It’s ZaaBiz…

- Another shouts, “Vee look like Frrreeaks!

There’s viskers growing on our cheeks!”

A boy who vos extremely tall

Cries out, “Vot’s wrong.  I’m growing small!”

- Extract from The Witches by Roald Dahl

Ve’re all speaking vith an accent here at the office.  Been having a look at ZaaBiz, a new Biz networking site that offers social referral recruiting (SRR) tools. (see my profile) Nothing new, I can hear you all shout, 2Vouch and Hoojano are also chucking their hats into the ring where this is concerned.  The difference with the team at ZaaBiz, though, is that their service is free, and leveraging the growing numbers of Tweeters on Twitter.  And being free, their concept is a little more subtle than the referral service offered by its monetised competitors.

I’ve put a few of my jobs on there…testing the waters.

I vill keep you posted about zaa results.

Hoojano Powers StaffSearcher BY MYOB

 

New player in the ‘Reward for Referral’ space Hoojano has officially launched today. Mike Wilkinson is CEO of HooJano.  He was formerly Group Manager, Innovation at Sensis, and has held senior marketing roles with both MyCareer and CareerOne.  He has spent the last 18 months developing the business and preparing it for launch.  

Mike has also been busy luring high profile partner in MYOB. Powered by Hoojano, they have launched StaffSearcher.com.au in the hope of leveraging from their more than 700,000 businesses and accounting practices in the Asia-Pacific region. 

Superficially, this concept is great.  It’s an innovative way of approaching the roundup of suitable candidates.  And it’s exciting that HooJano is finally off Alpha status and is ready to do some business. But what’s with Staff Searcher’s pitch “Forget Recruiters”?  

I’m clicking my tongue here.  You know that “click click” your mum used to make when you’d done something both stupid and disappointing?  Usually this sound was followed by a sermon steeped in Capital letters, like That Was So Immature and I Expect More From You.  

My mum, she could bowl guilt with more spin than Warney (and she’s pretty nifty on the old texting too:)).  Point is, mums have what they call “moral authority”, and I’m about to dish some of that out right now.  So if you’re on a diet, look away.

Of course, my investment in this discussion is skewed.  I’m a recruiter, and I want my industry to continue to flourish.  It feeds my family.  But there’s more involved in my perspective than my personal interest.  Recruiters do more for businesses than simply find resumes.  We must think of creative ways of attracting candidates, we’re often on the phone for the most part of the day, ringing contacts, social networking, getting the goss on so-and-so who wants to leave their current role and move into something different.  Most of us interview, we represent the clients and candidates, bartering for both their interests in trying to reach an agreement between the two.  Sometimes we’re like goddam matchmakers, or farmers, trying to get a cow and a bull to do the wild thing when both just want to chow down on some grass.

Hoojano/StaffSearcher, knowthis.  Probably a better approach to your marketing would have been to engage recruiters, rather than rally for their departure from the recruiting process.  

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.

Network Your Way Through Christmas

For the jobseeker and employers, Christmas is a quiet time. Thoughts of changes and restructures (and all those jazzy keywords that mean positions are available) are put on hold until post-festivities. job boards continue to exhibit their wares, of course, but activity tends to slow a little.

Sites like Hoojano and 2vouch will help provide more choice of 24/7 access for the recruitment industry into the future. In the meanwhile, however, there is always LinkMe.

Here’s my suggestion: subscribe to LinkMe over the break. While it is true that movement in the job market is put on ice for a bit, the new year brings with it a bunch of changes to workplaces that recruiters and jobseekers can take advantage of.  So now, more than usual, is the time for networking.  And the opportunities won’t arise from the mitigated job board activity. They’ll come from more passive means like networking sites.

2Vouch Goes Beta

I’ve discussed 2vouch on this Onrec blog already back in February Vouching For 2Vouch . Today they launched in Beta. Congratulations.

Social referral sites such as 2vouch and Hoojano(which launched some months back) will be a prominent aspect of how we recruit into the future. The idea is nothing new, as indicated by the old adage 2vouch has chosen to adopt as their motto, “It’s not what you know…” (initially they had a genie as part of their campaign. I wanna know where the genie’s gone:)). Being social creatures, we communicate with one another. Being creatures ruled by the ego, we like to be “in the loop”, and being creatures driven by economic concerns, we like to make money. 2vouch satisfies all the needs.

Recruiters pay referral fees to people who give them a lead on a placement. 2vouch is merely formalising this already-existing convention.

Online recruitment has placed some jobs on 2vouch, to give it a go. Stay tuned for how that’s tracking…I wish, I wish (picture me rubbing the magic lantern here) for several successful job placements….

Where’s the Genie??

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…..