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Recruit Ireland goes FREE!

Recruit Ireland found itself an a bit funny situation this month. On one hand they are the main sponsor of the National Recruitment Federation Conference later this week. The NRF is the association of the Irish Recruitment Agencies, and most of them are actually Recruit Ireland’s paying clients. On the other hand Recruit Ireland has decided to give Free Jobs Advertising for Ireland’s Employers – that are basically the clients of the agencies, hence their clients. Employers loved it since there is something free for them. We all like free things. Agencies hated it since they lost revenue while their cost (a fee that Recruit Ireland charges) is still the same.

Via the various channels different recruiters have publicly disapproved the move by Recruit Ireland. All the Recruitment Agency blogs and Social Networking Discussions state the clear and strong disapproval with the move. Recruiters feel it’s not a fair move. And they all raised the question – What will their own association (that charges them for membership as well) do about it? The 2009 NRF conference will therefore be very interesting, with the Recruit Ireland as the main sponsor, and 118 agencies, most of them angry (none has spoken anything positive about the move!)

From the Recruit Ireland’s perspective it was probably a – no brainer. They are not managing to sell any advertising to the Employers, and the Jobs site always looks better with the Employers jobs on it. No one likes the 100% recruitment agency dominated web site. So they decided to give it up for free to employers. It will fill their database of potential future clients.

I am really looking forward to the NRF conference later this week since there will obviously be some interesting discussions!

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Blogs

National Recruitment Federation (NRF) Annual Conference 2009

*** PRESS RELEASE ***

National Recruitment Federation Launches Annual Conference 2009 with the good news of 400 jobs filled last week

1st April 2009

The National Recruitment Federation today announced the line-up for its Annual Conference 2009 entitled Facing the Future With Ease – Education, Enterprise & Enthusiasm, which will take place on Thursday, 23rd April 2009 at Citywest Hotel, Saggart, Co Dublin. The Federation which represents recruitment agencies in Ireland, also heralded a more positive outlook in the jobs market with an estimated 400 jobs filled by its member agencies last week.

Flying in the face of today’s all-consuming mood of pessimism, depression and fear, the NRF is calling for a revival of the spirit, energy and gutsy innovation for which this country has been praised. For the first year, the Federation is opening the event to anybody in the recruitment profession. For further information call Ph: 01-8161754 or log on to www.nrf.ie

While recognising the need to address the key issues of concern to the industry today, the NRF made a conscious decision not to dwell on the negatives for the entire session. Instead they have decided to incite the steely resolve and indefatigable passion needed to get the industry back on its feet again. Indeed due to the kind support of the conference sponsors and exhibitors (listed below) there is no charge for attending the event for NRF member agencies with just a nominal charge for non-members.

Chaired by career management expert Rowan Manahan (Fortify Services), the conference will be officially launched with an opening address from Minister for Labour Affairs, Mr Billy Kelleher, TD followed by an overview of the industry “today & tomorrow” from NRF President, Frank Collins. (Most notably Frank will be introducing the federation’s education strategy on the day). Alan Haugh of the National Employment Rights Association will look at the state body’s progress to date in fostering a culture of compliance and improving the standards of employment, while Annmarie Muntz of the world employers body EuroCIETT, will give us an insight into the crucial role of our industry internationally.

The conference will then turn its attention to learning from experience as Lucy Gaffney, Chairperson of Communicorps (which has 44 radio stations in 9 different countries) and formerly Director and COO of Esat Telecomm, shares her tales of tackling the ups and downs of the economy over the years and most importantly coming through it in one piece. Inviting us to taking an introspective look at ourselves and how personality types have a strong bearing on how we manage stress, Tempy Cummins of Vision 2 Reality, will provide tips and advice on psyching ourselves up to meet the challenges ahead. Tempy will also give a very important nod to the fact that both owners and managers suffer deeply at these times and could do with a helping hand in motivating themselves before trying to motivate their staff.

