I read John Sumser's column on blogs yesterday and was a bit surprised how much he missed about the potential of recruiting blogs.
There's every reason to suspect that the Recruiting Blogosphere is a small Mutual Admiration Society with no visible means of support. If you ask the many (97.5%) recruiters who aren't reading, there's no question that blogs simply are not a part of getting things done. They are busy filling seats.
I have two major problems with this paragraph.
1) if 97.5% of your audience isn't aware of you, that's a potential for growth.
2) Everybody's busy. Claiming recruiters are too busy filling seats can be used to ignore training, upgrading your computer system, customer service, sourcing, paperwork, background checks or any other activity other than calling people on the phone and submitting resumes.
Now in all fairness, John is still taking the time to discuss blogs, so this paragraph doesn't sum up his entire opinion of blogging, but let's take a look at what he writes today.
Path one is the editor. One clear way of sifting wheat from chaff is to have a strong editorial hand at work...
Path two is the news-currency model. Current blogrolls..give you a window on what's happening. We're obviously biased towards the editorial approach but, a newsflow makes it possible to catch the right stuff.
In discussing blogs, John makes the mistake of mistaking his profession for that of the blogosphere as a whole. John aggregates and filters information into a series of daily columns, white papers, and reports. He functions like a gatekeeper of information for online employment. His view of the future of blogging seems to revolve around mini-newspapers competing with him.
Some recruiting bloggers do want to be like Interbiznet News. Some of us want to aggregate information and filter it out to readers. That's the best way to generate traffic, advertisers, and publicity. It's even been a success for some of us, including Recruiting.com, Joel Cheesman, Steven Rothberg, and myself.
Notice that with the exception of Anthony at Recruiting.com, none of the above examples are recruiters. We're marketers of our products and services to the online employment world. This is where the analysis of blogs as mini-newspapers completely falls apart.
There are tens of thousands of business blogs that are gaining traction online. Insurance and Real Estate Agents, Coffee Shops, Jewelry makers, Authors, PR Agents, wholesalers, plumbing contractors, interior design firms and every other business idea under the sun are tapping into the value of blogs. There are even some recruiters in that mix, using their blogs exclusively to source and prospect candidates.
Those people have been at work as a group for less than a year, and they are flying under the radar of business pundits who quite simply don't have the time to research what is coming. They are not part of the Recruiting Blogosphere that can be tracked in any of our blogrolls, but they are having an impact locally within each of their recruiting departments.
Major staffing firms are also looking at ways to use blogs. They are understandably nervous, but as they wait to jump in, independent recruiters are already using blogs to snatch up the best candidates. By this time next year, 50% of the Fortune 500 will have employment blogs of some kind. I know this because 1) I sell to these people, and 2) I spend my days searching out those nooks and crannies that most people don't have time to find. You'd be surprised at who already has a blog, but just hasn't announced it.
When I read John's analysis of the blogs, I could understand why he comes to certain conclusions, but he's limited in the same way that the major news networks are limited. It is not possible to track the full extent of blogs and mini-websites online. I don't know the full extent, and I'd be willing to bet I spend more time tracking recruiting blogs than anyone out there today. John has other duties, and so he only has the time and capability of reading a small portion of the blogs - those that filter traffic to each other.
I read Interbiznetnews daily. It's a vital source of information. In a world of ever-expanding information, it can no longer be definitive.
Blogs are not a fad. They are an expression of a public who is tired of being fed information by gatekeepers and has decided they want to filter their own information. Blogs are not a cause of that, but a symptom. They are not limited by what we can read in our spare time and they won't be boxed in by those who need to monetize information. They are as big as our imagination.
Update: John has a third installment up discussing the different types of blogs:
Today's post finally gets to the heart of the matter, which is recognizing there are many types of blogs attempting to reach different objectives. This is closer to the core of blogging, but I always wonder at the way in which John analyzes the blogosphere.
I've heard him say that blogs don't matter, but bloggers do. That's a very insightful statement, as the best part about blogging is what you take in, not what you put out. His post on blogs today helps define them in the recruiting world, but I don't know how much he is watching blogging in other communities.
Still I wonder - John's language requires a very nuanced reading.
"There's every reason to suspect that the Recruiting Blogosphere is a small Mutual Admiration Society with no visible means of support."
It's eloquent, but leaves plenty of room to claim that what he meant was the uninformed person might see it as a Mutual Admiration Society. Starting off his series on blogging this way should speak volumes, but with John, it's hard to tell.
