Tag: recruitment agencies

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Blogs Recruitment Recruitment Agency Search Engine SEO SERP

Recruitment SEO: Googoe Index Saturaton

Imagine the following scenario:

First in Google for your keyword!
Your web site has one page, and the site is with that page linked first for your main keyword. One would say this is the search engine optimisation done very well. The site is first for its keyword. What else can one ask for?

First in Google for all your keywords!
When will realise there are multiple keywords your site need to be first for in Google searches. One page will not make it easier. You will create one page for each keyword. It usually starts with the page for ‘Clients’ and ‘Job Seekers’. You will optimise each of those pages to get on top of Google searches for your search keyword of the search phrase. Most recruitment agencies would naturally want to be ranked on top for the phrase “Recruitment Agency” – to attract Clients. Then there are similar keywords targeted to Job Seekers like “Jobs in IT”, or whatever your agency specialises in. If you get first for those search keywords – have you done your SEO good? Of course, you are first in Google for all your main keywords.

Highly ranked in Google for every single one of your jobs, pages and blog posts (and having tons of them!)
In this scenario, you are not really first for search phrases like the usual hot one “Recruitment Agency”. Instead, all your jobs are on top or close to the top for ANY relevant keyword to that job. You cannot really define what keywords you are highly ranked for since it depends on what jobs you have advertised on your site at that time.

If you don’t have jobs in a particular industry, or for some reason, they don’t rank as well as your competition, you write blogs about those industries. In essence, what you are doing is you are creating more content and publishing it on more pages on your web site. Those new pages then start ranking for the keywords you are writing about. What you are doing is you are saturation Google index and the Google search results pages with your entries. This enables you to capture traffic for any search phrase you are interested in. Your web site becomes an inbound marketing platform that is quite simple to use. Need some Java developers? Just write about the Java development on your site. Get that content in Google index, and anyone searching for Java Development will see your site listed in the Google search results. If you write interesting articles and they are nicely presented in the search results – anyone looking for a Java development will come to your site!

This is what I call Google Saturation. It is a process of submitting the content on your web site to Google, for various search phrases you are interested in. Notice the difference between the top two scenarios. We don’t have the ”Main Keyword(s)” we want to rank for on top of the search engines.

The table below shows the Google Saturation of 29 recruitment agency web sites and www.JobsBlog.ie as a marker. The number next to each web site shows the total number of pages Google has from each web site.

Note that this table is the first on in this Recruitment SEO series that show really drastic differences between the 29 randomly chosen recruitment agency web sites.

URL Google Index
http://www.cpl.ie  496000
http://www.morganmckinley.ie  291000
http://www.hays.ie  184000
http://www.eolas.ie  10700
http://www.collinsmcnicholas.ie  7580
http://www.icds.ie  6980
http://www.brightwater.ie  5680
http://www.peoplegroup.ie  5490
http://www.rftgroup.ie  4810
http://www.Vantage.ie  4660
http://www.jobsblog.ie  4430
http://www.frsrecruitment.com  2390
http://www.hrm.ie  783
http://www.qedrecruitment.ie  610
http://www.careerwise.ie  602
http://www.Stelfox.ie  601
http://www.recruitmentplus.ie  533
http://www.3qrecruitment.ie  528
http://www.EdenRecruitment.ie  471
http://www.accountancysolutions.ie  446
http://www.MatrixRecruitment.ie  302
http://www.gempool.ie  190
http://www.Recruiters.ie  189
http://www.placeme.ie  145
http://www.hudson.ie  138
http://www.harmonics.ie  100
http://www.Brompton.ie  62
http://www.enterprisepeople.ie  37
http://www.solasconsulting.ie  5
http://www.Sigmar.ie  n/f

By looking at your web site visitors logs in a program like Google Analytics you will notice that even linked first for your most important keyword it still delivers traffic that is a very small percentage of your total visitor’s traffic from Google for all the other keywords combined. If you have a high Google Saturation – meaning hundreds of thousands of pages featured in the Google search results, the traffic for your main 10 most important keywords brings less than 1% of your total traffic! And as such, the ranking for one individual keyword becomes irrelevant to the overall traffic of the whole site. If you want to make a success in capturing the largest possible amount of free traffic, this is definitely the route to go. Think big! THINK BIG!

