The Saga of Recruiting.com – A new sheriff in town

I have been thinking long an hard about where to post this particular article. I have the SEO services for recruiters and small business blog which could be the right place – after all we are talking about websites, traffic, blogs, and page rank… so the topics covered might just fit nicely over there. I’m just not sure that is the right venue.

I also have the restaurant recruiters blog, which is designed for giving employers and job seekers in the restaurant industry (and yes other customer service focused businesses) insight into how recruiters work and how to better prepare themselves for changing companies and successfully getting a new position. Because I give tips to jobseekers about what recruiters do and how they think the discussion of recruiters, recruiting tools, recruiting websites and recruiting personalities from the recruiting blog-o-sphere could fit in well here too. But I don’t want my audience of jobseekers to come away with the wrong idea about how our profession works.

Also, there is an opportunity for submission of this particular article on Recruiting.com (RDC) and on RecruitingBlogswap.com. Steven Rothberg tells me that there are some 70 blogs that are participating in the blogswap but very few people are submitting articles, so if I post it there, it is likely to get published somewhere on the Internet.

I decided to write this post and include some topics that people are leaving out. There has been a firestorm of commentary regarding a site that is well known to recruiters but not to my regular readers – the site is recruiting.com and is a web 2.0 modeled community site where recruiters can participate by submitting articles of import regarding all things HR related and comment on the postings. Some of the founding members (I don’t know them all) are quite well known in recruiting circles and considered real experts. The sites original intent was to be a resource to the recruiting community, a gathering place if you will, where knowledge and friendship could be shared.

About a year ago RDC was purchased by a company called Jobster. Jobster is the brainchild of Jason Goldberg who continues (although my guess is for not too much longer) to be the CEO. Jobster is in it’s fourth iteration as a business having switched its business model from a referral site for employee hiring to its current model as a free job posting board. Back when Jobster purchased RDC it was still a referral powered hiring tool for companies that charged on a subscription basis. With referral hiring touted as "the most effective and efficient" way to hire talented employees – obviating the need for job boards, job ads and external recruiters. Jason Goldberg, as CEO, is what some would colorful and others would call controversial and polarizing. He has made some extremely brash statements about his competition (Monster in particular), about recruiters, and has been heard threatening his employees. There is no shortage of people who dislike him. I’m not among them. I don’t know him so I don’t have an opinion on that subject. But I do have an opinion on the subject of his behavior as viewed from our external vantage point. And I have to say that his behavior is troubling.

Jason’s behavior is troubling to me personally because what he does with his Internet property, RDC, effects my business. I haven’t ever been able to figure out why it was that Jason bought RDC in the first place. He kept on, as manager of the site, one of the nicest guys in the recruitosphere – Jason Davis. Jason was a founding member and guided the site and helped build community during the year that he was under contract to Jobster. However, aside from providing some rather meager resources to RDC, I never saw Jobster/Goldberg do anything to try to leverage the RDC domain name or the community that J. Davis built. I’m certain that I’m not the only person who was stumped by the purchase, who didn’t understand what Goldberg’s business goal was or might be. Jobster has never been a product that embraced recruiters in any way, it hasn’t been a product that was marketed to our community. Goldberg didn’t ask us for our input, even though he had the perfect platform from which to gather great participation from thought leaders in the industry. Goldberg claims to want to build great products for his users but never asked for so much as the first suggestion from all the folks who frequent RDC. With the more than 300 blogs that link to recruiting.com, it is common sense that tells you that there is a wide variety of people involved in recruiting and HR who make a daily trek to read and participate in the community. Why has Jason Goldberg done anything to leverage that audience? It is a head-shaker to me.

Recently, Goldberg stopped by to post a short set of questions on the blog which boiled down to asking if the site provided any value to its members. [you can read the whole post here] People who had been watching Jason Goldberg shoot his mouth off inappropriately, leak information about coming layoffs on his blog, then lie about them, then admit to them had a feeling that this little question that Goldberg just happened to post while Jason Davis was on vacation, was a precursor. Savvy business people could see the handwriting on the wall, and weren’t surprised when Jason Davis announced just a few days later that he would be leaving the helm of RDC. Ordinarily, a person who has done a great job of managing a business unit would be publicly praised and thanked by his boss when the time comes for him to leave… that didn’t happen. So one can assume that the two Jason’s may not be on the best of terms. Jason Davis is far too professional to air any dirty laundry regarding Goldberg and Jobster. It could be (although I doubt it) that Goldberg and Davis are not on bad terms, but Goldberg just doesn’t have the manners and grace to give Davis the public recognition that he deserves. It wouldn’t surprise me given his other immature behavior. I view it as just another incident that cements Goldberg as a controversial and polarizing figure in the Internet community.

Shortly after Jason Davis announced his departure, we got the public announcement that his replacement had been chosen. Goldberg’s choice for executive editor of recruiting.com seems to be a polarizing figure as well. It is none other than the Internet curmudgeon, John "Papa Smurf" Sumser. A quick visit to his Internet site – Intenetbiz.com – reveals a website stuck firmly in the 90’s; a publishing platform from which John continues to launch insults and tirades without fear of reprisal since he doesn’t allow comments from his readers. In his history he has accused respected recruiters of being spammers, called others "ignorant sluts", "spoiled", and most recently insulted the whole of the RDC community by calling us snakes. Papa Smurf seems to relish his role as a cantankerous old coot, who, like so many old westerns where the Grandpa was a horse’s ass, enjoys spewing insults at folks. Unlike those old westerns where the Grandpa had some redeeming characteristics that made him loveable, Papa Smurf seems to hide anything that would endear him to his audience. In one fell swoop, his post and additional comments alienated most of the people who make up the community that he is supposedly being brought in to run. It seems a fair assessment that there is a hidden, although not well so, agenda to dismantle RDC as it is now and have it remade into something completely different. Will it be an improvement? I don’t think so, at least not for its current family of users. You see it doesn’t make sense to ride into town with your six-guns blazing, calling the town folks snakes, scoundrels, and character assassins, if you don’t want those folks to eventually leave town. If there is gold under the town and you want to strip mine it, then the tactics that we are observing might make some sense.

Folks it seems plain to me that we are witnessing the last days of recruiting.com as we know it. Will it improve? Will it be a place that recruiters value and want to be a part of? Will it add value to our businesses? With history as my teacher, having observed Jason Goldberg’s actions in handling acquisitions and his own mainstay company, I would have to answer "no" to all of those. The domain name may live on, there may well be some way that John and Jason will eventually monetize the property, but I doubt highly that it will be anything for or about recruiters with our input and following any of our suggestions. There is just nothing in either Jason Goldberg or John Susmer’s past that would indicate that they would operate that way. There may be a new sheriff in town, but I think the town folk will be leaving.