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!