Category: Blogs

Categories
Blogs

WordPress 2.5

WorPress 2.5 is released!

It will take some time to get familiar with the updated WordPress 2.5 administration menus all changed. It looks a bit better in the Admin menu really. A bit more professional. But if it is a more useful GUI, I am not convinced jet. Perhaps it’s a bit early to judge. Let’s give it some time. One thing is true – WordPress 2.5 (admin) looks nicer!

All major plugins work even without deactivating them before the Wordperss 2.5 upgrade. The One Click Upgrade for Plugins, is a nice idea but it requires the FTP location of the new plugin, and that is something I could not find on any single plugin download page today. I checked about 20 plugin ‘Home Pages’, but none contained the FTP info required for the One Click Update of the plugin.

No new themes in the default installation of WordPress 2.5…. pity. They might think about a downloadable Theme Pack or something… The way Themes are handled today is not really a simple solution for non technical users.

Hey, you can change the color of the header (if you use Kubrik Theme)…. Well I did. I have changed me header! :)

And that is the only visual update on the JobsBlog.ie after the WordPress 2.5 update. The fancy color of the header. That’s it!

Categories
Blogs

Language Recruitment Fair

Looking for a job using your language skills?

Gresham Hotel, O’Connell Street, Dublin 1
Friday, 4th April 2008: 10.00 – 17.00
Saturday, 5th April 2008: 10.00 – 17:00

Then come and join us at the Language Recruitment Fair in Dublin, the largest and most exciting exhibition of its kind dedicated to language recruitment.

If you are a bilingual or multi-lingual speaker and you are interested in finding a great job that meets your skills this is a “must see” event!!

Why you should not miss the Language Recruitment Fair…
The fair showcases many national & international companies and organisations that are interested in recruiting people with language skills.
You will be able to meet many employers under one roof, saving you time and energy when looking for your new job!
You will be able to talk to leading employers Face-to-Face and discuss a wide range of employment opportunities in Ireland
Companies will be conducting interviews hoping to hire staff at the event
Bring your CV! so you can be interviewed and even get a job before you leave the fair
Recruitment professionals will be on hand to give you free advice about your CV and all other aspects to help you find your perfect job.

The Language Recruitment Fair will target candidates seeking multi-lingual positions in Customer Service, Shared Service & Finance, IT, Sales, Marketing and Translation attracting leading international companies over the two days.

Companies exhibiting include:
Accenture
Alienware
Canada Life
Cook
Cpl
EMC
Gem
IBM
Manpower
Sportingbet
VMware

Opening times for the fair: Fri. 4th April: 10.00 – 17.00
Sat. 5th April: 10.00 – 17:00

Categories
Blogs

LikedIN is offline – LinkedOUT?

LinkedIN Wizzard - Offline

LinkedIN is offline today. It is funny actually how a web site or Internet in general isn’t really reliable as the other medial or communication channels. Your mobile might be ‘Out of Reach’ but the landline always works. The TV works, the radio works. Well Internet related news services like web sites really do go ‘down’ often. The email servers as well.

LinkedIN - Offline

So I guess it is OK is LinkedIN goes offline now and then… :)

And BTW here is my LinkedIN Profile.

Categories
Blogs Google Recruitment

CPL

CPL Web Site - pointing to the http://alliancenurses.ie/The CPL recruitment agency is the leading recruitment agency in Ireland. They managed acquire a number of competitors, and also grow organically in some areas. The web site is a quite important thing for any recruitment agency. It represents you on the Internet, and the Internet is the channel for the majority of the communication a recruitment agency does. Jobs are listed on the Internet for job hunters and your services are displayed on your site to your clients. Every single email has a reference to the web site to help drive the traffic to the recruitment agency web site.

And jet this most important communication channel gets neglected. How? Well simply entering the web address without the ‘www’ part in it so just cpl.ie gives you the web site of: Alliance Nurses Agency. You can view the real copy also on their domain address: http://alliancenurses.ie/.

How did that happen? Most likely the configuration settings on the Microsoft IIS web server. I am guessing that the domain http://alliancenurses.ie/ is set “All undefined” option, and the admin did not specify the CPL.ie to point to the same where the www.CPL.ie is pointing.

