David Henry, VP Marketing at Monster.co.uk , has shared a neat Infographic which details the finer points of the new integrated media campaign, "Find Better" which launches on Monday 11 Feb. What I find interesting and unique about the campaign (which runs until 31 March), is that it is not TV for TV's sake. David and his team have made a concentated effort the last couple of years to ensure that advertising does not occur in a vacuum - look at the 2012 relationship with the Marussia Formula One team for example.
Once again, they are coming out with something different - looking to engage with Jobseekers throughout the day - with outdoor digital displays at rail and tube stations as well as on the roadside. Additional digital elements will feature on mobile, tablet and PCs. We have featured one of the new Ads in our cover page article, one ad below and have both ads which are released running in our Video Player.
Posted by: Gareth Jones in totaljobs.com, strategy, socialmedia, social recruiting, social networking, social media recruiting, social media in recruitment, recruitment technology, recruitment solutions, Recruitment, recruiting, online recruitment, on-line recruitment, On-line job hunting, monster, jobboard, job sites, job search, job boards, Job board, future, erecruitment, Engagement, Candidates, #trulondon on
28 Feb 11
I have been thinking a lot about job boards recently, as both a customer and a jobseeker. In these socially enabled times, it strikes me that the job board user experience should be something like this:
Jobs are displayed in easy on the eye tag clouds, instead of ordered lists we know are manipulated by the recruitment organisations who post them. Jobs are highlighted to me by other job seekers and I can rank them by most viewed, highest rated or user defined tags. It’s a visual experience, not a data driven one.
I can tag each job myself, just like I can currently tag the rest of my social life – my pictures, my bookmarks and so on – knowing that all my fellow jobseekers are doing the same. This rich user tagging is doing a way better job of delivering me relevant jobs than the job board search facility can.
What's more, I can connect with my social friends on the site, directly, along with other job seekers whom I don't know. Yet. The feature that flags the profiles of people who are also looking for a job in my specialism or area takes care of that.
It introduces me to others in the community who also happen to be looking for a job in the same area as me. We can swap notes, compare opportunities, give advice and extend our job-seeking network. And of course, make some life long friends along the way.
Sitting in the back of the room of about 400 delegates for the Enhance Media annual conference looking at the future of recruitment. Excellent speaker line up as we move into the afternoon sessions.
Intersting that this year there are probably about 50+ twitterers on the stream: #emconf2010. Last year there were 6 of us.
We will cover the individual presentations in more detail over the next few days.
The Lineup:
Wow, less than 4 weeks to go and the Bill Boorman phenomena takes on its latest iteration with TruLondon II and TruSource 17-19 February.
Inspired by RecruitFest in Toronto last year, Bill has grasped the Unconference model with both hands and taken it into places and worlds unknown. We have all gratefully jumped on board, giving us a chance to share knowledge and learning with colleagues and strangers on a level playing field. 
No more are we seen as just 'talking heads', but as session Track Leaders. But. to me, even that is a misnomer. We are active participants, learning as much as we teach.
The only downside? I want to sit in on every session, itch to put in my $.02 with other leaders, learn from the delegates, ask them what they really want to see happen in recruitment and share in their triumphs as well as sympathise with their disappointments.
What will I be doing?
Talking about Job Boards 2020 with long time collaborator Keith Robinson and online marketing expert Simon Lewis.
Looking at the Cultural Clash of cross border recruitment (as a Yank abroad for over 30 years, I have experienced this first hand in many countries) with Brit Jon Ingham, American Laurie Reuttimann, Canadian Geoff Webb and Dee Allan from Singapore.
Discussing Bill Boorman's pet topic (one of many), Phoenix Recruiting with blogger and thinker extraordinaire, Andy Headworth.
Linking up with Shane McClusker to explore my own Talent Puddle principle; hoping to extend and question this concept.
Oh, and while this is going on, RCEURO will be there to conduct interviews, report on the action, broadcast online radio with our European Thought Leaders track and the Bill Boorman shows.
Come one, come all and enjoy a great three days. Click for Registration:
So my second blog entry was going to be about Google Wave (don't worry folks - it's already written and you'll get it soon enough!) but I read a great post last week on Twitter and decided to change tack.
@grahamsalisbury wrote:
"I am beginning to regard online job boards with the same degree of suspicion that I normally reserve for Wikipedia"
I couldn't help but smile! I've been in the same job for nearly five years now, working as a recruiter, and I'd kind of forgotten what it was like to be a job seeker until recently. I shan't bore you with the gory details, but basically my employer has had to cut my hours due to the recession and so I've had to look for additional employment to supplement my income and keep Mr J in PlayStation 3 games (I know, I know...!) Anyway, the employment issue is resolved (temporarily at least) and I was lucky enough to not be looking too long, but this was my first time as a job seeker in some time and it was really quite humbling!
