Tag: LinkedIN

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Job Site LinkedIN Recruitment Social Networks Social Recruitment

How to use LinkedIn Skills Endorsements for Recruitment?

How to make sense of the LinkedIn Skills Endorsements?

LinkedIn Skills Endorsements is not the first time the Skills have been implemented as a part of a personal LinkedIn Profile. Some iterations had a self-scoring of out to 5 or 10 skills. Then just a pure 50 word skills. The current way the skills are implemented is by far the best I the whole history of LinkedIn! Why?

Crowdsourcing

What you say about yourself in your LinkedIn profile if more often than not a TRUE reflection of you. Your LinkedIn profile as your CV or a resume is a reflection of the portion of you that you want to show to the hiring manager of your next dream job. If that is not the case, we need to talk about it!

What your LinkedIn connections tell about you, by clicking on your Skills listed tells a whole different picture about you. In most cases the far more accurate one than the rest of your LinkedIn Profile.

How to use LinkedIn Skills Endorsements for Recruitment?

The challenge is to assess what endorsements are really valid ones, and what ones are the result of the gamification LinkedIn have created in this Skills environment. What it means is that all the skills endorsements are not the same (value).

Here is How to analyse the value of the LinkedIn Endorsement

It is quite similar to the Google PageRank algorithm actually. The more people have endorsed my skill “X”, the more valuable is my endorsement given to someone else for the same skill. Why? The more endorsements I got for a certain skill, the more likely is that I actually know about it. The more I know about the skill the more valid my endorsement for the same skill is.

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Career Internet Job Site Jobs LinkedIN Recruitment

Recruiting a Pope on LinkedIn

An interesting job post I Stumbled Upon,… (not really, I saw it on Mashable). It is for a Pope. Is it a good job spec? I’ll let you be the judge of it yourself:
popelinkedin1
popelinkedin2

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Internet Job Site LinkedIN Recruitment SEO Social Networks Social Recruitment

New LinkedIn Profile is good (for Recruiters)!

The LinkedIn haven’t really updated the Profile section for far too long time. It becomes a bit archaic in fact, so a new profile is really welcome. It is far easier to read and more importantly scan, as we consume the web sites. It also tells you far more about the person than the any older LinkedIn Profile version did.

One feature that really helps the recruiter to assess the potential candidate from his LinkedIn profile is the ability to quickly assess the candidate’s connections. You have a choice to display the connections by:

  • Company
  • School
  • Location
  • Industry

By looking at the graphical representation of your LinkedIn connections grouped by and industry the recruiter can quickly get what type of people the candidate is connected to on the social network.

It tells a lot about the person when you can see what schools are the people his connections are from. What companies do the candidate’s contacts work for is priceless. Location and industry profiles of the candidates LinkedIn contacts just add to the complete picture of a candidate.

All this data combined gives you very quickly a profile of the candidate’s connections. This data can help a recruiter profile a candidate much better than by just looking at a very static data, a document like a CV or the (old) LinkedIn profile.

Where LinkedIn could improve the display is in including what the number represents as opposed to displaying just the number of the connections in each group. It is annoying to have to put a mouse over each circle to find out what company or country the contacts are from. A tag cloud would be far more usefully display. A company name printed and on mouse over the exact number of the connections in that company? Would you agree?

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Career Job Site Jobs LinkedIN Recruitment Social Networks Social Recruitment

What is the No.1 job board / search engine you use to search for jobs?

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Career Internet Interview Job Site Recruitment Social Networks Social Recruitment

Interview with Cameron Worth

Cameron is the organiser of the International Recruitment Conference that is taking place this Friday in Dublin. He is really passionate about organising it and really a pleasure to deal with. Here is a short ‘Interview’ we had a few days ago with the upcoming International Recruitment Conference as a topic.

Q. Tell us about yourself and your company

A. My main background is in organising Recruitment Fairs and also heading up the business development team for a network of Multilingual Job Boards. Having organised Conferences in previous companies I am now offering the International Recruitment market something different.