Note: Yes I did call CPL and have let them know….Note: Yes I did call CPL and have let them know…. And guess what I am told: “That is OK, they are part of our CPL Group.” :)

Categories
Blogs CV CV Database Jobs Recruitment

Developing a Jobs Site / Job Board

Jobs Sites are fairly straight forward web sites. Not as simple as a pure presentation “shop window” web sites, but there is not that much to it.

Three basic types of registered users:

    Employers
    Job Seekers
    Job Board Admin

There is also a very small number of pages:

    Home
    Search
    Advanced Search
    Search Results
    Full job description
    Application form
    About / Contact

A few more admin pages in the back end of the job site and that is all you really need to get going. Later on you might ad a page for Company Profiles, Quotes, or similar Jada-jada required for the search engine optimization purposes. You might disguise it under eh title Career Resources, or something sounding equally smart.

Any web development company can do it fairly quickly, and if you stick to those basics, it will not cost you an arm end leg. Outsourcing the development to India will save you quite some money as well. And this is the reason we had more than 20 new job sites in Ireland launched in the same year 2007. Imagine 20 new job sites in the market that to anyone in the industry seams overcrowded.

CV Database exposed on the WebThere is only one problem with the job sites, and that is that they are more often than not built so that they store the CV’s of the candidates. This enables the job board owners to sell access to the CV databases. Holding onto CVs online requires a tough security, and if you have been cutting corners while developing your web site, it might not be there. The end results are that job hunters private data gets exposed. Sometimes their application history and sometimes even the full CVs find their way to the web.

Yes we did contact Karl to let him know and he pached the security hole quickly.

Categories
Blogs Jobs Recruitment Search Engine SEO

Job Boards and SEO in Ireland

Year 2008 started funny for the Job Boards in Ireland. Job boards started understanding that the Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the core of their business.

The reason the big job boards understood the y need to invest in SEO is because the year 2007 was the year where a largest number of the niche small job boards appeared in a single year. More than 20 new job boards requested to be included in the multiple job posting software eRecruit.ie in the year 2007 only! Those small niche web sites are in most cases industry specific, and usually have some link with some existing organisation or publication, or are just set up by someone who does know the industry. Knowing the industry helps in organising and running the small niche job board, so more often than not the niche job sites have some success as well. That hurts the job big boards, and it hurts them badly! So the national job boards decided to fight back in 2008, and to do so they are looking for the SEO people.

Irish Jobs - SEO JobIrish Jobs looking for the SEO Specialist:
http://www.irishjobs.ie/JobDesc.asp?ID=5125108&MID=3233

Due to continued expansion and focus delivering maximum jobseeker traffic to our websites worldwide a vacancy has arisen for an SEO specialist.
Job responsibilities:-
Knowledge and experience of SEO, Web 2.0 concepts, traffic and SEO analysis tools (Google Analytics, Google Webmasters Tools, keyword and structure research spiders)… Web 2.0?!

Jobs.ie Jobs - SEO JobJobs.ie (owned by Irish Jobs) are looking for that same SEO Specialist:
http://www.jobs.ie/ApplyForJob.aspx?Id=652847

This is actaully the same job in the same sompany as advertised by Irish Jobs. BTW Jobs.ie was purchased by Irish Jobs a year and a half ago.

Loadza Jobs - SEO JobLoadza Jobs made the adverts sound better by naming the job Online Search manager (SEO/SEM)
http://www.loadzajobs.ie/view-job-details.jobs?jobId=1077057

The Job Description finishes with the very funny sentence:

“Please do not apply if you have not got a good solid knowledge of the internet.”

That clearly shows they know what they are looking for!

Recruit Ireland…. nothing? About 20 different agencies have a job that appears in the search result for the word SEO, but no SEO jobs from the job site itself. Do they not need a SEO staff like the rest of the ob boards? Do they not trust the web site to deliver the candidate and have advertised in their papers?

Monster have a new site with a bit strange front page, and again they are not looking for a SEO specialist in Ireland. In all fairness, their SEO needs are probably managed from the head office in the US.

Ok, Ok,… EmployIreland.ie – no we are not looking for the SEO Specialist, we do have our SEO Consultant (that is available for projects!).

Categories
Blogs Jobs Recruitment

Video CV is here!

Ever noticed how hiring graduates based on their CV’s isn’t fun at all? Same CVs, with lots of education all over and no experience, at least not relevant one? Ever got into the situation where you cannot really determine anything relevant in eth CV, and started basing your filtering process solely on the ‘Interests’ and ‘Sports’ at the bottom of the CV?

