Jobs Ireland

Job boards, by tradition, provide a platform on which recruiters pay to advertise their vacancies then wait in anticipation for applications to flood through to designated in-boxes. There is nothing particularly deliberate about the service and the reactivity is both its strength and its weakness.

But in the current climate there is little room for limitations, so whilst reduced-cost recruitment solutions will continue to feature in most recruiter’s budgets, technological development dictates that unless job boards embrace more innovative strategies, they could see their status stifled by the sophistication of integrated products such as applicant tracking systems (ATS), CV parsing and the prospects of disintermediation.

Reactivity is history. Witness the rise of integrated proactive engagement.

In good times desirable candidates are comfortable, entrenched in their positions and paid well. They are confident. They don’t reach out and share because they see no purpose in it. Conversely, in bad times, everyone feels the need to share, so recruiters are inundated by CVs, most of which are either irrelevant or wholly generic; the latter being as bad as the former during a time when standing out from the crowd is so important.

So what should job boards be doing to ensure their users receive a service that will make them return? What is the future for job boards and how will they tackle the undoubted challenges that lie ahead?

The recruitment landscape now is about conversations. Web-savvy jobseekers are communicating in language that is natural, open and honest, sometimes even direct; more direct than recruiters might wish them to be. Everything is changing. People are connecting and working together. The Internet is enabling these conversations and there is nothing corporations or recruiters can do to stop it. What they can do though, is embrace it: for joining them and showing innovation is surely the only way to preserve.

For some job boards social media has come at just the right time. It provides them with the means of providing information (e.g. advertising jobs), building relationships (with clients and candidates) and conducting forums for discussion on how they can improve as an industry. Most importantly of all, however, social media allows job boards to get messages out from their clients to a far wider audience than many other recruitment channels. And these messages are delivered real-time, with accuracy.

If a job board operates in a niche sector the dissemination of this information is even more specific, so even more relevant. A jobseeker looking for marketing jobs in the UK, for example, should be better served by a job board specialising in the marketing field. They return to job boards where the content (and the current age is all about content) is targeted at them. People see tangible value in subscribing to newsletters and feeds, contributing to forums and joining groups if it directly benefits them. Generalist sites, whilst clearly valuable, cannot offer this exclusivity. Their unique visitor stats may be high but they are unable to harvest customer loyalty. Return rates are relatively low.

Sector-specific job boards are also far more likely to be empathetic to their clients. They hear where they are coming from, understanding their frustrations and working to their needs. For niche job board owners it is essential they engrain themselves under the skin of their market. Generalist sites have multiple variables and bigger margins for error. If a niche board fails to engage with its audience it will soon lose its unique identifier and will be dropped in favour of a more meaningful competitor. This is the same for traditional recruitment generalists.

The word ‘traditional’ is an interesting one. When does something stop being contemporary? Job boards have been around for ages but are still commonly classed as modern-day recruitment mediums. With the advent and development of social media, however, do job boards now fill a void between traditional recruitment companies and en vogue employment media? Irrespective of the answer it indicates challenging times ahead.

Job boards offer a low-cost but highly speculative place for employers to advertise their vacancies. Job boards offer recruitment agencies a platform from which to attract talent and develop brand identity. Two separate entities, two different purposes. But whilst the impression is one of mutual exclusivity there should be no reason why the pair cannot develop symbiosis via a job board. By the same token why should recruitment agencies view their competitors as foe? In an age where sharing information and being transparent are the currencies of social engagement, perhaps a job board provides the perfect place to perpetrate a fee-sharing mechanism.

Referral-based recruitment will dominate the employment landscape within two years. In the same period social media will evolve and, with it, opportunities to network will be met by a larger number of experienced social-engagers. These people will be accustomed not only to integrating with social space but using it to find a job and developing their careers. They will also be used to earning fees from recommendations.

