Digital Recruiting

Paul and Matt go offline!

Both myself and Mr Paul "Web 2.0, I've got a piece for the Blog soon" Harrison were quoted in the Personnel Today guide to Employer Branding this week. Nice set of articles but a shame it doesn't appear to be on their website. Slightly ironic as we were both talking about digital channels of communication!

Stop lurking and join in!!

Well the blog is almost three months old and I think we've all been delighted by the sheer number of people who are reading it! Thanks to you all and also thanks to those who have taken the time to leave comments or link to us.

Interestingly "Digital Recruiting" has also sparked a few debates and comments that some of us have been party to "off blog" as it were. It would be fantastic if we could get more of this debate happening on the blog itself. There are some people with some very strong opinions on digital recruitment out there and I know you are reading this. It would great to see you all posting comments and joining in.  Go on you know you want to, what's the worst that could happen!

There are currently a number of new articles "in production" from various people so make sure you've subscribed via the RSS feed as I'm sure you won't want to miss them ;-)

Matt

Digital Recruits

Less than two months old and we're already expanding! Welcome to two new authors keen to to jump on our vanity publishing bandwagon, old stager John Whitehurst and the new boy in the agency world Ciaran O'Sullivan. Let the banter / ranting / insightful debate commence

Sponsored by Jobster?

More perceptive readers will have noticed the addition of the Jobster widget to the blog. I actually put it there to illustrate a point (although if you click through enough we might get some cash as well!). There were only four job sites offering some kind of contextual or preference based job feed via a widget that I could find, all of them american with little UK content. Jobster won my vote as it actually had some kind of geographically relevant jobs. Where are the Monster.co.uks and Totaljobs...surely missing a trick with so many UK blogs now out there!

Is this what it's really like?

This really made me laugh!

Imagine....

Just saw the the Imagine programme “www.herecomeseverybody.co.uk” on BBC 1 (a rare quiet night in!) and it’s stirred me to post.

The speed at which the Internet has evolved even in just the 10 months I’ve been at Barkers is incredible. It’s not even that things like Wikipedia, Youtube, Myspace and Second Life or concepts like the Long Tail are brand new, they aren’t. However the way their growth has accelerated and the fact that their names seems to now be ubiquitous is extraordinary. Seeing them all name checked on BBC1 on a Tuesday night just proves the point.

It also brought it home to me that this is only just the beginning and the web as we know is going to change beyond all recognition. In some ways this hardly seems fair on a lot of companies who are still trying to come to terms with the fact the Internet changed everything in first place!

Wikipedia, Youtube, Myspace and Second Life aren’t the real Web 2.0, this is just the overture. These brands in some ways are like the four horsemen of the apocalypse. Signalling the start of the second coming and the end of the “old” Internet as we’ve know it!

This brings me onto my rant. I’m somewhat disappointed by the UK online recruitment industry’s reaction thus far to this phenomenon. Don’t get me wrong, the great and the good have all heard of it and you’ll struggle to go to a presentation these days where LinkedIn and My Space aren’t mentioned and mentioned enthusiastically.

However it’s very rare that you hear what the true implications for recruiting are going to be and how these emerging trends should be put to use in an appropriate way. I’m going to bold and say that is because most of the people talking about them just don’t understand how they work. Putting banner advertising in My Space, rushing to put “clever” videos on Youtube and developing recruitment pod casts no one wants to download is kind of missing the point.

I don’t claim to have all the answers but I do know one thing. We’ve always been told that word of mouth and referrals are the most popular way of finding jobs. Word of mouth and referrals are fuelling this phenomenon and that has already rewritten the rules for companies who make (or should that be made!) money out of music and journalism. Recruitment is next and unless we get our act together to stop just talking and start working out ways of doing, it’s just going to sweep on by past us. If we’re not careful our industry in the UK is going to be floundering in the technological version of the dark ages and we’re all going to be clinging tightly to our banners and job postings wondering where all the job seekers went!

So lets have some proper debate and some genuinely new ideas, they’re doing in the States we need to be doing the same here

Enter the Dragons?

Found these clips from the Canadian version of Dragon’s Den on Joel Cheesman’s blog. The last video is very entertaining viewing.

If I decide to become an entrepreneur I’m definitely going to the Canadian dragons rather than their more hardcore British counterparts. I’ve known job boards asked more probing questions just to see if someone should spend £350 with them, let alone invest two hundred thousand dollars!

The next big thing? What about the last big thing!

I seem to be continually asked what the next big thing for online recruitment is going to be. There seems to be an obsession at the moment from clients and agencies alike to be “cutting edge”, innovative and to be the first people to use a particularly innovation or technology in the recruitment space. Now this is not necessarily a bad thing, the UK online recruitment market is about to under go an inevitable seismic shift as the true potential of emerging Web 2.0 methodologies are realised for recruitment. However I’m still amazed that in their rush to seize the digital high ground a lot of people still haven’t got the basic building blocks of their strategy in place.

Now I’m not talking here about companies and organisation that don’t use online recruitment at all or those who think that just by using job postings alone they are going to solve their recruitment issues. That’s a whole new blog rant in its own right! I’m referring to companies and organisation that spend reasonable amounts of money on their online presence but have no proper tracking or means by which to measure the return on their sometimes considerable investment.

The unprecedented growth in online advertising has in the most part been driven by the high level of accountability of the medium in other market sectors. Online recruitment though really seems to be missing out on its true power. Most job boards will provide basic statistics on everything from click throughs to “online applications” which some companies use to help their purchasing decisions. There have also been some recent moves to try to audit and standardised these stats; this is certainly progress but is it genuinely going to be that useful?

There is absolutely no substitute for using independent third party tracking that tells you exactly what you need to know about your online recruitment advertising rather than what someone else thinks you need to know or what your job boards want to tell you! The other advantages of using a third party tracking system is like for like measurement across all your activity including search engine keywords and the fact you can track all the way to a genuine online application on your own web site and sometimes beyond.

How’s it done? Well there are lots of options out there including third party ad serving via companies such as Atlas and Bluestreak, in built tracking within many ATS systems and tracking within multi posting tools such as Broadbean. Very often a combination of all these provides the best information.

So before you run away and build your own recruiters office in Second Life or create a podcast telling people how great your company culture is, invest some time and money in third party tracking for the presence you already have. It’ll pay for itself ten times over I promise!

Launching Today

So what's the story? Well five of us like minded Digital Recruitment professionals have been meeting regularly in pubs in around Holborn for years to discuss and rant about the industry we've all chosen to spend a combined total of nearly 30 years working in! Last time we met we talked about setting up a blog and a few weeks later here it is. The idea is really to spark some alternative debate round the online recruitment industry, please feel free to join in!

Matt Alder - Barkers, Alex Hens - 33, Sinead Bunting - Mediacom Career, Ben Nunn - 33, John Buffey - Barkers, Paul Harrison - Carve Consulting