Category: Search Engine

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Career Recruitment Search Engine Social Recruitment

Discoverly’s nifty free Chrome extension marries data from Facebook & LinkedIn data (exclusive)

Ivan Stojanovic - Discoverly - The Inspirer

Facebook boasts a wealth of data about your relationships but very little professional information. LinkedIn is just the opposite.

A startup called Discoverly has developed a chrome extension that marries data from Facebook and LinkedIn. Founder and chief executive Theodore Summe jokes that Discoverly is “playing Switzerland” between the two social networking giants, which don’t speak to each other.

“Facebook and LinkedIn are great but don’t play well together, so valuable potential of users’ social data goes unrealized,” Summe told me via email. San Francisco-based Discoverly is building a series of products under the tagline “putting social to work,” and it competes with social business services like Rapportive.

discoverlychrome

Prior to starting Discoverly, Summe worked as a senior product manager for the Chatter product at Salesforce and was a technical analyst at Morgan Stanley. He has grown the team to five employees, including a UI and developer lead.

Summe gave me a link to the beta version, so I was able to give the service a whirl prior to today’s launch. I clicked the link, registered both my Facebook and LinkedIn accounts, downloaded a Chrome extension, and waited about five minutes for the service to “warm up.”

Once you’ve installed the free extension, you’ll be asked a series of personal and professional questions. I completed the quiz in a few minutes and was informed that I’m “practical, realistic, matter-of-fact,” which are qualities that I apparently share with both Michelle Obama and Alec Baldwin. Winning.

You’re also invited to create infographics from your social data. Discoverly can pull information from Facebook and LinkedIn to discern the location of your friends, popular universities in your network, and other insights. This is a particularly useful feature for those who are considering applying to college or moving for a job.

All in all, it’s well worth the five-minute download to view Facebook data on LinkedIn, and vice versa.

Recruiters might use Discoverly’s chrome extension to track down candidates and quickly discover whether they share any mutual friends on LinkedIn or Facebook. It’s also potentially valuable for graduating students and new entrants to the job market.

At every turn, you’re asked to share Discoverly’s findings with your friend networks. Clearly, the product is built to go viral. It’s fun and contains some useful information, so I could see it taking off.

From a privacy standpoint, Summe stresses that you already have access to this information on Facebook and LinkedIn. The startup merely makes it a bit easier to navigate. It won’t share that you’re using the service with your networks without your permission.

Discoverly also offers a business service, which is primarily how it plans to make money. That product is used by 40 corporate customers in beta. The startup has raised a small seed round of $750,000 from Bessemer Venture Partners, Atlas Ventures, and senior executives at Yammer. It’s a graduate of the Silicon Valley-based Alchemist accelerator, which only accepts early-stage enterprise startups.

By Christina Farr, Venture Beat.

Categories
Google Internet Job Site Jobs Monster Recruitment Recruitment Agency Search Engine SEO SERP Twitter

Google Penguin 2 and the Jobs in Ireland

Did you hear Google released a major update to Penguin 2 on Friday? Matt Cutts (the head of Google’s Webspam team) recently confirmed on his blog that Penguin 2.0 is now live.

So let’s see how did the Google Penguin 2 update affect our Irish online recruitment industry. Here is the search result page for the word “Jobs” made in Google.ie.

Make sure if you do this search yourself that you are not logged in into Google yourself, have removed the Google cookie, etc – so that you do not see the Google’s “Personalised” search result for you.

Here is the new google.ie ranking for the search word “jobs”:

  1. Jobs.ie
  2. IrishJobs.ie
  3. FindAJob.ie
  4. Indeed.ie
  5. RecruitIreland.com
  6. Monster.ie
  7. Fas.ie
  8. Ie.JobRapido.com
  9. JobsToday.ie
  10. Twitter.com/jobs

So what can we conclude from the list of the sites that a are on the first page for the phrase jobs? By comparing what we have used to see there before the Google Penguin 2 update we can see what sites have been affected. Let’s start with the sites not affected by the update:

The SAON Group web sites leading with the purchased Jobs.ie site on top and their original IrishJobs.ie is steadily on top.

Nothing changed there for years. In fact may years. The last change there actually when Jobs.ie overtook IrishJobs.ie. If my memory serves me correctly that was towards the end of 2005. Very shortly after that IrishJobs.ie bought Jobs.ie.

