Face The Facts

Whether we like it or not, the workplace is going to evolve into an almost entirely electronic arena.  What I mean by that is individuals will communicate with each other via the web, not face-to-face in an office.  Businesses probably will not even have offices in times to come. All of the consultants from Online Recruitment, for instance, pretty much work from home. We have an office in Melbourne, which we use from time to time to conduct meetings and to meet with candidates, but we aim to be entirely online when the rest of the world catches up with our way of thinking.I don’t want to have a discussion about the pros and cons of this.  Whenever I start to evaluate the costs and benefits of this way of operating, I feel as though I’ve stepped back in time and I’m having a chat to one of my printing colleagues about the evils of the printing press.  I don’t dwell on stuff like this, I like to anticipate future directions and run with them.  So don’t try to engage me on this point, it’ll bore the heck out of me.What does interest me, though, is the consequences of this new type of workspace.  It is on this point that some really fascinating questions concerning the role of social networking arise.  Humans are a social species.  Even the most introverted of us gets a buzz out of having a good chat every now and again.  But with no office; and therefore no water cooler, where are these chats going to take place.  How is that special intimacy that develops between colleagues while they’re sipping their water from inadequately small plastic cups going to arise?The answer, my friends, is blowing in the ether.  Social networking sites, such as Facebook, are going to become the means via which business provide employees with a forum for the all important team-building, for encouraging folks to get to know one another “outside work”; really all this amounts to is developing community.  And whether they know it or not, that’s why companies like Seek have created a Seek Group within the Facebook space with about 6,700 members, even including younger family member Joel Bassat. (Shouldn’t you be doing your homework??) A CareerOne employee has started a  CareerOne Facebook Group without any support. Probably because Myspace, owned by their parent company News Limited, is their focus for now with Myspace Jobs. And companies that have banned the use of Myspace and Facebook during working hours are gonna have to think long and hard about how the heck their people are going to communicate personally with each other when there are no longer four physical walls fencing them in.  Onward and forward, folks.  

Video Resumes Discriminating The Facts.

Pull up a seat. Let’s have a chat about video resumes. There’s a lot of talk about how this phenomenon could be a vehicle for discrimination. And I think we all agree that discrimination sucks and I know I do my darnedest to avoid it. But if you do harbor discriminatory views, let’s say you’re more partial to folks of Vietnamese origin to those who are of Chinese heritage, or if you prefer women than men, if you are going to think within this framework, the only thing that a video will do is enable you to call upon these biases one step in the process earlier. Point is, ultimately a candidate has to make some sort of physical appearance and if they’re up against a bigot, or misogynist, there ain’t much they can do to shield themselves from these sorts of prejudices.

For those of us in the industry who are not lame-brained enough to let any personal feelings against certain groups in our society ameliorate our abilities to find the best candidates for the jobs, video resumes will allow an increased sense of the candidate; their manner, grooming, level of charisma. None of these factors alone would be the determining factor for whether or not they make it to the next stage, they assist in the task of putting together a well-informed conception of the candidate.

Anyway, video resumes are more-than-likely going to take the form of a video-interview. These will be clips put together by companies like Hirevue where candidates, via a web-cam, will be asked a series of predetermined questions and allocated a certain amount of time in which to answer. How they answer the questions will enhance enormously the recruiter or employer’s sense of the candidate, cut out a lot of wasted time and be of great assistance to inter-nation hiring. This is a good thing.

A Rose By Any Other Domain Name….

I’m a big fan of Shakespeare. I know there’ll be folks who’ll stop reading this blog right now, suddenly haunted by memories of that hazy feeling you get when you’re in English class and you can’t understand a word of what Suzy in the front row just read out from her copy Romeo and Juliet or Hamlet. But bear with me. Like it or not, good old Will had a way with words. He could string ‘em together with such elegance that even today, many of the phrases we use come directly from his pen.