Q. Explain to me what the IRC is about in 20 words

A Conference for International Corporate Recruiters to connect, learn and respond to industry changes. 2011 is focused on Social Media Recruiting.

Q. What is the speakers line-up looking like?

A. Fantastic if I may say so myself. As well as yourself speaking we have the likes of Bill Boorman, who is just an absolute fountain of Social Media knowledge. We also have Data Protection expert Rob Corbet from Arthur Cox, Niamh Hall as well who is a Trademark attorney and is going to be looking at how brands can be protected on-line. LinkedIn are doing a 30 minute Q&A with the audience and to finish off we have the EMEA Recruitment Director from Oracle, a man by the name of Kevin Blair who is an excellent speaker.

Q. What are the intentions of the IRC?

A. A complete Monopoly on Social Media! Every tweet, status update, LinkedIn group, friend request will have to be approved by us. Only joking, we really just want to promote Social Media properly in the context of recruitment. A lot is being done but not a lot of it is done properly (one such exception is Peter Cosgrove’s training sessions which really seem to be very well-received).

Q. What do you want people to go away with?

A. A more informed opinion on Social Media Recruiting, new contacts in the industry, a deeper understanding of the potential issues with Social Media….Also the pen and conference guide as they look great!

Q. Is there plans for the future with your conferences?

There is and there isn’t. There is in terms of ‘Yes we will be doing these conferences in 2012 and beyond’ but there isn’t in terms of Subject Matter for these type of events. What is most important with these conferences, and what really infuriates me sometimes with other conferences, is that relevance is key. 1 year ago the market wouldn’t have been right for a conference like the one we have on Friday, so what is to stop this subject matter being dated and irrelevant in a further 12 months.

What is sure is that the conferences will always be based around the corporate recruitment industry and the current hot topics in the market at the time of the conferences.

When – Friday March 11th
Where – Guinness Storehouse, Dublin 8

More information on the International Recruiters Conference can be found at http://www.bilingualpeople.ie/conference
LinkedIn Group http://www.linkedin.com/groups?about=&gid=3770622&trk=anet_ug_grppro

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Career Internet Job Site Jobs Recruitment Search Engine Social Networks Social Recruitment

Simply Hired releases their first-ever UK Today’s Job Seeker Report

SimplyHired.co.uk has released it’s first annual Today’s Job Seeker report for the UK market. Based on the results of more than 60 user polls conducted on the site since October 2009, the report provides the industry’s most comprehensive picture of job seekers and their interests, behaviours and motivations. To download the full report visit http://scr.bi/ukjobseekerreport.

Highlights of the report include:
• Today’s job seekers say the most important consideration when looking for a job is work-life balance (36%)
• 69% of job seekers are willing to take a pay cut to avoid redundancy
• More than half of job seekers use social media sites in their job search, including Facebook (18%) and Linkedin (31%)

Gautam Godhwani, co-founder and chief executive officer, Simply Hired, said: “The current recession has created a new group of candidates, distinctive in their job search methods and what they want from their career. Today’s job seeker is part of a selective, independent and passionate group actively searching for work through social networking and personalised online job sites. We are pleased to share this data through our first UK Today’s Job Seeker Report.”

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Career CV Database Internet Job Site LinkedIN Recruitment Social Networks Social Recruitment

LinkedIn 2010

The following series of articles I will write about the long list of changes LinkedIn have brought in lately, and how does it all reflect the recruitment process in Ireland. The main topics are:
• Free Job Advertising by LinkedIn
• Paid Job Seeker Account on LinkedIn
• Why Would I Pay LinkedIn?
• LinkedIn Future – Advertising Platform

If there is any topic in relation to LinkedIn you think I missed – please let me know in the comments from below, and I will do my best to include it.

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Career CV Database Job Site LinkedIN Recruitment Social Networks Social Recruitment

Paid Job Seeker Account on LinkedIn

Dara O’Briain defined how wrong one can be in the eyes of the Irish low as:
1. there is all this stuff which comes under: That’s grand
2. then it moves into: Ah now don’t push it
3. … and finally it comes under: Right now you’re takin the piss, and that’s when the police come in.

