume that if your vendor says things are in XML format that you have a synchronous messaging environment.

Personally I don't see that we need synchronous messaging to fully exploit agent based computing, however it does help. A combination of synchronous and asynchronous messages overlaid with an effective workflow engine that automates forms processing will provide significant benefits to an HR department.

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ERE has blogs

I just noticed Electronic Recruiting Exchange has blogs. Cool. Not sure how long they have been there but it is still good to see, now only if they had an RSS feed.

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White paper registration!

Ok this is just a rant and I am picking on Hire Desk only because they are the most recent company to do this.

Many technology focused companies require you to register before you can download their white papers, this gives them some great lead data, which I support. But WHY WHY WHY do I have to do it everytime! Have they not heard of a cookie?

Even worse is HireDesk I recently subscribed to a email newsletter which I thought was going to give me access to some great content, lets not even start as to why they do not have an RSS feed. I got a email today around measuring the quality of new hires, I thought it was interesting so I clicked to download the white paper. Guess What! I have to register with them, again!

Now I am a subscriber to their email list they should know this and automatically allow me access to the white paper without me having to fill in the forms yet again!

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The truth about blogging

Heather Hamilton provides a great summary on what I feel makes blogs such a wonderful communication tool.

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There's more to life than just technology

I touched on the subject during my quick Jobster review last week and previously, technology alone will not save you. Well, today I noticed that the Jobster Blog provides a great overview as to what else needs to be done when trying to track down passive candidates.

Many a time I have sat with end users who start off a conversation by explaining the solution that they want, not the business problem that they have. The difference here is critical if you start with a solution in mind you are looking at technology as the answer, however if you start with the business problem and then look at solutions your solution has a greater chance of being balanced and addressing both the technical and non technical aspects.

Related to this is if you cannot implement your business process with paper then there is no point in trying to implement technology, because you have not yet clearly defined the business process. Implementing a technology solution without clearly defined business processes just does not work. Look at the recent discussions on workflow and messaging technology. These solutions have wonderful potential for any business, but if you don't clearly understand your process and clearly define how you are going to use the technology you will not be successful.

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Just updated my Blogroll

I have just changed my blogroll to more accurately reflect who I am reading. I was using BlogRolling but found it very difficult to keep in sync with Newsgator Online and as such as I added feeds I was not keeping the BlogRoll listing up to date.

I was also using BlogRolling to track static/news style sites that I read in more a bookmark fashion. Over the last month or so I have begun to play around with del.icio.us to manage these types of links. If you are interested, or just a voyeuristic soul then my links can be found at http://del.icio.us/mspecht

Over the weekend I notice that Newsgator allowed me to create a blogroll based on my feeds. I rarely read a blog that does not have a feed, at least more than once, I switched. Now my blogroll accurately reflects what I am reading, including the PubSub and Technorati watchlists. The only downside is the links displayed in the Blogroll go to the feed files, ie XML files and do not really display that well in the browser, I hope this does not detract from the over listing. The other thing I have done is to expose my Blogroll/feed listing view OPML, if you are interested.

Something I did learn as just because a Blogger site does not display a feed icon or link they might site have one. By default Blogger seems to create an atom.xml file in the root of a blog, for example careerxroadsannex.blogspot.com, did not seem to have a feed link so I subscribed to http://careerxroadsannex.blogspot.com/atom.xml.

A final thought I must compare my listing against the listing of HR blogs that is being circulated at the moment.

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Podcasting and vodcasting in education

Robin Good links to an interesting paper on the impact of podcasting and vodcasting in education. A recommended read for anyone involved in learning.

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More on employee communications

I'm sure this has been mentioned last week by someone, I just can't remember, so here goes again.

Further to my last post what happens when Mary from accounts posts her video on Google, while their terms and service prohibit pornography/obscene material there is still a large amount of content that really Mary probably does not want her colleagues in the office seeing?

What will happen to bandwidth usage in the office, will IT now have to ban certain file types, what impact will that have on the legitimate work?

Just more things to consider.

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Blogging policies

Lori Dorn points to an interesting piece by Niall Kennedy (from Technorati) on blogging policies and how employers in his mind are not looking broader enough at their policies.

Naill touches on the different disruptive technologies that are entering the workplace, blogs, cameraphones, IM, P2P, CD/DVD writers etc. Each of these "new" technologies (I say "new" as they are not really new it is just that they are now becoming mainstream) has the potential for good and evil the trick is we all need to learn how to use them for good. Most of us know that giving a tip to a mate over a few drinks that your company is about to announce something good/bad and if they act quickly they could make some money is bad. How different is that to tapping out the same tip on your blog, even anonymously, or via IM, email etc? Do employees understand that everything is tracked, have we told them? Do you even know that this is the case?

