Digital Recruiting

Yet more confusion?

Well this blog wouldn’t be this blog if someone didn’t comment on the recent news from ABCE about the new metrics they are introducing to “measure and report job application-related activities in a practical and comparable way”. The metrics are as follows

• Online job application: The submission to a server of an application form or a CV by a valid user
• Online job referral: A click on a link within a job listing to a URL specified by a recruiter
• Email job referral: A click on a mailto link within a job listing intended for the submission of applicant information and/or a CV to a recruiter

Let me begin with my usual disclaimer! I always whole heartedly welcome any initiative to move our industry forward and try bring some professionalism and sense where there was chaos. This certain fits into this category so well done to ABCE for all their undoubted hard work in getting this agreed. As you would expect though I have some major concerns…….

Firstly just how important, interesting or relevant are these metrics? In terms of what my clients are trying to achieve they don’t seem particularly important. The first thing anyone told me when I started in recruitment was that the perfect response to a job advert for a single position was one perfect CV that led to one perfect hire. Wise words…..quality is key and yes I know that is incredibly difficult to measure but bigging up stats that focus on quantity of people who “might have” applied is just going to confuse things even more.

That leads me nicely onto my second concern, how are these figures going to be used? The three different metrics are not comparable as they refer to three different ways of running campaigns and two of them are pretty far removed from being actual applications. More confusion! I’m sure very soon we’ll be getting three different job boards claiming to be the UK’s number one provider of applications each based on a different one of the three metrics. There is enough ambiguity here for an enormous amount of PR spin and I’m really not looking forward to seeing the press releases rolling in!

Thirdly and finally, exactly what consultation process did ABCE go through to get to these? I know all about JICWEBS and the way these things work but surely in producing metrics like these some employer / agency consultation process should have been gone through before hand? It seems very strange that the publishers representative bodies and various advertising industry bodies with very little to do with recruitment and resourcing should be dictating how employers measure success without asking first! If there was a consultation process then I find it surprising that none of the agencies or clients with big online recruitment spends were part of this. Unless of course there was a meeting I missed during my recent Facebook addiction!

Thoughts and comments please

smoking kills

Only 3 more days to go until smoking anywhere remotely fun will be outlawed!

Smoking Kills

Wow!

I can't even begin to comment on this, I still haven't picked my jaw off the floor!

I've recovered just enough to say thanks to Ciaran O'Sullivan for sending it to me!

Rich Media or not Rich Media, that is the question…

Or is it? 

I am less and less involved in the placement of banners and buttons on the UK job boards now, especially as my role is much more focussed towards the delivery of our website builds here, but every now and then I get asked to join a client, or sit in on an internal meeting, with some of our friends from the world of online recruitment.

Knowing what we can now deliver via our websites, and understanding the penetration of broadband within the UK – last I heard it was over 60% of the population and still rising, I am occasionally led to question why, in this day and age, we are given such limiting restrictions on the type of file we can supply to promote our clients on the majority of the traditional online job advertising platforms.

The animated gif for example – a file format so restrictive that you can only do so much – especially with the file size limitations we work within.  So basic, yet still the benchmark and, in most cases, the standard deliverable for the majority of ads placed on UK job boards. 

Some allow Flash, but only in limited circumstances.  Some don’t allow ‘recruitment advertisers’ to use Flash in certain places, yet directly below that slot are Flash banners being run by product advertisers, and so the story goes on.

The work currently being developed by our counterparts in the product market can at times be described as fantastic – integrating video, audio, interactive functionality, linking within banners to different places, tracking this usage, measuring the success of the components of a banner, etc., etc.  You know, really USING the available technology to enhance the message being presented.

And, there don’t appear to be the same restrictions we are presented with.  These seem to be available almost across the board, with a reasonable file size limit, and at the same time, they do not seem to ‘spoil’ the user experience.

So come on ladies and gents, I’d like to better understand why we are still being presented with these draconian restrictions on the type of file we present.

And, if anyone deems to bring up ‘download times’ as an excuse, I would seriously like to understand why.  Surely, whether it’s a Flash file, or a gif, the download time of a 12K banner is almost the same.

