Should There Be a National JobCamp Day?

Recently, Michael Vandervort over at The Human Race Horses wrote a blog about how HR professionals need to take more responsibility for job creation in this difficult market and said some really nice things about the upcoming Milwaukee JobCamp.

Namely, he brought up an interesting idea about how our grassroots event here in Milwaukee could be a model for events like it across the country. He was even calling for a National JobCamp Day. Cool. Obviously, this is something near to my heart and I’d love to see it.

Posted via email from toddnilson's posterous

Testing Posterous

Blogging has been getting easier and easier from a technical standpoint. Provided that you aren't afraid of writing, getting a blog under way about your recruiting work or your profession has never been simpler thanks to Posterous.

Posterous makes it as easy as sending an email to get a blog started. I'm writing this message from my Gmail account and sending it to my Blogger blog. You can also start a brand new blog or multiple blogs with it. You can also send it out to several other services at once, including Twitter and Facebook.

So start writing about your profession, your job search, or whatever. Attachments like video or pictures are all hosted easily, so you don't even need to know about manipulating or hosting files.

Yahoo! Sells Hotjobs to Monster

I'm sure many heard the news today of the long-rumored sale of Yahoo's HotJobs property to Monster. My first impression of the story was to imagine two stranded travelers stuck in the wild who turn to cannibalism. I've never been a fan of the job board model. If social networks haven't yet killed them off, they have certainly turned them into a back alley resource.

Why? Mainly because job boards are a holdover from the days of classified ads in newspapers. The really cool thing about job boards in 1999 was that, hey, you can write as much copy to describe your job as possible! Neat, huh? Unfortunately, that has led to job description bloat, creep, and rot.

When social networks arrived on the scene, they supplied the one element most important to anyone who really wants to join an organization--the opportunity to connect. Why would I want to submit a copy of my resume into a faceless portal when I can actually learn the names and a little background about the people I might find myself working with?

Okay, I'll admit that Monster still has LinkedIn beat when it comes to unique monthly visitors:



However, with this downturn, you didn't see anybody clamoring to be more skilled at using job boards. It was all about LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook and learning how to promote your personal brand.

I suspect that it is with a certain degree of arrogance that Monster can look at the unique monthly visitor statistics and see long term stability in what they offer. However, while it may not be LinkedIn that topples the dominance of the job boards decisively, it will very likely be a social networking application that does the deed.



What do you think?