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It is better
to not be on
the web than
to be on and
not know why
John Sumser

Reality
is more
complex
than
it seems.
John Gall

It's better to
do a few things
really well than
than to do
a lot of things
badly.
If you can't
make the necessary
commitments of
time and energy
to your
electronic
marketing
efforts
scale back
your plan.
John Sumser

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Network Confidentiality

(November 16, 2000) The Recruiting marketplace is an extremely fragmented universe in which social status, language, manners, regional difference, educational level, ethnic background, gender and other politically difficult factors determine the boundaries. In each of the segments (and we imagine 75,000 segments in the US, 200,000 segments globally), some things are features. Those same features are flaws in other segments.

This shouldn't really be news to anyone but the small group of technologists who, blinded by the possibility of "owning the market", simply can't see the importance of those differences. These are folks who would try to fund the Greek-Italian job board because the geographical space is adjacent. They tend to imagine Recruiting functionality as a "one size fits all" proposition. They'd giggle at our belief that it would take a team of anthropologists to figure out the personalization issues in a single dominant player. We're of the opinion that the issues involved in domestic American regionalization haven't even been touched.

That brings us to today's bugaboo: confidentiality. There is no question that a subset of job changers require confidentiality. When the CEO of a Fortune 1000 company starts to think about changing jobs, it has broad implications for the company stock price. If a number of her subordinates start to look around, the same stock price issues begin to work. This group needs confidentiality at a level not currently being provided.

At the same time, the last thing that a real "Free Agent" wants in the process is anonymity. The "Free Agent" business is built around "the brand name You" (as our friends at Fast Company put it). With personal reputation on the line, a respected "Free Agent" does not want to be confused with anyone else. A service that supports her needs will provide the opposite of confidentiality.

In some cases, a job board (or job board in a box) company will discuss confidentiality when they really mean "limited protection from large quantities of unsolicited email". While this is probably a good thing, we often find those same companies talking about the value they obtain by having access to all of the people who have applied to all of the jobs from all of the customers in their system. This is when it gets scary.

Network confidentiality means that candidates who apply to the jobs you post are "your" candidates. Far too many of the vendors in the space assume (as a fundamental component of their business model) that when a candidate applies to the job you post, they have the right to consider that candidate theirs. When you see a company counting the number of resumes in their database as a "feature", what it means is that they have data on people who have applied for other jobs. They are selling access to candidates who have (more likely than not) applied to your competitors. They are selling the same thing to your competition.

We're not saying that this is inherently a bad thing, just mislabeled in the current marketing language.

Network confidentiality should be available as a value added upsell from any major vendor in the space. In other words, you should be able to pay for the ability to have candidates who only apply to your job segregated from the rest of the database. At some level of the game, your fees should not be used to build the companies business at your expense. We're betting that this kind of feature will start to be available shortly.

- John Sumser

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