myhome is closing, as you know… 30-odd people seem destined to lose their jobs before the end of the financial year
By looking at my LinkedIn account, there are 12 people on the system (that I can see within my network anyway), most of which are IT professionals (architect, developer, product manager). I assume the technical team have worked with bleeding edge tools. I doubt they will be long term unemployed.
Go have a peek, and if you recruit any of them leave me a comment
Have a good Tuesday.
Hope you all had a fab beginning of 2008 – personally, I had a ‘fat’ beginning to the year, after all the holiday food that I am still trying to work off..
Just to bring to your attention what might be the type of online operation we’ll see more of in the coming months if it works for their stakeholders, Recruitment portals or markets are intended to aggregate employers and recruiters and take the friction out of a what is still very convoluted, and therefore costly, exchange. A couple of players coming up with soft and hard launch dates soon:
- VacancyBid, you can catch Danny Nerezov, the 24-year old CEO, on Facebook any day of the week. From their site:
VacancyBid is a Sydney based company which exists to lower the cost hire for employers, and create maximum revenue opportunities for recruiters.
- NeedRM; I met CEO Michael Rhodes many moons ago about this initiative, so I guess the business model has been reasonably worked. The tag line for the company from their homepage:
NEED Recruitment Market is a recruitment revolution that has the capacity to change global business dynamics. As an efficient recruitment marketplace that sits between employers and recruiters, NEED delivers real value to traders by harnessing the speed and global reach of the Internet.
I will be watching with interest to understand how they go to market and how well received they are specially in the context of:
- the continued growth of the BPO/Managed services deals between employers and one agency which brings its own exchange platform, thus locking out unauthorised delivery by other agencies
- the continued scarcity of talent, e.g. recruiters wondering “why do I need to go and bid for work which may not be overly profitable if I still have job orders I cannot fill?”
- the fact that these markets may rely on externally sourced data to reveal its effectiveness, that is employers/recruiters have to go back to the system and flag an engagement as closed (person placed)
In some ways, recruiters are already bidding for work using the classifieds model: if the see company abc publishing an ad for an accountant on a job board, I won’t be surprised if they receive a few calls from agencies canvassing the demand on an ongoing basis.
As I said, the marketplace is still partially intermediated. There’s a few challenges, I certainly don’t have the solution. My bet is technology alone will not diminish friction.
have a great year
Had you asked me at the beginning of the year: will you be in Vizag for business in 2007? I would have honestly said no.. but here I am. This is all part of the plot to justify why I have not been writing – or reading – blogs in the last couple of months or so. More details soon.
Anyhoo, I was reading today about how LinkedIn is not going to be bought by News… Just in case they change their minds and/or Nye stops playing cat and mouse, I reckon this is a fab purchase because it enables News to
a) move up the value chain re. employment [from classifieds (immediate placements) to relationships with professionals (workforce planning)]
b) nurture an interesting audience for its other advertising and content
So there
Have a great weekend
From PC World, quite an uncommitted article but this in my view is just the tip of the iceberg. I will see if I can dig down a piece from the 90′s that said that job boards were kinda looking good at the time, though most of the candidates were still coming from print ads.
Last week I went to the shops because there was a toy sale. It was the first day, so there was a toy overflow on the shop floor.. lots of people, parents with strollers filled with screaming kids, and me.The main attraction: the prices and supply were both good.
I went there mainly to lay-by toys for Christmas. Now, don’t get the idea that I am a fab planner and the ultimate smart buyer; the thing is if I don’t put these toys away now, I will never see them for the rest of the year, let alone closer to the Christmas season. The lay-by area of the shop was packed. You have to make an approx. 10% deposit of the total price, and few a couple more payments before picking the goods up.
I thought that maybe the store was leaving money on the table, that the discounts were too good for toys which people were effectively buying for the holidays. But, what is the shop gaining?
For starters the toys had to be picked up in November, until then they were not available. In reality the layby numbers were giving this people great marketing intelligence, which also impacts logistics, floor space utilisation, triggers other campaigns, etc.
How would lay-by work for recruitment?
- Employers would let agencies or their internal recruitment teams know the professionals they need 6-8 months in advance of actually needing the person
- External recruiters would charge 10% of the agreed fees; internal one would get an inter-department journal crediting their expenses.
