Digital Recruiting

Taking a little issue with LinkedIn believeing their own hype - Social Recruiting Summit

So for those of you who don't follow @mattalder on twitter (or work in whatever corners of Barkers Matt's cheery demeanor brightens each day, or belong to his close family and are in regular contact with him) you won't know that he's currently hobnobbing with some of the great and most connected of digital recruitment world at the Social Recruiting Summit  - being held at the uber webcool venue that is google HQ.

Anyway - as part of the stream of tweets coming out of google HQ (which, as I write this with the day only just starting, has me thinking that it won't be long before twitter falls over as a direct result of this event!) Matt sent this:

"accuracy of personal info when user has more than 10 connections better than a resume, people don't lie in public" RH #socialrecruiting

Now the RH he references is Reid Hoffman the founder of LinkedIn. And it got me thinking - yes they flippin well do! Certainly in my even limited experience it doesn't really prevent lying. But what worries me most is that encouraging naivety through misguided statements as above perhaps gives a greater false sense of validation to a person's profile and therefore any potential mistruths within.

I believe that as humans we're generally pretty polite to each other (in a "smile and say nothing" as opposed to "open and engaging" kind of way), particularly on a business level. So even if you click on a LinkedIn profile to read someone embellishing themselves to something unrecognisable from that which you know was the role they're describing, sometimes only discernible from the dates matching up with when you worked alongside them, would you really take steps to try and get that changed? And actually - for that matter - what steps can/would/could you take?

I recall instances where people have laughed our loud (yeh - really - not even 'LOL'd, but real laughter) having read what someone has said they've done or been responsible for on their Linkedin profile.

And then there's the validation of the profile "truth" - the recommendations from other people. It's just so, well, easy to ask a bunch of people to say nice things about you being pretty safe in the knowledge that they'll either ignore your request or be nice in the hope that you might reciprocate, perpetuating the flow of banality passing back and forth, with people so keen to scratch each others backs the true value of a reference is all but lost.

Now don't get me wrong - perhaps I'm just to polite (no - really!). I mean I took my profile off facebook because I just didn't like denying "being friends" to people I didn't know or even when I did wasn't particularly friendly with over 20years ago. Perhaps it's just me and I have social issues that transcend into social media. But I feel that Mr Hoffman has perhaps been supping a bit too much of his own Venture Capital PR laden spin-juice and is starting to believe his own hype.

I have no problem giving a reference about someone - did so quite recently as it goes - but that's when I'm asked in confidence to give my honest opinion. Integrity means different things to different people for sure, and there's nothing stopping me spouting banality in a private response to a reference check either - particularly if you wouldn't mind that person moving on from their current employ - but in social space I think the danger of that happening is even greater, so to start giving a greater level of credibility to what someone has made up about themselves being true just because "it's out there for all to see and no-one's contradicted it" I think is naive in the extreme.

LinkedIn is a great background check for starters, a living CV if you will - hell, we've even built integrating features for it into the ATS we've built (sorry for the shameless plug ;) - but to think that "people don't lie in public" is just plain delusional. Has Mr Hoffman never heard of Politicians?!!!! They're like us, just more so.

Workthing+ - what I saw

With the recent launch of Workthing+, the “is it right to charge candidates?” debate was certainly re-ignited (read some of it here on Recruiting Futurology). I wanted to step a little away from that particular cut and thrust and, having tried to give it a bit more time to look at all that’s on offer, give my take on the Workthing+ offer itself. It probably is worth stating for the record though that I have no problem with anyone charging for a service, whatever that may be - I actually kinda prefer that sort of transparency because it allows you to make an informed decision about the value for money you receive, and because you’re paying you are more bought into realising the full benefit of any facility – in short, putting more onus on you to make it work for you.