Job boards can be a vehicle for recruiters to attract a better quality of candidate to their vacancy by advertising the role with a cash incentive for recommending someone to it. This serves two purposes: firstly, few recommendations are offered lightly so the recruiter will receive endorsed applications – always a winner. Secondly, recruitment consultants can become referrers, working on vacancies with cash incentives, collecting fees they would not otherwise have been able. There are multiple benefits: recruiters always have new briefs to work on; a recruiter-registered jobseeker has more job options; it reduces the number of speculative calls/applications to the employer/recruiter.

Any niche job board embracing the referral model will add stickiness to its site and through an undoubtedly vast people network can ensure it is the oiled handle of this multi-cogged mechanism. Referral-based recruitment links all the staffing components together and manages to cohesively combine social media, social networking and innovation into one malleable solution.

As employers seek the feasibility of disintermediation, job boards and recruitment consultancies continue to prove their worth. But isn’t the true middleman the traditional recruiter? And if so, where would that leave job boards? Because if the figures are correct more than 50% of job board advertising revenue comes from recruitment agencies. Removing them would mean a huge reliance on direct employer spend, something they are trying to reduce. It is a merry-go-round of conjecture and hypothesis but one thing is for certain, as and when the economy flourishes again it will be the job boards with value-added customer retention schemes that will benefit and profit most.

Around 75% of job boards are owned by the major publishing groups in the UK. Clearly these companies are suffering in the current recession. Classified advertising revenues have dropped by over 17% in the last 12 months; some individual results are much more serious than this. The downturn is hitting advertisers and recruiters hard, attacking job boards from both angles. The short-term cites continued embattlement against cautious employers and cash-strapped recruitment consultancies. So, now more than ever, digital recruitment solution providers should be putting a reciprocal arm around the metaphorical shoulder of their clients, urging them to embrace their new solutions.

When the economy recovers it will be the innovators who thrive. Statics will die. There are too many potential landmines out there for a ‘traditional’ job board to remain reactive. Get with social engagement or get ready to fail.

Read more about the outlook for the recruitment landscape in 2011.

Simon Lewis | Only Marketing Jobs (via Onrec)

Written by Yuki Noguchi, Correspondent, National Desk, NPR News

With the unemployment rate at 9.4 percent and ticking up, millions of Americans are in the job market for the first time in several years.

But the job market has changed in that short time. The paper resume is laughably passe, at least in some circles. Not having a profile on the social networking site LinkedIn is, for some employers, not only a major liability but a sign that the candidate is horribly out of touch.

“If someone sends us a paper resume folded in thirds, stuffed in an envelope, it’s hard to take it seriously,” says Glenn Kelman, chief executive of Redfin, an online real estate brokerage.

Kelman says he has friends in their 30s and 40s who just missed the social networking boat and now need coaching in how things have changed.

For example, he says blogs and Facebook pages have gone from mere kids’ play to essential for communicating with employers online. Someone applying for a job in marketing, for example, will do much better in an interview if he or she already commands an audience through a blog. People in sales look better if they can prove they have a broad network of contacts in their field.

These new rules especially hold true in the high-tech fields, where being up to the minute is considered essential. But even other industries are following suit.

Job applicants are required to submit their resumes digitally at UMB Financial, a bank based in Kansas City, Mo.

“We get very few paper resumes,” says Pat Cassady, the director of recruitment at UMB. Cassady says 10 to 12 percent of UMB hires come through LinkedIn, and she searches niche networking sites for active users who might be promising business leaders. She is even planning to use Twitter to reach out to new recruits.

A recent survey carried out by RecruitIreland.com shows that despite the prevailing doom and gloom, Irish jobseekers can see some positive outcomes from the recession.
Dublin, June 16, 2009 – A recent survey carried out by RecruitIreland.com into how the recession is impacting jobseekers shows that despite the prevailing doom and gloom, jobseekers can see some positive outcomes from the recession.

. 70% of survey respondents agreed that bargaining for services is now easier
. Over half said there is less pressure to “Keep up with the Joneses”
. Half of those surveyed are optimistic about the future and the majority of respondents feel that recovery will take place in early 2011

Commenting on the results Emma Henry, Marketing Manager RecruitIreland.com said;

“This survey shows how resilient we are as a nation. It is refreshing to see that people can see some positives”

However, it seems that very few can escape the impact of the recession, 81% of the jobseekers surveyed have seen their jobs impacted in some way and 33% of those surveyed have actually been made redundant.

