It took my wife being gone for 10 days this summer for me to realize that my youngest kids aren’t babies anymore. Nope, they found the Ramen and frozen pizza all by themselves, and other than fights over MY Kindle, golf outings, bike rides to Buffalo Wild Wings and the occasional need to wipe a counter or two, I had fleeting symptoms of empty nest syndrome.
In the meantime, I stepped into this vicious debate over at ERE on sourcing candidates with SEO and realized it was time to put my money where my mouth is. So finally, I have set out to take two of my passions – open-source software and Internet recruiting – and marry them up to create Open-Source Career-Website Software (gotta find an easier way to say that).
It’s my new baby. Actually, it’s an extension of all the Internet marketing stuff I’ve been doing the last two years, but hey, some of history’s great inventions – penicillin, X-rays, Post-It notes and Velcro – came not from careful research but by accidental discoveries.
So basically what I’ll be doing is leveraging the great work by Umbraco (the open-source CMS) founder Niels Hartvig and others in the open-source community, including the amazing Paul Sterling of Modus Connect, to create a set of open-source scripts and documentation necessary for a great career website.
The cool thing about this is that the resulting product will work with any staffing, recruitment or applicant tracking (ATS) database. Doesn’t matter if you’re on Peoplesoft, Taleo, VCG, Bullhorn, SAP, ICIMS or TempWorks. By separating out the data access layer, any programmer can take the open-source code and adapt it to their system.
In fact, with a little tinkering it will work for any search engine marketing work you want to do, whether it relates to recruitment or not.
So if you want to follow along, download and install free, open-source content management system Umbraco, available at http://www.umbraco.org, and get all comfy with it.
I’ll be back with some scripts here soon.
