February 23rd, 2010
Announcing the New Online Marketing Forum. We are shouting about our latest resource for you.
Online Marketing is the life blood of recruitment agencies. There is a massive thirst for knowledge out there. To try and meet that demand Webshed have created a Online Marketing Forum.
The forum has boards for SEO, Online and offline marketing, Social Media, and PR. The idea is that it will provide a place to ask questions in an anonymous manner.
SEO is a huge area in itself, and since SEO, Marketing, PR and Social Media all tie together, we at Webshed prefer to use the term holistic SEO. The forum is broken into sections, but for a really good online presence all of the sections should be married together.
The Online Marketing Forum is very new. As a result there little activity on it. This will change. I have just begun actively marketing the forum, and over the next few weeks it will see a spike in activity. If you have a question or a comment do not be afraid to be the first to post. After all, every forum has to start somewhere!
The Online Marketing Forum should be a good resource for recruiters who want to learn how to build both their own brand and the company brand online. It is not just recruiters who will benefit. Anybody with an online business can use the forum and benefit from free advice.
It is your forum, and will be very much user led. Enjoy it. Visit the Online Marketing Forum at http://www.webshed.ie/forum.
Tags: Forum, Forum for recruiters, Holistic SEO, Marketing Forum, Online business, Online Marketing Forum, PR forum, Recruitment life blood, Resource For Recruiters, SEO, SEO Forum, Social Media Forum, User Led Forum
Posted in Nothing to do with recruitment really, Recruitment, Social Media | No Comments »
January 25th, 2010
IrishJobs.ie have announced that the number of job vacancies advertised on their site has stabilised.
The current number of jobs on the IrishJobs site is about 16,000. This is down from 45,000 in the midst of the Celtic Tiger years.
Sectors that are showing signs of recovery are:
- Accountancy
- Banking
- IT
- Finance
- Marketing
- Medical
- Sales
None of these sectors are at anything like the strength they were once at, but the fact that the free fall in job vacancy numbers has halted is good news. Reports from agencies also indicates a return towards some economic growth in 2010.
Tags: Accountancy, Banking, Celtic Tiger, Economic Growth in 2010, Finance, Irishjobs, IT, Job Numbers stabilise, Job Vacancy, Marketing, Medical, Sales
Posted in Economic Recovery, Job Boards, Jobs, Recession | No Comments »
January 19th, 2010
Text a Job (txtAjob.ie) Jobs to your mobile phone.
I previously wrote a post about Ireland’s only free-to-advertise text alert job board txtAjob.ie (Text a Job). They offer jobs to your mobile phone via text alerts.
In the piece I wrote before I remarked that a job seeker would be likely to receive lots of jobs that were not suitable for them. This was because the categories were very broad. I am delighted to report that this has been addressed in a significant manner. They have added a further 22 categories, meaning that subscribers to a specific category will have less flotsam to contend with. This is a very welcome development.
Of course, how relevant jobs are to the user will be highly significant when it comes to people retaining the service on their phones, so it makes good business sense.
TxtAjob have also stated that stale and repeated jobs will also be automatically removed. This has been a problem for all the job boards. As we entered the recession it got particularly bad, with fake job postings and multiple versions of the same job advertised. This was often in an effort to make an agency look like they had more jobs than were actually available. TxtAjob are actively removing any instances. The other job board to tackle this was RecruitIreland.com, who moved to a credits system like Monster last year.
It would seem that txtAjob have gained quite a few agencies as advertisers, but also have companies advertising too. I know that they have integrated with eRecruit to make job posting easier for agencies that use that service.
TxtAjob have also been advertising fairly heavily. They are running campaigns on Newstalk and on FM104, where they are also sponsoring FM104’s job finder spot.
Competing in the job board market is not easy, and txtAjob seem to be doing a good job of it. Since advertising jobs is free it makes sense to post jobs with them, particularly with the media coverage they are currently receiving.