OK – to the site/facility. My first observation is that there’s a hell of a lot they’ve bundled in. Loads of good stuff. From psychometric tests to a job seekers wiki/forum, to CV builders and activity planning. It’s all pretty nicely set out too (although some of the interface/navigation needs to have some “rough edges” smoothed – that’ll come with feedback and bedding down though), and whilst it’s hard for me as a non-job seeker to give the time and dedication necessary to really use all the facility to test what works for me and what doesn’t, I take my hat off to the boys and girls at Trinity Mirror Digital Recruitment (TMDR) for what they’ve got in place for launch.

If I’m going to be picky I’d have to say that I’d like to have seen more rich media throughout (videos and the like) to really engage the user, elements that would help establish a richer brand personality. The functional rather than experiential approach, I might even go as far as to say “flatness”, is typified by the home page “animated” element that would have been infinitely better had it a voiceover audio streamed with it – but all of this is easy to enhance and I’m sure is on a to-do list somewhere at Workthing+ HQ.

But there was one resource that I felt they’ve missed a trick by not making a consistent element within their own site. They have the facility to have your CV reviewed (a crucial part of the full service offer), but accessing that bounces you to a 3rd party site which kinda breaks my "in-site experience". It got me starting to wonder whether a 3rd party was suddenly going to start pitching me about writing my CV from scratch having already handed over my sign up money. Don't get me wrong - it's far far better to have it than not to have it (however broken it makes my journey), but if Workthing+ is setting up as a one-stop-shop then I feel it needs to look like that in every sense.

But all that said – I applaud the team at TMDR for stepping beyond ‘same old same old’ within the job board market. They have created something that I found to be very comprehensive and certainly doesn’t do the Workthing brand anything but good IMHO.

And one thing I particularly like, in a sad “I’ve clearly been hanging around this industry for far too long” kinda way, is the fact that Workthing started off all those years ago as a site that was intended to be an online careers advisory service first and a job board second. Over the years that got diluted as whoever owned it went for the mainstream “job board business model” – how wonderfully retro for Workthing+ to have effectively come full circle with TMDR, all be it with a changed business model that better reflects how the Internet has evolved over that time. Some good ideas just need time and business belief to prove themselves, here's hoping Workthing+ is given that second time around.

Potential tsunami or ripple? Google signal the WAVEing goodbye of Twitter

Global recession or not, the pace of internet technology development waits for no economic cycle it would seem. Recently google have announced their latest project – something that’s potentially so big they’ve broken with their usual “release it in beta & then keep working on it” approach and have started drawing attention to it months before it’ll be ready for public release. Google Wave promises to be a “new tool for communication and collaboration on the web, coming later this year”.

Twitter killer? Certainly looks like to me. It’s gonna dent the hell out of FaceBook & other such platforms too you’d have to bet.  So what is Wave – well in their own words:

A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.

A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.

Here's how it works: In Google Wave you create a wave and add people to it. Everyone on your wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web. They can insert a reply or edit the wave directly. It's concurrent rich-text editing, where you see on your screen nearly instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your wave. That means Google Wave is just as well suited for quick messages as for persistent content — it allows for both collaboration and communication. You can also use "playback" to rewind the wave and see how it evolved.

And here’s the video of it being launched

you can find all of this and more (including signing up to be alerted when it is launched) at http://wave.google.com/

It is of course pretty scary if you let yourself think about how much more of the “conversation” & our data this will put within the google domain – and you have to wonder how anyone can now stop them becoming the MegaCorp of many sci-fi nightmares that humans eventually have to rise up and rally against – but right here right now I take my hat off to the visionary and mega clever people at google and pray that the ATS market is way too small, for a few years at least, for them to bother knocking out a killer beta app for that! *Gulp*

☺

The end of Advertising agencies as we know them

This is pretty much a completely lifted article by Sean Carton posted on ClickZ.com, but I just thought it was so well put that I wanted to paste it across. I have taken the liberty of amending it in a few places to make it more UK recruitment industry relevant (talking about TV ads isn't really us), but I think the parallels are so striking overall it holds up. See what you think (oh - and there are some great posts linked to from the article too - so give yourself 15 minutes, get a coffee and have a good read).