So since 2005 the first two search results for the search for “jobs” have not changed in Ireland. So is Google doing much really with all these Panda, Penguin & Penguin 2 “updates”? Well in the last 7 years the results on top are not changing at all. Or does IrishJobs.ie & Jobs.ie have so good SEO specialists to keep them on top for all these years? It must be one of those.

The next three slots are Findajob.ie (aka LoadzaJobs.ie), Indeed.ie and Monster.ie. So what’s new here? Nothing much really in relation to the Google Penguin 2 update. Long term there isn’t much that has changed in here in the last 10 years really. What has changed is that Loadza has changed its domain name several times. They cannot seem to get it right really. EmployIreland.com that was 4th there is replaced by Indeed.ie about a year or more ago when they came to our market. Monster is the 5th recruitment web site there for the last 10 years.
So in essence the top 5 results for the word “jobs” haven’t changed at all in the last Google Penguin 2 update.

Where the changes that did occur are on the bottom part of the search page. That is the space that in the last 10 years have been occupied mostly by the Irish start-up job boards or similar sites. FAS was always there somewhere. They did rebrand to SOLAS, but forgot to do it online. Hence FAS.ie is still there. Good old civil servants…

So what the Google Penguin 2 update did affect is the last 4 remaining slots the search results page fro the word “jobs”. You can say Google hasn’t changed much really. What we are going to look at is if the Google Penguin 2 update was good actually. Or is it a step back in the quality of the search results?

The bottom of the page of the search results for jobs has been occupied by start-up job boards. It always was a dynamic space. In the last 10 year, about 100 web sites appeared and disappeared from there. I can remember the first Irish Jobs Aggregator IrishJobs.ie featuring there, and a long list of the site showing Irish jobs listings. There was one recruitment agency that made up there – in 2010 when the CPL.ie new web site was released. In this new update, CPL.ie dropped to 128 places, while their other site CPLJobs.com landed on a much better 53rd slot. Is there a hint that CPL.ie got hit by the Google Penguin 2 update? Most likely from the way it is ranking now.

It is still quite strange that no other recruitment agency got listed on the first page for the word “jobs” there ever, isn’t it?

So what did Google Penguin 2 update replaced the Irish start-ups with?

Ie.Jobrapido.com – one job aggregator. Well, it is the only .com web site here. It actually does have jobs aggregated from sites like freelancer.com and similar. Some Irish recruitment agencies as well. The overall quality of the jobs advertised (content) if poor. A large number of jobs are taken down from the sites they are originally published on anyway, and the whole set of jobs is a really poor representation of the list of active jobs in Ireland. In essence a really poor experience for a job seeker.

JobsToday.ie – a UK newspaper publisher. Note that any link you click on that site it brings you to their UK web site (.co.uk). This results-driven by the backlinks from their newspaper releases is so wrong that it actually reminds of the Yahoo style paid search result placements from the end of the last century. It is pointless and out of place. It is no good to a Google visitor. There are simply a handful of jobs listed there on some UK newspaper web site.

Twitter.com/jobs – The page with the HTML Title: Jobs at “Twitter –San Francisco”. San Francisco??? A search result to someone looking for a job in Ireland in Google.ie? Google? Don’t you have a Google Maps division? Or do you want us all to emigrate? What’s the story there? What kind of a (crap) search result is that? Or did the Google Penguin 2 algorithm value a social media sites results “a bit” too much so the results from the social media are going to creep into any search we make?

So to conclude what have the Google Penguin 2 update brought us? It removed Irish start-ups and replaced them with what can be the best described irrelevant search results. In their own vocabulary, they call it SPAM. Luckily for us, this only affects the bottom part of the page. The “under the fold” stuff. The top part of the page wasn’t affected by the latest update.

How did your site ranking feature in the Google Penguin 2 update last week? If you are stuck give the SEO Consultant a shout!

Categories
Career Internet Job Site Jobs Recruitment Search Engine

JobsBoard.ie will let you find the job 3 times faster than Irish Jobs site!

JobsBoard.ie will let you wind the page 3 times faster than Irish Jobs site!

There is plenty of job sites in Ireland. Each of them has plenty of jobs. Most of the jobs are the same on the job sites. So what site to choose? Perhaps the one with the most jobs? Perhaps the one you find shows the best results? Jobs most relevant to you? Jobs advertised by the employers you like? There is plenty of choices when it comes to job sites in Ireland.