If you recognise our self above, you will like what is coming next! A Video CV! You can actually SEE and HEAR the candidate. Now how is that in comparison to the poorly filled CV template with most of the required data for the CV (no Experience?!).

Thanks to a brilliant idea by CVizz.com that is all about to change!

Across the ocean:
A similar service in the US: VISAUL CV just got $5 mill. funding yesterday. Is that the first funding in the Video CV arena?

Categories
Blogs Google Search Engine SERP

Links exchange email requests

If you are the ‘Lucky’ recipient of any public email address like ‘info’ or ‘webmaster’ you are most likely receiving the links exchange request emails every week now. Someone is informing you that they have placed a link to your site or that they will place a link to your site as soon as you place a link to their site. They also take (your) time to explain you the benefits of the link building.

Under the current Irish legislation even the Irish company can send emails like that to any other Irish business. I see it as an obvious failure of the law to protect us from the SPAM. It is irritating because there is no really reliable and effective cure for the SPAM today.

So should you accept and put the links to all those web sites in return from the link obtained from them?

Here are the guidelines that you can use as a test in the following order:

If the email is sent from the free email host like Gmail – NO!
If the web site does not have a lot of the content relevant (really relevant!) to your web site – NO!
If the web page where your link is has more that 50ish links to some other sites – NO!
If the web page is not in the Google index – NO!
If the web page (not the site) has a Google Page Rank lower than 3 – NO!
If the web page where your link is has a Google Page Rank more than 2 lower than your page – NO!
If you just do not like the tone in the email – NO!

If you use the filter above – you will see that 99% of those emails will not pass the test. So even without performing the test, you can safely delete and ignore all such link exchange email requests.

Categories
Blogs Jobs Recruitment

Blog = Jobs Offers?

Will a good blog make you a magnet for a good job offers? Tom is the IT guy, who writes his blog for a few years not. His experience does not really show that having a good blog will make you attractive to the Irish recruiters. Is Irish recruitment industry a bit ‘Old Fashioned’, and glued to the Job boards and traditional advertising media? Do people in Ireland get a job via LinkedIN? Well definitely not in the numbers they should. What is missing from the whole recruitment process is the usage of the web outside of the job boards for searching the candidates. Blogging and social networking in general do not play any important part in the recruitment in Ireland.

At least not jet.

Until someone ‘understands’ it and just dives into the Gold Mine of the free Profiles, blogs, professional networks….

Categories
Blogs

Hosting365 is down again…

I am glad my blog is with Blacknight.ie, because Hosting365 is down again.


:(

An interesting thing happened after the last time Hosting365 was down for about a whole day. It was Friday if I remember correctly. What happened next was an email informing the clients that the prices are going up. And not just a few percent up, but Boy that was a shocker! Again if I am not wrong a U1 slot went from €79 to €149 or something ridiculous like that. Perhaps they lost a lot of clients because of a long downtime, so they had to fix the dent in the budget.

I wonder if we are going to get the same price hike after this downtime. The longer we are offline the scarier it gets. Not because our web site is off, but because more clients might leave Hosting365, and we the remaining ones might end up paying more again. So please Hosting365, do fix this all quick, I really do not want to go through the hassle of moving my hardware from you. And I will have to if you keep on raising the price!

I guess there is a reason we tolerate those downtimes. And perhaps one of them is that Hosting365 has the cheapest .ie domain names in Ireland. Second is that their phone support works. It is not perfect, but the best I have experienced so far.

It is actually quite funny, since the Hosting365 is not the only issue currently on the net. Parts of the South Europe also have some serious DNS problems, since some countries cannot ‘see’ a majority of the internet in the last hour as well.

Did you notice that there is almost no SPAM in the last hour? Isn’t that just nice?!

Categories
Blogs

The Second Generation Of Job Aggregators

Julian Stopps wrote an article: “The Second Generation Of Job Aggregators” that made me thinking. What is the next generation of the online publishing and advertising media going to look like (and function like)?

The following are the basics:
1. Web 1.0 – a ‘Classic Job board’, where people go and advertise jobs, and job seekers browse and search.
2. Web 2.0 – A ‘Jobs Aggregator’, a site that displays jobs from different job boards.
3. Web 3.0 – this is the question….

