Thoughts on Ning and the many Recruiting Networks out there

There have been big and interesting changes that Ning has recently made in order to better the experience for what must be millions of members of all the communities that are run on their system. RecruitingBlogs.com of course is one of them.

It’s hard to condense what really I think it all means because I would need a lot of space. I have been focused on this almost exclusively for the last 10 days. I believe though that it will be better for members of RecruitingBlogs.com and the networks in general who are on Ning.

If you go to Ning.com and log in with your username and password that you use here, you will see all of the networks that you belong to. It’s right there. You can see all of the content coming from those networks as well. It’s good.

Here is a list of networks that I belong to. I am not very active in many of them but you can’t be busy everywhere.

The friends you have on RecruitingBlogs.com are connected to you no matter what site on ning you made friends with them on. This is significant because it's now easy to share networks, network with people and promote networks you like to people who you think will appreciate it.

If you are logged into Ning.com and you find a network you like, you can hit the recommend button, a list of your friends come up and you can send a message to them letting them know you think they will like the network. I hope this will make it easier for you to share RecruitingBlogs.com with those who do not yet know about it. we have a lot of content here. I think it's what makes RecruitingBlogs.com unique.

What it means for the network creators of these sites is different and I believe if Ning is successful in delivering their master plan, it will be great for the RecruitingBlogs.com Social Network and great for all of the other networks as well.

So, I want to introduce you all to a number of recruiting networks that are built on Ning. You can also do a search on Ning to find other networks of interest including other recruiting related sites.

The networks I visit at least once a day

Talentbar
MagicMethod Phone Sourcing
Fordyce Letter ning site
Future Of Talent
Jobboarders
HRM Today

No disrespect to the ones I did not mention, it's just these are the ones I visit the most. I hope that the admins for many recruiting networks out there start pushing other related sites they like and encourage their members to start looking around and doing the same. It's how the blogosphere became healthy and it's how this new medium will become healthy. We all still need respect, it's not just about how big your network is.

One of the things that has come from all of this is that RecruitingBlogs.com and TalentBar will be trying some things together. We have decided that we will carve out a piece of the right hand column of every page on both our sites and this will allow us to deliver messages, ads, anything we thing everyone who belongs to both our networks should know about. Miles has also written about it here.

I hope you find some interesting networks as a result of Ning’s new release and I also hope that these networks will start promoting to their members all of the other great recruiting related networks on Ning.

If you have any questions or want to discuss stuff, let me know or leave a comment.

Thanks

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Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Bruce Rowles on March 11, 2009 at 4:35pm

Jason,

Recruiter-Talk is also interested in sharing the ideas and messages to other members and welcome the opportunity to share and promote other Ning Recruiting sites.

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Permalink Reply by Slouch on March 11, 2009 at 5:08pm

great. I set up a group on recruitingblogs for network administrators of recruiting related ning sites so join that lets start talking.

Bruce Rowles said:

Jason,

Recruiter-Talk is also interested in sharing the ideas and messages to other members and welcome the opportunity to share and promote other Ning Recruiting sites.

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Permalink Reply by Recruiting Animal on March 11, 2009 at 6:31pm

1. Yeah, like I see the potential for joint projects but I'm missing the point about sharing. What's there to share?

I've also examined the changes on ning.

2. Do the new member pages relieve us of the need to reproduce our ID's on every network?

Will we still have our own pages on the different networks so that we can show information that is relevant on one but not another?

For instance, the C++ geek network might want to know different things than the parakeet owners network.

3. I don't think that the new member pages will become the focal point of ning.

There are no chat boxes on the member pages so you have to communicate with people via the socnets themselves

I don't think that people will visit their own ning page to get see a feed of the activity from all of their networks and cherry pick the threads they will follow. I think they will visit the network they are most invested in and participate from the main page.

I'd be curious to see if anyone disagrees with me.

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Permalink Reply by Grace Kutney on March 11, 2009 at 6:38pm

Thank you for sharing your thoughts. Though I belong to RecruitingBlogs and Secrets of the Job Hunt, I hadn't been paying too much attention to the larger Ning picture. I'll be paying closer attention now. Thanks, again!

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Permalink Reply by M A on March 11, 2009 at 7:24pm

I agree. I actually forgot how many Ning sites I belonged to, until I checked my ning page :-) This actually encouraged me to de-subscribe from a couple.

Recruiting Animal said:

I don't think that people will visit their own ning page to get see a feed of the activity from all of their networks and cherry pick the threads they will follow. I think they will visit the network they are most invested in and participate from the main page.