Google Saturation is one of the key factors of SEO. It is also the most often ignored one.

Categories
Internet Job Site Recruitment Recruitment Agency Search Engine SEO

Recruitment SEO: Links are the currency on the web!

Search engine optimisation is in essence a huge amount of statistical analysis and a lot of trials and errors. There is not book about it, since by the time it gets printed it is completely outdated. There are two SEO Rules:

Content is King
Links are the currency on the web

Nothing else matters as much to your web site ranking as the content you have on your site and the links from other web sites to your site. If you get those two things right – you will get the free traffic from the search engines. Relevant traffic – people searching for what your web site text copy is about.

We looked at the Google PR, MozRank and Alexa rank of the 29 recruitment agencies. Today we will look at the links towards those 29 web sites. The numbers next to each recruitment agency web site show the total number of links found on the web pointing to each domain. The more links to it – the more search engines ‘Like’ the domain, and hence show it’s web pages higher in the search engine results.

This site JobsBlog.ie is within them again as a tracker for performance.

URL

SEOmoz Link Count
www.hays.ie 117643
www.cpl.ie 59629
www.morganmckinley.ie 34688
www.eolas.ie 8333
www.brightwater.ie 6766
www.jobsblog.ie 6552
www.peoplegroup.ie 4235
www.hudson.ie 3357
www.careerwise.ie 2689
www.3qrecruitment.ie 1707
www.Sigmar.ie 1630
www.hrm.ie 1453
www.EdenRecruitment.ie 766
www.rftgroup.ie 580
www.collinsmcnicholas.ie 578
www.icds.ie 539
www.frsrecruitment.com 491
www.qedrecruitment.ie 358
www.accountancysolutions.ie 318
www.Recruiters.ie 305
www.gempool.ie 189
www.Stelfox.ie 187
www.recruitmentplus.ie 177
www.Vantage.ie 149
www.harmonics.ie 141
www.solasconsulting.ie 110
www.MatrixRecruitment.ie 92
www.placeme.ie 25
www.enterprisepeople.ie 23
www.Brompton.ie 12

Any surprises above?

Categories
Recruitment Recruitment Agency

National Recruitment Federation Conference 2011

Jonathan Campbell at NRF 2011The Conference entitled ‘Recruitment 2011 – The Way Forward” in City West Hotel on Thursday 12th of May focused on the dynamic tools and skill sets the industry needs to embrace in order to approach the coming year with confidence. With a line up of excellent speakers from around the globe, a full schedule has been designed to arm the delegates with training, advice, and tips to enhance their business skills well into the future.

NRF President Colin Donnery said, ”The Irish economy has probably had its most challenging 12 months ever but there is an optimism returning to businesses in most sectors. The recruitment sector has proven its resilience during this period with agencies providing the flexible staffing solutions that have helped our clients get through the worst and grow into the future. Impending changes in legislation this year will have an impact on how we do business in our temporary labour markets so it is vital we are ready for all eventualities. With this in mind we have chosen a strong line up of Global expert speakers who will impart information on trends, legislation and what the future holds for the Recruitment Industry in Ireland.

With the new impending legislation for Agency workers coming into effect in December this year the Federation invited the NRF members to bring along their HR Clients. It resulted in the probably largest attendance of any NRF Conference lately.

Speakers:
Mr John Perry TD at National Recruitment Federation Conference 2011Mr, John Perry TD

Wikipedia: John Perry (born 15 August 1956) is an Irish Fine Gael politician. He is currently a Teachta Dála (TD) for the Sligo–North Leitrim constituency,[1] and the Minister of State for Small Business.

