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.
On behalf of RCEuro, I would like to congratulate industry thought leader Matt Alder on the launch of his new business consultancy, MetaShift, a strategic consultancy which works at the cutting edge of the Recruitment and HR industries. Matt announced the new direction in his life in his blog Recruiting Futurology , which we are streaming on our home page.
We are featuring the the Recruiting Unconference video about Matt in our Audio and Video Player.
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.
Finding candidates in the shallow water
We started a bit of a global debate on the Monday evening ‘Ready for Lift Off '' online Radio Show hosted by Bill Boorman. (The audio of the main show every week is available on our home page) I dropped in my concept of Talent Puddle, as opposed to Talent Pool. Michael Homula of Bearing Fruit Consulting picked up on it and by the next day had written a great post on his site about it.
This was my original thinking:
Talent Puddle - a term I evolved after years of talking to companies and conferences about building and using Talent Pools . Actually came to it after a fishing trip, trying to find the right fish in a very large lake, but success came in very small inlet.
Applied the thinking to Talent Pools - Too deep, too hard to see the bottom where the best candidates are. So, let's look in the shallower water, The Talent Puddle
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?
Posted by: Alan Whitford in Tip, The Recruitment Conference, technology, strategy, Recruitment, online recruitment, iProfile, HR-XML, Global recruitment, global, future, erecruitment, Alan Whitford on
12 Feb 09
Response handling and new technology applications:
Will technology finally unlock recruiter productivity?
Alex Charles, product director and co-founder of iProfile
Alex is a board member of HR-XML , the global standards body for sharing HR information.
Alex was second up at The Recruitment Conference , covering a topic close to our hearts and minds. I have known Alex for a number of years and worked closely with him as we got HR-XML off the ground in Europe.
His theme on recruiter productivity is a good spin – away from the usual stuff that Alex and I have done for years about what the technology is and how to use it.
Agenda
- How far have we really come?
- Future ideas
- Address capability of your staff and technology
- Threats and risks
An interesting question: Are recruiters more productive because of technology?
Only two of us in the room say yes
Why aren’t we more productive?
- Is it the quality of technology?
- Is it the challenges of the cynical recruitment business owner?
- How do we compete with the larger online players like job boards?
Good slides showing the spaghetti junction of information, tools, contacts - slides will be made available on the conference website.
Challenges about the data we hold in our databases now
DAXTRA
Steve Finch
Bringing the Internet Inside
Automating Recruitment Knowledge
Integration of the use of the Internet with the internal business processes of recruitment
Knowledge=Information + Process
Information on candidates, job boards etc and the internal process/workflows
Who Wants What?
- Candidate wants job
- Employer wants employee
- Match = knowledge heaven
Where, when and why
timing, location and message
(Guess what, Recruitment is a sales function – which we have been saying for what seems like forever)
Where is the information?
Job boards and social/business networks, comms systems, referral networks and knowledge sites
How can we exploit all of these data sources?
Good slide with the boxes and arrows, can’t replicate here
Some good slides of Recruitment and Internet 1.0, how thinks used to link together.
Another view of Internet 2.0
About the knowledge interface and integration of the processes.
Info and text from the web and elsewhere is only unstructured information, is not data which can be knowledge. Need to use the extraction/parsing tools to structure the data.
This approach enables new recruitment business practices and models because the data can be searched and matched more effectively
Improve the efficiency of the processes: Use Multi-search to examine a wide number of information sources/databases
Conclusion
- Greater quantifies of knowledge
- needs to be integrated into workflow
- Some technologies can do this now
- More will come
Posted by: Alan Whitford in technology, strategy, social networking, Recruitment, online recruitment, future, Facebook, erecruitment, Enhance Media, Bracknell Forest Coucil, Advertising on
29 Jan 09
Bracknell Forest council
Janet Berry
Bummer, just closed the browser window and lost the entire presentation blog
Will try and remember what I already wrote.
Council has Facebook pages and Twitter pages.
On Twitter: 55 following, 87 followers, 210 updates
Both link to the Council career pages
Council has intentionally moved to online, with both their career site and Jobsgopublic.com
Reduced their overall spend on recruitment advertising by moving to direct sourcing. Almost no local press jobs advertising, other than lineage for lower level jobs.
