Social Networks Are Not Just About Having Fun.

I’ve been banging on about the importance of social networking to recruitment and my job networks on Twitter are gaining a considerable following @JobsAustralia @Jobseen @GamerJobs @ITJobsSydney as an example. Check out this article from the weekend Courier Mail by Amanda Horswill. Read article here. You’d have to be an ostrich not to notice the level of media coverage social networks receive these days. “These networks won’t work”, “It’ll take years before social networks are vital to recruiting”, said the critics. I say the critics need a rethink on these claims. I say, social networking is already integral. If you don’t believe me, read in this article what Iggy Pintado has to say about my ideas…

Ah. I love it when a plan comes together.

Other adaptations of social networking techniques create new takes on a traditional job board. Online Recruitment owner Geoff Jennings says he runs a number of different Twitter accounts that “feed” (provide updates to) “followers” (people who agree to receive his messages) a one-line description of particular categories of jobs, followed by a weblink to the job ad on a different website such as Careerone.com.au. The information he uses is collated by a third party, a website called an aggregator (www.recruit.net), which “scrapes” information off a number of websites and collates it into a single-line description called a “news feed”. Jennings takes this news feed, combines it with an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed from other sites than ban aggregation, and mixes in a few of his client’s positions that he is contracted to fill. He then broadcasts the jobs on Twitter, under account names such as ITjobsbris and ITjobssydney and gamerjobs.

“At this stage I am just testing the service. My company is not yet big enough to draw a large following on Twitter if I only put the jobs my company was recruiting for. But if I put many jobs on I can feed to a broader audience,” he says.

“That’s my strategy, anyway. I am very up-front about it (on those accounts).”

He maintains a personal account under his own name: “I don’t flog jobs in there, it’s to brand me as a recruiter. But on the other accounts, people don’t want to see me in there among the jobs.”

He says while he doesn’t get a large number of inquiries from Twitter to his company’s positions, the response so far is promising.

“I do get a lot of people ‘re-Twitting’. That’s when people pick up my Tweet and put a RT in front of it and send it out to their network. Then you get that community-based thing going. From that, I have had emails saying ‘I am interested, tell me more’.”

Social networking expert and author of Connection Generation Iggy Pintado says Jennings could possibly represent the future direction of Twitter.

Live Recruitment Rumble – May 7th, 11:00am

There’s nothing like a good stoush.

And frankly, while I like nothing better than a good old jab at industry players like job boards and recruiters, I reckon it’s about time I took on one of my own kind.

So, rally around the shelter shed, peoples, it’s gonna be a bewdy. (details here)

Join online recruitment industry leaders Geoff Jennings and Thomas Shaw for a LIVE “Recruitment Rumble” Thursday May 7th, 11:00am – 12:00pm. All gloves will be off as Geoff and Thomas go head to head in a discussion about key topics (Geoff may even wear his shiny purple boxing shorts).

Joining in the live discussion is Diane Lee, founder of Even It Up! providing a perspective from the job seeker point of view and “outsider” to the industry.

Topics for discussion include:

- Future of the traditional Job board?
- SEEK vs. CareerOne/Monster – who will win?
- Fake job adverts?
- RCSA: Soft as a marshmellow?
- Should I use a recruitment agency or go direct?
- Background searching candidates online?

Do you want to listen or join in the discussion? Register here.

Geoff Jennings is the controversial man at the helm of http://www.geoffjennings.com, a site dedicated to keeping the recruitment bastards honest. He has worked for online industry leaders and is currently Managing Director of www.onlinerecruitment.com.au

Thomas Shaw is the “pretty boy” of online recruitment, having established his stranglehold of the industry via his blog www.recruitmentdirectory.com.au/blog By day he works in the recruitment industry, and at night a tweet from Thomas can make or break your organisation.

Diane Lee is the founder of Even It Up! which aims to provide information about recruitment practices for Australian jobseekers. Diane is leading the revolt from frustrated job seekers who want an even playing field www.evenitup.com.au

2009 Predictions

The Christmas trees have now (hopefully) all been packed away, everyone’s recovered from their post NYE HOs, and we’re all gearing up for a fascinating 2009.

