Category: Career

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Career CV Database Job Site Jobs Recruitment

FÁS

I write a lot about the job boards and there is one I was avoiding so far, but the time has come – Let’s talk about FÁS!

FÁS as the organisation was in the media a lot for many months now. When the 1bn budget FÁS has reached the media, earlier this year, FÁS made it as the Story of the Week, in the most national print and TV channels.

To put this story in the perspective, only a handful Irish job boards reach 1 million revenue. In the same time all the job boards are very profitable. OK we all know FAS is more than just a job board, but to anyone in the recruitment industry 1bn budget sounds simply astronomical.

Comptroller - FASDepartment of Enterprise, Trade and Employment – Comptroller and Auditor General John Buckley published a Special Report titled: Advertising and Promotion in FÁS for presentation to Dáil Éireann.

In the summary of Findings one can read that: Over the period 2002 to 2008, FÁS spent over €48 million on advertising, promotion and related activities including jobs fairs and activities to promote science.

In other words €48.2 mil advertising budget for 7 years. That is well over a half a million a month! €573.810 to be precise.

How did FAS manage to spend half a million a month for seven years? Well not very creatively: Print 62%, TV%, Radio 13% and Outdoor 13%. Did you notice something missing? Well no online advertising budget? Half a million advertising every month and not a cent in online?! Well come on FÁS…

Comptroller - John BuckleyThe full report is actually quite interesting read. It is full of over a half a million (or more) here, half a million there, for stuff that was either not used or not even delivered. My personal favourite is the car purchased and paid for in full, but never delivered.

The FÁS report is a very good reed. I can highly recommend it, and many thanks to John Buckley for putting it together. Here is a full PDF download.

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Career Job Site Recruitment Social Recruitment

Paddy Power Recruitment Site

Paddy Power Recruitment
Paddy Powers recruitment web site called ‘WorkWithPaddy.com’ is an example of a great employers recruitment mini web site.

It looks nice
It is very easy to read
It showcases the Paddy Powers careers, the people, the locations,.. the company.

There is even a link to the Facebook Group – that currently has 249 members, so a bit of Social Recruiting included in the mix as well.

All in all, … probably the best employers recruitment site in Ireland?
(the sentence above inspired by Carlsberg advertising)

One thing that does not really look and work well is the integration with the candidate manager that shows during the job application process. Bringing the third party screen in the (iframe) window is always a bit risky, since the owners of the site have no control over it. But even that didn’t manage to ruin the good impression the Paddy Power recruitment web site leaves you with!

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Career Job Site Jobs LinkedIN Recruitment Social Networks Social Recruitment

Find a Worker

find-a-workerFind a Worker is a jobs site and a business directory with a little bit of the social networking as well.

Find a worker is a job site. You can post a job for free.

Find a Worker is a business directory web site. You can promote your business here. Like the Golden Pages.

Find a worker is a personal branding site. You can advertise your own skills for free. Like LinkedIN.

What is missing on Find a Worker? Of course, and iPhone application to grasp all that data.

As a side offer, you can also purchase web sites on Find a Worker. They will also make sure that: “… your site is added to google with the appropriate keywords and meta tags…”.

Irish online recruitment scene is changing. There is more and more sites with innovative ideas like Find a Worker. Hundreds if not thousands will finish where they started, but one day one new idea and a site like this will change the way we do recruitment completely. It is the right time for the change!

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Blogs Career CV LinkedIN Recruitment Social Networks Social Recruitment Twitter

Does your CV and LinkedIN Profile Match?

Your LinkedIN Profile is most likely a copy of your CV. If a recruiter does a ‘Background Check’ to verify your CV the same data will be on your LinkedIN ‘Published’ online Profile, and that is great. Your CV is all true. The issue with the CV and the LinkedIN Profile being the same is a missed opportunity for a job seeker.

Your LinkedIN Profile should tell far more than your CV does to a recruiter.

What to include in your LinkedIN Profile?

