Jobs Market

Jobs Market is a free web site where both Candidates and Employers can publish. Candidates publish their Profiles and even blogs, and Employers publish their Jobs and company profiles and again blog posts. Anyone can connect to anyone, and candidates can decide if to accept the offers to connect from the Employers.

A free site Jobs Market is best positioned to help Irish recession and get the available workforce in contact with the right employers.

Alan Shortall

Feel like Blogging?

Alan Shortall wrote a 'corporate' style blog. The majority of the blogs are more 'personal'.

How is yours?

Irish Blogger

http://seoireland.wordpress.com/

 

It is getting easier to blog every day. The number of different web sites where you can open a blog is growing quickly. The latest Irish one is Irish Blogger.

 

Wordpress is probably the most popular option. Check the ease on blogging there with blogs like SEO Ireland for example.

 

Blogspot has been here for years, and it looks it will remain a top player in the blogging field. Again a sample of a blog there Irish Jobs in Ireland or Irish Jobs Ireland

 

 

Jobs Board

Jet another Irish Jobs site... :)

IT Jobs

Social networking and recruitment?

A blog and a job board in one?

Check yourself:

IT Jobs

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.

Recruitment Agency Website CMS

Recruitment agency web sites in Ireland are quite simple in general. Most of them are based on some simple content management systems (CMS) that enable non technical users to edit the content of the web site. There are two types of the content based on the frequency of the update. The content hat needs to be updated daily is jobs advertised. All the agents within the agency need to have the way to publish and update jobs on their recruitment agency web site. It cn be done in the way that each agent has a login and password, and can log in to the recruitment agency web site, and publish the jobs (manually) to the web site. A bit more advanced scenario is where an internal database that is used to store active jobs has a capability to publish to the web site directly, so a recruitment agent needs to publish only to the internal recruitment database. The third solution is that a multiple job posting software is capable of posting to the recruitment agencies web site as well as to all the job boards. In most cases this works out as the best solution, since you do not really want your ‘duplicate’ jobs in your internal database, since this will mess up your internal metrics, and cause a whole lot of other problems if not used carefully. Another type of the content is the text, of the web site. What recruiters tend to put on their web sites is a lot of informational text about how to write a good CV, how to travel to and within Ireland, all about local tax, whatever they think would be a useful info for job hunters. ON the other side they also put a lot of marketing text to attract their paying clients.

Altogether there is not that many pages on a Irish recruitment agency web site. There is the usual Home, Employers, Candidates, About, Contact, and in the most cases very little besides that. If the jobs are published on the agency web site, the search is usually on the Candidates page, and there is usually one Search Results page, and then each job can be previewed trough the Job Details page.

And here we go to where almost all the Irish recruitment agencies fail in the design of their recruitment web sites. The largest mistake is to fail to display their most valuable content – job details on a set pages as opposed to on one single page.

The URL in most cases looks like:

.ie/jobdetails.asp?id=1019

There the TITLE tag is:

- Job Search – Job Details

And the TITLE is the same for all the pages like:
jobdetails.asp?id=1019, jobdetails.asp?id=1020, jobdetails.asp?id=1021,…

As well as the TITLE being the same, the META is also being the same. So what a search engine does see on the Irish recruitment agency web sites is about 10 to 20 almost static web pages (Home, About, etc.) and ONE page jobdetails.asp that has a different content based on the ID parameter. And the Contend really does not differ much based on that parameter, but a blob of text in the BODY element actually is the only thing that changes, and most of the BODY content actually stays the same. What Google fails to understand is that this is the most important part of the Irish recruitment web site It just does not get that the most important content, and the most dynamic content is displayed via the single page jobdetails.asp and that there is some parameter like ID that controls what job gets published when.

The result is that Google (and no other search engine) will spider that page jobdetails.asp any more than the other ‘static’ pages are spidered really. The effect is that most of the jobs advertised on a recruitment agency web site will never actually end up in Google! The management of the recruitment agency most likely invested a lot in development of their fancy web site, and some technology to get their jobs updated on their web site, but hey – Google does not see it???

Why is it important fro Google to see find and index all your jobs, and keep on doing that often? Simply because Google will drive you a free applicants as opposed those you have to pay to job portals for.

Conclusion:

If you want to get free applicants that find your jobs on your own web site via the search engines like Google, you have to publish your jobs properly on your Irish recruitment agency web site. jobdetails.asp with the same TITLE, META and most of the BODY content is certainly NOT the way to do it. You do need to display each job on a URL that Google will recognize as a separate page. Job boards have understood this long ago, and are just using this to publish all the jobs they contain to Google in the way that Google can understand it.

UPDATE on 14/04/2008

See Related article on: http://www.seoconsultant.ie/dynamic-metatags-dynamic-title-url-rewriting-h1-h2-are-all-a-must-have-for-any-cms-today/33/