Progressions - From Recruiting to Larry, Moe and Curly to T-Rex

Today was a day for progressions; not necessarily progress, but progressions. I was looking at was several trends, things that we do, watch and listen to and just considering how things change and evolve. I figured why not put them out there. . . for what they are worth. Besides it has been awhile since I wrote anything here.

The first one is in regard my profession. How we find candidates has changed dramatically. It use to be back as recent as 2000 that the newspapers were still a source of candidates. Certainly before that time they were. When I started at Merrill Lynch they had people responding to advertisements in the New York Times and the Newark Star Ledger with typed resumes on crisp paper and mailed with a proper cover letter.

That has changed. Currently we have replaced the file cabinet with all those paper resumes with an internal database. The job advertisements listed in the paper are now on Monster. The New York Times in fact partners with Monster. As I focus on IT Professionals I am also using DICE. the point is we are now in the digital age.

The story does not end there, however, with the digital age. It is also the age of the Internet. The web itself progresses and today it is all about the niche. There really is no longer a central hub like the Times.

Television and the media is experiencing the same trend. There was once only the major networks. Now we have cable networks, satellite TV, and things like Hulu among others. The audience today is distributed across all of these. Likewise in recruiting, there are today multiple sites and places online and off to locate candidates. Those include Linkedin, things like Meetups, which is part online and part offline, various groups-which are an extension of the professional associations of the past, and even Facebook. Let us not forget Craigslist, which is a throwback to the newspaper classifieds, but online. Just as media and its advertisers can no longer focus on mass audiences, so to recruiting must turn to the appropriate niche. That is just the progression.

Jumping to another progression is the Three Stooges or the "Do not try this at home" theme. You remember Larry, Moe, and Curly. . .and let us not forget Shemp. The three idiots that did all kinds of insane and idiotic things. Sometimes extremely painful things. They would routinely bring a chuckle to my face, and occasionally a gasp from others that did not go for such absurdities.

Not too long ago you had to go cable for such stupidity - to JackAss. In fact I have caught AMC playing the stooges too! Today, however, there is Youtube. Now any sixth grader who can crash his skate board, or put himself on fire and just beat himself up pretty good, and ultimately limp away, can potentially be a star. If he does it right, he could have a million hits on his video. Really though, Jackass and Youtube trace back to the Stooges, who I would gamble were doing the same act in Vaudeville before going to the big screen and then the little screen after that.

This is the last one, the last progression. It was perhaps the most speculative, and one that I was simply wrong about. This afternoon I was listening to regular old FM radio briefly in the car-Q104. Imagine that! Anyway, they proceeded to play Tall Cool Woman in Black Dress, the classic Hollies tune. As I listened to it I realized that it shares the same rhythm as the classic T.Rex song Bang a Gong. Another progression, as I thought that the Hollies recorded the song in the sixties. Actually it was recorded in 1972. The T.Rex Classic it turns out was recorded and released in 1971, so if there was any progression it was the other way around. Oops.

In short things always progress, one way or another, and that does not necessarily infer progress.