Category: Recruitment

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Jobs Recruitment Recruitment Agency

Where are the Recruitment Agencies in Dublin?

Ever wondered where are the recruitment agencies in Dublin? Well Golden Pages has a service called FindOnMap.ie that has a location on the map of their listings in the Golden Pages. How accurate it is? Be the judge yourself:


dublin recruitement agencies

I know one thing I did a training and consultancy in the recruitment agencies this year From Swords to Bray, and even further in Graystones. None of those recruitment agencies are on the map. Perhaps those are other counties? Bray and further south is Wicklow, and perhaps those are only the Dublin based displayed?

A nice touch from the Golden pages, I think. Is it worth their subscription fee, that is another question.

96 recruitment agencies opted for this advertisement. I wonder if it brought any business?

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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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Internet Jobs Recruitment Recruitment Agency

Giggzy Ireland’s Biggest Industry Network

Just in case you have not heard, the biggest Ireland’s Industry Network is Giggsy. At least according to Giggsy web site:

Giggzy is a Business Network website. It provides a platform for industry leaders, professionals and job seekers to interact online.

Underneath that lovely introduction there is also a feature to register as a Job Seeker and Employer. The most prominent feature on the site is also the Job Search. You can also exclude agencies in your search.

So what is Giggzy really about?

It is a wana-be jobs site, and a social networking site in one? Kind of like LinkedIN, but for Ireland, and Ireland only? I really like the idea. But the packaging is just awful. The mixture between the jobs site and the networking site in the branding messages is extremely confusing, or just simply put – bad.

The implementation of the web site from the technical perspective is on the level of the site you get for free from a nephew, or a low paid student.

The company behind Giggzy is called: Active Staffing Solutions. It sounds like a recruitment agency, doesn’t it? Is it jet another jobs board by an Irish recruitment agency?

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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!!!

Categories
Career Recruitment

Career Opportunities for People With Terrible Grammar

From Jobs Ireland Blog:

Career Opportunities for People With Terrible Grammar

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Recruitment Recruitment Agency

A recession is the best time to be in the recruiting business!

As companies tighten their budgets, the recruitment freezes become more and more widespread. When it comes at the end of the year, you will hear a large number of recruitment managers mentioning the recruitment freeze as early as October. What does it mean for the recruiters? Almost no new business for the last two months of the year.

A lot of recruiters will look for another job this winter.

Especially the ones providing the ‘Volume Recruitment Services’, lower in the food chain. If nothing drastically changes in the industry until the next year, those that are still around in January 2009 will cash it big in the February. Long hiring freezes always generate a large wave of the new heads required short afterwards.

How to get to 2008? Watch for the competition bailing out, and grab their contracts. Expanding your client base in the following months in 2008, will make a huge impact in the Q1 of 2009!

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Blogs Jobs Recruitment Recruitment Agency

Is Jobs Blog still alive?

Is Jobs Blog still alive?

That is the question I got a lot last few weeks. It is funny how your constant readers almost expect you to publish regularly, and note the absence of the new blog posts. My summer was a strange mixture of (tele)work, holidays, sailing, diving, travelling, business, networking, socialising and visiting people and places. The result was devastating for my blog. The only posts I did post was being stuck on the airports with flights cancelled or delayed, or such weird situations.

It is September! And September is a Special Month in the Recruitment in Ireland. Majority of the advertising contracts are renewed in September. January is the second most popular month for such an activity. Sales people are very busy. If you did not book your business (Let’s do Lunch!) meeting or a dinner, you will find hard to get a face to face meeting with a salesman of the recruitment advertising! Fully booked in advance!

New start up recruitment agencies pup up like mushrooms after the rain in September. Considering the amount of rain in August…

Jobs Blog is Alive!!!

The question is how is the recruitment alive in those turbulent economic times…

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Interview Jobs Recruitment

Resignation Letter the Yahoo Stile!

Resignation Letter the Yahoo Stile!

When you get a new job, there is always this thing hanging… The Resignation! Most of employers will ask you for some form of letter, and isn’t it the nice way to escape from the face to face meeting?

Anyway if not to sure how to structure the letter – here is a bit of help from our friends at Yahoo: http://yahoorezinr.com/.

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Jobs Recruitment Search Engine SEO

Jobs Ireland (Jobs-Ireland.ie)

I started working on a new job site this month. It is called Jobs Ireland and is hosted on a domain www.Jobs-Ireland.ie. It is early days rally. Today it is a ‘Job Board in the Nappies’, but some of the ideas that are coded now actually look like the interesting features for the end users.

Jobs Ireland Usability

In general the job boards in Ireland tend to suffer from the ‘over development’ while a new feature is built onto the existing code every now and then. After some time all those ‘extra’ features tend to overshadow the main features of the jobs board. The results that it is hard to find out how to simply apply for a job. Starting fresh with Jobs Ireland the aim is to get a set of features that are useful to the job hunters and stick to that set of features, without adding more and more. This is all to help job hunters to simply find the job they want and enable them to simply and quickly apply to it. Effortlessly is the word to use here really.

