Competition is good in Irish recruitment and jobs sites!!!
Earlier this month I noticed a number of nice new modern logos from the Irish recruitment agencies. That pushed me to get the new nice and modern logo for the new Irish jobs site: Jobs Board.
Today, the new site redesign is published of one of the oldest Irish recruitment web sites: Ireland Jobs. (IrelandJobs.ie). Here is the new logo:
No comment
(Just click to open each image) :)
Nice logos all around from the new Irish start up recruitment agencies, and here is one more contender. Not really a recruitment agency, but a jobs board but still in diapers and therefore appropriately listed within the start-ups.
So here is the new logo for the Jobs Board (www.JobsBoard.ie):
I have spent the whole day analysing the web sites of the recruitment agencies in Ireland. I have visited 431 web sites exactly (from my browsers history!). In general the quality of the web sites is better than some 3 months ago since I did my last ‘check’ of the recruitment web site like this. What was noticeable is some really nice logos there. There is a member of recruitment agency logos with a strong Web 2.0 elements:
But the clear winner for the best logo in the ‘Newcomers’ category is definitely HR Synergy:
Well done!!!
Web 2.0 with its main characteristic that ‘Everyone Can Publish’ didn’t really make much difference to the jobs web sites. Even the ‘Most Professional’ social network LinkedIN did not have much of the impact on the job boards, even to the ones tightly integrated with it like SimplyHired. The Blog as such again failed to leave any impact on the jobs boards. Video CV, video in interviewing, video presentations of the jobs and companies didn’t do much until today as well. In general the job boards kind of didn’t seem to notice the Web 2.0 have happened at all.
Web 3.0 will have a quite different impact on the job boards. The Web 3.0 is going to try to make sense of all this publishing of the Web 2.0. Remember the rating stars on blogs or ecommerce web sites? The Web 3.0 will use those and really rate each piece of the content based on the users ratings let on those web sites. Google AdWords programme has an element of that even today. If you create an advertising campaign, and Google AdWords displays it a lot without people really clicking on it, the advertisement will be demoted, and will not show o the prominent highly visible places any more. In fact, it might only be showing hen there is really nothing else to fill the advertising space with.
Web 3.0 Jobs Board
The jobs board is a place where there is a huge amount of ever changing content, with a huge number of visitors flicking trough it data, and guess what? Scoring the data as well! Scoring? How? Well there is the job application. The more the job is applied for, obviously the more it is interesting to the majority of the people. A jobs board CAN make sense of its data. It can RATE each job by the most important factor (conversion ration) number of applications for each job.
The job applications are just one element a jobs board can use to rate the jobs advertised. What it can also use is the number of the job is viewed. That quality score is about the quality of the job title and a short job description – that display the job in the search results.
Furthermore the length the visitor spends on the site where the job is, is the element the a jobs board can use to determine about the popularity of the job.
The complete picture of the ‘value’ of each job needs to be gathered from the combinations of the elements above that define the quality or the popularity of each job. The date of publishing certainly has to play its factor here.
Can you imagine a jobs board that functions like Digg? And only if the job generates enough applications in its short life span, only then does it ever get to the front page? Well this is what a Web 3.0 Jobs Boards are going to be all about.
I saw the Dell logo today on the LoadzaJobs web site home page. The logo looked so sad really. With all the recent Jobs News about Dell reducing the staff levels, and even more worrying titles in some Irish newspapers that calculate if the whole Dell operation in Limerick is about to shut down one wonders what is the Dell logo doing on the LoadzaJobs web site? Does it look so sad because there is no jobs advertised behind it? It has the round shape that kind of resembles the Smiley but, doesn’t it look sad?
It is a dream of every recruitment agency to have a job board. Some only dream about it but some actually make it happen. Here is the nice example: TheJob.ie by Approach People Recruitment. A nice colourful web site. About a hundred jobs published with the direct employers name (but not contact details) disclosed.
Advertising costs are comparable to the highest in the market. Relatively to the sites traffic, it is probably one of the worst sites when it comes to the ROI of your marketing spend. Recruitment Agencies are not allowed. Perhaps simply they know better that it’s not worth that kind of money.