The end of Advertising agencies as we know them

Do we really need advertising agencies anymore? Are we witnessing the great "reboot" of the advertising industry hastened (but not caused) by the current recession?

It's pretty obvious to any reasonable person watching the tens of thousands of layoffs in the industry along with the simultaneous implosion of the newspaper industry that the ad biz as we know it is in serious trouble. Couple that with the ongoing decrease in advertising spending along with new studies (such as this one from Microsoft) that predict that the Internet will overtake TV in 2010, and it's clear that advertising as we've all grown to know it is on the way out.

I'm not predicting the death of advertising. That's baloney. If anything, we're witnessing the rebirth of an entire industry that's going to expand in ways we've never thought of before -- especially if we expand our concept of what advertising means. And we'd better. Before we blow it like the newspaper industry has.

To understand the tectonic shift we're in the midst of now, it's helpful to remember where ad agencies came from. Originally advertising agencies were "agents" for newspapers, placing ads produced by clients in newspapers. In 1877, the J. Walter Thompson Co. figured out it could sell more advertising space if it created the ads instead of relying on clients to create ads. The modern agency was born.

As new media developed, the advertising agency adapted. Radio and TV required new creative skills and new people. Agencies kept growing and adding more overhead. Agencies became more unwieldy, more rigid, and more set in their ways.

Then along came the Internet and all that changed.

It took a while, but today advertising is less about the big colourful press ad campaigns and more about producing measurable results across a host of media and channels. Social media, search marketing, and online direct response (with its associated need for candidate-relationship management and other data-handling technologies) have required new skills and and a new way of thinking.

And that's the crux of the issue. Advertising as we've known it has always been about an "interrupt" model that requires candidates to pay for content by sifting through pages of classified print ads. It's been about grabbing and holding attention in a linear way because that's how media worked.

It doesn't work that way anymore. And neither does the advertising agency as we know it.

Why? The full-service monolithic agency model worked fine in a world where there were a small number of national newspapers, a local/regional champion or two and perhaps a niche industry magasine too. It doesn't work when you have to deal with dozens of media channels and a plethora of options within each that change on a nearly daily basis. New technologies pop up (social networking, Twitter, online video, etc.) and new skills and new thinking are needed to deal with them. Large organizations with large payrolls, hierarchical structures, and well-defined (and well-defended) areas of expertise can't possibly hope to make any money when they have to staff themselves with a constantly expanding cast of experts to deal with new media challenges. Add to that a compensation model based on a world that's long gone (retainers and media commissions) and the agency model we've all grown up with starts to look like a relic of the past. Turmoil in the industry provides proof.

So what to do? Simple: explode the idea of the monolithic agency. Get rid of the concept that only an agency that does everything can possibly create and manage large campaigns. Look for more flexible and fluid models that expand and contract as needed, bringing in new expertise when needed and ditching it when it's not. Think distributed, not centralized. Think "collective," not "company."

As more people get laid off and can't find jobs at other agencies (who are also laying people off), more people hanging up their shingle and do whatever it is that they do best, creating an explosion of entrepreneurs and experts who (without the overhead of a big company) can do things cheaper, faster, and more flexibly than their counterparts at big companies.

If this sounds suspiciously like the "free agent" and "new economy" predictions we heard eight years ago, it kind of is. But there's one big difference: now we have the (free!) tools to actually make it happen. Social networking, collaborative tools such as Google Docs, and advances in mobile technologies make it possible to create a distributed team that doesn't need to be in the same place to work effectively.

So what's the agency of the future going to look like? Probably a lot smaller and focused on strategy, account/project management, creative leadership (but not execution), and media strategy (but not planning and buying). Most agencies will revolve around these hubs if they're honest with themselves. Agencies will exist to provide high-level strategic guidance that clients need in a media-chaotic environment. Agencies will expand or contract as needed or will explore radical solutions such as crowdsourcing to get work done for less money.