It is strange actually that the modern job boards do not include any job seekers generated contents. That would actually bring a job board to a Web 2.0 Recruitment era. There is obviously an issue in sticking a Wiki on a job board. This actually prevents the ‘Classic Job Board’ to even enter the Web 2.0 group of web applications.

Job Aggregators in Ireland and worldwide, have their fair share of success and problems. If they pass on the queries in the real time to the job boards the speed (and traffic) becomes an issue. If the results are spidered or crawled and stored up front, the possibility of the removed jobs gets higher the older the spidered data is kept.

So a Jobs Aggregator would be ‘perfect’ if it could quickly display the fresh and accurate data from the jobs boards. For that to happen there needs to be a process of the job board ‘pushing’ the new data to the Job Aggregator. The second requirement is for the job board to ‘announce’ any changes like a job updated or a job deleted.

PING

The first part of the technology required actually already exists and is used within most of the blogging engines. There is a facility in the job blogging engines to ‘PING’ other web sites – to announce a new content published. The example is this blog that you are reading, published on the WordPress blogging platform, that can be (and is this case is) set up to PING the Google search engine every time a new blog post is published. What does Google do when it receives a PING notification with the URL of the new post? Google sends it’s crawler, and in most cases within minutes crawls the new page, and includes the new page in the search index. The whole process takes a few minutes only, and that is with a very, very busy Google search engine that crawls the whole Internet.

So imagine a scenario where there would be a jobs web site that would let other sites PING it, and would send a crawler to the site path pinged her, and included the new page in its search index. The process would not take more than a couple of minutes. What that would mean is that the new job site would have the new jobs added to it in almost real time. There would be a couple of minutes lag, and that is more than tolerable. What is really needed for this to happen is that the recruitment sites build in the automatic facility to be able to send a PING when a new job is posted. That as we know is not really that hard since a PING in reality is a pure simple http request containing the URL of the new page advertised.

The next steps?

The technology of updating the jobs and especially removing them does not really exist. Updating might actually be implemented on a recipient side in the sense when a PING request sends a same URL that is already stored in the database, for the crawler to be sent to the originating page gain, and the old record overwritten. The deletion is a totally different story. The whole PING technology just does not support it jet (at least not that I am aware of it?). Perhaps an implementation of the existing PING technology could be used with a small extension, perhaps with a DELETE command sent somewhere in the PING http request.

Categories
Blogs

eBay and PayPal Irish Jobs and Career Website

eBay & PayPal Jobs site (www.ebayjobsireland.com) is the second Irish Employers recruitment web site (that I have found so far). The fact that there is a web site is very good for eBay & PayPal, but the web site itself is… everything that a jobs site should not be. It is absolutely amazing that a eBay and PayPal both 100% Web 2.0 companies managed to have a jobs site of so low standard.

Just a few main points what is wrong with the eBay and PayPal jobs in Ireland web site:

1. ebayjobsireland.com domain name as opposed the Irish domain ebayjobsireland.ie – this will definitely impact the search engine ranking, and help in hiding the site from the Irish job seekers
2. A home page is just a pure branding message. Where are the jobs?
3. Where exactly are the jobs?
Click on Careers in eBay. A new page opens. Are the jobs there? No.
Click Search eBay Vacancies? A new page opens. Are the jobs there? No.
Click on Search openings link. Are the jobs there? No.
But there is a Search form. Fill the form
Click search, and VOILA! Here are the jobs.
In just 7 clicks and you are reading a job description!

From a usability point of view – that is a failure.

By looking a bit deeper into the structure of the page itself, one can see that the jobs are actually not on the ebayjobsireland.com, but the page is actually showing a Brassring.com page in a window frame. The effect of that is that no search engine will ever find a single job advertised on the ebayjobsireland.com page.

From the search engine optimisation point of view – that is a failure.

Compared to the Microsoft Recruitment site in Ireland that has even the RSS feeds,


eBay and PayPal Irish career website
wins the
2nd Best Irish Recruitment Site Award for 2008.

I also need to mention that eBay is one of the 10 Best Companies to Work for in Ireland.

Categories
Blogs Google Jobs Recruitment Search Engine SERP

Irish Defence Forces Jobs

Irish Defence Forces JobsJust saw a quite unusual Google AdWords campaign for the Irish job advertising market. The Irish Defence Forces is advertising (and paying the TOP Google AdWords rate!) for their add to be displayed for the keyword ‘jobs’ in Google.ie.

