Category: Recruitment

Categories
Career CV Interview Jobs Recruitment Recruitment Agency

Free Jobseekers Workshop

The workshop will run for 90 minutes and will cover:
• Writing a world class CV
• Where to find the next job
• Advice on dealing with recruitment agencies
• Improving interview skills and techniques
• Networking skills
• Negotiating salaries

The goal is to provide insight and support to candidates who are currently in a difficult job market. Free Jobseekers Workshop is targeted at all levels of candidate, from junior through to senior management.

Where & When?
September 30th from 6PM to 7.30PM at the Grand Canal Hotel, Dublin 4 and will be presented by NRF Committee member Peter Cosgrove.

Register
To register a candidate for the NRF Jobseekers Workshop or offer your services for the CV Clinic please contact the NRF office on 01-8161754 or email name and contact details to director@nrf.ie

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Job Site Recruitment Recruitment Agency

Recruitment Industry Awards 2009

National Recruitment Federation (NRF) is launching its Recruitment Industry Awards 2009, a gala awards ceremony on Friday, 2nd October 2009 at The Four Seasons Hotel, will once again be presented by RTE’s Pamela Flood.

Judges:
Mark Fielding, CEO ISME,
Kirsty Kirkwood, former European Head of Staffing, State Street
Sean O’Meara, Former Chief Executive, Young Advertising
Grainne Martin, Ex-MD of Computer People Ltd

The Jobseekers Choice category is where you can have your say about who is the best Recruitment Agency of the National Recruitment Federation at Survey Monkey

Here are the agencies shortlisted for the award:
Approach People
CaterAssist
Clark Recruitment
CPL Recruitment
Elan IT
Executive Connections
FRS Recruitment
Global Medics
Grafton Recruitment
Hudson
Jackie Brown Medical
Julia Ross
Logiskills
Noel Recruitment
Nuparc
Parc Aviation
Prosperity
Recruiters
RecruitmentPlus
Robert Walters
Servisource
Sigmar Recruitment
Star Recruit
Three Q Catering
Vantage Resources

Voting Rules:
Only one vote per person. Participating parties cannot vote.

The closing date for the nominations is (was) today at 5PM. So if you are reading this – sorry, you are too late for Recruitment Industry Awards 2009!

Categories
Internet Job Site Recruitment Recruitment Agency

Work in Ireland (WorkinIreland.ie)

work in irelandWork in Ireland (WorkinIreland.ie) as jet another recruitment job portal. Although it is not really publicised, it is owned by a recruitment agency called Work Direct (WorkDirect.ie). The agency is run by the Directors Philip Beggs and Sabina Frontzek.

The Work in Ireland site is not that bad looking. Certainly not that bad as a FAS Jobs Site I wrote yesterday about. There are also about 20ish jobs advertised between two advertisers Alex Harp and Step One Recruitment.

The site has one sole purpose and that is to create a stream of fresh CV’s for the Work Direct recruitment agency. Therefore he advertisers email address and any contact details are hidden. On the page showing a job details there is also no Apply button, but it is replaced by Register Now button. This is to force job seekers to leave all their personal details, and the copy of the CV to the recruitment agency that runs the site before the application is sent to the advertiser.

I wonder will any recruitment agency, when they decide to make a job board, use their experience and knowledge of the industry and create something new? Something that will improve the process of the online recruitment? When will a single recruitment web site really differ from all the others? All the Irish recruitment agencies have jobs advertised on them, and all the sites are exactly the same. Same features, and quite a few actually look the same (Prosperity.ie being the exception). What happened to creativity? Is there absolutely nothing innovative the Irish recruitment agencies can come up with for more than 10 years now?

(hint: think social media)

Categories
Blogs Career CV Jobs Recruitment

Less jobs and far less candidates in 2009

The recruitment in Ireland is changing, and changing a lot in this recession. We all know there are far less jobs advertised. All the metrics point to it like the Irish Employment Monitor by Premier. The Unemployment is growing as companies are reducing their staff levels or closing and leaving Ireland due to its un-competitiveness. The problem is that the skillset of the people being made redundant, in most cases does not fit the jobs advertised. The jobs advertised therefore cannot be filled by the unemployed people.

Passive Candidate is Cautious

Who will fill the jobs then? What about people that have jobs already? Are they interested in the career move? Well most of them again, in this market, would still prefer to stay with the existing employer. At least they will collect a redundancy package if they get fired. Leaving a job for a better one with the new employer is not on the cards of most people in the current market.