Although the economy is on a slowdown, the pace of technological advance is hurtling along at break-neck speed with networking, advice, business deals etc all taking place at a phenomenal rate online. The savvy entrepreneur knows that the future is on the net but many a savvy entrepreneur is also up to their neck in trying to manage their day-to-day business and simply do not have time to find out what’s new and how to do it. Coming to the rescue will be internet communications expert Keith Bohanna (co-founder of dbTwang.com), who will address in particular the area of Blog Marketing with a live demonstration on exactly how to make the sites such as LinkedIn and BlogSpot work for you.

To keep recruiters in touch with their target audiences, chair person Rowan Manahan will present us with some feedback from both employers and jobseekers on what they need from recruitment agencies today therefore helping them to adapt their services to ever-changing demands. And finally, delegates will leave with a strategy in hand for igniting the engines of enterprise once again as consultant Bill Boorman famed for his “Tin Hat Strategy” will present a 13 Point Plan for Business Growth.

Said NRF President, Frank Collins, “The last year and in particular the last 6 months have thrown the industry into an unprecedented freefall. We have of course seen slowdowns before but as the saying goes, the higher you climb the further you fall. Ireland has had it good for so long and are now in the midst of conflicting arguments as to where to turn. The NRF has put much thought into how it can help to provide some answers to questions but most importantly how to inject a little energy back into our hearts so that we can help to drive the economy forward again. I’m confident we’ve created a schedule that will help do just that and I look forward seeing the results.”

The National Recruitment Federation is a voluntary organisation set up to establish and maintain standards and codes of practice for the recruitment industry. Representing approx 120 companies throughout Ireland the NRF focuses it’s attentions on providing these members with the best possible service in terms of communication, support, advice sharing and problem solving.

ENDS

Frank Collins is available at any time for comment or interview. Speakers may also be contacted for interview upon request.

For further information contact:

Elaine Roddy, Director, NRF. Or Frank Collins, President, NRF.
Ph: 01-8161754 or 086-8582085 Ph: 01-8161763 or 087-2840804

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Blogs Career Jobs Recruitment

Financial Careers on Ireland’s Banks

Poll results from the Cinancial Careers Jobs Site:

Is the worst over for Ireland’s banks?
5% Definitely, we have turned a corner
35% Still too difficult to tell
60% No, there’s still a lot of work to be done

I guess no further comment needed…

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Blogs Career Internet Jobs Recruitment Recruitment Agency Search Engine SEO

How to post a job online Part 2: Job Tags / Keywords

The following article is the second part of three articles on – How to Post a Job Online. The first article is Job Titles. This second article concentrates solely on the Job Tags or Job Keywords.

Job Tags

Tags or Keywords are the words or phrases we can associate any page with to help the search engines and content management systems understand what is our content about.

How to create a set of tags that will drive traffic from the search engines to your job advertisement?

When you have crated your ‘perfect’ Job Title, you will most likely and up choosing one of the number of the good ones you came up with. That best one will then be your Job Title, and the rest of them you can use as Tags. How many? The more the better! Job sites usually let you publish around 1000 characters in the Job Keywords field, so do not exceed that limit.

Tags multiply the power of the Job Title. How do they do it? Simply because most jobs sites and modern CMS-es know how to use tags to generate pages, and links from them. If tags structure is applied correctly, it can multiply your job applications numbers.

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Blogs Career CV CV Database Internet Jobs Recruitment

Jobsket

I visited the Jobsket (Jobsket.ie) web site today. It’s one of those now innovative sites that their owners and founders know will be the next big thing on the Internet. Unfortunately as we all know not every single site can success, such is the nature of the market. You can recognise those sites by not really having any real meaningful info what they are about, and you cannot really do much yourself on the site.