What about snapping a picture of the office and placing it on Flickr? Many companies ban camera's on site for fear of trade secrets being photographed, does this mean we all now need to check our phones at the door? Or with the rise in DVD writers can employees now walk out the door with the payroll system on a single DVD?

As I said all of these technologies can be used for good or evil, we need to educate ourselves, management and employees on how to balance the good, bad and the ugly of each technology. The good can be seen when blogs help team/workplace communication, cameraphones assist in product development or marketing, IM enables collaboration across locations, P2P rapidly allows documents to move around the organisation, etc. Possible solutions are for induction courses to inform our employees on what is appropriate for each organisation, specific courses for our existing employees we did this when email and PCs were introduced.

Lots to think about for a Monday morning.

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Workflow vs HRMS

Dubs from the HR Technology Discussion board provides a great primer on workflow.

As Dubs said workflow in HR is HUGE, I could not agree more. The ROI that can be demonstrated by an effective workflow solution can pay for itself very very quickly. It does not even need to be a top of the line (complex) implementation to get major benefits.

Dubs describes in his second example agent based computing, and according the SAP one of the next big things. Agent based computing is a very broad area and will impact all areas of the business, including HR.

I Dubs third example where disparate systems are interacting with each other you are starting to move into full cross process automation. Typically these scenarios have been implemented by the use of a message based architecture. In the late 90s there was a big movement towards a standard called CORBA, however this proved very costly to implement. In the last couple of years the growth in web services and XML has meant that we are getting closer to applications being able to communicate with each other.

The only downside with all of this technology is you must have your processes clearly defined and consistently applied across the enterprise. While this is not too hard in a single legislative environment the more sets of legislations and cultures that need to be included the more complex and costly things get. Very very few organisations have been able to effectively implement even relatively simple processes such as leave requests across different countries. You need to have a very good understanding of what you are trying to achieve and be able to document the scope in a clear manner, otherwise your projects have a very high chance of failure. The other very important aspect of workflow is testing. Testing of workflow solutions can be difficult and requires a slightly different approach. For example many workflow systems allow for escalation rules to be built into the process, ie when a manager does not action a task it gets escalated via the workflow to another manager. If the escalation time frame is set to 5 days, you need to ensure your tests take this into account and the result might be longer test cycles.

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Blog anonymously

(Via blog*on*nymity)

The EFF have published an interesting item on how to blog anonymously. The post has some good tips and some not so good ones, many are also only relevant if you live in the US which while might be good for a lot of bloggers does not cut it for the rest of us.

Again not being an IR/ER expert I do wonder about these sorts of things, does actively trying to hide your blog when you know the content might get you fired actually makes things worse if you do get caught? I guess it would depend on your local legal environment.

A final thought, it is very hard (if not impossible) to really be anonymous in the internet. So it is easier to just "Be Smart"!

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Quick Jobster Review

Just a quick post before I leave for work. Yesterday I had lunch with Dave Lefkow from Jobster who was in Australia on evangelising-type trip, and thanks again to Dave for picking up the tab.

After lunch we sat at a bar in Southbank and he gave me a quick demo of the product. Unfortunately the demo was just Flash-based as we had no WiFi, when will be get more Wife spots in Australia? From what I saw the tool is very easy to use and solves a simple but complex problem for recruiters. While a smart recruiter could probably run similar referral campaigns themselves, Jobster gives you so much more.

They have based the product on several similar ideas, social networks, employee referrals and the fact that many times your best candidate comes from a recommendation, from here the tool builds on this base to provide recruiters (both internal and external) a fantastic framework/baseline for to be build and manage referral campaigns. On top of this they provide further features/reports for recruiters to understand where leads are coming from ie referrals or recommendations and to understand how many degrees of separation exist between each lead.

The web interface is clear and easy to navigate once you have had a bit of training. You can see at each set of the process where your campaign is up to, how many people have received it and how many people have registered. Each time someone registers they end up in your talent base, and such they might match a job you have in the future. Jobster have worked very hard to reduce the amount of information you need to collect about a person before they end up in the talent pool. Another nice feature is Outlook integration, which provides an easy mechanism for recruiters to select their initial contacts for the campaign.

Reporting is a little light however as Dave explained they wanted to get people using the tool and then with customer feedback understand what was needed. Having said this the reports I saw were useful and informative about your campaigns.

Their pricing model is also very sensible and would appeal to most corporate recruiters.