Tags: Free job posting, free job site, job board, job text alerts, Text a job, txtAjob, txtajob make improvements
Posted in Job Boards, Job Hunting | 2 Comments »
January 13th, 2010
Email addresses you should not use for job hunting
It is astounding how many people send in CV’s from email addresses that do them no favours what so ever. I have no problem with anybody calling themselves hotgirl69@gmail.com, stud09@hotmail.com or mushroom.trev@ucd.ie, but I do not want to see it on a job application. Yes It amuses me, it makes me laugh and it may even make me remember you. The trouble is you really don’t want to be remembered for your decidedly dodgy email address.
How is a recruiter supposed to put you forward as a professional in your field when they know that you are willing to use an email address like the above to promote yourself. Ireland is not quite the repressive Catholic Ireland it used to be, but alluding to sexual prowess, recreational drug taking or criminality is not clever.
It could perhaps be excused if it were not so simple to get a new email address that is more professional. trevor.sorbie@gmail.com is a lot better than mushroom.trev.
Now that that is off my chest, do I really have to go into making your profile private on facebook and cleaning up your Linkedin profile? Good. Oh, just one thing on facebook. If, like me you are linked to Saddam Hussain, Salman Rushdie, Osama Bin Laden and George Bush, just because you though it was funny… be aware that you cannot make your friends private. If you are looking for a job then ditch your less admirable, politically incorrect, or controversial friends. You do not want somebody else getting your job just because you inadvertently offended your would be boss by linking to somebody they despise.
Tags: Change your email address, dodgy email addresses, Email address, Facebook, George Bush, Hotgirl69, Job hunting in Catholic Ireland, job hunting tips, Linkedin Profile, Mushroom Trev, Osama Bin Laden, Salman Rushdie
Posted in Job Hunting, Jobs, Social Media | No Comments »
January 7th, 2010
Declan Fitgeralds Hat Tip Award
Declan Fitzgerald, the Microsoft recruiter who started of the Irish Recruiters group on Linkedin decided to hold his own Recruitment Awards over the Christmas period.
Dubbed the Irish Recruiters Hat Tip awards, Declan asked for nominations from the pool of over 1,000 members of the Linkedin Group.
You can check out the results for yourself.
While there are several recruitment agencies and individuals mentioned in the awards, it is unfortunate that being the organiser, Declan could not be mentioned himself.
Declan is a massively keen social media exponent. It is perhaps not surprising, since he is an in-house recruiter for Microsoft, that he is somewhat obsessed by technology – not that I can talk! Thus the awards focuses solely on the use of technology and ability to adapt to technology by recruiters.
I don’t know of any other recruiter who has managed to grow a linkedin group so successfully. In fact Declan’s impact on the recruitment industry was such that, after he organised his first conference for recruiters, there where whispers that he was trying to take over from the National Recruitment Federation. This is absolutely not the case, but it is a strong indicator of the ground breaking work he was doing bringing Irish recruiters together.
The Irish Recruiters group came about at a time when the Irish Recruitment industry was just waking up to the potential of Social Media for Recruitment. The first tentative steps were being made, and everybody was hungry for information on how to use it without time wasting. Declan saw the opportunity and acted on it.
So Declan, here’s a hat tip back at you!
Tags: Declan Fitzgerald, Hat Tip Awards, Irish Recruitment, Linkedin, Linkedin Groups, Microsoft, National Recruitment Federation, Recruitment Agencies, Recruitment Awards, Recruitment Industry
Posted in Recruitment, Social Media | No Comments »
January 5th, 2010
Ok, so saying “no news is good news” is a lousy cop out for neglecting the posts on this blog.
The truth is that I have been spending more time on my seo blog.
Recruitment News had a nice Christmas. Hope you did too.
In fairness though, there has not been a lot of news in recruitment over Christmas. Another agency (which I had never heard of before) bit the dust. There is some more news, but I’m saving it for later when I have a bit more time to write. I’ll try and get around to it this evening.
I have also conducted a small experiment in blogging. I’m sure you are all aware that it is necessary to keep blogging regularly in order to keep your blog at the top of the pile.
Well I decided to see just how often you need to blog, and how long it takes to regain lost places in the Google rankings. It turns out that a newish blog like the SEO one lasts only about a week before slipping at least 4 places. A more established blog will fare better. It will still slip, but not as much or as fast.
It took me three posts on three successive days to regain my position.