One thing that I don’t like about TheJob.ie jobs site is the fact that they are representing themselves as TheJob.ie there, and do not mention anywhere that they are in fact the recruitment agency Approach People Recruitment. I guess that is because of the fact that a large number of people just do not want to hear about the recruitment agencies at all. In my opinion, this is one of the reasons for such a poor opinion about the recruitment – where a recruitment agency is trying to hide, or represent itself as something else. A number of UK and US recruiters have just opened their web sites for employers to publish jobs – and made success with their sites. This sounds more like passing off as someone you are not.
Advice: Just get your name printed on the site. Do not try to hide. In the long term it is better for the brand as well.
JobisJob.ie is another jobs aggregator that popped up in the Irish market. Interestingly this site decided to stay out of trouble, and is publishing the source of every job it displays on the site. Also when you click on a job listings it brings you to the job site where the job was taken from. The problem with such a process is that the links from the job aggregator site often link to the jobs that have already been removed from the job boards, so the user experience of a job hunter is not really high.
Business model of the JobisJob.ie seems to be purely in trying to monetize the traffic achieved. So far they display Google AdSense. The majority of the Google AdWords Publishers seem to be the Irish Recruitment Agencies.
Spaniards, we wish you well!
Jobs2Do seams to heave really lots to do to get someone to apply for those jobs now.
Google PR2
Job2do.ie has a traffic rank of: 3,469,434
Google showing 1 link to their site?
Hum…. A bit unusual approach for the Jobs Board. One would assume a lot of people visiting the web site, but Job2Do obviously have slightly different approach?
Monster has something strange on their site. And we are talking about the ‘Real Monster’ here. Are they looking into getting the job hunters engage in some social networking on the Forum on their site? It is an interesting attempt from the Search Engine Optimisation perspective, but wouldn’t it look a bit better if there would be a few messages in the forum? It looks kind of empty the way it is – a forum with absolutely no messages in it.
Jobs.ie has a new logo. Actually it is still the same as it was since about 4 years ago, but it just got the new Web 2.0 glossy 3D look to it with a darker blue color that makes it more serious and sincere. Really nice! Well done Jobs.ie!
I am not entirely sure what does the logo represent, but I am afraid it stands quite well in the internal competition we used to have in the company – who will make the worst logo for a job site. The www.Jobs-Ireland.ie logo used to be in the lead, but Monster Finance is really quite an impressive contender as well!
The name,… Monster. If the real Monster finds out it might not do anything, but if they ever take a jeopardise a single client contract, Monster will put up a fight that no Irish start-up can fight against that easily. Remember when IrishJobs.ie sued IrelandJobs.ie for the same?
Since I have this ‘other’ interest besides the online recruitment (call it a hobby!), I cannot not to notice that from the SEO perspective this new Monster Finance is quite a strange recruitment web site. Probably quite a different marketing plan, since Google for example has their front page at ‘0’, and all the other pages are not rated (greyed out). Google traditionally was the driver of the traffic to the Irish Jobs Sites, and Monster Finance have decided to get it from somewhere else. Who knows they might be on to something!
Asking a candidate for the disclosure of the sex and age during the registration is a usual sign of not understanding the Irish Recruitment Market.
No phone number on the site, no contact email address, it certainly resembles the Google business model (or a two boys in the shed or a kitchen – starting their business).
But then the mystery revealed itself today, when I got contacted by Rahat, who is a Business Development Director at Monster Finance. Interestingly enough his LikedIN profile also reveals a Recommendation from: Brian Fairbrother, Business Development Manager, Loadzajobs – Independent Newspaper Group. It is kind a strange that the BDM of one job site is recommending the BDM of the other job site for his current position? Recommending the competition is certainly a noble thing. Here is a full recommendation for Rahat:
“A Strong Entrepreneur. A Manager who turns possibilities into realities. A professional that thinks out of the box and looks at Business Challenges as Major Opportunities. Rahat’s new business model will offer a High Value Added service to the Recruitment Sector. Watch this space…….”
And then you realise that Monster Finance is actually a recruitment agency – they hide that fact on the front page, but have it buried deep in the Terms in the small print.
