Category: Career

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Jobsket

I visited the Jobsket (Jobsket.ie) web site today. It’s one of those now innovative sites that their owners and founders know will be the next big thing on the Internet. Unfortunately as we all know not every single site can success, such is the nature of the market. You can recognise those sites by not really having any real meaningful info what they are about, and you cannot really do much yourself on the site.

Jobsket will force you to give up your email address (do I have SPAM…) and then they let you in to log in. When you do log in there is less to see then on the outside, so let’s not waste ink on the Jobsket here anymore. What I wanted to show you is the interesting poll results left from the people who visited Jobsket. The Question was:

Submit an Idea
We’ve setup a feedback forum so you can tell us what’s on your mind. Please go there and be heard!
20 Votes – Import CV from LinkedIn
4 Votes – Change tags
3 Votes – Improve CVs viewer
3 votes – Allow import your CV from Google Docs
1 votes – Allow sending my CV

jobsket

What this tells us is the people do not care really about the fancy feature about a jobs site. What people do care is their own time. I do not want to insert another bloody profile and online CV here. I have a profile (that I am proud of) in LinkedIN. Now go and take it from there you lazy….

Twice many more people suggested the LikedIN connection than all the other suggestions altogether. Now what does that tell you? It tells you that people are sick of creating their profiles and filling the repetitive info in the forms on the various sites. It tells you that there is the time for one site to be a holder of your personal info, where the subsets of it you as the account holder will be able to open to various other sites.

Ehm,… this blog post was about Jobsket. So what is Jobsket really? Jobsket is a spider that takes jobs from Jobs.ie and than matches your CV with the positions advertised and calculates from the published salaries what is your CV, or what are you ‘worth’. I tried. In my case rolling the dice gave more precise results.
The data they collected from Jobs.ie is so old – yeas there are the positions in there that have been published not last year, but before the recession started – so you can guess how accurate the figures are.

The Feedaback from (powered by uservoice) on Jobsket is nice though.

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Career Jobs Recruitment

Bankers applying for jobs in McDonald’s

jobs-in-mcdonaldsPhoto credit: Myung Jung Kim/PA Wire

Evening Echo:

Jobs in a new McDonald’s branch in Ennis have attracted applications from unemployed bankers, architects and accountants.

There were 500 applications for jobs in the new branch in 10 days. The jobs were advertised solely on a banner at the site which was taken down after 10 days because franchisee Kieran McDermott had received so many CVs.

He said the situation was the direct opposite in 2002, when he opened a branch in Shannon.

Employees were difficult to find then, as Ireland was at the height of the boom with very low levels of unemployment.

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Career Jobs Microsoft Recruitment

When will the recruitment market in Ireland turn around?

There is the current state of the LinkedIN Poll from Microsoft Ireland:
When will the recruitment market in Ireland turn around?

likedin-poll-When will the recruitment market in Ireland turn around

The responses do not seem very optimistic! :)

likedin-poll-results- When will the recruitment market in Ireland turn around

The fact is that recruitment in Ireland is still very much alive. It might be hard to believe since you are bombarded with the news about job losses every day. Check the Jobs News site for the published news about jobs in Ireland. But the reality is that the vast majority of the Irish workforce is still working. The Irish companies are still doing what they have been doing before the crisis. A large number of the companies have made some staff redundant, and those have been the staff that are not triticale to the operations. If company can get their product out with 20% staff reduction, they did it in the last few months. The words like efficiency and productivity finally got their meaning now. The end result is actually going to be good for the Irish economy. We will get more productive workforce. The people who lost their jobs will eventually find a job somewhere else or start their own business. This is what we are good at in Ireland.

The next result is that we will eventually bring our prices down. January 2009 was the first month in the long time that we had negative inflation, or deflation. And we need a quite a few more months like that. That will drive the prices down. Cost of living will be balanced with the rest of Euro zone. We will stop going shopping to Northern Ireland, because ‘everything is half price up north!’. Ireland will become competitive.

We do need this process of restructuring of our companies, and if we do it right we will come out stronger.

I know that this sounds a bit like David McWilliams. But guess what, the Microsoft Recruitment Poll results are even less optimistic! More than half of the people think the recession is to stay here for MORE THAN 2 YERS!

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Career Internet Jobs Recruitment Recruitment Agency

Web design in Ireland

Serving the needs of the online recruiters in Ireland for the last 5 years I got to know a number of the web design companies in Ireland. There is quite a large pool of excellent web design and/or web development companies. The fact that there used to be over 600 registered recruitment agencies on average during the last 5 years generates a need for a hundreds of recruitment agency web sites. On average a recruitment agency (or any other) web site needs to e replaced every two years. That defines the size of the recruitment agency web site market in Ireland of about 200 to 300 web sites per year!

