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/

So who is The Worst Irish Online Recruiter?

So who is The Worst Irish Online Recruiter?

I was asked that question a lot lately since I wrote the last post with the Worst Irish Online RecruiterHeading in it. Most assumed it is BT with its strange online recruitment process that was mentioned in the previous posts. But it surely is not BT. BT is a telco. Recruitment is just the thing they have to do and it is not the activity that they want to make money on. They need to do recruitment as well as they need to water and maintain the plants in front of their building. If they do not care about the plants, BT will still be OK. The plants my look a bit down, but BT will not suffer muc because of it. Same is actually with their recruitment. If it does not work 100%, that doesn’t mean they will not be providing the great service that they provide. Their staff might look a bit ‘down’ as their plants do, and that is all.

The worst Irish Online Recruitment can only be the company whose main activity is the recruitment. So a recruitment agency or a staffing company. As hard as it is to be to choose the best recruiter, it is equally hard to choose the worst. You need the whole panel of judges to select that ‘Worst One’. The classification will put recruitment agencies in the following categories:
1. Do not have email

2. Use Gmail or HotMail

3. Do not have their web site – but have their own domain and email (All ‘Under Construction’ folks fall in there)

4. Have a Web site – that is a web page. One page with their logo, and contact details

5. Have a web site but no jobs listed on their own web site

6. Have a web site, and jobs are listed on their web site trough a link to the jobs site where they advertise

7. Have a web site with their jobs on it in such way that Google only ‘sees’ one job and one page

8. Have a web site with their jobs properly advertised and Google can see every single job

9. Have a web site with a lot of quality inbound links

10. Have a web site that has properly search engine optimized (onsite optimization here)

Note than those from 1 to 5 did not invest much really. But the 6 and onwards, they actually did pay (directors nephew usually) for their web site to be developed. In my opinion the ones following in the group 6 are the worst. They wasted the money in developing the web site, but when it comes to jobs data it is not hosted on their own web site but they send you to their vendors to display it to the visitors. What that means in the real life is that when they finally acquire a visitor, they send him/her avay to the job board, who will resell that visitor (CV) to their clients (employers) and the competition (agencies) gladly! OK, what page of a Business Plan do you miss if you manage to skip if you manage to define your business process so that you give your clients (of did you not get that a job hunter is your client in this century?)

The fact is that there is a percentage of the recruitment agencies in Ireland who just do not realize that they are doing something wrong here at all. The result is that therefore so many of them close their doors quickly, or get stuck since they can not really grow like that, since they give away all the benefit they bring to the recruitment process (job hunters) to their competitors via the job boards.

So where do you see yourself in the scale ablove?

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.

What do these Yanks know!?

What do these Yanks know!?

To run any small business a broadband connection is ‘always a good thing’. This is why we in Ireland have a numerous broadband providers (stop laughing!). You can choose from a plethora of wired and wireless ones (stop laughing, now!). . Even satellite connections are available. If you recently sold a farm in a south Dublin to the developers, you might actually not feel the monthly charges for the broadband service. The rest of us do.

So when someone from a not so ‘IT Hub’ country comes to Ireland, and tries our magnificent broadband offering, nothing but superlatives comes out as in the Venturing online in Ireland article by Thomas C Greene in Dublin.

Mr Green, you have not tried the lot! There is also a Clearwire in Ireland. Clearwire is also known as a company that got serious money form Intel. Intel presumably pumps money in the companies with te specification of the WiMax that they support, and ClearWire is the number one here. Does ClearWire work in Ireland,… well exactly as thie other Irish Broadbung gangsters. A bit in the city center, and of course not on the ground level but rooftops. No 3D map of was ever made not even for the capital Dublin. So wireless broadband coverage was calculated based on 2D maps, that do not take buildings into the count. The funniest test you can make is to take the ClearWire antenna, plug it in the laptop, and a mobile power supply, and do the Lift Test. Simply go to any fancy office buildings on the river bank, ISFC is a good example. Go to the lift and establish a connection on the top floor. Now as you go down the lift, and go slow, floor by floor, watch the signal weakening, and ultimately disappearing close to the ground floor.

That test shows you that the coverage maps where the WHOLE city centre is well COVERED from multiple stations,… is rubbish. they simply did not have a 3D model of the city.

Viva broadband in Ireland!

Friday!!!!!!! Lets talk about SAILING!!!!

Well, it is Friday...

Lat us not think about work any more. One needs to get some pleasant thoughts in the head on Friday afternoon. A Pint in a pub is always an option. A bit of Tennis or golf if the weather allows. But I just could not get my eyes of the boat on the picture from Sailing Charter Croatia site… When will my dreams come true???

Using Google Adwords to find Candidates

On a Friday morning I found a blog from Stephen Fowler, with a bit of a real life experience with Google AdWords and it's usage in recruitment. Remember a few weeks ago I also wrote about it? Not only wrote but reccomended it? Here is a link ot the full article: Google vs. Irish Job Boards (1:0) .

