• Thought For The Day: Technologies Do Not Die
• U.S. Payrolls Fall, Unemployment Rate Climbs to 5.5% Still, the rate is below the 30 year average of 6%. And, a national average does not begin to tell the regional story.
• Tens of thousands of highly skilled workers turned away Google explains its view of the H1B process. Scan the Google Policy Blog Workforce articles to see how highbrow our industry can be.
• Tribune Co. Plans Sharp Cutbacks at Papers “the struggling company has looked at the column inches of news produced by each reporter, and by each paper’s news staff. Finding wide variation, they said, they have concluded that it could do without a large number of news employees and not lose much content.” The downward spiral accelerates.
• JobDig Starts New Blog About JobDig Toby Dayton introduces a blog that is more tightly coupled with Job Dig’s business needs. It’s an interesting move that is echoed by Eric Shannon’s short posting on Job Boarders, What Should a Job Board Blog Focus On?
• Jobs, Businesses, and The Leisure Economy Reach Branding Club is offering a very interesting webinar on a sea change in the economy.

• The Future Of Social Isn’t Content Spewing (I Hope) Arrington gels the arguments in recent conversations about the future of Social Media. In one utopian view it’s “every single human being posting their thoughts and experiences in any number of ways to the Internet.”  Arrington says, “The future of social media, I hope, isn’t in more tools to help us spew more content. Instead, we need ideas and technology that can leverage all this available online content (including status and activity streams) to enhance real world social interactions.” He must be reading about the Recruiting  Roadshow experiments.
• The Future of Mobile Social Networking MIT’s Technology Review speculates about Steve Jobs next product introduction wave on June 9th “using the iPhone’s map and self-location features, as well as  information about the prior activities of the user’s friends, Whrr  proposes new places to explore or activities to try.”
• TrendWatch: Comparing MicroMemes, Network Feeds, and MacroMemes    Jeremiah Owyang provides food for thought about making sense of the various kinds of information available in social networks.
• Job Boards Are Restaurants, Databases Are Home Cooking From Alex Cantu comes the Talent Drive view of the universe.
• Recruiting Slow? The Problem’s Not Your Tools… “If the recruiter isn’t doing well enough to afford their own iPhone, they probably can’t afford your system..”. So says Maren Hogan “What dismays me is this massive array of tools available for those of us in the talent acquisition and management spaces. Holy shitake! You’d  think that with enough vendors to fill a football stadium, our issues as recruiters would be solved by now.”

• Digging Into Recruitingblogs.com V 1.7 Advanced LinkedIn user abandons service.
• Twitter: Don’t blame Ruby, blame Scoble In the spirit of LinkedIn being passive aggressive with Recruiters, Twitter joins the fray by blaming its users for its problems. Truth is, power users cause technology to fail while communications companies are inherently technical. Part of the risk in radical transparency (as Twitter is learning to practice) is that when you are wrong, that’s transparent, too. This is a nice look at some of the isues.
• Naveen Jain’s Latest Scam: Intelius Infospace founder is giving  a bad name to background checking. It’s hard to be slimier than the  rest of the “guilty until proven innocent” crowd.
• Web Technology Trends for 2008 and Beyond Pointer and instructions for short useful presentation.
• NotHired Real, now.

If you haven’t noticed, Arbita, the Minneapolis based Internet Recruitment Advertising agency, is undergoing a market changing transformation. Once the mouse that roared ( a Peter Sellers comedy about a small nation that declares war on the US and wins, improbably), Arbita has been polishing its credentials quietly over the past couple of years. The little engine that could has become a major force in the industry. Relentless travel and deal making by the firm’s charismatic CEO are at the heart of the game.

Today’s announcement that Arbita has merged with Job Machine underscores the radical thinking that is at the core of this juggernaut. Besides finding a long lost brother, the pairing provides a game changing level of synergy. All of a sudden, one neutral and objective firm is providing a full spectrum of sourcing services. From Training for desktop sourcing to tightly orchestrated Recruitment Branding campigns, the newly minted service does it all.

Instead of an Advertising agency trying to navigate emerging tools and services, Arbita is primarily a software company that happens to be good at meeting client needs online. Shally Steckerl’s JobMachine, another entity founded on sheer optimism and the moral high road, offers industry changing tactics for workforce development, candidate pipeline acquisition, raw sourcing technique and polished social networking tactics.

Together, the two offer breadth in strategy, ease of implementation (from core software), and full choice in tactics (the complete range of sourcing alternatives).

Look closely at this transaction, it heralds a new day.

Take a gander at these unemployment statistics:

• 70 Metropolitan Areas (out of 369… about 20%) have unemployment rates below 4%
• 170 Metropolitan Areas (out of 369…about half) have unemployment rates below 5%
• 45 Metropolitan Areas (out of 369, 12%) have unemployment rates over 7%

There is trouble in non-coastal California, the rust belt and relatively rural areas.  There is a boom economy in Washington DC, Texas, and interesting parts of the northern Middle of the country.

The thing to notice is that, in spite of all of the rhetoric, there is no such thing as a national economy.

In Unix and other computer multitasking operating systems, a daemon (pronounced /ˈdiːmən/ or /ˈdeɪmən/) is a computer program that runs in the background, rather than under the direct control of a user; they are usually initiated as processes. Typically daemons have names that end with the letter “d”: for example, syslogd, the daemon that handles the system log, or sshd, which handles incoming SSH connections. (Wikipedia)

It’s also the title of an astonishing new novel. Daemon, by Leinad Zeraus is Snow Crash  (here’s the Wikipedia piece) for the next generation. Snow Crash, you might remember, shaped the way we got used to the web. Emerging in 1992, the novel gave form to thematic and philosophical notions that have colored the evolution of the Internet ever since.

Daemon is the story of a Game Company executive who, while dying of brain cancer, manages to achieve a plausible sort of immortality as a computer virus. Leinad Zeraus (Daniel Suarez spells his name backwards) melds real industry insight with very plausible technical scenarios. At the least, this is the emergence of an author of science driven  thriller. At best, it’s like snow crash..prophetic and structural.

All the way through the book, I wanted to call Jeff Hunter to see if he thought the ideas made sense. The world described in the novel is built in pieces of things that I understand. I want to know if it’s possible. Bot generated politics and economies sounds technical. In Daemon, it’s suspense.

Great Recruiting includes much more than winning competitive tactics. A hard look at the way that the long term future impacts the short range battlefield is essential to any Recruiting system that produces long term value. Daemon delivers a plausible alternate reality including Recruiting strategies that rival Google’s.

Get a copy and read it on your next flight.

Recruiters spend lots of time and energy reframing the mundane and technical. At their best, they deliver compelling stories about values and experiences. Daemon is an example of that craft.