Digital Recruiting

Now that is one sick idea!

Another chapter in our continuing series of new ideas in social computing. Again like Twittervision it's courtesy of a Google Maps mash up.

This week's tip for the top is Who is sick. Users can post details of their afflictions and their location so you can see what you're going to catch in advance.

Is it a work of genius, a resource for employers to predict future attendance levels, a brilliant way to justify throwing a sickie or just this week's blogging fad. Quite frankly who knows but London looks like a very healthy city to be in at the moment....with the exception of the poor woman near Kingston who has a heavy cold

Twitter Ye Not?

After reading about it for a few weeks, I was moved to try Twitter the other day and by so doing entered the fascinating world of micro blogging. I have absolutely no idea whether it will be the next big thing or gone by the summer but I do know that if you watch Twittervision for more than a few minutes it can get scarily addictive!

If it does catch on and some forward thinking company or individual tries to get an Onrec / Ri5 / etc industry first announcement by being the first in the UK to put a recruitment ad on there....tough luck because I've already done it!

Matt

A Blog is a Blog is a Blog, that's why it's a Blog!

Without doubt this blog has taken off quicker than any us ever imagined it would. The traffic is growing week on week and I think I can speak for all of us when I say how grateful we are for all the positive comments we’ve received about it. I’d also like to say a huge thank you to everyone who has got on their high horse and posted a comment…..long may it continue. I for one have really enjoyed the debate we’ve had so far and I’ve enjoyed reading everyone’s contribution regardless of whether I’ve agreed with your point of view or not. I’d also like to say a big thank you to everyone who has either blogged about us or linked to us.

There have however been three or four incidents now in the last few weeks that have stirred me to write this.

The point of any blog is to get people talking passionately about something they are interested in, something that other people can then comment on, perhaps take exception to and certainly debate within the same forum. The fact that the main authors on Digital Recruiting compete with each other aggressively on a day to day basis in business, makes the co-operation and sharing of information that we have on this blog even more interesting to me.

Recently though we have started to get some negative feedback from people we have apparently “upset”. Interestingly this feedback has come either via a third party or offline (i.e via phone calls or face to face). I’m all for debate and constructive criticism but would rather that it happened on the blog itself….that after all is the point!

Digital Recruiting isn’t Onrec, it isn’t Ri5, it also isn’t a vehicle to be nice about everything in the industry for the sake of “growing the market”. What I hope it is becoming is a centre for sensible informed debate. I think it is great that there is now a place where we can talk about some of the things that aren’t so good about online recruitment or that we would like to change. By finally getting these things out in the open we can start to all make things better and “grow the industry” that way.

I think we need to mature as bloggers and blog readers and take note of what they do in the US. If someone feels affronted by something that has been written about them there, they just blog back and move on. Today’s exchange between cheezhead and the jobster blog about vertical job search engines is a great example of this!

For those who haven’t then please read the disclaimer on the about page. We are just expressing our opinions not planning some evil conspiracy to “pick on people” or “tar everyone with the same brush”. Digital Recruiting is a place for everyone who reads it to express their opinions; it’s as simple as that. The editorial policy (if that is the right word in the context of a blog!) couldn’t be simpler. Anyone can post in the comments providing what you write is in someway relevant to the debate. If anyone wants to get up on their high horse proper and write as a guest author all you have to do is email [email protected]. Providing what you’ve got to say is interesting and debate worthy then we’ll publish it.

A Night Worth Networking

  Just wanted to say a belated thank you to Louise from UK Recruiter and Dan Mcguire from Broadbean (looking like Blind Date contestants with their name badges on in this picture!) for inviting me to speak at the Recruiters Network last week. I thought it was really well organised and attended. Well worth making a note of the next one for those of you who couldn't make it.

It was also good to meet fellow bloggers Stephen Fowler and Mike Taylor....you never know this blogging malarkey might just catch on!

Finally a special mention must go to Joe Slavin from Fish4, not only for being a great person to do a joint presentation with, but also for stealing the show by falling off the stage in mid speech!! I can't wait to see the video!

Matt

It's called Internet

Kudos to my good friend Howard at the Adventures in Digital Marketing blog for finding this one.

Very much in the same vein as Paul H's screenshot of Monster 1996 in his post the other day, here is a news story from 1993.

Amazing how things have developed in 14 years and how some things haven't changed at all.

They're back!

Looks like this blog's favourite American academic institution has upped their game (slightly!) with their new recruitment video. Scroll down to see the post about their last one.

Only a few hundred views this time though compared to a quarter of a million with the other one. Just shows you what sort of content gets noticed on YouTube!

Oh for a close button......

