May 2006 - Keywords, metatags and the long tail of recruitment

A long time ago the late Mike Dixon, who originated this column, synthesised his chief concern week in and week out as the business of putting round pegs in to round holes.

I can’t think of a simpler way of expressing the prime role of recruitment. Yet, in spite of big strides in technologies for the sifting and processing of applications, most of the industry, with the exception of headhunting, remains focused on filling jobs from the ranks of hopeful contenders.

The typical online job board, for example, relies heavily on its mass of job hopefuls maintaining their CVs that can be searched by employers.

But how do you reach people who are good at their jobs and happily in work, spending little or none of their time scanning job advertisements? The search industry was founded on the ability of its researchers and the contacts and industry knowledge of individual headhunters to find, then prize out executives from their posts to undertake senior jobs elsewhere.

Imagine if that kind of relationship-based process could be captured in a web-hosted system that exploits the extended reach of individual networks. Just think of the times, when asked if you have the answer to a particular problem, you have said: ‘No, but I know someone who does’? These are the principles behind Jobster.com, a Seattle-based business that has just established an office in the UK.

It took a while for my conversation with Jason Goldberg, chief executive (called chief jobster on his calling card), to get around to the web service. He happened to mention that he had worked in the White House during the Clinton administration so I just had to ask.

“Yes West Wing did reflect reality except the five or so characters in the TV series represent maybe 40 or 50 in reality. I was working 100-hour weeks for six years,” he says. In the last two years of his time there he was senior aid to Erskine Bowles, the then White House chief of staff. That meant starting work at 5 am to prepare briefing notes for the 7 am senior staff meeting after leaving work every night about midnight.

“There were meetings all day so you had to sit down at night to get the work done,” he says. From the White House he went to Stanford Business School to “recharge my batteries”, then AOL before joining T-Mobile where he helped to establish it’s Wi-fi service. It was there, when staffing up his project team, that he first encountered the difficulties of recruiting people.

There was no shortage of CVs for jobs. In fact there were thousands to choose from for every advertised post. “But most of these were the desperate unqualified people posting their CVs where they can. I wanted people already doing work, not looking for work. I wanted those who were the best at their particular jobs,” he says.

He sent out notes to people he knew inside and outside the company, asking if there was anyone they might know who would be suitable for one of his openings. Tapping this network that broadened through the additional networks of others, he filled every job.

Jobster, the online business he founded just two years ago, is designed to replicate this same system. If the first generation of online job boards has been engaged in getting jobs and CVs online, the next, he believes, must focus on matching the needs of employers with individual talents and aspirations.

Signing up for the service, it did not at first seem very much different from other online sites. But the use of metatagging –where you add key words describing your various interests, skills and experience – allows you to find other people on site with the same interests. A new feature lists various interest groups and forums where like-minded or similarly skilled people can contact each other. One, for example, is called “China human resources”.

Building up such site networks can help applicants in the long term. But it is the features that subscribing employers can use that marks this service out from many of its competitors. One subscriber, PacifiCare, a US-based health plan issued invitations through the programme asking its employees, their friends, family and other contacts to join its own “talent network”. Within one month this network extended to 10,900 members.

Using Jobster’s online advertising campaigns PacifiCare could reach speciality groups within its own business as well as potential (but passive) candidates outside the company accessed through its network. Some 95 per cent of some 141 prospective candidates initiated through its new system came from referrals.

In a paper published during the 1960s, Mark Granovetter, a Stanford- based professor, referred to the dynamics of social connection in job search as “the strength of weak ties.” He found that many job referrals came not from people in an immediate network, but among those linked in to the network, sometimes quite tenuously, through individual members.

Now companies are building their own talent networks that are extending far wider than a company’s own employees. The Jobster system for example, can keep tabs on all the people who might have finished second for specific posts, allowing recruiters to get back to them for future openings. In the past such people were often lost to human resources departments after a job had been filled.

In the face of new services like this, the headhunting industry is going to need to sharpen up its practices. While many on-line services have been feeding what has been more of a commodity market in the past, Jobster is starting to feature higher level management jobs and has already filled various vice-president posts in the US.

“An employer may give a job to a search firm to find someone. The headhunter might talk to 50 people and produce one candidate. At Jobster all the information from those 50 contacts would be retained for the client company,” says Mr Goldberg.

Another facet of this kind of offering is its ability to exploit what Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine, has called the “long tail” – outlined in depth in a forthcoming book, The Long Tail to be published by Hyperion in the summer. This is the ability, using search engine principles, to reach an entire market, including all the niche players. In the jobs market these are people with specialist interests who may be vital to a company that previously would have been unable to find them.

Internet technologies that can access this so-called long tail at minimal cost are already revolutionising the music and publishing sectors. But there is more to come and the jobs market, where every member is an individual, is the perfect medium for these new approaches.

The recruitment market is about to be turned on its head. If talent becomes more visible then so will competition. What are the implications for the best people? How will they manage demand for their services? Will companies be able to employ people in the way they have done in the past, or are we going to see an increase in “guns for hire” and binding contracts? What the football industry calls the “tapping up” of players is going to spread elsewhere.