And yes, I know people will come back with tales of ‘not everyone has Flash’ or ‘’our users don’t want to be distracted’, but I often find this difficult to believe – especially as they are already being distracted by the 4/5 frame animated gifs that pepper our job boards.

So, my request is this, can we start to stretch ourselves a little more – technically – and perhaps bring the available advertising platforms up to the standards of those our product agency peers seem to be able to utilise on most lifestyle sites. 

I’m sure not all of our clients will want to utilise these ‘new technologies’, but for those that do, I think it’s about time we offered them the option.

I’d be really keen to hear the point of views of some of our friends in the online recruitment media industry on this, and perhaps get a discussion going here about moving into the new generation of in-site promotional materials.

If, as a site, this does not apply to you – and you are embracing leading edge technologies and advertising practices, then just enjoy the opportunity to show the rest of the market what can be done – we’d still be interested to hear your opinion.

Cheers folks, and it is a Friday afternoon after all…

Oh, and sorry Matt, got impatient - 

A greater question pondered

OK – so just to fill in the pieces for anyone reading this a fresh. About 10 days or so ago I posted an entry entitled “Gossip – and a greater question to ponder” . In that I invited comments and promised to come back with my own thoughts. 

Some interesting comments – thanks for those.

From the way I’m looking at this Jamie got pretty close to nailing it straight off for me – the candidate decides. Well kinda. Thing is – I’d argue the candidate doesn’t necessarily know a good thing when they see it, so it’s not really a conscious decision most of the time (unless of course they’re serial job seekers, who aren’t really the target of most recruiters). With so much on offer to them it’s a decision mostly made on the basis of top line perceived relevance and immediacy, that and whoever has the greatest presence in their influencing spheres at the time they become an active job seeker.

I still firmly believe that job seekers are in the main job board agnostic. Web users these days know what they like and they don’t like, being very quick to make up their minds (low faff tolerance). Maybe be one or two job boards once tried will stick in their minds (relevant URL, particularly engaging design / content, seeming to offer the right type / good mix / spread of jobs), but when it’s job hunting they’re onto this will only bring them to you first – not tie their job search and application direction to just that site.

However, who’ll decide on success in such a crowded market is just as much, if not more, decided by the recruiters / clients. Everyone is saying in one way or another that if indeed they’re claiming to be “the biggest” then they’ve got the “best penetration” or the “widest network” or the “most relevancy”. With so many options the collective end result is actually scaring the spend back to what people know - we all know the adage “you’ll never get fired for placing an ad in the Times”, who’d have thought so soon we might apply similar to an “established” job board.

It’s with interest that I read things are not too dissimilar in the States. I’m sure many readers of this blog follow the US insight from Cheezhead – well a posting late last week covered exactly the same subject ("monster must love the clutter") with the same conclusion (and indeed I guess a lesson in history of “old sayings” for me too) – “In such environments, consumers tend to embrace what they know and dive even deeper into their comfort zones.”. 

I'd say our market differs from that of the USA in many ways (admittedly on my part being learned rather than first hand experience). We seem to be talking 3-5 internet years behind in terms of penetration and usage, the US job board market being dominated by some big players who either got to market first or have fought long and hard to make up the difference. But it would seem that in a very British push of niche market entrants we’re not actually all that different – certainly in regards to the subject of this post.

Maintaining any kind of conscious presence with passive or indeed nowadays even active job seekers is no cheap or short term strategy. Add that to paying customers clamming up in the face of a massive and confused market and perhaps there’s a dose of economic reality coming to the market - Jobs Reunited leading the way. 

I’ve steered a million miles away from Friends Reunited as a personal user. However on having a peer into it this weekend (through someone else’s login) it seems my gut feel was right. From what I saw the lion’s share of people came in and left never to return having nosed around and committed minimal information. Most didn’t seem to have updated their information over the past 4 or more years. So the point? Friends Reunited seemed to have an instant unique appeal that perhaps has been / is being surpassed by the newer generation of truly social networking sites. And if you can’t become an irreplaceable part of your user’s life (for me iGoogle at the moment) then your careers site needs to stand on its own two feet, and be better / different / more promoted than the established players. Clearly a few prime time TV slots around Ant & Dec just wasn’t enough to establish a differentiator for either clients or potential candidates within a peaking social media site. Dems de breaks.