We've had a bit of feedback recently that the site is turning into a bit of a rantfest. I'd prefer to call it lively debate (particularly as I don't think rantfest is actually a real word!) and I think that's a good thing. However to keep the detractors happy there are definitely some more positive posts on the way.

In the meantime though I've got to have a mini rant about the new interstitials that come up as you go into Ri5 . Yes they look lovely and yes they grab your attention........the first time!

I wasn't as impressed the second or third time I had to sit through them as I waited impatiently to find out all the latest happenings in the recruitment advertising industry. Come on guys could we have some frequency capping or a close button at very least!!

I'm so going there!

No wonder British Unis are keen to get their recruitment videos on YouTube, just look at the competition!

Now that my friends is how you get a quarter of a million views..........

I never realised it was that simple!

Just read this post on Peter Gold's blog. I'm sure there is a blog debate about pricing in the offing at some point so won't touch on that now. I was amused though by the opening paragraph of the article in The Recuiter which he links to:-

With so many job boards on offer, and so many continuing to enter the market, choosing which one to use can be a bit like deciding at which restaurant to eat. There are the household brands like Monster and Reed.co.uk — equivalent to McDonalds and Pizza Express. Or there are more exotic specialists — wotservicejob.com or justengineers.net, for instance, comparable to your local Thai or Indian eateries.

Looks like we've been missing the point all along with the debate in the two posts below....it would seem that media planning is as simple as strolling along your local high street!

Damn Lies and Statistics

In the light of the recent NORAS report and predictable “We’re Number One!” press releases, I thought it would interesting to put down a few thoughts about research and stats in our market.

First of all, although I’ve never been a fan of NORAS, Alistair and Tim deserve a lot of credit for their tenacity in keeping it running regularly for this long. It’s also always interesting to see some new top line stats on online recruitment. However it is absolute not the utopian credible measurement and planning tool the sites who take part seem to be determined to persuade me it is

The longest running debate in online recruitment has always been about consistent independent measurement of job sites and how any resulting stats might be used to select the “correct” job board. Conferences have been run, meetings have been held, lunches have been expensed, and drinks have been consumed. What should we measure? How do we compare apples with apples? Who should pay for it?

The more I think about and the more I talk to my clients, the more I realise that the whole thing is a waste of time and brain power………in short a big red herring. Let me explain why

Once upon a time there was thing called “Old Media” and it consisted of things made of paper and analogue signals flying through the air into other things called radios and TVs. There were also people called advertisers who were interested in whether they were getting any kind of return on investment. No one really knew because it couldn’t be measured and that really wasn’t very good. So in order to keep everyone happy lots of lovely statistics started to appear and things like ABC and NRS and lots of other collections of letters were born

One day though something called Digital Media arrived. It could be measured, it could tell its advertisers exactly what they were getting for their money and go into such minute detail they could change the way they advertised on an hour by hour basis and thus really drive their return on investment. Unfortunately though a lot of people missed the point and argued for years about how generalisations and umbrella statistics should be applied to this new arrival.

Hopefully you can see the point I’m making.

This is usually the moment that someone says to me something like “Well that’s all very well Matt but lots of clients still aren’t using online recruitment. We need things like NORAS to get them started and show all the beginners how to choose which job boards to use”

At this point let’s look to the world of digital advertising in the product arena. A parallel debate is raging there about introducing some kind of planning currency that is similar to TV advertising. Again a waste of time but the only reason it is being pursued is to convince massive brand advertisers like P & G to move money from TV to online. This kind of reasoning does not hold up in the online recruitment space though.

The biggest recruitment advertising spenders in the market all already mostly all over the job boards. Granted they might not be doing things in the right way or spending as much as they should but that is to do with strategic understanding and isn’t something umbrella stats can address. The big spending laggards in our market are elements of the public sector and believe me when I say that this is not an issue that statistics and surveys are going to solve! If it was we would have reached the tipping point already.

I also don’t think auditing job board applications is the answer either. Firstly with so many different technology platforms in place I would be amazed if everyone could ever agree on a standard definition of an application. Secondly the only metric worth knowing is applications driven by job boards through corporate web sites and none of the clients savvy enough to measure this are going to, or indeed should, give away their competitive advantage by publishing it!!

Finally it would be a bit one sided to rant on about things that are, after all, attempts to grow our market, without offering an alternative.

Rather than focusing on numbers of things and generalisations why don’t we focus on users, experiences and behaviour? I don’t want to know so much about what jobseekers do and how many of them do it, I want to know about their thinking, motivation, influences and reasons why. Its only by doing this that I believe we can make our market fulfil its significant future potential