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Career Interview Microsoft Recruitment Recruitment Agency

Martin Cerullo

martin_cerullo1Martin Cerullo, Director, Resourcing Communications, Alexander Mann Solutions is presenting in two events later this week in Dublin. First is the event organised by Microsoft Ireland: The Future of Recruitment conference on the 7th of October in Westbury Hotel, Grafton Street. The second is the Bringing Consumer Marketing Techniques into the World of HR in The Penthouse Suite at the Morgan Hotel, 7-12 Fleet Street, Dublin and will run from 8.30am to 10.30am.

I asked Martin what he is going to talk about in Dublin:

Martin Cerullo: On The Future of Recruitment conference I’m going to be talking about how we are embracing the world of technology to improve financial and quality performance throughout the whole recruitment lifecycle. I’ll be covering everything from employer brand to attraction as well as assessment and onboarding. As the recently voted Global Leader in RPO (HRO Today Magazine), I think we come at this from a unique perspective due to the different types of organisations we work with, the geographies we cover and the technology neutral position we occupy.

Martin Cerullo: On Bringing Consumer Marketing Techniques into the World of HR breakfast event: In a tough financial climate, many organisations struggle to gain investment for employer branding activities. Come along to this event where we will explore the business case for building a strong employer brand and the return on investment it delivers.

About Martin Cerullo
Martin has worked for Alexander Mann Solutions since 2006, and is the Director responsible for the global resourcing communications practice, which manages all employer branding, sourcing and recruitment innovation across AMS clients. Martin has 12 years experience of working in the recruitment sector, with a major focus on employer brand management and development, recruitment advertising, website development and sourcing strategies. Martin has also built and managed solutions in outsourcing of graduate recruitment attraction and selection. Before Martin joined AMS, he spent the previous 6 years working for Euro RSCG Worldwide, one of the world’s largest global advertising groups. As a board director of the Riley division, Martin had responsibility for 2 advertising agencies as well as the development of strategic services such as employer branding, diversity and digital recruitment and managing relationships with clients including Morgan Stanley, British Airways, BP, Airbus and B&Q. Twitter: @martincerullo; LinkedIn www.linkedin.com/in/martincerullo

Categories
Blogs Internet Microsoft Recruitment

Irish Recruiters Toolbar

There are great skills hidden in the Irish recruitment workforce. Declan Fitzgerald who you all know very well by now if you are readers of this blog, have created a browser toolbar for Microsoft Internet Explorer and Firefox.

Irish Recruiters toolbar

Irish Recruiters Toolbar helps you to find and read the latest blog posts on Jobs Blog! – That should be a tagline! :)

Irish Recruiters Toolbar is represented on a video, and you can see the video and download the toolbar on Declans blog. Thanks for putting Jobs Blog in the video Dec!

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Career Internet Jobs LinkedIN Microsoft Recruitment Recruitment Agency

Irish Recruiters LinkedIn Group

After the recent success of the Irish Recruiters LinkedIn Group’s first conference – The Future of Recruitment – Part 1: The Road Ahead, Declan Fitzgerald has been planning already for Part 2, and after repeated requests to hold Part 2 before Christmas, Declan is now aiming for the 18th of November as the time to run the event and try get the Irish Recruitment industry together again to discuss what are the challenges currently facing our industry and what is the future of recruitment.

Declan is in planning phase at the moment but he has confirmed that Alexander Mann will be giving their RPO prospective on the theme as well as EMC from Cork will be discussing why they want a Cloud ATS and how they are going about implementing it. There will also be more presenters on the day but they have not been confirmed yet. To learn more please visit, Declan’s blog: the Irish CyberSleuth and also you can follow updates on Declan’s Twitter account. I’ll also keep you up to date with any other news I learn in the future about the event.

Hopefully, it will be another great event for networking, learning and debate.

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Blogs Career Internet Jobs LinkedIN Microsoft Recruitment Recruitment Agency Twitter

Recruitment Conference

irish-recruitment-conference-2009

Irish Recruiters LinkedIN Group got together in the a form of a Recruitment Conference.

It was great to see so many friends together, thank you all for coming!

We all need to say a BIG: Thank You to Declan Fitzgerald who organised it all again so well!

Pictures? Well this time around I decided I will mail you the pictures – and only the ones you are on! Just put the comment below and I’ll mail you all the photos you are on. I emailed some nice photographs to your mailboxes already, so check there first. This is just out of a respect for all of you who joined us for a pint afterwards. Please no funny faces to the camera anymore! :)

When the world’s largest professional social network is at the same table with the country’s largest jobs site and the largest recruitment agency, all organised by the world’s largest (richest) IT company… it has to be interesting. Even in the extremely sad times like these. 3 out of 2 recruiters have been made redundant in the last 9 months. I guess the room would be fuller if the conference took place a year ago.