There is one thing to consider. It is the speed of the job site. If you visit it regularly, the more important it is. Will you wait for 10 seconds to see the jobs you want? Will you wait for 10 seconds every time you visit the site? Not if you can avoid it, and not if there are faster sites that will let you browse or search the jobs a few times quicker.

Here is the sample of the JobsBoard.ie and IrishJobs.ie web sites. The speed load comparison is done by www.whichloadsfaster.com:

Why wait for your job forever? Visit www.JobsBoard.ie today and register for the daily new jobs now!

Categories
LinkedIN Search Engine SEO Social Networks Twitter

Top Referrers to www.JobsBlog.ie

Top Referrers to www.JobsBlog.ie:

  1. linkedin.com – 276 Visits
  2. t.co – 82 Visits
  3. google.com – 22 Visits
  4. google.ie – 18 Visits
  5. facebook.com – 15 Visits
Categories
Blogs Internet Jobs Recruitment Recruitment Agency Search Engine SEO SERP Social Networks Social Recruitment Twitter

Recruitment SEO: How many web sites link to yours?

In the Links are the currency on the web we looked at the total number of links no the web that the Link Count tool from SEOmoz would show for our 20 recruitment agency web sites. But not all the links are equal. The more I think about it, it would be fair to say that no two links are the same. One (smart) way thinking about the links is to count just the web sites that link to your web site. So if there are 2 or 2 million links from some domain to your web site it would still count as one.

If we look at our 29 recruitment agency web sites list and www.JobsBlog.ie between them where is what we get:

URL

Sites Linking
http://www.cpl.ie

568
http://www.hays.ie

294
http://www.morganmckinley.ie

265
http://www.brightwater.ie

127
http://www.jobsblog.ie

126
http://www.hrm.ie

125
http://www.collinsmcnicholas.ie

100
http://www.eolas.ie

100
http://www.careerwise.ie

86
http://www.EdenRecruitment.ie

77
http://www.peoplegroup.ie

70
http://www.frsrecruitment.com

68
http://www.Vantage.ie

65
http://www.icds.ie

55
http://www.Sigmar.ie

51
http://www.3qrecruitment.ie

46
http://www.rftgroup.ie

44
http://www.Stelfox.ie

34
http://www.recruitmentplus.ie

32
http://www.accountancysolutions.ie

26
http://www.Recruiters.ie

19
http://www.MatrixRecruitment.ie

14
http://www.harmonics.ie

14
http://www.hudson.ie

13
http://www.gempool.ie

9
http://www.qedrecruitment.ie

7
http://www.Brompton.ie

5
http://www.placeme.ie

5
http://www.enterprisepeople.ie

5
http://www.solasconsulting.ie

4

The results show that only 5 Irish Recruitment agencies have more web sites linking to them than this blog. If you want your jobs to be seen by as many possible job seekers and as many possible clients (employers) it would be natural to want to bring visitors from as many sites to your site. Therefore having as many web sites linking to your site would help you get more candidates and clients. As simple as that. The above table show how good are you at that particular task. If your site is not on the list, you can get this figure for your site and compare yourself with the competition.

Even more important than this direct traffic of visitors that you get from other sites is the fact that from the perspective of the search engines like Google, your site the more “important” the more web sites link to your site. So the more links you have to your site – the more likely is that Google will display any content on your site above the similar content on any other web site. This is extremely important for the ranking of your jobs. When a similar job is advertised on many job boards and recruitment agency web sites, the site that will get listed on top is very often the one that has the most links from other web sites.

How to get more links to your web site?

Submitting your site to an online directory? – that is the most common answer I get when I do the Recruitment SEO Training. Unfortunately, the answer is always – no. Why not? The practise was abused and Google decides to in most cases ignore it, and in some cases even penalize it.

Just do not buy links. Please. – That is what Google would say, and in my experience, this is the best advice possible in most cases.

Spamming social media with your links. – Will make sure you get ignored, not followed by anyone but bots. Again the time and money the drain.

SO WHAT THEN?

Think about what links do you click at on the web.

You might click on a link in the article you are reading on some site. If you are reading a review on some blog, about the new tool the LinkedIn has launched, and there is a link to that tool within the article – you might click it. Ask yourself how did that article ended up on a publication you are reading? Can you submit your content there? With a link to something new and cool on your web site? If you are thinking of PR submissions at this stage, I can tell you, you are on the wrong track. Think of guest blog posts. Think of the places where different people publish content. You are probably getting where I am going with this… yes the combined name of all such sites is Social Media.

