alexa rankings for .com.au domains
realestate = 964
myhome = 98,055
houses = 539,050
carpoint = 456
drive = 7,899
cars = 556,862
What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other word would smell as sweet.
Romeo and Juliet, Act II
Apr 182007
I am still scratching my head about thebigchair. Maybe it’s that Fairfax got me used to the sleeker mycareer and the newest channel looks blunter that it really is. Maybe it is early stages and there are really, really big changes for the site already under way. Maybe for the next release I can actually search for jobs, as opposed to just be able to browse, and browse.
If I had it my way, I would have not wrecked the fin review online a few months ago and would have sprinkled big chair content all over and around it. Imagine a smooth bubble or dialog box or something prompting people for an exec role with a company when there is a news piece about that company and you hover on the article. You did not even have to spend money to build another brand and drive traffic to another career site. And if you are thinking “what happens if the news is not good for the hiring company?” well it can’t be that bad to provide a potential applicant with relevant information, can it?
Other than that, one of the benefits for the site as explained in recruiterdaily, is that visitors can make expressions of interest, without submitting a CV; I guess the research Fairfax made shows this function is a plus because seniors don’t like to send their CV online.
Three points on this:
- my theory is that top-end candidates do not want to send their CV’s to people they don’t know or haven’t heard of. Resumes from senior professionals fly all over the internet via email, once relationships are built. So this is not a channel issue, this is a trust issue; information resolves the issue: information about the employer, the agency, the consultant, the job itself
- a serious recruitment process does not kick off without a resume, period. That may be something you and I don’t like, but that’s how it works at the moment. It will take significant changes for recruiters to do away with the document in its current form and substance
- the majority of the current advertisers to thebigchair, within which you can find the larger agencies, still prefer to by-pass the expression of interest jig and request for applicants to use the advertiser’s own apply online engine. So, not much damage done.
Apr 122007
Give yourself a moment to check the ugly recruiter experience post from 37 signals and the feel-good story from Senzee 5. US-based but very topical for us in this region, as the candidate shortage persists and recruiters try harder than ever.
Takeaways for recruiters/consultants:
- people write online about their experiences with recruiters/agencies, whether they are good or bad
- bad experiences impact you personally as a recruiter as well as your company/agency
- people will be quick to pick up if you are lazy or false when attempting to personalise your marketing to potential candidates
- as a recruiter, you need to get out of your way to stand out in front of high calibre professionals
37 signals link picked up and passed on by Kris
Apr 122007
As reported today in shortlist and over a month ago here, careersites joins a raft of specialised/vertical job boards in Australia, all hoping to get some of the online advertising action. You can now see the careersites profession portals they will want to play on – at least initially – and a link to something called Talentbank which is throwing one of those unhandled server errors as at tonight @ 10:30 pm
When I started marketing LatinOcean’s services, I was of the opinion that niche sites attending specific professions, demographics or even regions had a good chance to produce quality candidates for advertisers. Fact is, the agencies I have spoken to and worked with over the past few months tell me that the sites they have trialled or subscribed to have failed dismally to produce the expected flow of applications. I get this may be a statistically unsound sample to infer much about niche sites, but it did surprise me that noone had anything positive to say about them.
So what’s the story? Are vertical boards generally undernourished from a marketing perspective? Is the size of the market too small for specialist boards to operate at a scale that makes a difference to advertisers? Is the classifieds model itself tired and on the out? Do the people that run these sites know more about classifieds that the vertical they are trying to serve?
If you know of happier experiences with niche sites – and you are not the owner of one – let us know. All the best to the new players too
Apr 122007
Most of you may have heard that referrals are meant to be a good source of quality candidates. If you delve further into the source of this perception, it usually comes from anecdotal evidence rather that measurable results over time; for that reason too there is no additional intelligence on which referral channel is the most effective (e.g. employees, placed candidates), for example.
