For candidates already plagued by the resume black hole, Gmail Priority might be just the thing to convince them to go old school and snail mail in a job application.

Since the beginning of the month, Google has been offering an enhancement to its popular and free Gmail service, which has more than 176 million users worldwide. Gmail Priority, an opt-in service, filters incoming email into three categories: Important and Unread, Starred, and Everything Else. The idea is to make it easy for heavy email users to know what mail to read first.

Like everything else Google does, Priority depends on algorithms to sort the mail. First it filters out the spam (and does a great job of that). Then it will decide, based on what you read, what you respond to, and to whom, and what you tell it, which category it belongs in. Starred mail is in the user’s control and marks mail for special consideration.

Sounds useful? So what’s the downside?

Job seekers, especially those who blindly send out resumes, won’t even be able to fool themselves into thinking someone might have actually touched their resume. Maybe even filed it.

That may not seem like a negative if you’re a recruiter who gets those mass resume mailings. But what about your own pitches? Passive candidates you source from LinkedIn, trade associations, and the like may never see that great job opportunity if you get sorted into the “Everything Else” pile.

Sure, the email will be there and accessible. However, heavy users may come to consider that particular pile the equivalent of the kitchen junk drawer. That’s the place you look only when you know something you need is there, or you can’t find it anywhere else.

The more a prospect doesn’t open that mail, the more such mail Gmail Priority will dump there. It learns what you like, as the video demonstrates.

Before anyone thinks the sky is falling, Gmail Priority only affects Gmail users and then only those who access their mail directly via the world wide web.  Those who use a mail client — Outlook, Thunderbird, Pegasus, for example — will still get their mail handled as always. (There’s pressure on Google to fully enable the priority feature for client-handled mail, so that may come eventually. Right now, Google is enhancing and improving access for mobile devices.)

Besides these limitations there’s always the question of just how many people will adopt Gmail Priority. Last fall Google introduced Sidewiki. That browser add-on allows users to leave comments on any webpage they visit. Although I come across the occasional Sidewiki post, it doesn’t seem to have gained much traction.

More importantly, as a recent post by Loren McDonald, a VP at marketing provider Silverpop, points out, Gmail Priority is part of a trend toward providing better email inbox management. Sorting mail by significance has all sorts of implications, some of which I’ve already noted. But as McDonald’s post makes plain, it may well exacerbate the problem of bacn: mail the user says they want, but which they rarely if ever open. Think of how your candidate relations management might be affected by having those periodic job announcements or industry and company tidbits sorted into the “Everything Else” group?

What I suspect may happen, if inbox management tools become widespread, is that social media communications will grow ever more valuable. Facebook wall posts and tweets may become primary tools, if not to convey the complete message, then to alert followers and friends to where the information is. Twitter is already serving that purpose. Facebook is close.

If nothing else, Gmail Priority has the industry talking and considering what the future of CRM mailings may be when inboxes are divided into “Important” and “Everything Else.”

One of our goals with the new community is to reach out to the entire recruiting profession to participate in our conversation, not just those who visit the website each day. (Don’t worry — we’ll always love you best!) To that end, we’ve opened up the conversations on ERE.net in a couple of new ways.

Email

We received a lot of pushback from the community about our decision to do away with the email group discussion digests with the full text of each post in the group.  We originally did this because we were trying to cut down on the volume of emails that you receive from ERE.net, but doing away with it altogether was a mistake.

The team here has created a new email digest that I think will meet both goals. It has a personalized email with the full text of all the groups and discussions that you are following, and at the same time you’ll have fewer emails cluttering your in-box. In fact, it looks a lot like the digest that we had before we made the big change! Of course, if you prefer the new emails with just the synopsis, you can still get that.

To sign up for the new email digest, you need to click on the “manage” link at the top right of the ERE.net website (make sure you are logged in).

On your manage account page, just scroll down to the “Newsletter Subscription” section of the page, and check the box next to “ERE Discussion Digest.” After you check that box, you can choose to receive the “personalized” version (only messages from discussions you’re following or from groups you’re a member of) or the “all messages” version. Be sure to click the “change subscription settings” button when you are done!

Twitter

There are more recruiters every day who are active on both ERE.net and Twitter (and so am I), so I’m excited that we can now link those accounts and automatically let our Twitter followers know when we post to the ERE.net community!

To set this up, you must have a Twitter account! If you do, go to the ERE Community, click “Settings”, and then “Broadcast”.

Now check the box to enable the Twitter connection, save your changes, and finally click on the authorize link.

Here’s an example of how it looks – my status update on ERE about this post!

Give the new options a try, and let me know in the comments (or on Twitter!) what you think!