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My last blog entry caused me to think of a new business idea.

It'd be like Jobster, but distributed.

Right now, it appears to me that Jobster clients (companies) post jobs, etc, out to the world and they respond.  Also, people interested in that company can setup a profile that tells Jobster what kind of jobs their interested in there.

The idea has magic--a sitting pool of talented individuals, drooling for a chance to get in.

But my idea is to flip that around a little, in a few ways:

1. If people created their own profiles, especially if they could embed their online resumes with microformat tags that intuitively created this profile for them based on what their resumes say, then a microformat-sensitive search engine could help recruiters drill-down through a distributed resume store to find the right candidates.
• This significantly lowers the barrier to entry for any new good job-board to enter the market because the number-one problem for a board is having good people.  The big job boards are big not because their tools are better, but the perception is that they have better/more people.
• Then, the candidate search engine (like a reverse indeed.com) that peforms the best wins.  The one with the most intuitive tools or helps the recruiter manage information (or extract and share information) will win.  That changes the whole paradigm from a command-and-control to an open, shared system.
• Like Kayak for finding talented people, this business model would depend on connecting people to the resources, not owning rights to the resources
• The big job boards would adopt these microformats and allow these search engines to access their databases of people.  Well, they should.  The board who lowers this barrier first will crush the others.
  
2. XFN (a way of linking to people with special microformat-embedded information that explains how well or why you know someone) steps in here and adds a microformat of "wouldhire" or something like that, meaning "I trust this person enough, I would hire them if I had the chance.
• Mash this up with the self-created profile from above and you have a two-way selection system.  A recruiter could search by skill-set, education level, location, etc, and then sort the results by how many people tagged that person as "would hire". 
  
  Take that a step further, and rank the people who said they would hire someone by how many inbound "wouldhire" links they have, or if they are, indeed, a hiring manager, recruiter, or executive.  Done right, thiswould give implicit approval of a given individual, cluing recruiters in on who might be the best hire.
  
  I think this would be a huge way LinkedIn or Plaxo could step forward into opening their networks and providing meaningful, relevant metadata about people.  ZoomInfo is already 80% there.  The rest of this being put in place would kill off their competition.
  
3. What else have I not thought of?