using social networks

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.

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!