(Nov 7, 2008) Yesterday, I had a great conversation about the growth of RBC. We looked at the statistics on compete.com.

• Over the course of the past year, the number of unique visitors to the site each month has grown by over 500%.
• The total number of monthly visits has exploded at a rate of nearly 1,000%
• Attention (our percentage share of all time spent on the net) grew at a similar pace.

Things get interesting when you compare RBC with other similar properties. Social media is changing things rapidly in our universe. In the following links, we use ERE and HR.com.

• Compared to the dominant members of the industry, attention paid to RBC is significantly greater. That means that the industry as a whole spends more of its time here than anywhere else, than the other two combined
• The number of unique visitors on RBC is growing so fast that you'd be tempted top predict that we'll overtake the industry leaders by this time next year
• RBC has more monthly visits than the other two combined

Take some time and explore the resources at compete.com. The more comfortable we all get talking about basic metrics, the better we'll be at navigating our emerging environment. Knowing the difference between unique visitors, total visitors, attention and other web behavior is essential to the emerging form of 21st Century Recruiting.

Recruiting is going to change much faster than anyone imagines. Probably not so much at the level of the actual physical interaction required to make the deal. But everything that surrounds that basic transaction, the entire context, is up for grabs. What we're learning here in our little community is exactly how to navigate the changes as they come along.

I've been working out the details of how you build a top level Recruiting strategy that includes the tactical use of social networking. It's a real work in progress and I invite you to think about the subject and join the conversation.

Ultimately, much recruiting will be a game of community development. Searching far and wide all of the time to find people who are available in the spot market is a very reactive approach. The ultimate idea will be to develop relationships with everyone you might hire over the next X years and build relationships with them. In the community, you might (gasp) get them to build relationships with each other.

We'll all need to know lots of things to make that a reality. Web performance metrics are critical. We'll have to be good at measuring the performance of work done in and by the community. Watching the compete.com data is one way to stay plugged into the consequences of your involvement here.

John Sumser has been chronicling the Recruiting Industry forever. You can catch his work at JohnSumser.com. He's the CEO of the Recruiting Roadshow. These days he's been working out the kinks in a new process for developing a top level Recruiting Strategy