My only concern is around the implementation and change management of such a tool, another item confirm by Dave as being recognised by Jobster. To this end they have begun to find top recruiters and recommend deploying only to a limited set of people so that the system gets success before total deployment within an organisation. This is a very sensible approach and if there are issues down the track it shows that it was not the tool, more the process and practices used by the other recruiters.

In the end if you have hard to fill positions and people who might fill those positions have email then you would find a benefit from using Jobster.

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I've been published on CircleID

My post on .jobs has been profiled on CircleID with the title Fitting .JOBS Into the Marketplace

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HR plug ins for sharepoint

Via Angus Logan

Stephen Huen has created a series of HR focused placeholders for Sharepoint and the MS Content Mgmt Server. If you are a sharepoint site you might want to have a look and see how they go. Unfortunately I do not have a sharepoint environment to test them on so I would be interested in feedback if anybody uses them.

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Jobs Discussion board

Joel Spolsky has just opened up a new forum on his Joel on Software site for jobs in the software development field. Like all good sites it has an RSS feed.

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More on dot jobs.

There have been several posts over the last 48 hours in response to the new dot jobs domain on both sides of the argument.

John Sumser from The Electronic Recruiting News provides a balanced view of the new domain and in the end determines that then new domain will not help job seekers. Gerry Crispin has a slightly different view on The CareerXroads, which is not surprising as Gerry was a advocate of the new domain from the beginning. Joel Cheesman provides a fantastic top 10 thoughts on the new domain as well.

There seems to be agreement that the main winners from all of this are SHRM and EmployMedia, as there is going to be the traditional land grab as we all rush to get our domains. Jason wants recruiting.job, in reading Gerry's post he views that Jason won't get it, but he should. Gerry also mentions we won't be seeing domains like blow.jobs, but what about Blow Off in the UK at http://www.blow.co.uk/, they might want blow.jobs I can't see why but there is the possibility. This land grab will result in more money going to EmployMedia, SHRM and ICANN.

Let's look at the whole global aspect of the new domain. Most US based organisations struggle to provide consistent recruiting approaches to all countries around the globe. Look at Microsoft as a good example. The corporate careers site is at http://www.microsoft.com/careers, the Australian/New Zealand site is at http://www.microsoft.com/australia/careers/. Are we going to end up with microsoft.jobs and microsoft.jobs/australia or microsoft.jobs.au? How are the subsidiaries going to be catered for? Another issue, take National Australia Bank one of the largest banks in Australia have the domain national.com.au, however if you look at national.com you end up at National Semiconductors in the US, so who should have national.jobs? Are job seekers going to have to learn new domains just to see the careers site, nationalaustraliabank.jobs? How will SHRM clearly and evenly promote this new domain around the globe, or will they promote it first to their members, primarily US based and then to people outside of the US as an after thought? Maybe they will need to partnership with similar groups like AHRI around the globe.

Then there are the technical issues. As John mentioned any tech person can point microsoft.jobs to http://www.microsoft.com/careers, so where is the value? Joel brings up the idea of the registration process needing to be very easy for non-technical people. If only a qualified candidate can apply, ie someone who complies with the same code of conduct as SHRM members, then it will have to be very easy because many HR people are still trying to come to terms with technology as it is. Joel also talks about search engines and the waiting they give, the quality of the data so that .jobs does not end up like .net. There is speculation that .jobs will mean organisations will want to post jobs firstly to their own sites so job seekers can find them quickly. I feel this is missing the take up of vertical search with sites like Indeed, however dot jobs will make things much easier for Indeed and others to join the market place.

Now if these items, and others, can be addressed then dot jobs might have value to add in the internet, unlike dot tv. EmployMedia and SHRM could learn a thing of two from how the .com.au domains have been handed out, ie you must provide a valid government identifier to show that you are a valid business. But even this process has been full of headaches around trademarks, brands and other identifiable attributes that companies have wanted to use preceding the .com.au.

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New HR Blog

Just got an email from Lori telling me about her new blog HRLori that she launched over the weekend. Her first post is about blogging and keeping your job! She points to an interesting piece of law within California and how it impacts employees and employers.

Welcome to blogsphere Lori!

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Registered for Blogtalk Downunder

Just registered for Blogtalk Downunder in May, should be good!

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.jobs domain approved

It seems that SHRM has got their wishes for a new .jobs domain. Details of the SHRM release are here.

I posted about this in December and had some concerns over the introduction and how it would operate.

It will be very interesting to see how things play out in the coming months around registration processes etc. I really hope SHRM takes a global focus and does not make this just a US-centric activity.