Take “A Rose by any other name would smell as sweet”, for instance. Probably true if you’re Romeo trying to woo Juliet, but not if you’re the creator of a website. A bad name, and you could come off smelling like a pile of steamy dog-crap.

I reckon we’ve all come across a domain name or two that makes us wonder what its creators were thinking when they came up with it. I’ve recently considered, for example, Recruitmenow which sounds like a site for cat placements and hoojano. It took me two weeks to interpret the meaning of that one, at first I thought it was some sort of porn affair (run-off from Oraljobs, see my blog on that one) Gobbldegoop.

We have an innate sense of what makes for a stinker of a name, but pinning down the factors making for a good domain name is a bit harder. Webestate is getting sparser and sparser so finding a good name that is available can be difficult. Here are some tips for creating a great domain name:

Make the name meaningful: try to keep it around the meaning of the core concept of the site

Make it uniquely identifiable: while some of these points apply across all marketing, this is probably the most important to remember with a domain name. Give the site a name that will not mean that a misspelling will send it to the competition.

Make it easy to type so that people don’t have to rely on links and shortcuts to come visit you.

Make it Memorable: most folks can only remember 7+/-2 digits and the same rule applies to memory for the letters of words that are made up. Make your name easy to remember.

Give it a little X factor: Charm, charisma, quirkiness, something a little out-of-the-ordinary will help with fulfilling a few of the above criteria.

Let’s have a little fun…let’s call it Domain Names 101…check out how many domain names, just off the top of your head, match the above criteria…good times for those of us who are thinking internet thoughts at 4a.m…..

.asia Landrush Kicks Off Today

The Landrush phase for .Asia domain names started at about 10p.m. last night our time. It ends on the 12th March 2008. What this means is that any member of the general public can apply for webestate in Asia. If uncontested, the space is yours. If it is contested, you will be asked to enter a bidding process for ownership.

The timing of the Landrush didn’t aid my already well-documented insomnia as I spent the good part of last night buying up on Asian webestate. It was worth the dark patches under my eyes this morning. This is the kind of opportunity folks are witness to only every few generations. It represents the chance to be a pioneer on untouched land. It’s great to see that Seek, Career Builder and Montser have secured their slice of Asian cyberspace, but where were the other players? C’mon guys, surely you’re not that hung up on your need for beauty sleep?

Wink Wink, Nudge Nudge.

Sex sells, that’s how the adage goes. But Oraljobs, this new site for agency Personnel Concept, is taking this rather outdated advertising maxim to the extreme.

I overlooked the fact that I had to download the latest version of Firefox to enter the site (it always annoys me when I’m asked to download the very latest version, sites should speak the language of the common people). Once I finally entered the site, I was asked if I was “having a hard time?” and then if I want to get “blown away” I was then encouraged to make my own avatar so that I could “have a little fun”.

I felt as though, rather than entering a site for a professional recruitment agency, I had just stepped into a world of Benny Hill repeats.When someone sent me the link for this site, my first thought was that it was a joke. I still think it’s a joke, but not in the initial sense. And remember how in my last blog I drew an analogy between some recruitment consultants and some hookers? Well, this is taking things a little bit too far.

JOBX and Recruitment Academy Plugging Leaky Bucket

JOBX and Recruitment Academy has announced today the launch of the first exclusive Recruitment Industry job and candidate board including an on-line networking forum. This industry-first will be called recruitMenow, a new division of Recruitment Academy. The site will provide a space in which recruiters looking for consultants can advertise jobs, and consultants can promote themselves to recruiting companies. Kinda like a directory for recruitment consultants.

But don’t go to the space expecting to find anything. This is what’s there:

“recruitMenow will launch mid March 2008 and both JOBX’s CEO Richard Maré and Recruitment Academy’s founder and Managing Director Michael Dimopoulos believe this new partnership will accelerate and dominate this space rapidly.”

