Job Baskets: The Reason Recruiters Get Spammed with Irrelevant CVs

I was speaking with The IT Job Board earlier this week and they highlighted to me that they do not have a job basket function on their website. This may seem a small issue, but it is a fairly radical departure from the norm. Most job boards know that many recruitment agencies and corporate recruiters struggle to record the origins of the hires they make. Many of them seem to end up judging job boards based on the number of applications they to send to them. The IT Job Board takes the view that they would rather encourage strong applications rather than lots of applications, and I congratulate them on such an approach. Interestingly, their application numbers are not bad and we have already made placements from their service.

We have a strong applicant tracking system in place, from Hireserve, and record where each hire comes from as well as how many completely irrelevant CVs we see. This means we can focus our efforts on the right job boards as well as quickly reach decisions on new job boards we trial.

But going back to my original point, as many job boards know that their customers struggle to track applications from their board through to hire, they make sure they encourage as many applications from their job seekers as possible, to ensure their stats look good when its time to review and renew contracts.

How do they keep the applications as high as possible? They have a job basket. Some job seekers are selective in their approach, while others will throw every single job that comes back from their search into the basket and apply. Ironically, many job seekers experience the same issue in reverse when recruiters spam out their one job to 200 people from their database who happen to have one keyword on their CV.

It's also worth noting that some job boards have taken the approach of encouraging a "one click apply" system, just in case loading several jobs into a basket and a multiple application process is too timely.

In the current climate, none of the other recruiters I meet are complaining that they do not get enough applications. Plenty are complaining about the quality of their applications, and almost everyone is complaining about too many applications. Everyone that is, except me. I am a realist. I know that many of the new clients that come to us do so because having to wade through the crazy amount of irrelevant applications is simply not feasible in the modern-day, lean recruitment dept. If they do manage to review every CV, then they struggle to reply back to all candidates, perform proactive searches of online CV databases and social networking sites such as Linkedin. So I can understand why easywebrecruitment looks an attractive proposition, but I would say that, wouldn't I?

Viva la Job Basket!

New Online Recruitment Training Dates Announced

Our free online recruitment training sessions have just gone nationwide. As I look at our Eventbrite account we have 36 events taking place between now and March. Starting in Birmingham tomorrow.

If you want to find out how to recruit for free via social networks like Linkedin and Facebook. Or maximise your return on investment when you post adverts to job boards. We run our half day sessions to between 12-20 direct recruiters at time and we have had some really positive feedback so far.

Here is a full list of dates and a short video giving an example of just one of the tips we look to give away in the session.

Linkedin Opens Up Their Platform

Linkedin has just announced they are opening up their platform for developers to integrate their applications with Linkedin. This is the model that Twitter adopted from the very start and is probably the biggest single factor in explaining their extraordinary growth. So not unsurprising that the other big players in the social networking space have sat up and taken notice.

Tweetdeck is one of the first applications to take advantage of this new development. But you can expect the floodgates to open. Although networks such as facebook have a much larger community of members, marketeers will be far more interested in being able to influence and market to the linkedin membership.

Whilst this is all very exciting, there are some key questions that spring to mind. Will the opening of the network to outside developers mean that marketeers and recruiters find a way to "spam" their messages to large groups? Up until now the use and pricing of inmails has made the network largely free of spam whilst still being reasonably priced.

Will we see federated CV search applications that allow recruiters to search the Linkedin network whilst also searching their own internal talent pool/cv database? Bullhorn and Broadbean already have applications that search multiple databases at once.

One thing that will definitely happen, your average linkedin member will undoubtedly see more approaches from recruiters on the hunt for passive candidates. If you are not recruiting on Linkedin you need to start NOW.

Linkedin Recruiter Professional Services - Review

Linkedin has recently announced that they are rolling out their Recruiter platform to recruitment companies. Initially this product was only available to corporate recruiters. I have spoken to a number of corporate recruiters who have spent a reasonable amount of money on this product and in general their feedback has been very good. So I signed up for the first of the webinars demonstrating it.

Now I need to make an important point. If you contact Linkedin and ask them what profile do I need to upgrade to in order to "see the entire network" they will point you in the direction of the Recruiter Platform, which is their most expensive product. This is wrong and their sales staff are being very canny in how they answer this.

The good news is if you have a linkedin profile, regardless of what account type you or how many connections you have made, YOU CAN ALREADY SEE THE ENTIRE NETWORK. Yes all 52m. I have tested this myself. If you don't believe me do a search of the network just for UK profiles. If will show you a number just over 2.7m. We all see the same number of profiles. The difference being as a corporate account user I can see more of the individual's profile. However, even this is a mute point as in 99% of searches the basic account will show enough data for a recruiter to be able to make a well informed decision on whether the linkedin member is worth contacting about the vacancy.