Seek, CareerOne and MyCareer have all just popped around and drawn the tarots from the deck (not REALLY.  You guys have got to learn not to take everything I write literally:)) and here are the results of the session.  Here are, in other words, the Geoff Jennings predictions for the online recruitment market in 2009:

Seek will target the SME market

Seek has seen consistent revenue growth of over 30% for the past four years.  This is largely attributed to  growing job ad volumes, price increases and the Seek Learning revenue contribution. 2009 will be a very different story for the market leader and it will take a mighty effort to achieve 0% growth.  They might attempt this feat by:

- Ditching their focus on recruiters and targeting the SME’s (Small Medium Sized) businesses, especially those who currently advertise in print. This will enable them to tap into a new advertiser that will be much easier to grow the yield with because it is accustomed to paying hefty print prices.

- Push new products. Stand Out ads, Premium ads…obviously, this will also contribute to yield growth and it is a path that Seek has already begun to promenade.

- Grow the Learning business: this will supplement the losses of the Core business.

- Concentrate on ensuring that the international investments work contribute to the bottom line.

CareerOne will tread water.

No significant inroads were made by CareerOne in 2008.  I’m going to acknowledge that they moved ahead of MyCareer in traffic numbers, and this was a good effort…but that has more to do with my imbibing post-festive spirit and less to do with any sort of massive leap by the former.

In 2007 they sold against the promise of a new website for almost a year, leaving many advertisers scratching their heads.   They’re likely to do the same in 2009,  as a result of the new joint venture with Monster. We might see some action on the new look partnership offering by the end of 2009, but by then it will be too little too late for their bottom line.  Promises, promises…

MyCareer will change business models.

MyCareer will move from being a generalist job board (with the only variation on this being their failed attempt with Job Fox in the Headhunter plan).  They will continue their downsizing (hopefully with a little more aplomb than their last Melbourne attempt) and they will cash in on their quality audience by launching a range of fully-integrated EGN executive ads. across all their online news sites.  They could also acquire PageUp People, the Applicant Tracking System (ATS) provider that has an enviable relationship with the corporate market that MyCareer could benefit from.  This would also mean getting in before Seek does.

Aggregators

These pimps of the job space are here and have set-up shop on a street corner near you. Will they make any real impact on the job market? Probably not. They fall short in a few areas.  Firstly, they don’t really have an adequate revenue model and we don’t have enough users in Australia to warrant further investment. Secondly, Seek has ensured the demise of aggregators by not allowing its job inventory to be scrapped. Lastly, the user experience is not great because of the searchability of expired ads..

Referral sites

The new guard are here. It will take all of 2009/10 to establish their offering. But traditional job boards beware. 2Vouch, Hoojano and the like will have a large impact on how the market is shaped for the future and will be targeting the same SME market as you are.

The World’s Greatest Business Mind Announced

I know I thanked a bunch of people on the night, but I just wanted to take this chance to reiterate: thank you to all who voted for me, as well as to colleagues who helped me achieve this award (you know who you are), and finally, friends and family who held my faith for me in a little bucket when I was willing to let it all flush down the dunny.

In case you didn’t catch the announcement, watch it here:

Office Yoga

Ooooooooooooooom.

Oh. You’re here. Sorry. Didn’t mean to be rude, just getting into the spirit of things. It’s Krishna’s birthday this weekend. Big celebrations around town – and I’ve given a spot of yoga a go. Got me thinking…

This has nothing at all to do with New-Age propaganda. It’s a well-established idea that stress interferes with cognitive function and behavior. Put simply, if you’re feeling overwhelmed, you probably aren’t too nice to be around and you can’t solve problems as well as you normally can. And your muscles react. They clench up into balls and send additional signals to your brain telling it that you are stressed. A vicious…vicious cycle. Ooooooooooooooom.

Get your yoga balls out, team. They were all the rage in offices in the early nineties. And if you feel like a frootloop sitting at your desk on a slippery big ball and prefer the chair, try this exercise, designed especially for the covert yogi.

Drop a pen on the floor. Tuck your pelvis under (you do this by pulling your belly-button in), extend the arm which is on the opposite side to where the pen is and swing it around and to the ground to pick up the pen. keep your spine straight all the while. Repeat for the other side.

While you’re down there, check for lost coins…Ooooooooom.

Seek Delivers

There’s good money still to be had in the traditional job board model. If you are Seek. They finished the financial year with total sales up 34% to $210.2 million. Nice.

Not hard to see why. Even their competitors are advertising with them…

Recruitment 2020

I’m all inspired by Rudd’s 20/20 Conference. As most of you have heard my anti-meeting rants, this might seem surprising – as this was really just one huge meeting.