Perry was born in Ballymote, County Sligo. He was educated at Ballymote National School and Corran College, Ballymote. Perry was first elected to Dáil Éireann at the 1997 general election for the constituency and has retained his seat since.[2] In 1997, he became Fine Gael spokesperson on Science, Technology, Small Business and Enterprise, and the Border Counties. In June 2000, he was appointed Assistant Director of Organisation and Deputy spokesperson with special responsibility for Border Issues. He held this post until February 2001.

Between September 2002 and October 2004 he was Vice-Chairman of the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Communications and Natural Resources. He has also served as Chairman of the Dáil Public Accounts Committee. In October 2004, he was appointed to the position as party spokesperson for the Marine, in Enda Kenny’s Front Bench. He was demoted from the Front Bench after a reshuffle following the 2007 general election. He was a member of Sligo County Council from 1999 to 2004, representing the Sligo–Strandhill electoral area.

In July 2010, he was appointed as party spokesperson on Small Business.[3] On 10 March 2011, he was appointed as Minister of State for Small Business.

Peter Cosgrove at National Recruitment Federation Conference 2011Chairperson: Peter Cosgrove, Vice President NRF
Peter joined the NRF committee in July 2009 and was elected to the role of Vice President in October 2010. Peter started his career in banking with JP Morgan before working with PWC in London as a management consultant. He began his career in recruitment in 2000 with Robert Walters, subsequently with Hudson in 2003 and currently is a Director with CPL. Peter has a strong background in running a sales business as well as turning businesses around through strategic and operational initiatives demonstrated in recruitment roles and previously in his PWC career. Peter is a regular contributor to the national media on areas of recruitment, assessment and retention as well as a speaker at industry events. Peter is also a Board member of the not for profit organisation Junior Achievement an organisation targeted at keeping students in schools to improve their education.

Colin Donnery President National Recruitment Federation Conference 2011Colin Donnery, NRF President
Colin has been working in the recruitment industry since 1998. Initially working with an international IT consultancy he has also managed agencies in the Sales and Marketing, Hospitality, Engineering, construction and scientific sectors. Colin has been working with FRS Recruitment since 2003 as general manager , FRS specialise in the provision of bespoke labour supply and permanent recruitment solutions across all sectors in Ireland and internationally.

Frank Collins at National Recruitment Federation Conference 2011Frank Collins, NRF Legislation expert
Director of Compliance and Regulatory Affairs at Parc Aviation Limited.
Frank is a Fellow of the Chartered Accountants in Ireland and has a Bachelor of Business Studies Degree from Trinity College. He also lectures in Trinity College on the Business and Information Technology Degree course.

Tony Goodwig at National Recruitment Federation Conference 2011Tony Goodwin, Antal International
Tony Goodwin is the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Antal International, a global management and executive recruitment company and one of the fastest growing business services organisations in emerging markets such as China, Eastern Europe and India. Antal now has 92 offices in 32 countries around the world. A graduate of Middlesex University, Tony trained as a Chartered Accountant before moving into financial recruitment where he ran operations for HW Group (now part of Hudson). In 1993, spotting the potential of the new professional employment markets in the former Warsaw Pact countries, he set up his own business with an office in Budapest in Hungary and named the company Antal – Hungarian for ‘Tony’. Since then Tony and his team have developed substantial businesses in highly challenging environments across the globe, including both Russia and China. Tony has completed a book ‘How They Blew It’ which was published in July 2010. In June 2010, Tony was named as one of the country’s top businessmen after being awarded a prize at the Ernst & Young London & South Entrepreneur of the Year Awards 2010.

