Cheezhead Recruiting News and Opinion

I’ve received a lot of feedback from a recent post, HR blogging. I clearly struck a blogospheric nerve in the HR community.

This seems to be the current equation: Very few employers doing it + many people curious about it = a tremendous opportunity.

Like Wayne Gretzky used to say, "To be successful, skate to where the puck is going, not where it is." I’m paraphrasing, but I’m sure you get the idea.

So here’s another reason to love the potential of adding a blog to your Internet recruiting strategy:

Speakers at the recent Blog Business Summit proclaimed "E-mail is dead."

Why? Well, there are a lot of reasons, but basically spam has ruined much of e-mail’s effectiveness.

And this effects online recruiting, because so much of job board success is being able to e-mail current openings to candidates without them having to visit the job site every day. Sign-up for a job alert and voila, there they are in your inbox regularly.

However, the threat of your job openings getting to your target audience is decreasing. That should be a concern. Because the people who visit job sites daily are not passive candidates like the e-mail alert crowd tends to be (and the ones you want).

The alternative,  say the bloggers, is RSS.

Basically, RSS is a small bit of computer code that pushes blog posts
from a Web server out to the blogosphere, where they can be retrieved
almost instantaneously by blog reader Web sites and software that users
download or sign-up for. After signing-up, users can specify keywords, or even specific blogs, that they
are interested in.

Yahoo! and MSN, for example, allow you to add RSS feeds to your My homepages. It’s easy.

Therefore, if you’re an employer and actively blogging, anyone with an RSS feed targeting information about your company, industry, local market, jobs, etc. will be able to access your blog to learn more about your company – as well as be in front of your jobs.

E-mail is limping, while RSS is beginning to jog and about to go into a full-on sprint. Will your company have a blog to take advantage this new trend?

Popularity: 3% [?]