Category: Blogs

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Blogs

Jobs Blog > Web 2.0?

Well I guess I owe it to you my dear readers (especially ‘The Regulars’), a bit of the visual upgrade to the JobsBlog.ie. When I first started blogging, I was not sure how will it work. My first few blog posts were just a bit… insecure. :)

Then I got to the first 100 visitors a day, that I have put myself as a target originally when started. And from there onwards and upwards…

Anyway, I just realised I concentrated on the quality of the content 100%. What I forgot is the ‘looks’! So, to get all my ramblings into some more readable and nicer framework I decided to start working on the visual improvement of this Jobs Blog. A properly designed logo is what I will work on first, and then the layout and the rest. Here are some samples of the fancy looking web 2.0 logos. Let me know what ones you like?


jobsblog-web2.0-logos

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Blogs Jobs Recruitment Recruitment Agency

Is Jobs Blog still alive?

Is Jobs Blog still alive?

That is the question I got a lot last few weeks. It is funny how your constant readers almost expect you to publish regularly, and note the absence of the new blog posts. My summer was a strange mixture of (tele)work, holidays, sailing, diving, travelling, business, networking, socialising and visiting people and places. The result was devastating for my blog. The only posts I did post was being stuck on the airports with flights cancelled or delayed, or such weird situations.

It is September! And September is a Special Month in the Recruitment in Ireland. Majority of the advertising contracts are renewed in September. January is the second most popular month for such an activity. Sales people are very busy. If you did not book your business (Let’s do Lunch!) meeting or a dinner, you will find hard to get a face to face meeting with a salesman of the recruitment advertising! Fully booked in advance!

New start up recruitment agencies pup up like mushrooms after the rain in September. Considering the amount of rain in August…

Jobs Blog is Alive!!!

The question is how is the recruitment alive in those turbulent economic times…

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Blogs

Irish Jobs buys Local Jobs Group

Irish Jobs buys Local Jobs Group.

Irish Jobs (IrishJobs.ie or SaonGroup.com) bought another company. If you look at their history, they seem to buy something every summer. Since they bought Jobs.ie 3 years ago (wasn’t it early September?), they started doing their summer shopping abroad. Some Chinese and UK web sites. This time it is Local Jobs Group (http://www.localjobsgroup.co.uk/). Those guys have a long list of ‘Local’ jobs web sites all over UK.

Neither Local Jobs Group nor IrishJobs or Saon Group have any press release published yet (at the time of writing) and not much of the details are out. Irish Jobs seams to hide the prices it pays for job boards, but as a ballpark it is a few million every summer.

So who is next on their target?

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Blogs

How to find jobhunters?

Or how to make jobhunters find you?

Remember my post about the Jobs-Ireland.ie web site?

Here is the record of the traffic in the first 30 days:

Jobhunters finding Jobs Ireland job site

The average number of jobhunters for the first 30 days was 10 per day.

The average number of jobhunters for the last 7 days was 20 per day.

The number of jobhunters on the site yesterday was 30 (per day).

Funny how you can still make web sites with the ‘Buid it and they will come’ marketing philosopy, and if you bouild the site right, the job hunters (visitors) will really come.

Categories
Blogs Jobs Recruitment

CIPD Ireland Annual Conference 2008

It is a beautiful day today, almost perfect to drive to Lyrath Estate Hotel, Kilkenny, to attend the CIPD Ireland Annual Conference 2008.

Both The Irish Times and the Independent are the highest ‘Platinum Partners’. Meaning you can see the teams of the sales people from both Loazajobs and Irish Times Jobs – doing their best to sell some advertising while mingling with the HR personnel. Wine them, dine them, (a bit of golf on the day like today please!) and sell them your expensive advertising space.

Well done both sales teams of our Irish newspapers on sponsoring the (British CIPD) sales event packaged in the HR wrapping. :)

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Blogs

Jobs Fair

An Online Recruitment Jobs Fair has several advantages over a Traditional Recruitment Fair.

Jobs Fair for Recruiters

More convenient: No staffing required.
More effective: Lasts for two weeks instead of a few hours.
More cost-effective: Cheaper than holding an actual job fair. No material, travel, food and accommodation costs.
More targeted: Targeted at specific industries/audiences.
Global scope: Available to anyone with an internet connection.

