Job Boards Add Learning Functionality

Most recruiters that I know are weary of mainstream job boards because the flow through rate of qualified candidates is low. Specialized boards like Dice.com are better but they're all feeling the pain of the recession and greater use of social networking sites and are therefore trying to generate new sources of revenue.

Dice is aggregating and promoting certain technical certification courses to make it easier for technical folks to stay current on the highest need skills. Dice isn't charging companies to list their courses but people can take the online courses through Dice, so it'll be a modest source of income.

Dice is smart; they're adding value to their site but I do wonder how much longer before Facebook adds skill profiling (a la LinkedIn) for their 250 million members and starts making money via postings, private searches for recruiters, or even some sort of placement. LinkedIn is still really not taking advantage of its potential, so there is a huge opportunity for Facebook to get this right. I could easily see it adding highly detailed skills profiles, ideal organizational descriptions, availability listings (especially for short term contract work...), etc. to allow users to actively or passively search for work. Many professionals have their polished, dry LinkedIn profiles and their more casual, fun Facebook profiles, and many of us have colleagues in both. Given Facebook's need to grow revenue I think we'll see some creative approaches to blurring these lines.

Creative Ways To Land Your Next Job

Is It Really Just About Strengths?

Good, short blog from Steve Roesler about the current fad of emphasizing strengths as a primary leadership tool and the importance of a more balanced approach.

His point is that people can hide behind their strengths either because they're lazy and don't want to learn new skills or simply don't like doing certain things. Often positional power is the subtext behind people telling others that they aren't "good" at doing certain tasks and therefore need others to do it for them. Anyone in HR has seen the person who is excellent at certain tasks but has the team skills of a piece of toast, yet their manager looks the other way because, in the short term at least, they don't want to rock the boat or simply lack the skills to give balanced feedback.

In the end, like all management ideas, it really comes down to a balanced approach to solving problems, learning as you go, and helping people with the art of working together.