Brave new world of jobs galore?
Jinfo Blog

3rd April 2010

By Tim Buckley Owen

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Online recruitment services seem to be on a bit of a roll at the moment, with investors taking new interest in a couple of them and more in the pipeline. But how do both jobseekers and employers know that they’re working properly, and do you need to avoid your intentions becoming an open book? It was no less a figure than Ireland’s Taoiseach (or Prime Minister) Brian Cowen who announced the $4 million of funding secured by the Dublin based Weedle, to enable it to expand its social media platform in the United States and elsewhere globally (http://digbig.com/5bbgta). Free to join, Weedle claims to leverage social media and semantic technology to connect people with skills with those that need them (http://digbig.com/5bbgtb). Meanwhile the United Kingdom based Brave New Talent also entertains global ambitions, securing £350,000 from investment angels to fuel overseas expansion plans that include the US, India, Australia and South Africa. Founded by award-winning young entrepreneur Lucian Tarnowski, it also harnesses social networking technology, is free to those offering ‘talent’ and generates revenue from subscribing employers who create employer profile pages and foster communities of candidates (http://digbig.com/5bbgtc). Across the Atlantic, the DirectEmployers Association, a not-for-profit human resources consortium of what it describes as ‘leading global employers’ (http://digbig.com/5bbgtd) is working on a system that will list and automatically code jobs on offer by city and occupation. Bill Warren, the former president of online job search pioneer Monster.com, is behind this initiative, and a syndicated Associated Press article reports that he has the high costs levied by commercial providers in his sights (http://digbig.com/5bbgte). Cost seems to be one of the driving forces behind all of these ventures, in fact. Partly supported by the government agency Enterprise Ireland, Weedle’s goal is jobs, not profits – and Brave New Talent, too, talks about ‘reducing the costs of recruitment’. Social networking makes all these cost savings possible, so it’s not surprising that services like LinkedIn promote their own job search capabilities almost as a by-product. LinkedIn has in fact just announced a new beta feature called Real-Time Profile Matches, which will automatically match up to 24 suitable member profiles to jobs posted on the service (http://digbig.com/5bbgtf). Beneficial as all these developments may be, there could be a down side too – whether for recruiters or the recruited. For instance – as with all systems that depend to some extent on saving costs through automation – how do you know the search algorithm’s robust and the data appropriately coded? Not only that – what you choose to say in your recruitment profile is just the start. Where else are potential employers going to discover more about you? Try http://www.vivavip.com/go/e27896 for some timely warnings.

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