What I took from the conference is that the social networks definitely ARE the most important recruitment tools. LinkedIN is the most important although having so slow penetration in Ireland. Less than 150 000 registered, and only a small percentage of that with a useful profile (from the recruitment perspective).

Job Boards still dominating the market but quickly losing their prior historical dominance. Recruitment advertising fees are dropping, and also disappearing with RecruitIreland.com leading that avenue.

Recruitment agencies are changing their offerings and repositioning themselves in the recruitment process. From all we have heard on the recruitment conference and especially on the ‘After Party’ – if you know how to use Twitter to source the candidates, there is a great future for you in recruitment!

Categories
Jobs LinkedIN Microsoft Recruitment

Irish Recruitment Conference

Reminder: Today is the last day to get a discount for the tickets for the Irish Recruitment Conference: The Future of Recruitment – Part 1:The Road Ahead!

Save 25% on the ticket by buying today. Go and get yours now! See you there!

Categories
Blogs Google Internet LinkedIN Microsoft Recruitment

Declan Fitzgerald

Social Networking, Blogging, Recruitment 2.0, an all the other buzz words do not mean anything until all those technologies are utilised, and utilised properly. It is actually quite easy to embrace it all, or any part of it, and make absolutely nothing. How many web sites, job sites, blogs social networks or internet projects in all shapes or forms get published and just nothing happens with them afterwards? If you do it, you have to do it right, to make any kind of impact. There is a long list of people and companies trying, and all are in the same race. Only one or a small number can therefore succeed in every niche.

Irish employers have stayed out of all this new way of attracting talent. Irish companies haven’t made much success in blogging or the next step – recruiting via their blogs. LinkedIN and Facebook are used as the tool for the background checking more than what they are built for – for sourcing. Boolean searches, we all tried it and found gems, but very few in Ireland and it was disappointing.

But then it all started changing. And the change started with Declan Fitzgerald – a recruiter form Microsoft who calls himself – The Irish Cyber Sleuth. Declan was brave and jumped heads up into the blogging and social networking. Fairly quickly all his efforts come together with a great result. The result is actually so great that not only Microsoft will benefit from it, but it has far greater repercussions on the whole Irish Recruitment and Human Resources industry. Things will never be the same again. Declan lifted us and made us all think on how we do our business, and in some cases ‘Pushed’ us into the future of the recruitment.

So how did Declan Fitzgerald do it all?

Well Declan did a lot of things, and the result we see today is the combined result of all of those actions. What we have today is:

Blog: The Irish Cyber Sleuth: The Future of Recruitment is in the Cloud
Talking about someone’s blog is just like painting about someone’s music. Read it! It is the most popular Employer recruitment blog in the country for a reason. Here is how Declan describes it himself:
I am passionate about technology and recruitment. This blog is about the intersection of both, keeping an eye on what is happening in both industries in Ireland and abroad and understanding, commentating and theorising about what is happening on the gleam of the knife of recruitment innovation.

LinkedIN Group: Irish Recruiters
Declan made the largest group of the Recruiters in Ireland on LinkedIN. He closely monitors the activity, moderates it and encourages positive discussions. A lot of hard work and it is all paying off not since the group has 852 members today, and not just ‘anyone’ in it.

Tuesday Club
Being such a great networker, Declan knew that he needed to organise the Irish Recruiters to meet physically as well, not only over the Internet. The Tuesday Club is the meeting only for the members of the LinkedIN Group Irish Recruiters. And this is what makes it so good. Only the people who keep an eye on the future have been there. This makes the quality of discussions that Declan organises with the questions prepared up front, on the highest level. We all learned something on Tuesday Club! It is not that often to see people working the Irish jobs sites, multiple job posting service providers, ATS, recruitment agencies and in house recruiters all in the same room in the very open discussion? Recruiters sharing experiences like what jobs site they use for what kind of a position? The timing was perfect for the Tuesday Club. Recession brought us recruiters very close together as the industry. We genuinely want to help each other and care about each other. Even that we might be a competition some times. The ruthless ‘Sales and Nothing but the Sales’ approach we used to have during the past decade grew into a nice and relaxed atmosphere. Enjoyable. Tuesday Club that Declan so passionately organises is just the best that could happen to the recruitment industry in Ireland.

Recruitment Conference: The Future of Recruitment – Part 1:The Road Ahead!
As if the above wasn’t enough, Declan went on and organised a recruitment conference. Ireland has seen a very few of those, and if I remember correctly the biggest so far was the one Marco and his Jobs.ie crowd organised some 4 years in Westin Hotel in Dublin. Declan invited the top heads from the largest Irish recruitment agency and largest Irish jobs site, and some people from Microsoft and LinkedIN. A serious line-up. He asked them to give their views on the future of the recruitment. Declan was brave again since those 4 views should be all going in their separate directions. The Q&A session will be lively!

