Tag: Jobs Ireland

Categories
Career Internet Job Site Jobs Recruitment Recruitment Agency

Advertised jobs numbers comparison

Here is a list of jobs advertised on the leading Irish job sites and the recruitment agency web sites.

Job Boards
Irish Jobs 12253
Recruit Ireland 3350
Monster 2969
Jobs 2800
Irish Times 1883
Employ Ireland 1339

Recruitment Agencies
CPL 1340
Brightwater 1291
Morgan McKinley 1178
Sigmar 671
Stelfox 627
Grafton 228
Manpower 183

Irish Jobs has by far the largest number of jobs. Actually they have about 10 times more jobs than the average competing Irish job site. Is there really that much jobs? Is that a real success story? When the numbers are so much off the scale, it always stinks a bit. Especially knowing that they own the Jobs.ie site that does so badly on the jobs numbers compared to the main site.

On the recruitment agency side there is a tight race at the top. CPL still has it top spot, while surprisingly a small company Brightwater is in second. They show more jobs on their site than a much larger company Morgan McKinley that is on the third spot. Are Brightwater really working as Busy Bees? Are they really filling 5 times more roles than companies like Grafton or Manpower? Again quite unlikely. Same as Irish Jobs web site above, the number are again just very off the chart.

Categories
Google Internet

Silicon Republic review of Jobs Blog

silicon_rep-logo Silicon Republic, Ireland’s leading technology news web site published a nice review of Jobs Blog:

Ivan Stojanovic works in the recruitment industry and operates EmployIreland.ie. JobsBlog.ie is where he waxes lyrical on the topic.
He keeps us up to date on the latest seminars, talks, new sites and companies, and tackles issues like ’10 don’ts for job hunters on social
networks’.
His top tip? Make sure nothing embarrassing shows up when you Google your name.

Thanks Silicon Republic for the nice touch!!!

Categories
Career Internet Jobs LinkedIN Recruitment

Worky

workyWorky is a Recruitment Social Network. Kind of like LinkedIN, but a few years later. Worky has no people in it jet, but has the pricing model – a bit steeper than LikedIN.

What is wrong here:

RecruitIreland goes FREE and in the same month Worky is goes live more expensive than LinkedIN, that Irish recruiters find too expensive.

Oh,… and also Flexitimers stopped charging for the jobs advertisements as well. There are clear signs more and more sites are going to go free. But not Worky. Worky is more expensive, so obviously better than LikedIN.

But Worky is global, so not in a league with Irish Jobs and Recruit Ireland. Worky is the new Monster. Actually Worky is a new Monster and LikedIN together.

Worky we wish you well!

Here is what Worky says about themeslves:

Why Worky? … The before and afterCandidates
No more dark ages of the job boards
When everybody first started using the internet it was a novelty to see jobs from the newspapers up there
It gave us all a buzz applying for a role online
And for a couple of years that model of offline or newspaper style job adverts stuck up on the internet kept us happy in the dark

But not for long
Very soon it was endless lists of jobs and endless lists of job boards, sites boasted about how many jobs they had but candidates only wanted one job and so lost heart..

Did the agency or the company get my application?
Did my application fall into a big black hole?
Who is looking at my application?
Do they like my application?
Can I not see a bit more about where this job is before I apply?
Don’t they want to know my preferences before we get off the first block?
For employers and agencies it became heartache too
Why can’t I find suitable matches?
Why do so few applicants match what I’ve asked for?
Which job board do I use?
Do these job boards spend anything on advertising?
Which one actually engages with the mainstream everyday candidates?
Along came the Upload your CV era – but full of broken promise

For candidates

Who is looking at my CV?
Is it still live?
Do I have any control?
It’s too complicated to make it anonymous?
Can my boss see my name or our company name?
For Employers

Employers grew tired of seeing that 1458 people matched their job
Grew tired of keyword searches so man who sold java coffee was matched against 1000s of java programming jobs
At last Worky…
Not a job board
Not an upload your CV mechanism
For candidates a place to create your own individual online skills profile and have it seen by every employer for free in the safe knowledge that it is anonymous until you see that they may have a role to suit. A place where once you upload your profile, you can job-hunt while you sleep.

works for candidates… Join in

For Employers A place to copper fasten the skills you want in an employee, a place where you can see with ease who matches your job financially, geographically, by skills and by work experience to name but a few. A place for employers to see first if there are matching candidates before committing to pay

works for hirers… Try it now

Categories
Blogs Internet Recruitment Recruitment Agency

Recruit Ireland goes FREE!