Categories
Blogs Recruitment Recruitment Agency Search Engine SEO SERP

Recruitment SEO: Googoe Index Saturaton

Imagine the following scenario:

First in Google for your keyword!
Your web site has one page, and the site is with that page linked first for your main keyword. One would say this is the search engine optimisation done very well. The site is first for its keyword. What else can one ask for?

First in Google for all your keywords!
When will realise there are multiple keywords your site need to be first for in Google searches. One page will not make it easier. You will create one page for each keyword. It usually starts with the page for ‘Clients’ and ‘Job Seekers’. You will optimise each of those pages to get on top of Google searches for your search keyword of the search phrase. Most recruitment agencies would naturally want to be ranked on top for the phrase “Recruitment Agency” – to attract Clients. Then there are similar keywords targeted to Job Seekers like “Jobs in IT”, or whatever your agency specialises in. If you get first for those search keywords – have you done your SEO good? Of course, you are first in Google for all your main keywords.

Highly ranked in Google for every single one of your jobs, pages and blog posts (and having tons of them!)
In this scenario, you are not really first for search phrases like the usual hot one “Recruitment Agency”. Instead, all your jobs are on top or close to the top for ANY relevant keyword to that job. You cannot really define what keywords you are highly ranked for since it depends on what jobs you have advertised on your site at that time.

If you don’t have jobs in a particular industry, or for some reason, they don’t rank as well as your competition, you write blogs about those industries. In essence, what you are doing is you are creating more content and publishing it on more pages on your web site. Those new pages then start ranking for the keywords you are writing about. What you are doing is you are saturation Google index and the Google search results pages with your entries. This enables you to capture traffic for any search phrase you are interested in. Your web site becomes an inbound marketing platform that is quite simple to use. Need some Java developers? Just write about the Java development on your site. Get that content in Google index, and anyone searching for Java Development will see your site listed in the Google search results. If you write interesting articles and they are nicely presented in the search results – anyone looking for a Java development will come to your site!

This is what I call Google Saturation. It is a process of submitting the content on your web site to Google, for various search phrases you are interested in. Notice the difference between the top two scenarios. We don’t have the ”Main Keyword(s)” we want to rank for on top of the search engines.

The table below shows the Google Saturation of 29 recruitment agency web sites and www.JobsBlog.ie as a marker. The number next to each web site shows the total number of pages Google has from each web site.

Note that this table is the first on in this Recruitment SEO series that show really drastic differences between the 29 randomly chosen recruitment agency web sites.

URL Google Index
http://www.cpl.ie  496000
http://www.morganmckinley.ie  291000
http://www.hays.ie  184000
http://www.eolas.ie  10700
http://www.collinsmcnicholas.ie  7580
http://www.icds.ie  6980
http://www.brightwater.ie  5680
http://www.peoplegroup.ie  5490
http://www.rftgroup.ie  4810
http://www.Vantage.ie  4660
http://www.jobsblog.ie  4430
http://www.frsrecruitment.com  2390
http://www.hrm.ie  783
http://www.qedrecruitment.ie  610
http://www.careerwise.ie  602
http://www.Stelfox.ie  601
http://www.recruitmentplus.ie  533
http://www.3qrecruitment.ie  528
http://www.EdenRecruitment.ie  471
http://www.accountancysolutions.ie  446
http://www.MatrixRecruitment.ie  302
http://www.gempool.ie  190
http://www.Recruiters.ie  189
http://www.placeme.ie  145
http://www.hudson.ie  138
http://www.harmonics.ie  100
http://www.Brompton.ie  62
http://www.enterprisepeople.ie  37
http://www.solasconsulting.ie  5
http://www.Sigmar.ie  n/f

By looking at your web site visitors logs in a program like Google Analytics you will notice that even linked first for your most important keyword it still delivers traffic that is a very small percentage of your total visitor’s traffic from Google for all the other keywords combined. If you have a high Google Saturation – meaning hundreds of thousands of pages featured in the Google search results, the traffic for your main 10 most important keywords brings less than 1% of your total traffic! And as such, the ranking for one individual keyword becomes irrelevant to the overall traffic of the whole site. If you want to make a success in capturing the largest possible amount of free traffic, this is definitely the route to go. Think big! THINK BIG!