Jobs Fair for Candidates

More convenient: Can visit several companies from the comfort of their own home, and can be accessed from anywhere in the country 24/7.
More cost-effective: Can attend without the expense of time or travel.
More interactive: Host of user-friendly and state-of-the-art features including Podcasts, Employer Videos and Webinars.

Do you think Irish Recruiters are ready? For Employer Videos? Podcasts? Webinars?

What about Job Hunters? Aren’t they just interested in a better salary?

Categories
Blogs

After Recruitment?

Monster.com founder Jeff Taylor is furthering his goal of taking newspaper services online with Tribute.com, a website for the bereaved.

Monster.com founder Jeff Taylor helped you find a job, and helped ease you into middle age. Now he wants to help you build the last web page you’ll ever need.

Tributes.com is scheduled for a soft launch in June. It aims to provide a central location to house online memorials for those who have passed on. It’s starting with $4.3 million in funding, with The Wall Street Journal as a lead investor.

Taylor, who retired from Monster.com in 2005, says Monster was intended to take the jobs section of newspaper’s classified ads online. So online obituaries seemed like an inevitable next step.

In my ‘other’ job as the MD of Portal Ltd., the web and software development company, I have managed the development of the several newspaper web sites in Ireland. Perhaps the most important was the Leinster Leader Group, who our company developed an online publishing system for and the web presence. One of the features as that a visitor could book Classified Advertising via the web site and pay with the credit card.

One thing I noticed there in the reports was the obituaries. It was interesting to notice that almost all of them have been booked from oversees. What this meant is that the Leinster Leader tapped into the new market, since the only way to get the advertising in paper before was to call on the phone or walk in their offices. Neither is convenient if you are in Australia. The revenue from obituaries alone multiplied after the web site was launched. The whole new market (world – Ireland) opened.

Leinster Leader Group was sold a bit more than a year after publishing their revolutionary web sites. If I remember correctly the value was 138 mil. All the business consultants, journalists and columnists have been asking themselves what was that huge price based on…

Spot on Jeff!!!

Categories
Blogs Jobs Recruitment Search Engine

RSSJobs.ie – First job application sent to the Employer!

Well it was only about 30 hours ago, when we announced The Launch of the RSSJobs.ie Job Site, and we have just sent the first application to the Recruiter!!!

There are a few milestones in the development of the jobs site:

Uploading the site to the Internet so that it is visible to everyone.
Publishing your first jobs
Inviting other employers to publish jobs
Sending your first application
The first contact from an employer interested in advertising
The first returning customer
The first approach by the competition, (another job board) testing waters, and checking how are you doing
The first approach from the buyer
SALE!!!

RSSJobs.ie is about 30 hours old now. We have done almost half of the list above! :)

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Blogs

New Recruitment Web Site Launch: RSS Jobs.ie!

How do you launch a recruitment web (a job board) site in Ireland?

The Traditional (offline) way

You ring everyone you know. You get everyone you can get to ring everyone they know. You get your PR going., You send email with the announcement and the invite to the launch party to all your customers. And partners. Everyone!!!

What is the result? You get a few (and a half) jobs advertisers by some young and naive recruiters or employers. You don’t really get job hunters on your site.

Obviously with a couple (and a half) of jobs advertised only, you cannot really call it a job board, especially since not a decent application went through yet. You have more recruiters visiting than job hunters.

You failed.

Soft Launch

But you are the entrepreneur. You bounce back!!! You recognise our failure, and just rename it to the ‘Soft Launch’. To potentially give you an opportunity to do it again. When you learn how to do it. Or get money from someone to do it right.

Harsh Reality

You want to give your job site another go, and realise that the marketing budget should include a bit more than a cocktail sausages on a Launch Party. There is a need for the whole range of the activities, and all of those are online activities:

  • Pay Per Click advertising with Google AdWords?

    • Is that for you? No! It’s far too dear to pay an euro for a single visitor!!!

  • Search Engine optimisation?

    • To pay an enormous daily rate to that agency or a consultant who will just tell us that we need to spend even more money?