Link to your Blog. On your blog you can show all different qualities a recruiter is searching for:
Expertise in a subject
Communication skills
Writing skills
Presentation skills
Team Building skills
And much more!

Links to your Twitter account where your conversations with the other influencers in the market and subject matter expert are published and visible are the next essential part of your LinkedIN Profile. Your network of known people and especially their recommendations are what sets you apart from the thousands of other applicants for the same job.

The CV opens the door. It invites the recruiter to start the research about you. Make sure your social media and social networking presence is the extension of your CV. If your LinkedIN Profile is a copy of your CV, it doesn’t really have a great value. It is also an opportunity missed.

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Career Job Site Jobs LinkedIN Social Networks Social Recruitment

Social Networks Vs Online Job Boards…

Here are just two facts first:
1. Revenues of online job boards are falling
2. Social networks are (still!) gaining popularity

Why are job boards in trouble all of the sudden after being profitable for more than 10 years?

The troubled world economy that hit the recession in the second half of the 2008 and continued well into most of the 2009 (is it over yet???!!!) resulted in the first dip of the volume of the internet traffic. First ever actually. It is the first time since the Internet exists that the volume of the activity on the internet was smaller compared with the same month a year ago. All the iPhones and all kind of internet enabled devices did not help here. There have been far less people working (and surfing in their breaks), and far less people had time to surf during their work.

The combination of the large reduction of the job advertisements (that generate the revenue for the job boards, and also the drop in web site traffic in general – the figures of a job boards in 2009 do not look so rosy!

Social networks are a long term threat to the job boards.

The number of people spending time, and the sheer amount of time people spend on the social networking sites does not really leave much time to search the job boards. Compared to the job boards, the social networking sites are actually extremely boring. There is 0 interaction on the site really. As a job hunter you apply for a job or jobs you like, and what you get back in 99% of the cases is an automated response in the email. The confirmation of the job application. Impersonal and sterile. The social networks on the other side let you publish the content for other users (or anyone on internet) to read and see. Social networks let you say what you think (that your spouse doesn’t!). Social networks encourage you to comment pretty much anything!

You can meet new people. You can catch up with old school mates. You can check the last summer holiday photos of your cousins. You can upload your fancy wedding photos, with all the family in strange dresses in the background! You can grade photos and comment them. You can upload video from your car racing weekend. Your greatest fishing catch.

Social network is like a pub. People are talking. Social network is like a ‘Corso’, the main street boardwalk where you hang out with your friends and their friends. You can also do some business with all this people there if you feel like it. But do not really have to, since you can check how your mates commented the game yesterday. And tell them how YOU think your home club should have played.

After you got used to the way of communication that the social networks or let you by broadcasting YOUR message to the masses, the idea of browsing boring listings of the jobs on the job sites simply isn’t that appealing any more.

Social Recruitment is born simply because people are far more active on the social networks than on job boards. If Twitter wouldn’t have that many visitors and users it would be impossible to hire staff there. But the sheer volume of users on Twitter makes it a platform where you really can hire staff with the most crazy restriction anyone have ever imposed on the recruitment process – communication limited to 140 characters (spaces included!!!). Facebook is probably the platform with the largest number of useless, and distracting applications but the fact that the number of active users is larger than most of the countries in the world – makes it a perfect sourcing application for a large number or positions. LinkedIN is specialising for the recruitment itself – the social network of professionals. Even their Jobs section isn’t visited as much as all the others since it is simply boring. Visitors expect more from the social networks then the boring jobs listings. They want to contribute. They want to read other peoples contribution. They way to confirm their decisions by getting the independent views from other people with similar conclusions.

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Career CV Internet Jobs Recruitment Social Recruitment

2009 Jobvite Social Recruitment Survey Results

2009-recruitment-survey-resultsDo you or your company use social media networking or social media to support recruitment efforts?
76% plan to invest in employee referrals
72% plan to increase their use of social networks
66% have successfully hired a candidate identified or introduced through an online social network

Jobvite also asked employers to list the social networks and here is how they rank against each other.

social-recruiting-survey-2009-results

95% or recruiters use LinkedIN to find candidates(!). Do you?