Porn

Continuing in our recent slightly off core topic series of making statistics more interesting by presenting them as videos on Youtube........

Before anyone gets any ideas about what I was looking for when I found it, it was on another advertising business blog!! Will be back to the topic of digital recruiting in my next post

Matt

fun and education in one

nothing to do with this blog but ... well look at it and you will see

Math

Something new from the Telegraph - how exciting.

Would like to thank Kork from MAD.co.uk for sending me this press release (very finger on the pulse Mr Desai – or is that me having mine no where close to it? Probably! ;-)

JOBS.TELEGRAPH.CO.UK LAUNCHES ADDED VALUE OFFER ON CROSS-PLATFORM RECRUITMENT ADVERTISEMENTS

From June 1 recruiters will be offered a free advertisement in The Daily Telegraph with every online single job posting purchased. This is the first in a host of new initiatives from Jobs.telegraph.co.uk, to invest in and expand its online advertising offering to clients, capitalising on the success of the website which was re-launched last July.

Advertisers will be offered a free 6 x 1 advertisement in The Daily Telegraph jobs supplement, worth £660, as part of the Telegraph Media Group’s re-launched recruitment advertising rate card. Jobs.telegraph.co.uk is also building a dedicated online only Recruitment sales team in order to provide the knowledge and expertise expected by their clients in this fast moving market. This will be supported by increased investment in online marketing.

Nigel Leigh, Product Manager for Jobs.telegraph.co.uk, said: ‘Although recent research has shown that online advertising spend is surpassing print and television advertising spend we believe our clients are best served with cross-platform solutions which is why we are launching this initiative’. Jobs.telegraph.co.uk focuses on six core recruitment markets  - engineering, manufacturing, construction, sales, oil & gas, and utilities & energy. Each sector has its own dedicated webpage within Jobs.telegraph.co.uk.

Alex Foster, Classified Sales Director, Telegraph Media Group said, ‘For quality of response The Daily Telegraph has always been market leader in these sectors, due to strength of our readership and our understanding of our customers needs. This development is a natural continuation of both’.

So, buy online & get press free – times, they are indeed a changing my friends.

I think this is a move that has the potential to disturb quite a few if they choose to admit it (publisher and job board competitors alike - quite probably some agencies too), but this is surely just a natural next step, the perfect embodiment of a national multimedia publisher further bringing together their offering and maximising what is in fact their main point of difference – access to on and offline job seekers, both passive as well as active.

From the candidates’ perspective then I think it’s probably only positive, and for the Telegraph it is clearly aimed at re-enforcing and raising their recruitment brand, giving their online recruitment offering that boost through a distinctive point of difference that I think they’ve been looking for to help it compete more successfully.

Interesting move – perhaps sometimes the boldest changes are the ones that in retrospect were the most obvious, just for legacy reasons the hardest to face up to. What do you think?

Gossip - and a greater question to ponder

I’ve heard a whisper. And I guess blogs are as good a place as any to see if there’s any truth in that whisper – especially when the whisper (true or otherwise) gets me thinking about raising an important question. (Fingers crossed the right of reply that a blog offers is enough to prevent any posting being litigious, here we go).

Anyone else heard that Jobs Reunited has just made its sales staff redundant?

If there’s no truth in the scurrilous rumour then I of course apologise to anyone employed by the site. But whether this is or isn’t true leads me to muse as to whether the explosion of this and that careers site .com or .co.uk is so fragmenting and confusing the candidate and, importantly, client market that the industry is in fact in danger of once again becoming it’s own worst enemy.