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The power of the internet

On Friday morning I posted about Jobster and the misunderstanding many seem to have had about what they are trying to achieve.

I also commented in the post that I would like to see what made them tick. About 4 hours later I got an email from Jason looking to hook up and show me what they have been doing. On an aside it is good to see the new HR technology vendors (Indeed and ResumeFit included) are paying attention to the blogosphere.

I did not immediately reply to Jason as I was on my way out the door to fly to Sydney for the weekend to see family. On Saturday I logged into my GMail and replied to Jason saying I was in Melbourne (GMT+10) and maybe we could hook up via Skype? Jason replied via his Blackberry that he had someone who would be in Melbourne this week. Dave then replied via his Blackberry and we started to line up a time to talk.

Exchanges like this just reminds me about the power of the internet and the different communication devices that are available. 5 - 7 years ago I could have quite easily missed Dave's trip to Melbourne as it would of taken us all several days to reply to each other's messages.

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What is Jobster doing?

The Jobster blog has linked to a item posted by Cote who was questioning the logic and design of Jobster.

Jason Goldberg does a really good job of explaining why they are doing what they are doing. That is trying to tap into the passive job seeker. He also explains why they are not opening up for people to register because they are active job seekers and not the target market.

It is interesting to see the disconnect between what people are use to seeing online and what is happening at Jobster. What do I mean? Well normally when a company launches with a big fan fair they want lots of people to register or try out their service, Jobster is different.

Having said this I would love to look underneath the hood and see what makes Jobster tick, out of pure interest.

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More on IM

ComputerWorld here in Australia have picked up on the IM issue today as well. This time they are quoting SurfControl and their particular report on the threats posed by IM technology within the enterprise.

Must be something in the air today?

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Funny how things line up

Over the last few months I have touched on IM an its possible uses within organisations, and the lack of take up.

Today I noticed Dubs from HR Technology Discussion Board picked up on the HR.com item on IM and the reshaping of organisational communication. Dubs quite rightly mentioned several of the security concerns around using the consumer based IM clients, a reason the big players looked at developing corporate IM platforms and while Lotus Sametime and Microsoft Office Live Collaboration tools will take off, and why many IT shops block the IM ports, have locked down desktops and implement State-full Deep Packet Inspection on their networks. Dubs then found an item in CNet confirming his thoughts. Strangely enough, or not, if you download the IMLogic report you will see that most security issues have come from the MSN network about 75%. These attacks are using social engineering to successful infect end users and due to the nature of the tools being used IM worms will spread through your network at a far greater rate than any email based worm.

Ian Goldberg from blog*on*nymity also posted today on some the issues around IM and brings together some of the encryption and privacy items around the whole topic. Ian gives a very good technical background as to WHY consumer based IM tools have issues. He also raises some interesting thoughts on the whole identity management issue.

All of these issues are why organisations like IMLogic, and others, have created specific products in this area. Many of the existing accounting and legal compliance standard such as SEC, NASD, HIPAA and SOX have legal obligations around storage of client communications.

The benefits of IM are the ability to facilitate multi party collaboration, presence awareness, collaboration anywhere and immediate closed loop communications within your enterprise. These benefits have significant upsides especially when IM is implemented consistently across the enterprise and even integrated into business applications such as CRM, and ERPs. But while the benefits of IM are large from a collaboration point of view the downside can also be very large if not implemented correctly. Once again IM is an area that HR should be working "hand in glove" with IT to ensure all of the legal, compliance and people issues are taken into account.

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Mark Jen's blogging policy

It seems Mark Jen (ex Google and Microsoft fame) has been helping his new employer with their blogging policy. (Thanks to Michael Fitzgibbon for the link).

Overall it seem a clear easy to read policy that most employees would understand and be able to follow. In reading the comments on Mark's blog readers have certainly pointed out areas for improvement, however that would be the case for most policies. Thomas Nelson Publishing have been going through the same process via Michael Hyatt's blog Working Smart and have revised the policy to be more readable.

I hope Mark and the team at Plaxo have taken into account their organisation's culture when developing the policy. For example Microsoft seems to have taken into account their culture with the very general "Be Smart" but that would not work for all organisations, Sun has done the same thing.

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Jobs In HR

Registered last night for a new service called Jobs In HR. Jobs In HR is an Australian based service that emails jobs to subscribers on a weekly basis.

As of Mar 22 05 they had 3400 subscribers all receiving HR jobs on a weekly basis directly into their inbox. The jobs are ad free as the ad publisher is paying $A120 per ad for a month period, interestingly they exclude agency recruiter roles as they are classified as sales roles. Further they currently do not offer RSS feeds, however after contacting Vincent Ho from Jobs in HR he said they looked at it but doubted the wide spread addoption or RSS readers by HR professionals in Australia something I would have to agree with him on.