A number of corporates and agencies furnish people with bonuses and rewards for referring others if the candidates get the job offer and stick around beyond the probation period, or some variant along those lines. To me, the payout was a windfall as opposed to the core motivation to link up someone from your network with a job. Am I off with the fairies for thinking this?
I mean, do we as social entities direct our efforts to complement our earnings with financial rewards that stem from dobbing in the people that we know and think can hold onto a job? Or is there a middle ground, whereby we both look to reap gains whilst supposedly doing someone a favor?
I got to think about this in light of 2 recent events: the launch of jobbountyhunter in Australia, and me being semi-spammed by someone from my LinkedIn network who was trying to get me to join “the myspace of recruitment”. I won’t go into the detail of their business models, which are totally different btw; the jist of both though is that their success relies on you wanting to make money off your friends.
I am very curious to see how well these businesses go. Personally, I don’t see it happening for them; I refer someone to create a reputation as a referrer of great people and to create a reputation as a finder of great jobs for people. These are social reasons underpinning social behaviors, right?
Apr 122007
Most of the people I have talked with recently either haven’t heard or delved much into understanding the Google Base service. In a nutshell, Base is a free-of-charge classifieds-like space that enables advertisers load their ads in specific verticals: cars, houses, personals, jobs, etc. The idea as the google base blog explains it to posters is that
“based on your items’ relevance, users may find (your ads) in their results for searches on Froogle, Google Maps and even our main Google web search”
(further down in the same page, the Base Reach description actually does away with the “gogle web search” part so there’s a bit of a mixed message there)
This is not just catered for the one-ad pusher: the site has instructions for advertisers with serious volumes. And obviously, this is not part of a charity program; more content (from posters) produces more pages and pageviews (for/from the user) which produces more ad view opportunities (for Google’s paying advertisers) and more ad revenue (for Google).
Effectively, when you do a search on Google, it is not evident yet that Base results are coming up as natural or sponsored results. Yet. Instead, if you want to see Base listings you have to go to the Base search page (if you are in the know of something different, yell). This is understandable as it is expected that a service like this will create contention between Google and its advertisers as it effectively competes with them; the issue tails onto Google advertisers’ own clients, who in theory at least, could effectively load up classifieds directly to Google. So, this is clearly disruptive.
Somehow or other, I see the contention going away, whether it is through sheer muscle or via a compromise that assures advertisers that they are still getting their money’s worth. In this context, it will be interesting to see what is the service take up once Google goes all out on it and how it is featured to complement the current advertiser services.
At this stage of the game I would venture that free classifieds are not going away. The obvious fact is that advertisers do not pay to just blast data online, but to attract the right audience. You may say that this is the core reason why you still want to pay a job board for ad posting or (may be less so) for a print ad in the paper: because they get you the right individuals. If not, well they need to try harder for you.
Among early Base adopters in Australia, I was able to see today that sites like Careerone and Nowhiring, posting on behalf of their own clients with the aim of further reaching the available channels to look for talent on the web. Who will be the first agency to use Base locally?
Apr 092007
Back in my day, whenever any of the divisions of an old employer of mine wanted to run a one-off poll from the company’s website to produce a news piece, or advice to job seekers, or get input to complement/test other research projects; we would have to scramble to either buy poll software, or deal with free code that would never work as intended, or – worst of all – give someone the idea that we needed to build it from scratch.
Just in case you come across this situation and need a poll in a rush to ensure that you don’t lose momentum, you can build your poll at polldaddy
found via chad
Hope you had a good long weekend
Apr 032007
Long introduction not required: I give you Jobsinpods
People get audio files from jobsinpods with career info, employer details (what’s it like to work at acme, values, testimonials) and actual job openings, that can be listened to on their iPods or mp3 players whilst on their way to their soon-to-be ex-employer 
Flipside, it provides a mobile channel to agencies and employers interested in marketing to potential candidates via alternative media (you noticed how many people with earplugs on the train, ferry, streets – right? there you go)
