I did see a lot of Google logos, but this one really made me laugh:
Go an make a search, see what it finds out!
As Gretchen correctly pointed out in the comments of the Microsoft Jobs Blog – The Winner of The Best Recruitment Blog in Ireland Award 2008 the Microsoft Jobs in Ireland are actually covered on the Microsoft International Tech Jobs Blog as opposed to the US one.
The Microsoft International Tech Jobs Blog is actually on a Live Space platform that has its own advantages and disadvantages as a blogging platform. Live Spaces is great for networking since it is integrated with both Hotmail and Instant Messenger, and you can have your Profile and Photo albums there as well. So kind of a well rounded service offering a nice integration of all various social networking activities. The drawback for a blog itself is that if the blog is the only thing you want to promote, your interface is extremely cluttered with all this MSN stuff all over the page. There isn’t a 1000 WordPress Skins to choose from to apply to match you taste and needs. You are just stuck with all this advertisements for Windows Live Something. OneCare. WhoCares?
Declan Fitzgerald’s blog is in the Irish environment simply revolutionary. Two things stand out:
Oh, and BTW all the Microsoft Jobs in Ireland posted as blog posts.
Declan has got it right. It is extremely simple to check and subscribe to the RSS of fresh Jobs in Ireland for example, and there is an inviting video where Declan will walk you through what they do, and what they are looking for. Those are the two main messages a recruitment blog should have. It needs to say what are we looking for in the skills list, and show what positions are currently open. The RSS Feed is actually above the expectation here. Since this is the first Irish Employers Recruitment Blog, it has set a high standards for the followers.
Again, well done Declan, and well done Microsoft in Ireland!
Every Recruiter in Ireland I spoke to about Blogging asked me the following same questions:
How should I go about it? See the bottom post 22 hours for detailed steps.
Then the next question is always: What should I blog about?
Danny Wall wrote the shortest and simplest answer in the article Number 1 in Google – The Blog:
The Blog
This is one of the best and easiest methods of getting traffic and links, yet it is also the one that is most often done wrong. All too many blogs for ecommerce sites are nothing more than “product posts.”
So, let me say emphatically that:People don’t care about you, your cat, or your products!
That may sound harsh, but it’s true, they don’t. What your potential customers will care about is their problems, wants, and desires. Therefore, your posts should play to the customer but target the niche to which you market.
Blogs should contain articles that will be of help and interest to your target market. They should contain links to interesting news stories or bits of information. In other words, your blog should be a valuable resource to your target market independent of what you sell. Additionally, you should post to your blog every day (and twice a day is better).
So in the Irish Recruiters world, what can you blog about? Just start the two lists. One is the list of questions that your employers ask you during your day. Write them all down, one under another. Do the same for the questions you get during the day from the Irish Job seekers. An hour before you go home take a look at your lists. See chat questions keep on popping up. Are the clients concerned about the quality of the candidates? Perfect. Your first Recruitment Blog Post is going to be titled: ‘Quality Candidates’. In the article define the ‘Quality’, write a short quality matrix table, search the web to se what others wrote about the ‘Quality’ of the candidates. You might learn something!!! Put it all together in a short one page post and Voila! You have your first post!!!! Just do the same every day.
Defining the list of the jobs that are really Irish Jobs, or specific to Irish people both in Ireland and abroad is not an easy task. There are the traditional jobs Irish people have been associated before that include the list below
This is a list of the truly traditional Irish Jobs:
Those jobs are all based on the old Irish traditional values.
Where are we today?
Traditional Irish jobs are not advertised online today The modern Irish online recruitment industry does not serve the traditional Irish jobs recruitment at all. The Farmer inherits the farm from his father. Same as the brewer. A dancer, a musician, a writer, they are just born with a skill that if nourished blooms into the piece of art.
Modern Irish Jobs advertised in Ireland by both employers and recruitment agencies are some completely different Irish jobs. Based on the numbers advertised online on the Irish jobs sites the Irish Jobs sought today in Ireland are:
Pharmacy Jobs
IT jobs
Sales Jobs
Banking Jobs
Marketing Jobs
And so on…
Notice the difference? We still drink milk (or beer&whiskey) every day! Where is a Farmer’s job advertised? A Brewer’s job?
If you want to get a job in Ireland to contribute to the Irish Dairy or Drinks production, you will not get a job as a Farmer or a Brewer. What you will get is one of those beautiful Modern Irish Jobs.
A Dairy Factory will have a list of Jobs like:
Junior IT Customer Support (1st level)
Senior Management Consultant
PA to Marketing Director
HR Administrator
Experienced Process Technician
Hey? Where does the milk come from????
Good old Irish Jobs were much simpler…
The Best Recruitment Agency Blog in Ireland Award 2008
In not that strong competition between the Recruitment Agencies in Ireland
The Winner of The Best Recruitment Agency Blog in Ireland Award is:
Ta – daaa!!!!!!!
This is the first Blog used for the recruitment purpose I have found by any Irish Recruitment Agency. Well done Prosperity!!!
I do not know Matt (the author), but an interesting read under the title:
Recruitment in Ireland, Competition vs. Cooperation, and Facebook
From Matt who describes him selves as:
I’m working as a consultant, creating new marketing and digital strategy solutions for the company…
The ‘Official’ definition of Recruitment in Ireland on Wikipedia.
The Best Recruitment Blog in Ireland Award 2008
In not that strong competition between the Employers in Ireland
The Winner of The Best Recruitment Blog in Ireland Award is:
Ta – daaa!!!!!!!
This is the first Blog used for the recruitment purpose I have found by any Irish Employer. Well done Microsoft!!!
