Categories
Blogs Google Search Engine SERP

Links exchange email requests

If you are the ‘Lucky’ recipient of any public email address like ‘info’ or ‘webmaster’ you are most likely receiving the links exchange request emails every week now. Someone is informing you that they have placed a link to your site or that they will place a link to your site as soon as you place a link to their site. They also take (your) time to explain you the benefits of the link building.

Under the current Irish legislation even the Irish company can send emails like that to any other Irish business. I see it as an obvious failure of the law to protect us from the SPAM. It is irritating because there is no really reliable and effective cure for the SPAM today.

So should you accept and put the links to all those web sites in return from the link obtained from them?

Here are the guidelines that you can use as a test in the following order:

If the email is sent from the free email host like Gmail – NO!
If the web site does not have a lot of the content relevant (really relevant!) to your web site – NO!
If the web page where your link is has more that 50ish links to some other sites – NO!
If the web page is not in the Google index – NO!
If the web page (not the site) has a Google Page Rank lower than 3 – NO!
If the web page where your link is has a Google Page Rank more than 2 lower than your page – NO!
If you just do not like the tone in the email – NO!

If you use the filter above – you will see that 99% of those emails will not pass the test. So even without performing the test, you can safely delete and ignore all such link exchange email requests.

Categories
Blogs Jobs Recruitment

Blog = Jobs Offers?

Will a good blog make you a magnet for a good job offers? Tom is the IT guy, who writes his blog for a few years not. His experience does not really show that having a good blog will make you attractive to the Irish recruiters. Is Irish recruitment industry a bit ‘Old Fashioned’, and glued to the Job boards and traditional advertising media? Do people in Ireland get a job via LinkedIN? Well definitely not in the numbers they should. What is missing from the whole recruitment process is the usage of the web outside of the job boards for searching the candidates. Blogging and social networking in general do not play any important part in the recruitment in Ireland.

At least not jet.

Until someone ‘understands’ it and just dives into the Gold Mine of the free Profiles, blogs, professional networks….

Categories
Blogs

Hosting365 is down again…

I am glad my blog is with Blacknight.ie, because Hosting365 is down again.


:(

An interesting thing happened after the last time Hosting365 was down for about a whole day. It was Friday if I remember correctly. What happened next was an email informing the clients that the prices are going up. And not just a few percent up, but Boy that was a shocker! Again if I am not wrong a U1 slot went from €79 to €149 or something ridiculous like that. Perhaps they lost a lot of clients because of a long downtime, so they had to fix the dent in the budget.

I wonder if we are going to get the same price hike after this downtime. The longer we are offline the scarier it gets. Not because our web site is off, but because more clients might leave Hosting365, and we the remaining ones might end up paying more again. So please Hosting365, do fix this all quick, I really do not want to go through the hassle of moving my hardware from you. And I will have to if you keep on raising the price!

I guess there is a reason we tolerate those downtimes. And perhaps one of them is that Hosting365 has the cheapest .ie domain names in Ireland. Second is that their phone support works. It is not perfect, but the best I have experienced so far.

It is actually quite funny, since the Hosting365 is not the only issue currently on the net. Parts of the South Europe also have some serious DNS problems, since some countries cannot ‘see’ a majority of the internet in the last hour as well.

Did you notice that there is almost no SPAM in the last hour? Isn’t that just nice?!

Categories
Jobs Microsoft Recruitment

Jobs in Ireland – Microsoft & Yahoo

The proposed acquisition of Yahoo by Microsoft will definitely have an impact on the jobs in Ireland if the merger goes ahead. By looking at the type of the jobs in Microsoft Ireland today, the majority of the jobs are in the European Operations Centre (EOC), where the Sales jobs and Customer Service jobs dominate. There are some Localisation jobs, and some software development jobs based in Ireland, that mostly relate to the Microsoft Live for the European markets.

Yahoo on the other had was always predominately a US market oriented company. Yahoo never really had much of an impact in Europe. Perhaps that is the opportunity that Microsoft wants to explore, in bringing the Yahoo services to the rest of the world, where Microsoft has a strong foothold? If they decide for such a move that would definitely mean a strong workforce presence of Yahoo in Europe.

The situation in the US is a bit different. What both Microsoft and Yahoo, and any other tech company has to recruit there is the techies who will make the products or the services. As in the

Cnet’s article: Another difficulty for a Microsoft-Yahoo marriage: Recruiting

The battle for tech supremacy, then, is largely a battle for talent. And so one crucial question about Microsoft’s $44.6 billion bid for Yahoo is whether a combined company could more easily attract software engineers–an increasingly precious commodity. Both companies are already fighting the perception that their most innovative days are behind them.

