Guest Post

Is online recruitment in Ebay’s future?

As I’m sure may of you have heard the story of David Wood who recently became the first person to legally sell himself on Ebay.

David came up with the idea, after having been out of work for sometime, of advertising himself on Ebay in the form of a business service. Listed as a ‘Super Sales Package’ with starting bids of £35,000 for a years service, he outlines the benefits that his package would bring to any business who chose to purchase it and stated that he would accept the listed price in 12 monthly instalments and would consider sensible offers.

He’s managed to attract a storm of media attention for his innovative approach to finding a job including generating a great deal of hype on Twitter and other social networking sites.

But the question many people are now asking is; will Ebay choose to add job seekers to their product list? Arguably they already have a lot of the infrastructure in place to do it given that they are a massive online retailer that regularly handles transactions worth tens of thousands of pounds. So why wouldn’t they?

Part of me thinks it would be a great idea to see more candidate lead job sites, where people are encouraged to shout about their skills instead of just dropping into a CV database along with so many others. Though how successful are they likely to be? David Wood’s success is mostly due his status as a pioneer in this respect, he gained focus by doing something new, with hundreds or thousands of job seekers listing themselves how much success could any particular individual hope for? Also, by providing what is in essence a free CV database to recruiters Ebay would be throwing down the gauntlet to some extremely large online recruitment businesses such as Reed and TJG.

Ultimately though I think the best lesson that can be drawn from David’s story is this; dare to think, be unique, find an empty stage and shout as loud as you can. People will notice.

One Comment

  1. Really interesting piece Bill. I think there’s a lot more of this type of thing to come, we have these huge on-line giants with the best distribution platforms that are household names, expect more from the likes of Facebook, Twitter, and Google along these lines

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