Right, I feel better now I have got that off my chest.

The RPS (Recruiter Professional Services) is essentially the same product that corporate recruiters have been using for over a year. It looks really good and is very easy to use, and aside from being a nice and simple product it actually has lots of nice features which will enhance your average Linkedin sourcing strategy.

Including:

• You can "pool" inmails. So if multiple users are on RPS all their inmail quotas are shared in one big pot.
  
• Your search results are listed in a summarised format so you can see where the hits are against your search and easily scroll down through multiple profiles on the one page.
• You can shortlist profiles to a folder and then send inmails in batches of up to 10 (Linkedin is very careful not to make it easy for someone to spam inmails, hence the limit of 10).
  
• You can see 1,000 profiles in your results (if you get 1,000 results you are not searching correctly, but technically this is still a benefit if you really want to wade through that many profiles).
• Multiple users can share project folders and collaborate together on campaigns.
• You can add notes against profiles that stay within RPS.
  
• All individual consultant activity is logged in the account. So if someone leaves your employment you do not need access to their Linkedin account to see what roles they have been working on, what inmails they sent and notes they made.

All in all, I was a little sceptical to start off with but in the end I was impressed. It's not meant to be an ATS, although it has many similar features. If you use linkedin on a shoestring as most recruiters seem to, then it probably won't interest you. If like me you use Linkedin as a primary recruitment tool and you send a lot of inmails, then I would give serious consideration to making a purchase.

Google tells it's users what it thinks!

Google is always trying to make the internet easier for its users. For a while now they've been suggesting the search term you are looking for as you type it in. Now, I appreciate this is an automated service delivered by a piece of software. Google is not voicing its own opinions (even Google does not have enough lawyers to cover themselves from the lawsuits that would emerge from some of these!). So it's not really Google's opinion, but something I thought I would have a little fun with.

This is what Google thinks of Careerbuilder....

How about Monster?



What about little ol' EasyWebRecruitment I hear you ask? Well, we're not on Google's radar yet......

Right I am off to build 50,000 websites that all contain the statement "EasyWebRecruitment Rocks!".

CoolIris - You have to see this!

I started this blog with the aim of posting about internet recruitment related subjects. I would not normally make a posting about something unrelated, but I've just downloaded the cooliris app for firefox (after reading article about it on techcrunch). Now, I download a fair few firefox apps, and this is the best I have ever seen. It lets you slide easily through photos in a very cool slideshow mode. It has other features as well, but it's the way you interact with photos in the slideshow mode that is the real jaw-dropping moment.

Easywebrecruitment are working on a new website, and I'll be speaking to our web designer in the morning about integrating this technology. Whilst this will be a nice feature to have on our site, for other websites such as shopping sites it would be a great app to help users to browse through various items.

I appreciate this not a recently released app so you may have already seen it, but if you haven't go to www.cooliris.com and see it for yourself.

Does Facebook Recruitment Advertising work?

I've just been reading a rather startling account of how many advertisements on Facebook are run by advertising networks simply looking to scam facebook users. The article is written by an insider who designed many of these scams, and shows a fairly lax approach to facebook policing this. You can read this article here.

We've presented our online recruitment training sessions to almost 300 direct recruiters so far this year, and not one of them has reported using Facebook advertising as a means of recruiting staff. Is anyone out there using it for recruitment? If not, why not? Is it simply a matter of major brands not wanting to have their adverts run along side the slightly seedier adverts, or do recruitment adverts simply not work on Facebook? Google seems to have a reasonable number of direct recruiters placing google adword adverts. I am yet to see any direct recruiters looking for staff on Facebook.

Other Options

There are still other ways to recruit staff via Facebook. The most productive being to build a group or profile page to promote your vacancies and let everyone know what it is like to work in your organisation.

The Future

In the article I mentioned earlier, Dennis Yu does paint a somewhat rosier picture for Facebook advertising in the future. He explains that once the major brands start to heavily advertise on the facebook network (and many of them are there already), then the spammers and con artists will be squeezed out by the rise in advertising prices. Personally, I think it is a little lame for Facebook to wait for market forces to resolve this issue, but the future for Facebook advertising could be bright. So make sure you stay up to date on this issue.

FREE Training Sessions Start Tomorrow

After a successful pilot of our online recruitment training sessions, we have decided to roll out a new series of events.

You can see the schedule for these events here.

The feedback from the candidates who attended the first series of sessions can be seen here.

