Take a look at the screenshot – 3 out of the top 4 results for a search query on “hr jobs in Cape Town” are job aggregators. The websites Indeed, CareerJet, and Jobsincapetown.net are all job aggregators which means that they scrape their content off other source websites.

I have no real problem with websites scraping other sites and consolidating their content, but my expectation is that the collection of mighty brains at Google could tweak their formula so that the source of the content is typically ranked more highly than a site that rips the content off and has no original content of its own.

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2. Awesome… free, high-quality recruiting software

I’ve taken a whirl through SmartRecruiters and I think it’s brilliant.
And their business model is the bit I like the best.

For those that aren’t familiar with acronyms like ATS and RMS, Applicant tracking systems and Recruitment Management Systems are typically ‘enterprise’ software that helps companies manage their recruitment processes and their pool of applicants.
Offerings range from complicated to simple, and expensive to cheap, and include options such as Taleo, Oracle’s iRecruitment, Graylink, HR Smart, ProfessionL and others.
And now there is a simple a clever system that is free – SmartRecruiters.

SmartRecruiting is not advertising supported, and derives their revenue by taking a cut from the various job boards they have integrated with such as Monster, CareerBuilder, eFinancial Careers and others.

Very smart, and great software.

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So says Marc Andreessen, and I think he is right.
Full article is here at the WSJ

I case you’re lazy and want the 1-line summary:

My own theory is that we are in the middle of a dramatic and broad technological and economic shift in which software companies are poised to take over large swathes of the economy

Andreessen shows how almost every industry has either been transformed already by a disruptive shift towards an online and software-centric approach, or is about to be transformed.

The bit that I find particularly cruel in the South African context, is that the shifts we are seeing take place are likely to leave economies such as our own far behind in the battle for global competitiveness.

many people in the U.S. and around the world lack the education and skills required to participate in the great new companies coming out of the software revolution. This is a tragedy since every company I work with is absolutely starved for talent. Qualified software engineers, managers, marketers and salespeople in Silicon Valley can rack up dozens of high-paying, high-upside job offers any time they want, while national unemployment and underemployment is sky high. This problem is even worse than it looks because many workers in existing industries will be stranded on the wrong side of software-based disruption and may never be able to work in their fields again. There’s no way through this problem other than education, and we have a long way to go.

This quote should be terrifying to South African politicians… if this is what is happening in the US, we’re in deep trouble in South Africa with our poor general standards of education.

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1. Awesome… free, high-quality recruiting software

I know not everyone has a favourite piece of search tech, but I’m a big fan of Lucene and Solr. We use Solr all over the place at News24, and we’ve started using it on Careers24 by rolling deploying it for the job search side of the platform.

I noticed today that Twitter had done a swap of their old Ruby/MySQL search for a custom search engine built on top of Lucene and Java, and in the process managed to speed their search up by 3x.

That’s no small speed increase, and it’s also meant that their search servers can handle 10x the load, which in turn means a smaller server footprint, lower power, less heat, and way more headroom for growth.

Nice… any tech that can handle a billion daily queries is probably good enough for us….

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Just got my first piece of classic spam through LinkedIn this morning.
Not a random job offer or a networking request from someone I’ve never met – this is the real deal.
The link goes to a pitch for books and seminars on “Infinite Banking” (whatever that is).
It looks like this is a fake profile that is then added to a couple of groups, and the direct contact facility affoded by group membership used to send the spam.
Anyone else started seeing this?

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1. Operation: Yellow Snow (updated)
2. Recruiter or scammer?

I got an unusual version of my Google results listing when I did a search for a piece of camera equipment today.
Haven’t seen this elsewhere, suspect it is an experiment.

anyone else getting this?

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This great video arrived in my mail today:

Diferença_sala_chefe_e_a_sua

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I’m in Newbury, England at the moment for work. I thought it would be a good opportunity to buy a decent zoom lens for my SLR, so I’ve been using Google to do some research on a couple of lenses for my Canon camera.
There’s a great lens that has just been released by Tamron – the SP 70-300mm F/4-5.6 Di VC USD but it’s pretty hard to find at the moment so I’ve been hunting around via Google.

Imagine my surprise when I started spotting Jessops ads for the EXACT lens I’ve been looking for embedded in the News24 website.

I’ve since seen these ads all over the place as I browse the web, and they are very cleverly targetted to the exact items that I’ve browsed via Google or on the Jessops website.

This is very clever stuff… everywhere I go I’m confronted by images and prices for the exact thing I want to buy right now, and it’s hard to get away from the urge to buy!

Anyone else seen good examples of this happening?

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So it looks like I wasn’t the only idiot who couldn’t work out just what Wave was supposed to be used for (see my post here – http://tim-gregory.com/2009/11/google-wave-makes-me-feel-stupid/).

Google is gonna shut it down…

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I’ve created my first Facebook group, dedicated to drumming up some support for stopping the Yellow Pages and Phonebook spam we’re subjected to every year.

I’m hoping we can get the group up to a decent number and then set a date for returning our unwanted phonebooks.
Maybe it can become an annual event until the bastards decide to ask us if we want the books first before dumping them on our doorsteps.

So go here, join the group, post it to all your friends, and let’s hatch a plan to deliver on Operation: Yellow Snow – the mass return of unwanted Yellow Pages and Phonebooks to the Trudon offices.

UPDATED:

Can you believe that the line “Please consider the environment before printing this email” was added to the mail from a Trudon employee? Should perhaps read “Please consider the environment before printing 6 million phonebooks”

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