Our situation in Ireland is quite different. Since the techies are a minority in the US based companies operations on Ireland. The Customer Support Jobs and Sales Jobs make a majority of an average Irish based subsidiary of the US corporation. So the Microsoft acquisition of Yahoo, if it goes ahead is bound to make a strong Yahoo presence in Ireland. The best bet is actually in South Dublin in the Sandyford Industrial Estate & Leopardstown Business Park where Microsoft is based as well.

Categories
Google Jobs Microsoft Recruitment Search Engine

Microsoft Proposes Acquisition of Yahoo! for $31 per Share

Well, Microsoft tried really hard to develop their own MSN AdCentre to try to compete with Google AdWords. Years passing by, but a miserably low percentage of the online advertisers switched to Microsoft’s offering as opposed to Google’s AdWords. Microsoft thought it has a ‘channel’ via it’s MSN.com, and Hotmail. But Google’s Gmail actually managed to attract new users, with a smart marketing offers (2 GB of free space!) and a Anti Spam that actually works!

So if Microsoft wants to capitalize on it’s Investment in the AdCentre and also Live.com (that seems a bit lost or beheaded) they need to purchase someone who has visitors – to be able to display the adverts from their AdCentre customers. Yahoo? Well, if there is nothing better on the market, and there does not really seem to be, is a good choice. Yahoo has the experience (remember Overture?), and is has a much better search technology than that MSN ever managed to develop. In the last years the MSN search results are actually becoming more and more pathetic. Ok to be more precise – irrelevant.

So is it a good move for Microsoft to buy Yahoo?

For the Irish workforce it might actually be good. Since Microsoft has a strong presence in Ireland, while Yahoo never bothered opening an office here. I bet if the acquisition goes ahead, we will see some Yahoo jobs in Ireland as well.

Do you Yahoo?

Categories
Blogs

The Second Generation Of Job Aggregators

Julian Stopps wrote an article: “The Second Generation Of Job Aggregators” that made me thinking. What is the next generation of the online publishing and advertising media going to look like (and function like)?

The following are the basics:
1. Web 1.0 – a ‘Classic Job board’, where people go and advertise jobs, and job seekers browse and search.
2. Web 2.0 – A ‘Jobs Aggregator’, a site that displays jobs from different job boards.
3. Web 3.0 – this is the question….

It is strange actually that the modern job boards do not include any job seekers generated contents. That would actually bring a job board to a Web 2.0 Recruitment era. There is obviously an issue in sticking a Wiki on a job board. This actually prevents the ‘Classic Job Board’ to even enter the Web 2.0 group of web applications.

Job Aggregators in Ireland and worldwide, have their fair share of success and problems. If they pass on the queries in the real time to the job boards the speed (and traffic) becomes an issue. If the results are spidered or crawled and stored up front, the possibility of the removed jobs gets higher the older the spidered data is kept.

So a Jobs Aggregator would be ‘perfect’ if it could quickly display the fresh and accurate data from the jobs boards. For that to happen there needs to be a process of the job board ‘pushing’ the new data to the Job Aggregator. The second requirement is for the job board to ‘announce’ any changes like a job updated or a job deleted.

PING

The first part of the technology required actually already exists and is used within most of the blogging engines. There is a facility in the job blogging engines to ‘PING’ other web sites – to announce a new content published. The example is this blog that you are reading, published on the WordPress blogging platform, that can be (and is this case is) set up to PING the Google search engine every time a new blog post is published. What does Google do when it receives a PING notification with the URL of the new post? Google sends it’s crawler, and in most cases within minutes crawls the new page, and includes the new page in the search index. The whole process takes a few minutes only, and that is with a very, very busy Google search engine that crawls the whole Internet.

So imagine a scenario where there would be a jobs web site that would let other sites PING it, and would send a crawler to the site path pinged her, and included the new page in its search index. The process would not take more than a couple of minutes. What that would mean is that the new job site would have the new jobs added to it in almost real time. There would be a couple of minutes lag, and that is more than tolerable. What is really needed for this to happen is that the recruitment sites build in the automatic facility to be able to send a PING when a new job is posted. That as we know is not really that hard since a PING in reality is a pure simple http request containing the URL of the new page advertised.

The next steps?

The technology of updating the jobs and especially removing them does not really exist. Updating might actually be implemented on a recipient side in the sense when a PING request sends a same URL that is already stored in the database, for the crawler to be sent to the originating page gain, and the old record overwritten. The deletion is a totally different story. The whole PING technology just does not support it jet (at least not that I am aware of it?). Perhaps an implementation of the existing PING technology could be used with a small extension, perhaps with a DELETE command sent somewhere in the PING http request.

