Hire Strategies Blog

Monster - get real!

According to a recent article in Recruiter Magazine, job scraping is NOT legal! Maybe, maybe not but Monster have thrown in their opinion, and I quote:

"Monster UK & Ireland has been scraped three times in the last six months. Clients were using search engines to find where their jobs were ranked. After doing so, they saw the URL and applications were not going to Monster or a partner site. This prompted them to call us as they were losing the ability to identify and effectively manage their job ads and applications via Monster's recruiter back office".

Yeah, right, 'clients' do this all the time and of course they won't want any applicants applying direct.

The Monster is running scared; you can run but you can't hide from FREE job listing sites!

Cheezhead has moved!

Joel Cheeseman, now known as Cheezhead has moved his Blog to, well, a new Blog. He can tell you all about it over there.

I'm worried - a little.

I'm off to Morrocco in 3 weeks to take part in the infamous Marathon des Sables, a 250km 'run' across the Sahara desert, carrying all my food and clothes for 7 days. I'm not however too worried about the event.

For the last 3 weeks my fixation has not been on freeze dried food, green tea, drink powders or packing my gear. I've been trying to find a mobile camera phone and Blog platform that will allow me to sit in the desert and update my Blog with my mobile phone in real time without anyone else having to re-enter the data. And I originally thought it would be a cool thing to do!

Well, I've come to my senses and decided to take a small book and camera and add it all when I get back in a more traditional manner. Not sure how I'll get by without the Internet but I'm sure I'll survive really; assuming I don't actually take the gadgets?!

I'm just worried at how much time I now spend Blogging instead of sleeping.

Who are your real competitors?

One of the things I do remember from a training course was about competitors in a sales environment; and not the obvious ones! Doing nothing is a competitor, the internal option is a competitor. OK, pretty obvious but ask a job board who their competitors are and they'll reel off the usual suspects. They need to look a little closer to home though as all of their customers are potential (if not actual) competitors be they recruitment agencies or employers. If the agency or employer has a decent employer brand, a career site supported by an e-recruitment system, help with SEO and SEM, then they are going after pretty much the same applicants as the job boards they may also be using.

And with free classifieds coming from Google, Yahoo and MSN, and vertical search from Jobster, Indeed and Simply Hired, it is getting easier by the day to miss out the job boards for FREE!! Maybe this primarily benefits the big brands, but it's the big brands that the job boards need so as to attract the job seekers in the first place. Think about it: 'We have jobs with M&S, Tesco, Superdrug, Mothercare etc" OR "We have jobs with Smiths Butchers, Best Meat Pies, Mollies Fruit Shop etc".

Maybe, just maybe, we will see job boards paying the employer to have them list their jobs on the job board! And media buying commissions are earned from the amount we earn for the employer rather than for the job board. A topsy turvey World as they say. Don't think I'd like to be a traditional job board these days.

Google Base is on the march.

Google are urging retailers to make better use of the Internet and "embrace the e-commerce strategy" whilst at the same time stating that they could (will!) develop Base into an online platform through which retailers could sell their products.

And as Google Base marches closer to our shores with it comes the rest of the service including house, cars, jobs etc. Free job listings for employers: so where will that leave the job boards? Not a problem they will no doubt think as the employers will be slow to take this up in the same way they were initially (or still are) with job boards. So the job boards will be the one to put the employers jobs onto Base to further enhance the number of applicants and extend their service offering. They do already do this of course e.g. Monster, Totaljobs etc so surely more will follow and this will be the model the employers adopt.

Well, let's see but I reckon it could all be very different; particularly in niche sectors such as retail!

Vote with your feet.

Great Blog from Seth Godin:

"I don't feel like playing tonight" - How much do you care about authenticity?

Job boards do get a hard time - maybe unfairly so.

A recent Blog from Jobster points out that 9 out of 10 online job board applicants are unsuitable. Well, this may of course be true (based on my analysis work it is!) but job boards really do get a hard time about it.

If old media was more effective, and putting in a lineage advert didn't result in too many unsuitable applicants who ring in (and you have to answer the phone - how distracting is that!), then the job boards would deserve a hard time. But old media has the same problems so maybe we should lay off the job boards a little and put in place the facility to manage the volume or use old media and add a few more phones!

Because with the right technology you can find good applicants within your inbox.

Checklist.

Just finished reviewing 165 retail brands e-recruitment activities i.e. have they got a career site, do they use an e-recruitment system, do they use job boards. 98% have some kind of career site, almost 50% use job boards, and less than 25% have implemented an e-recruitment system!

So, what do we suggest:

1. Get a decent careersite - it doesn't have to cost a lot to work.
2. Get your career site optimised.
   
3. Get some kind of e-recruitment system - it will pay for itself very easily!
4. Use one of the retail job boards - for now.
5. Use Freecruitment from Reed - it's free and it does work.
6. Invest a little bit of your budget in Google Adwords.

Now, some of the above may sound confusing so watch this space for how to update your e-recruitment knowledge. If you can't wait feel free to contact me.

Rate this recruiter!

The eBay feedback system works well for eBay but I wonder how useful it would be for job boards to add it? Maybe 'ask recruiter a question' could be fun! Can't see many adding it unless they think about all applicants being potential customers.

Maybe I could add it to Retailhomepage - our retail jobs gateway.

A view on the future of online - from Jobster.

I was at the Onrec conference earlier this week which had quite a mix of speakers. One of particular interest was Jason Goldberg, Chief Jobster from Jobster; or CEO if you prefer.

Jason has a clear view on what will happen to job boards over the next few years so have a look at his latest Blog posting as it makes interesting reading.

you will also notice his lack of capital letters as well, clearly a brand thing as his business card is no different. unless the capital letter is going the same way as the job boards.....!