The aim of the sessions is to unlock some of the secrets of online recruitment. We openly show you how we use job boards, linkedin, CV databases, job board aggregators, twitter, facebook etc to source candidates in the most cost efficient and time efficient manner. It's also an excellent opportunity to hear how other direct recruiters are currently approaching these issues. A full list of the course content can be found here.

It's a half day session totally free as long as you are a direct recruiter!

Choosing the right title for your job board advert

As part of our next wave of Online Recruitment Training Workshops we're going to be releasing a series of videos showing some of the content we go over in the half day sessions. Here's a sneak preview in the form of Part 1 - Choosing The Right Job Title for Your Advert...

Why Recruiters Can’t Find Active Job Seekers on Linkedin

Linkedin has over 50m members. I believe it’s the most powerful recruitment tool on the web. But, like many other recruiters I suspect, I do get a little frustrated with it sometimes. Unemployment numbers are up and this recession has left millions of people worldwide out of work. After 17 years of economic growth many professionals who were previously considered the “talent” of the market, have found themselves out of work for the first time since they left education. I’ve blogged before on how I think Linkedin could assist active job hunters by making them stand out from the 50m.

Recruiters have the jobs (although not as many as before) so why not make it easier for them to find the active candidates?

Why hasn’t linkedin taken this step already, there are two possible reasons as I see it:

a) They are not aware of this issue.

b) They do not want to add an option to search for active candidates as it might see them lose revenue from inmails or job adverts.

Linkedin is generally very responsive to their community of members and so I have to believe this must be something they are not aware of.

At this year’s onrec conference, I asked Kevin Eyres, the European MD of Linkedin if there is going to be an update to members profile pages, to allow their members to highlight that they are actively looking for a new position. He announced that they have just added this functionality. I think he mistakenly thought that the addition to select Job Inquiries as something you are interested in hearing from people on.

Now, no one I have spoken to in the Online Recruitment Training sessions I run understands the difference between selecting “job inquiries” or “career opportunities”. The linkedin blog and help section make no explanation as to what the statuses mean. Linkedin for dummies defines it as follows:

Career opportunities: If you’re looking to augment your skill set so you can advance your career, or if you want to network with people that could approach you with a career opportunity now or in the future, you’d want to select this setting.

Job inquiries: If you’re open to receiving job offers or interests from other companies, you’d want to select this setting.

Confused? Well this next part is only going to add to the confusion. When recruiters search for candidates on Linkedin they have the option to search for members based on these contact settings. We see this option listed as the opportunity to search for “potential employees”. Now I would suggest to all recruiters reading this, that you ignore this option but that’s another blog for another day.

This is the crazy part. If you select that you are "interested in career opportunities” your profile will show up when recruiters search using the "show me potential employees” option. But your profile WON’T show up if you selected that you are interested “job inquiries” instead of “career opportunities”.

So come on Linkedin! 50 million members means you must have several million active job seekers as members, hidden in your network.

How important is the Candidate Experience to your organisation?

We've been nominated for an award for the service we deliver to candidates, so it’s easy for me to sit here and say how great we are (that was yesterday’s post). However, I am a little concerned with the candidate experience delivered by the rest of the flat fee recruitment industry. As you would expect, I am a huge fan of the flat fee recruitment model, I think it delivers real value for the customer and is far more efficient than the prehistoric traditional agency model.

But most providers don't deliver a great service to candidates. It's no secret that most flat fee recruitment providers view the candidate as a commodity, something to be passed around to clients with no feedback and no candidate care.

I was interested in seeing the level of candidate care that was delivered by one of the more well known flat fee recruitment agencies, they were early adopters of this flat fee model, so should have had enough time to get this right by now. I decided to "mystery shop" them to see what the candidate experience was like. It was, as I suspected, dismal. The conversation went something along these lines:

Me: Hi, I am enquiring about the Payroll Manager role in Woking (I've changed the details of the role to protect the guilty).
Flat Fee Receptionist: Yes, have you seen the advert online.
Me: Yes, I have
Flat Fee Receptionist: Ok, well if you are interested then you need to apply online for the position.
Me: Ok, but I just had a couple of quick questions that I was hoping someone could answer?
Flat Fee Receptionist: All the information we have is on the advert.
Me: Ok, but I just need to know if the role is in walking distance of Woking train station as I don't drive?
Flat Fee Receptionist: All the information we have is on the advert.
Me: But I don't want to apply for a role then get an interview only to realise I have wasted everyone's time if I cannot commute to their office.
Flat Fee Receptionist: All the information we have is on the advert.

