Jason Goldberg kicked off the 2006 ERExpo with a look at what Jobster sees as the future directions of online hiring.  You can watch the video from Jason’s talk here.

In the future, we believe that job search and advertising will shift towards being:

1. More targeted (search based, and contextual targeting)
2. More distributed (on thousands of websites, not just job board destinations)
3. More social (rich communities, online referrals and networking)

These shifts create opportunities for a new breed of technology driven employment services that provide alternatives to traditional “classifieds style” job advertising.

The Google research blog has an interesting piece on their hiring strategy. These are good ideas, though I’m always a little skeptical of tidy graphs and simulations that show after the fact that your choices were optimal.

Their two key points are to only hire candidates who are above the mean of your current employees, for obvious reasons, and to use no hiring manager, because hiring managers will always prefer some help to no help.  Instead, candidates are interviewed for company fit and then assigned to a team once they meet the bar.

An alternative to no hiring managers is to always give hiring managers too few heads to get the job done.

This strategy aligns incentives nicely– hiring managers know that if they hire someone who is good but not great, they’ll be short staffed.

The alternative strategy taps into whats good about the hiring manager, which is that properly incented, he or she will go the extra mile to track down and sell the right person on the team.

Which strategy is better is debatable, but you certainly can’t compare them with a simple simulation.

Vast has launched with an interesting approach and business model to vertical search, based on an extremely open API and liberal terms of use.   

All of their vertical search data is available in XML feeds that can be integrated into any site, any  even high volume commercial ones.   No written permission is required for this use, except for sites that are themselves crawler-based.

Their business model will be based on embedding advertisements within the feeds, and (I would speculate) also on manipulating the order of ads.  (I can imagine Intel bidding against AMD for preferential sorting within the jobs feed.)  When they get around to including ads and figuring out the financial model, they plan to share revenues with their partner publishers.

In effect, Vast is commercializing the idea of mashups, relying upon other sites to integrate their functionality and expose it to large audience.  They are moving business relationships, advertising, and monetization to the tail end of the process once they’ve obtained critical mass.

In some ways, this approach is antithetical to that taken by Google, in which their is always a clear delineation between ads and content, and in which there are strict limits on how their API can be used that give Google a great deal of control.  (The Google API is limited to 10,000 hits per day and non-commercial use.)  

In a world of mashed up content and ad stripping technology, it seems inevitable however that some blurring of ads and content will happen.

Vast also has an interesting blog that has some helpful background.  The title of the initial post, “Something Vast this Way Comes”, seems to be a play on Google’s “Do no evil’ by way of Something Wicked This Way Comes.

SixApart has raised $12 Million in a third round of funding for use in “new products, international expansion and network growth. 

They are particularly interesting in expanding blogging to include more older users, office workers, and international users, especially corporate users in China.  (According to one study, 52% of Chinese office workers write Internet blogs.)

With all of these efforts to expand the adoption of blogging and social networks, could they become as ubiquitious as email?   Users every day compose content in the form of emails that might be better published in a more shareable space, so it doesn’t seem impossible. 

The interesting thing about blogs versus email is that they are so much more amenable to tagging, aggregation, linking, sharing, advertising, and so forth.  (Putting ads next to email is creepy, putting a relevant ad feed next to a blog is quite natural.)  A shift from email to blogging is more technically and socially significant than it might first appear.

The Unofficial Google Weblog reports that Google is granting free advertising for nonprofits.

Nonprofits that are accepted into the Google Grants program are awarded an in-kind AdWords advertising campaign on Google.com for at least three months to increase traffic to their website, and raise awareness of their topic areas.

In order to be accepted for the program, organizations must have be based in the US, and have a 501(c)(3) status, assigned by the Internal Revenue Service.

USA Today reported on a a non-profit director that put up a website to attract donors to raise money to pay doctors to treat people in Africa and Asia. When he launched he was getting two visitors a day, and one donation per week. When he got accepted into Google Grants and received the free advertising, he started getting over 300 visitors per day, and 25 donations from all over the world. Donations were hitting around $5000-$8000 each from people that found the site on the Internet.