Jobsket will force you to give up your email address (do I have SPAM…) and then they let you in to log in. When you do log in there is less to see then on the outside, so let’s not waste ink on the Jobsket here anymore. What I wanted to show you is the interesting poll results left from the people who visited Jobsket. The Question was:

Submit an Idea
We’ve setup a feedback forum so you can tell us what’s on your mind. Please go there and be heard!
20 Votes – Import CV from LinkedIn
4 Votes – Change tags
3 Votes – Improve CVs viewer
3 votes – Allow import your CV from Google Docs
1 votes – Allow sending my CV

jobsket

What this tells us is the people do not care really about the fancy feature about a jobs site. What people do care is their own time. I do not want to insert another bloody profile and online CV here. I have a profile (that I am proud of) in LinkedIN. Now go and take it from there you lazy….

Twice many more people suggested the LikedIN connection than all the other suggestions altogether. Now what does that tell you? It tells you that people are sick of creating their profiles and filling the repetitive info in the forms on the various sites. It tells you that there is the time for one site to be a holder of your personal info, where the subsets of it you as the account holder will be able to open to various other sites.

Ehm,… this blog post was about Jobsket. So what is Jobsket really? Jobsket is a spider that takes jobs from Jobs.ie and than matches your CV with the positions advertised and calculates from the published salaries what is your CV, or what are you ‘worth’. I tried. In my case rolling the dice gave more precise results.
The data they collected from Jobs.ie is so old – yeas there are the positions in there that have been published not last year, but before the recession started – so you can guess how accurate the figures are.

The Feedaback from (powered by uservoice) on Jobsket is nice though.

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Blogs Recruitment Recruitment Agency

Brightwater: Are we as a nation too hard on ourselves?

Irish recruitment agency Brightwaters online poll for January 2009 was:

Are we as a nation too hard on ourselves?

online-poll-feb-results

David Bloch, CEO of the Brightwater Group comments:

Until now I have gone with the “ask the audience” answer, but not this time. I think the Irish are too hard on themselves!

I am speaking as a person who has worked in Ireland for 11 years, but was born in the States, and lived in 6 different countries. I love Ireland, but recognise that while the Irish are wonderfully proud and patriotic, they are also the first to be hard on themselves. Self-deprecating humour and an almost disbelief that they really are as wonderful as so much of the rest of the world believes them to be. Even during the Celtic Tiger years, while certainly there were Irish people who believed their own hype, there were so many that believed Ireland’s success was too good to be true. Now that the bubble has burst, there seems to be the belief that it really was just an illusion and Ireland will sink back into the mire. The UK, the US and most of the rest of the world exhibit more self confidence!

Confidence is a fundamental emotion and cannot easily be switched on and off. Ireland must believe in themselves and believe they are worthy of being at the top table, to remain at the top table.

Self belief springs from many things, but starts with honesty and trust in the country and the system. I am therefore adamant that wrong-doers (there are question marks hanging over several government, banking and other officials) should be dealt with quickly and severely! The worldwide view of Ireland Inc is at stake. Is Ireland a country of law? A country we should invest in? More still, the self confidence of the country is at stake. Are we still a nation of corrupt politicians and businessmen (you scratch my back & I’ll scratch yours), or are we a nation of integrity and strength who will not tolerate corruption? It’s time Ireland stopped putting themselves down and stand up proud and strong. We will not accept being treated like that, we deserve better!

Only by overcoming obstacles can you prove to yourself what you’re really made of. The recession is a challenge and an opportunity. As President Obama says: Believe!

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Career Builder is comming to Ireland!

Something strange happened today. First a well known Irish Recruitment agency called on the phone this morning and asks if we can post their jobs via our Multiple Jobs Posting service to the CareerBuilder job site. I found it strange because CareerBuilder is an old site and it used to be US oriented so far. So I checked and guess what? There is a CareerBuilder.ie Irish site.

cpl-jobs-web-site

I looked around and it has about 15 clients advertising jobs. Not overtly impressive, but hey!? It’s a start. CareerBuilder is in Ireland!

As the day goes by, I was checking some recruitment sites of the Irish recruitment agencies to get some inspiration, and guess what? Cpl has a new web site. I actually liked the old one better. But this one has all the right things that a recruitment site should have today: Video, blogs, and this giant footer made of gazillion links. I watched the video. And noticed that the vide on the CPL web site is an advertisement for the CareerBuilder! I still do not get what is he jobs site advertisement actually doing on a recruitment agency web site. Beats me!