Jobs Ireland Speed

Another aspect I am also interested to look into while developing this site is the speed. The job boards have a clear problem with the speed for the two reasons:
1. Too many jobs slow the databases behind the jobs sites
2. Too many marketing messages and advertising sold as banners make the pages ‘heavy’

The aim with the Jobs Ireland is to make it fast as a web site should be. I started measuring the speed of the job site from the day one, before a single job was published, and am testing it as it is populated with the jobs. Initially just after the Jobs Ireland site was first installed I populated the database with 50 000 jobs and have run the speed test. The results did not show much difference with a ‘full’ and completely ‘empty’ database. That is the target I am working towards with the live jobs now as well.

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Google Jobs Recruitment Recruitment Agency Search Engine SEO

Recruitment Roadshow 2008: What is The Best Job Title?

Recruitment Roadshow 2008 took me to Swords and Tallaght today visiting the two La Creme & Premier offices. It was really interesting how the same presentation I am giving every day evolves from the contribution from the recruiters I meet every day. The most interesting topic we spoke about today was the Job Titles. Basically the question was:

What is The Best Job Title?

Since the Job Title appears in the Job Search Results on the job boards, and it also appears on the Search results of the search engines, it is very important to write the job title in a such way that it invites the web site visitor to click on it. If the job title does not make a job hunter click on it to see more of the job, the application process gets ‘broken’ and a visitor/CV is lost.

The conclusion is that a job title has to be:

    Short
    Descriptive
    Attractive – it needs to sell the job

By looking at the Google Analytics data of a recruitment agency web sites or a job sites, and comparing the number of views of the same job with a different job titles gives a definitive answer, and that is that:

The job tile on a recruitment agency web site and a job boards shouldn’t be the same!

Why? Simply because you are trying to attract the job hunter in the different environment.

Job Titles for the Job Boards

Job boards contain thousands of jobs. Most likely there will be numerous jobs with the job tile that is exactly as yours. Standing out is a good thing. Sometimes you need to ‘Go Crazy’ as well (for certain type of jobs). I have heard how the tiles like: ‘Can you sell ice to the Eskimos’ work well, simply since they stand out.

Recruitment Agency and Corporate Site Job Titles

Job tiles on your own web site need to be far more formal. There are two reasons for it. Here you do not compete with the rest of the recruiters in the country. Here it is all about you and your brand. Informative, descriptive, short, attractive…

Another point is that your web site content is the main driving force to the web traffic to your recruitment web site. The majority of the content of the recruitment sites are the job descriptions. Google just loves your jobs online since they get updated regularly, and Google ‘loves’ the live content. Your job titles will most likely (should really!) contain the most used search phrases to drive the traffic from Google. If you want relevant traffic you need the job titles that are 100% relevant to your jobs.

This simply points to the obvious:

Job titles for the job boards and job titles for your company web site shouldn’t really be the same.

Categories
Jobs Recruitment

Recruitment Roadshow 2008

When you get stuck with a job for many years, and you are good at it, in time you will become an expert. If you are passionate about your job and like it, you will explore and find ways of improving it. You will talk to other people in the industry and get to the forefront of the innovation.

Or is it just me?

One way or the other, I have spent my last 5 years in managing online recruitment web sites. It drove me into the whole search engine optimisation (SEO) industry, and all kind the online recruitment related disciplines like multiple job posting, developing of the clients recruitment agency web sites and in general consultancy for the Irish recruiters. Combining the knowledge gathered and the relevant experience gave me a clear picture where the recruitment in Ireland currently is, and where is it going. Comparing it with the UK market is a natural thing, but the American and Japanese are actually today about a year more advanced, and better ‘describe’ our Irish future.

I have spent years training recruiters on how to use all kinds of various online recruitment tools. From the early job boards like www.RealJobs.ie and aggregators like www.IrelandJobs.ie to the www.EmployIreland.ie I run today. Then came blogs, then came social networking, really simple syndication, mash-ups of all those and as well the www.LinkedIN.com!

Online recruitment has changed in the last 12 months more than it have ever before. It is perhaps only comparable to the ‘restructuring’ in the recruitment industry ranks after the Dot.com bubble burst.

The questions that every recruiter is asking today are:
1. Where to get the candidates?
2. Why don’t I get as much CVs or applications from the job boards?
3. Where is the quality of the applications (gone)?
4. Where should I advertise?
5. Should I use LinkedIN? How?
6. If every search begins in Google, why is Google AdWords so bad (expensive) for the recruitment? What are the alternatives?

To answer all those, I set down and prepared a presentation:

Recruitment Roadshow 2008

I will held presentations in various shapes and forms in a number of the recruitment agencies in Dublin, Cork, Limmerick, Gallway, Waterford and … during this last few days in May and the whole June. Still a few days available in the mid June. The next round will start at the mid September 2008, so book early at 01 440 1900!

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Blogs Jobs Recruitment

CIPD Ireland Annual Conference 2008

It is a beautiful day today, almost perfect to drive to Lyrath Estate Hotel, Kilkenny, to attend the CIPD Ireland Annual Conference 2008.