Other key findings are as follows;

. 35% have had a reduction in salary and over half of those have also seen reduced working hours
. 31% feel that their careers are on hold for the moment, some even feel that their careers have taken a step back. According to one respondent;

“Yes, I was made redundant in my career. I had worked hard to get to where I was and now I have to take a step back about 5 years just so I can get a job!”

. 16% are taking the opportunity to invest in further training
. 14% have actually benefited from the recession through promotion as the result of a job freeze or are benefiting from increased experience through job sharing
. 8% are taking the opportunity to start their own business

“It is particularly heartening to see that our entrepreneurial spirit is still flourishing with over 8% of respondents setting up their own businesses” Commented Emma Henry

“Pressure to keep up with the Joneses, however, has been replaced with the pressure to get or keep a job and there is no downplaying the stress this can cause.

In an effort to help ease this stress a little RecruitIreland.com has been running a campaign offering free jobs advertising to all Irish employers until September. The objective is to provide a one stop shop online for jobseekers.

To date the campaign has been a great success and we now have over 450 employers supporting the campaign and advertising their job vacancies on the site.”

The Irish Recruitment Conference was a place where you could see Irish Jobs and LinkedIN together.

Jane and Patrick having a chat during a break of a Irish Recruiters Conference: “The Future of Recruitment – Part 1: The Road Ahead”

Jane Lorigan, CEO of IrishJobs.ie
Jane has been CEO of IrishJobs.ie for over 4 years and is also a board director of Saongroup which is an Irish company that is one of the fastest growing online recruitment companies in the world. The group has expanded quickly in the last 2 years and now has operations in the UK, USA, Canada, China, India, The Gulf, Caribbean, Central America and South Africa.

Patrick Traynor of LinkedIn
Patrick is sales manager for corporate solutions for LinkedIn. He has 15+ years experience in sales positions in a variety of online industries and is currently helping LinkedIn expanded its market share into Europe.

What is Twitter?

Twitter is a social networking tool which permits its users to send and read other user’s updates also known as tweets, which are text-based messages of up to 140 characters in length. Basically, the updates done on twitter are displayed on the user’s profile page and delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them.

It is said on twitter website, Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

The main purpose of Twitter at first was to provide a very simple and unique method of communicating with people for casual chitchat. However, nowadays it is a powerful tool on the internet to generate website traffic.

Let’s talk about, How to make friends and attract traffic on twitter?

•Twitter is a wonderful platform to keep on connects with people who are following you and who you are following. It is also known as Micro-Blogging as the messages are limited to 140 characters only.

•Offer some unique things like useful content or articles so that your followers will appreciate it. I like to offer my blog updates, what am I doing on it?
•Never miss the any opportunity to promote your Twitter page. Place your Twitter profile link out where people can find you like on your own website, blogs, article resource box, email signature file, in forum posts, etc. People will follow you on if you have some trustworthiness.
•To keep your worth, you need to be reliable when posting new updates, or tweets. Present it if you have something to offer or you will lose your strength.
These are few simple things you can follow to make new friends and generate traffic. There are few more features available on twitter website that you can see visiting the help section.

Worky.com is a new Irish Recruitment Social Networking site.

Ireland is a nest for the recruitment sites. Obviously a very small number of the sites work well for the employers in Ireland since the market can only support a certain number. Worky is different, since it is built to be a global recruitment social networking market. Worky is in essence a LikedIN with no registered users. Or Monster with no jobs. Or both in the same time actually.

Where is the full Worky recruitment site article.

Recruitment Article of the Day:

How Recruiters can use Boolean Searches by Pushpa Sreenivasan

By Pushpalatha Sreenivasan: The use of Web 2.0 Technologies in Recruitment has been well documented over the last year or so in this blog. While Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook grab most of the headlines one of the less talked about but most effective tools Recruiters can use is using Boolean Searches.