Last time I was job hunting, local papers were still reasonably en vogue and, while job boards were very much in the picture, there seemed to be just the one or two big names that were worth a visit. But how things have changed now! Now my local papers are all affiliated with (different) jobs boards, there are niche boards popping up all over the place and (maybe it's just me, but) there seem to be even more ‘big name' boards too! Now I've no problem really with the number of job boards in existence; as a recruiter I've advertised on plenty in the past (with mixed results!), but what I did find particularly annoying was the way the same jobs were duplicated over and over on all of them.
Some employers were guilty, but it was mostly the agencies with the multiple postings. And you can bet your bottom dollar half those posting were out of date too. Job hunting is a drain at the best of times, but I felt as though whole evenings were just vanishing into a black hole!
Other than spending half my life trawling the internet for vaguely relevant and still current job vacancies, my biggest quandary was which jobs to apply for. The current market means that most of the jobs I liked the look of didn't pay the kind of salary I was used to getting (and in my part of the world, salaries aren't really that great anyway). You work hard to get to where you are and no-one wants to take a step backwards, but at what point do you put your pride aside and say that some income is better than no income? I've always said (rather arrogantly) that there's no reason for me to ever be unemployed - there is always the counter at McDonalds or the checkout at Tesco. But that's really not true any more; even these entry level jobs have people queuing to apply because some income is better than no income. And there you have it! Who would employ me; a somewhat overqualified candidate with no recent retail experience, over someone who's been made redundant from Thresher or Woolworths who is far more relevant?! But how do you decide what's worth the effort? Do you apply for anything and everything and hope that something sticks, or do you do what you'd normally do (if jobs weren't so fiercely fought over) and stay targeted and focussed, even though there are less relevant positions to apply for? It's so difficult to decide. It's easy to judge people who apply for jobs they're totally over qualified for, but the reality is that many people are not in a situation where they can support themselves and their families with no income.
Though I didn't apply for that many positions in the end, I got not one reply saying thanks but no thanks. These were applications directly to employers rather than through agencies and the funny thing was that this neither surprised nor bothered me. And that made me feel a bit sad. When did such disrespectful behaviour start becoming so universally acceptable?!
Unfortunately I don't have the answers to these problems, but I did want to share my experiences. It's a tough market out there and, as recruiters, it's easy for us to get caught up in our work and forget that we're dealing with real people: They have feelings, families and responsibilities just like us, and they are trying to doing their best. We can all show a little more compassion. Put yourself in the jobseekers shoes for a few minutes and ask yourself how you'd feel.
Picking up on the reports from the Milch & Zucker conference , A Journey from Attraction to Selection. Still have a few to do, and will bring them out over the next few days. Pictures and video are starting to appear on the M&Z site as well.
Opening up the afternoon sessions, with Miodrag Perin of Bertelsmann, New York office. Met him at dinner and found out he did his graduate degree at my alma mater, SUNY at Binghamton. More evidence of how small the world really is.
This was fun, as Bertelsman has done a lot of interesting things, including setting up a specific Recruitment brand and website. Mio is a dynamic and engaging speaker.
A couple of key concepts if you are going to reach out with Social Media as a recruitment media:
- What works for marketing also works for us
- We want to be where the people already are
Tested the idea of video applications, by filming his own team - proving internally how it can work and what actually has to be done. See the video of Mio on the RCEuro Video section.
Points out that individuals are spending lots of time on the networks (compared to amount of time on a company website), where content and information is relevant.
Create Your Own Career
Inside our thoughts, inside our heads - everyday there are tons of ideas, phrases, concepts that should be shared and used in candidate attraction.
Social Media is no longer a 'nice to have'. It is a necessity.
What was the Bertelsmann journey?
18 months ago, on Flickr and the business networks like Xing, LinkedIn as individuals, not as company.
Resistance from internal colleagues 18 months ago:
- Nobody Twitters
- What does this have to do with recruiting?
- What a waste of time
- We should have our own video player
BUT
We want to be where the candidates are
Decided to integrate sharing tools such as "tell a friend" into website and
integrate various analytics into the website to deploy and track activities
Developed the tag line and the complete recruitment website:
Create Your Own Career 2.0 by getting inspired.
What has been the result?
- New career web sites in Germany and internationally
- 38,000 unique visitors per month
- Top results of ranking, No. 1 in US, Europe, CEE
- (Potential Power Ranking 2009)
What does his social landscape look like today?
Blogs, maps, chat, self assessment, videos of real employees on YouTube, Flickr
Created presence on the major Social Media sites:
I am in Bad Nauheim (Frankfurt) today for the Milch & Zucker HR/Recruitment conference, A Journey From Attraction to Selection .