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Career Internet Job Site Jobs Recruitment Recruitment Agency

Free Jobs (freejobs.ie)

Who says there is no such thing as a free lunch?

free-jobsI call from a client today about their jobs being published to FreeJobs.ie made me thinking. Their jobs published on the Free Jobs web site are about 3 years old. They got an application for a job advertised there yesterday. Since my client is using the multiple job posting service eRecruit, as a part of our Recruitment Marketing Manager product, they assumed that eRecruit is supplying the jobs to the Free Jobs web site, as it does to all the Irish Jobs sites (and news sites, and blogs, and niche web sites, etc…). Well in this case this was not the case. We in eRecruit have actually never even heard about a site called Free Jobs before.

So jobs published on Free Jobs web site are taken from somewhere. And published on the Free Jobs web site, without the owner of the content – the advertiser, in this case a recruitment agency knowing about that fact. Three years after that, the advertiser receives the job application. And un unpleasant situation really – how to explain to the poor job hunter that the recruiter quoted on the Free Jobs web site does not work anymore in that recruitment agency? How to explain that the company that was actually hiring does not even exist anymore? How to explain why is the job advertised, and invites the job seeker to reveal quite a lot of his private data (in the CV) for something that is not there? Quite unpleasant, isn’t it?

Well, that is the problem with the things that are free. No one is really responsible for the maintenance or the quality of their service. Sometimes it seems one would be better of paying 1 Euro, or some minimal fee, and receive a guarantee of a quality of service. This provides some revenue to the service provider as well, that helps funding the project. In the same time it gives the user of the service a level of guarantee that the service provided will work well.

I like free things. We all do. But unfortunately there are inherited problems with free services. Free Jobs web site is not the alone in the scenario where a free service of advertising jobs simply failed because of the unsustainable business model.

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Blogs Career CV Internet Job Site Jobs Recruitment

Jobs.ie Career Workshop – €100 only!

I got a mail this morning from Jobs.ie web site. They are offering me a 100€ career workshop.

 

I thought about it during a coffee this morning. Recruit Ireland have changed their model and are offering free advertisements to the Irish employers. Until they fill their books with names, whom to start selling once when the recession is gone. Their prediction is in September. That being September 2009. In the same time Jobs web site is looking for other sources of revenue. And there are the job seekers. With thousands of job seekers on your site daily, why not offer them something, for let’s say,… 100 quid? There certainly is a market for it since we are in the steady double digit unemployment with very little signs of it getting any better anytime soon. With so many people hungry for jobs – why not take a €100 of each? In a form of coaching?

 

I have to admit, I like the recruit Ireland approach better with their Get Ireland Working campaign. What Jobs site is doing kind of sounds like: Get Ireland Paying. I know, I know. Recruit Ireland is after the same money. They will start charging those employers the moment they can. I just like the Employers paying for the recruitment advertising, not job seekers. I do not think it’s really fair to ask someone looking for a job, especially if unemployed – anything! Not even shaped in the fancy candy bar wrapping of ‘ Career Coaching’.

 

And no, I am not a socialist.

 

Here is a full offering from Jobs.ie:

 

From: Jobs.ie [mailto:info@jobs.ie]
Sent: 30 July 2009 09:32
To: irishrecruiter

Subject: Jobs.ie Career Workshop – Thursday August 13th.

 

Jobs.ie - Jobs in Ireland. Irish Jobs.

Dear Jobseeker,

CAREER WORKSHOP – BEAT THE MARKET & INVEST IN YOUR CAREER.

The Job Market in Ireland has changed dramatically. There are less jobs and increased competition for them. Developing your career including finding the role you want now requires a more dynamic approach to find success.

Jane Downes of Clearview Coaching Group in conjunction with Jobs.ie is delighted to announce, due to consistently strong feedback from previous attendees, that the next “Career Workshop” tailor made for this market will take place Thursday August 13th in the Davenport Hotel Dublin 2 at 6pm.