There is one thing one has to manage when his blog becomes ‘popular’. JobsBlog.ie is a bit more than a month old now. It tops several searches in the Google.ie search engine results page (SERP) for a a number of search phrases. That means traffic. Some wanted some not really.
Today I logged in to check if I got any comments on those few articles you can see published so far. And to my surprise – YES! There are 99 Blog Comments!
All excited I click to go to read them (and moderate), only to find out that I have 99 SPAM Blog Comments. So 100% of SPAM in the first month. Really poor quality of the response…
I guess it is a time to try to find a solution to prevent unauthenticated comments…
Is it a dawn ow the job boards with all the Facebook, LinkedIN and the rest of them popping up? Or is there a space for both to coexist, perhaps in an semi integrated / partnership way?
Would it not be nice if you would get an Job Applicatin with a CV and a link to a LinkedIN Profile, so that you can check if you know someone who knows the applicant? Did some of the people you know know them and trust tehm, or even reccomend them? Or a MySpace web page? Or anything else to help you get ‘The Feel’ about the person? It would, wouldn’t it?
Facebook will not replace a job board, but could definatelly help if brought in into the recruitment process. The question is, would job seekers like it?
http://www.pcworld.com/…/tech_recruiters_turn_to_facebook.html
Big Business and Blogging
In US this is the current status:
‘Overall, I found 41 of the Fortune 500 (8%) had some level of corporate blogging.’
From: http://www.businessandblogging.com/big-business-blogging/
In Ireland? Well do you know of ANY business blogging? Microsoft is trying but it is all more advertisement than a blog. Anyone else on the Green Isle?
What do people do most on the Internet? When asked, the response is the mixture of:
House hunting
Cars related searches
Jobs searches
Holyday related searches, mortgage, insurance are the second most important group.
Almost all the behaviour monitoring will record the same above activities. This is what we ‘admit’. In the same time Internet itself consists of more than 2/3 of some king of pornographic content. I wonder whom is that for?
Anyway, the major three activities, let us call them Property, Cars and Jobs here, and really very funny when it comes to the Irish Google placements (web site positioning) for the relevant key phrases. While Property and Cars have a 3 to 5 strong market leaders, and the rest of the first page of Google.ie search results is filed by the sites that just ended up there, the Jobs category seems to have a super strong competition (compared to the two other categories).
By default Google.ie shows 10 results of a search performed. So 10 web sites can be of the first page. The rest of the results has a far less ‘Visibility’. The top 5 or 6 pages are what was called ‘Above the Fold’ before, since ht monitor resolution would allow only the top half of the Google.ie results page to be displayed at a time. To see the rest, the user had to scroll down.
In general the people click more on the result positioned higher. The Number One listing in a Google Search Result is extremely important for any Internet related business. So if you are a Job board… you get the point.
Again the problem with the ‘Jobs’ market in Ireland is that there is currently about 35 web sites that would like to call themselves a Job Board. There is also about 400 Recruitment Agencies web sites that would benefit greatly from the high placement in Google.ie search engine results pages.
Historically looking, for the most important keyword for job searching in Ireland: ‘Jobs’ – there NEVER was a single recruitment agency on the first page of the Google.ie search engine results page. At least not in the last 5 to 7 years. That is simply because there are all those job boards filling up the spaces. To make the situation even more interesting every year there is more and more job boards in Ireland. Niche job boards are popping up like mushrooms all over. It really is not that easy to find the industry that does not have its own ‘Specialist Job Board’. Most of the strong industries have multiple niche job boards active today.
It really is interesting to see the recruitment agencies that are multimillion businesses paying for the advertising slots on a job boards that are a single man operation, or even someone’s ‘Second Job’.
I am really interested to see who will be the first Irish recruitment agency that will realise the importance of being listed on the first page of Google.ie for the phrase like ‘Jobs’, and actually manage to do it! Anyone ready to place a bet???
It is interesting to see how Microsoft employees know how to blog only, and I mean ONLY about Microsoft. They might stride to a game of golf, but in general, every single blog post from a Microsoft employee is about the Glorious Microsoft. No other company managed to ‘swing’ the employees as well as Microsoft does.
Declan is a Lead Techincal Recruiter in Dublin. Check the blog yourself:
http://internationaltechjobs.spaces.live.com/
‘www.joinmicrosofteurope.com is brilliantly designed using’…. something tells me I will disagree, but let’s not jump o conclusions, perhaps this Silverlignt is not as it looks like, just another Flash. I will be writing about SilverLignt as a development platform for a recruitment agency web site early in the next year. It would be interesting to see if Silverlight can challenge WordPress (on php!).
Check the Microsoft Europe Recruitment Web Site:
http://www.joinmicrosofteurope.com/
Comments are welcome!
Silverlight? I am curious to see how well can the spiders index the content on such a web site…
An interesting definition from Texas Workforce on how we actually ‘flow’ trough the job hunting phases in our career.
From: http://www.twc.state.tx.us/news/tjhg/cycle.html
‘Landing a job doesn’t mean you’ve reached some final destination. It’s really just another stage of the job-hunting cycle, which you will travel throughout your working life.’
Step Zero/Six:
WORK: Track Achievements; Connect with People; Increase Skills; Assess Yourself
Step One
ASSESS: Identify Assets, Deficits; Prepare Portfolio; Develop Résumé; Target Specific Jobs
Step Two:
PREPARE: Office Materials; Wardrobe; References; Support System
Step Three:
SEARCH: Used Varied Methods; Connect with Others; Track Progress
Step Four:
CONTACT: Phone Calls; Cover Letters; Application Forms
Step Five:
INTERVIEW: Research; Questions; Offer; Negotiations