Declan does not show any signs of tiring actually. The Tuesday Club ended in him making sure everyone knows their input on the topics for the next meeting is not only welcome but expected! He names his first conference ‘Part 1’ for a reason. He already has a plan what will the next one be about and when are the likely speakers.

Well done Declan!

Categories
Blogs Internet Jobs LinkedIN Microsoft Recruitment

Tuesday Club – Irish Recruiters on LinkedIN

Social Networking finally started happening on a proper scale in the recruitment industry in Ireland! What accelerated is that one of the largest US multinationals present here in Ireland made the best person to stimulate the social networking available. Declan Fitzgerald is today the best known blogger on the recruitment topics among Irish employers. Declan did not stop there, but organised the social networking via the LinkedIN Group – Irish Recruiters. The group today has 840 members, and is still growing quickly. The next step Declan decided is to bring the social networking from the web to the real life, so we got:

irish-recruiters-logo Tuesday Club – Irish Recruiters on LinkedIN

How to sign up? Join the Irish Recruiters group in LinkedIN first, and see the Group info for more!

Categories
Internet Microsoft Recruitment

CPL, Irish Jobs & Microsoft: The Future of Recruitment

00992CS-UFor the €200 fee CPL, Irish Jobs and Microsoft will tell you what The Future of Recruitment is going to be like.

The conference will include content on:

What challenges the CPL and Irish Jobs are experiencing in the current climate?

How Microsoft recruits?

How cloud computing is evolving recruitment?

The future trends, techniques and technologies from the CPL Irish Jobs and Microsoft

Examples of Irish companies that are offering innovative recruitment products and services and connecting to job seekers in new ways…. – I believe this is again from the above three companies.

Categories
Career Jobs Microsoft Recruitment

When will the recruitment market in Ireland turn around?

There is the current state of the LinkedIN Poll from Microsoft Ireland:
When will the recruitment market in Ireland turn around?

likedin-poll-When will the recruitment market in Ireland turn around

The responses do not seem very optimistic! :)

likedin-poll-results- When will the recruitment market in Ireland turn around

The fact is that recruitment in Ireland is still very much alive. It might be hard to believe since you are bombarded with the news about job losses every day. Check the Jobs News site for the published news about jobs in Ireland. But the reality is that the vast majority of the Irish workforce is still working. The Irish companies are still doing what they have been doing before the crisis. A large number of the companies have made some staff redundant, and those have been the staff that are not triticale to the operations. If company can get their product out with 20% staff reduction, they did it in the last few months. The words like efficiency and productivity finally got their meaning now. The end result is actually going to be good for the Irish economy. We will get more productive workforce. The people who lost their jobs will eventually find a job somewhere else or start their own business. This is what we are good at in Ireland.

The next result is that we will eventually bring our prices down. January 2009 was the first month in the long time that we had negative inflation, or deflation. And we need a quite a few more months like that. That will drive the prices down. Cost of living will be balanced with the rest of Euro zone. We will stop going shopping to Northern Ireland, because ‘everything is half price up north!’. Ireland will become competitive.

We do need this process of restructuring of our companies, and if we do it right we will come out stronger.

I know that this sounds a bit like David McWilliams. But guess what, the Microsoft Recruitment Poll results are even less optimistic! More than half of the people think the recession is to stay here for MORE THAN 2 YERS!

Categories
Career CV Database Internet Jobs Microsoft Recruitment

Take a sneak peek at the new Monster

Take a sneak peek at the new Monster Jobs Site

Monster is all about their new site. That isn’t actaully available. And will not be available this year. That does not stop them advertising it for the last couple of months. They started sounding a bit like Microsoft advertising their Vista. A lot of hipe, for a long, long time, but the result is…

Well let’s give Monster a chance to actaully show it to us. They promised it in Januarry next year (how crazy do you have to be to release teh new version of the job site in the month when job boards have the most traffic? If someting goes wrong, and things allways go wrong with the new releases, do you really need to show it to the most of visitors? :)

Well I guess it was a marketing driven decission, as Monsters decisions allways are, as oposed to the someones who knows how to run the operations.

Releasing a new jobs site in the year 2009, I would consider to be a failure if it does not have an element of the social networking. Is Monster smart and brave enough to bring the social networking in online recruitment on a large scale, as oposed to what LinkedIN is trying to do? Let’s wait and see ….

Untill then we will just be getting thoise emails and PDF’s titled Take a sneak peek at the new Monster or simmilar…

Categories
Jobs Microsoft

Microsoft released Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 today in Dublin

It staff should upgrade their skills since soon enough we will see the Microsoft 2008 products in the job specs for the IT contractors and permanent staff.

Here are a few photos I took there today uploaded to: flickr.