Whether this scenario turns out to be completely accurate or not remains to be seen. But nobody can look at what's going on today and say that the agency of tomorrow is going to look much like the agency of today or yesterday.

So what do you think? Has Sean hit the nail on the head - or am I just part of that "explosion of entrepreneurs and experts" and therefore my judgment is clouded by desperately hoping that the new world that Sean talks of is to become the new reality?

TribalTrekGate 09 - boldly going into industry folklore

Well - here it is.

There was a bit of a ripple in the webosphere about two weeks ago when we heard tell of a Star Trek Spoof video viewable on YouTube from Tribal Resourcing, fetauring the Senior Management team. Unfortunately it seemed to get beamed back up nearly as quickly as it arrived amongst us.

But the web has a habbit of Kling(ing)on to tomfoolery and one keen eyed & public spirited citizen managed to capture the footage before it hit warp 5 and so, hoping Tribal phasers don't go any higher than just stun, we thought we'd share and let you make your own mind up about it.

Personally - I think if nothing else it shows a bit of personality and a senior management team willing to not take themselves too seriously. And if it doesn't raise a smile (certainly 2nd or 3rd time of watching) then you're dead (Jim).





Oh - and appologies for pun overdrive. What can I say - I tried to contain myself but I got to a stage where I "couldnae tak it anymoor capn!" My pun overide sensors "werre gonna blow" if I didn't redirect the full force of the bad taste photon shield right back into the post.
:-D

Missing In Action – a recruitment advertising agency video, but not as we know it

We started this week with a bit of a ripple in the recruitment advertising twittersphere from a certain agencies video post - a ripple that despite the apparent best efforts of the generating agency to remove the video almost as quickly as it was posted has left a bit of a phasers to stun kind of afterglow.

A few lucky people got to see it and I have it on good authority from one such person that Tribal have produced a spoof Star Trek-esque spoof promo. Im afraid all I can show you is where it clearly isn't (you'll get what I mean if you click on the main video as it comes up  "we're sorry, this video is no longer available") - http://www.youtube.com/user/BHTribal1

It seemingly flashed onto the web Monday morning but within an hour or two was gone again.

For me it begs the question – how can something go that far and then be pulled? Does the pulling of it say more than the making of it (apparently all harmless fun that the person I talked to about it felt showed a bit of agency personality)?

Or perhaps there was copyright infringement that they hadn't checked and worried them?

Any one got any answers? Anyone got any other theories? Anyone got the video downloaded?

Come on Tribal - leave the klingons on the starboard bow and show us your funny bone(s).

:)

Recruiting: SoMe, Web 2.0, Pros & Cons and the future - some thoughts

I was recently approached by OnRec.com ("The Magazine for Online Recruitment around the world") to contribute to an article. You can read the article here - Using social media and Web 2.0 effectively (with additional contributions from Jamie Leonard, Euan McDonald & Lucian Tarnowski). I thought I'd post my full thoughts here too.

How can recruiters use social media and Web 2.0 effectively to engage candidates?
The best way to use social media to engage candidates is by first ensuring you understand your target audience. If you have an idea of where they may already be congregating online or what they’re consuming (by way of web content) then it’s a great idea to ‘listen’ to them first whilst you work out what you can bring to the party. If you’re hoping that a couple of tweaked press releases every other month will in any way be engaging then you’re setting yourself up for a very public fall, or worse: indifference.

Put yourself in the audiences’ shoes because they’re asking “What’s In It For Me” and if you can’t answer that with some degree of empathetic certainty then best manage your expectations right down from the start. Engagement requires the buy in of both parties – and if you aren’t offering anything compelling or interesting then you can’t really expect to reap the benefits.