  • Social Networking?

    • We don’t have time to write blogs! We don’t have them to read other blogs and comment and engage in the conversations!

  • Social Bookmarking?

    • – ok, if you understand what this means in the online recruitment context, your knowledge is far above the average recruiter today.

    The scenario above happens every month in Ireland since I am in this business. A new job boards are popping up like mushrooms. Most of us do not hear of them really. Since they never do much but the ‘Launch’ thing above.

    I did the opposite today. I launched www.RSSJobs.ie. I did not tell anyone about it. Never will actually. I will probably NEVER ADVERTISE the new job site. No press releases. No unbiased articles in the Sunday Business Post. Those that actually cost you ¼ of a page in the Recruitment Section.

    RSSJobs.ie is born today! It’s official!!! :)

    Categories
    Blogs Google Jobs Recruitment Recruitment Agency Search Engine SEO SERP

    Google AdWords in Recruitment?

    Google AdWords was good!

    Years ago I was preaching to the recruiters in Ireland to start using Google AdWords. The cost per click (CPC) was literally a few cents. The early adopters really drove massive traffic, and relevant traffic to their web sites. I remember my own www.IrelandJobs.ie – and how easy was it to purchase a thousand visitors a day. We experimented a lot and found that the best click trough and the conversion rate on our web site was for the AdWords Campaigns linking directly to a job just advertised.

    Today the scenario is the opposite.

    Google AdWords is bad!

    Cost per click started grooving from the day one. It was just a question of time when will it all stop making sense. In the late 2007, when CPC reached the 1 Euro, a lot of people started revaluating their Google AdWords accounts and rethinking if that spend still makes sense. A large number of advertisers stopped their accounts or limited their budgets. The results are that the CPC stabilised for a time. It took some time to get used to pay over a euro for a visitor. Advertisers got used to it, and the price is soaring up again.

    So why is paying a single 1 Euro per job hunter bad for your business?

    Well simply because you could be paying about half by purchasing your traffic from other sources. Call today for details: 01 440 1900!

    Categories
    Blogs

    Why should you not trust Google?

    We got used to bugs in all the software products. We have all experienced a programs that would suddenly freeze, or even a whole computers brought to the halt. Google is nothing more than a program on a computer. And as any program on any computer, it can be wrong, and be very wrong actually.

    What is Google actually?

    Google is an indexing software. It looks (reads actually) at a web pages and stores their content in its database. With its content stored it analyses the content taken from those web sites, and assigns each page and web site a relevant keywords. Google determines the keywords by their occurrence(s) on the web page. So when a user does a search Google will be able to quickly display the relevant pages for that keyword. It will not have to scan all the pages, it just looks into its index.

    Google is also trying to tell us as much as it can about those search results really. Google wants to be informative. Therefore next to the search results, Google also places a link with a text ‘Similar pages’. The idea is that if a user does not like this result, but is interested in the topic, could drill down into the related pages here.

    Google also show the ‘Age’ of an entry in its search results pages. So when it can Google will show when was some result entered in its database. Google currently shows the age only for the content that is submitted by the Google XML Sitemap or that is ‘PINGed’. And here is where Google gets it all wrong….

    Here is just one example:

    I have made a blog about the Jobs in IT in Ireland. The Idea was to list all the Irish IT Jobs on one place. I have put it under the domain www.Jobs-IT.ie. When I was about done I submitted it to Google. And the spider come, indexed the content and started showing it. The new content is submitted every few hours, as a new jobs are posted. And here is where Google got the times all wrong.

    The time next to the search result that Google shows is – the date 8th April.

    Jobs

    The content that the page in the Google index shows is from the 3rd of April.

    Jobs

    I do know that the content is actually being published there on an hourly basis, so the page in the Google index if it would have really been from the 8th would have the content from the 8th or in worst case some of it from teh 7th if the snapshot was taken in the early morning. But Google is showing the content from the 3rd and dating the same content as it is of the 8th. This is where Google got it’s dating all wrong.

    Do you still trust Google?

    As any other piece of software, it has bugs. Bugs do get fixed in most cases when they get fined. The point is that Google as any piece of software has a long list of problems and con not be totally trusted.