Ann Swain, APSCO
Ann Swain is the Chief Executive of The Association of Professional Staffing Companies, formed by the merger of the Association of Technology Staffing Companies and the Forum of Professional Recruiters in January 2009. APSCo provides a strong and united voice for those recruitment firms involved in the acquisition of business professionals on behalf of their clients on a permanent or flexible basis. Ann has a wealth of experience in the professional recruitment market as a recruiter, manager, trainer, sales director, managing director and spent a few years on the client side of the fence as an HR Manager. She was the founder, in 1988 of Learning Curve, the specialist recruitment industry training company which was acquired by the Delphi Group in 1997. Ann’s first, very successful, business book ‘The Professional Recruiter’s Handbook’ was published by Kogan Page in 2009 and has become a business best seller. Ann is a well-respected authority in our industry, a hugely popular international speaker and a passionate advocate for the UK Recruitment Profession.

Jonathan Campbell at NRF 2011Jonathan Campbell, Social Talent
Jonathan has worked as a Recruiter in Ireland and the Caribbean for the last 13 years but now runs Social Talent, a talent acquisition consultancy and agency that specialises in providing technology and social media services to recruiters. The team at Social Talent build talent communities; develop employer branding strategies, train internet recruiters & source recruitment staff for clients globally. Since forming late in 2010 they have worked with most of the leading recruitment agencies in Ireland and also work with corporates in the legal, technology and financial services sectors.

Kingsley AikinsKingsley Aikins, Networking Matters
Managing Director of Kingsley Aikins and Associates and is also Senior Advisor to The Ireland Funds having served previously as CEO of The Worldwide Ireland Funds. Previously he was Executive Director of the American Ireland Fund and founding Director of both The Australian Ireland Fund and The Ireland Fund of New Zealand. He formerly worked for CTT and the IDA. Kingsley is a graduate of Trinity College Dublin. Since 1976 the Fund has raised over $350 million for philanthropic projects across the island of Ireland and around the world. The fund is driven by members of Ireland’s worldwide Diaspora. Kingsley was also contributor to the Farmleigh Conference in 2009.The presentation covered both diaspora issues and networking: specifically the importance of a comprehensive global strategy that covers trade, investment, tourism, education and philanthropy and will shed light on what other countries are doing in this area. He outlined his four stage approach: Research, Cultivation, Solicitation and Stewardship.

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 CV Recruitment

JOB SEEKER Workshop in CORK, NOVEMBER 10th

Following the Recruitment Workshop in Dublin, Peter Cosgrove from Hudson Recruitment is holding the same in Cork. There is a Galway Workshop planned as well. Date and location will be confirmed here closer to the date.

JOB SEEKER EVENT CORK NOVEMBER 10th

The National Recruitment Federation is hosting a free job seekers event on November 10th.

Location: Imperial Hotel, South Mall,Cork
Date & Time: November 10th at 6pm to 7.30

The talk will be presented by Peter Cosgrove of the NRF and will cover the following:

• Writing a world class CV
• Where to find the next job
• Advice on dealing with recruitment agencies
• Improving interview skills and techniques
• Networking skills
• Negotiating salaries

If you would like to have a recruiter take a look at your cv please can you bring along a copy as there will be a cv clinic afterwards.

Please email: director@nrf.ie to register your place.

Categories
Internet LinkedIN Recruitment Recruitment Agency Social Networks Social Recruitment Twitter

Social Networks – a threat to the Recruitment Agencies?

Social Networks are here! Recruitment and sourcing in particular is changing. Job Boards that the recruitment agencies have been relying for as their main source of candidates are getting smaller role to play today. The future for the job boards is not extremely bright either. Their dominance is being replaced by the social networks. There are more and better candidates using social networks than job boards. Recruiters had to follow the trend – moving their business of the job boards – to the social networks.

Job boards will not really die tomorrow. Job boards will still have their place in the online recruitment world. Most of them in a bit different shape or form. They will serve as repository for active jobs, and feed their data to the web sites with the high ant targeted traffic (do you recognise the description of a social network here?).

A lot of the recruiters are not extremely happy with the way that social networking sites are changing the recruitment. They feel the threatened. Why? They feel that they will be bypassed since employers will be able to source and recruit directly on the social networking web sites. Those recruiters go that far that they themselves do not use the social networks, trying to stop the wheel of change.