Expect a plethora of these new sites. Companies are keen to take advantage of the culture of online networking, and so they should. It is cost-effective and indeed, very efficient means of reaching out.However, this appears to be a little undercooked. I can’t see how it will gain the support of recruitment agencies, who won’t be too keen on their staff advertising themselves on the site. Also, there are a few sticky privacy issues that may arise for the consultants. For example, and excuse my loud voice BUT WHO’S GOING TO ALLOW THEIR PSYCHOMETRIC DATA TO BE MADE PUBLIC WITHIN THE INDUSTRY IN WHICH THEY WORK? Ahem. That feels better.

Further, in its media release, recruitMenow makes the claim that its site will help to address the problem of attrition within the industry. Yep, read the line again if you don’t believe it. It’s what we all wanna hear, no? I know of hookers who are more loyal to their street corners than some recruitment consultants are to the businesses they work for. And stop me now if my logic is a bit off, but how in the heck will a recruitment consultant job board, a site whose very raison d’etre is to advertise new jobs for people and allow people to promote themselves for new jobs, diminish attrition rates?

I’ve got this little mathematical equation running through my head and I’d like to share it with you, ’cause sometimes, words are confusing. Maths explains some stuff better. It goes like this:Promote new jobs to recruitment consultants + recruitment consultants leave current employment to go to new job = INCREASE in attrition.

Mr Moe, he was my math teacher in year 8. I reckon he’d be real proud of me right now.

Vouching For 2Vouch?

2Vouch coming soon.

This is a site based on profiteering from the popularity of internet-based social networking.It works like this: folks sign up and get sent ads for jobs. If they think that one of their friends fits the requirements, they recommend the friend and that person becomes a member as well. If the friend secures the position, the person “vouching” for them gets paid a fee, which can go directly to them or their favorite charity. The beta for the site is well prepared and the instructions are presented to would-be participants in a clear and cogent manner (except the voice-over syncing in the clip is a bit off and reminds one of a Chinese martial arts film). This is always a good start.

I’m a huge fan of this idea and have often pondered its implications at four in the morning when my head is full of cyberspace and the flashing of the computer screen that haunts my days begins to intrude into my night-time. Sites such as Facebook have demonstrated that the drive to be popular and fill one’s profile with a plethora of friends drives many an introvert into sudden extroversion.

I’m bugged by a few factors, though. And I’m prepared to risk appearing overly-critical and ponderous in order to get the low-down on what others think about my suspicions.

Firstly, any business that relies on friends or acquaintances making a profit from one another has an air of the Amway about it. Just the knowledge that there is more to my friend’s recommending me for a job than the simple pleasure they experience from me being happier or taking one more step up the ladder of success – they stand to make money from me. And whether this goes straight to their hip pocket or to that of their favorite charity, they are still gaining something more tangible from my taking the job offered than the joy of an alturistic act.

There are all sorts of personal and political dilemmas that can be foreseen here that may lead people to steer well clear of the site. What about the promotion of jobs from colleague to colleague within the same company? What about the guy who vouches for his mate for a position but the mate refuses to take the job, thereby doing the guy out of a buck. Personal strain…hello, here we come.

And haven’t the old Jobs.com.au kinda tried to do this anyway? Is this another attempt to cut out the recruiter that is going to fall on its face.Let me tell you up front – I hope I’m wrong.

Sleeping With The Enemy

This week, Jobspeed, a new IT job board website was launched. Superficially, the marketing propaganda is probably making recruiters prick their ears up to listen. The site’s run by a consortium of recruiters, thus the we-know-what-you-need-come-over-here-and-be-with-others-of-your-own-kind spiel. It’s promising a faster service, real jobs and the pay per application fee seems, at the outset at least, to be fair.

Let’s look a little more deeply at this, though. We might find that if we scratch the surface, all that glossy, almost-dry paint might start to chip off in slimy chunks, only to reveal something that recruiters might want to steer clear of.The main problem with this concept is that it is run by recruiters, lead by Lloyd Harrington Recruitment. Even if you’re a recruiter and you’re prepared, say, in a moment of conciliation and peace to all the brothers and sisters to overlook the fact that by paying them instead of Seek, you’re feeding the opposition, would you want that same opposition plumper and stronger but also with access to all the applicant information from applicants applying for your jobs? Nup.