Google Saturation is one of the key factors of SEO. It is also the most often ignored one.

Categories
Internet Job Site Recruitment Recruitment Agency Search Engine SEO

Recruitment SEO: Links are the currency on the web!

Search engine optimisation is in essence a huge amount of statistical analysis and a lot of trials and errors. There is not book about it, since by the time it gets printed it is completely outdated. There are two SEO Rules:

Content is King
Links are the currency on the web

Nothing else matters as much to your web site ranking as the content you have on your site and the links from other web sites to your site. If you get those two things right – you will get the free traffic from the search engines. Relevant traffic – people searching for what your web site text copy is about.

We looked at the Google PR, MozRank and Alexa rank of the 29 recruitment agencies. Today we will look at the links towards those 29 web sites. The numbers next to each recruitment agency web site show the total number of links found on the web pointing to each domain. The more links to it – the more search engines ‘Like’ the domain, and hence show it’s web pages higher in the search engine results.

This site JobsBlog.ie is within them again as a tracker for performance.

URL

SEOmoz Link Count
www.hays.ie 117643
www.cpl.ie 59629
www.morganmckinley.ie 34688
www.eolas.ie 8333
www.brightwater.ie 6766
www.jobsblog.ie 6552
www.peoplegroup.ie 4235
www.hudson.ie 3357
www.careerwise.ie 2689
www.3qrecruitment.ie 1707
www.Sigmar.ie 1630
www.hrm.ie 1453
www.EdenRecruitment.ie 766
www.rftgroup.ie 580
www.collinsmcnicholas.ie 578
www.icds.ie 539
www.frsrecruitment.com 491
www.qedrecruitment.ie 358
www.accountancysolutions.ie 318
www.Recruiters.ie 305
www.gempool.ie 189
www.Stelfox.ie 187
www.recruitmentplus.ie 177
www.Vantage.ie 149
www.harmonics.ie 141
www.solasconsulting.ie 110
www.MatrixRecruitment.ie 92
www.placeme.ie 25
www.enterprisepeople.ie 23
www.Brompton.ie 12

Any surprises above?

Categories
Internet Recruitment Recruitment Agency Search Engine SEO

Recruitment SEO: Alexa traffic ranking

After ranking the Irish recruitment agency web sites based on the Google PageRank and less known SEOmoz rank here is the one most marketers are familiar with: Alexa. What Alexa does exactly and how does it do it was a topic of a debate from the day Alexa have started publishing the traffic ranking scores. Some people like it, and some don’t. As with most of the ranking algorithms, it is usually the people featured on top that agree with Alexa’s results, and the ones ranked towards the bottom would have a different opinion. But that is the nature of every semi obscure ranking system. And in the world of SEO, nothing is really that straight forward!

What does Alexa web site ranking number mean?

What does Alexa say about their ranking number? They say that the Alexa number associated with each web site is its ranking in the overall global web traffic. So a site with the Alexa’s No. 1 is the web site with the most visitors, and as the ranking number grows the lower you are on the list of the sites based on the number of visitors. So the smaller the Alexa ranking score, the more traffic your web site has (according to Alexa).

So here is the same list of the 29 Irish recruitment agencies and the www.JobsBlog.ie within them so you can use it as a benchmark. There are some results that are just “screaming out” in this Alexa web site traffic ranking list. I’ll let you be the judge of it yourself:

URL

Alexa Rank
http://www.cpl.ie

291100
http://www.morganmckinley.ie

336866
http://www.hays.ie

803824
http://www.brightwater.ie

874987
http://www.peoplegroup.ie

1274311
http://www.Vantage.ie

1441180
http://www.eolas.ie

1769945
http://www.jobsblog.ie

1817137
http://www.icds.ie

1854172
http://www.frsrecruitment.com

1997184
http://www.EdenRecruitment.ie

2428334
http://www.collinsmcnicholas.ie

2595232
http://www.hrm.ie

2811817
http://www.recruitmentplus.ie

3457055
http://www.careerwise.ie

4564311
http://www.Stelfox.ie

4828821
http://www.Recruiters.ie

4831059
http://www.rftgroup.ie

5312061
http://www.3qrecruitment.ie

6804532
http://www.MatrixRecruitment.ie

8119435
http://www.accountancysolutions.ie

8669731
http://www.gempool.ie

8720144
http://www.solasconsulting.ie

9507536
http://www.hudson.ie

12469855
http://www.enterprisepeople.ie

12578768
http://www.placeme.ie

17197072
http://www.qedrecruitment.ie

18446204
http://www.harmonics.ie

18661080
http://www.Sigmar.ie n/f
http://www.Brompton.ie n/f

Why are there two web sites that have no data in Alexa? I have absolutely no clue.