- I am not sure if it would be necessary to discount fees significantly but if you take the cost of money, the upfront ‘deposit’ could enable an agency to reduce fees in accordance to their average financing costs
- Recruiters would work with significantly larger lead times to fill roles, with better understanding of the clients’ talent demands, and therefore with a more focused approach to talent sourcing
Do you think this would improve the timely supply of talent?
Is it realistic to know people requirements six months in advance, other than sudden departures, etc.?
What are the real-life show-stoppers to recruitment lay-by that you can foresee
* lack of trust that the recruiter will actually find the right person?
* hiring managers changing their minds?
Usually I write a post and move on.
However this one got a good comment, which you may miss out on if you don’t check previous entries.
By good I don’t mean I concur 100%. I somewhat disagree with the outlook expressed in the last item. By good I mean it highlights a few key messages regarding using networks as a sourcing tool or advertising medium:
- The network environment gives you access to additional candidate info you may not get when advertising in the paper or a job board. It even gives you information about the people that decided not to go for the job; this has to be good intelligence for future postings
- Recruiting becomes more personal and symmetric. You as a hirer have a few more obligations in things like response management, to ensure that your ad increases the strength of your network as opposed to the other way around
- Networks as promising sources of good candidates may/will deteriorate IF the hiring processes do not adapt to a network environment and the behaviors it spouses
Here is the comment again. Thanks Anonymous
Tagline: “We are like dating for jobs”
Jist: Matches candidates with employers based on resume type information plus something that resembles a preferences and attributes profile (e.g. are you money-driven, does you work have to have a positive social impact). Climber calls this the Career Fingerprint.
Snapshot today: At the moment the jobs matched to the system’s registered users are keyword-matched ads from the Indeed engine, but as employer preference data grows the matching is expected to be more comprehensive. Professionals have private profiles and decide to share personal/contact info to specific employers.
Initial assessment: The attributes and preferences profile is superficial; then again, it is not meant to be a rigorous tool to assess a person’s suitability for a role. Given this, if the profiles were to convey the candidates/employers likes and dislikes, there is an increased chance to assess a level of compatibility between potential hire and hirer at the onset.
I would also like to know how this information is embedded (e.g. taken into account) in the recruitment process. Maybe RPO and corporate recruiters are readier than others to use this information effectively.
Down the track: It has the potential for interesting metadata
My philosophical question: At the end of the day do you hire on (soft) compatibilities or hard skills?
Went for a bit more info, but the system is like, down
My first foray into empirical research as part of LatinOcean. It is really more a brief compilation on how recruiters are using the system in the region in an attempt to transcend the hype and the buzz.
Don’t go too hard on me re. sample sizes and statistical relevance; nevertheless I hope it is of benefit to some of you out there, and feel free to pass. Enjoy
The notes to the latest Seek Employment Index report that on a year-to-year basis job applications are 5.5% higher compared to a corresponding 35.8% increase in news job ads posted to their site. I assume that the numbers for the other two biggest job boards show similar trends (set me straight if I am wrong please)
If I were to stick to the Seek numbers, the stats are saying that a typical/average advertiser is getting @ 22% less applications per ad; which implies less candidate processing work, less job-application-related exchanges, etc; so this is in itself not a bad thing from a processing cost and churn side of the equation.
The problem arises when with the available candidate pool (constantly fed by your applications flow) you cannot fill the role. What this means in turn is that the candidates that make up the 22% that are NOT applying to the roles you advertise happen to be the ones you needs to make a placement or fill a vacancy. So you could be receiving 22% less applications but in fact you may be losing up to 100% of your quality applications (placeable candidates).
What do you do if you are an advertiser?
What advertising advice do you have to give if you are a job board?
If you find flaws in my reasoning, pls give me a shout… and kudos to Seek for their transparency with the trends.
I have given the What We Offer section a very small update, as I have now included a LinkedIn master class session and the management of recruitment advertising campaigns on Google (AdWords) in our offerings portfolio.
I have been very suscint in what I have included on the site mainly because every time I have delivered on these services, they vary substantially depending on the client requirements. I might need to expand on the basics perhaps, as newbie clients come on the site and they need a bit more handlholding, which I am more that happy to offer.
Feel free to pass these details around, there will be a referral fee for you. And even better if you want to take our services up.