The change is here. And more of it is coming. Embrace it. Don’t fight it. Resistance is futile.

Online recruitment as well as any online business are changing. Changing constantly and rapidly (Microsoft: At the Speed of Light). Adoption spread and growth of the Internet fuel the acceleration of the change of Internet itself. Market penetration phase is shortening, and the market reach is growing.

Social networks are NOT the end of the recruitment agencies.

Internet brought the quick and cheap advertising to the recruiters 15 years ago in a form of job boards. Employers used them as well as recruitment agents. Both successfully. Both competed for the same candidate. Social networks are no different. Both direct employers and recruitment consultants will use them. If used right, social networks will be (are today!) extremely beneficial in the recruitment process. Does this mean the end of the tunnel for the recruitment agencies? Absolutely not! Recruitment agents have their place in the recruitment process, and will always have it as long as they add value. The tools they use will always the be the tools that are on the disposal of the employers as well. Social networks today, and whatever comes along tomorrow.

Categories
Career CV Interview Jobs Recruitment Recruitment Agency

Interview: Peter Cosgrove

Peter Cosgrove of the NRF will hold a talk for job seekers on September 30th in the Grand Canal Hotel for up to 100 people. To register please email director@nrf.ie.

This is a pilot test free jobseekers workshop by NRF. The presenter Peter Cosgrove agreed to meet me over a coffee and we had a short chat about the upcoming event.

Interview with Peter Cosgrove

What is Free Jobseekers Workshop?
The National Recruitment Federation (NRF) felt that it would be of great value to the members if we were able to help recruitment consultants in a very difficult period. Given the amount of candidates on the marketplace it is inevitable that recruiters are spending more time speaking with candidates but often therefore not getting enough time to talk with clients. This job seekers initiative is to help recruiters put candidates in touch with a free event that they will benefit, as well as giving recruiters more time to focus on speaking to clients to get new assignments for their candidates.

Why has the NRF decided to run this event now?
I think there is a lot of negative press out there and unfortunately recruitment consultants are getting some of this even though they are often just the messengers. This is something they can do for their candidates that they will hopefully appreciate and improve the overall brand of the NRF recruitment agencies.

What does the event cover?
The event is designed for all levels of candidates and is to highlight that the market is completely different and your cv and approach to finding a job has to be also. Specifically it will cover:

• Writing a world class cv
• Where to find the next job
• Advice on dealing with recruitment agencies
• Improving interview skills and techniques
• Networking skills
• Negotiating salaries

Where and when is it happening and how do you register?
The job seekers workshop will run on September 30th from 6PM to 7.30PM at the Grand Canal Hotel, Dublin 4 and will be presented by NRF Committee member, Peter Cosgrove. A cv clinic will follow the event so bring a cv. To register please email your name and contact details to director@nrf.ie but remember places are limited.

Give one good reason why candidates should attend?
Everyone will learn something from this event and if you are proactively looking for a job there will be tips in this presentation that I guarantee will help every job seeker get their next job!

Categories
Career CV Interview Jobs Recruitment Recruitment Agency

Free Jobseekers Workshop

The workshop will run for 90 minutes and will cover:
• Writing a world class CV
• Where to find the next job
• Advice on dealing with recruitment agencies
• Improving interview skills and techniques
• Networking skills
• Negotiating salaries

The goal is to provide insight and support to candidates who are currently in a difficult job market. Free Jobseekers Workshop is targeted at all levels of candidate, from junior through to senior management.

Where & When?
September 30th from 6PM to 7.30PM at the Grand Canal Hotel, Dublin 4 and will be presented by NRF Committee member Peter Cosgrove.