But once you are confident that you know your audience then the best advice is just to get on with it. You’ll soon know whether you’re hitting the right note and raising any interest, and then: keep it up; keep listening; stay true to your brand values; show integrity; keep looking for other avenues to broaden that reach. Overcoming the initial inertia is probably the hardest part of the whole thing, after all then you’re just doing online what you do in the real world.

What are the benefits and also pitfalls to avoid when using social media and Web 2.0?
The very least you should achieve is an enhanced search engine profile (Search Engine Optimisation), because the search engines love regularly updated content - and you should be producing that if nothing else. But the full rewards, if you get it even modestly right, are very compelling:

• The potential to broaden your recruitment horizons – reach outside of traditional, potentially stagnant talent pools and desperate active job seekers.
• The opportunity to change preconceptions about your business that might otherwise have harmed your recruitment activity (often without you knowing).
• Influence / balance online conversations that would otherwise negatively affect your employer brand.
• Reach passive candidates, establishing and then maintaining a front of mind presence with them.
• Differentiate from the competition - tangibly.

The main pitfall to avoid has certainly got to be underestimating the time commitment this will require. For some people the ability to write engagingly comes more easily than for others, but either way once you’ve started any such activity then you have to keep it up, otherwise that can often be perceived more negatively than not starting out at all (stagnant blogs or poorly updated social media groups can speak louder of your organisation than the outdated content). Another pitfall is not being prepared. If you haven’t listened then you won’t know what you might come up against, you won’t add any value and worst of all, you might not have anything interesting to say (in the target audiences eyes at least).

And finally it’s important to remember that nowadays people “trust peers over marketers”, so be ready to take the rough with the smooth as people will look to openly validate your messages against other (sometimes disgruntled, often highly cynical) commentary. If your company isn’t willing for you to be open and honest, perhaps your Employer Brand is actually as much fiction as fact, then maybe it’s best to get that right first before opening yourselves up to the full frankness of the web.

How do you see social media and Web 2.0 developing and influencing the recruitment industry in the future? What will be the next big change?
I think that web will increasingly force the transparency of employer propositions’, certainly within key skills markets. Companies will begin to understand the tangible business value of being THE “Employer of Choice” and invest in managing their Employer Brand more fastidiously, doing so from the inside-out, also realising the benefits of actively encouraging an open culture to further enhance the external Employer Brand.

Potential candidates on the other hand will increasingly hear about jobs through any number of web touch points, peer to peer networks being increasingly ubiquitous, but will also have more and more sophisticated “search agent” type tools that will scour the web on their behalf, sifting through information and collating “must read” lists that will include appropriate job opportunities and articles/comments about previously flagged target prospective employers, all bundled together with their other daily news and active interest subjects feeds.

And what this will all mean is a significant shift in the balance of recruitment spend from what is still overwhelmingly focussed on attraction based activity to a far greater investment in long-term Employer Brand management and broad reach digital engagement activity. Why? Because companies will grow to realise that the new web paradigm is more a technology underpinned attitudinal one than a new medium to be controlled, so getting someone’s attention becomes a (still) crucial but fundamentally relatively smaller part of the overall business picture.

And the next big change?
Joe Public and the Corporate World have a long way to go to get up to speed with what is possible today. The vast majority still barely get Web1.0, so there has to be a period of catch up and consolidation as the technology already here gets converged and simplified – and that’s actually what is going to be the big change: a massive swell of new and existing internet users switching from just accessing 2 or 3 elements of the web resource to becoming immersed in the complete social web.

The systems, technology and downright mindboggling cleverness underpinning the web will continue to evolve at a lightning pace too (not least in pursuit of the next next big change – The Intelligent Web), but I believe a large part of the focus will switch from “what” can be done to “how” it’s done – most importantly delivering the user experience that enables the greatest number of people to engage with each other as efficiently as possible. And with the Internet increasingly being where we store our information and where the software we use runs from (as opposed to on our local hard drives) so barriers to access will continue to diminish and remote functioning capability improve, all furthering the swell of immersed users – welcome to the age of Cloud Computing.