Categories
Jobs Recruitment Search Engine

Job Aggregators in Ireland

Job Aggregators have their fair share of success and problems. As far I can remember the first one in the Irish market was www.IrelandJobs.ie. It was displaying jobs from about 5 to 7 job boards that existed in Ireland back in 2002 -2003. Job boards went ballistic!!! Every single one of them turned aggressive, and word ‘court’ found its place in every single sentence they produced. It wasn’t funny. Later the service was actually reversed. So as opposed to take the jobs from the job boards we made a Multiple Job Posting service www.eRecruit.ie, so as opposed to take jobs to job boards, all of the sudden we started feeding the recruiters jobs to the job boards. Now we are all ‘Partners’ and we get nice boxes of chocolates and stuff for Christmas from them (Except one!!!).

A number of jobs aggregators have been launched since in the Irish jobs market. Actually about one a year. You can see them stopping advertising in Google AdWords from a few months from the launch to about a year later. None of them invests in the search engine optimisation (SEO), therefore are dependent on the visitors traffic from the search engine marketing campaigns (SEM). Economically such a business model is not sustainable economically, and when the investment is spent, they tend to vanish from the job advertising scene in Ireland.

Categories
Blogs

eBay and PayPal Irish Jobs and Career Website

eBay & PayPal Jobs site (www.ebayjobsireland.com) is the second Irish Employers recruitment web site (that I have found so far). The fact that there is a web site is very good for eBay & PayPal, but the web site itself is… everything that a jobs site should not be. It is absolutely amazing that a eBay and PayPal both 100% Web 2.0 companies managed to have a jobs site of so low standard.

Just a few main points what is wrong with the eBay and PayPal jobs in Ireland web site:

1. ebayjobsireland.com domain name as opposed the Irish domain ebayjobsireland.ie – this will definitely impact the search engine ranking, and help in hiding the site from the Irish job seekers
2. A home page is just a pure branding message. Where are the jobs?
3. Where exactly are the jobs?
Click on Careers in eBay. A new page opens. Are the jobs there? No.
Click Search eBay Vacancies? A new page opens. Are the jobs there? No.
Click on Search openings link. Are the jobs there? No.
But there is a Search form. Fill the form
Click search, and VOILA! Here are the jobs.
In just 7 clicks and you are reading a job description!

From a usability point of view – that is a failure.

By looking a bit deeper into the structure of the page itself, one can see that the jobs are actually not on the ebayjobsireland.com, but the page is actually showing a Brassring.com page in a window frame. The effect of that is that no search engine will ever find a single job advertised on the ebayjobsireland.com page.

From the search engine optimisation point of view – that is a failure.

Compared to the Microsoft Recruitment site in Ireland that has even the RSS feeds,


eBay and PayPal Irish career website
wins the
2nd Best Irish Recruitment Site Award for 2008.

I also need to mention that eBay is one of the 10 Best Companies to Work for in Ireland.

Categories
Jobs Recruitment

Multiple Job Posting Software

eRecruit.ie is the leading Irish multi-posting service. Working alongside all Irish job boards and utilising cutting edge technology, eRecruit.ie can offer recruiters the most comprehensive and cost effective job posting service available.

eRecruit.ie is the only Irish ‘Instant Job Posting’, Multiple Job Posting Software that enables you to preview you jobs posted in real time on all Irish Job boards.

Post to your own website – Set up a link so your adverts are also posted on to your own website.

Integrate with your recruitment database – Export job adverts directly from your database.

eRecruit.ie ‘no strings attached’ free trial is available to all Irish Recruiters.

Categories
Blogs Google Jobs Recruitment Search Engine SERP

Irish Defence Forces Jobs

Irish Defence Forces JobsJust saw a quite unusual Google AdWords campaign for the Irish job advertising market. The Irish Defence Forces is advertising (and paying the TOP Google AdWords rate!) for their add to be displayed for the keyword ‘jobs’ in Google.ie.

Is this the first time a Governmental agency (or how do you call the Army?) has engaged in the recruitment advertising? Is it the case where Army (The Marines) goes first to the new territories, and the others follow afterwards?

Categories
Jobs Recruitment Search Engine

Monster Jobs via RSS

Just noticed the update to the Monster.ie job site this morning. First impressions are really good. Nice usage of cookies, it stores a job seekers activity history. That enables you to see je list of jobs you have viewed on Monster jobs site before. The interface seams upgraded with the right column with different data, filers and menus that ease up job searching and filtering. It reminds a bit of the new eBay layout of the eBay US web page (eBay.com – when you are logged in).

