Linkedin Vacancy Distribution - Posting Jobs to your Linkedin Profile via the BlogLink Application

On May 25th we will be launching our Career Site product with a free days training for interested parties. We plan to build careers sites that are closely integrated with Social Media and able to distribute our client's vacancies automatically to Twitter and Facebook as well as Job Board Aggregators such as Indeed and Trovit. The aim being to distribute vacancies onto as many relevant mediums as possible with zero effort required from them. But what about Linkedin?

Well if you post vacancies on Linkedin ($195 a posting) then they will show up in your linkedin profile.


They will also show up on your company page.
As part of the research, we were keen to devise a way of having your latest jobs feed into your profile so that anyone viewing your profile can leap straight to your careers site if a vacancy catches their eye. Once again this is a long range tactic that will eventually pay off so you don't want to have to keep updating / tweaking your profile. Keep the input (your time) to a minimum, then you are under less pressure to deliver a quantifiable output (hires/applications).

Step 1 - Get an RSS feed from your Applicant Tracking Software Vendor (Recruitment Software)

If you don't have an ATS provider then you will probably not be able to take advantage of this method. But we use Hireserve and I would recommend them highly (we like them so much we actually partnered with them to sell their products to our clients).

Our RSS feed is: http://jobs.easywebrecruitment.com/rss.xml

Step 2 -Add the RSS feed as a listed website under "MyRSS Feed"

Select to edit your profile. Then select to edit the websites that are listed under your profile.


Then choose "MyRSS Feed" and input your RSS feed.


Step 3 - Viola!

Your vacancies will automatically appear in your profile.



Those of you who are very clever will realise that although this method does work there is a small problem in that our RSS feed is not listing our most recent roles but its listing them alphabetically. Do not fret. Your RSS feed should be able to list them in date order, we have already raised this with Hireserve and a quick fix will be in place soon.

NEXT WEEK

Next week we will show you the second half of this strategy including how to get your vacancies automatically listing in your company page for zero effort. Watch this space....

Linkedin Vacancy Distribution - Status Updates

We put a lot of effort into searching the millions of profiles found on linkedin when we're recruiting for those more demanding roles. It's a topic I've spoken about on this blog before and cover in depth in my Linkedin Training Webinars, but what about the other side of the coin? What can be done to help candidates searching Linkedin for job opportunities to find your vacancy?

This week I'm going to take a look at some quick and easy methods you can use to get your vacancy in front of the right people. Starting with an area of your Linkedin profile that most visitors see first, your status update.

Updating the status on your linkedin profile is a quick and easy way to immediately broadcast a vacancy to the Linkedin network. Simply log in to linkedin and fill in your status update box (see above) to immediately broadcast your vacancy. This displays in the network activity section on the homepage of your connections and in the email update they receive from Linkedin.

Making it easy for applicants to apply is a key issue, and ideally you want to provide a link that will take them somewhere they can both get more information on the role, and apply online with the minimum of fuss. While your hands might be tied slightly by where your vacancy has been posted, the link provides a great opportunity to implement a little "meta-analytics" and see how people are reacting to your post.

Using Bit.ly

What is bit.ly? bit.ly allows users to shorten, share, and track links (URLs). Reducing the URL length makes sharing easier (useful for the limited space of a status update).

Producing a bit.ly link is easy and can be done in seconds at bit.ly, sign up to a free account and you will also be able to track the number of hits your link receives and where they come from.

If your link is getting a large number of hits you'll know that you have a great opportunity to grow your network in that area, widening the audience for future vacancies. Of course the ultimate metric is "did you hire from this method" but as this method is one that take seconds and delivers a relevant candidate occasionally, you will likely have to do it over an over again until you get a hire. 


This is why bit.ly is important, because the potential of success with this method largely depends on the strength and relevance of your network. If you are advertising a Software Developer role when your network is full of bankers the chance of success is greatly reduced and will largely depend on them referring your status update on to their network or to someone they know (see here to see how Linkedin is encouraging its network to share). Bit.ly will give you a good indication as to whether anyone is actually clicking on your update.

Tomorrow, I will show you how to post jobs within groups, a simple but effective strategy to get your jobs in front of the right people for FREE.

On Saturday, I will finish this little series of blogs by showing you how to get your jobs to dynamically update in your profile via the BlogLink application. So you profile automatically shows your organisations latest roles (see example below).

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!

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.

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?