This went on for a bit longer, but I finished the call understanding one of the reasons why this provider is able to offer their service at a cheaper rate than EasyWebRecruitment. Because there is far less service provided than we presently offer. We encourage all our clients to "mystery shop" us, and many do. If you phone our office about a vacancy you will in almost all occasions get your call transferred to the person managing that vacancy, who will be able to intelligently answer all of your questions about the vacancy and the client.

There are two competing models emerging within our industry. The scenario above is a good example one inefficiency in the "automated flat fee recruitment model". There are many more. This model attempts to replace each process that might have involved a well trained recruiter with a robot or a not so clever piece of software. Our organisation and a few others understand that if you take the human beings out of the process what you end up with is a one-size-fits-all service that does not flex to the needs of the client, does not deliver real candidate care and, ultimately, does not reduce costs for your clients (as more roles go unfilled).

You get what you pay for, but flat fee does not have to mean a service delivered by robots.

In tomorrow's post I will highlight the real differences between these two competing models.

Candidate Feedback sees EasyWebRecruitment nominated for RecruitRank Award

It’s almost 4 years since the start of EasyWebRecruitment as a flat fee recruitment agency. When we set out our aims and objectives it was to surpass the service delivered to both candidates and clients whilst dramatically lowering their costs. We have seen lots of happy clients come back to us with positive feedback on our service but we have never tried to precisely measure the experience the candidates using our service find.

We have always worked to a principle of updating every single candidate on the eventual outcome of every single application they make to us we also make sure we reply to every email and return every phone call. It is this approach that has seen candidates using jobsite recruit rank service rate us as one of the best performing agencies in the UK for candidate experience.

Whilst we don’t expect to win on our first outing to the Awards, it feels great to be nominated and free champagne is my favourite champagne.

For more information on all the finalists, see: http://www.recruitrank.co.uk/finalists.html

Is Social Recruiting a Primary Recruitment Method for You?

I have been completing some research recently into recruiting via Social Networking sites and I reached the conclusion that for most organisations, Social Networking mediums are definitely a secondary recruitment method…

So what do I mean by secondary recruitment method?

Why is there such media attention on these new recruitment methods?

Why are organisations not able to utilise the full potential of many of these networks now?

And can I go back to how I have recruited for the last 10 years and ignore these new mediums?

These are all questions that have been actively debated in our office. I am going to try and answer the first two questions in this article and cover the next two in a few days time.

So what do I mean by secondary recruitment method?

Primary internet recruitment methods would currently include, job boards, corporate careers sites and online CV databases. These are primary methods because they are responsible for most of the hires that come from the organisation’s internet recruitment program. In my experience, and from a straw poll of about 40 people I have spoken with so far, social recruiting is not yet making a significant impact. Only two organisations (both niche software companies) suggested they were recruiting extensively via headhunting on Linkedin.

Why is there such media attention on these new recruitment methods?

Well firstly, there is massive potential. Facebook has 250m users globally. Linkedin has over 40m users. Most Recruiters primary problem of “sourcing the talent” would be solved if it was easy to filter through this information and locate relevant people. As I will cover in my second post though, your ability to recruit just via these two mediums can vary greatly.

Secondly, the media love something new, they jump on wacky stories about the internet such as this one or about how people have lost a job via Facebook. They will bang on about the latest survey that shows X % of people will look to use their social network when looking for a job. This can work, and I’m not disputing the potential of your network to help you find your next position, but this has been happening for centuries. Social networks just make the process easier. It is an evolution not a revolution in recruitment terms.

I am a fan of social networks, particularly Linkedin (which I recruit via extensively) and I believe the revolution might be coming. It just isn’t here yet. On my next post I will answer the remaining two questions:

Why are organisations not able to utilise the full potential of many of these networks now?

And

Can I go back to how I have recruited for the last 10 years and ignore these new mediums?

Why Linkedin should do more for Active Jobseekers

Ok, first things first. I must confess, I’m a big fan of Linkedin. It allows my colleagues and I to search a network of over 2.2m UK profiles, which we do on a daily basis, and inevitably turns up a top class candidate or three.

Much has been written on other blogs about how users can use Linkedin to promote themselves. The membership is largely made up of skilled professionals and executives, many of whom have found themselves out of a job and with the phone not ringing for the first time in their lives. They’ve read and applied all the online advice to enhance their profile and expand their network, so why are they are not being approached by recruiters?

Like many other recruiters I want to be able to identify these individuals. They have similar skills to their peers, but they are likely to be far more receptive to my approach. Don’t get me wrong! This is not LazyWebRecruitment, and we are willing to do the work needed to headhunt truly passive candidates, I just think Linkedin could make a simple update to ensure recruiters don’t miss out on searching this active jobseeker network.

