Remember blog moved!

Remember my blog has moved to http://www.specht.com.au/michael, while the blog has moved the feed has stayed the same.

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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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