Now, if you compare the Alexa ranking above and the two lists we have looked at before: The Google PageRank and SEOmoz MozRank, there are some obvious similarities. It is especially obvious towards the tops of the lists. The same recruitment agency web sites feature the top spots, and there are no “Big Surprises” there. If your site is high in one listing, it is high in the other two as well.

Categories
Blogs LinkedIN Recruitment Recruitment Agency Search Engine SEO Social Networks Social Recruitment

LinkedIn: Follow a company button

If you are still wondering why have you placed the Facebook ‘Like’ button on your home page this will be interesting for you!

If at some stage you got bored checking how many Facebook ‘Likes’ your page got and you have offered an iPhone draw when you reach 10 000 ‘Likes’ this is even more relevant for you.

Remember that job site dressed in the social network that has sent you those nice young people to show their fabulous Recruiter Package? The one that cost more than your total advertising budget? Well, they would like you to place their button on your Home Page. And guess what they do not want to you pay for advertising them on your home page. They want to help you get more followers on their platform. Why? So that they can sell those to you. In a lovely Linkedin Recruiter Package.

LinkedIn Follow Button

Quite a strange sales model from LinkedIn, isn’t it?

Google did something similar some 6 months ago asking all web site owners to put a ‘Google+’ Button. Blogs accepted it because of the simplicity of installation of it. Does it drive any substantial traffic or bring any other benefit? Well no.

Do you think web sites will not get the LinkedIn Follow button?

If you decide to place a LinkedIn Follow button on your page, here are the three nice formats you can choose from:

Will LinkedIn Follow button slow your web site? Yes.
Does the speed of the site affect the site ranking in Google? Yes.
Will you site drop in Google index because you have placed a LinkedIn Follow button. Yes, a bit.

I have to admit the ‘Like’ from Facebook was more original than any of the copycats. They could have really come up with something better in all this time!

Categories
Career Internet Job Site Jobs Recruitment Search Engine

Indeed coming to Dublin

Indeed in IrelandAfter Google, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter setting up in Dublin, the global job scraping site Indeed is setting up its European HQ on our soil. The first interviews will be held in the second half of January by their US staff (VP level) and the UK based Indeed staff.

About Indeed from their own web site:

Indeed is the #1 job site worldwide, with over 50 million unique visitors and 1 billion job searches per month. Indeed is available in more than 50 countries and 26 languages, covering 94% of global GDP.

Indeed has been active in Ireland in some form by sending traffic to the Irish job sites for many years now. They would ‘scrape’ the jobs from the job sites, display on Indeed.com and when a visitor clicks to apply, he or she lands on the job advertised on the job site (and exact page) the job is taken from. Indeed has also registered the Irish domain indeed.ie quite a few years ago, and a couple years ago started actually displaying jobs on the Irish sites on their own indeed.ie. Paid service includes submitting a feed to Indeed, with your latest jobs in the XMPL format that they update once a day on their own site.

We wish all the best to Indeed with their future in Ireland!

Categories
Career Internet Jobs LinkedIN Recruitment Search Engine Social Networks Social Recruitment Twitter

Blue Belt in Internet Recruitment

Recruitment training is an on-going hot potato in Ireland. When in early 2006 one of the largest recruitment agencies in the country called me to deliver a training, I was flattered but in the same time shocked. It was true that I knew how to write a job spec so that it appears on top of the job boards. It was true that I knew how to search LinkedIn. I know I am a good trainer. But,… shouldn’t recruiters know all this already?! Why do they call themselves recruiters if they cannot attract or find candidates?

I spoke to a lot of recruiters while traveling and training them around the country, trying to find out what do they do about their training and coaching. Interestingly enough almost all of them told me they have some internal training programme. What was even more interesting no one thought them even the basics about writing for the web, or searching the web to source candidates. The web as such was not a part of the recruitment training in Ireland in 2006! Fast forward to present.