LinkedIn is also placing the job seekers in three categories and offering a product for each. If you are looking for a job you should pay different fee based on how desperately you feel:
1. Basic Job Seeker
2. Job Seeker
3. Job Seeker Plus

What those get you is that you: Get noticed by recruiters with a Job Seeker Badge. And you can send some from 0 to 10 LinkedIn messages called inMails to other LinkedIn members.

Large numbers of us Irish feel a bit strange with this public display of interest in another job that you present with your profile on LinkedIn. In the US, people are in fact far more honest on the labor market. The size makes a difference, and Americans are far more mobile within the country. The way we are is we are looking for a job close to where we live. A Cork-man will hardly even contemplate to move to Limerick just because there is a better job there. Americans would move thousands of miles away easily for a better opportunity. So when social media comes into play where you publicly state your intentions (and what you feel about your current employer), we have a problem here. Everyone knows everyone, and have a cousin that knows someone, etc. So the job seekers accounts in Ireland can actually be looked in Dara’s classification as well. This time it is a classification of a job seeker – how badly do you want a (new) job? LinkedIn accounts here should be renamed as:
1. Basic Account (just paying and faking I am not looking!) – I am grand.
2. Job Seeker (coming out aren’t we?) – Don’t push it!
3. Plus- Right now you’re takin the piss, and that’s when the HR come in!

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Career CV Database Internet Job Site LinkedIN Recruitment Social Networks Social Recruitment

Free Job Advertising on LinkedIn

Well, we all know that job advertising on LinkedIn is for most of us, far from free. With a lack of a volume discount that is the industry standard in within job board, LinkedIn actually priced themselves far too high. For that reason, the number of job advertisements sold in Europe was always really symbolic. It was always just a handful US multinationals with jobs in Ireland advertised.

LinkedIn decided to give away free job advertisement to recruiters. They know the ‘First Time Free, Pay Later’ model only too well. Remember, for a number of years, LinkedIn was 100% free to anyone. Only in the last couple years they brought in the paid LinkedIn Recruiter product, than all the different paid types of the accounts as well. The move I personally really never liked – the paid account to the job hunters is now available on LinkedIn. I just never liked asking unemployed for cash, to help them find a job. Regardless if you call it unethical, or just super greedy, in my books it is just bad.

So how will the free job advertising on LinkedIn change the recruiters life?
If you did not get your free LinkedIn job advertising slot – ask for it. There is plenty of Irish LinkedIn staff fairly active on LinkedIn itself, so get connected, and ask for free slots.

When you publish your jobs on LinkedIn, and I will cover that topic later on it this LinkedIn series – How to publish a Job on LinkedIn? You will notice that only a certain jobs in Ireland can be filled via the LinkedIn. Do some research before – since publishing a wrong type of a job on LinkedIn is exactly the same as publishing a CEO job on Jobs.ie (a.k.a Nixers.ie).
But the real problem will actually happen if you do manage to hire via paid job advertisement on LinkedIn. You will want to advertise again – and the far too high advertising price by LinkedIn will stop you.
The only way for recruiters ‘Friendship’ with LinkedIn going forward is if LinkedIn gets a bit smarter and creates a super low cost entry level Recruiter package. To get recruiters used to pay a small nominal fee and upsell from there. The current jump from Free to Paid product for the recruiters is too high for LinkedIn’s product to be considered as a ‘Freemium’ offering.
Would you pay LinkedIn in the PPC model (clicks on your ads to jobs)? YES!
Would you pay LinkedIn in the PPA model (per CV received)? YES!
Aren’t those the super low cost, and tight budget control products? Didn’t that exactly built Google into the largest advertising agency (and platform) in the world in the shortest timeframe possible?
So here is an open letter:

Deal LinkedIn,

Stop taking money from job hunters, and get to business. Just implement the appropriate business model used by all eh market leaders in online advertising –Google and fast growing Facebook. We will all be far more interested to be placed in the control seat, and monitor our budgets in some PPC or PPA model than purchasing an unknown value – Job Slot Advertisement. Your current model is a showstopper. PPC model will be embraced instantly by far larger number of potential customers (recruiters and employers), so instant cash flow, and in the end will also bring in far higher revenue than your job slot or job credit advertising model.