So no wonder the web design companies in Ireland had it good over the last number of years. The average budget was about €25 000 per the recruitment agency web site and a number of big players got their site done for over €50 000. And then the Celtic Tiger got a bit tired, and could not sustain pricing structures implemented in the Irish recruitment industry. As a side effect the web design in Ireland was and still is hit badly. The web design was the industry where huge sums of money have been changing hands for many years between gentleman. Today, when the market is almost gone completely, there is this bitter taste in the mouths and the solicitors are getting involved to untangle the complex contracts and unfinished projects.

The number of the new job boards in Ireland is greater than the number of the new recruitment agency web sites being published in the last 6 months. The job boards owners are forgetting that it is the recruitment agencies who are supposed to be paying their fees. And the Recruitment agencies cannot even invest in their own web sites?

It seems that the online recruitment is the industry that is disappearing from the radar of the web design companies in Ireland. And that is the same industry that up until the last year had a few hundred new web site releases. The size of the market is not smaller, but the market almost do not even exist for the recruitment web site design.

We all had it good for many, many years now. In the same time we become extremely expensive and therefore uncompetitive on the international web design (or any other) market. Foreign companies are running away, since our tax breaks cannot justify our costs any more. It simply does not pay to do business in Ireland any more. Irish web design companies should rethink their strategies and pricing in general. Otherwise very few of the web sites will actually be made in Ireland any more. We all know it would really be a pity, simply because there is and there is quite a few really good web design companies in Ireland. If we loos them, the internet based businesses like the online recruitment will suffer as well.

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Blogs Career Jobs Recruitment Recruitment Agency

Any Jobs in Ireland?

Today’s announcement from one of the leading jobs sites in Ireland nicely describes what does a jobs scene look in Ireland today:

Hi All

Just a quick note to let you know we have now added some new locations;

Europe
Australia
United Arab Emirates
New Zealand
Canada
USA
South Africa
North Africa
Middle East

If you have any queries please let me know.

The jobs sites cannot really survive advertising the jobs in Ireland only. Simply there is not enough jobs in Ireland to sustain the business model of advertising jobs in Ireland only. There simply isn’t enough jobs here anymore. Irish Jobs are gone. Jobs are elsewhere today.

Welcome to the emigration wave…

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Blogs Career Jobs Recruitment Recruitment Agency

Sales Staff Salaries

I often thought how to structure the remuneration package for a sales staff in the recruitment or even more specific is the sales of the jobs site subscriptions. The jobs sites sell the three month, six months and the most often the annual subscription that includes the free usage of a number of jobs slots on the site. What it means is that the client, an employer or a recruitment agency can use their XX number of jobs slots as they like. There is usually some side products on the jobs sites like the CV Database Access, or a Hot Job – that is displayed on the home page. Some company branding packages with the company logos around the pages on the job site are also common practice.

The sales staff are usually paid so that there is a percentage of their salary that is a Basic Salary. It is guaranteed and not related to their performance. For a junior sales staff it is not far off the minimum wage, and it grows with the experience of the person. The other part of the salary is the bonus that is related to the performance achieved in each time period. The bonuses are really structured differently in different companies and industries.

Obviously the sales person should bring more in (revenue) the company than what his own costs are. So here is a question then:

Should a sales person rather accept a percentage of the revenue or the classis sales remuneration package comprised of a basic plus a bonus?

Obviously for a good sales person a percentage of the revenue if it is a substantial percentage should be a far more interesting option, since it brings the person to a ‘Partner’ level instantly. It is actually even better then a partnership since the sales person gets a percentage of the revenue generated, regardless if the company is actually profitable at all.

I have heard recruiters saying, that the percentage of the revenue is interesting for them but that the sales process can take long time to close, and there is the mortgage, the car,…

So I tried to look at it from a different perspective. How about a sales person taking home 100% of any revenue he makes for the first month or so? How about 100% of all the revenue made in the first two months??? Surely there should be quite enough clients you can close a deal with within 60 days?

What do you think? Am I on the right track? Would you take a job where you take home everything you make for the first few months?

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Blogs Career Jobs Recruitment

Rocket Jobs

Rocket JobsDecember is here, and December is the worst month in the recruitment industry. Why? First, it is short and second, it is the end of the financial year, and budgets are frozen. But the Irish Celtic Tiger does not sleep. Perhaps it should be rebranded in the Snow Leopard. Why? Since in our country even in December the now jobs sites are popping up like mushrooms after the rain. The new kid on the block in RocketJobs.ie!

