I had the opportunity to speak at two conferences in the last couple of weeks. Yesterday I was on the Search Innovation Panel at Goldman Sachs Sixth Annual Global Internet Conference, together with the CEOs of Kayak, Gurunet (Answers.com) and Ingenio. Last week I was on a panel that explored business models for syndication at the Syndicate Conference.

One would expect there to have been some overlap of subject matter between these two conferences, but in fact it was hard to find any connection at all between the two communities. The Syndicate Conference was focused on blogs, syndication, RSS and surrounding business models. At the Goldman Internet conference, the terms ‘blog’, ‘syndication’ and ‘RSS’ were almost entirely absent. The Goldman conference was all about the internet sector, but mostly in the context of established, publicly traded firms and the dialogue was grounded in financial, marketing and management terminology. It’ll be interesting to see if and when the concepts of Web 2.0 and syndication migrate to Wall Street.

Paul

I participated on a panel at Kennedy Information’s 2005 Recruiting Conference this week on the topic Recruiting for the New Realities of Business. The other panelists were Tony Lee, Wall Street Journal Online Vertical Network publisher and Sheila Greco, CEO & Founder of Sheila Greco Associates.

Joe McCool, who was moderating, encouraged me to give a technology perspective – specifically, my take on how Web 2.0 is impacting recruitment; morphing the traditional online recruitment environment into what could be called Online Recruitment 2.0. Key tenets are openness and flexibility:

1. Open Distribution. RSS is starting to be adopted as a job distribution method and not just by Indeed. Hotjobs is the first major job board to embrace the technology, and we predict it will become universal. This will inevitably break down the prevailing walled-garden approach to online recruitment.

2. Open Communication. Blogs are starting to be recognized as a recruitment tool as well as a corporate communications channel. By their nature, blogs entail open two-way communication between a company and prospective employees. Heather Hamilton from Microsoft had earlier talked in depth about the benefits of blogging to her company’s recruitment process. Her blog is here and Gretchen Ledgard, a technical recruiter at Microsoft, has a blog here.

3. Open & Flexible Pricing. Pay-per-click search engine advertising is becoming a real alternative for staffing professionals to source candidates. Having to pay a fixed price for a job posting is a legacy of print advertising and the flexibility of pay-for-performance is an attractive alternative.

A lot of this is new to people in the staffing industry, so getting these ideas across simply will be very important. Let us know your thoughts!

Paul

We launched a partnership today with Clusty, a consumer search engine owned and run by Vivisimo. Indeed is powering a Jobs tab on Clusty, enabling Clusty’s users to benefit from the application of its clustering engine to Indeed’s job search results. Job seekers may choose to cluster jobs by topic, by company or by city. See the Press Release here and try it out here.