Time to get wise about online job search?
Jinfo Blog

7th February 2010

By Tim Buckley Owen

Item

Online job search specialist Monster has just announced that it is buying leading recruitment website HotJobs from Yahoo!, becoming the authorised provider of career and job content on the Yahoo! home pages in the US and Canada (http://digbig.com/5bbbgb). Meanwhile another claimant for the top online job search spot, Simply Hired, has announced expanded integration with the major social sites Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter – including the first LinkedIn mashup to enable job seekers to immediately see any connections they may have at the organisations returned in their search results (http://digbig.com/5bbbgc). Even at a time of high unemployment, all this development activity is scarcely surprising. In a recent major survey of social networks, the Economist points out that employers save money by cutting out middlemen such as headhunters – and by looking at rich online profiles of candidates, they can cut the time it takes to get the right people into jobs (http://digbig.com/5bbbgd). But as we’ve seen before (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e27071), that can be a two-edged weapon. A recent study commissioned by Microsoft from the market research firm Cross-Tab revealed that 79% of United States hiring managers and job recruiters reviewed online information about job applicants; indeed, Online Reputation in a Connected World found 70% of US hiring managers saying that they had rejected candidates based on what they found (http://digbig.com/5bbbge). There’s evidence that people are paying more attention to their online reputations. At a recent United States Federal Trade Commission round table in its Exploring Privacy series (reported by the Register newsletter at http://digbig.com/5bbbgf among others), Facebook’s public policy director Tim Sparapani said that 35% of Facebook users changed their privacy settings following the social network provider’s controversial privacy roll-back, compared with a claimed industry average of 5-10%. But the increasingly ubiquitous use of multiple platforms may both make it harder for potential jobseekers to keep track of past indiscretions while simultaneously offering potential hirers even richer territory to till. Among its recent Five Social Software Predictions, for instance, Gartner foresees a blurring of email and social networking services, and also advises organisations to experiment with smartphones and consider how to anchor their collaboration tools on them (http://digbig.com/5bbbgg). There are caveats for employers too. Suzanne Wheatley, of the information recruitment firm Sue Hill, blogged recently about a global recruitment company that had launched an iPhone app for its candidates to search all available jobs on their website and apply online – all without interacting with a person (http://digbig.com/5bbbgh). ‘I can't help but think that organisations might, subconsciously, associate speed of response and technology with suitability for a particular job,’ Suzanne concludes. She has a point; if you accept that on the internet nobody knows you’re a dog, that sounds like a dangerous assumption.

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