John has started a point creating a PPC (pay-per-click) campaign to prove that he has the skills to do so. PPC is generally provided as a self-service model, with Google being the largest provider of both marketspace and advertisers. This enables them to match nearly all searches to advertisers, which is their greatest asset. Steve Balmer pointed that fact out when he was speaking about the Microsoft-Google aquisition in an interview with venture capitalist and marketing strategist Guy Kawasaki.

John was recently asked if he can run a PPC campaign on behalf of a client in a contracting environment – the recruitment agency was trying to match a candidate with experience in PPC advertising. How hard could it be? John ventured out to set up some PPC campaigns for himself, and, noting that this service had inherently been designed as a self-service model, is trying to see if there were any difficulties in using the online tools.

It is, at the end of the day, a situation that highlights one of the major issues that limit the opportunities for people with a varied background (as opposed to “straight-career-path-people”) – today’s recruitment agencies are, thanks to computer technology, glorified IT-based matching businesses, where candidate profiles are compared with open listings, based on simplistic matching profiles. This cannot be good enough, as it will only honour fact-based skill sets, which are based on either degrees and held positions. Broader experience in a variety of fields, and self-employment are usually ignored. However, often it is exactly these experiences that bring the most valuable asset to today’s business world – by applying the ability to learn and adjust to different challenges and situations, these people can drive a business forward and come forward with new, sometimes unusual ideas, and open mind and the skill to handle the unknown challenges that are out there.

That’s not something that can be described in a CV or pulled from a database.

Update: please see also this related post by Rational. He discusses profiling from a hirer’s perspective.