Category: Industry

The Destruction of the Head Hunting Industry

This is a random thought that just popped in my head.

With information becoming increasingly available, I’ve been thinking that the headhunting business will go through a major destructive phase in the next few years. There are two things the Internet changed:

  • Better distribution of information on job openings
  • Better distribution of information on candidates

Definition: For those of you who are unaware, head hunters are professionals that search for employees and pair them up with open positions in companies. In a typical scenario, a company will pay a recruiter (head hunter) a fee that equates to 2-3 months of that employee’s yearly salary. Companies pay this because recruiting employees is expensive. I’ve done a lot of hiring in the last few years, and I know how time consuming it is to review hundreds of resumes and then interview. A head hunter is basically an outsourced HR department. Additionally, candidates often approach head hunters who re-post job openings in various job boards.

And there’s a third trend that will come based on increasing information available to the public:

  • Automation of job and candidate pairing

A long time ago, I was business partners with a man who was formerly a head hunter. I remember him telling me how wonderful the internet made his job. He told me that when he was my age, recruiting meant shaking a lot of hands, memorizing every face and name you ever met, and storing large piles of business cards. For him, recruiting was now about posting jobs on Craigslist and Monster and referring the candidates. To him, he was still the gatekeeper. These days, anybody can be a headhunter with a little Internet know how.

head hunter productivity chart
head hunter productivity goes up first, then down (we are in the middle stage now)

However, sites like LinkedIn can change all that. The one true value proposition that headhunters provide is that they serve as matchmaker. But as more information is available and technology improves, this process should become more and more automated. For example, right now, LinkedIn has job postings. On its own, it’s just a new competitor to Craigslist, but what makes things interesting is that LinkedIn also has the data points to find all of the candidates out there that might fit the job requirements — without anybody lifting a finger.

Right now, the information stream is mono-directional: job postings (and recruiters) broadcast information. The goal is a bi-directional system where seekers fill out their requirements (a.k.a. their resumes) and both sides let the system do the matching. This can only work if both sides have maximum information about the other. Think of it like a dating site for job seekers. It’s a hard problem to solve given the time-sensitive nature of job searches, but it’s an inevitable outcome as more and more information centralizes onto the Internet.

5AM thought of the day.

Google’s Real Goal Behind All Their Free APIs

Ever wonder why Google gives away so many web-developer tools? Tools that otherwise seem like complete money-and-bandwidth-pissing schemes (notice how most of these don’t directly show ads):

This is all about obtaining browsing behavior in a long term bid to increase ad efficiency. Nothing else.

  1. It is not about making things more “open”
  2. It is not about making web development easier
  3. It is not about making an online operating system
  4. It is not about competing with Microsoft
  5. It is not about making the Google brand more ubiquitous
  6. It is not about showing ads in new places

If any of these above things happen, they are a (likely planned) side effect. For example, if a particular API makes something easier, that is good because it will encourage other developers to adopt it as well. But as I will explain shortly, the commonly held beliefs about Google doing Good or Google making the web more open are simply not the reason for these initiatives.

If you notice, all of their APIs use JavaScript. This means all of their APIs have the ability to note what computer a given request is coming from. This means that on top of your search preferences, they can eventually begin to correlate your browsing habits based on the sites that you visit that use Google APIs.

For example, if my blog were to use a YouTube embed, it would be possible for Google to read a cookie originally placed on your machine by YouTube and correlate it as traffic coming from this site. This means they can uniquely track every YouTube video your computer has ever watched since the last time you cleared your cookies. YouTube is just an example because most of Google’s APIs are far less obvious to the end user. For example, the unified AJAX libraries could be used by a good half of the “2.0” websites out there without impacting performance (and in many cases would make the sites load faster for the end user). But because everything is going through Google, it’s possible (although I’m not saying that are) for them to track which sites you visit.

If this isn’t extremely valuable information, I don’t know what is. Don’t forget that the AdSense API is, in itself, a means for Google to track every website you’ve ever been to that uses AdSense, and for a way for Google to know exactly which type of ads interested you in the past. Once they know what sites you visit, they can surmise what a given site is about, and then determine, for example, what sort of products would interest you.

It’s the classic advertising chicken and egg problem: If I knew what my customers wanted, I could sell it to them, but they won’t tell me.

…And Google found the chicken. For the time being, they haven’t started using this information (at least noticeably), but I am sure they will as market forces move to make competition in that area more necessary.

Say goodbye to privacy. =( Oh wait, I’ve been saying that for quite some time now.