A RAD hangover (or just a miserable aging git)?

There’s no doubt I was considering myself very lucky to get an invite (even as a late stand in – I’ve never been too proud to be someone’s second option come good) to the RAD awards this year. But thanks to the generosity of Jobsite.co.uk I made the event.

I think a bit of pomp & celebration every once in a while does you good, and for me having the RADs in January helps put off any silly new years resolutions for the month of January, pushing them back (if there are any I’m feeling silly enough to make anyway – usually around curtailing of alcohol intake) into the shortest month of the year ☺

I think it’s only fitting (within this particular blog) to keep any observations about awards to those digitally based – and I’m very happy to say that after a some previously negative comments about the rationale and wisdom of judging decisions (of RADs and of course the NORAs) I think there were some very worthy winners indeed. In particular I thought the Shell game looked truly innovative (am hoping that Sinead will get to write us up a case study of it), the Asda site holds together very well indeed (no easy thing for a main careers site), the Landrover site was a vision of flash loveliness (I agree probably a bit too form over function – but a beauty to behold none the less), and I agree with the judges that the National Graduate Development Programme video was a very powerful piece superbly executed and so to me looked to be a worthy overall champion.

It’s nice to write a review about how I think it’s clearer than ever (certainly in the categories listed above) what was ticking the judges boxes – and, most importantly for me, the candidate engagement aspect wasn’t lost in the appreciation of the work before them.

But I was left with a strange after taste from the event (and one that was even stronger than the gin & tonic with double baileys chaser that “did me in” – thanks Gemma! ;). The event was hosted very ably by Rob Brydon, but despite his best efforts (and I don’t think it was just me) did it seem to take a bit longer than usual to get to the awards element of the evening? Did the food take longer (less people than previous so can’t see why that should be the case)? Was there more of a gap between food being cleared and it starting?

Whatever it was, the longer the event takes to get into full swing then the shorter the audiences attention span – which I felt to be a real shame, as there really was some excellent work on show. The audience seemed, well, more disassociated from what was actually happening than I can recollect from previous years.

This feeling was made all the stronger when I met someone at the bar later in the night who agreed that they’d had a great time – but quickly went on to say that there’s no way they’d suggest their HRD (FTSE top 50 company) should attend because it seemed little more than a bit of an agency/media piss up. And don’t get me wrong – I, and in many cases unfortunately very well documented, have enjoyed more than my fair share of serious hospitality and intra-industry exuberance. But it got me thinking whether there were simple steps that might be taken that would allow such an event to have it’s creative integrity & best practice filled cake and eat (or rather drink) it?

So here’s some sober thoughts / suggestions / musings:

1. Could the event start earlier? Let’s face it – it’s a big night out and many people have to travel for at least half the day to be there, so why not shift it forward an hour.
2. Do the awards element first. If the event is truly about the awards – the celebrating of creative excellence from our industry – then why not hold off the meal and excessive merriment just a little longer? (obviously starting earlier would help this too)
3. Show the shortlisted work before hand so we actually get to know what’s been judged and can come with a raised level of interest and opinion whatever our agency / client chances of success on the night.

I believe some of the work that I’ve seen over the years from our industry – in whatever humble or not so humble way you may take my ramblings – is truly worldclass, and we should be proud of it. Extremely proud of it. Sometimes a creative team or agency clicks into a winning grove, often or not led by a particular client that gives them the kind of brief(s) or latitude (as well as sometimes budget) that others of us can’t always seem to engineer. But then all of a sudden the landscape changes and some really great work comes from another direction all together. And it’s for that reason that I’d actually like to see steps taken to afford more deference to the quality of what we’re seeing and celebrating – more deference than most of us (it’s quite apparent) can muster straining at an image on a screen after c.4 hours “networking” over a light 3 course meal.