The logo and the web site colors show a strong resemblance to a ‘Home Made Burger’ place called Eddie Rockets. Oh yes, there is the resemblance in the name there as well when you think of it…

Perhaps it is the burger place branching out into the other industries since the news of the Irish pork being banned worldwide for the illegal amount of toxins being found. Their marketing should be: We have all Irish Jobs and,… would you like fries with that?

Honestly I think that Ireland will benefit from all those job boards. It will create jobs. People will work for those companies, web sites will be developed, marketing campaigns (or not?!), sales teams will call the recruiters… It’s all good for Ireland as a country and for Irish jobs market as well. It would be interesting to revisit each of this year’s new job board reviews in about 12 months time and see how is still there, and who is actually in the real competition to become a leading Irish jobs site.

Rocket Jobs – I wish you all the best!

(PS, I am not a great fun of a chicken burger really…)

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Career CV Database Internet Jobs Microsoft Recruitment

Take a sneak peek at the new Monster

Take a sneak peek at the new Monster Jobs Site

Monster is all about their new site. That isn’t actaully available. And will not be available this year. That does not stop them advertising it for the last couple of months. They started sounding a bit like Microsoft advertising their Vista. A lot of hipe, for a long, long time, but the result is…

Well let’s give Monster a chance to actaully show it to us. They promised it in Januarry next year (how crazy do you have to be to release teh new version of the job site in the month when job boards have the most traffic? If someting goes wrong, and things allways go wrong with the new releases, do you really need to show it to the most of visitors? :)

Well I guess it was a marketing driven decission, as Monsters decisions allways are, as oposed to the someones who knows how to run the operations.

Releasing a new jobs site in the year 2009, I would consider to be a failure if it does not have an element of the social networking. Is Monster smart and brave enough to bring the social networking in online recruitment on a large scale, as oposed to what LinkedIN is trying to do? Let’s wait and see ….

Untill then we will just be getting thoise emails and PDF’s titled Take a sneak peek at the new Monster or simmilar…

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Blogs Career CV Database Google Internet Jobs Recruitment Recruitment Agency Search Engine SEO

Green Jobs

I am pleased to announce the nicest Irish Job board: Green Jobs!

A this is second new job board I am looking at today, and funnily enough the first one was also ‘green’ or perhaps a bit to ‘green’!

Anyway back to Green Jobs! It is again the jobs site owned by the recruitment agency, and the good thing is – they do not hide it a bit! Their Green Search logo is proudly displayed in the header next to the Green Jobs one.

The Green Jobs Design

The design of the Green Jobs web site is probably the nicest site design of all Irish recruitment web sites. Modern, Web 2.0 (and beyond), light colors on the white background, 3D,… what can I say? It ticks all the right checkmarks! It really is a pleasure to look at, and I find hard to write about it, since I just keep starring at the front page. And not only the front page. When you browse around, you find the little graphics in the site that are relevant to the content, and make the site easier to read and follow.

There are some possible improvements on the looks, it could be a bit modernised since some elements are a bit… ‘old’. The latest jobs scrolling make me really nervous since I cannot really read about the job. It’s too quick! Featured employers box ruins the balance, and is over, over,… out-standing. Fonts could be a bit more exiting… But hold on! This is still probably the nicest (Heineken) jobs site in Ireland!

PS. If you are a graphic designer who made those graphics please call me on 076 670 8888 now! I have a job for you!
PS2. In case you are calling from Brasil, there is +353 for Ireland in front of the number…

The Green Jobs Usability

Well,…. there is always a room for improvement. Again, there is only one green button, on one page only that leads you to the job search facility. I think a job site’s main purpose is to show jobs. The Jobs Search should be on every page. I will repeat that. The job search should be present on every page.

SEO of the Green Jobs

Well not much of SEO on the Green Jobs page. There is actually a test you can do on a job site to check how serious contender are they. You just look at the URL of their job posting. If the page where the job is actually displayed does not contain the job name in the URL, in the TITEL, in the META, in H1 Tag, and a few times in the text…. well then that page will not get much relevant traffic from the search engines. You have to ask yourself – why publish something if it will not have any reach?

So let’s see the URL of the job post on Green Jobs:
greenjobs.ie/jobseekers/info.php?jobid=158

Well, you be the judge… My take on it is that they will always depend on Google AdWords for the traffic to their site, and we all know that this is not really sustainable way to run a job site.

Conclusion?

Green Jobs is the nicest little recruitment site in Ireland. It is cute in its simplicity really. Well done and all the best Greens!!!

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Career Recruitment

Career Opportunities for People With Terrible Grammar

From Jobs Ireland Blog:

Career Opportunities for People With Terrible Grammar