Categories
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!

Categories
Career Recruitment Recruitment Agency

PMO Open Day

Cpl PMO Solutions are pleased to announce a Recruitment Open Day for IT Business Analyst’s. Cpl as largest IT Recruiter have unrivalled access to Ireland’s top companies in the Multinational, IT, Finance, Telcomms sectors and across the economy as a whole. With this coverage our specialist recruiters deal with the hiring managers for IT Business Analysts in every sector and are interested in meeting Business Analyst’s coming from a functional or technical background at all levels for current and upcoming opportunities (contract and permanent) with our clients.

If interested in attending please call in to Cpl’s offices in 83 Merrion Square, Dublin 2 between 12noon and 7pm on Thursday Feb 11th or contact liam.walsh@cpl.ie or Ph: 01 6146135 / roisin.kenny@cpl.ie or Ph: 01 6146073 for more info.

Categories
CV Database Job Site Jobs Recruitment

Free Irish Jobs Sites

There is more than a ten of Irish jobs sites that advertise themselves as free Irish jobs sites. Advertising the jobs is free. Some of them would then try to charge if a recruiter or employer tries to engage with the job candidate, and most of them would just send the job applications and CVs for free to the employers as well.

There are a number of business models here – where if an employer wants’ a extra exposure on the front page, he can pay for that. Or banner advertisement are available, or in most case Google AdSense is there on the site to monetise the web site traffic.

Job Aggregators would even go a step further, where not only that the job publishing is free, but they will also take the jobs directly from your job site for you.

Then there is a few dozen Irish jobs sites that are not really advertising that the job advertising is free, but if you ask nicely, you can get your jobs advertised on them for free with no problem. Those are usually smaller and niche web sites that cannot attract enough web site traffic to be able to charge for it. They usually start with a Free Trial for job advertising for all the employers and recruiters. Then they hope the jobs advertised will build the required amount of job seekers on visiting the site that the job board owners will be able to sell that traffic later on. When that does not happen, and it doesn’t in most cases, the pay per click advertising is usually brought on in the form of Google AdWords to try to keep the job hunters visiting the jobs site. When the budget for that is gone – the job site usually turns silently in the free job board – with some sort of monetising the web site traffic like Google AdSense.

The majority of the Irish Jobs sites end up in this category of free jobs sites – simply because they cannot attract enough job hunters to be attractive enough to the job hunters.

How to find where to advertise your jobs for free?

Search for jobs in Google. When you see a web site with no physical address and just a form to fill to contact them, or a mobile phone – you just found a free jobs site. The exception might be only the site owner is still finding it hard to realise that his jobs site is not really head on with the top Irish jobs sites (as he hoped for) but silently become a free Irish Jobs site.

Categories
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!

Categories
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?

Categories
Career Jobs Recruitment Recruitment Agency Social Recruitment

Job: Principal Resource Specialist (Senior Recruiter)

The role of the Principal Resource Specialist (Senior Recruiter) – PRS is to develop and deliver excellent recruitment services to the client in line with agreed service levels. A key component of this role is to design innovative sourcing strategies to attract candidates from within the market place in a cost-effective manner. The Principal Resource Specialist is also responsible for building excellent relationships within the hiring manager community in order to identify opportunities for direct hiring and provide guidance to ensure a best practice approach to resourcing is adopted.

This is a key role that requires a responsive, strategic and client-facing individual.

  • Essential to have in house recruitment experience
  • Proven track record of sourcing candidates directly & ability to source directly from multiple channels and recruit at all levels
  • Ability to deal with rapidly changing priorities
  • Excellent ability to deal with people at all levels – internal and external stakeholders
  • Good commercial and business acumen
  • Target driven and ability to meet key deadlines

Job Title: Principal Resource Specialist (Senior Recruiter)
Job Location: Dublin South
Hiring Company: Alexander Mann Solutions – global leaders in Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO)
Applications to: garreth.woods@alexmann.com

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 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 Google Internet LinkedIN Microsoft Recruitment

Declan Fitzgerald

Social Networking, Blogging, Recruitment 2.0, an all the other buzz words do not mean anything until all those technologies are utilised, and utilised properly. It is actually quite easy to embrace it all, or any part of it, and make absolutely nothing. How many web sites, job sites, blogs social networks or internet projects in all shapes or forms get published and just nothing happens with them afterwards? If you do it, you have to do it right, to make any kind of impact. There is a long list of people and companies trying, and all are in the same race. Only one or a small number can therefore succeed in every niche.

Irish employers have stayed out of all this new way of attracting talent. Irish companies haven’t made much success in blogging or the next step – recruiting via their blogs. LinkedIN and Facebook are used as the tool for the background checking more than what they are built for – for sourcing. Boolean searches, we all tried it and found gems, but very few in Ireland and it was disappointing.

But then it all started changing. And the change started with Declan Fitzgerald – a recruiter form Microsoft who calls himself – The Irish Cyber Sleuth. Declan was brave and jumped heads up into the blogging and social networking. Fairly quickly all his efforts come together with a great result. The result is actually so great that not only Microsoft will benefit from it, but it has far greater repercussions on the whole Irish Recruitment and Human Resources industry. Things will never be the same again. Declan lifted us and made us all think on how we do our business, and in some cases ‘Pushed’ us into the future of the recruitment.

