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.