A recent study released by the Pew Internet & American Life Project produced an estimate that an amazing 1 in 10 online adults maintain a blog. The percentage of users age 30 and older increased from 7% to 11% from 2007 to 2009. The number of Internet youths aged 12-17 who blog dropped a little bit due to what most analysts think in favor of social networking sites with their increasingly brief and mobile communication habits (“teenagers,” right?). There are 30 million bloggers since 2000, when there were 0.
Major metro newspapers have shut down, and my Tampa Tribune is thin enough to sneeze at – literally, there are enough pages in it to barely satisfy a hearty sneeze, but not enough pages to get a fireplace fire going. Even my favorite sports magazines are thin now – the articles less robust and with fewer investigative, substantial stories, and instead fluff-filled ones. Facebook has boomed to be the third largest website in the world – where now everyone has a soapbox for every and any opinion, and let’s face it, much of these opinions are totally un-researched and trendy. Facebook actually has pages that incite “movements” and “fans” of incredibly innocuous things. A friend of mine once said “Facebook is when the general public gets in between great ideas and the news.” It’s difficult to disagree.
On top of real news diminishing and millions of blogs and Facebook entries blowing into the Internet, I inferred in my last blog entry that there is mounting Internet information that is already obsolete and taking up the Internet and limiting search results much like that massive island of garbage that is floating around in the Pacific Ocean.
How does this set up for your recruiting efforts? Not good. Especially for those employers who still are merely referring jobseekers to a handful of links of websites of organizations in their service area which sends the message “sell yourself” – which promotes these jobseekers go into the “Internet black hole” to find blog entries, Facebook pages of teenagers, and “glamorized news” – much of it years old, and even if it is recent, the news is often about the latest county sheriff’s drug bust, or worse.
If employers HONESTLY consider that their target jobseekers (and in our clientele’s case who target doctors and advanced medical practitioners) are in the highest tier of the intelligent people in our country (let’s call it the top 10% in the country regarding innate and learned intelligence), then sending them into the Internet hoping these professionals will arbitrarily find one source after the next which promote their careers are excellent options for them, is complete fantasy.
- News, blogs, Facebook, referring jobseekers to a website the employer didn’t produce – these get in the way of professional recruiting success, and do not promote it.
Our Online Job Tour™ invention allows employers to produce and maintain and fully control the “presentation” and the information they provide to jobseekers they are competing for. This is while they use the Internet (on a single website) to maximize the recruiting efficiency model by bringing a “virtual onsite interview visit experience” to jobseekers and their families – that is better and more comprehensive than the real trip. We are about to launch our new website which has compelling testimonials of jobseekers – one Harvard-trained physician, who are contacting our clients desiring their posted jobs without a real visit to their hospital campuses and community! ‘Unheard of before Online Job Tour. The ramifications of this are compelling – from jobseekers who now believe what they see online – particularly how Online Job Tour presents content they need, to how they are fed up with the futility of Internet job search and combing through Internet "garbage."
The answer to reaching today’s web-savvy jobseekers – especially intelligent “top 10%” professionals, are with “niche” tools and approaches that directly appeal to them that serve as bona fide web solutions to the mutual needs of both parties – especially as the Internet gets bigger.
To contact me directly, email me at carlbrickman@yahoo.com. I am also on Facebook. Learn more about my work at http://www.onlinejobtour.com/