So how did Declan Fitzgerald do it all?

Well Declan did a lot of things, and the result we see today is the combined result of all of those actions. What we have today is:

Blog: The Irish Cyber Sleuth: The Future of Recruitment is in the Cloud
Talking about someone’s blog is just like painting about someone’s music. Read it! It is the most popular Employer recruitment blog in the country for a reason. Here is how Declan describes it himself:
I am passionate about technology and recruitment. This blog is about the intersection of both, keeping an eye on what is happening in both industries in Ireland and abroad and understanding, commentating and theorising about what is happening on the gleam of the knife of recruitment innovation.

LinkedIN Group: Irish Recruiters
Declan made the largest group of the Recruiters in Ireland on LinkedIN. He closely monitors the activity, moderates it and encourages positive discussions. A lot of hard work and it is all paying off not since the group has 852 members today, and not just ‘anyone’ in it.

Tuesday Club
Being such a great networker, Declan knew that he needed to organise the Irish Recruiters to meet physically as well, not only over the Internet. The Tuesday Club is the meeting only for the members of the LinkedIN Group Irish Recruiters. And this is what makes it so good. Only the people who keep an eye on the future have been there. This makes the quality of discussions that Declan organises with the questions prepared up front, on the highest level. We all learned something on Tuesday Club! It is not that often to see people working the Irish jobs sites, multiple job posting service providers, ATS, recruitment agencies and in house recruiters all in the same room in the very open discussion? Recruiters sharing experiences like what jobs site they use for what kind of a position? The timing was perfect for the Tuesday Club. Recession brought us recruiters very close together as the industry. We genuinely want to help each other and care about each other. Even that we might be a competition some times. The ruthless ‘Sales and Nothing but the Sales’ approach we used to have during the past decade grew into a nice and relaxed atmosphere. Enjoyable. Tuesday Club that Declan so passionately organises is just the best that could happen to the recruitment industry in Ireland.

Recruitment Conference: The Future of Recruitment – Part 1:The Road Ahead!
As if the above wasn’t enough, Declan went on and organised a recruitment conference. Ireland has seen a very few of those, and if I remember correctly the biggest so far was the one Marco and his Jobs.ie crowd organised some 4 years in Westin Hotel in Dublin. Declan invited the top heads from the largest Irish recruitment agency and largest Irish jobs site, and some people from Microsoft and LinkedIN. A serious line-up. He asked them to give their views on the future of the recruitment. Declan was brave again since those 4 views should be all going in their separate directions. The Q&A session will be lively!

Declan does not show any signs of tiring actually. The Tuesday Club ended in him making sure everyone knows their input on the topics for the next meeting is not only welcome but expected! He names his first conference ‘Part 1’ for a reason. He already has a plan what will the next one be about and when are the likely speakers.

Well done Declan!

Categories
Blogs Jobs Recruitment Recruitment Agency Search Engine

Get Your Jobs Indexed by TwitterJobSearch

If you are a recruiter in Ireland I am guessing you would like your jobs to be advertised in real time in as many publications as you can afford. Any Irish Jobs boards are the obvious choice, and then the FREE Jobs sites that accept job advertisements. In Ireland there aren’t that many free jobs sites, but here is a free one, trying to be a jobs site – Twitter!

How to get your jobs in Twitter Job Search?

You will need to get your jobs in the format below and submit them to the Twitter Jobs Search.

<?xml version=”1.0″?>
<jobs>
<publisher-name>Your Job Site</publisher-name>
<publisher-url>http://www.yourjobsite.com</publisher-url>
<job>
<id>unique12345</id>
<date>2004-06-22 10:33:11</date>
<title>Customer Service Representative</title>
<company>Big ABC Corporation</company>
<url>http://www.yourjobsite.com/viewjob.php?jobid=unique12345</url>
<salary>50K per year</salary>
<jobtype>full-time, part-time, permanent</jobtype>
<education>Degree</education>
<experience>2+ years</experience>
<location>London</location>
<postcode>W1 3GR</postcode>
<description>Strong Applicant. Communication skills. </description>
<category>IT, Internet</category>
</job>
<job>
<id>unique12346</id>
<date>2004-06-22 10:33:11</date>
<title>Customer Service Representative</title>
<company>Big ABC Corporation</company>
<url>http://www.yourjobsite.com/viewjob.php?jobid=unique12345</url>
<salary>50K per year</salary>
<jobtype>full-time, part-time, permanent</jobtype>
<education>Degree</education>
<experience>2+ years</experience>
<location>London</location>
<postcode>W1 3GR</postcode>
<description>Strong Applicant. Communication skills. </description>
<category>IT, Internet</category>
</job>
</jobs>

Categories
Blogs Jobs Microsoft

Declan Fitzgerald’s (Lead Technical Recruiter in Microsoft)Blog

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!).