Yours truly,
Irish Recruiter
irishrecruiter@gmail.com

Small note on the article of this article
To write successfully for the web you have to put something extremely catchy in the title. Most likely something that is not really ehm,… true. You need to make sure your title is so intriguing people will click on it to follow the link and land on your article. Hence the title of this article is:
Free Job Advertising by LinkedInAs opposed to what the article is really about:
LinkedIn Have sent a number of free job slot advertisements to a few recruiters in Ireland.
You are far likely to click on something like free job ads by a leading global recruitment social network – especially if you are a recruiter – which this article is for!

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Blogs

Irish Jobs feeling the heat from Facebook

The social media is leaving scars on the traditional advertising models. How your brand is represented on Facebook is far more important than the article in Irish Times. Why? Simply because of it far greater reach. Far more people read Facebook than Irish Times. Far, far more, and the gap is getting bigger each day.

In recruitment the social media is finding it’s place, and Irish Jobs Sites feel it on their skin. A dozen of small job boards simply vanished during the last year. The big national ones are in the panic mode. Here is the sample from Irish Jobs, how they are reacting to the recruiters and candidates embracing he social media sites, and just leaving their IrishJobs.ie web site. They publish a survey that shows people spend tons of time on Facebook, and less on LinkedIn and Twitter. But they take a protectionist view to try to save their (extincting) industry. So they say that the social media sites, with Facebok leading the game actually costs Irish industry – since people hang out on Facebook as opposed to work. Here is their story:

Findings from IrishJobs.ie’s social networking at work survey

Ninety per cent of all respondents said they used Facebook in general, while 39pc visit YouTube and 15pc use Twitter.
The survey found that workers were against the idea of banning these sites at work. Some 77pc were in favour of some sort of access to them during working hours.
More than half of the respondents felt they are just as productive as ever and 7pc feel that social networking sites make them more productive.
The 7pc claim that short breaks to check these sites help them concentrate better when they returned to work.
Five per cent of respondents claimed they were less productive, as they were constantly distracted.
It was also revealed that large companies were more inclined to have a social networking usage policy during work hours, with 58pc of those within these companies confirming it.
Usage among employees in these companies was lower, with 43pc logging onto social networking during work hours.
Some 27pc of SME employees said their workplace has a social networking policy and as a result, 55pc of employees admitted to using these services at work.

What this press release is supposed to achieve is a knee jerk reaction from the directors and business owners – to shut down access to Facebok (please correct me if I am wrong here)! It is the same surfers that Irish Jobs have lost over the last years, that went to Facebook. Facebook is more fun than boring jobs sites. And Irish Jobs and the likes are losing visitors, losing advertisers, and the revenue. Their business model is actually quite ‘Last Century’ really. And with no future. And it is a hard fact to swallow! Hence the scare tactics here by the Irish Jobs marketing gurus.

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Jobs LinkedIN

LinkedIn Jobs Video


How good is your LinkedIn Profile???!!!

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Blogs

For Hire: Recruiter On Demand!

A company is hiring a blogger / social media person. Senior management have spent a lot of time defining the position. They couldn’t really make up their mind if that is a web (hence IT) position or a marketing position. Number of different people contributed to the job specification. The required skills list had 50 items. From various program languages, sys admin, and db admin skills, to B2B and B2C, and B2B2C marketing skills. There was of course a lot of Photoshop, Flash and Action Script as well. And PPC. And people management. And CSS.

Their company HR have shortlisted the top 5 candidates, and interviewed them. 4 of them got sent to the next stage with the Managing Director (they are serious about his position!). The managing director is an accountant by profession. He doesn’t understand more than a half of the abbreviations used in the Job specification. As did the HR personnel (none of the skills required for this position are the core skills for the company average employee).

