Posted by: Ben Hutchins in UKrecruiter, technology selection, technology and the modern day recruiter, talent management, talent attraction, Talent Assessment, strategy, staffing, recruitment technology, recruitment system, recruitment solutions, recruitment software, Recruitment Leadership, recruiting software, recruiting, recruiters, outsourced recruitment services, online recruitment, online profiles, on-line recruitment, Mobile Recruiting, International, human resources, hr, gradweb, graduate recrutiment, Graduate Recruitment, graduate intelligence, Global recruitment, Gala Evening, Engagement, Employer Brand, employee branding, Creative, Communication, clients, awards, assessment, applicant tracking system on
17 May 13
GradWeb crowned ‘Outstanding Outsourced Recruitment Organisation’ at the prestigious Recruiter Awards for Excellence 2013. GradWeb, the entry-level and graduate recruitment outsourcing specialists, has been named the ‘Outstanding Outsourced Recruitment Organisation’ at the 2013 Recruiter Awards for Excellence.
The Recruiter Awards for Excellence recognise, reward and celebrate the outstanding achievements in recruitment over the last 12 months and were held at a gala ceremony at the Grosvenor House Hotel in London on 1st May.
Open to all major recruitment specialists and judged by a diverse panel of leading business experts from some of the biggest names in the recruitment industry the award recognises outstanding client service, effectiveness and efficiency by an Outsourcing Recruitment Organisation.
According to the judges, GradWeb was the ‘stand-out winner’ in the award category, successfully demonstrating the delivery of cost-effective solutions for a wide range of clients across a variety of sectors. The judges particularly highlighted the innovation required in not simply providing an off-the-shelf solution but creating bespoke recruitment services tailored to fit the unique and exacting challenges faced by today’s businesses. They said;
“GradWeb provides its diverse clients with the ability to reach the right candidates through methods such as its innovative online recruitment technology to attract and reach the right candidates; its Intelligent Attraction’ approach to improve the effectiveness of clients’ campaigns and its end-to-end services including concept design, marketing, candidate management, screening and assessment”.
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.
As we have posted in the news section today, the
CIPD report Jobs: The Impact of Recession and Prospects for Recovery had some interesting conclusions regarding movement of the economy and its impact on possible job recovery.
The scary area for me was the concluding comments by the Chief Economist at CIPD (raise your hands all of those that knew there was such a person at the CIPD), John Philpott:
“Unless the economy rebounds from recession far more strongly than most economists expect the likelihood is that the recovery will be broadly jobs-light, resulting in a slow grind back toward the pre-recession rate of unemployment. And while a jobs-loss recovery is not the most likely scenario it remains a distinct possibility, which means it is of vital importance that the government, the Bank of England, and their counterparts abroad, maintain expansionary fiscal and monetary policies for as long as necessary”.
Translation? We could be on the way to a "jobs light" recovery.
I will set up a poll/survey and look for your comments.
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
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.
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
For years now the technology of video has been available across the Internet for websites to utilise as they see fit. Over the last 5 years the success of YouTube has shown that people not only use video on the Internet, they demand it. The platform is improving everyday and is now ready to take off.
It is quite ironic that the largest news sites on the Internet all have video functionality.........but wait.....so do the sports, weather, social media and travel sites, having all now adopted video media into their site offerings. All of these are part of our daily lives, jobs however, which we all get out of bed for everyday day is far behind. Why hasn't the job board and recruitment market followed???
A recent report showed that, in the USA, the most searched term was "jobs". In 2008 in the UK it was 10th. No real surprise given the current economic climate, but why are these sites that offers the most sort after search term not offering the latest gadgets and options to their users, candidate and advertiser. It is true that Monster and Careerbuilder have recently re-launched (again) their sites offering video to both users, to a degree, but why has it taken this long.
Both companies spent an enormous amount of money on Superbowl advertising and have yielded no result, in fact reports say they went backwards (http://www.ere.net/2009/02/09/what-do-you-get-for-100k-a-second-a-drop-in-traffic/). They spent money on TV advertising (video essentially) to gain brand awareness and traction to their sites. Is this a case of too little too late?