As an introduction if you have not used Boolean searches in the past, a Boolean search is where one enters the key words into a search engine like Google or Yahoo within the inverted commas and use words like OR, AND, NOT which are called as operators with modifiers such as Quotation Marks “” and Parentheses () to narrow the search.

For example, OR can be used to search to include results that contain either of the words you are looking for. For example EAI OR EIM. OR is a good tool to use when there are several common spellings or synonyms of a word.

As for AND, its used for inclusion of key words. For example if I’m searching for a Java Developer, as I need both the key words “Java” and Developer to be present in the CV I need to give a command like this in the search engine – “Java AND Developer

The “AND” operator narrows the search down by combining the key words.

This way, one can play with the Bolean operators to narrow the search and get precisely what one is looking for.

How does Boolean Search help in recruiting?

Firstly, it comes handy to sort out the information a Recruiter is looking for. Once the data is sorted, then the search conducted within sorted data proves even more effective than search with the raw data. Also, Boolean search has the capability to increase the search in terms of speed and efficiency when searching profiles online through search engines. One of the ways to get a hang of it is trying with various operators with some permutation and combination.

If you are a job seeker and want to get much more visibility of your profile make sure your skills and experiences are clearly defined in the form of key words and people know how to get in touch with you.

Another best ways of using Boolean Search is not sticking to one search engine. Using multiple search engines enhances one’s access to certain extraordinary information, which sometimes your most favourite search engine would not be able to pick up. This is quite interesting and also the introduction of this new search engine www.zuula.com. In its own words, Zuula is an innovative Internet search service that gives its users quick access to web, image, video, news, blog and job search results from all the major search engines. This really comes handy as one need not hop from one search engine to other.

The author of this article has been with the Oracle India Recruitment Team for the past three years and can be contacted at pushpalatha.sreenivasan@oracle.com

Recruit Ireland offers Free Jobs Advertising for Ireland’s Employers.

Ireland Inc has not ground to a halt. Despite the current economic uncertainties of businesses across Ireland, new businesses are starting up, some are expanding and vacated positions do need to be filled. But doom and gloom prevails and confidence is low. RecruitIreland.com is combating this by taking immediate action and launching a campaign offering Free Advertising to Ireland’s employers in a bid to get Ireland’s talented workforce back into employment.

“By enabling Ireland’s employers to advertise jobs on our website free of charge we believe we will be providing a valuable service to businesses at a time when they need all the support they can get,” commented Emma Henry, Marketing Manager RecruitIreland.com.

RecruitIreland.com has a large talent pool of loyal, highly qualified and skilled professionals visiting the site on a regular basis. Employers who place their jobs on RecruitIreland.com will benefit not only because the service is now free of charge, but because it will also draw in highly skilled candidates who may not otherwise have seen those positions advertised.

“We also hope that this will bolster the confidence of those who find themselves unemployed, that they will see that there are jobs out there and that as a Nation we have not ground to a halt.”

By offering free advertising to every employer across Ireland RecruitIreland.com aims to create one central bank of all the available jobs in the country, thereby taking some of the strain out of the job hunt for job seekers.

RecruitIreland.com is Taking Action to Get Ireland Working Now!

The great thing about a job interview is the way that it narrows the field. If you can get in front of the people making a hiring decision, that means that you've already moved from a group of perhaps 100
resumes to a field of just a few serious contenders. At that point, your chance of getting a job offer improves dramatically.

Of course, having surmounted that huge hurdle, the last thing you want to do is blow it. To that end, here are 10 job-interview gaffes to avoid.

1. Complaining about the parking or directions.
Don't think it doesn't happen! As cordial and happy-go-lucky as your interviewers may seem, they don't want to hear a job-seeker complain that the place was hard to find or that the parking is inconvenient. The best (that is, the worst) example of this I ever experienced as an HR person came from the candidate who said, "Seven handicapped parking spaces next to the front door? What, are you having a wheelchair convention or something?" That was a short interview.

2. Bad-mouthing your previous job, manager, or company.
If you've been laid off or suffered some other unpleasant experience at your last job, it's easy to launch into a litany of everything the old employer did wrong. Don't do it! The interviewer is bound to wonder "Will this person be bashing me behind my back on some future interview, too?" Zip it.

