Some time ago I said that I would be making an
announcement. Then a little later I said that announcement was concerning where
I would be doing my “recruiting specific” blogging for the foreseeable future.
Well, today I get to tell you the rest of the story.
I met the fine people at SimplyHired in October of 2004.
My consulting business was humming along and I saw a bright future telling
software companies how to make products that would appeal to the recruiting and
job seeker markets. Then, as luck would have it, I got a call from two
recruiters in the same week: one from SimplyHired and one from EA. Over the
course of the next several months I had many interesting discussions about the
two sides of the talent market fence: the candidate experience and the needs of
the corporate recruiter.
Although I pride myself on staying current with the
latest and greatest in recruiting technology, my meeting with SimplyHired was a
bit of a revelation. I had a sort of “no duh!” experience – aggregate jobs. Of
course! We all watched FlipDog sputter out and so I just assumed the idea
wouldn’t have much traction. My conversation with SimplyHired made me believe
there was a better way to do it.
If that epiphany had been the breadth and depth of my
interest the conversation would have quickly ended. But something about
SimplyHired intrigued me. Here was this group of guys who had made it big in
their last start-up and so should have been resting on a beach somewhere.
Instead, they had decided to go look for jobs. And in the process of looking
for jobs, they realized a universal truth – being a job seeker is not a lot of
fun. We can have many grand conversations about how the candidate is in control
(and I often do) but at the end of the day recruiters are the ones that buy
services, not candidates. So recruiters get cool tools like Jobster and
candidates get… well, less.
This realization made the guys at SimplyHired mad, and so
they dedicated themselves to finding a way to put the candidate in control.
Aggregating all the jobs that candidates could want was just the first step. As
I said here and
here
the real business trick is not only to aggregate all the jobs, but also to
provide services that make people who aren’t looking for jobs (but almost
certainly will be at some point in the future) interested in spending their
time thinking about their next opportunity.
Why the background? Well, recently I have been getting
asked by people why I am not writing more. The truth is that I have been
writing a lot, but just not for Talentism.
A couple of months ago my friends at SimplyHired came to
me and said “Would you help us with our blog? We want to do a better job of
having a conversation with our potential customers as well as the broader
community of people who may be interested in what we offer, and we think the
blog is a good way to do it.”
I haven’t spent a lot of time this year blogging about
recruiting and job seeker topics so I thought it would be a good incentive to
get back on that track. And so I agreed. I figured that if I was going to be writing about
recruiting and the candidate experience anyway, I might as well publish for
people that I like and respect and who will be able to put more time and energy
into managing a blog than I could.
What does this mean? First, it means that Talentism will
be getting less content, and the content that it does get will be more around
business strategy, global HR best practice and cutting-edge technology. Second,
it means that SimplyHired is about to do something really cool with it’s blog
and you can read my thoughts about recruiting and the job seeker experience
over there. And it also means that I will be reaching out to many of you,
asking if you would like to be a part of the new SimplyHired blog and
contribute your content there.
The people of SimplyHired are a great group to work with.
They are inspired and passionate about their mission of giving candidates the
right tools and connections to make Job Search fun (at least as fun as
possible). It will be an honor to help them bring their unique voice back to
the blogosphere. I hope that you will work with me to add your voice to the
offering.
Wow, SH is getting back in the blogging game. I for one would love to contribute.
Posted by: C.M. Russell | September 05, 2006 at 04:21 PM
Great to hear C.M. They will definitely be in touch this week.
Posted by: Jeff Hunter | September 05, 2006 at 04:32 PM
count me in too Jeff !
Posted by: Gautam Ghosh | September 06, 2006 at 12:01 AM