With the launch of the new Recruiting.com, much buzz has been made about where the latest incarnation of the recruiting community will take us. Will Recruiting.com lead employment bloggers to a brave new Digg World, or will it fall prey to unscrupulous article submissions by casinos, mortgage companies and the corporate recruiter who figures out they can post a job and submit it to the main page?
As in all social media, the new Recruiting.com is going to face what is known as the Tragedy of the Commons.
The tragedy of the commons is a phrase used to refer to a class of phenomena that involve a conflict for resources between individual interests and the common good.
A example of the tragedy of the commons is litter in a public park. If I visit a public park and make a mess, should I clean it up? Individually, there is no benefit. The time spent cleaning the litter is time I could spend more productively. If I don't clean the litter, then others in the park are forced to look at it, or clean it up themselves. In a good community, everyone does their part, but only as part of a social compact that keeping the park up helps everyone.
That's where we stand today. Basically, Jobster has changed the format of Recruiting.com from that of editor's choice to community choice, and thus opportunity (and tragedy) await the rest of us. Before, the editors picked up the trash because of the low volume of posting and tight control. Now, anyone and everyone can submit articles, and determining what is trash and what is treasure is a community effort. There's a lot of room for abuse in that system.
Let me pitch two scenarios:
A strong set of highly motivated independent bloggers, previously ignored or passed over by the editors, develop at strong pattern of steady submittals of quality material from around the blogosphere. Rather than submitting only their own articles, they submit the best articles they find, thus fulfilling the filtering function that blogs bring to the table. Recruiting.com becomes a real-time, effective example of what the community is talking about, and the resulting information value is high for everyone. Strong editorial control remains with Jason Davis, who picks off submittal spam from non-recruiting sources, as well as article-spammers who regularly submit non-essential and self-serving information.
This is the ideal for the community. A resource that filters the best content for us.
The second scenario:
Individual bloggers looking to maximize their traffic and exposure, submit their articles to the main page no matter what the content. Certain unscrupulous characters figure out how to game the voting system to increase the number of votes their article's receive. Good content submitted by other bloggers (carefully spell-checked and well thought out) goes off the page so quickly that the time spent submitting an article is no longer worth it to anyone but the article-spammers. The sheer volume of content submitted makes it difficult for Jason Davis to keep up with, resulting in the increasing presence of true spam submitted on the site. An article written in good faith on posting job postings to Recruiting.com leads to hundreds of corporate recruiters nationwide submitting their job postings, unaware of uncaring of the effect on the community.
The resulting informaton value is very low.
These two scenarios are not that far apart, and a third looms that tight controls on submitting articles leads to a small cliche of bloggers "owning" the content, restricting the growth of the community to the same people we've always read.
What is the answer? Self-policing - and that's a matter for the community to decide rather than Jobster, as rules don't mean much in social bookmarking when they are handed down. The success or failure of the new Recruiting.com is quite literally going to be decided by the community and it's ability to control itself.
We're all in the beginning stages of this experiment, but it's probably time to start asking questions about the best way to use this amazing new resource.
Some extra resources on Social Bookmarking:
General Commentary: Site Pro News.
Using Digg and Netscape to get more traffic: ProNet Advertising
Digg Me or Bury Me: A Slate Article on the effectiveness of Digg sites.