The moral of the story…. my new years resolution is to blog daily. I may not blog on every blog every day, but I won’t be leaving it for more than a few days between posts.
I have noticed during my surfing that many of you have corporate blogs. Some of them have not been updated in months. Why is that? I’m not going to spend more than five minutes on this one. Plus, once you get into the habit it gets easier. Nominate somebody (or some people) to write your blog. Schedule it. Mary blogs on Mondays, Trevor on Tuesday, Charlene on Wednesdays etc. Remember too that if you are using wordpress you do not have to publish the post straight away. Sometimes, if I get into the swing of writing, I write several and only publish one on the day. The rest I keep for another day.
As you will have seen from this and many other blogs, you do not have to stay on-topic all the time. This post has very little to do with Recruitment News, but you will notice that I still managed to mention it!
I’ll be mentioning blogging in my next post too. Here’s another blogging tip. If you write several posts on the same/similar topics in succession, they tend to do better in the Google ranking stakes.
Happy new year to you all and happy blogging.
P.s. I am always looking for Recruitment News. If you work for an agency and have any news (however small it may be) I have no problem plugging it here if I think it may be even vaguely interesting
Tags: Blog post, Blogging, Blogging tip, Corporate blogs, Good News, No News, Post, Recruitment News, SEO, Seo Blog
Posted in Blogging, Recruitment, Search Engine Optimisation | No Comments »
December 8th, 2009
The new Google SideWiki could potentially be a Public Relations nightmare for companies. In most cases I suspect that management are not even aware of its existence, let alone it’s potential for harm.
The new sidebar pictured below works on the same principles as Wikipedia – thus the name. While the site owners entry will be on top, it allows any registered Google user to write comments attached to your site.
Google Side-Wiki on Recruitment Agencies Ireland. A useful tool for web surfers or a potential PR disaster?
Did I just say anybody? Yes I did. Would you allow everybody in the world to write content on your site? Not in a million years. But now they can do just that. In fact users can comment on every single page of your site. They can have different comments on different pages.
The age old adage of word of mouth working better for bad news than good news holds true here. Treat a customer badly and you may well pay the price. Only instead of the customer bad mouthing you to just friends, family and colleagues, they can now (if they feel aggrieved enough) denounce your services to the world. On your very own website.
It doesn’t stop there either. What about your competitors? Do you trust them not to write disparaging comments about your company? That would be bad enough anywhere, but to have those same comments attached to your own website would be highly embarrassing.
So what can you do about it?
- Get acquainted with Google Sidewiki. Get the Google toolbar. To view a wiki entry for a web page, just click on the sidewiki button on the google toolbar.
- Get your own comments in first. A site owner (your google account must be associated with the website – webmaster tools validation) can make a wiki entry that will stay on top of all other comments. This entry can be made to show up for all pages on the site. This is particularly useful since most of us have dynamic websites.
- Make your own comments lengthy. Surfers are lazy. We hate scrolling any more than we have to. Do not put in just two lines in your own wiki entry. Make it long enough to ensure scrolling is necessary. Thus it takes effort to reach the other comments, leaving you more control over what people read.
- Subscribe to the comments RSS feed. This will not work in outlook, so you will have to use another RSS reader. This should really be at number one in this list. You need to know what people are saying about you. By subscribing to the RSS feed you will know every time a new comment is posted. (As an aside here, I am assuming that you are also using Google Alerts to let you know every time your company is mentioned on the Web.)
- Submit a removal request. If you do become the victim of unwarranted abuse through sidewiki, then you can request that the comment be removed. Think before doing this though. A well handled response can sometimes work better from a PR point of view than having the comment deleted. After all, if somebody has gone to the trouble of writing damaging material attached to your site, then when they find it deleted they could be encouraged to write the same information elsewhere. Tackling it at source may be a better option.
It’s not all bad news though. People can write nice things too. It doesn’t have to be a PR nightmare.
Posted in Social Media | No Comments »
December 7th, 2009
Will the army get the Garda Bikes if they have to take over from a striking police force?
It looks like it might be a job for the army! The GRA (Garda Representatives Association) have announced that they will be balloting members about possible industrial action. This comes despite the fact that Gardai are prevented from striking by law.
