Magic Pot of Jobs

I keep hearing all my recruitosphere buddies falling all over themselves to talk about how great ZoomInfo is and how much easier it make it for them to network and find candidates, and how if you say something on the Internet that you regret, ZoomInfo will surely find it.

Meh. So I go to check out my own summary a few months ago, and it’s wildly, woefully out of date. No worries, I say to myself, I’m sort of re-strategizing my personal brand and rearranging some web stuff, and I’m sure ZoomInfo will catch up.

Well, today, 6 months later, it hasn’t. It hasn’t found my new online resume. It hasn’t found my LinkedIn profile. It hasn’t found my name change, even though it’s on every one of my sites. If you look for Tiffany Bridge, you don’t find me. If you look for Tiffany Baxendell Bridge, it’ll find Tiffany Baxendell and ignore the Bridge.

People, I am all over the damn Internet. I am not difficult to find. I put that stuff out there so that it will BE FOUND. And yet the most recent information ZoomInfo had for me was a cached version of my MPOJ bio that’s at least 5 months old. One of the other references was from a staff listing at one of my old jobs. My name was taken off that staff listing three years ago when I left that job…

And yes, of course I can (and did) claim my summaries and update them (somewhat, haven’t finished yet), but surely ZoomInfo can’t seriously expect that everyone is going to take the time to do this, not when I’ve already had to take the time to fill out my profile on heaven-knows-how-many other profile-and-networking sites. It seems like it would be a lot easier to just not act like the Wayback Machine.

And then, even after I filled all that in, ZoomInfo has the same serious shortcoming that I’ve been taking LinkedIn to task for:

It has no way whatsoever to handle a person’s name change.

This is not rocket science. A significant portion of the population changes their names at least once, and then a significant portion of THAT population changes them again later.

Why is it so difficult for the makers of social software to add in a little extra functionality for “former names used” or “some people know me as?” Why, once I have claimed a summary at ZoomInfo and confirmed my identity, can I not change the name on that summary? My last name is not Baxendell anymore, and I’m working very hard to get that change reflected on all my various web identities, and yet LinkedIn and ZoomInfo refuse to add this one simple feature that would allow people who knew me at my previous jobs AND people who have met me recently to find the same information about me.

At least at LinkedIn I can include both names in the last name field and the search will find them both, but what about people who aren’t using their pre-married names anymore professionally? Should the people they knew earlier in their career or went to college with not be able to reconnect with them?

Maybe if the tools were better more people would, you know, USE them.

UPDATE: Lest anyone think I’m just pickin’ on ZoomInfo and LinkedIn, let me also point out that Jobster doesn’t accommodate former names that well, either. Hey JGo, can you do something about that?

Congratulations to the RecruitingBloggers.com crew on their launch yesterday.

It’s a bunch of recruiters blogging together, bandying nonsensical nicknames and ridiculous inside jokes around, and… hey, come to think of it, it’s rather like the old Recruiting.com, but with different faces!

Not that I’m complaining, mind you. Nature abhors a vacuum, after all, and clearly with the Recruiting.com relaunch, there was a vacuum in that niche, whatever it is.

(Seriously, much love, guys. Adding you to my feedreader now.)

According to the HR Blogging Community and Technorati, MPOJ is the #8 Job Hunting Tools blog. Yay!

You like me, you really like me….

I’ve been getting slammed with trackback spam across all my blogs for the last 24 hours- I woke up this morning to find nearly 150 new ones that will have to be cleared out manually. So I have deleted the trackback script from the server until I can find a good way to prevent it from happening (disabling trackbacks in wordpress doesn’t stop the spam flood). Or, you know, until spamming becomes a capital offense akin to treason or espionage.

If you link to me, I’d totally appreciate a comment in the comment box- I’ve got a pretty good solution for spam there.

I’m making my reservations now for the Recruiting 2006 Conference in New York City in November. You can spot me in the Blogger’s Corner, fighting the good fight to clue in corporate America about what a little transparency can do for their image as an employer-of-choice. Many thanks to Jason Davis of Recruiting.com for organizing this adventure.

I’ve never been to a conference of this magnitude- at my last job, I was always the one who got left behind at the office while everyone else went to the trade show- and certainly never as a “blogger,” so I’m not quite sure what to expect yet. But I’m looking forward to the trip and hope to post lots from the road.

In the meantime, I’m going to be formulating some talking points about corporate blogging, so I’ll be soliciting your thoughts along the way.

As a general rule, I’m not a huge fan of podcasting. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s cool that there CAN be podcasts- I’m a proponent of citizens’ media in all its forms- but I personally have very little patience for it. I’ve got to wait for the file to download, plug in my iPod, sync, and then find time to listen to it when I don’t need the language centers of my brain for something else. And I have to have music while I’m commuting or I get cranky, so that’s right out.

So I don’t listen to podcasts, and I don’t really want to produce one. But sometimes I wonder if podcasting might not enhance some of the ridiculous stories I tell here, because I get some ridiculous phone calls. Too bad I can’t record the calls I get, because some of them deserve to be heard by the world, like the one I took where I had to spend the first several minutes trying to figure out if he wanted a recruiter or a phone sex operator. (Here’s a hint: Don’t say, “Be gentle with me, I’ve never done this before” while speaking slowly and breathing heavily if you’re looking for a job.)

As many of you know, I’ve only been a recruiter for about a year and a half. Before this, I worked for a software company and in the IT departments of a number of other companies, which is why I was hired to do tech recruiting.

But it also means that I know less about things like… best practices in contract recruiting. And suddenly I have occasion to need a crash course in working as a contract recruiter. So if any of my esteemed colleagues want to help a sista out, I’d appreciate it if you dropped me a line. tiffany @ the name of this blog.com, or use the contact form linked in the navbar.

(No, I didn’t lose my job. Everything is fine, thanks. But I need some information.)

By the way, I updated MPOJ’s disclaimers and policies today.

It won’t affect most of you, but if you’re trying to launch a new employment-related site or product, you might like to read it.

John Sumser has an interesting BlogSwap post up at Recruiting.com today about whether there’s any value in blogging if essentially we’re just blogging for each other.

It’s not a new question- I seem to remember a kerfuffle a few weeks ago about whether or not the recruiting blogosphere is simply a “mutual admiration society” or not.

It’s a valid question- I know there are days when I, like the commenter on Sumser’s post, feel sort of confused by all the inside jokes and weird nicknames being bandied about by the recruitosphere A-listers. But nonetheless, whether I write Magic Pot of Jobs or not, I’m still finding a lot of value in my fellow recruiting bloggers’ postings.

Permit me to beg the question, though: Even if we’re only creating value for our fellow bloggers, is that such a bad thing? Clearly we have joined this community because we find it valuable, and the failure of others to find that value themselves doesn’t diminish the value of the community to me, or to HR Guy, or to Canadian Headhunter, or whatever.

What do you guys think?

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BIS provides background checks to employers worldwide.

In case anyone was wondering, I did eventually get my exam code and passed the test for my CSP today.

Now I get extra letters after my name. W00t.