Would you like to see this info when you are applying for a job?
Apr 182012
Apr 012012
You must have also been following the thread re. Seek raising their prices and how unfair that is in the context of the recruitment industry being in uncertain times, etc.
The main charge: Seek is making a ton of money!
The bastards!
Well, there are a few reasons why Seek’s destiny (read profitability) is not the same as that of the recruitment agencies:
1/. Most, if not all, of Seek advertisers are in the recruitment business. But Seek is not; Seek is in the online advertising vertical. And because of their business model, they’re now driving an NPAT that is 10 times that of the commercially viable agencies (don’t quote me to the cent; I am not running an analyst briefing). There are drastically different economics driving each industry.
2/. Seek’s goods are price-inelastic, which means that changes in price levels will not dramatically change customers’ demand for it. Recruiters as well as hiring companies that need people cannot do anything else other than continue posting jobs. Conversely, companies that are not hiring will not advertise for roles no matter how affordable a job posting is. So why not up the price? If I were a shareholder I would have cheering for a 19% rise, not 9%.
The assumption here is that there is either a belief or hard data that indicates that Seek still gives placeable candidates to its advertisers. Knowing that you’re keen on price-inelastic goods, you better be damn sure that they return to you what is expected of them.
3/. I reckon demonizing Seek is significantly less effective than voting with your feet. Perhaps now (better late than never) is the time to think about what else do you do as an agency or employer to get the talent you need and reduce your dependence on a single source of people.
What if you invest half of you what you spend on Seek on building other sourcing channels? This is what we did when we swapped newspapers for jobs, right?
My clients are all recruitment agencies; none of the guys and gals I have spoken to are overly worried about Seek’s price increase. What they are thinking is: how do continue ensuring my business model works? How do I keep my profitability intact, or how can I better it? Do I need to diversify? Move out of Aus?
Which are the right questions to ask.
Nov 282011
This sign is usually parked near the intersection of River and Shirley roads in Crows Nest; during peak traffic hours, the area is a nightmare to drive through, if you can drive through. I live half a mile down from where this ad is.
I am not sure when you last time paid attention to a You-Haul advertisement pushing a jobs website, let alone remembering to check it out once you got home. Seriously, I am just glad to get out of the bumper-to-bumper nightmare without getting too stuck.
Pretty dumb to spend money on this, huh?
Well, the ad is parked in a spot that is pretty much equidistant to The Royal North Shore and Mater Hospitals; surruounding them there is an entire ecosystem of labs, surgeries, private practices, physio centers, you name it.
My neighbour is a nurse. At the small primary school my kids go to, there are at least 1/2 dozen midwives who live in the area. They surely drive around River Rd all-the-time.
I’ve a had look at the advertised website. It is a bit of a substandard online experience, compared to best/better practice. It does what it needs to do as a jobs site, however.
Question is: What would you say is the candidate response due to the ad by the side of the road? I am not expecting huge flows of CV’s, but possibly high relevance levels and material volumes of applicants, given their geo hyper-targeting.
I will aim to get in touch with the agency guys and see if I can complete the picture. Just remember: you can have a niche campaign on wheels if you want to, outside Uni’s (graduates), coming out of Pyrmont (digital, IT), etc.
Have a good evening.
Aug 162011
Just read the article ‘Why Facebook will destroy LinkedIn’ on ERE .
This is argued on the basis of four core reasons:
- Larger volumes of people on Facebook
- Similar demographic groups
- Recruitment tools showing up on Facebook already
- Better ‘social marketing’ at Facebook
I think the article should have been better titled ‘Why Facebook can be used as another platform to recruit’. Less attention-grabbing for sure, but perhaps more balanced.
This piece, IMHO, assumes that LinkedIn will sit on its hands and let all the wealth of profiles, companies and relationships information logged over the years go to waste. I don’t see it happening
Along these lines, the ‘Facebook is huge’ argument echoes the pitch of job boards sales reps of yesteryear selling eyeballs and traffic. Organisations never needed Unique Browsers; they always needed placeable candidates that allowed agencies to earn a fee, or corporations fill a role. Bits of functionality like LinkedIn Skills which enables self-skills-coding has the looks of a powerful offering to do things like ‘get me 15 developers with android games experience in Sydney’
Similarly, demographic similarities have to be complemented with intention of presence – I go to LinkedIn to generate leads, connect with professionals, and hopefully grown my personal brand. I go to facebook to chat to my sister in Peru, look at pictures of friends and fam, mostly.