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Blogs

Lifestyle Sports

Lifestyle Sports, known for its overstuffed outlets, with loud music, long queues, and football jerseys expressed the interest to purchase the number of Sasha shops. Sasha, and it’s owner Lyric Retail have been losing money for a few years, and have decided to pull off from the market with its Sasha brand.

If Lifestyle Sports really acquires a number of the Sasha shops, I wonder what will happen with the staff. Sasha employed almost exclusively female staff, while the Lifestyle Sports shops use to have mixed staff with a majority of the male sales staff.

I guess Lifestyle Sports could be smart and try to keep the staff of some shops and brand them as ‘Girls Sports Stuff’ shops for the female market.

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LoadzaJobs

It is funny how an economic climate change can make your company name sound funny: Loadzajobs!

In the Celtic Tiger era the name Loadzajobs meant something. Loadzajobs meant something good. It sounded somehow relaxing, in a sense, telling you not to worry about anything since there are Loads of jobs in Iceland available at anytime. Well those times are gone! The more appropriate description of the state of the Irish Economy today would be Lodzaredundancies!

Loadzajobs is still displaying some jobs there on the web site. Somehow it doesn’t sound so convincing any more. Loadzajobs sounded much beter a year ago. Today it would sound funny if it would not be happening to us!

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Blogs Career Jobs Recruitment Recruitment Agency

Any Jobs in Ireland?

Today’s announcement from one of the leading jobs sites in Ireland nicely describes what does a jobs scene look in Ireland today:

Hi All

Just a quick note to let you know we have now added some new locations;

Europe
Australia
United Arab Emirates
New Zealand
Canada
USA
South Africa
North Africa
Middle East

If you have any queries please let me know.

The jobs sites cannot really survive advertising the jobs in Ireland only. Simply there is not enough jobs in Ireland to sustain the business model of advertising jobs in Ireland only. There simply isn’t enough jobs here anymore. Irish Jobs are gone. Jobs are elsewhere today.

Welcome to the emigration wave…

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Blogs

Recruitment Roadshow Ireland 2008 – 2009

It is almost 2 full years now that I started doing the list of the trainings and presentations collectively called The Recruitment RoadShow. I had a chance to get to know a really large group of the recruitment consultants all around the country. Two years is a long time to be giving the same presentation. So the list of the topics has changed during the time. Some topics like the Recruitment Blogging have just expanded, and started dividing into the smaller more defined presentation topics as blogging evolved and it usage grows in the latest years.

Not only that the Recruitment Roadshow is changing, but I feel I am changing with it. Most of the change is the deeper understanding of the recruiters. It is understanding how different the recruiters and the recruitment processes they implement are. It affects the candidates as well, since their experience differs drastically from a recruiter to a recruiter.

What I have learned is that there is no perfect recruiter (that I somehow assumed before!). As in all other professions there are all kind of people with all kind of different skills in the recruitment industry. But it is not guaranteed that the recruiter I like you will like as well. This is because you might need a completely different service level than me. And the recruiter will most likely perform better working with one of us then the other. So our perception of the same recruiter will differ. And sometimes it differs drastically!

I also noticed the difference in a perception a group of recruiters will have of a received Recruitment RoadShow training. Some of them would like the hands on approach, and the newly acquired skills would be the exact match to what they have been looking for. Their new skills will help them do their job better and faster. And they would understand it and would rate the training session highly. But unfortunately if you deliver the same presentation to a large group at once, you are bound to have some people you will just not serve with what they need.

For example if you have an hour long training on how to utilise the social networking web sites in the recruitment process, and you have a person in a group that is just introvert or shy, or for any other reason has a block towards communication with the unknown people in the open forum (that is quite a strange situation and is just not for everyone), he will not take anything home from such a session.