The important update of the Monster Jobs Search Page is the inclusion of the RSS feed. This enables a job seeker to subscribe to any custom developed search, and store it in the RSS feed URL that can be called from any RSS Reader to display up to date Job Search results for the defined search. Since we at www.EmployIreland.ie introduced that feature in the early 2007, more and more job boards will have it.

Well done Monster on the inclusion of the RSS feeds Jobs Search results subscriptions!

Categories
Jobs Recruitment

Best Companies to Work for in Ireland 2007

Best Companies to Work for in Ireland 2007

According to the Great Place to Work® Institute Ireland The best place to work in Ireland is in one of the 10 companies listed below:

Accenture
Airtricity
Brightwater
CB Richard Ellis Ireland
Diageo Ireland
eBay
Google Ireland Ltd
Microsoft Ireland
Sigmar Recruitment
Unicare Pharmacy Ltd

In other words, if you work in one of those you are within the ‘privileged’ ones between us and should consider him/herself extremely happy. Why? Since the rest of us DO NOT work in the 10 best companies to work for in Ireland! You who work for the best companies to work for in Ireland have absolutely no right to moan and complain about ANYTHING!

The rest of us? We can say EXACTLY what we want about:

– That crazy, crazy, crazy new layout on the Red Cow roundabout. Why do they call it a roundabout anyway? It looks far more like a mixture of a number 8, the infinity sign, and a few more 9-es and 6-es!
– The Bus that is full again, just passing by the station where we are waiting in the rain, and some idiot smashed the bus shelter again.
– CHAOS in traffic in city centre
– M50 is a parking place again. They should start charging per hour!
– M50 Toll Bridge cue forming at Malahide roundabout.
– Sandyord Industrial Estate MADNESS. And you from Aitricity and Microsoft, just keep your mouth shut!
– DART, ohh, DART…. not again? What works on the rails now?!
– LUAS where one gets that sardine feeling (who said smell?!)
– Rent up again? How comes rent always goes up more than my salary increases?!
– … and do not get me started on,… well, that’s enough here.

So if you work for one of the best places to work listed above, just keep on enjoying your life. The rest of us can complain. You cannot!

From the looking for the new job perspective, wouldn’t it be normal then to first try to get a job with one of the best companies to work, and then talk to the recruitment agencies if you do not succeed to enter this holy circle?

Categories
Google Jobs Recruitment

Google Ireland Jobs

The Google Ireland Jobs page is designed in the traditional Google Design Stile. The only ‘Outstanding’ design elements Google Recruitment or Web Development department found appropriate to place on the site is a bit of the green font. Noticeable is also the usage of the word ‘Opening’ instead of the job. That is most likely the trace of some super-wise marketing agency, trying to avoid the connotation of job – work – long hours – low salary – slavery. Instead they call it an ‘Opening’ where one could build his career – success – happy family – new house – a Volvo Estate, two dogs, and a house in the suburbs.

A bit of showing off with the always suspicious: 10 Best Companies to Word For – Ireland 2007, awarded by the Irish Independent (presumably to the largest advertisers).

Striking is the Google’s complete ignorance of the SEO on its own recruitment pages.
The URLs like:
http://www.google.ie/support/jobs/bin/topic.py?dep_id=1054&loc_id=1110
http://www.google.ie/support/jobs/bin/answer.py?answer=74881

The non existence of the proper and relevant META and TITLES just shows how Google is the company that does not depend at all on the Search Engine Optimisation, but probably has a completely different set of problems like managing the volumes than the average recruiter.

The absence of any contact details, not phone, no email not even a physical address(???) just confirms the obvious problem with the quantity of applications.

From the usability point, there is no way for a job seeker to subscribe in any way. No email alerts and no RSS. That is a decision I do not really understand. It is like saying: “We do not want return visitors!”. Non inclusion of the RSS feed is probably the biggest mistake on the Google’s Jobs site.

There is also a greyed out footer on all the pages that reads:
To all recruitment agencies:
Google does not accept agency resumes. Please do not forward resumes to our jobs alias, Google employees or any other company location. Google is not responsible for any fees related to unsolicited resumes.
Perhaps the last sentence of that footer tells you about the business practices of the recruitment agencies Google has had to deal with.

Overall impression? Google’s Recruitment web site is the fastest recruitment web site. But there is a feeling that there is something missing here. The absence of any contact details is just striking. I believe it is unique in the Irish market, and that alone makes it hard/not acceptable. The absence of the RSS feed is also surprising from a 100% Web 2.0 company.