Television is still the most heavily utilised medium for advertising in terms of revenue. The Internet is fast catching up and the like of video across the "net" is the major reason it will pass it eventually. If you know your demographic is on the "net" why not engage with them in the best way?
Video is more engaging, more enticing and offers the viewer the ability to relate to a product or service far quicker and with more relevancy. How many times have you tuned out when an ad on TV comes on that doesn't interest you? A video has the ability to filter out the irrelevant and a great video attracts the best........
A well planned and executed job board video, candidate CV or advertiser (job ad or employer branding) will produce better results then words on a screen. A picture tells a thousand words, a video 100,000+..........................
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.
Last session before Lunch Finally, a future view will be discussed by Giles of Enhance Media, our hosts. - this is what we came to hear.
A view of online recruitment from Web 1.0 to Web 3.0 - although I am not sure Web 3.0 is necessarily 'real' , as Web 2.0 is not really fully utilised or even really well defined within most pe0ple's minds - which Giles is referring to.
Future elements will be based on:
Long Tail
Semantic Web
Funnily enough, we talked about Semantic Web 3 years ago as the 'next thing' and Long Tail has been in 2 of the 3 presentations this morning.
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
First speaker today is Luisa Mauro from You Tube. So we are live blogging and will get the full presentations at the end of the event and may come back to some of the presentations with fuller coverage.
Some frightening statistics;
- 1.2 billion minutes of video watched every month.
- 15 hours of video uploaded every minute.
- Taking up 10% of global bandwidth.
Last Thurs I was sitting in a hotel in Lieden, Holland whilst my many friends in the UK recruitment industry were gathering at the Grosvenor House Hotel for the prestigious RADS. A great event.
The RADS was a "baby" that I launched with a great gentleman called Austyn Hallworth; he was at the Independent ( Classified Ad Mgr) and I was Sales Director at a new HR magazine called Personnel Today.
The idea was to have an awards event in the UK to refect the "best" in recruitment. The event, today branded the RADS and organised by Reed Business Information has grown into a wonderful celebration of what is best in recruitment communication. It has achieved what we set out to do.
The UK recruitment industry enjoys some of the finest creativity in the world of recruitment. The result of a highly competitive labour market, a rich source of print media and agencies and clients who are prepared to be brave and push the barriers of what is HR communications.
The industry has also "seen off" the threat of the web....there were those in '99-2000 who believed that "branding" was dead and that all jobseekers would do was go to huge job databases, search, get matched and apply...whoops sorry, I mean a job board.
Yesterday Google announced that it was making 100 recruiters redundant. This is in addition to further cuts in the organisation's global headcount.
Over recent years in both the US and Europe I have had the pleasure of meeting Google recruiters and what top people they were: innovative, passionate and professional. They really lived the "Google" brand.
This is the headline of an article posted today by Dawn Passaro, I liked it so took the liberty of posting the article in full and it very much follows on from my last blog on RCE on Britney and "personal branding"...it seems there might be a business model in this chaos!!
Attention all recruiters! Are you having trouble finding recruitment assignments? Maybe you should shift your target to the other side of the street. By that I mean, sell your services to the job seeker, instead of the corporate employer.
In the news today, and from people I know, I see massive layoffs and downsizing everywhere. The law of supply and demand tells us that many organizations will not have to work so hard to fill their open positions (if the skill sets fit). Companies may think twice before budgeting for recruitment expenses.
Consider this alternative: Personal Branding. It's a good skill to develop in any case as a part of your own career management process, even if you don't offer it to clients. Check out Dan Schawbel's
Personal Branding Blog. He is the author of " Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success (Kaplan, April 2009) . His blog has a wealth of "how-to" information on Personal Branding.
I just read an article in the Wall Street Journal titled Job Seekers Pay Marketers to Improve Their Prospects in the 1/6/09 edition. The article mentioned a company called Reach that helps outsourced individuals or any job applicant for that matter, to focus on their own personal branding, and to use that information to find their next job.
Kevin Wheeler has done it again.
Read his really excellent article on ERE.net "What’s Going to Be Different in 2009"
As always with Kevin, he hits the nail on the head, as he did in his session at our Global Recruitment Conference in Amsterdam.
