Targeting passive candidates

Jobshout brings you the best and most relevant CVs for your job. Because using Jobshout you can post your jobs on targeted niche sites, you're less likely to get unqualified and irrelevant job responses and more likely to reach qualified, passive candidates.

Besides, automated world class and effective natural SEO, an integration with Broadbean - Jobshout can be setup really easily to post jobs on other sites for example indeed.co.uk, Google base using SOAP, XML and RSS technology. It can even be further extended to meet needs of different industry sectors and we are open to make
this process even easier to mash up and share the information on different and relevant websites as per different needs.

For example, if you publish IT jobs in a specific industry or skills we can customise Jobshout to publish jobs on niche sites relevant to that industry. Now doing it all from central place saves time, remove chances of errors, and increases productivity. And in this way, Jobshout will keep your staff happy.

Try yourself by clicking Jobshout trial! or drop us an email info@jobshout.co.uk to find out more about Jobshout.

Online ad spend increase 238% year on year

According to the Internet Advertising Bureau, online advertising in 2007 cost £2.8 billion. Of this, £286.8 went on 'online recruitment classifieds' - job boards to you and me.

Most jobseekers go online

This is another bit of research, this time from Borrell Associates in the US. "Opportunity abounds online: nearly half the jopbseekers who have internet access are not using online media to look for a job", it says. Well, that may mean that there is a lot of opportunity for growth, but it also means that right now, over 50% of internet-enabled people looking for work go online.

Interestingly, the report also comments on the use of video by employers and recruiters as being "the hottest new tool". Total ad spending on online video was $522 million in 2007 and this is predicted to rise nearly twentyfold by 2012. Of this a "significant portion" is going to job- and employer-related video. So if you want to steal a march on your competition, get yourself an online vid!

Invite Google to index your pages

To invite Google to come and index your page webmasters will generally add a ‘robots.txt’ file. This file tells the Googlebot that you want it to read and index your page.

Now most people will not know how to write a ‘robot.txt’ file or maybe have never even heard of it. Well Google have come up with an ingenious translator that turns your requests into ‘robot.txt’ file, it is called generate robots text. Now you don’t even need to learn the language used all you have to do is know what you want indexed.

There are however some problems relating to privacy that some robots from other sources will just ignore the file and search everything. To overcome this you should protect private information by passwords and not rely on the ‘robots.txt’ file.

For more information have a look at Google Webmaster Blog.

Ever wondered how many recruitment companies there are in the UK?

Well, we certainly have. Here, courtesy of the International Confederation
of Private Employment Agencies (CIETT) is the answer, as well as the figures for nine other countries. It makes intriguing reading:

Japan: 30,600
UK: 10,462
Germany: 7,885
USA: 6,000
South Africa: 2,739
Netherlands: 2,100
Czech Republic: 1,707
Poland: 1,541
Brazil: 1,250
France: 1,200

You can get a copy of the whole report, which is worth reading, here.

Five minutes to enhance your brand

Surprisingly – to me at least – about 80% of our clients choose to publish their job board using the jobshout.co.uk domain. That means that the address you promote is xyzpeople.jobshout.co.uk.

That’s fine as far as it goes. But how much more impressive – how much better for your brand – is it to direct people to a subdomain of your own site – such as jobs.xyzpeople.com? After all one of the main advantages of publishing your own job board is to enhance you standing in the eyes of clients and candidates, and using your own domain name for your job board just looks so much better.

And if it looks better to people, the chances are that it is going to look better to search engines too. Publishing those jobs under your own domain will tend to enhance the ranking of your whole site in relevant searches; and any standing that your site already has in the eyes of Google & Co. will, conversely help the search engine performance of your job ads.

And the good news is that the whole job should take about five minutes at the outside, though it does sound technical and, therefore, scary. But it should be really easy. Just get whoever it is that looks after your site's Domain Name Server (DNS) records (very often it's your ISP) to create an entry for a new subdomain. All this means is that, as well as the www. subdomain (www.xyzpeople.com [or whatever]), you would now have a DNS record for jobs.xyzpeople.com as well. This would be a CNAME entry (...I know, but don't worry...) pointing to www.jobshout.co.uk.

Having done that, go into your Jobshout setup and specify your site’s domain name (jobs.xyzpeople.com).

What if you have been promoting the address of your job board as being a jobshout.co.uk address? No problem – both addresses will work now.

It’s easy, and will richly repay the little bit of effort involved.

(XYZ People is the name of our demo site, in case you were wondering.)

Recruitment 2.0! Yet another 2.0 for us to use

Most of us all hear about Web 2.0 (social networking sites) but now there is talk of recruitment 2.0. Recruitment 2.0 is the new thinking, new channels and new approaches to candidate and client attraction. With all these new ideas and systems to understand, how do we use them and more importantly what are they. Below are a couple of ideas that have been suggested:

Using search engine marketing

Candidates and clients are starting to use search engines more as filters for their searches, be it for jobs or agencies. This means that the fight for marketing online and improving your ranking is becoming increasingly competitive. Search marketing also includes pay per click searches; these are starting to get used more in recruitment because of the benefits of target marketing. The Internet is such a great tool for marketing because of the democratic nature that allows any company no matter what the size to rank higher than their competitors and that is why pay per click and online marketing is so popular.

Using SMS and portable Internet

The portable Internet on phones will be vastly improved within the next couple of years making it a viable option that recruitment companies should embrace. Having a mobile web page could be crucial in reaching your target markets and again gives you another channel to capture your target market. SMS alerts are also a relatively undiscovered area that will be explored more and more as mobile Internet improves. There are already talks of getting targeted SMS messages to your phone as you walk by shops, there are of course many problems with this but this is only at discussion point and I have no doubt that in the near future it will be happening. With the Iphone already in circulation and being an all in one device that allows easier navigation around the Internet soon more affordable products will be available and this will create another channel to access potential candidates and clients.

Digital community matters

We are now seeking advice from people who have put their thoughts and reviews on the Internet; we do our own knowledge seeking and find what we want. We don’t believe what people or adverts say to us, we need to reinforce our ideas ourselves and we will spend time doing this. Ultimately the candidates and clients are getting more power and are being more choosey in deciding which company they want to work for. By using Blogs, pod casts and other tools you are encouraging a two way communication. Engaging in conversation and opinion sharing invites people to make contact and stimulates interest.

So what now?

Recruitment 2.0 is all about new channels at lower cost, more proactive, engaging and measurable. This seems to promise a lot and can seem a little too good to be true but with more and more advances I see no reason why these new channels can not be explored to the best of our abilities.

Just out of interest there are already talks about Web 3.0, we just cannot keep up it seems.