Great lineup of speakers from around the world.
Leading off by Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Jager,HR-Marketing und recruiting in einer verntetzten Welt (HR and Recruiting in a Networked World)
Apolgies in advance, I will only pick out one or two highlights, as my German is not up to scratch for full translation. We will have links to the main presentations after the event.
Posted by: Alan Whitford in totaljobs.com, Recruitment, On-line job hunting, LinkedIn, Job board, Global recruitment, future, Facebook, erecruitment, Alan Whitford, Advertising on
01 Oct 09
Attending a breakfast seminar today in London, hosted by Totaljobs , featuring Totaljobs marketing research and International Labour market research by the Intelligence Group for The Network
Paul Smith, Group Marketing Director of Totaljobs Group , led off the presentations, after the introductions by John Salt. We will write about the Intelligence Group presentation (which is very impressive) later.
General economic challenges have impacted the job market
- Decline in jobs
- Increase in jobseeker activity
- Google - recruitment query searches up 55% year on year
Advertising spend drops from £1.2 billion to £600 million
- Offline decline 50%
- Online decrease 30%
Paul projects a modest increase end 2011, early 2012 and online recruitment ad spend will pass offline in 2012
Posted by: Alan Whitford in Recruitment, online recruitment, On-line job hunting, media, marketing, job sites, job boards, Job board, Global recruitment, global, erecruitment, Advertising on
16 Sep 09
The Network , which brings together career sites from 119 countries and generates traffic of more than 45 million unique monthly visitors, held its annual conferenence in Bulgaria this month. The conference, hosted by partner Jobs.bg, was covered in Bulgarian publication, Human Capital, including videos of presentations from the managers of the leading job sites in France, Russia, Germany, Poland and Britain such as Totaljobs.com , StepStone and A denclassifieds .
Leading international career sites reported a decline in the published positions between 35 and 40 percent as a result of the global economic crisis. The good news is that some Western countries noticed a slight increase in the published positions last month.
The coverage and presentations can be viewd on the Human Capital site in native Bulgarian or the tranlsated version.
What happened in Dallas this week?
Contributor and member Bill Boorman just returned from Dallas, where he attended TalentNet Live!, a one day local training event to bring the latest in recruiting best practices, trends and social media techniques to the DFW audience. #TalentNet was co-founded by Susan Kang Nam and Craig Fisher.
Wrap Up and Slides from TalentNet Live Recruiter Conference available on the event website.
In the meantime, here is a link to the presentation to one of our favourite recruitment gurus, Dennis Smith , recruiter Extraordinaire in the wireless/telcoms space.
Or you can view the presentation from SlideShare below.
Posted by: Alan Whitford in Wendy Jacobs, Twitter, strategy, social networking, social media, recruitment solutions, Recruitment, online recruitment, on-line recruitment, On-line job hunting, interview, Global recruitment, erecruitment, Bill Boorman, Alan Whitford on
13 Jul 09
Great shows today
Bill Boorman's online radio show , in its third week had great guests from US and UK. This week's show features a collection of veteran recruiters discussing what clients want from the current market.
Listen to the full broadcaset in our Video/Audio stream: ON AIR - Ready for Lift Off. Or you can follow the link to to the BlogTalkRadio site and listen/download. Check out the first two shows either on our site or on the BlogTalkRadio site.
Listen to Billboorman on Blog Talk Radio
Andy Headworth has started another stream of controversy on his blog and Twitter today, picking up on the article I wrote about last week here on the Recruitment Community Europe site: Lynne Featherstone and her suggested bill regarding equality and discrimination in recruitment that could be solved by taking names off CVs/Profiles.
Here is the text of my response/comments that I posted on Andy's blog.
Let's all get real about this. I agree with Andy that it could be the start of a 'slippery slope' When do you decide to stop 'anonymising' a CV. Name, location, school, employer all could be used in a discriminatory manner. The reality is, as we discussed last week in the posts about Video CVs, discrimination, if it happens, will happen at the interview, no matter how identifying characteristics might be hidden beforehand.
At the same time, Alex is right about what technology could do. 12 years ago at Resumix we had the ability to create a complete skill profile, match it against the job requirement and hey, presto! Matched candidate and job - without name, identity, etc etc. All could have been anonymous. But guess what? Hiring companies actually want to know the name of the person they will be interviewing. They want to know where the candidate lives (how long will it take the candidate to get to work everyday?) They want to know what kind of education the candidate has.
So, with due respect to Lynne and Mark, this is an act of folly, a solution looking for a problem that it will not solve.
I was traveling back from Holland Friday evening and picked up my free newspaper (and yes I still read print!!) . The article on page 4 by Brian Groom suggested that " Britain's job market may be able to bounce back faster than in the past".