Register
To register a candidate for the NRF Jobseekers Workshop or offer your services for the CV Clinic please contact the NRF office on 01-8161754 or email name and contact details to director@nrf.ie

Categories
Blogs

Horizon Outplacement by Irish Jobs

About Horizon
Horizon is the new online, outplacement service from IrishJobs.ie. Is your company making staff redundant? Would you like to offer additional support and advice to ease these staff back into employment quickly, but are put off by the cost of traditional outplacement services? Then Horizon is for you. Call or email your IrishJobs.ie account manager and see how we can assist you today.

Not only that most of the national recruitment agencies offer outplacement services, but job boards decided that they could get in that market as well. Recruitment is obviously not doing that well if everyone who is involved in it is turning their service around and offering outplacement services.

Recruitment agencies I do understand but Jobs sites becoming Outplacement service providers? Is that a bit far stretched match?

Categories
Blogs Career Internet Jobs LinkedIN Microsoft Recruitment Recruitment Agency Twitter

Recruitment Conference

irish-recruitment-conference-2009

Irish Recruiters LinkedIN Group got together in the a form of a Recruitment Conference.

It was great to see so many friends together, thank you all for coming!

We all need to say a BIG: Thank You to Declan Fitzgerald who organised it all again so well!

Pictures? Well this time around I decided I will mail you the pictures – and only the ones you are on! Just put the comment below and I’ll mail you all the photos you are on. I emailed some nice photographs to your mailboxes already, so check there first. This is just out of a respect for all of you who joined us for a pint afterwards. Please no funny faces to the camera anymore! :)

When the world’s largest professional social network is at the same table with the country’s largest jobs site and the largest recruitment agency, all organised by the world’s largest (richest) IT company… it has to be interesting. Even in the extremely sad times like these. 3 out of 2 recruiters have been made redundant in the last 9 months. I guess the room would be fuller if the conference took place a year ago.

What I took from the conference is that the social networks definitely ARE the most important recruitment tools. LinkedIN is the most important although having so slow penetration in Ireland. Less than 150 000 registered, and only a small percentage of that with a useful profile (from the recruitment perspective).

Job Boards still dominating the market but quickly losing their prior historical dominance. Recruitment advertising fees are dropping, and also disappearing with RecruitIreland.com leading that avenue.

Recruitment agencies are changing their offerings and repositioning themselves in the recruitment process. From all we have heard on the recruitment conference and especially on the ‘After Party’ – if you know how to use Twitter to source the candidates, there is a great future for you in recruitment!

Categories
Career Google Internet Jobs Recruitment

How to write a job advertisement – for Google?

Since the Irish recruiters have finally understood that the search engine optimization strategy is the key to the success of their business I get asked a same question more and more, and more often:

How do I write a job advertisement so that it attracts more and better quality candidates?

While the page you are publishing a job advertisement has the critical determining factor when it comes to search engine rankings, the targeted keyword phrase should still appear in the add itself. Also having your keyword combinations appear throughout the job specification generally helps search engines further identify the relevancy of the page for your search keywords.

Here are a few general tips for keyword integration in your jobs advertisements:
1. Job Titles
The most important place your keywords should appear is in the title tag of the page. The nice thing about job boards is that your job post or page title will be automatically transformed into both title tags and either an H1 or H2 heading tag as well. Remember, your headline should wrap your keywords in a pithy promise that perfectly communicates what the job is about.

2. Short Job Description
I’ve always found it useful to repeat the targeted keywords in the short job description, as long as it can be done in a way that is appealing to the candidate and reinforces relevancy. Since many job boards use this initial copy as the displayed description of the job, you want to make sure you are accurately inviting the candidate to click through as well.

3. Subheadings in Job Description
Another important place that keywords can appear is in subheads that aid the reader in navigating down the page. A resource that matches up well with the targeted keyword phrase will find natural opportunities to restate keywords in subheads, as an introduction to the next topical section of the page. Subheads are on jobs sites typically created using the H3 tag.

