Waste your Irish jobs advertising budget!

Waste your Irish jobs advertising budget!

If online marketing is not your core business you better stay away from it and stick to what you are good at.

The following blog post will show you how to waste your advertising money - completely! You can put a six figure sum in online advertisement, and a wrong process in your Irish online recruitment will just drain that budget without giving you any results – no applications.

It is surprising how many employers, especially multinational corporates got it so wrong when it comes to Irish online recruitment. We will take one randomly chosen one for the purpose of the description of their poor Irish online recruitment process. The company described here is not even the worst offender, and there are many to choose from that compete for the crown of the:

Worst Irish Online Recruiter

Again, we will just randomly take one of the contenders – a known company BT Ireland.

My personal opinion about BT Ireland is actually great. I know a few people there, and they are really nice people. I have used their services for years and found them reliable and competitively priced (Hey they fight with Eircom!!!)

BT Ireland today advertises their positions on Monster.ie and IrishJobs.ie. That is great. Two known Irish Job boards, not overlapping much in their audience, well chosen mix one would say. 20 to 30 jobs advertised on each job site. Interesting to point out that the jobs are not the same on both job sites. Meaning the jobs in Irish Jobs are not om Monster in most cases and the other way around. What does it tell you? Is someone monitoring what type of applicants what job board attacts, and therefore publishes jobs that work better with one job board to that one only? That would be a sign of really well organized HR department, and seriously skillful recruitment admin.

But the reality is very, very different…. When you try to apply for a job advertised from BT on a IrishJobs.ie you realize that there is no Apply button at eh bottom of the job description. But instead…. The text:

Please follow this link for instructions on how to apply

That is a hyperlink towards you application. The problem with that is that that link there is where you want to bring the most applicants to – to click on it and apply to your job! Surprisingly BT Ireland have chosen to print that most important link in the smallest font used on the whole page!?

OK, ok, lets say you find it, read it, understand the message, and actually click on it. I know it is unlikely, but for the sake of argument,… OK? Someone will click on it once in a while?!

And there goes a real surprise! A Word document opens in a browser and reads:

Application form guidance

How to apply for an external vacancy in BT Ireland

To apply for the particular role you are interested in with, log on to http://www.btpeople.bt.com/APPLIC/frames/general_postings.htm

Tick all search categories and enter Ireland as location.

Click search.

This will bring up all open vacancies in BT Ireland.

Select/tick role(s) you wish to apply for

Add to job basket

Click apply for jobs in job basket

If you have not registered with BT careers before you will need to enter your email address and password(less than 12 characters) for first time user for Identification purposes.

Am I kidding? No. Really, not. Here is a screenshot:

What if I do not have word on my computer? What if I am on PDA? What if my security settings in the browser do not let me open or download Word docs from the web? What if I am on a slow dial up, and it just take a bit to much time? What if…

Well BT did not ask themselves that question, after all they are the ISP, and if you are on dial up, BT Ireland will provide you with a entrance to the future on their super highway broadband DSL lines!

Well, if you thought that was shocking so far, get ready for a real fun! Let us assume that you are realy that keen to actually apply for that job they have advertised. You click on the link in the Word doc, and it DOES NOT as you would expect bring you to the page with that same job advertised, but to some general BT Ireland recruitment web site.

OK, you are a fighter; you will find that job again on this site, will you not! It could not be that hard after all.

Let us try to get the listing of all the jobs in Dublin that BT Ireland has advertised on their site here. Just tick all the check boxes, type Dublin as a location, click search and you get what? 6 jobs only? Out of 20 or 30 advertised on job sites? 4 ut of 5 job seekers will actually not find the job they have found on the IrishJobs web site? Ok, there is a way to actually choose a bit more jobs, if you type Dublin 14 and Dublin 4, but even Ireland will give you only about half of the jobs advertised on job boards. Just do not put ‘dublin’ since you will start getting error boxes…

Then there is some more fiddling with an online basket where you need to get your job into, and then go two screens back to click Apply for the job in a basket, the register with your email and password, and about 30 minutes after you have found your job on the job board, and are only one click away to actually sending your application to BT Ireland you get the following screen:

What they expect you to do here is to follow 12 short steps and build an online CV. In this review we will not cover the process from here after since up until here it was about enough time that one would spending to apply fro a job even in BT Ireland. To enter your Name, address, jobs, schools, skills, references, hobbies once again,… well even BT Ireland job is not worth that much really.

If one calculates a dropout rate on every single obstacle one finds in getting to the job application form, the percentage of the applicants who get to the application from the IrishJobs web site will be in the single digits.

Job applications are why you advertise your jobs. If you loose 90% of the applicants, you have wasted 90% of your advertising budget. Or do multinational corporations in Ireland actually advertise only for branding purposes? And hire trough recruitment agencies? Well even if not intentionally, with an online recruitment strategy like BT Ireland and with the most of the online recruitment advertising budget simply wasted, they surely do not manage to hire much directly from the job boards.

How to get on top on Irish Jobs?

How to get on top on Irish Jobs?

There is a long list of questions I get asked frequently, and there are ones that almost everyone asks. But there is the one that almost everyone asks:

How do I place my jobs on top of the job searches on job boards???

I do tell the recruiters how to do it. They do not do it (and continue doing it straight away) and they ask me again:

How do I place my jobs on top of the job searches on job boards???

And it drives me nuts….

So here it is:

Option A

Pay for it! Almost all job boards have some ‘Hot jobs’ feature. IS the cost justifiable? You will have to find it for yourself. It does depend on your negotiation skills as well!

Option B

Update your jobs. And do it regularly. In fact do it as per the job update limit of each job board! And that is not all. You will get much better response to your job ads if you get your job in the ‘Jobs by Email’ alert sent to the job hunters. Some job boards like Recruit Ireland send the whole long list – of al the jobs refreshed every day, to every subscribed job hunter. The result is that there are a lot of jobs in the email, and they are more or less the same jobs every day – so job hunters will not click on many of those. Other job boards like Irish Jobs or Monster will send you only 10 jobs per day in the job alert. This is where the value is – to get your jobs listed within those 10 jobs. The number of applications sent to the jobs listed in the Jobs by Email is multiple times higher than in the jobs that do not get in the email alert. That is a fact, and it is a cross job board fact. TO get the job in the email alert you need to refresh or publish, depending on a job board, your job in Ireland in the certain time of the day. Subscribe to a different job alerts, and try and publish your jobs in different times a day. You will find the time and the action – publish or just update) required for each job board to get it the job in the job alerts.

When you do find the time and the action required to put your job in Ireland in the email alert of the job board you are publishing your Irish jobs to, you need to put the job into as many different alerts, in as many industries, locations or categories that job hunters have used to create their Jobs by Email alerts. Go to each job board and create different alerts to understand how they function. You will also be able to use your created job alerts to measure and monitor your success of getting your jobs in the Jobs by Email alerts.

Is it easy? NO!

Does it pay to invest your time in it? YES!

Why? You multiply the response rates!

Will job boards get mad at me? Not if you play by their rules! So read their terms carefully, and consult with your account managers of each job board.