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.

recruitment, employment, vacancy, jobs, job

OK, lets put it in the perspective of the volume of the Google searches for the Irish surfers.

recruitment, employment, vacancy, jobs, job

Conclusion: ‘jobs’ RULEZ!