Now with a pretty mediocre economics degree I understand that this is just market forces playing out and therefore an understandable and expected part of life. There are only so many people that will make £millions from establishing and sticking with a niche offer long enough to flog it on to a traditional media desperate to once again try and get a bit more of “that online action” (or at least show their share holders that they are) as they watch their bread and butter revenues evaporate before their very eyes. Them and some established online players who I guess are far better placed than I to evaluate the true worth of an established candidate / market presence over a starting from scratch and taking the smaller guys head on approach.

It’s just that even with a dedicated online media team behind me the number of sites available to try and all vying for client spend (whether vertical, horizontal, verti-zontal or hori-tical) are just mind-boggling for us – and it’s our job to try and be all knowing. And there’s more coming to our attention every week. Even with the predictions of massive continued movement of spend online surely we’ve reached / are reaching the point of over saturation and there’s a market led cull on its way? I’ve been asked about when the market will reach tipping point for clients to migrate their spend more comprehensively online – I think that before that we’re approaching a different tipping point altogether.

Don’t get me wrong – most, well many, of the “newer” sites have very credible offers and seemingly the potential candidate traffic too. If it were my money then I’d probably give them a pop. At the right price then why the hell not. All you exponents of digital recruitment know that in a candidate driven market it doesn’t take a lot to provide a decent ROI. But it isn’t my money – and my client’s budgets are limited, often very modest with it, and they’re predisposed to being conservative (perhaps me too with my arse / the future of their online confidence and therefore spend on the line). 

I’ve got my own thoughts on this (of course – when don’t I ;-) but I thought rather than pile it all into one posting I’d see if anyone has any comments they’d like to make on this. I’ll continue writing on this now (offline as it were) and then come back and post my thoughts on the matter in a few days.

So what you heard and what you think? Anyone out there?

:-)

A Change In Attitude

While watching a bit of TV I stumbled upon this and wanted to post the link ... it really stood out.

The busyness economy works on face time, incremental improvement, strategic long-term planning, return on investment, and hierarchical control. The burst economy, enabled by the Web, works on innovation, flat knowledge networks, and discontinuous productivity:

http://webworkerdaily.com/2007/04/19/busyness-vs-burst-why-corporate-web-workers-look-unproductive/

From looking at this and the clashes you have seen written about on this blog - it does highlight a big issue with the management of digital in our industry. Now I am not going to say one side is better than the other - THIS is to have a discussion not mark sides.

Well when you look at people - this can be the first conflict. The sort of person you need to really challenge and change the way we do things is NOT a typical recruitment advertising corporate player. In fact the exact opposite - how do we handle this? Building teams is always an issue ... especially teams to re-think our business. I would suggest Edward de Bonno, How To Have A Beautiful Mind as a starting point - it is more important to be interesting than to be right (both sides need to think about this).

When you look at process ... innovation does not come from formal business structures. It also does not come from business planning or attempts to talk about the future - you should not impose one's views on a problem; one should rather study it, and in time a solution will reveal itself (that was actually written by Albert Einstein but it summed up my thoughts). When you look at this the constant attempts to be the first or to do shameless self-promotion is not actually improving the industry. Intelligent collaboration is needed to improve our overall ability to achieve the migration to digital - so how can we work to improve our overall solutions.

Remove the short-term mind-set - I have got to admit I have never worked in an industry that based itself so much on short-term targets. When you look at every long-term debate. Recruitment is getting more and more of an issue for business (the Economist article earlier this year is probably the most important). So why is it that so many media owners and agencies are crying over their shrinking market? Maybe the business models of the past just do not work? If you look at Ralph Stacey, Managing Chaos - he suggests that as the process of change makes long-term planning more difficult then we need new flexible business structure to deal with this. Planning becomes more important - but not in the traditional mindset of 5 year development plans.

My final little point on this is saying we need to use the talent in the industry ... to be honest most brains are wasted on pointless delivery issues - caused by all of the above. Maybe it is time to start stepping up and changing things - it needs a new mind-set from the agency management teams + working together to have intelligent discussions and collaboration on key issues (a trading currency and system integration). I could go on but this is not a rant - I am really interested to see what people think?