But all that said I don’t want to detract from the fact that I’ve been very impressed as to how the RADs have, certainly in recent years, worked hard to evolve with an industry that has seen it’s media and execution sophistication shift at what (certainly in business terms) is near light speed. With some strong and clear direction, through listening to those at the evolving coal face, and almost certainly some good chairpersonship along the way, I think the RBI team have kept these awards relevant. So well done to all those who produced work they thought good enough to enter as well as those of course who won on the night – and here’s hoping that the RADs push to keep pace with our industry's changing landscape, whilst perhaps taking some steps to ensure this great work gets the focus and acclaim it truly warrants on the actual night.

Get into the Christmas spirit at someone else's expense

If you’re reading this then I would think I’m probably fairly safe assuming that you are aware to at least some small degree that for the best part of the last year (in all senses :) I’ve been establishing a business we call 3D MarComms. Well we wanted to get into the Christmas spirit and need your help in doing so. All you have to do is visit our blog, leave a comment with the charity of your choice and then we’ll give the most popular charity £1 per comment left.

Go on – it’ll take you all of a minute at most, so click through and give a quid from our pocket. It couln't be much easier

:)

What’s that coming over the hill?

Well, as the song goes – for 2009 it is indeed “a Monster”. A renewed and re-invigorated Monster.

On Monday I was invited to the launch breakfast of the new Monster.com look and functionality. Launching from Millbank Tower, the home of the New Labour spin machine and from a job board that was practically there at the start of the Internet (and certainly mastered the art of it’s own brand of Internet hype I’d suggest), I was expecting polish and shine but to have to leave questioning whether there was any real substance. I was pleasantly surprised to actually find quite the reverse.

Our starter was a 60second advert which we were told by Monster’s UK MD was made but never aired because the American target audience only ingest 20-30second adverts. Hmmm – was this a portent of what was to come – something made that looked nice but actually didn’t do the job and left you wondering “how much?” & “why?”?!! Oh dear. I thought the presentations themselves were actually pretty flat, which was surprise reversal of expectations no1 – but hey I’m no polished Alan Whitford myself, so I’ll just leave it at that and move on to looking at the substance.

So what did I make of the new offering? Well let’s start with the fundamental principles. Aggressive growth through global acquisition is a tough business model to deliver against long term, especially when you’re in the websphere and “bringing together” different systems – and Monster have clearly been honest with themselves about the fact that it was approaching do or die in terms of addressing this. So as of January every single Monster site (well most – the rest to come) will be working off the same single platform. No different inventory for this site or that site – and one would also hope the facility for a sales team to access real time stats and data (and costs?) to give you a simple response to what should be a simple global question. So, in theory, tick one.

The next thing they’ve done is completely re-invent the user interface. What’s a user interface? Well that’s what the visitor to the site interacts with. And I think they’ve done a cracking job. Now of course the proof is actually in the using, but from the screen grabs I saw I’d say that this is a significant advance – for both the candidate user (front end) and the recruiter user (back end). NEVER underestimate how dramatically a bad interface will ruin / hamstring your site, or for that matter how much a good interface will enhance your site.

If people can’t work out quickly how (or why) to use something then they just won’t – particularly in such a crowded place as the job board market. So it doesn’t matter how clever this widget is or that whodjamaflip - if it’s not easy to get to grips with they won’t be arsed (you may have heard of two examples sites that do this element pretty well: Google & Facebook). To a slightly lesser degree the same is true of a back end experience – if it’s a pain to understand and work with then it’ll be barely used (or used just as little as it can be), and if the candidates don’t fall in through basic use then it all adds up to a negative overall impression of the entire proposition. Monster has reinvented both experiences.

I see this as a massive tick for Monster and short term will be a big positive. Knowing they HAD to change the underpinning system (more on that shortly) they did the right thing and used the time to also bite the bullet on design (which due to the new technology on offer they probably had to do anyway), but I think from what I’ve seen it looks like they’ve done their work very well.