Categories
Jobs Microsoft Recruitment

Jobs in Ireland – Microsoft & Yahoo

The proposed acquisition of Yahoo by Microsoft will definitely have an impact on the jobs in Ireland if the merger goes ahead. By looking at the type of the jobs in Microsoft Ireland today, the majority of the jobs are in the European Operations Centre (EOC), where the Sales jobs and Customer Service jobs dominate. There are some Localisation jobs, and some software development jobs based in Ireland, that mostly relate to the Microsoft Live for the European markets.

Yahoo on the other had was always predominately a US market oriented company. Yahoo never really had much of an impact in Europe. Perhaps that is the opportunity that Microsoft wants to explore, in bringing the Yahoo services to the rest of the world, where Microsoft has a strong foothold? If they decide for such a move that would definitely mean a strong workforce presence of Yahoo in Europe.

The situation in the US is a bit different. What both Microsoft and Yahoo, and any other tech company has to recruit there is the techies who will make the products or the services. As in the

Cnet’s article: Another difficulty for a Microsoft-Yahoo marriage: Recruiting

The battle for tech supremacy, then, is largely a battle for talent. And so one crucial question about Microsoft’s $44.6 billion bid for Yahoo is whether a combined company could more easily attract software engineers–an increasingly precious commodity. Both companies are already fighting the perception that their most innovative days are behind them.

Our situation in Ireland is quite different. Since the techies are a minority in the US based companies operations on Ireland. The Customer Support Jobs and Sales Jobs make a majority of an average Irish based subsidiary of the US corporation. So the Microsoft acquisition of Yahoo, if it goes ahead is bound to make a strong Yahoo presence in Ireland. The best bet is actually in South Dublin in the Sandyford Industrial Estate & Leopardstown Business Park where Microsoft is based as well.

Categories
Google Jobs Microsoft Recruitment Search Engine

Microsoft Proposes Acquisition of Yahoo! for $31 per Share

Well, Microsoft tried really hard to develop their own MSN AdCentre to try to compete with Google AdWords. Years passing by, but a miserably low percentage of the online advertisers switched to Microsoft’s offering as opposed to Google’s AdWords. Microsoft thought it has a ‘channel’ via it’s MSN.com, and Hotmail. But Google’s Gmail actually managed to attract new users, with a smart marketing offers (2 GB of free space!) and a Anti Spam that actually works!

So if Microsoft wants to capitalize on it’s Investment in the AdCentre and also Live.com (that seems a bit lost or beheaded) they need to purchase someone who has visitors – to be able to display the adverts from their AdCentre customers. Yahoo? Well, if there is nothing better on the market, and there does not really seem to be, is a good choice. Yahoo has the experience (remember Overture?), and is has a much better search technology than that MSN ever managed to develop. In the last years the MSN search results are actually becoming more and more pathetic. Ok to be more precise – irrelevant.

So is it a good move for Microsoft to buy Yahoo?

For the Irish workforce it might actually be good. Since Microsoft has a strong presence in Ireland, while Yahoo never bothered opening an office here. I bet if the acquisition goes ahead, we will see some Yahoo jobs in Ireland as well.

Do you Yahoo?

Categories
Blogs Jobs Microsoft

Microsoft International Tech Jobs Blog

As Gretchen correctly pointed out in the comments of the Microsoft Jobs Blog – The Winner of The Best Recruitment Blog in Ireland Award 2008 the Microsoft Jobs in Ireland are actually covered on the Microsoft International Tech Jobs Blog as opposed to the US one.

The Microsoft International Tech Jobs Blog is actually on a Live Space platform that has its own advantages and disadvantages as a blogging platform. Live Spaces is great for networking since it is integrated with both Hotmail and Instant Messenger, and you can have your Profile and Photo albums there as well. So kind of a well rounded service offering a nice integration of all various social networking activities. The drawback for a blog itself is that if the blog is the only thing you want to promote, your interface is extremely cluttered with all this MSN stuff all over the page. There isn’t a 1000 WordPress Skins to choose from to apply to match you taste and needs. You are just stuck with all this advertisements for Windows Live Something. OneCare. WhoCares?

Declan Fitzgerald’s blog is in the Irish environment simply revolutionary. Two things stand out:

  • 1. RSS Feeds of Microsoft jobs in each EMEA Centre
  • 2. Video representation of each Microsoft EMEA Centre

Oh, and BTW all the Microsoft Jobs in Ireland posted as blog posts.

Declan has got it right. It is extremely simple to check and subscribe to the RSS of fresh Jobs in Ireland for example, and there is an inviting video where Declan will walk you through what they do, and what they are looking for. Those are the two main messages a recruitment blog should have. It needs to say what are we looking for in the skills list, and show what positions are currently open. The RSS Feed is actually above the expectation here. Since this is the first Irish Employers Recruitment Blog, it has set a high standards for the followers.

Again, well done Declan, and well done Microsoft in Ireland!