Tough Recruitment

This shortage of jobs combined with the current un-predictive economy actually created a shortage of the qualified candidates. Employers are hoping of hiring the top skilled staff for less then what they had to pay for a year ago. In most industries, that is just not happening to them. To make the things worse there is a whole lot of CV’s to browse trough for every job advertised, and it takes time…

Recruitment is tough today

Then again there are jobs that can be filled today that could not be filled 12 months ago at all. There are also cool new skills emerging, and new jobs demanding those skills. Who was hiring Search Engine Optimization Consultants, and Pay Per Click Specialists 12 months ago? Not to mention Bloggers, Social Networking Professionals, Online Branding Managers and whatever you will need in the coming months?

Required skills are changing. Jobs are changing. The same workforce should fill those places and do those jobs. That is one of the core problems in the recruitment for the current jobs advertised in Ireland.

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Blogs Internet Microsoft Recruitment

Irish Recruiters Toolbar

There are great skills hidden in the Irish recruitment workforce. Declan Fitzgerald who you all know very well by now if you are readers of this blog, have created a browser toolbar for Microsoft Internet Explorer and Firefox.

Irish Recruiters toolbar

Irish Recruiters Toolbar helps you to find and read the latest blog posts on Jobs Blog! – That should be a tagline! :)

Irish Recruiters Toolbar is represented on a video, and you can see the video and download the toolbar on Declans blog. Thanks for putting Jobs Blog in the video Dec!

Categories
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.

Categories
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!

Categories
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!

Categories
CV CV Database Internet Recruitment Social Networks Social Recruitment

Irish Jobs beat Worky on pricing

Irish Jobs had the approach ‘If you can’t beat them, buy them!’ for many years now. Then Worky came. With most likely slightly too big price tag for the current market. Remember Worky has the global ambitions.

Worky opened up a new model of sourcing. A Pay as you Go model. You can do what you like, and you pay only when you want to contact the candidate. €20 per contact. Not much for a perfect candidate, wouldn’t you agree?

Well Irish Jobs realised, – Hey we have a bigger database. Thousands of CVs parsed in database. Why don’t we sell that?

Here is what Irish Jobs ofers:

IrishJobs.ie is proud to launch our brand new ‘Pay as you go’ CV database system enabling you to cherry pick the candidates you want.

The IrishJobs.ie CV Database has proven to be a highly successful tool for both jobseekers and recruiters. Over 35,000 high calibre candidates across all industry sectors in Ireland have recently uploaded their CV onto IrishJobs.ie and this database is continually growing.

With our CV database you can

-tailor your search requirements by selecting the job category; roles, minimum -experience and salary range, plus include specific keywords.
qu-ickly identify CVs matching your criteria as search results are displayed as a -snapshot overview including the candidate’s objectives
-search for suitable candidates in complete confidentiality – an excellent tool for times when you do not want to advertise a position

With our new ‘pay as you go’ model you only pay for the CVs you pick (Just €15 + VAT per CV).

Get ahead of the competition by targeting quality candidates instantly and efficiently. Check out our database in RMS today.

Kindest Regards,
The IrishJobs.ie Team

I am not sure if that includes a Jobs.ie database as well. That would be the first question I would ask.

Then again compared to Worky – Irish Jobs is cheaper. €15 per CV from Irish Jobs, against €20 per contact on Worky.

A leading Irish jobs site and a start-up social network – both charging for selling the private data. I still think it should be free.

Categories
Recruitment Recruitment Agency

CPL profits shrank 92%

Got an interesting tweet from Anne from CPL today. Pointing to the PR about CPL. It basically says that CPL is still in black. Pretax profits dropped 92% to €1.7 million for the 12 months to June, in what it called “better than expected” annual results.

Although he public knows them as the largest recruitment agency, they have actually laid off a lot of staff this year: from 483 to 333 over the year. A few good friends within them.

Irish Times and RTE have their full stories online.

Just one interesting fact. Goodbody analyst Dan Cavanagh said he was expecting operating profit of €4.9m for CPL in the year to June 30.

How wrong was he? :)

Categories
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.

Categories
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?

Categories
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.

Categories
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.

 

Categories
Career Internet Job Site Jobs Recruitment

Get Ireland Working

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

I really do!