As well as the social networking sites the blogging has a long list of issues in the corporate recruitment perspective. How do you control your corporate branding policy on private blogs by the staff that is published in real time? What is even worse the blog is open to anyone to contribute? So in other words any of your competitors or people who might not like you very much can post anything he wants on your corporate blog that is a part of your publish web site? Branding issues, liability issues,… the list is actually pretty endless. And in the same time at this stage we KNOW we HAVE TO do it?

I also have to thank all of you who have helped me to get the Recruitment Roadshow to where it is now. To everyone who asked a question that helped me to understand you better. Some 3 to 4 years ago we brought in the multiple job posting into the recruitment in Ireland, and automated the boring task of posting your jobs to the Irish jobs sites. The last two years of the Recruitment RoarShow made it quite clear that there is more to be done in the recruitment to improve the whole process. It is the strict and well defined usage policy of the social networking, blogging and publishing of the content online in general to help the recruiter market themselves and be found directly (as opposed via the jobs sites) by the more targeted candidates.

www.JobsBoard.ie is where the next recruitment platform for the Irish market will be published, and it will include all that you have suggested in the last two years during the Recruitment RoadShow sessions. When you start using it, please let me know did we get it right!?

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Blogs

Recruit Direct

I love Googleing for the new Irish jobs sites. It is fantastic how the search engines dig them all out somehow!

Anyway, here is the one that does not like the Irish recruitment agencies. It is called Recruit Direct! This site actually has a phone number and the physical address published. By having those two items it actually stands out in the crowd of the ne Irish jobs sites.

The design is kind of ugly. Then again it can be only myself…

Then again I had even uglier web site many years ago. It was called Real Jobs. And guess what – it had the same business model – advertising the employers jobs only, not letting the recruitment agencies on. You are probably guessing right it failed then. So here is my experience of a failure for free to all who are interested:

Jobs Sites with no recruitment agencies do not live long in Ireland.

Or at least I was not smart enough to make it happen. Neither have a dozen other people that have started the same business since. If you think you are smarter than us, go ahead and show us how is it supposed to be done.

My advice – learn from other peoples mistakes (Mine!:) )

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Job Spy (Jobspy.ie)

Recession? What recession? Not even this snow is stopping the new Irish jobs sites from popping out like mushrooms from the ground after the rain. THE fact that there is far more people being made redundant in hte last six months than the new positions created really does not bother no one in het Irish jobs board and recruitment industry.

Do not believe me? Hell here is another new jobs site for you. It’s called Jobs Spy. Of course the owner did not bother to put he company registration number or registered business address on the site as it seems to be the fashion lately with the new Irish jobs sites contrary to the rules from the Company Registration Office. Perhaps it does nto even apply to someone doing business as a sole trader – since he is not a company, so the CRO rules do not apply? :)

Who knows…

The only thing that is a fact is that if you are not certain where to publish a job in Ireland today, you have plenty of choice!

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Blogs

Recruitment RoadShow 2009

After the really successful and well received Recruitment RoadShow 2008 presented in the number of the Irish recruitment agencies, this 2009 started early in January. It was all well until today. In January I did the presentations that included from the basic multiple job posting tips and tricks, to the advanced candidate filtering based on the quality of the web site traffic driven from Google.ie. I also presented in both multinationals like Manpower and a number of the start-ups. It was interesting how different teams took the same presentation completely differently, so I had to customize it to make sure everyone gets the most out of it.

The second day of February, and it all went wrong! Why? Well, I couldn’t get my car uphill to get out of the estate. We have been completely snowed in! I really wasn’t so sure how will the client receive the excuse, but fortunately most of their staff had the same problem, so it went down well. To be honest, I was a bit afraid it is not the excuse one would find really believable in Dublin!

Picture from the Recruitment RoadShow 2009:

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Blogs Jobs Recruitment

Irish Jobs sites prices falling

It is interesting to see how the overpriced Irish jobs sites started reducing their prices drastically. I just saw this ad this morning, and I still think they should reduce it much, much more, but at least it is a step in the right direction… Perhaps a too small step and too late?