4. Related Words and Synonyms
Good job description copy should naturally result in words that are related to, as well as synonyms for, the keyword phrases you are after. Rather than mindlessly repeating the same words ad nauseam, assume that search algorithms are advanced enough to look for proper contextually-related words that support your targeted keywords. Think skills!

5. Specificity
One of the hallmarks of great job description is specific, descriptive words in lieu of bland general terminology. Specificity aids the reader by clearly demonstrating relevancy, allows for more dynamic copy, and provides opportunities to increase the general on-page keyword frequency. Make sure to employ your specific keywords when feasible within the context of the job description, rather than rely on generic wording.

6. How to Apply?
Let us not forget that we want the Candidate to apply for the job. Otherwise, what’s the point of advertising? Once again, your job advertisement should conclude with a call to action that prompts the reader to travel down the path you desire. It might be to use a facility to apply for a job on a jobs site, or to contact you directly. Your primary keywords should naturally fit in with the next step you want the reader to take.

Conclusion
The key to good job advertisement is crafting the content that seamlessly integrates keywords in a way that doesn’t offend the reader. In fact, good keyword-rich job advertisement should never even consciously alert the reader that keyword repetition is being employed for any reason other than his or her own benefit.

The other factors that determine whether your job advertisement will appear in the search results in the search engines, or your competitors is the number and relevancy of the links to the page where the job is advertised. You should certainly submit your jobs to the social media sites, especially if advertising jobs on your own web site as opposed to a jobs board shared with your competition.

Categories
Career CV Database Internet Jobs Recruitment Recruitment Agency

Two recruitment agencies go out of business for every new job board

New recruitment web sites in Ireland are popping up. About 2 a month in the last 12 months. Recession stimulates the jobs sites creating somehow.

The new sites try to be unique somehow. All trying to solve some problems that either recruiters or employers or job seekers seems to have. The real problems Employers have right now are far most related to financing the redundancy packages. The secondary problem is managing the volume of low quality applicants. Recruitment agencies have a problem that there are no jobs for them to fill. No jobs to advertise on the expensive job boards they prepaid. There are two recruitment agencies that go out of business for every new job board that pops up!

Since recruitment industry has shrank by 2/3 of its headcount nationally, there is basically no money left in it. So a new job boards are looking for someone else to charge for their services. And there is just one more type of the user of the job board – The Candidate. A new recruitment video jobs site is thinking about exactly the candidate as the source of their revenue.

I am against of charging applicants in principle. When you finished your school, did you have money to spend on presenting you to the potential employers? The result is that the service provider of such video application web site would advertise jobs in the coolest companies, and all the poor applicants would pay to upload their videos there.

The end result is that a poor applicant would be a few applications or euro worse off. The Google’s and the other brand names employers would get another trillion applications, and someone in between would get very rich.

As a principle I am far more fond of the Robin Hood principle where you take from the rich (employers) and give a free service to the poor (candidates).

Categories
Blogs

Jobs Market works for you!

JobsMarket.ie is a Social Network for recruitment. Here is a how Jobs Market front page describes the jobs sites:

Jobs Market works for you!
There are three fundamentally bad aspects of the jobs boards:
1. The job boards are selling YOUR data and you gave them it for free.
2. The job board has effectively restricted access to companies who can afford to pay for the service.
3. Your data is only visible for those periods of time when companies pay for it and actively search for some skills.

Jobs Market is the reverse of this and bring benefits for those actively looking for work, those not actively looking for work, employers and even recruitment agencies.

So what is Jobs Market?

Here’s what Jobs Market does:
1. Enables people to promote their skills
2. Enables people to publish their availability and references
3. Enables people to control how their data is presented and how they can be contacted
4. Allows ALL employers to search for people

Best of all? It’s simply free to everyone.