Having completed research into the needs of the sites users, numerous requests were made to create a workshop for job seekers. The good news is that we have now done so and it is to be run by one of Irelands leading on the ground Career Coaching Experts, Jane Downes.

This workshop is suitable for individuals of all levels seeking work, making total career changes or those who need to take stock and effectively plan their next move. It is also an option for an organisation seeking to offer redundancy support to employees.

The workshop will provide its attendees with the opportunity to access expert opinion and advice in the following key areas:

  • An inventory of your own individual transferable skills.
  • An assessment of your own unique personality profile.
  • Learn the 8 key things needed and which will determine and affect your success in career change.
  • CV’s & Cover letters – How to market yourself and give an impressive consistent message.
  • Essential Interviewing skills – How to sell yourself and get more job offers.
  • Job Search Strategies and Planning – get ahead of the rest!

Take away the following from this workshop:

  1. Clarity about where to go next including an assessment of your personality profile.
  2. Renewed confidence about what you have to offer and how to manage your career.
  3. A clear consistent message to offer potential employers.
  4. A polished and dusted off YOU ready to face the market and “go public”.
  5. A workable plan to get you to where you want to be.
  6. Increased momentum and motivation.

Meet the Workshop Facilitator:

Jane Downes is founder of Clearview Coaching Group (www.clearviewcoachgroup.com) which was established in 2004 following an extensive career working within the area of Executive Search, Recruitment and HR Consulting. Assignments frequently involved carrying out recruitment consulting projects for some of Ireland’s brand name clients. Jane uses this vital experience gained in her Executive and Career coaching sessions with her clients and in her workshops. Jane also co owns Irelands 1st Assessment and Coaching Centre for Emotional Intelligence – www.EIIreland.com. Jane regularly writes for the National Press on Career, Motivation & planning and managing yourself within the workplace. Jane is a qualified Life & Business Coach, Career Coach Assessor and licensed Emotional Intellegence Assessor (EQi). She also has a 1st class honours Social Science Degree from UCD and a 1st Class honours Training qualification (NUI).

Limited places available – book today! CLICK HERE TO BOOK

Cost: Your investment for this workshop is €100 (via www.jobs.ie)
Venue: The Davenport Hotel, Merrion Square Dublin 2 www.ocallaghanhotels.com
Date: Thursday August 13th
Time: 6.00pm – 9.15pm
For further information please email jane@clearviewcoachgroup.com

If you do not wish to receive mailings from Jobs.ie click here to unsubscribe.

 

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Career Internet Job Site Jobs Recruitment

Get Ireland Working

getirelandworking RecruitIreland.com has a new ‘sticker’. I like it! :)

I really do!

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Blogs Career CV Job Site Jobs Recruitment

Happy with your Job?

myhorizonlogoA study by Irish jobs website MyHorizon has found that 94 percent of Irish people are not working in their dream job.

The report found that job seekers are willing to take the measures required to change this however, as 60 percent said they would be willing to go back to college to get the training needed to find their dream job. Career guidance had proven to be a problem area for most respondents with 88 percent saying they had received no guidance since leaving second level education.

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Career Internet Jobs LinkedIN Microsoft Recruitment Recruitment Agency

Irish Recruiters LinkedIn Group

After the recent success of the Irish Recruiters LinkedIn Group’s first conference – The Future of Recruitment – Part 1: The Road Ahead, Declan Fitzgerald has been planning already for Part 2, and after repeated requests to hold Part 2 before Christmas, Declan is now aiming for the 18th of November as the time to run the event and try get the Irish Recruitment industry together again to discuss what are the challenges currently facing our industry and what is the future of recruitment.

Declan is in planning phase at the moment but he has confirmed that Alexander Mann will be giving their RPO prospective on the theme as well as EMC from Cork will be discussing why they want a Cloud ATS and how they are going about implementing it. There will also be more presenters on the day but they have not been confirmed yet. To learn more please visit, Declan’s blog: the Irish CyberSleuth and also you can follow updates on Declan’s Twitter account. I’ll also keep you up to date with any other news I learn in the future about the event.