Fortunately the MD is smart enough to realise: How are we to hire someone when we know nothing about what that person should be doing? How are we to determine if one or the other is better or worse between the last few candidates? How to include professionalism as opposed of the ‘Blink Effect’ and just hire the one we like the most as a person?

01 440 1900 rings.

The HR Manager explains the situation. They need a blogger. And a Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and (the list was long here) person. And PPC management. And much more. Jet there is no one in the company competent enough to interview a candidate. So they get an idea. To hire a Recruiter. A Social Recruiter. A blogger, a Twitter, a LinkedIn, a Ning,… advanced user – specialist. They need someone to interview the shortlisted candidates and make the professional decision – who is the best match for the company?

How do you hire a blogger today, if you yourself never wrote a single blog post yourself? Or perhaps never even read one?

ADVERTISEMENT: Call 01 440 1900 Today for your Irish Social Media Recruiter – we will help you choose the best candidate for your company!

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CV Database Job Site LinkedIN Recruitment Recruitment Agency Social Networks Social Recruitment

LinkedIn Recruiter for Recruitment Agency

Well LinkedIn have decided that the Recruitment Agency market is to big not to service it. The new product called LinkedIn Recruiter is launched that enables Recruitment Agencies to harvest the full power of the LinkedIn Social Network.

Is LinkedIN Recruiter a good or a bad thing for you?

Well, depends from your standpoint. LinkedIn as any other social network is finding hard to monetise it’s service. The subscriptions to Employers aren’t making the desired revenue levels. Advertising Jobs didn’t take up in most of markets. In Ireland for example, there is about 30ish jobs advertised in LinkedIn at one time for the last two years (January 2009: 17 jobs in Ireland advertised in LinkedIN). Obviously not a sustainable business model. Considering and national job board even in the recession times has thousands of jobs advertised.

Therefore from a LinkedIn’s perspective, this is clearly a new revenue stream.

From the Recruitment Agency perspective, this lets them in LinkedIn on a completely different level than before. Built in protection when the staff leaves and being able to share the contacts and the communication is what was always missing element for the recruitment agencies. LinkedIn Recruiter is here to offer all what a recruitment agencies need to use LinkedIn on a larger scale than before.

And then there is a job hunter, the passive job hunter, the ordinary LinkedIn user. How will LinkedIn Recruiter affect him/her?

One thing is for sure – the amount of the job offers sent via LinkedIn InMail is going to increase. In markets where the LinkedIn Recruiter is going to be large, and there is a shortage of certain skills in the workforce, some LinkedIn users will find themselves as a target to job offers. So far it was great – since they wanted Employers to find them when they have a job for them. What happens when the Recruitment Agencies have a capacity to get to them easily is that a great ‘candidate’ will be contacted by every recruitment agency trying to fill the same position. So you might get 5, 10, 20,… InMails from all different Recruitment Agencies who are interested to head hunt you for the same role. If you not like the role – will you respond to all of them saying: ‘No Thanks.’? And when that happens next week when another company has a similar role, and you get XX InMails about it again?

So the success of sales of LinkedIn Recruiter will decrease the quality of the LinkedIn service for the job hunters that have skills that are in demand in their markets.

The trade off that LinkedIn is making with introducing LinkedIn Recruiter is that to increase their profits, they decided that it’s OK to decrease the quality of the service they are providing to their most sought users. The longer term problem for LinkedIn is what if those best users leave, finding they get too much SPAM? And with that crème candidates cut off, LinkedIn all of a sudden becomes not a source of Good passive Candidates, but of just … Passive Candidates? And even those slightly fed up by being hassled by many recruiters for the same job they don’t want in the first place?

Then again, LinkedIn limits the number of InMails that a recruiters can send a month. It is 50 a month (to multiple recipients each). So to reach more candidates and send more InMails a recruitment agency will just by more licenses. That creates more revenue for LinkedIn, so they will turn a blind eye that the top candidates gets bombarded with job offers.

Ireland might be a bit specific in that regard. Ireland is a small country where everyone knows everyone. (Almost) Literally! Online Social Networking take up in Ireland is far lower than in the US (where LinkedIn is from). Ireland is still the country where more people get a job via the traditional Job Boards than via the Social Networks. The ratio is changing, but we are far from the situation currently in US or Far East.