Is this the first time a Governmental agency (or how do you call the Army?) has engaged in the recruitment advertising? Is it the case where Army (The Marines) goes first to the new territories, and the others follow afterwards?

Categories
Blogs Jobs Recruitment

Web 2.0 Recruitment

The recruitment industry is changing. To stay on top any recruiters has to in one way or the other follow the change, since the ‘old’ recruitment model will soon simple disappear in most industries. The Web 2.0 Recruitment will differ greatly from the traditional recruitment in the aspect of the recruitment advertising and searching and sourcing the candidates. The combination of the whole collection of the social networking web sites, the collective bookmarking and scoring web sites, the personal blogs, corporate blogs and a purely recruitment blogs with change the role the traditional job sites (job boards) have today.

Web 1.0 Recruitment

The job boards have replaced the traditional media like newspapers, radio, billboards, and TV. After the year 2000 the web was catering for the vast majority of the recruitment advertisement business. The broadband penetration was fuelling it. It still keep on fuelling it 8 years later, and bringing it to a next level. The level of the Web 2.0 Recruitment.

Web 2.0 Recruitment

The job boards and their CV databases will start losing their value in the Web 2.0 Recruitment model that we are entering. As Encyclopaedia Britannica disappeared when Wikipedia gained popularity the similar future is ahead for the job boards.

LinkedIN is slowly replacing the CV databases in the more advanced economies like UK and US. The most popular CV database in Ireland, the Monster’s CV database will soon start feeling the heat from LinkedIN. The crucial moment will be when the quantity of the newly created LinkedIN profiles becomes greater than the number of the new CV’s Monster’s database receives a day. And that is very likely to happen in the year 2008 if the current trends continue.

Recruitment agency and employer’s web sites will start blogging and utilising all the blog related content syndication, RSS, pinging, trackback and comment features to attract and engage the job seekers. The Job seekers will from their end in their personal blogs generate their own related content, and ‘engage’ really more than just ‘subscribe’ to the recruiters offerings.

Altogether the Web 2.0 Recruitment will be more characterised by networking, contributing to the content, and engaging in content development than just traditional advertising jobs.

Categories
Blogs

Web Hosting

The web hosting in Ireland is really strange. The prices vary so much that if you do not shop around you have a chance to pay more than double for the same service.

Imagine that you want to write a blog like this one (wwwJobsBlog.ie). Who would you choose for web hosting it from the Irish web hosting companies.

The requirements are very simple. You need a Linux hosting with the Php and MySql support, and the ability to install WordPress. If you need to upload it with FTP it is OK, but if it is available in their control panel, that is a definite plus.

Irish Web Hosting companies consist of those who:
1. have their own data centres and their servers in them:
1.1 Hosting365.ie
1.1 Digiweb.ie
2. have servers in someone else’s data centre
2.1 Blacknight.ie – servers in www.dataelectronics.ie
2.2 Novara.ie – servers in www.servecentric.com
2.3 IrishDomains.com – servers in www.dataelectronics.ie
3. reselling the space on someone else’s server. That is usually your local web designer.

So here goes the pricing for hosting the WordPress package:

Hosting Company

TOTAL

Hosting/year

.ie domain/year

Hosting365

 €65.90 €39.95 €25.95

Digiweb.ie

 €69.18 €39.19 €29.99

Blacknight.ie

 €77.99 €42.99 €35.00

HistingIreland.ie

 €140.00 €70.00 €70.00

Novara.ie – Host.ie

 €168.00 €99.00 €69.00

IrishDomains.com

 €218.00 €149.00 €69.00

All the prices above are from the web sites that the links are provided in this article. All the prices listed do not include Irish VAT of 21%.

The cheapest package is from Hosting365 the total is €65.90 (+VAT) The most expensive one covered in this report is the offer from the IrishDomains.com that is: €218. Therefore the difference in the price of web hosting in Ireland can be more than three times. The suggestion is to shop around while you are choosing your web hosting provider.

Support is the other important web hosting issue besides the price. Here is the checklist:
1. if there is a phone support number on the web site
2. if the phone support is included in your package
3. is the phone support number a free 1800 number
4. is the phone support the 1890 and it states that it is a local call price number
5. call the support on the phone and see how long will it take to get to a person
6. ask a question to see if a support person understands you and is showing a willingness and knowledge to really provide support.