Hopefully, it will be another great event for networking, learning and debate.

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Blogs Career Internet Jobs LinkedIN Microsoft Recruitment Recruitment Agency Twitter

Recruitment Conference

irish-recruitment-conference-2009

Irish Recruiters LinkedIN Group got together in the a form of a Recruitment Conference.

It was great to see so many friends together, thank you all for coming!

We all need to say a BIG: Thank You to Declan Fitzgerald who organised it all again so well!

Pictures? Well this time around I decided I will mail you the pictures – and only the ones you are on! Just put the comment below and I’ll mail you all the photos you are on. I emailed some nice photographs to your mailboxes already, so check there first. This is just out of a respect for all of you who joined us for a pint afterwards. Please no funny faces to the camera anymore! :)

When the world’s largest professional social network is at the same table with the country’s largest jobs site and the largest recruitment agency, all organised by the world’s largest (richest) IT company… it has to be interesting. Even in the extremely sad times like these. 3 out of 2 recruiters have been made redundant in the last 9 months. I guess the room would be fuller if the conference took place a year ago.

What I took from the conference is that the social networks definitely ARE the most important recruitment tools. LinkedIN is the most important although having so slow penetration in Ireland. Less than 150 000 registered, and only a small percentage of that with a useful profile (from the recruitment perspective).

Job Boards still dominating the market but quickly losing their prior historical dominance. Recruitment advertising fees are dropping, and also disappearing with RecruitIreland.com leading that avenue.

Recruitment agencies are changing their offerings and repositioning themselves in the recruitment process. From all we have heard on the recruitment conference and especially on the ‘After Party’ – if you know how to use Twitter to source the candidates, there is a great future for you in recruitment!

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Career Google Internet Jobs Recruitment

How to write a job advertisement – for Google?

Since the Irish recruiters have finally understood that the search engine optimization strategy is the key to the success of their business I get asked a same question more and more, and more often:

How do I write a job advertisement so that it attracts more and better quality candidates?

While the page you are publishing a job advertisement has the critical determining factor when it comes to search engine rankings, the targeted keyword phrase should still appear in the add itself. Also having your keyword combinations appear throughout the job specification generally helps search engines further identify the relevancy of the page for your search keywords.

Here are a few general tips for keyword integration in your jobs advertisements:
1. Job Titles
The most important place your keywords should appear is in the title tag of the page. The nice thing about job boards is that your job post or page title will be automatically transformed into both title tags and either an H1 or H2 heading tag as well. Remember, your headline should wrap your keywords in a pithy promise that perfectly communicates what the job is about.

2. Short Job Description
I’ve always found it useful to repeat the targeted keywords in the short job description, as long as it can be done in a way that is appealing to the candidate and reinforces relevancy. Since many job boards use this initial copy as the displayed description of the job, you want to make sure you are accurately inviting the candidate to click through as well.

3. Subheadings in Job Description
Another important place that keywords can appear is in subheads that aid the reader in navigating down the page. A resource that matches up well with the targeted keyword phrase will find natural opportunities to restate keywords in subheads, as an introduction to the next topical section of the page. Subheads are on jobs sites typically created using the H3 tag.

4. Related Words and Synonyms
Good job description copy should naturally result in words that are related to, as well as synonyms for, the keyword phrases you are after. Rather than mindlessly repeating the same words ad nauseam, assume that search algorithms are advanced enough to look for proper contextually-related words that support your targeted keywords. Think skills!

5. Specificity
One of the hallmarks of great job description is specific, descriptive words in lieu of bland general terminology. Specificity aids the reader by clearly demonstrating relevancy, allows for more dynamic copy, and provides opportunities to increase the general on-page keyword frequency. Make sure to employ your specific keywords when feasible within the context of the job description, rather than rely on generic wording.

6. How to Apply?
Let us not forget that we want the Candidate to apply for the job. Otherwise, what’s the point of advertising? Once again, your job advertisement should conclude with a call to action that prompts the reader to travel down the path you desire. It might be to use a facility to apply for a job on a jobs site, or to contact you directly. Your primary keywords should naturally fit in with the next step you want the reader to take.