The extensive usage of Google AdWords to advertise this site puts other AdWords publishers in the recruitment industry in a disadvantage, since Google itself does not have to pay for it. In the same time it is competing for the positions in AdWords with its clients who pay big sums every month. It might be (or is it?) legal, but certainly is not moral at all.

Conclusion: One would expect Google should do better. Recruitment obviously is obviously falling far behind the strengths the company has in other fields.

Categories
Blogs Jobs Recruitment

Web 2.0 Recruitment

The recruitment industry is changing. To stay on top any recruiters has to in one way or the other follow the change, since the ‘old’ recruitment model will soon simple disappear in most industries. The Web 2.0 Recruitment will differ greatly from the traditional recruitment in the aspect of the recruitment advertising and searching and sourcing the candidates. The combination of the whole collection of the social networking web sites, the collective bookmarking and scoring web sites, the personal blogs, corporate blogs and a purely recruitment blogs with change the role the traditional job sites (job boards) have today.

Web 1.0 Recruitment

The job boards have replaced the traditional media like newspapers, radio, billboards, and TV. After the year 2000 the web was catering for the vast majority of the recruitment advertisement business. The broadband penetration was fuelling it. It still keep on fuelling it 8 years later, and bringing it to a next level. The level of the Web 2.0 Recruitment.

Web 2.0 Recruitment

The job boards and their CV databases will start losing their value in the Web 2.0 Recruitment model that we are entering. As Encyclopaedia Britannica disappeared when Wikipedia gained popularity the similar future is ahead for the job boards.

LinkedIN is slowly replacing the CV databases in the more advanced economies like UK and US. The most popular CV database in Ireland, the Monster’s CV database will soon start feeling the heat from LinkedIN. The crucial moment will be when the quantity of the newly created LinkedIN profiles becomes greater than the number of the new CV’s Monster’s database receives a day. And that is very likely to happen in the year 2008 if the current trends continue.

Recruitment agency and employer’s web sites will start blogging and utilising all the blog related content syndication, RSS, pinging, trackback and comment features to attract and engage the job seekers. The Job seekers will from their end in their personal blogs generate their own related content, and ‘engage’ really more than just ‘subscribe’ to the recruiters offerings.

Altogether the Web 2.0 Recruitment will be more characterised by networking, contributing to the content, and engaging in content development than just traditional advertising jobs.

Categories
Blogs

Web Hosting

The web hosting in Ireland is really strange. The prices vary so much that if you do not shop around you have a chance to pay more than double for the same service.

Imagine that you want to write a blog like this one (wwwJobsBlog.ie). Who would you choose for web hosting it from the Irish web hosting companies.

The requirements are very simple. You need a Linux hosting with the Php and MySql support, and the ability to install WordPress. If you need to upload it with FTP it is OK, but if it is available in their control panel, that is a definite plus.

Irish Web Hosting companies consist of those who:
1. have their own data centres and their servers in them:
1.1 Hosting365.ie
1.1 Digiweb.ie
2. have servers in someone else’s data centre
2.1 Blacknight.ie – servers in www.dataelectronics.ie
2.2 Novara.ie – servers in www.servecentric.com
2.3 IrishDomains.com – servers in www.dataelectronics.ie
3. reselling the space on someone else’s server. That is usually your local web designer.

So here goes the pricing for hosting the WordPress package:

Hosting Company

TOTAL

Hosting/year

.ie domain/year

Hosting365

 €65.90 €39.95 €25.95

Digiweb.ie

 €69.18 €39.19 €29.99

Blacknight.ie

 €77.99 €42.99 €35.00

HistingIreland.ie

 €140.00 €70.00 €70.00

Novara.ie – Host.ie

 €168.00 €99.00 €69.00

IrishDomains.com

 €218.00 €149.00 €69.00

All the prices above are from the web sites that the links are provided in this article. All the prices listed do not include Irish VAT of 21%.

The cheapest package is from Hosting365 the total is €65.90 (+VAT) The most expensive one covered in this report is the offer from the IrishDomains.com that is: €218. Therefore the difference in the price of web hosting in Ireland can be more than three times. The suggestion is to shop around while you are choosing your web hosting provider.

Support is the other important web hosting issue besides the price. Here is the checklist:
1. if there is a phone support number on the web site
2. if the phone support is included in your package
3. is the phone support number a free 1800 number
4. is the phone support the 1890 and it states that it is a local call price number
5. call the support on the phone and see how long will it take to get to a person
6. ask a question to see if a support person understands you and is showing a willingness and knowledge to really provide support.