While employers aren’t discouraged from advertising, I don’t see how they could be encouraged to recruit from the site at the same rate as recruiters are charged. Perhaps they are being offered a different rate?And if you’re just reading this article for my witty banter, and if you don’t give a stuff about outcomes for employers or recruiters, but one day, it might be 40 degrees outside and the aircon at your office is broken and the woman in the next cubicle is munching like a cow on a packet of Thins, and they stink because they’re cheese and onion, and you decide to go to Jobspeed to check out their ‘real jobs’, then ask yourself how they’re going to verify the realness of the jobs. Are they going to check each and every one for credibility, or simply black card the recruiters known for posting false positions. Ask yourself that.

I have always been an advocate of recruiters running their own job boards. I think that if we are ever to become independent of job boards such as Seek, that this is the way to go. But with Jobspeed, as it is a consortium, there is really no difference from the recruiter’s perspective. We are still paying someone else to sell our wares.

Directing Traffic

Statistics are king in businesses such as online job boards, where success or failure is measured by the amount of traffic to a site.However, there are two methods of collecting data used by the online recruitment industry in Australia.

The industry standard is the panel-based methodology used by Nielson/NetRatings. This tracks data from a panel of about 400 consumers. They report the stats to the market on a monthly basis. As data relies on subscription at a fee, several of the smaller job boards, such as JobX and Jobs, Jobs, Jobs do not participate in this form of data collection.

Alternatively, Hitwise Australia collects data directly from ISP networks. Stats from Hitwise are updated on an hourly basis. The data from this method is therefore more raw and “real-time”. It gives the stats-geeks a chance to analyse the comings and goings of consumers, peak times for views etc, providing an excellent opportunity to better understand consumer practices. Hitwise data is not reliant on individual job board subscription, as is the case with the NetRatings data. However, this data excludes any information from the Telstra ISP networks.

First up, let’s all agree on this: before any one method can be considered the industry standard, it should include data from all possible sources. Therefore, both methods currently in use are deficient in this regard. Hitwise, for its exclusion of Telstra data, and NetRatings for its exclusion of minor job board data.

Arguably, the effect on the data purity of these two deficiencies differs. The NetRatings data gives us no indication whatever of the popularity of the minor sites. It is merely indicative of the popularity of the three main players, Seek, CareerOne and MyCareer. However, the Hitwise data, while excluding a whack of info from the Telstra ISP, allows us a snapshot of where all the industry competitors sit in popularity. It would be difficult to contend that a greater portion of consumers of any one site would be more likely to be Telstra ISP customers. Therefore, as the exclusion affects both the big and smaller players, while it alters quantity of data, it probably does not alter the quality of it.Whatever method of data collection one considers, if we have a look at the figures for January, Seek is the undisputed market leader.CareerOne have seen a better- than- average traffic rise than their close competitors MyCareer and have assumed the number two position. If this was due to spending more dollars on advertising then MyCareer can quickly buy back the number two spot in February.

However, when we consider the popularity of Linkme for the month, there is a conflict between the two data. Linkme have dropped off the NetRatings list with a 97% decline. However HitWise shows a rise in their traffic and rankings. This discrepency may be due to the launch of the new site in January. NetRatings is possibly still tracking the old one and Linkme have moved on.Admittedly, there are several other factors to be considered in the question of success and failure of the job boards. These include: number of c.v.’s on their databases, how many job alert emails go out each day and how good are the quality of applications. Volume isn’t always better.

However when looking at popularity alone, based on the above, we need to challenge the idea that NetRatings is the industry standard of popularity rating for the recruitment industry. But, even if we all concur that a new metric is required for the measure of popularity, will we ever be able to agree on how that measure should be derived?