Conversational recruiting

It is pretty much recognised now that the majority of applicants look at the employer career site when considering a job, particularly with high profile brands such as retailers.  But the information is generally static, read only and the application process is at best a one way transactional process.

But the web savvy applicants of tomorrow (and many of today) will expect a lot more.  In the same way that it is assumed there will be a career site, the same assumption will be made about there being a talent/recruitment blog.  Applicants will want to discuss various aspects and expect that there will lots of additional data as a result of comments and questions raised via the blog.  I even expect the braver employers to have a wiki so that the information flow can increase based on user needs.  Given time, the blog and career site will merge into one and the job search will be in the side bar as will be a number of hot jobs in the same way that blogs such as Jobster already has.  But rather than promote jobs for other people (as per Jobster et al) the employer will promote their own jobs to their own traffic.  Nothing radical to us bloggers but quite different to all the career sites out there at the moment.

Search will be improved and simplified to work more like Amazon (A9) but look like Google; no more clunky drop downs and poor search results but relevant jobs/posts/comments that give the applicant data they need to make the right decision.  And to keep them on the site, people who applied for this, also applied for this and this as per Amazon etc. 

As the e-commerce sites improve, they create a great place for ideas for the best recruitment sites.  Only the leaders will really exploit these options but that is why they are leaders.

This conversational career site is a big focus of mine for 2007, I'll be coming back to it on a regular basis as I start to implement these ideas.  First step, create a blog based career site to show exactly what I am trying to create.  Nothing exciting yet but first base has been reached: Hire Strategies Jobs