Today I got my certificate: Blue Belt in Internet Recruitment. And I am very proud of it! And I know that everyone who did a one day course with me to get the Blue Belt in Internet Recruitment certificate is valuing theirs as well! Why? We simply learned so much within a day that it was hard to take it all in.

Only a few years after there was NO training for any usage of the web for Irish Recruiters, there is all of a sudden something that is a world class recruitment sourcing training programme? For this to happen the following was needed:

1. Internet, and especially the social part of it – where everyone can publish. Blogs written by enthusiastic experts have change the way we learn.
2. Recession that have shaken up the recruitment industry so much that every recruitment agency or HR employers department had to rethink the way they do their business.
3. And the most important ingredient – a RECRUITER with a passion for recruitment and the web.

There is no better person that I know of that would do it better than Jonathan Campbell. An inspirational speaker, innovative recruiter and a patent trainer.

Do you know how to find all public profiles, see a full profile of every single LinkedIn user, know how to find his/her email address, and the same for blogs Facebook and twitter? You do? Well than the Blue Belt in Internet Recruitment course is not for you.

Do you publish your jobs on job boards and search the CV databases to find candidates? And are happy doing so? Then the Blue Belt in Internet Recruitment is NOT for you as well.

Jonathan’s Blue Belt in Internet Recruitment is for everyone else in between. And I can tell you I know very few recruiters that are in the first group who know it all already. On the other hand I know a lot of recruiters who are job board ONLY oriented. And happy to do so. I do understand that there are niches, and industries where that works well. I also know that there is less and less of those every single day.

If you are short of candidates there is nothing else currently available in Ireland that I would recommend better than Blue Belt in Internet Recruitment course. Why? You WILL learn to find ANY candidate that has left his professional footprint anywhere on the web.

Categories
Career Internet Job Site Jobs LinkedIN Recruitment Search Engine SEO Social Networks Social Recruitment

LinkedIn Skills – SEO of your Profile!

Categories
Career Internet Jobs Recruitment Search Engine Social Networks Social Recruitment Twitter

#truLondon

#truLondon is tomorrow. Jet another recruitment conference in the already full calendar of similar events. Or at least events that would fall under the same category. Only this one is not a conference but as the organiser himself call it, this is an: Unconference. Interesting marketing spiel you would say, and then realise how wrong have you been after attending it.

For any conference, there will be fantastic speakers and those that are less relevant to what you are interested in. The conference format forces you to sit at your table for the full duration of it, and hopefully survive to the end to get to that valuable networking time. I know it myself, talking to a group of 100 recruiters about the aspects of the social internet sourcing, a large portion of them are asleep. They are here for the next or previous speaker. Their candidates are not on social networks (or at least they strongly believe so!). Here is where the unconference style gets interesting. There are always a number of topics covered by different speakers. You choose the one you like best, and even if you find a presenter boring – you can easily walk out and join something else going on in the same time. Sometimes even whole groups if they finish earlier – just ‘walk out’ and go and join another topic. What is even more important the setting is always organised so that there is no presenting of a speakers (OK, Bill does blow a whistle sometimes!) there is no podium, but kind of like Musical Chairs setting where people just sit around and one expert starts and leads the discussion on a chosen pre-set topic. Having no stand and podium the emphasis is on discussion. All in the group are invited to contribute. A good track leader will invite everyone in the group to contribute, and allocate time for everyone to have time to do so. The format is usually like: Here is a something that I have done in the recruitment that helped me a lot. Can this help you recruit in your industry or geography or niche? Interestingly enough the ones who are track leaders, actually learn the most. They hear all kind of feedback, and ideas of different possible applications of what they spoke about. Now tell me, how much have you learned as a speaker on a classical conference where you talk for 45 and have 10 minutes Q&A session?

But Bill did not stop there. Besides organising the best possible recruitment conference Bill makes sure that no one goes home for dinner. You simply get a continuous session pretty much until you can stand on your feet (or sit on anything) that day/night. There is no corporate policy that applies to you after hours, so a true brainstorming sessions just kick inspired by combinations of all the official talks during the day. And tomorrow you do it all over again. Two full days (you can forget 9 – 5 PM schedule), of top notch recruitment futurology.

To make things worse tomorrow we will also have to dance on the #Ride event in the City Hotel.