Who will be the first Irish recruitment agency in Ireland to take up the LinkedIn Recruiter offer?

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Job Site Jobs LinkedIN Recruitment SEO Social Networks

Jobs.ie and EmployIreland.com on the raise

Jobs.ie and EmployIreland.com are the only two web sites that recorded a growth of the unique visitors numbers during September this year. According to Complete who collects the public data, as opposed to the marketing messages from the job boards, Irish Jobs, RecruitIreland and Monster both recorded a significant drop of traffic during September 2009.

irishjobs.ie jobs.ie recruitireland.com monster.ie employireland.com

September is the very important month in the online recruitment industry. In the previous ten years, almost all leading job boards would have a record numbers of visitors in September. The current recession is obviously affecting the online recruitment industry.

Are the social recruitment sites like LinkedIN and even twitter, or Irish start-ups like Jobs Market stealing the traffic from the job boards? It certainly seems the case, since the traditional job boards are obviously getting less traffic.

So what have Jobs.ie and EmplyIreland.com done to keep the traffic rising during September? A bit of SEO perhaps? What do you think?

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Job Site Jobs Recruitment Social Recruitment

EmployIreland.ie Looks to Rebound in Tough Job Board Climate

Since the economy bottomed out and took scores of Irish jobs with it, purveyors of job boards have seen corporate customers curb or cut contracts at the same time they’ve dealt with an influx of résumé postings from the newly unemployed.

More companies also are adding job postings and career centers to their Web sites, or are using social networks such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn for recruiting, which raises the possibility that they won’t go back to previous levels of job board spending once the recession ends.

The result: falling revenue and earnings, as evidenced by publicly traded job boards such as industry leader Monster Worldwide, which in the first half of 2009 lost $11.7 million on revenue of $477.4 million, a 34 percent drop from the same period last year.

Peter Zollman, executive editor of Classified Intelligence, a consulting group that tracks the classified advertising and job board industries, says that while the job board industry has struggled in 2009, some privately held firms may be better positioned to weather the recession.

One such firm…

The above article is actually from: http://www.workforce.com/section/06/feature/26/71/27/index_printer.html

The second part of the article is less interesting and less relevant for Europe and Ireland in particular. This is my attempt to finish it up:

One such firm is EmployIreland.ie.

EmployIreland.ie is the only job site in Ireland that hasn’t been letting go it’s staff during the recession.

Irish Jobs lost their largest client – CPL. Jobs.ie is selling traffic left right and center. They even implemented Pop Under windows, and that’s surelly the worst marketing practice. RecruitIReland even went free for a the best part of the year to get jobs on their site. Loadza made all kind of experiments like Online Jobs Fair that did not stop clients leaving.

The traffic job boards in Ireland are attracting fell drastically, as well as their revenues in 2009. Most of the jobs sites are actually using Google AdWords PPC to drive traffic, since there is simply not enough ‘organic’ – natural traffic from the search engines.

The fact that the revenues of the Irish job boards will not bounce back up is something all of them are trying to hide. Or they simply live in denial.

Social networks is where the recruitment is turning to and massive job boards will slowly be losing their revenues. Going forward it will not be so rapid as it was in the 2009, but there is less and less advertising revenue available for jobs advertising in the years to come.

Even new jobs sites are not popping up as quick as they did up until just a few months ago.

EmployIreland.ie is in the unique position to thrive in the current market. It is agile enough to change with the times. EmployIreland.ie is in its core a technology company Portal.ie. The experiments with the recruitment social networks lead to a number of BETA releases like JobsMarket.ie and JobsBoard.ie, and a few international ones.

By running the only Irish real time job posting system eRecruit.ie, the company is in the unique position to….

I am kind of out of inspiration any more. Just remembered the title of the Recruitment Conference yesterday: The Future of Recruitment … Job boards are less and less part of that future. EmployIreland.ie will lead the way by innovation, and embracing the new ways of doing business in recruitment industry!