I was reading “Branding the Feed” in Business 2.0 Magazine ((Heilemann, John, July 2006. “Branding the Feed.” Business 2.0, Volume 7, Number 6. Page 42.)) about Dick Costolo’s Feedburner strategy (If you read this site through a feed, it’s coming through feedburner).
Not a new thought, but it occurs to me that RSS (Real Simple Syndication) feeds could and should be applied to HR. Clearly this won’t be a revelation to my friends over at the recruiting sites where RSS feeds can be used for a multitude of purposes such as job board updates. Aside from recruiting, learning systems can publish course listings to employee portals (employees could subscribe to various course categories) and on-line internal corporate blogs used for knowledge sharing can be easily distributed (and fed to an employee’s personal portal page).
RSS, like other web 2.0 technologies has primarily been a social phenomenon. Applications into the corporate business computing world have been slow to adoption, even though almost all of us use these technologies. Log into your personal yahoo or MSN page and you’ll see RSS running in the background everywhere.
The HR technology world is all wrapped up in SOA and SaaS – technologies to improve workflow process and service process. Through XML, portals present access to data straight to the employee desktop. What’s missing is that technologies such as RSS have the ability to present ‘knowledge’ straight to the desktop and we haven’t found a way to capitalize on the technologies.
I’m predicting that in the next few years, we’ll see a quantum leap in how these technologies effect our work lives. The new generation of workers is upon us as 20 somethings enter the workforce with an incredible ability to multi task with dependencies on specific technologies, data navigability and a specific type of presentation that facilitates the way they work, communicate and network.
8 responses to “RSS in HR”
RSS in HR August 17, 2006 on 2:00 am | by Systematic HR I was reading “Branding the Feed” in Business 2.0 Magazine 1 about Dick Costolo’s Feedburner strategy (If you read this site through a feed, it’s coming through feedburner). Not a new thought, but
). At the time of HR-XML’s first meeting, consider that Google was not well-known and there was not yet anything like a third-party job search engine (at least not one with significant traffic). The systematicHR blog recently had a post on RSS in HR. RSS is one example of a Web 2.0 technology that is influencing the business of HR and recruiting. In response to that post, I commented that it is really amazing is the number of intermediaries the web has bred and gave the slightly exaggerated
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This is an interesting topic. In the very early days of the web, there was a lot of buzz about the web being a “disintermediator”, What is really amazing is the number of intermediaries the web has bred. Consider an employer that advertises a job with its local paper, which shares it with its job-board partner, where it is picked-up by a job search engine, which syndicates the job out as an RSS feed to someone’s blog, which is possibly picked up by some other aggregator (an exaggerated case?) It is tough to figure out for any party in this chain who is a competitor and who is an “eco-system” partner (and who is both). RSS is everywhere. So the branding is a lot harder to figure out than the technology. Its not RSS, but how a business can use it as part of an offering to create/maintain value.
From the job seeker’s point of view Craig’s list was a pioneer in this area, as they’ve had RSS feeds for resumes and job postings for quite some time. When indeed.com, simplyhired.com, oodle.com, and other job boards started RSS feeds I even wrote some Perl to aggregate these and search for particular job titles in certain cities and summarize those. It’s a very powerful search technique and there will probably be more tools like this available soon.
I found that just a few employers were publishing their own job listings in RSS form, and their IT folks I spoke with said there were very few folks looking at those.
Probably the most powerful use of RSS for me has been the ability to quickly scan many blogs of interest in my industry or career (I use the Sage Firefox extension) and discovering new companies via the blog postings I come across.
Truth is that in HR recruiting, on the candidate processing side, there are so many legal constraints, that it remains challenging to build secure “mashup” type applications that an enterprise would be comfortable using. Secure web applications with sql databases are the way to go for most situations, especially when it comes to simple lists, which need to be actionable anyway.
Al,
You are right to give a bit of a reality check here. What is sort of remarkable about RSS is that it is both pervasive and remarkably underutilized — at least directly by your average web surfer/job seeker. However, there is so much foundation out there it is hard to imagine that RSS won’t become a major way job seekers connect with employers. Earlier in the year, some HR tech bloggers proclaimed 2006 as the year of the subscription — maybe that will be 2007 or 2008 — but it will happen. I think when it does, it will almost be unremarkable since RSS will have faded into the background of a web-user’s experience. That said, I’m not surprised that employer portals aren’t making investments around RSS – it would seem to be such a low-cost or no-cost service they could get from existing talent acquisition/job advertising partners. I am surprised, that more employers haven’t surrendered the tiny bit of web-page real estate that might be required for a RSS button to subscribe to “Acme Corp” jobs.
On “mashups,” this is related, but you are straying into a bit of a different area. “Mashup” is somewhat of a troublesome word since it is a bit inexact. Because it is inexact, I may be reacting a bit to your statement that for candidate processing “Secure web applications with SQL databases are the way to go for most situations”. Leaving the “mashups” out of it, I do have a very different view of candidate processing. Increasingly, candidate processing is very much distributed. Securing distributed processing is challenging and requires a good deal more sophistication than putting up a standalone, web-based, relational database application accessed securely via https. But distributed processing is being done because it has to be done. I get an increasing number of calls from small, hosted ATS and background-check providers who are late to realize that there is no future isolated, hosted applications. At the same time, costs of securing the distributed realm are increasing. New competencies are required — WS-security, federated identity management. So repeatable, standards-based means of securing distributed processing have become a priority. So I guess you are correct to say that securing distributed candidate processing is troublesome, challenging, etc. in the HR domain, but my long-winded point is that employer requirements and the state of the art are considerably beyond secure web applications with an SQL database.
Mashup was a bit vague in my post. I was referring to public, open RSS to open API type of mashups, like housing maps on craigs list/google yahoo maps integration, podbop.org or what have you. I felt that it may be difficult to have the simple RSS xml format to be useful in software applications that handle candidate processing. I’d love to see some examples if someone has done so.
As for the power of XML in HR, of course, there is much that can be done and is being done here, and in a secure manner. HR-XML is a powerful tool in this regard and will continue to grow in use. It’s actually a pioneer that other industries will soon copy in their areas. But HR-XML is a comprehensive structure, not the simple list that RSS supports.