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ERNIE, please use the form on the
linked page.
 Self
Deception
(June 7, 2001) The only thing we can rely on with certainty is our
inherent ability to deceive ourselves.
This simple truism applies to so many aspects of our lives that it
is one of those sayings that ought to be hung on your wall. Anyone who has
ever immersed themselves in the details of managing a technical process
will recognize the recurring feeling. The things that initially look like
easy to understand "buzzwords" are actually precise and detailed
disciplines. In order to stay sane, the human propensity to bookmark the
unknown as "safe and simple" is at the root of our ability to deceive
ourselves.
The same is true with running a business for the first time and
experimenting with new ideas. The "gotchas" are most often in the places
that you'd least expect them. In fact, "expecting them" has more to do
with experience in the arena than it does with a sensible and rational
prediction of what might happen. The clearest way to describe the risk in
the MBA approach to management is that it assumes than anything can be
managed with generic principles. In fact, the "devil is in the details" of
any particular discipline.
"Job Scraping" or "Do-Nothing Recruiting" is a good case in point.
On the surface, the idea that a recruiter can simply post a job to the
corporate website and automation will take care of the rest is a good one.
Like "Prince Charming", "winning the lottery" and "build it and they will
come", however, it's one of those fantasies that involve success without
dirt under the fingernails. Our inherent ability to deceive ourselves is
always rooted in the reluctance to get dirt under our fingernails.
Solutions that are too easy always create the very problem that they
sought to solve.
Here's the problem.
In order to scrape jobs from a website, a human being (no, it's not
ever going to be automated), has to visit the website and learn the form
in which jobs are posted (the architecture). As long as the architecture
remains stable (a couple of months at best), all of the
jobs can be "grabbed" from the site on a periodic basis. When the
architecture changes (and it's hard to automate the detection of such a
change), the job scraping mechanism won't work properly and the site has
to be revisited.
In other words, periodic human surveillance on the part of the job
scraping company is a necessary component of the process. There is no
available option to post some jobs some places. It's an all or nothing
purchase decision.
The initial surveillance produces an extraction template through which
all of the jobs are processed. In other words, job scraping is a
great tool if you want all of your jobs posted to the same place or places
all of the time (like most small businesses). It is cheaper to
have someone else do the work of detecting changes in your posting system
or website format than it is to do it internally.
This is why the TMP acquisition of FlipDog is so initially
powerful. Their markets (mostly small and medium sized businesses)
precisely want one stop shopping. Larger accounts demand more service (and
they are the "property" of the newspapers). If you want this job posted
here and that job posted there and don't want either posted in the same
place, the problem is too complex to be left to an outsourced automatic
engine. As the E-recruiting market gains sophistication, job scraping
services will come to be seen as limiters of options (you can only use
our network).
So, how would you fix the problem?
A chat with the leaders of the job scraping companies on this
subject gives rise to the notion of tagging jobs with distribution
information when they are posted. That is, as each individual job is put
online, little bits of coded information could be embedded in the ad that
told the job scraper where to place them (and more importantly, where not
to place them). In today's market, all jobs are posted everywhere, whether
the customers wants this or not.
(Once upon a time, this buckshot distribution method worked.
Unfortunately, in today's cluttered distribution environment, the process
is extremely self defeating.)
If you have to code each job separately for distribution before
posting it, what do you have? Why it's the systems that are in place in
the various JAD companies. The remarkably silly thing about job scraping
technology is that its logical evolution is to cease being a what it is
and rapidly become a forms based posting system. The supposedly advanced
technology can only grow to become the solutions that it proposes to
replace. How ironic.
In other words, if you want to use the future of job scraping, use an
existing Job Advertising Distribution company.
- John Sumser
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