My 1.5 Sense continued…

I have a question.

At OnRec there were the usual suspects from the Recruiting Technology world; ATS vendors, Social Networking vendors, niche and other job boards and some “filters” and selection and assessment vendors.  What there weren’t were a lot of Recruiting Leaders.  Maybe with budget cuts and the economy, people are just not making investments in their recruiting technology this year.  Which makes what I’m about to point out all the more unbelievable.  (prepare for shameless plug)

AllianceQ is a strategy to solve recruiting problems.  It is generated by and for Corporate America and is the only strategy of its kind in the market today.  Oh, and it’s FREE!

Yet at OnRec for two days I watched the gurus of recruiting, the people whose job it is to review, assess and write about what’s new for Recruiting departments, walk right past our booth and not even acknowledge our presence.  Interesting but not funny. 

One prominent “thought leader” walked by our booth (a double size booth, bright, white and conspicuous as Charles Barkley in a yoga class) no less than 6 times in 2 days.  Not a smile, not a question, no interest at all.  I shook hands and said hello to another ”pundit” who failed to ask one question about what we are doing or how things are going.  The only guru who took the time to check it out was Joel Cheesman putting him, once again, at the top of the list of thought leaders in my book.  The guy is actually interested in solving recruiting problems!

I guess a few of these folks got burned by touting Itzbig as revolutionary and then watching it go belly up.  They may be gun-shy about really looking into anything new and different for two reasons:  

  1. They are vested in the paradigm of Internet recruiting (keyword matching, advertising “impressions” focused, fragmented model). 
  2. Breaking the paradigm of Internet recruiting (i.e., creating a solution instead of another way to make money from the problem) threatens their businesses.

So here is the question I need help with:

IF the “internet recruiting” industry is 13 years old (1995ish - today) AND if the thought leaders who have been around for 1/2 that time or more are truly focused on solving problems THEN why are we still doing things the same way today that we were 10 years ago?

Hope to see you at ERE this month!

October 3, 2008 | Filed Under Industry Perspectives 

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