But I also reckon it’s great to be future-focussed, and to map out some sort of inspired plan for how we want to shape things. I can’t guarantee the likes of Cate Blanchet – I look crap in a skirt…this should prove interesting all the same.

I’ve got my ideas, but today I’d like to chuck a Rudd and throw it out there to you. What do you see are the major issues for recruitment in the coming years and how can we as an industry adapt and overcome some of the forseeable obstacles.

And in case you’re sitting there like a lump of lard, staring at the screen with not even one heck of an idea by way of response in your head, here are some questions to spur some internal thoughts. If you come up with anything decent, be sure to share…

What will the recruitment industry look like in 20/20? Will it be regulated, for instance?

What role will technology play in finding staff? Will everything be automated or will the ‘human touch’ of recruitment consultants still be required.

What measures do recruiters need to take to deal with the shortage of skilled labor? And will the shortage get worse or are we taking adequate steps to deal with it?

Will Job-boards exist or will jobs be found via aggregation from the sites of individual companies?

Jobs, Jobs, Jobs Health Check.

“We think that we can create the number-two job board in Australia within 12 months, which really means knocking off MyCareer and CareerOne, and we think that we can be a third of the size of Seek within three years.”

-Guy Sigston (smart company magazine, 20 Feb., 2007)

It’s nearly a year on for Jobs, Jobs, Jobs. Call it an early happy birthday present if you like, but I reckon they’re about due for a little health check.Let’s start with the positive. The site has pretty good functionality. It remembers the user and returns the upon entry to their last viewing point. Handy stuff. And not that it really matters so much, but the site is aestetically slick and easy to navigate – a welcome break from some stuff I’ve been looking at lately.Okay.

On to Guy’s quote. See, the problem is, if you’re going to go to the media with big claims, you wanna be pretty sure that you can see the claims through. Based on this idea, Guy Sigston was pretty…um…stupid. Sure, you left Jobs, Jobs, Jobs rather “abruptly”, but you’re back now and I reckon all the hooha is no excuse for not making good your inflated promise, Guy.

Let’s have a look at how things are tracking…According to Hitwise Australia February 08 market share, Seek holds 25% of the market, and CareerOne and MyCareer, 8.7% and 7.3%, respectively. Jobs, Jobs, Jobs has NOT EVEN 1% OF MARKET SHARE. I don’t wanna kick you when you’re down, and frankly, I wouldn’t be expecting much more than what you’ve achieved in such a short time. The thing I have an issue with is your public escalation of expectations. Don’t tell folks that you’ll be number two in a year, don’t tell folks that you’ll be a third of the size of Seek in three years, unless you have a bloody good plan for how this will be achieved.Say we let ‘em off the hook for the Guy comment. Say we’re in a benevolent mood and we’re prepared to allow a pretty humungous margin of error…where do we go from here?

Archie Mills, my friendly telesales rep. from Jobs, Jobs, Jobs, led me to the answer to this question. Archie was pretty keen to get my business by setting up a meeting with one of the sales team. I’m pretty busy, though, and won’t go to meetings unless I’m pretty sure it’s going to be fruitful for me (this is the reason I’m self-employed, goddam). I asked Archie for some info about the job board and he sent me an email, jam-packed full of claims. Most of them were pruely propaganda. For instance, “We offer better value”. Der, Arch. Then there was this one “57% growth in the past two months” That one bugged me a bit, considering that January is the comeback month for job boards. I wanted clarification on that point, “How does this compare with the growth of the competing job boards” and “What is the source of the statistics”, I asked my new friend Archie – twice. No reply. That was a few weeks ago.

Looks like Jobs, Jobs, Jobs is up to their old tricks again.

The world of Online Recruiting

It’s about time I started to write on my own page about what’s happening in the world of Online Recruitment. I am a huge fan of Joel Cheesman’s blog, Cheezhead, and Brett Iredale who recently closed his blog at Nowhiring.

I have enjoyed seeing how much the recruitment industry has evolved over the past decade. I remember working at Fairfax Digital’s MyCareer and having to battle with the print folks. The team at Seek and their very clever marketing in the early days, have changed the way employers and recruiters search for new talent.

Where to from here? Maybe video will be the next big thing?

This blog will endeavor to catch any Online Recruitment news as it happens and report.