China Hiring Future

Picture one of your friends. Letís call her Amanda Li.

Amanda has a job as a Design Engineer in one of the big international technology companies based in Beijing, China. Life is good and Amanda is known for being responsible, practical and creative. She gets the job done, and adds that little extra that only a small number of engineers are capable of. Sheís a Star and much is expected of her by her colleagues and managers.

When the redundancy letter arrives unexpectedly it hits her like a ton of bricks. Her company has gone bankrupt. Nobody expected it and itís not anyoneís fault. Not in her office anyway.

Fortunately, Amanda lives in the year 2009. Her immediate reaction is to go to her personal blog. Everyone in 2009 has a blog and it is the standard way to communicate yourself to other people. Blogs are shorthand for ME.

Amanda posts that she is looking for a new job and she does this by simply marking herself as a ícandidateí on her blog. This signals she is open to talking to hiring managers, and within hours she has an incoming call from one on Skype, and an MSN chat conversation from an íinterested partyí who is also looking to hire in her industry. Two days later she signs a job offer for a new position with a better package, more responsibility and a strong career path to Design Manager.

Amanda did not apply to a single hiring portal for a job. She did not send her Resume or Profile to anyone by email. She did not call a single headhunter. She did not call any of her friends, nor did she look for referals from her own personal network. In fact the only thing she did was to mark herself as a ícandidateí on her blog.

So is this fantasy or fiction and could it arrive in 2009?

Putting the Web to Work for You
Itís called Structured Blogging, and while it might not be the next big thing, there is definitely something going on here. Something that could eventually lead to the scenario above.

Amanda is an engineer but she doesnít know the exact details of what happens when she does make the change on her blog from ístaffí to ícandidateí. íI mean, who needs toí, she says to herself. It all operates in the background as it should.

What she is actually doing is using a kind of standardized marking system (Itís based on XML tagging but we donít need to go into the details of this). As the search engines spider the web, at some point in the future, they will read the content of any blog and recognise how to classify it by reading the tags. So when someone puts up a blog post the search engine can recognise the type of post and understand the individual elements within it.

This is not a trivial change.

At present blogs are spidered by the big search engines but these search engines only use simple keywords to classify a blog or a post. Bloggers spend a lot of time trying to tweak their sites to fit in with the keywords they want to own. This is a lot of work and not for the faint hearted, or the technically challenged.

With structured blogging anyone will be able to mark their blogs posts very easily and, collectively, the web will be able to figure out what you are saying and understand the meaning.

You could post an advertisement to sell a second hand car, put up an apartment rental advertisement, or post a technical review of a new flat screen TV. The search engines would know what post was about, and they would be able to communicate this meaning to people who have previously registered to receive information on this issue. Googleís Personalized Home Page takes a small step in that direction.

Internet users tend to like it when something makes it easier for them to do something and structured blogging is no different. Itís a little too technical at the moment but once it is built into the web itself, so to speak, it should become mainstream. Then you get the tipping point like Podcasts now, or blogging itself in 2005.

For the hiring process this could very powerful. If search engines can understand meaning from the structure of data they can easily identify someone who is open to looking at positions in the design field in Beijing, or who is open to a construction project in the Middle East.

Anyone Hiring Manager who is looking for someone like this can sign up to specialised sites that will aggregate the content for them. When Amanda posts on her blog that she is in the market for a job structured blogging will distribute the information to the right people.

All individuals will be able to signal their candidacy to interested parties and bring them to their blog by the simple act of changing their status to ícandidateí.

If you are looking for someone in Beijing with a design background who has recently changed their status to candidate you will be quickly brought to Amandaís blog. Her Resume or profile will be waiting there for you to examine and the Resume page will already have been tagged so it can be found easily. In additon, the Resume will only be seen by you and by other people that Amanda has chosen. That is yet another tag.

Conclusions
The scenario suggested by structured blogging is not actionable right now, but someone, somewhere is going to figure out the necessary steps to get us there. Linkedin has already taken a small http://english.talent-software.com/index.php?s=hresum target=_blank>first step and all its profile are in the hResume format. Thatís 9 million people, and rising Ö

Tagging will not be for all content but if tagging content on a blog only needs one click then you will have widespread adoption eventually.

If the content has some value itís worth a click from the author. If the content is not tagged it probably wasnít worth finding in the first place. Resumes or profile have a market value so there is an incentive to tag.

It was definitely a smart move by Amanda.

Email frank.mulligan@recruit-china.com
Frank Mulliganís blog english.talent-software.com