Conclusion
The key to good job advertisement is crafting the content that seamlessly integrates keywords in a way that doesn’t offend the reader. In fact, good keyword-rich job advertisement should never even consciously alert the reader that keyword repetition is being employed for any reason other than his or her own benefit.

The other factors that determine whether your job advertisement will appear in the search results in the search engines, or your competitors is the number and relevancy of the links to the page where the job is advertised. You should certainly submit your jobs to the social media sites, especially if advertising jobs on your own web site as opposed to a jobs board shared with your competition.

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Career Internet Recruitment

ISME

The news headline today is that ISME, via Mark Fielding says that 70000 jobs are in danger.

Here is the full story from the RTE web site. I’ll pay a pint to the one who can explain why are 70000 people in danger of losing their jobs, and where does it say so in the piece of news broadcasted on all Irish media?

Call for employment action plan
Tuesday, 2 June 2009

The group representing small and medium sized businesses in Ireland has called on the Government to introduce an emergency employment action plan.

The Irish Small and Medium Enterprises Association says some 70,000 jobs in the sector are in immediate danger.

In a survey published today, ISME confirms that almost all such businesses have introduced either a pay cut or a wage freeze since the start of the year.

ISME is calling for an emergency plan including PRSI exemptions for employers taking on new staff and job maintenance subsidies to deal with the number of firms planning lay-offs, which according to the organisation’s survey, has risen to 35% from 25% two months ago.

Almost all small and medium business have introduced pay cuts or wage freezes since the beginning of the year, ISME says.

ISME Chief Executive Mark Fielding said that immediate action was called for and that drawn-out negotiations with trades unions needed to be cut short.

He said that it was better to have workers remaining in employment than to add to the Exchequer costs by becoming what he called a burden on the State.

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Blogs Career Internet Jobs Recruitment Twitter

Twitter Marketing

Twitter is a social network that lets the users communicate with messages of only up to 140 characters. SMS-ish like. When you register you can follow other people and what happens when you follow them – whatever they write is shown on your profile. You actually subscribe to their updates. Other people can follow you and that enables you to place your message on their Twitter profile page. Altogether twitter is a tool taht delivers short message from a user to a group of users who subscribe for this updates.

The description above actually describes a fantastic marketing tool. You can subscribe to whoever you like, and get their messages. Anyone else can subscribe to you. It is a massive permission based marketing model, dressed up as a social network.

Twitter can be used as a marketing channel to market anything. A business, a brand, a product, or a person. In fact it is used in personal branding right now in Ireland with candidates marketing themselves on Twitter just nine days before the Elections for the European parliament.

Here is how candidates from the Dublin constituency use Twitter to market themselves to the Irish voters.

Another interesting aspect , besides the number of followers and following, is the Activity. How many messages or broadcasts to their followers have each candidate made so far?

Name Number of Tweets
Déirdre De Búrca 259
Eoin Ryan 144
Joe Higgins 160
Proinsias De Rossa 44
Eibhlin Byrne 30
Caroline Simons n/a
Mary Lou Mc Donald n/a
Patricia McKenna n/a
Gabriel ´Gay´ Mitchell n/a

The article Twitter and European Elections in Dublin South shows the number of followers and people following – or basically a ‘Broadcast Network’ of each candidate. You can clearly see that the number of messages published is in direct correlation with the number of people following you.

So how to use Twitter in the recruitment or looking for job? Simple! Just log in, create your account, look for interesting people, follow them, publish the messages you want to be found and followed for. The more messages you post to the larger and ‘more interesting’ network, the more effective will your Twitter marketing be.

Do not forget how are you presenting yourself as well. There is a full Profile you can fill on Twitter about yourself.

eibhlinbyrne-dogMake sure you do not put a face of a dog instead of your photo as the
Major of Dublin did, since people will be quite reluctant to follow a dog!?