Great to see such a service, but I wonder about it's long term viability if a job aggregator service like Indeed was to launch in Australia, in the meantime good luck to them.

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How to start blogging

Michael Hyatt from Working Smart has posted a great intro on how to actually start a blog. He outlines 8 steps needed to get going and stay going. Having spoken with several people recently who are thinking about starting but don't know how, have issues on what to write, or the time to write his items provides a nice starting point.

I would add two things that if you are looking to set up a blog:-

1. Read other people's blogs and comment on them.
2. Get an RSS reader so you can easily read other people blogs in an aggregated fashion.

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More on engagement

Terry Hill from the Performance Management Blog provides some additional thoughts on developing employee engagement.

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Can you please reengage

Keith Jackson over at Corporate Engagement quoted an interesting item from the Australian Fin Review on employee engagement, or lack there of.

Employee engagement is really about person to organisation alignment. Without advocacy, motivation. satisfaction and commitment (aka pride) an employee will no be actively engaged in your organisation. Many years ago while at Nortel we worked to a very simple (and popular) formula Employee Satisfaction drives Customer Satisfaction which drives profits or ESAT + CSAT = $$$. Essentially if you have an employee who is proud of their company they naturally want to see their customers happy.

So how do you get people to engage at work? Invite them to something that is meaningful.

Oh, and if we look at the quotes from the Fin Review it would seem that the main reasons employees feel disengaged is poor company leadership and problems with the employees' immediate manager. :-) If we look honestly at this issue the article claims that this issue is costing Australia $A30 billion pa, wow! What an impact we would have if we got a 10% increase in engagement, an extra $A3 billion into the economy.

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Benefits of HRIS technology

Dub from the HR Technology Discussion Board, points to the great usage of HRIS technology to help support single sourcing HRO.

Having been involved in something similar at Nortel with PwC, the options we have available today are certainly far greater than even 5 years ago.

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Personal messages

Simon reminded me of really interesting concept today, he called it evolutionary behaviour, I call it personal communication.

What is it? Cameron Reilly sent him a hand written email note from his Tablet PC. Having also been on the receiving end from Cam I can say it feels very personal. With the advent of email, SMS, IM, Skype, etc the notion of sending or receiving a hand written note has all but disappear. As Cam mentions in the comments on Simon's blog he does it because it is personal. Such an action removes the loss of personal touch we get when everything is online.

Now how else do I justify a Tablet PC?

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Cost of online recruting?

Joel Cheesman has some interesting thoughts around using web analytics to help develop recruitment metrics. Great idea!

Joel sees Google's purchase of Urchin as a step in the right direction.

I agree with Joel's view of both the recruiter and ATS's in this matter. Most recruiters do not understand what can be done with technology and most ATS vendors just seem to have their head in the sand when it goes to forward thinking changes.

It will be interesting to see where things go.

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Your online presence

Louise from BlueSkyResumes looks at ZoomInfo. She touches on some of the same items I did a week or so ago.

What all these services are really doing is providing vertical search. There has been lots and lots of discussions about this in the last few weeks. What I don't see is the traditional recruiting vendors entering the conversation. Maybe I am just not looking the the right spot, but I would love to talk through these concepts and ideas with some of the players. Maybe they are keeping their ideas secret, I hope that is what they are doing and not ignoring the discussion?

Does the HR-XML consortium have any thoughts? I would expect the grassroots growth in vertical search around jobs and candidates could be hurting their push for standards.

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RSS/Blog Spam

Over the last few weeks I have noticed sites like Hris Info appearing in my Technorati and PubSub watchlists. Essentially I am being returned entry after entry of advertising, which is just plain annoying.

Why am I ranting about this? Well I also happened to notice an item on Enterprise RSS talking about how a site's search engine ranking was increased dramatically because of their RSS content. We have had email, comment, wiki and other types of spam, and it now seems due to how search engines rate RSS content we are going to get overloaded by RSS spam. The end result will just be another battle in information warfare.

However, there is always the chance that I am missing something and it is not what it seems, that has happened before :-)

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Labour shortage will worsen

Hmm, it kind of sounds to me that our government is giving up on the issue, I know the words don't say this but if I read between the lines it seems that it all might be too difficult.

However, China and India will have lots of graduates, maybe all the work will be offshored?

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eLearning podcast

Just got an email from the guys at The Otter Group about their first eLearning podcast.

You can find out more on their blog or subscribe directly here.

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