LatinOcean – Digital Marketing Consulting

A due diligence process gone awry due to an apostrophe and a delete-happy finger that killed proper copy instead of a test page, were – respectively – the cause for inaccurate speculation and the reason for the demise of a post detailing my encounter with online employment directory whoshiring.com.au

The post went on to say that there were no apparent traces of vertical search technology on the portal – just links to the websites and job listing areas of both corporates/employers and recruitment agencies.

The question remained as to how, standing alone, the site would make any money beyond straight ads. Having said that, I thought the site would prove to be a useful stop for job seekers and publishers who bothered in having a presence on the Internet.

Thanks Brett for setting me straight, apologies for not being able to post the comment, thanks for the good wishes and good luck catching all that traffic from grammar-picky job hunters

overview: marketed as a career tool set, Jibber Jobber it is a DIY job search activity tracker, including all the relevant dimensions required to have a fairly complete job hunting picture. It does so by meshing the basic attributes of contact management, networking , document storage, and lead (jobs) tracking

background: Founder Jason Alba is an ex-job seeker after a surprise layoff notice, so this is a service built from the ground up, taking into account the frustrations and needs at the coalface. more background and announcements in the company’s blog

design: nothing fancy, pragmatic and no clutter; only a couple of links that don’t work.

pricing/value: the standard offering is fairly fleshy, fees start at USD$ 9.95 per month. Have a look at the functionality chart for detail

opportunity: career management services have been offered for a while now in a hybrid fashion (e.g. job seekers working in tandem with advisors and web-based modules). Stick a white label on the site and don’t be surprised if a few CM firms take it on to enrich their own offerings; alternatively, this can be presented as a stand alone DIY platform (as originally intended) to corporates who restructure and need to outplace people

challenge: although the service aims at minimising the hassles associated with tracking services, you still have to type in a bit and invest the time in keeping records updated, etc. This seems to me as a worthwhile effort to make; job search is indeed a full time role

Nice exercise in global sourcing from Google. Code Jam being effectively an appealing, mass-scale testing exercise to select top programming talent.

Software development competitions are not new in the US. What’s interesting is that this was the third regional one (previous ones were run in the US and Europe). Maybe Asia is next.

Whereas some firms move code building to other regions to reduce costs, other seem to hand pick high productivity professionals from worldwide candidate pipelines, thus giving themselves a chance to produce superior goods/services.

Do you need to be as big and reputable as Google to pull this off, or can organisations use their assets (brand, products, values, culture ….) to reach and engage individuals with the skills you need to aspire to be superior?

emurse – the company that brought you only the resume builder tool that makes you feel like wanting to use it, as far as i can gather – has announced the launch of their very own vertical search engine. They might be one step closer to enabling users to use their emurse cv’s seamlessly with other apply engines (e.g. from job boards, corporate careers sites, etc); though they still need the cooperation from the target sites.

Louise Fletcher from Career Hub kindly forwards the Insider’s guide to resume writing, a compilation or articles aimed at all those job seekers who still are being asked for their resumes by employers and consultants alike (e.g. everyone)

Dr. Charles Handler writes about employee selection in the second life (SL). Nope, it does not refer to the after-world. Just check out SL on wikipedia or what is SL; it might be a bit away, but not unthinkable anymore. Say hi to Pedro Trenton if you get in

Zoominfo has been promoting the heck of its PowerSearch service over the last few weeks in ERE. One of the promo materials is this white paper on 07 recruitment predictions; obviously a bit self-serving but it includes a few comments from known names in the US online recruitment space, which you might want to track during the year. My guess is that Zoominfo has the potential to be as locally useful as LinkedIn is shaping up to be.

Women’s niche job board JustBe is up and running with some content and a few jobs. Keen to see how it grows and the function it invests in as it matures (bit of a promise about ‘networking’ in one of the placeholder pages in the site)

A question for you: when an employer/agency advertises on a niche job board (not a profession-based niche, but more one of the likes of Adage, JustBe or one of those 400 job boards for Hispanics in the US) do you post the jobs:

a) with a view to tap into the demographic attended by the niche site whilst still taking applications from other sources

b) that require the successful applicant to be (at least preferably) of the demographic attended by the niche

c) both

The question interested me because the answers had implications to the niche site and its audience. Given that there is implicit value in relevance and exclusivity, to have jobs posted in the niche because of reason b) above would be best in terms of servicing the community of both seekers and publishers. At the same time, the site needs critical mass sooner than later.

How big is small?

Slowly but surely coming out of the holidays daze, but awake enough to see a couple of things that may have happened in the last few weeks:

- seek putting their reach to work in the area of businesses for sale classified ads; is this just an opportunistic advance or a more strategic move into multi-vertical advertising in lieu of a saturated online job ad niche?

- google killed it, yahoo kept it and now linkedin is sporting its answers space. There might be value in the content as the topics might be only on recruitment, job seeking and promotion a business, but let’s see how the moderators manage

Have a great start to ’07 and drop me an email to jorge@latinocean.com if you think I can be of help