The Social Recruiter Blog (Hire Strategies)

Where would you look for a job?

Indeed have just released their Job Postings Per Capita index for the UK. The 15 most populous urban areas are ranked by the number of job postings for every thousand people during the month of November 2009.

Their funky map illustrates the data: the bigger the dot, the more job postings there are per capita. Job Postings per Capita is a measure of job competition. Lower ranked areas have fewer jobs available per person and more competition for each job.

Glasgow and Belfast are at the bottom, with only four job postings per thousand people. London is the #1 job creator with 18 job postings per thousand people. With over four times as many open positions per capita as Glasgow and Belfast, it tends to be a lot easier to find a job in London.

The top five urban areas are:

• London
• Bristol
• Liverpool
• Nottingham
• Sheffield

I think this makes pretty interesting reading. 

• Not much use if you live where you live and don't intend moving.
• Maybe a great way to reduce the flood of people into your area if you don't have any jobs :) 
• A good way of making excuses when you can't fill vacancies.

I'm sure we can find a few more....

What's a marketing process?

Ask any recruiter and they'll have a recruitment process; even if it is only "in their head" it will kind of exist.  There will also be:

• An interview process.
• An assessment process.
• A new hire set-up process.
• A payroll process.
• And quite a few more besides.

But, ask them what their marketing process is and I'll bet you get a mumbled answer at best.  No marketing process, no way you'll get consistent, measurable results.  You'll chuck a load of money away but that's about all you'll get.  Thing is, it's not actually that hard.  Why's no-one doing it?  Well, it's the same for any part of any business; marketing rarely gets the attention it deserves because it "doesn't work" and costs too much without delivering enough value.  Maybe true in many cases but, it doesn't have to be like this.

Direct Recruiting Strategy

If you have yet to put any real effort into your Direct Recruiting Strategy in my view, time is running out!

With signs of life in the economy once again, and adverts for Christmas already being added (for example) to e-mail footers, I reckon that Christmas will be better than most business leaders will publicly state, and consumer spending will just keep on rolling throughout January and beyond.

The knock-on effect will be that businesses will need to re-focus their direct resourcing efforts to ensure they recruit direct instead of relying just on recruitment agencies.  Or, if they choose to go down the agency route (nothing actually wrong with this) they need to ensure they compensate their agencies well as they will have plenty of business to choose from.

For details on how to develop your own DIRECT RECRUITING SKILLS take a look at our current Social Recruiting Workshop and Google Adwords for Recruiting Workshop.

Is local recruitment advertising the way forward?

I was talking to a client the other day about how certain large, horizontal job boards were just not delivering.  Still too many irrelevant applicants either skill based or overseas!

With Google Adwords you can target your ads at a local level which would be one way of avoiding too many applicants who do not even reside in the UK.  Of course where you want to target people in specific countries you can also create campaigns that target those locations as well.  Find me a job board that can geo-target in this manner!

Next time you want a lower fee watch this!

Hire Strategies Discovery System Breakfast Seminar - July 7th London

We are running a free employer only breakfast seminar on July 7th at One Aldwych in London for employers who are either:

• Still recruiting and want to do it more cost effectively.
• Planning ahead and are looking at their future direct resourcing strategy.

Very few people need convincing on the merits of direct resourcing but actually putting the right things in place at the right time and for the right cost is not as easy as people would hope.  Having done this now on a number of occasions we have now systemised our process which allows us to quickly identify where an individual employer will get the quickest return but also have a 3 year plan to work towards.

If this sounds of interest more details are on our website at www.hirestrategies.co.uk/discover.

Bad landing page?

Google are pushing Adwords for recruitment quite hard these days which I am in support of.  But, one of the biggest errors I still see from job boards to (a few) corporates are bad landing pages.

Orange - I am

I wrote a post a while ago about Orange and their use of SEM to promote their 'I am' campaign.

Since the early days of this campaign, the Orange site is now:

• 2nd in Google. (1st UK only)
   
• 6th in Yahoo. (2nd UK only)
   
• 20th in MSN (page 2).

Not bad considering it is such a generic term and shows how a site can improve based on traffic etc.  Some points can be learned from this as far as recruitment SEM is concerned.

I am

I've noticed that a few advertisers are starting to display search terms on their TV adverts rather than a URL.  Two examples are 'navy jobs' for Navy Jobs(!) and 'I am' for Orange mobile!!  Orange then in turn use SEM to ensure they are at the top of the search page.