3. Digging into details off the bat.
The typical selection process allows plenty of time for you to learn everything you need to know about the company's dental plan, its tuition-reimbursement policy, and the size of your cubicle. Don't ask about any of these items on a first interview, when you should be focusing the conversation on the role and the organization.

4. Groveling.
Employers want to hire people who can do the jobs and who are enthusiastic about the work. What's not so appealing is the candidate whose every word and gesture conveys the message, "Hire me, I beg you!" Joblessness is no fun, but you don't help your chances of getting the nod by presenting yourself as a candidate whose most notable attribute is desperation.

5. Answering a question before you understand it.
The absolute worst answer to any interview question is the response that shows you weren't really listening. When an interviewer asks a question that requires thought, like, "Tell me about a time when you had to convince a team of people to change gears," you don't want to blurt out, "Oh, I've done that a million times!" Any "tell me about a time when" question is a question that the interviewer has chosen to elicit a specific problem/solution story from you. Take the time to think through the question and compose a thoughtful answer. A few minutes of silence in the room won't kill anybody.

6. Spacing out.
Any interviewer worth her salt will be able tell when you've zoned out. If you're wondering whether the 5:40 train will get you home in time to watch the playoff game, the interviewer will spot it in your eyes. If you're really out of it, he may throw you a curve ball like, "So, who would you say was the most effective member of Teddy Roosevelt's cabinet, and why?" Stay in the room, with your eyes either meeting the interviewer's or looking thoughtfully at the ceiling. Or your shoes.

7. Slouching.
We'll throw in tipping the chair back off its front legs, resting your head on your hand, and lacing your fingers together behind your head.

8. Cursing.
Interviewers love to put job candidates at ease. When you reach the state of ease that lets an "f-bomb" escape your lips, you've gone too far.

9. "Opening the kimono."
It's tempting to share with a sympathetic interviewer the news that this job search has been really hard, that you're not getting callbacks, and that you've already sent out 150
resumes. Don't do it. Smart job candidates put out a vibe that says, "I'm glad to be here with you and this job might be fun, but I'm a capable person who's aware of his value on the job market."

10. Doing anything disgusting.
The long list of personal gross factors includes picking one's teeth or nose, spitting, and other unmentionables that are best left to the imagination. Any of these is a sure-fire interview-killer (and can we really blame the employer for that?). One candidate asked me for a cup of water, took a sip, swished it around in his mouth, and spat into a potted plant. Niiiiiice!

Liz Ryan is a 25-year HR veteran, former Fortune 500 VP and an internationally recognized expert on careers and the new millennium workplace.
Contact Liz at liz@asklizryan.com or join the Ask Liz Ryan online community at www.asklizryan/group.
The opinions expressed in this column are solely the author's.

If you prepared your CV properly, and applied to the relevant job you like, there are only three possible outcomes. You will get a mail saying you are not suitable or something similar, you will not hear from the recruiter at all, or,…. Your mobile will ring! Everyone loves to get that call: “This is John. I’m calling to see if you’d like to come in for a job interview.” Your pulse races, then your stomach drops: “What am I gonna wear? What am I gonna say?”

The time has finally come! You’ve been called for an interview. Now what? Don’t sweat it! Prepare yourself to win. You know you’re ready for the job…now you have to convince the employer as well!
Getting ready is a probably the most important part of your interview. You will likely (and you should!), spend more time preparing yourself than you will in the interview. Preparing includes getting to know more about the company and the job, and being able to explain how and why you’re the best person to hire. To help you study, be sure you have a full job description. If you do not have one from when you first applied for the job, be sure to ask the person who is arranging your interview for a copy. Even if you do have it, make sure it is the most recent and the most complete job description.

What then? Try to find the examples in your past or work experience where you have made achievements that are relevant for the job. Simply list all the requirements from the job description, and prepare a short answer that showcases what have you done in the past that shows you will do it good in the future job as well.

He honest in the interview. And even more important: Be yourself!