I am 100% confident I will hear about and see things I didn’t even know exist. I just learned reading in advance about something called Google+ Hangouts that Oscar Mager is going to talk about tomorrow. I do not know where have I been hanging out lately, but I honestly haven’t heard of the Hangouts thingy before. It sounds a bit like Facebook party, but with video element as well (oops, have to get a haircut today!) Oscar is already talking about the application of in in the recruitment. Bill said here that what is discussed on the #tru events becomes practice in recruitment some 3 to 6 months later. Not all of course – but very little have emerged in recruitment that wasn’t discussed months ago on the #tru events in this year.

Glen Cathey wrote an extensive review on the last years #truLondon on his blog. Here is one sentence where sums it all up:

I found TRU London 3 to be a fantastic experience and a welcome (and needed!) deviation from the traditional conference. I was exposed to more content and more engaged discussion than I have ever experienced at a recruiting conference of any kind.

I had a chance to participate on #truDublin and #truLeeds unconferences this year, and am really looking forward for the #truLondon tomorrow.

SEO for Recruiters

I am leading a track on SEO for Recruiters tomorrow afternoon – and want to thank you all who have sent the questions up front today. I also want to thank for all the feedback on the last SEO for Recruiters session I lead in #truLeeds. I am thinking on doing the #GoogleDance in London again tomorrow…

Twitter for Recruitment

There will most likely be another ‘secret’ track (you heard it here first) about nice sourcing on twitter. Ask about it tomorrow since it is not really announced (not much!).

So that is in short what is about to happen over the next days on the #truLondon conference. 190 names confirmed so far, and a long list of great topics and speakers. Well done on preparing it for us Bill! It is on us know to make it a success!

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Blogs Career CV Internet Job Site Jobs LinkedIN Recruitment Search Engine Social Networks Social Recruitment Twitter

Facebook or Print ads?

Ivan Andrija Stojanovic, Head of Online, CPL Osijek CroatiaWill you advertise on Facebook or in the traditional proven media like newspapers or radio?

I was talking to some postgraduate business and IT students (Overeducated and under experienced for Jobs of tomorrow) and asked them who has the Facebook account. I wanted to show how deep the Facebook penetration actually is. I got more hands up than that I could count. So I reversed the question – and asked who doesn’t have or didn’t use his Facebook account in the last week. I have 3 hands up. In the group of 80 people.

I asked them if they bought papers (any papers) in the last 7 days. Two bought local classified advertising paper looking for flats to rent. One bought photo magazine and one other bout a gardening magazine. Same 80 people.

All are postgraduate students, and all are looking at the job market. All are exactly those you will want to target with your jobs advertisements. So where will you advertise?

To look into it even further – the question is how will you actually advertise there. Facebook and LinkedIN will gladly take your money. Since those are ‘Cash Hungry’ businesses. Twitter and most other social networks do not provide a facility where you can just bluntly dump your advertising budget. It is a known fact that the proper ‘usage’ of a social networking site will give you far better results that advertising on the same site. Painfully small is a list of jobs filled from the advertisements on Facebook or LinkedIN. The way one sources the candies from the Social Networking sites is by constant branding, inbound marketing, networking – all the opposites from classical advertising.

Facebook seems like the best place to invest 90% of your recruitment marketing budget from todays perspective. Tomorrow? Ahh… it will probably change again… Just remember, it will never be the same as it once was, and the wheel will never start turning back. Where you will invest next year, is most likely into something that does not even exist today.

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Career Internet Job Site Jobs Recruitment Search Engine Social Networks Social Recruitment

Simply Hired releases their first-ever UK Today’s Job Seeker Report

SimplyHired.co.uk has released it’s first annual Today’s Job Seeker report for the UK market. Based on the results of more than 60 user polls conducted on the site since October 2009, the report provides the industry’s most comprehensive picture of job seekers and their interests, behaviours and motivations. To download the full report visit http://scr.bi/ukjobseekerreport.

Highlights of the report include:
• Today’s job seekers say the most important consideration when looking for a job is work-life balance (36%)
• 69% of job seekers are willing to take a pay cut to avoid redundancy
• More than half of job seekers use social media sites in their job search, including Facebook (18%) and Linkedin (31%)

Gautam Godhwani, co-founder and chief executive officer, Simply Hired, said: “The current recession has created a new group of candidates, distinctive in their job search methods and what they want from their career. Today’s job seeker is part of a selective, independent and passionate group actively searching for work through social networking and personalised online job sites. We are pleased to share this data through our first UK Today’s Job Seeker Report.”