Sometimes I wonder why is it a dream of every second recruitment agency to run a jobs board as well? I guess they think it’s easy…
Anyway as well as with any start-up jobs site – we wish Monster Finance all the best!
For those of you who did not notice that the majority of the news is about people being fired lately (check Jobs News), as opposed to being hired, there is a piece of news here as well: Ireland has a new jobs board! It’s called urFired. Sorry OOPS Hired. Simply done mistake. SimplyHired therefore. Well no SimplyHired but the mistake simply done. So the new job board is urhIred. Or something more or less like that.
Is there a worse timing for publishing the jobs board than in the days like these? I remember doing the same mistake with my first one RealJobs.ie! :)
We wish the urHired team all the best!
urHired! urCareer! urWay! upUpwards and urOnwards!
What do you do when you purchase too many job slots on a job board? You use them and fill with the duplicates of the jobs you need to fill or write a generic job spec for the type of the jobs you are hiring for, and publish those.
Duplicates, Duplicates, Duplicates…
The advantage in having the same job published exactly the same more than once on a job board is very low. In taking some time and changing each copy so that it has a unique title, and quite different job description will generate more applications, but will also result in a lot of duplicate applications. (you asked for it!)
Speculative Positions
If you are recruiting for a position where you require a large number of the staff with the similar skills, and they tend not to stay that long with you (students, etc), than you need to have the same job advertised al all times on the job boards.
Just a note on the job title advertised as ‘Speculative Positions’: Putting the ‘Speculative Positions’ as a title of a job advertised on a jobs board will not really do you any good. An DBA Guru is far more likely to click on a job that includes a word DBA than on a job titled ‘Speculative Positions’.
CV Magnet
If you want to get a large number of the CV’s for the job published, just write a loose Requirements. Many job seekers use the Job Requirements to ‘filter themselves out’. If you write 6 separate requirements, and one is ‘6 years industry experience’, you might lose someone how has all the other five but only 5 years experience. And that is certainly no recruiters intention.
If you remove the requirements completely, you just mark them as the ‘Desired Candidate Requirements’, or just note that the candidate should have at least 2 of 6 listed, you will increase the number of the applications, while not drastically decreasing the overall quality of the job applications.
An article published by the IRC is becoming more and more relevant in the times ahead. In the tight times like today, companies are rethinking their headcount requirements and the positions that are not on the critical path of the delivery of the service or the product are in real danger. A large number of the companies are just not replacing the people that have left this year, thus decreasing the headcount. The others are simply offering a redundancy packages that we can read about every day (Jobs News).
In the same time every single company will do all in its power to keep its best people, the core team, the drivers of the business. And this is where the retention comes into play:
Faced with an increasingly tight employment market, competition for experienced staff has not just impacted hiring strategies but even more so retention strategies as companies are increasingly using counter-offers as an essential part of their retention strategy. Experienced staff are often faced with multiple offers and quite often these will include a counter-offer from their current employer.
We have seen clients increase salaries by up to 50% in order to retain key members of staff within the finance sector – the costs of replacing staff are so high and competition is so tight that companies are pulling out all the stops in the ongoing issue of staff retention.
It is a difficult decision to weigh up a new company against your existing employer when a decent counter-offer is on the table and employees should carry out their own due diligence when looking at any new opportunity. Accepting a counter offer can seem like an easy option but it can also have a long-term impact on your career. When weighing up a counteroffer against a new offer of employment we would always advise candidates to analyse the reasons that prompted them to look for a new role in the first place. Quite often a counteroffer will offer a pay increase but you will fail to really address any other issues that you may have with your existing company. Our experience has shown that once someone accepts a counteroffer they will still start looking for a new role six months later!
What we will see more in the remaining in the 2008 is that people who stay with their current employer – DO NOT leave their employer that easy after receiving the hefty salary upscale. Interest rates are going up, house prices are going down. People will want to feel some security that they will be able to pay the raising mortgages.
Unless you are the CEO of Ryanair CEO Michael O’Leary, or Unilife CEO Alan Shortall, or someone on their level, it is quite unlikely you will be changing your employer for a higher salary, and be starting from the scratch with a new employer in the last quarter of 2008.