So here is the Stephens take on it:

Last week I was contacted via Google Adwords in regards to comments I made on ERE, about using Adwords as an alternative to job boards to find candidates. So as to preempt Google’s questions, I thought I would re look at my campaign and fill you in on how it all worked out.
The funny thing was it was just a trial to see if it would work, partly because my normal route via the Job Boards wasn’t working. What did amaze me was not only did it work but how quickly it produced suitable candidates.
Probably first I should explain how Adwords works to help you grasp the concept. Google as I am sure you are aware make’s its money from advertising, by clients paying for links that appear on the right hand side of each search, or they appear on various websites like mine. (If you look to the right of this post, below the title Ads by Goooooogle you should be able to see them). Now what is clever, is those ads should be relevant to the website or the article such as recruitment or Adwords, the client then only pays if you click on his ad, which then redirects to a web page, in my case it was the vacancy page, simple really!
What makes this so good for recruitment is that for a nominal amount, you get your recruitment ad in front of 100’s or 1000’s of relevant candidates instantly, and you only pay if the candidate is interested. In my case I wanted to find welders, so I wrote a small ad and chose key words, which would prompt my ad to appear, such as "jobs for welders" or "welding". Now what is interesting is this technique finds passive candidates also, to explain a welder may have been searching for a welding technique but my ad would still show in the search result to right or on the page of the article. Now if the welder did click on my ad, it would then redirect to me for a cost of 13 pence or about 25 cents (Please note some key words or phrases can be more expensive).
What is good here, is you can set a daily amount to spend and a maximum bid price thereby keeping costs down. So just to give you some figures, from my campaign I advertised for 2 months and during that time the ad appeared 46,000 times, 3,335 people clicked on the ad and just over 120 people registered. As a result it cost me £3.73 per candidate registered and they all were relevant.
My only word of warning is that if you are not careful you can spend more than you should, so set your daily budget and keep an eye on costs and also be aware you can also target region.

Permalink: http://www.recruitment-views.com/?p=129

Well, I hate to say: I told you so!!! Google AdWords does deliver. In Ireland even more so than in UK. The smaller size of the market, means less bidders, means smaller cost per click. Just imagine your ads showing at the Irish Jobs site.

Where should I advertise my Irish Jobs

Weddle’s Research Factoid

Recently asked visitors to the WEDDLE’s Web-site to tell how they found their last job. A total of 708 people participated in the survey. Here’s what they told were the top ten sources of hire:

31.2% Answered an ad on a job board

10.6% Sent their resume to the company

9.3% Answered an ad in the newspaper

8.5% Responded to a tip from a friend6.

8% Were referred by an employee of the company

6.6% Received a call from a headhunter

5.1% Answered an ad posted on the company’s Web-site

4.9% Attended a career fair

4.8% Used networking at a business event

2.7% Received a call from a staffing firm

2.7% Responded to a tip from a family member

So what does that tell you? Should you stop advertising offline? Well no! You need to catch that slice of the market as well. But this should guide you where to pour the majority of your budget, and how to slice the rest.

'Jobs Ireland’ or ‘Ireland jobs’?

So how do Irish job seekers look for the job online?

What is the phrase they put in Google? Is it ‘jobs Ireland’ or ‘Ireland jobs’?

Or do they put words like ‘Recruitment’, ‘Vacancies’ or ‘Employment’?

I have heard so many opinions on this so far.

A Recruiter will tell you that a word ‘Recruitment’ is what he would use.

A Job hunter will tell you – Hey! It is a Job that I am looking for!

Maps on recruitmet web sites?

I wonder why no Irish recruitmetn or Irish job site have never implemente a map service on their site. What do Irish jobs sites do? They put together Irish emoployers and not only Irish job hunters but job hunters from all over the world. Would a feature 'Click here to se us on the map' be usefull next to the Employers job post to the job hunters? Would job hunters use it to locate and get directios to the Employer in Ireland?

Or even better,... imagine looking for the job useing a map! If you are looking for a job in Sandyford, there is no Irish job site that will give hte the functionality to search for the job in Sandyford Dublin Ireland. The best you will get ofered is Dublin South. Would it not be nice if one could create a map view of the IT jobs with salaries over 50k and with keyword '.NET'? Google Maps is here, Microsoft Live Maps is here... The technology is all here. I bet people would use it if it would be available.

Windows Live Writer

I have just downloaded the Windows Live Writer Beta to see if I can find something useful to write my blog in. I tried all the tools that I found so far, and non of them was really nice and useful.

This was supposed to check spelling but I can not really see it checking spelling as other MS product I am used to...

Don't you just hate those HTML editors that insert a paragraph when you press enter, and expect the line brake to be entered... Well Windows Live Writer is not the exception. Check this: <enter>

OOPS! A new paragraph!

So how exactly does one enter a line brake using the keyboard???

Let us see how does the Insert Link functionality work: Job Ireland Well, not bad.

There is also and Insert Map link:

Not that bad, seams Microsoft is learning from Google Maps!

Nice zoom in, but pushpin doesn't seam to display... But still a nice feature.

Ping Servers is a nice feature built in. Pity they did not built in some feature to search for the ping servers.

Conclusion (so far): Windows Live Writer is not a bad tool. Map, ping and a lot of settings you can save is really good. Unusual spellings (from a Microsoft Office perspective) and a bit strange WYSIWYG editor is a bit obvious drawbacks. Align JUSTIFY attribute is missing. Good thing again is that you can go to the HTML code and set it up there.

OK, let us see how will the first post look published! PUBLISH!

Heh,... well it didn't work. I got an error message that the Weblog does not support image publishing. It offered me to set up a FTP account details. Since I use blogger, there is no such thing as FTP, so... a big drawback. Perhaps it could have checked my settings while inserting the image, and if Blogger is there - show up a notification that it might not work?

Let me try with no images.