I joined Branchout early in their life and was trying to use BeKnown. Kindly, and – this might go for Australia only – we’re at very very early and immature stages of seeing candidate attraction and retention happening on FB. I am not saying it will never happen; rather I am arguing that the social links – which can nurture professional links (e.g. I want to work at Adidas ‘cause I love the brand, and my cousing tells me training for salespeople is great) – are at this stage a huge haystack to look for needles.
I am looking forward to seeing a network, environment, app, etc. giving LinkedIn a run for its money; this will be very beneficial for the market as it will accelerate the pace of offerings. I just don’t see LinkedIn destroyed anytime soon.
Have a good rest of the week.
Jan 312010
It’s the beginning of the year and I am already disappointed.
I thought 2010 was going to be the year where significantly less job ads, print or online, were going to include phrases like:
- ‘leading multinational’ to refer to the hiring company
- ‘high calibre individual’ to refer to the candidate they want to attract
- ‘challenging and dynamic environment’ to describe work conditions
What’s the real chance to get who you really want for this role with ‘details’ like those above?
I understand the anonymity has been used to protect clients from ambulance chasers, unsolicited CV’s etc. Those protection costs though are extremely high. It will cost real money to process unsuitable applicants – for example.
You might find the right individual in that hay stack you are generating. But just in case, get your calculator out and do your numbers; your job ads might be making your advertising/sourcing process more expensive than what you imagine.
Dec 012009
Maybe…
In a recent post, @greg_savage reported that he had asked attendees of an RCSA event/roadshow for a quick show of hands about social tools usage. The results:
a) 80% of recruiters have a LinkedIn account, whilst only 20% were using it ‘actively’
b) there was a very low take up of twitter (5-10% have a handle)
You know what? If there were more ‘active’ recruiters on LinkedIn, or more consultants moving into twitter, the ‘damage’ might be even bigger.
What damage?
I went to @coffeemornings last Friday; I spoke to four peeps that had been approached by recruiters on LinkedIn that they had not heard from – let alone met – before; these peeps ranted about these recruiters effectively cold calling them, to either connect and then be referred to other LinkedIn members, or do the usual tyre-kicking (you happy in your job? kinda thing).
Some recruiters are using new(er) tools and combining them with old practices and old thinking. Big risk.
And big opportunities.
Recruiters that notice that LinkedIn is not a resume database or a Yellow Pages for candidates, will score; they will give themselves room to develop their brand as individual professionals and that of the firms the happen to be working for.
Recruiters that feel the disconnect between social tools and the ‘let’s put bums on seats’ way of recruitment, and are courageous enough to re-energise their practices in the eyes of clients and job seekers, will come on top.
Big risk. Big opportunities.
Feb 252009
Recruitment agencies are receiving less assignments from their clients
Recruiters – like all or most of us – need to stay busy or else. They start chasing ads
If they chase ads, they might as well have a candidates that can fill the role
In lieu of/addition to looking at their own databases, recruiters chasing ads opt to create their own sourcing/trawling posts
The incremental cost of posting the trawling job ads is negligible; recruiters may have already paid for them as part of their monthly contracts
Applications per ad are already up given our context
Candidates won’t get much attention, because the recruiter’s interest in them is contingent on the ad-chasing success ratio (which I would say is low)
Hiring companies are getting peeved with cold-calling consultants, which leads them to (if possible) write more and more generic ads so that they are not identified by ad-chasers
What’s in the horizon?
As contracts with job boards get renewed maybe there will be less ads (both good and bad, but proportionally less bad ones)
Reduced confidence on recruiters will lead job seekers to going back to job seeking via people you can trust, which can also include hand-picked recruiters, but also colleagues, friends, family.
Referrals based on trawling ads will not produce results.
Niche sites that have the inclination and capacity to monitor the quality of job ads could also get the thumbs up. Issue here is: what’s quality? An ad for a work-from-home scheme? The fifth version of the same ad? A suspicious looking/fake one? The more judgment you apply the more labor-intensive / costly the exercise.
Hiring organisations have an opportunity to work on their employer brand during this time, A ‘grey’ recruitment practice does not necessarily imply low candidate quality.
