Rezoomex - a starfish using web2.0 to elongate the tail of recruitment business
A quarter of a century back we were just a handful of recruitment consultants in Pune, India which used to be a sleepy "pensioner's paradise" with a very laid back approach to business. Globalization of the 90's saw the arrival of big executive search and recruitment firms having operations spread across the globe. With the advent of the Internet and job portals where candidates can publish their resumes to a large population of recruiters;resulted in a multitude of recruitment consultants who are thriving on an apparently insatiable demand for talent. The recent boom in IT recruitment catalyzed this process.
The long tail of the recruitment consulting market
At this time there are a few thousand individual consultants and firms engaged in the recruitment business. This number seems to be going up every month. This is a phenomenon quite similar to the one described by Chris Andersen in his book called The Long Tail .In this book Chris also describes the role of an “Aggregator” – a pre requisite this phenomenon to occur. Aggregators like e-Bay, iTunes, Amazon, Flikr, You Tube and Salesforce.com are characterized by –
1. Its free – financed by advertising or by sponsors who benefit from the application.
2. There is minimum check or quality control on the content that is hosted there. Quality is a result of a self imposed discipline.
3. The aggregator enables customers to search from among thousands of content providers in the long tail. Customers can also rate the providers and feely post their opinions – thus providing valuable information to other customers and feedback to the providers.
Rezoomex as an aggregator
Rezoomex plans to provide free hosting to recruitment services who will be able offer the following content to their customers
1.Candidates can Upload resumes and provide some minimum information.
Rezoomex plans to evolve as a Star Fish and not a Spider
2.Employers and candidates can search the right consultant and provide review comments about the consultants – both positive and negative.
3.Enable communication between candidates, employers and consultants with contact information masked wherever required.
4.Employers can search resumes, publish vacancies and schedule interviews
5.Candidates can view historical record of vacancies where s/he was sponsored, selected or rejected.
6.Employer can view historical record of candidates who were forwarded, interviewed, selected or rejected.
7.Recruiters can download a manual/ book giving tips on running the recruitment business.
8.Recruiter can have his own web page, letter head and visiting cards.
In their book The Star Fish and the Spider Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom have observed that aggregators such as e-Bay , Napster or Skype evolve more as peer to peer networks with the following characteristics1.There is no CEO with command and control. It’s a collaborative network lead by catalysts who serve as role models.
Agile team used to develop the "Rezoomex" application is organized more like a starfish. You can read more about it in this posting.
2.There is no head quarter. Members run these organizations from many locations using distributed information and decision making.
3.They use open source software which is a result of a collaborative development effort. The software itself enables peer to peer collaboration.
