My search friends don't understand recruiting
Even my favorite SearchHead John Battelle gets pumped about the Yahoo! HotJobs launch of a web-scraper today.
Everybody seems to enjoy the implications for the HotJobs! legacy business: isn't it colossally difficult to get people to pay for the exact same something you're now giving them for free?
And that's true, and I can imagine there are going to be some pretty glum folks among my former colleagues at HotJobs who are on the sales floor.
But what's bad for legacy HotJobs isn't going to make today's and tomorrow's recruiters sing either. Because what the search engine folk don't appreciate is that search is different for things and people.
If I'm looking for an inanimate thing, the search approach to the world, which is throw everything possible at me, and give me the tools to sort through quickly, works just great. Because the thing itself, or, more exactly, the information about the thing itself, has no "incentive" to give me wrong information, Google works great. When I'm searching for information about an apple, all the orange information out there doesn't try and pretend to be more apple-like to get my eye.
But when it comes to people, the part that job-seekers like: show me all the jobs out there that *I* want to see, is exactly the part that the job listers *hate*. Because as a job departs from the bottom percentile in terms of pay, status, fun, or requirements, the number of inappropriate applicants proportionately increases. It's as if the better and shinier apple you're looking for, the more peaches and pears and oranges you get showing up in your results claiming to be a Red Delicious. The search paradigm (more appropriately, the unfiltered search paaradigm) only works on searches that are person-to-thing or person-to-person-with-no-misaligned-incentives.
To the extent that HotJobs is successful in driving inappropriate applicants to corporate job sites, companies will either give them the --do not follow-- Heisman move, or simply take more and more of their jobs off the public web.