Recruit Ireland found itself an a bit funny situation this month. On one hand they are the main sponsor of the National Recruitment Federation Conference later this week. The NRF is the association of the Irish Recruitment Agencies, and most of them are actually Recruit Ireland’s paying clients. On the other hand Recruit Ireland has decided to give Free Jobs Advertising for Ireland’s Employers – that are basically the clients of the agencies, hence their clients. Employers loved it since there is something free for them. We all like free things. Agencies hated it since they lost revenue while their cost (a fee that Recruit Ireland charges) is still the same.

Via the various channels different recruiters have publicly disapproved the move by Recruit Ireland. All the Recruitment Agency blogs and Social Networking Discussions state the clear and strong disapproval with the move. Recruiters feel it’s not a fair move. And they all raised the question – What will their own association (that charges them for membership as well) do about it? The 2009 NRF conference will therefore be very interesting, with the Recruit Ireland as the main sponsor, and 118 agencies, most of them angry (none has spoken anything positive about the move!)

From the Recruit Ireland’s perspective it was probably a – no brainer. They are not managing to sell any advertising to the Employers, and the Jobs site always looks better with the Employers jobs on it. No one likes the 100% recruitment agency dominated web site. So they decided to give it up for free to employers. It will fill their database of potential future clients.

I am really looking forward to the NRF conference later this week since there will obviously be some interesting discussions!

Categories
Blogs Jobs Recruitment

Irish Jobs sites prices falling

It is interesting to see how the overpriced Irish jobs sites started reducing their prices drastically. I just saw this ad this morning, and I still think they should reduce it much, much more, but at least it is a step in the right direction… Perhaps a too small step and too late?

Categories
Blogs

SnazzyJobs

I guess some people will say I like writing about the Irish Jobs boards. The funny thing is that there is so many popping out, it is almost every week you hear about a new one. This is just in the last month or so:
TheJobs.ie, JobisJob.ie, Jobs2do.ie aka Spamers, Monster Finance, urHired

So here goes an interesting one. The Irish .ie domain seemed a bit too expensive so it is called SnazzyJobs.com. At least it is Hosted in Cork, so Google.ie might actually not ban it completely, if Google Webmaster Tools is to be believed.

Here are the first impressions:
1. Logo resembles any other stock logo sample, not really inspiring (as was the case with a number of the recruiters logos earlier this year).
2. Legal Stuff – company registration number and the registered address nowhere to be seen on the site.
3. Why publish so many pages to have only Coming Soon text on them?
4. The site is actually designed in some ’90-ies style. It is really hard to read the font in the menu. Green font with the green shadow on the green background? Here are some Design ideas: Jobs Board.
5. The code is not as messy as most of the jobs sites are actually, but a bit too much of that Java code all over. It is an interesting choice to have the jobs board in php, while all the leading job boards are the powered by the Microsoft .NET. Another interesting choice is
6. StatCounter as opposed to Google Analytics? Interesting choice. I would still use both, since the speed the Google Analytics is being developed at the moment, with stuff like Data Visualisation (Google Analytics Motion Chart), will overshadow most of the aspects of otherwise very useful StatCounter.

You need to be brave to show your price list online where there is nothing really anyone can buy for less than a thousand euro. It could actually be used as a company slogan:

Snazzy Jobs
Where prices start at thousand Euro

Or maybe not?

There seems to be some 250 jobs advertised. Considering the time of the year and the (econ)comic situation in the country it is not bad really. There is also 2 jobs advertised in the last 7 days, so the site is not dead!

But honestly it will not be much more if some serious effort is not applied. The designers have decided to ignore a few important facts. SEO and Usability. The URL’s look like this:
snazzyjobs.com/jobsearch.php?ok=1&v000=&v001=1&v010=0&v011=&v101=&v111=....

To find the job search you need to click on some well hidden green button on the green background. And that button is one the single page on the site? Perhaps this is a part of the screening process: If you manage to apply – you must be a smart person, so we will look at your CV!

And,… you also need to create and account with Snazzy Jobs to be able to apply for the job. That last hurdle in the application process will definitely go well with the applicant. If banks and governments are losing the personal data, should I be leaving it on the web site that even does not confirm the company registration number required by the CRO?

Snazy Jobs we honestly wish you the best!!!

Categories
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.