But what of this much vaunted technology that’s going to “change everything”? I actually think it does indeed have the potential to do so. Monster have looked at their CV database not as just a pile of CV’s, but as a source of knowledge from which to train a kind of search based artificial intelligence. Is it going to be perfect from day one? No. Is it going to be a pretty blunt tool? Absolutely – but it’ll get better and is already significantly less blunt than other sites’ can offer. Monster are actually doing their bit to bring the future to today – and this system (if it’s worth the millions they’ve spent on it) will just get better. It will never stop learning, and as more people rate the relevance of the possible matching vacancies it delivers them it will learn some more.

Look – if you’re reading this you’ll be bored to tears with discussion about what web2.0 is/isn't/might be – but this is indeed web3.0. And if you know me you know I hate to bandy terms for terms sakes, but sometimes it’s easier. Web3.0 is about the intelligent web, websites doing some thinking for you and in return for some of your data and/or perhaps a little time provides you a far "richer" experience (without you even realising it most of the time). And that’s what this is.

And do you need to know how it works? No. All you need to know is this:

•     Monster has a very impressive audience to tap into to start with – that’s a good start.
•     They’ve redone their interface so it’s easier for candidates to use – that will pay dividends in the short term (possibly leading to better informed candidates, my money says certainly leading to more candidates).
•     The search/profile matching is very clever but will take time to bed in – but it should be pretty good to start and it will get better and better and better.
•     The more people that use the system the better the search/profile matching gets (it’s a recession, so you can pretty much guarantee an upswing in traffic).
•     The better the search/profile matching gets the more people talk about it and the more people us it.
•     <repeat last two ad infinitum>

Now there were lots of other bits and pieces talked about but I’m sorry to say I didn’t necessarily buy into those as the shinning future. For me it was largely about a job board trying hard to gain some Social Media space (or at the very least some headlines from those who fall for massively complex diagrams and organisations trying to be the next Facebook or LinkedIn) and IMHO will generally in practice wash over the greater candidate community.

Monster is trying to do in web2.0 terms what Workthing did with web1.0 when they entered the market not as a straight up and down job vacancy posting website, but rather a kind of career advisory facility with jobs. Everyone does that now though, so Monster are using latest technology to do that in a far more engaging way. It may take off, it may not – when you’re talking Social Media not even Monster are in charge of whether the web takes to it or not (no matter what the pitch says). Anyway, time will tell for that – and just because I’m a cynic doesn’t mean that I won’t applaud them for trying. And at least they’ve not put all their eggs in that one social career networking basket.

I’m a simple man at heart and I think simple things work best on the web. And it’s those elements I’ve laid out above as to why I think it looks as though they have some fundamental elements right to actually indeed game change the job board market.

But – I’m gonna slip in a disclaimer here – and quite a big one. Over the years (admittedly I’m going back quite a few - but the market is slow to forget) I had plenty of clients coming to me disillusioned with the Monster sales machine (or indeed the delivery that didn’t back up the dream they felt they bought). My worry is that in a down recession where the pressure is on a hard pressed sales force then the dream weavers will be out and by 2010 we’ll be seeing another pile of client/media relationships in tatters.

Make no bones about it: I think Monster have here what could be one of the best interfaces of any jobboard with the clever underpinning technology to back that up and keep evolving and enhancing the candidate experience – it should be a winner.

All that really matters to people buying space is bums on seats and I see no reason why that shouldn't be significantly enhanced by your tech & design teams' efforts. But please guys n gals @ Monster – resist the pressure (as much as you can without losing your job) to blow it by believing your own hype and go all short term and aggressive on us again – keep your focus on the site delivering great results and this will in turn beget great results for you. The investment WILL pay dividends, but it will need time and nurturing. With a platform that looks like it can really deliver Monster should seize the chance to be a little more approachable like the toy Trumpy given out on Monday - I just hope it doesn't have an ugly short-termist sales crazed monster inside all too desperate to get out and get us all angry again.