Jobs Market recruitment Social Network is in BETA stage. With the interesting usage of LinkedIN hResume. :)

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Career CV Database Jobs Recruitment Recruitment Agency

TalentTank.ie

talenttankieWell the recession does not seem to have any impact on the creativity of the Irish future jobs board owners. TalentTank.ie is the latest proof of that. While some of the largest ones are changing their business models drastically:

  • Jobs.ie adopted Google AdSense advertisements, and is selling pop under traffic (those popup windows that open behind the main window with some unrelated (usually dodgy) web site
  • IrishJobs.ie selling pop under traffic
  • RecruitIreland.com giving it away for free to any employer to advertise

    • TalentTank.ie has a quite different business model from a day one. This is what they say about themselves:
    In essence, TalentTank.ie is a web-based platform that provides both Individuals and Employers to quite simply make a difference in this current down-turn.

    TalentTank.ie will also explain the details:

    Talented Individuals register with TalentTank.ie to offer their talents and skills for free, for a couple of hours or days a week for a specified period, so as to demonstrate their skill sets. Employers in turn register with TalentTank.ie to avail of this free pool of resources in turn driving productivity with out any additional cost over-head.

    Basically it is a free labour for the Employers. As TalentTank.ie say – ‘no cost’.

    Thereafter, having demonstrated their net worth to their Employer colleagues, Individuals then have the opportunity to onward and directly network with potential Employers, in effect bypassing costly recruitment agencies and enabling a quicker and more cost effective route to employment for both parties.

    Recruitment agencies are being bypassed to avoid their cost as well. So Employers do not have to pay for the staff or the recruitment.

    This initiative will allow Employers become more competitive in terms of reducing labour costs and driving skills-base, which if adopted cross sectors and industries, will contribute significantly towards establishing a foundation for recovery. And of course, as an Employer’s business grows, so to will the need for new Employees.

    Employers are getting staff and the recruitment of the staff for free so they will be more profitable and as ThinkTank.ie page say – establish the foundation for the economic recovery. Staff and recruitment costs written off profit margins shoot up, and Ireland becomes competitive again. The roar of the Celtic Tiger can be heard running back towards us!

    Or did I not get it right somehow? Do you get it?

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    Blogs Recruitment Recruitment Agency

    Brightwater: Are we as a nation too hard on ourselves?

    Irish recruitment agency Brightwaters online poll for January 2009 was:

    Are we as a nation too hard on ourselves?

    online-poll-feb-results

    David Bloch, CEO of the Brightwater Group comments:

    Until now I have gone with the “ask the audience” answer, but not this time. I think the Irish are too hard on themselves!

    I am speaking as a person who has worked in Ireland for 11 years, but was born in the States, and lived in 6 different countries. I love Ireland, but recognise that while the Irish are wonderfully proud and patriotic, they are also the first to be hard on themselves. Self-deprecating humour and an almost disbelief that they really are as wonderful as so much of the rest of the world believes them to be. Even during the Celtic Tiger years, while certainly there were Irish people who believed their own hype, there were so many that believed Ireland’s success was too good to be true. Now that the bubble has burst, there seems to be the belief that it really was just an illusion and Ireland will sink back into the mire. The UK, the US and most of the rest of the world exhibit more self confidence!

    Confidence is a fundamental emotion and cannot easily be switched on and off. Ireland must believe in themselves and believe they are worthy of being at the top table, to remain at the top table.

    Self belief springs from many things, but starts with honesty and trust in the country and the system. I am therefore adamant that wrong-doers (there are question marks hanging over several government, banking and other officials) should be dealt with quickly and severely! The worldwide view of Ireland Inc is at stake. Is Ireland a country of law? A country we should invest in? More still, the self confidence of the country is at stake. Are we still a nation of corrupt politicians and businessmen (you scratch my back & I’ll scratch yours), or are we a nation of integrity and strength who will not tolerate corruption? It’s time Ireland stopped putting themselves down and stand up proud and strong. We will not accept being treated like that, we deserve better!

    Only by overcoming obstacles can you prove to yourself what you’re really made of. The recession is a challenge and an opportunity. As President Obama says: Believe!