The real key for me of what Janet has done:
She has analysed and researched the existing staff, the potential marketplace for staff and the potential impact of trying to reach the GenY universe.
A great chart mapping:
GenY, GenX, Baby Boomers and Veterans/ mapped against national averages within the employment community.
They analysed what will attract GenY employees
Then analysed what are likely to be barriers to attracting GenY - including internal culture and processes.
Then develop the candidate attraction strategies to match the real requirements.
Challenges of promoting web 2.0 technology
Facebook advertising - only reaching those on Facebook
BFC employees cannot access Facebook at work
Add on ideas
Informal networking
20-30 % of hires by word of mout
Include the messages about Facebook to staff comms, and ask them to add BFC to their personal pages
Future - What will Janet do in 2009?
- Emphasise and enhance the initiatives already started for Geny
- Section and team branding
- Use SEM
- Influence the Baby Boomer managers
- Measure and monitor where the jobs are being initially seen
Posted by: Alan Whitford in Tip, technology, strategy, social networking, Recruitment, online recruitment, future, Facebook, erecruitment, Creative, Alan Whitford, Advertising on
29 Jan 09
Josh Smith of Facebook leads off the afternoon session. Lots of stats, so will only give you a few:
- 150 Million users globally
- 800 new registrations daily
- UK has 1 million new users per month
- 25% of audience is over 35
- 65% of UK internet population join Facebook
- 50% of members return daily
- 25 minutes per day on the site
- average 2 vists per day
- 55/45 split between male/female
OK, enough of those statistics :-)
How is Facebook evolving as a recruitment medium?
Targeted marketing is the key.
Jeremy Mason from Revenue Science delivered an excellent presentation on Behavioral Targeting, a term well discussed amongst online marketeers and more information on the topic can be found on the IAB site.
For many publishers this has become a key issue and one which they are investing in to give greater value to their advertiser BUT it is as important to understand who their audience is and what and where they have been and go after they touch your site.
Jeremy defines what behavioral targeting is; "targeting groups of users with ad and content based on anonymous previous activity and attributes".
Why is this becoming a "boom"business" ;
- We have a pyramid issue when it come to online content- at the bottom is the huge chunk of advertising led content BUT at the top is contextual search which has far more limited content.
Posted by: Alan Whitford in technology, strategy, Recruitment, future, erecruitment, Enhance Media, Creative, blogs, awards, Alan Whitford, Advertising on
29 Jan 09
Aggregation and Data Driven Marketing
Simon Appleton
They founded Planet Recruit and sold it to Hot Group in 2003. Set up Workcircle initially as an IT job board. Changed to Vertical Search Engine (Aggregator).
What does the aggregator really do?
For Candidate: can search across multiple platforms on one site.
Traffic source/driver for job advertisers – job boards, employers, agencies
What is Data Driven Marketing?
Attract the right candidates in high volume, and then direct them to the right destination site.
Tony Jewell
How have the new revenue generating and traffic generating models evolved?
Nice stuff on ‘cost per action’ if you run a web business
Evolution of their thinking on most cost effective way of gathering jobs and then reaching the candidates.
What they call: Workcircle 2.0
Evolved to the jobs aggregation model (like Indeed.com from the US)
Can help the smaller niche job boards get ‘cheap’ traffic
Challenge was how much traffic could the cost effectively buy.
Long tail thinking entered into the evolution of Workcircle
Sponsor all combinations of a job title (wrote a tool to generate the long tail list - over 1 million keywords)
Used the Google API (application programming interface) to create the giant Google Adword campaigns
Resulted in Massive Traffic Driving
Lots of great stats and ROI data for them (80% ROI for money spent on Google).
Lessons learned
Using both SEM (for paid for listings) and SEO (for organic listings) to ensure overall listing and traffic works at optimum for traffic driving
Long Tail generates overall cost is optimised
Ensure that paid for listings have the deep link directly to the job, not the job site
Ensure that you actually have job inventory to match the keywords you are actually advertising
Click through rate is not the best measure of ad success