Some may fear anarchy, but we can rest assured that the army will be called in. My only question… Will the Garda bikes be used by the army?
Seriously though, are we really going to end up with Soldiers taking to the street, giving tourists directions and issuing parking tickets? I can see the countries criminal classes feelings being divided into two camps; those that would look forward to the crime spree, and those who would rather the law enforcement not have rpg’s and m16’s.
Tags: Army to take over from Gardai, Crime Spree as Gardai Strike, Garda, Garda Bicycles to be used by army, Garda Representative Association, Gardai, GRA, Irish army on bicycles, Soldiers, Soldiers take to the streets, Strike
Posted in Jobs, Nothing to do with recruitment really | No Comments »
November 27th, 2009
Got a headache with your servers. Take one Cloud computing pill to relieve tension
Here is the thing. You can have a server with your entire database on it. You have to back it up, have redundancies in place, ensure it is physically secure, keep the hardware and software on it up to date, protect it from power outages or spikes. It’s an expensive thing to run if it is done properly.
That is why, increasingly, recruitment agencies are turning to hosted software. The company that provides your recruitment software keep the server. They are responsible for backing it up, keeping it running smoothly, and keeping it up to date.
It runs over the internet. This is cloud computing. Your software and database are “out there” in the cloud that is the internet. Obviously there is a server involved, but you don’t need to know about it. All you have to do is log into your software.
The result.. no headaches. Don’t have an IT team. Not a problem. You pay to have somebody else worry about it.
The benefits:-
- Reduced staff (You can reduce your IT team)
- Lower cost desktops. Your desktops will only need an internet connection. They will not have to have any hefty, resource draining software running on them. In other words, you don’t have to buy higher end machines. You just need a good internet connection.
- Offices split over several locations do not need complicated VPN tunnels set up to communicate between several servers. Again, all you need is an internet connection.
- Lower Maintenance bills for your hardware and software. Computers need regular attention to keep running smoothly. Using a cloud solution makes that someone elses problem.
- If your business burns down you can be up and running again as soon as you have a working PC and an internet connection.
- It is much harder for data theft to take place on your premises (nobody can plug a USB key into your server and download your database)
- Someone to shout at. It’s nice to have somebody else to give out to if everything is not running entirely smoothly. You will have a whole team of them to work on getting it right.
The Disadvantages:-
- The cost is higher from your provider (but this should still work out less expensive than having to upgrade your own server). Have you virtualised your servers yet? That will be done for you.
- Lack of control. You give up some of the control you have over your systems. In general you will be giving control to people who are better qualified to look after them anyway.
- High bandwidth requirements. While you can be extremely portable (particularly if you use Voice over Internet for your telephony), the internet connections needed for each staff member and for voice calls will use up a considerable amount of bandwidth. A 3 meg broadband connection may be ok for general occasional browsing, but you are likely to need considerably more. If you are based in the center of one of our metropoli then this is not a problem (apart from the expense), but outside our major cities broadband speeds are still embarrassingly low and can’t cope. Even where higher broadband speeds are offered. The actual speed often falls far short.
- Online security. While it will be in the hands of your provider, by using online services security will never be as good as a closed system. Then again, if you have a wireless network then your security is not great anyway. If you have not upgraded your security from the Eircom default you can be hacked in under a minute! Still, If you want total control over your security then you need to keep your servers under your own roof.
- You have no say in who your service provider hires. If you hire your own IT personnel then you know what you are getting. You can check references, look at their linkedin profiles, facebook and see who has recommended them. You build a bond of trust and loyalty with your employees. That is all out of your control with a cloud based recruitment system.
Ready to take a further plunge into Web 2.0? Some of you have already!
Tags: Backing up your data, Broadband requirements, Closed networks, Cloud Computing, Cost is higher for cloud computing, Database, Facebook, Hosted software, Linkedin for reference Checking, Linkedin Profiles, Lower cost desktops, Lower your IT bills, Online Security, References, Servers, Someone to shout at, Telephony, Virtualising your servers, Voice over Internet, VOIP, Web 2.0
Posted in Cloud Computing, Recruitment, Recruitment software | No Comments »