Both The Irish Times and the Independent are the highest ‘Platinum Partners’. Meaning you can see the teams of the sales people from both Loazajobs and Irish Times Jobs – doing their best to sell some advertising while mingling with the HR personnel. Wine them, dine them, (a bit of golf on the day like today please!) and sell them your expensive advertising space.

Well done both sales teams of our Irish newspapers on sponsoring the (British CIPD) sales event packaged in the HR wrapping. :)

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Jobs Recruitment Recruitment Agency

Irish Recruitment Marketing

If we clearly define and make a distinction between Marketing and Advertising in saying:

Advertising–what Larry Heiman refers to as “Lead Generation”–is the “magnet” you use to attract the customers you want to your business. Marketing is the process you use to determine who and where those people are, what they buy from you, why they buy from you, and how they think. With that information at your command, then–and only then–can you begin to construct the strategic magnet that irresistibly attracts your ideal customers.

The typical Irish Recruitment Agency hires a Marketing Manager. The Job of a Marketing Manager of an Irish recruitment agency is to… ADVERTISE! Marketing manager manages the advertising budget, typically spent on the Irish Job boards, and the print, radio, beer mats, bus shelters, LUAS, cinema, bank machines, taxi, airports and other visual advertisements.

The closest the Marketing Managers of the Irish recruitment agencies ever get to the real (Internet) marketing is when they ask the job boards to supply them with the ABC approved figures, that show the number of the visitors per day, their geography, and so no. Anyone who has ever seen the two of the such reports from different Irish Jobs Boards knows that you simply cannot compare one with another. And if you try to reach some conclusions from those reports – it is in clear disparity with what you see yourself online.

The Online Marketing Manager of an Irish Recruitment Agency should know the answers to the following questions:
1. Who are our clients (employers) looking for, and expecting us to deliver?
2. What internet recourses do those candidates use?
3. Who is advertising on those web sites (or online software like Skype for example)?
4. How likely is it that an advertisement is going to be seen on the web page where it is advertised?
5. How likely that the advertisement will result in a ‘click’, and wring a job hunter to our web site?
6. What is the cost per application from each of the web sites where the jobs are advertised?

As opposed to the above, the typical Irish Marketing Manager of an Irish recruitment agency is interested in and managing:
1. What Job boards to use and advertise on?
2. How many jobs can be advertised there (number of job slots)?
3. Are our jobs ‘seen’ in the searches on the job boards ‘high enough’ – or down below thousands of other advertisements?
4. Can we reduce the rates paid to the job boards (or increase job slots!)?

We all know that people use the search engines more than job boards. In fact, the job boards get the vast majority of their visitors from the search engines. In the same time the Irish Recruitment Marketing Managers are totally oriented and dependent on the Irish Job Boards as opposed to the search engines. The only exception is Google AdWords that most of the agencies have trued using, but were simply outbid by their own money they invested in the Jobs Boards, who simply outbid them.

An Irish Online Marketing Manager of the Recruitment Agency should think on how to put his advertisements on the web sites that are being visited the most. Google.ie is on the top, for a long time now. Why is there not a single recruitment agency on top of the search results for the phrases job hunters use to find the jobs? Simply because the Marketing Managers have got the wrong job description. They should not manage the advertising budget, but monitor what job hunters use, and where they can be ‘surprised’ with the advertising message.

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Jobs Recruitment Recruitment Agency

Recruitment Process – Getting the Right Candidate for the Job

Larry Heiman wrote a nice blog post: Recruiting is a Marketing Task
Here is the part where he explains the Marketing processes applied to the recruitment, and sourcing to help you find that right candidate for the your jobs:

As an enlightened business owner, you understand the importance of doing market research on your prospective customers. For example, you want to know where they’re located, any common characteristics they may have and, ultimately, as much as possible about how they think – their needs, wishes, and motivations. The goal, of course, is to refine your ability to effectively and efficiently target your message to those with whom you most want to do business.
Well, you may be surprised to learn that this wisdom equally applies in seeking prospective employees. In fact, marketing for customers and marketing for employees address the similar four key questions:
• What is my likely trading area? (Where are my likely employees located)?
• What is my product? (What is the position?)
• Who is my “ideal customer”? (What are the qualities of my “ideal employee”?)
• How can I best attract their attention?
Even when you are feeling the pressure to quickly fill an unexpectedly open position, you’ll save yourself a lot of grief if you take the time in advance to get very clear on the answers to those four questions.

In the Irish market – that is dominated with the recruitment agencies advertising on the job boards and the traditional media, would you see such model as a ‘workable’ one? The most agencies will try to get the candidate who is slightly overqualified, to impress the employer with a quality of the CV. Also they try to match the same role title – of the past and the future role of the candidate.

So in a sense – the recruitment agencies her in Ireland do all the opposite to what Larry is suggesting above.

I personally like the marketing processes applied to the recruitment model. I can see it work beautifully, especially with the lower level jobs in Ireland.