Hire Me!

Now I’m open to suggestions as to how best to achieve this? I quite like the idea of adding a flag on their profile page, after the individual’s name, saying “Hire Me”. Then let all recruiters have the option to search for these active job seekers.

Now some of you might say you can already tick a box on your profile saying you are “open” to job offers. This is not the same and the numbers support it. Of the 2.2m profiles I can see in the UK, almost 1m is “open” to career opportunities. This is basically the proportion of people who are willing to consider other jobs.













In the US, Monster has setup a tour to “keep America working”. How have linkedin changed their site to help their members looking for a job?

I attended the Onrec Conference in June and asked Kevin Eyres the European MD of Linkedin this very question. His answer, was that you can search the active job seekers and that they have done a recent update in the past two weeks to add this enhancement. Well, I’m not sure if he was referring to the US site and if this feature is now live (if anyone knows please update me), but it is definitely not here in the UK site.

So with so much talent going to waste, surely linkedin will jump in and help, they don’t have to go to the trouble that Monster has, I recognise that they are not a recruitment service, but they stand in a unique position. So come on Kevin where is this update?

Which is the best day of the week to post an advert on a Job Board?

Our busy part of the week tends to be a Friday afternoon. I suspect Friday morning is a good time for many of our clients to do weekly meetings and decisions get made on new vacancies that they need to recruit for. By the afternoon, we are normally in full swing turning their job descriptions into optimised advert copy for the job boards we use.

Our clients may be keen to get these adverts live by the weekend, but we’ll tend to advise against posting vacancies on a Friday. Customers can always disregard this advice, but there is a logic behind it.

When posting a vacancy on a job board there are two primary methods by which a candidate can discover it, both methods are less effective if you post on a Friday, and here’s why…

Job Search

Many job boards will display the more recent adverts at the top of the search results. Now I am generalising here, some job boards treat adverts equally regardless of when they were posted, and just try to deliver the most relevant advert to the top of the list based on the search term, but the majority will have some bias towards newer postings.

This means if we post your advert on Friday, your advert will perform best when searched for on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. These are the 3 days of the week when people are least likely to think about job hunting, and this is backed up by the audience figures to all the major job boards on these days. Also, did I mention that Friday is typically the busiest day for posting jobs? So post on Friday and you will have the most competition, competing for the smallest audience.

Jobseekers and Email Alerts

The second method is when a job seeker discovers your vacancy by setting up a job alert with the job board. Normally, after a jobseeker runs a search, the job board will offer them the chance to have the results of this job search emailed to them every day, saving them having to remember to return and run this search daily. If we post our advert for your vacancy on a Friday, then the jobseeker would normally get an email from the job board on Saturday morning.

I check my emails 24/7, it’s like a nervous twitch, whenever I stand in a queue or have to wait for something I have to check my email on my iphone. But will your potential new employee have the time to check their email on Saturday? Even if they do are they really going to have time to apply for your position?


Why we do like Mondays

So what is the best day of the week to post a role? Ideally you want to be posting your jobs the day before job board traffic hits its peak. According to all the job boards I have spoken to over several years, it’s Monday. This is backed up by most UK job board traffic peaking on a Tuesday. I have also previously heard from Jobsite that their traffic peaks at around 11am on this day.


Our Stats for June

We managed 98 vacancies in June, generating 24,059 applications, a whopping 245.5 applicants per role for us to screen out all the irrelevant candidates from.

Our friends at Idibu (our job board posting partner) were good enough to send us the figures on when these applications were made. The graph below shows applications dropping off severely over the weekend and peaking on Tuesday, backing up the Monday posting argument. The second chart shows the peak hours of the day for applications.

The Origins of EasyWebRecruitment

At the time I started EasyWebRecruitment in January 2006, there were a couple of other companies in the flat fee internet recruitment space. Looking at the service they provided I became convinced a company with a more pro-active approach could build upon their offerings and make it easier (hence the name) for companies to use a flat fee service. Initially, the service was focused on advertising for clients’ roles, screening CVs and then laising with clients as to the shortlist we forward. Low on cost, big on value, it was a simple way to get companies recruiting online, and a great building block from which to develop a more comprehensive service. This service has evolved over the past few years to include extensive CV database searching, searching social networking sites such as Linkedin, online candidate assessment, personality profiling and even branded featured adverts on major UK job boards. If you’re reading this then you probably know how fast the recruitment market can move, and why continuing to build on our service is essential if we intend to remain at the forefront our industry.