Cheezhead

I’ve been thinking about blogs a lot lately, particularly their role in Internet recruiting.

See, since the dawn of the dot-com, these bastions of online employment have been in fast, constant pursuit of delivering the endangered passive candidate to employers doorsteps. From tactics like pushing jobs via e-mail to partnerships with MySpace, the strategies have arguably been effective, but still no Holy Grail has been claimed.

If you think about it, as sexy as vertical job search is, isn’t it the same pig, just in a different dress? In other words, whether it’s CareerBuilder or SimplyHired, isn’t it the same recycled active job seekers they’re attracting? I’m speaking in generalities, I guess, but you get the idea. It’s a “Let’s reinvent the wheel” mentality.

Obviously I’m a big fan of search engine optimization and marketing, which, till I’m blue, will argue the fact they can help get highly targeted candidates to your door like no other medium in existence.

But let’s get back to blogs.

A lot has already been written about Crunchboard, the job board arm of Valley blog darling Techcrunch, but the short of it is this: Successful blog focused on technology issues adds job posting feature, helping employers target elusive, most-likely-employed, best-of-the-best tech talent in a way that job boards cannot.

This week, I also received an e-mail from Eric Yoon of JobThread fame asking me if I’d like to put a job board on Cheezhead (I’m assuming he won’t mind the free pub’ from this e-mail’s reproduction).

Hi Joel,

Just wanted to check in with you to see if you’d like to setup a job board for Cheezhead?

Below are a few sites that have launched boards recently using JobThread Groups:
http://jobs.treehugger.com
http://jobs.techgigger.com
http://nextny.jobthread.com

Setting up the board is turnkey and free. If you decide to charge for postings, we can work out a rev share. Also, we’d be happy to setup the template for you into your site’s look-and-feel.

Please let me know if this is something of interest to you or if you’d like to discuss more.

Very best!
Eric

Hmm, jobs on Cheezhead? Intriguing.

Not sure my blog is the perfect venue for job content, but the idea of leveraging the growing popularity of blogs - particularly highly targeted blogs generating a growing, loyal following - to promote jobs is pretty powerful. And I’m sure the idea of making a little extra coin is one that resonates with bloggers. If my math is right, Crunchboard is on pace to bring in $30K-plus a month.

Blogs as the new job boards. It helps reinforce how small is the new big. We’re so busy broadcasting jobs and resumes en mass. Shotgun-style. Content is king! Not always, perhaps.

Maybe a little less gorilla and a lot more ant is a better answer. And maybe blogs will help get us there.