This positive piece of news came from Nigel Meager , director of the Institute for Employment Studies , He said " I think the labour market is in better shape now than in either of the previous recessions. For any given fall in economic activity we are likely to be able to survive it better that we were in previous recessions and we are likely to bounce back slightly more quickly."
Wishful thinking? Well both the CIPD and the Sunday Times also feel that we may be coming out of the worst, so who knows.
What I do know is that my friends in Europe are begining to feel the heat. In Holland the volume of job posting are down 40%; in Belgium activity is almost at a standstill and in France it is a similar story.
We will send a note to all our friends across Europe getting their first hand experience of what is happening in local recruitment markets across Europe.
Posted by: Keith Robinson in technology, strategy, social networking, Recruitment, online recruitment, On-line job hunting, Netherlands, media, Keith Robinson, Holland, Global recruitment, global, future, erecruitment, blogs on
15 May 09
It's been some time since I last blogged as Alan and I decided that we needed to rebuild and re-brand the Beta of Recruitment Community Europe and at the same time build our Pan European members and marketing database.
This week I was fortunate enough to be a speaker at the Corporate Social Networking Conference in Amsterdam. It was also great to spend a couple of days at the conference with fellow speaker, Paul Harrison from Carve Consulting, a true thought leader in this space.
The event was put on by Thys Spragers and his team at KREM , one of Holland's leading consultancies in this space. With over 190 attendees in this current climate, it shows the interest in the topic and also reflected the quality of the speaker line up KERM had put together.
The morning saw two true visionaries in the social media space. The first speaker was Jeremiah Owyang , Senior Analyst at Forrester, blogger and commentator on the sector. Second was Urs Gasser , Executive Director Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard.
Coverage of Lynne Featherstone's comments about CVs and discrimination by Human Resources online today brings up the age old conversation about how recruiters might discriminate based on what they read or see on a CV. Full text of the article is also copied below.
Interestingly enough, a thread on Andy Headworth's blog today has been discussing the impact of Video CVs on the recruitment process, again with some hints about the possible discriminatory impact.
All of this reminds me of the Personnel Today April Fool article a couple years back that the EEC was going to require all interviews to take place behind a screen so that interviewers could not see the candidate at all, thus eliminating any visual bias in the process. Of course, 50% of respondents thought it was a great idea!
Are we such a 'PC' mad society that we have to legislate for common sense, professionalism and fairness? And, as Lisa Scales pointed out in the debate with Andy, no matter what is done before the interview, once the candidate is on-site, having had an 'unbiased' CV will not stop potential prejudice happening during the interview.
Looking forward to the debate.
Posted by: Alan Whitford in UKrecruiter, SEO, Recruitment, on-line recruitment, On-line job hunting, media, Louise Triance, erecruitment, blogs, Alan Whitford, Advertising on
22 Apr 09
What a great milestone today. Louise Triance has sent out issue no. 400 of the premier UK recruitment newsletter, ukrecruiter .
Starting small, she has built an amazing following and a stable of regular contributors. I did manage to contribute for about a year with a series of technology oriented articles, but then faded away :-)
Louise has grasped the blog world and continues to grow the business, having added new colleagues and services in the past year.
If you haven't subscribed, please do so here .
We can only hope that RCEURO will have the legs that ukrecruiter has.
Posted by: Alan Whitford in Twitter, tips, technology, social networking, Recruitment, online recruitment, On-line job hunting, LinkedIn, future, Facebook, erecruitment, Creative, An De Jonghe, Alan Whitford, Advertising on
20 Apr 09
Wow, interesting series of blogs/articles out there on this topic.
I would love to see our blogging and social network experts like An de Jonghe, Ricardo Risamasu, Peter Gold, Bas van de Haterd all leap into this fray.
Check out: Tom Foremski of Silicon Valley Watch , who started this off this week relative to a PR 'expert' who advised on the use of Twitter and Facebook.
Then Jason Gorham has picked it up and run with it as it relates to an 'expert' in digital recruitment advertising.
This topic stream could be related to any type of 'expert consulting' in our and other industries. How many of us who do have the expertise from actually using the products/services/strategies have been pushed aside by a client/prospect because we do not come from one of the 'big name' companies?
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We at RCE have known Mike for a long time and he delivered as usual a great presentation with some excellent simple tips;
Mike has also just published an update version of his book "How to find a job using the internet". You can see a review at CareerSiteAdvisor.
What is online marketing?
Mike then gave some key statistics showing the growth of on-line media, most off which we have been covered in other blogs on RCE, see Internet Advertising Bureau.
One of the real transformations has been the growth of paid search a sector now dominated by Google with 88% share followed by Yahoo with 4%.
