80:20 Rule in Job Advertising Budget does not work!

80:20 Rule in Job Advertising Budget does not work!

Remember the old 80:20 rule that says that 20% of your staff does 80% of the job, and all other similar ‘connotations’?

Well if you apply the same to your Jobs Advertising Budget and split it between online and offline advertising, it simply will not return the expected inverted result.

The fact is that most of the large recruiters spend far more than a half of their Jobs Advertising Budget in offline advertisement, and a failrly small chunk online. There is an obvious reason for such a distribution since there is a fairly limited vendors that could bite into a Job Advertising Budget providing any kind of services. We are talking about a handful job boards only, and Google AdWords, that again with GeoTargeting to Ireland applied can not consume any significant amount of your Job Advertising Budget. So the majority of it gets spent offline. The larger the recruitment agency or consultancy gets, the larger the offline chunk is. The largest agencies spend more than 80% from our ‘Rule’

And here comes the funny part!

The percentage of CVs attracted from offline advertising is always far more than 20%. The single digit figures of the % are the reality!

What does this mean? It means that +80% of the Jobs Advertising Budget attracts less than 20% of the applicants. Talking about money wasting? The same is also true from the opposite perspective: less than 20% of your budget brings in more than 80% of your applicants.

Update jobs, Clone Jobs, Duplicate jobs...

An interesting fact jut came up today in a discussion with a recruiter in Ireland. The fact that a job published on almost any job site in Ireland, quickly disappears in thousands of jobs advertised. The larger the job board is – the more jobs it has the fact that a job gets ‘lost’ is more true. We looked at Irish Jobs and have saved a snapshot of a search results for the keyword ‘Manager’ in all locations. We have dome the same every 10 minutes during a 2 hour period. The test was run on Monday during a lunch time (a 2 hour lunch?! J). The results are outstanding! The saved web pages – that are the same web page actually just displaying the status of it in 10 minute intervals, did not contain a single same job. Meaning that no job have ‘survived’ fro 10 minutes on the front page of IrishJobs in the results for the word ‘Manager’.

So the reality is, if someone is looking for your jobs, you have 10 minute interval from publishing it, until being gone from the first page!!!


So this obviously makes you think! Should I:

1. 
   Update Jobs – does that Update All button do anything???
   
2. Clone Jobs – a new job is a new job! Let’s see what their terms and conditions actually say….
   
3. Duplicate Jobs – How about advertising the same jobs 5 times? At least it will get there in front of the visitors 5 times more than a single one!
   

The worst part in the whole story is that each job board is different. One really needs to spend a lot of time analyzing each one to understand how to (ab)use it to it’s full potential. And even worse are the constant changes of Terms and Conditions, and new job boards popping up that you have to understand.

Doesn’t it always seam that your jobs are on the bottom of any list on the job boards?

Best Irish Recruitment Office

Best Irish Recruitment Office

It is interesting fact to notice when you are visiting all the different recruitment agencies in Ireland how their offices differ. The interiors differ so much that it actually makes you wondering – are all those companies in the same business?

There are offices in some underground spaces that should be used only for storage of your skiing gear or perhaps as a vine cellars. Most of the offices in towns are in some ‘Gorgeous Georgian Houses’. In the same time almost all of them are almost falling apart, and while climbing up the cracking stairs, you are wondering - Will I ever get alive from here?!

Another advantage of housing a recruitment agency ins one of those Lovely Georgian Houses in convenient locations in City Centres is the fact that there is no parking space, or if there is it is pay parking that is 100% full all the time. In the same time they call you for an interview in there?

Parking space problem is even worse in the recruitment agencies placed in Modern – purpose built industrial estates. You can be sure you will NEVER find a parking space there. And those industrial estates are purposely built outside the reach of any public transport?!

But,... there is a light at the end of the tunnel here....

There is one company where I just felt good when I entered. It is Premiere Group, with their office in Dublin. Pay parking in front of the main entrance had quite a few parking spots, but the real surprise is waiting for you inside! The reception area of a size of a 4 bedroom house, bottled water on offer, and a receptionist with a best Logitech mouse on offer today (MX Revolution – retailing at about € 79 in PC World).

The surprise is even bigger when you visit a Cork office of Premiere Group for example. Same furniture, same glass walls, same feeling actually. And even nicer view on the river from a fancy corner meeting room.

Well done Premiere Group – a clear winner for the nicest office of any Irish Recruitment agency!

PS. If you think you have an office you should show off – please fill in the Comments form below.

Happy New Year dear Irish Recruiters!

Happy New Year dear Irish Recruiters!

The festive season is ending, so here is a bit of a free advice and consultation on how to spend your money a bit wiser. Since most of you are investing in getting visitors to your web site (I have just noticed Google AdWords ads for most of your web sites), you might be interested in the user experience a job hunter will have when he/she gets to your web site. Let us take a large agency like HRM as example. A job hunter clicks on the advert that reads:

Ireland Jobs
Ireland's Leading Employers
Search Our Huge Selection
www.HRM.ie

…comes to your web site to look for those jobs at the page he/she is brought to:
http://www.hrm.ie/index.cfm

Chooses your Job Sector …and looks for a Search button,… and looks, but there is not a Search button anywhere?…

Patient job hunters will find Submit Your Search link printed in the smallest font on the site. When clicked a portion of users will get a popup window saying: You must choose a sub category. Others might not get it depending on the popup blockers installed.

Telling a visitor what they ‘Must’ do might not be the best way to make their way to your advertisements. If HRM is measuring the drop-off rate here, they would see the huge percentage of visitors just giving up at various stages in the search process, before they actually get a chance to find a job and apply for it?
To increase ROI from your Google AdWords campaign, consider an advertisement that looks like this:

Contracts Manager
Dublin South
Large Irish contractor
€110K + Benefits

That links to the page where that same job is advertised: http://www.hrm.ie/jobs_details.cfm?id=17118

The effect is that the job hunter that clicks on the ad (and that is what your pay for) will cost your only those few (tents) of cents per click. A huge percentage of the job hunters will apply and send you their CV. With Google AdWords campaigns and your web site design set up properly, you still can achieve getting CV’s well below one Euro per CV. No job board in Ireland can compete with that and deliver you 1000 CVs for 1000 Euro. Another important thing to notice is that with Google AdWords you can choose where you want your job hunters from geographically with the Geo Targeting facility in Google AdWords. Again no job board can do that as well, and tell you we will only send you CVs from job hunters that are physically in Ireland (or any other country) right now.