Thank you @jobadder for your comments re. niche sites
Hope your week finishes very well
Oct 282008
Over the past couple of years I have seen recruiters getting significantly wiser as to how to use web-based products, services, techniques; to source the talent they need to deliver to their clients. The majority of the tier-one players have made serious investments in skills (adoption / training) and products (e.g. subscriptions) in order to create what I call a multi-channel sourcing platform using generalist sites, niche sites, search, search marketing, professional/social networks, referral systems, etc. I’d love to think that LatinOcean had something to do with that.
This multi-pronged approach to candidate engagement – I am also happy to report – hast lost its novelty value and is now imbedded in the recruiters’ workflow, which is where it makes a difference. It is now part of the day to day for a material number of agencies and internal recruitment teams. This is not going away; we’re not going to just post classifieds anymore, is my bet.
Concomitant to this evolution, job seekers need to think now (more than ever) as to how to nurture a multi-channel job hunting platform online. Which employers do you want to be targeted by? Who do you want to meet? What is the first search result you want to appear when someone Googles your name? What is the best platform to research a company or agency or individual recruitment consultant?
What I am pointing to is that we, as job seekers / professionals in constant career flux, need to understand that it is our responsibility to determine/influence our reputation online and to use the channel other than just clicking the ‘apply online’ button to get the job you want. We are empowered and able to do so without the need for technical wizardry or expensive/cumbersome overheads.
Given this, I thought I would start a bit of a list as to what you can/should do/consider when refining your ‘interactive job seeker’ self. Hopefully the list and the points outlined can be enriched with adds / edits from the readers.
1. Reports of the demise of the standard word/text/PDF resume have been greatly exaggerated. This is still the document that recruiters work with when it comes to the crunch. So if you are going to post one of this mothers online, ensure it is a current one and it reflects your agenda/interests pretty much up to the minute.
2. The resume format of choice might be the same but possibly there are smarter ways to manage its distribution/broadcasting. Give emurse a try to keep multiple versions of your resume, and a fairly clear trail of who you’ve sent it to. If you believe a fancier CV format will contribute, register with VisualCV and give it a crack
3. If you want to be seen and approached at an early stage of the recruitment process or as recruiters conduct their sourcing activities, work on your online profile. LinkedIn is still very much the place to go for this (XING is not playing in Australia and has no plans to do so – in any English-speaking nation, for that matter). Beef up your profile with work experience, academic pedigree and associations; all of this gives the system a chance to connect you with (arguably) solid connections.
4. Avoid things that create churn for the recruiter. Serial/batch job applications to classified ads are as counter-productive as multiple postings of the same advertisement. In both cases you as the job seeker are on the receiving end. If your name crops up multiple times for a large variety of roles, you may not be considered as a serious applicant. I know this is a broad generalization and a perception that maybe overridden in case you happen to be a good candidate for any of the roles, but I think it’s a reasonable rule of thumb.
5. Google yourself, and have a look; which result comes first? If you have a common name (you know what I mean, so don’t take offence) narrow down your search to your profession or company. Are your results showing within the first 10-15 results? Are you happy with the results that point to you as an individual / professional? I spend a bit of time on my LinkedIn profile and it appears that LinkedIn corresponds by investing in SEO on my behalf (and theirs, of course)
6. Search yourself on Zoominfo. This engine crawls the net to work out a profile extracted from the info accessed. You can actually register and ‘claim’ the profile the system works out and update it with current information
7. If LinkedIn appears too slanted to networking as opposed to to-the-point job hunting you can keep an eye for the LinkedIn job ads. Alternatively you can have a look at resume databases like LinkMe, which is more a job-seeker ready environment with some social features. Remember also that you have the option on several job boards to make your profile and CV visible to recruiters
8. Use Google, LinkedIn, Zoominfo and Facebook to research a company of a specific individual recruiter. If you want to check out a company, also check their careers site; further to this, create a Google email alert so you can receive news or blog postings about the company you are interested in (you want to hear from people that have actual experience with the company, not with their PR machine). While you are at it, create an email alert for yourself (e.g. enter your name as a search key)
9. Publish (this is a bit of a big one to elaborate) may tackle on part 2
Just run out of time, I am sure there are good/better ones to add for job hunters to consider; send your comments and adds to keep building this up over the next few days.
Send me an email if you need further help on this, I might be able to tailor a few things for your specific situation as a job seeker (jorge at latinocean.com).
Have a great rest of the week
Sep 152008
US-based data but it gives you a glance anyway.
Will be interesting to see what is the effect of the content deals, the ad revenue drives and the monetisation of the community in general, on the network
Via techcrunch
Sep 102008
Would love it if it can be of use to anyone
Cheers
