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 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?
For those that know me this is not a reference to a my days as a media director, or my size, but a very neat event founded by Jamie Leonard and which I am off to today for a second time.
So what is MyLongLunch? Simply put, it is speed pitching. You are at a good venue, each participant has a small booth in a room packed with HR comms agency people. You get 10 minutes with each to pitch your business or service.
It is time efficient for both parties. There are no "how's the golf, pets" etc - conversations. You have to get to the point and it s a great way to fine tune your "elevator pitch".
I am attending wearing two hats; to interview the founder Jamie (should be fun) and to discuss the launch of a new site www.careersiteadvisor, which aggregates career sites and job boards in the UK into an easy to search index. This will provide the job seeker and, soon, "industry professionals" the ability to review the sites they visit; therefore it will become a career site comparison site.
The site links to the embedded careers page of over 1,300 corporate career sites today( this grows every week as more sites come on board) and all basic listings are free.
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
A report today showed that Jobsite has reported that 54,000 jobhunters have sat a virtual job interview with Duncan Bannatyne via the BeMyInterviewer service, with over 210,000 unique users visiting the site in the last year. The service’s most popular question was “I’ve interviewed 20 people for this job, why should I employ you?” which was accessed on average every 50 minutes.
Clear proof that candidates are eating up video content on job sites and clearly would love more video abilities moving forward.
Talent on View can provide recruiters and job boards globally with the latest video technology to enhance your site or recruitment process.
Please contact me on
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for further details.
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
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.
Hi
As you will see in the news article under the media tab on the home page, Monster has launched its new 'seeker' experience.
As we have been on the soapbox about the Candidate Experience ever since the early days of our Internet Recuitment Series over 5 years ago, we thought we should address the new experience.
Keith is writing in his blog some interesting comments and suggested that I wouls be reviewing the site. After looking at Joel Cheesman's outstanding in-depth analysis, there isn't much to say about how it works.
Eric Shannon provides a slightly more acerbic view , with some terrific comments on his blog continuing the debate.
Hi
I have just created a poll on my LinkedIn profile page. Trying out another one of their application inserts to see what kind of response I might get from my 3800 connections.
The questions and answers are limited in number of characters, which is good for this kind of application.
Will be interested to see how many answers I get directly. If you happen to not be in my LinkedIn network, use the link to take the poll, and while you are there, go ahead and LinkIn with me.
Alan
Hello there
Well, here I am again, trying another method of uploading presentations, this time from Scribd , who are promoting their iDocument format.
Why, you might ask? Because this presentation is normally 9MB. I have two presentations from our GRC 2008 Conference that are over 35MB. Naturally, this is too heavy for most users to be able to download.
Please let me know whether you prefer this approach or the SlideShare approach that is in my earlier post.
Al
