Kangarooster

Hi all,

David Manaster of ERE.net (promoters of the Global Expo 2007 in Amsterdam in November) just pointed out a new video on YouTube about Blogging.

Technorati Tags: Candidate attraction, e-recruitment, ERE, kangarooster

This has been a very very interesting few weeks. Bringing a new site (or any other software development project) to completion or “go live” is always an intense period. It takes incredible commitment, teamwork and belief to get past the final 5% of fine tuning. We have all of that and more with the team behind Kangarooster. The development team have been working 20 hour days, sales and marketing have been pounding the pavement to ensure that new clients will be ready and the rest of us have been doing everything we can to pitch in on delivery.

Even more exciting to me has been the robust discussions we are already having about future generations of the site and the platform for the ‘white label’ corporate prospects. This is a real sign of company development and maturity, when you can realistically examine your current offerings and plan out 2-3 years.

Stay tuned.

Al

Technorati Tags: Candidate attraction, e-recruitment, kangarooster, online matching

Hi all

Great that we have reached May - with its emphasis on May Day in Europe as a day for workers (even though we are actually celebrating the holiday in England today), I thought it would be good to re-iterate our commitment to the candidate/worker experience.

We are looking to expand the user experience with a variety of elements that no other site can deliver:
KANGAROOSTER USP – delivering on the vision of a better match and better candidate experience.

• Our matching engine delivers a higher quality of matching, even with key words.
• Our matching engine delivers proximity results, displayed on the dynamic GoogleMap.
• Our matching engine delivers relevance ranking by a percentage of match.
• The Search page delivers dynamic results in multiple display options, without making the candidate go to another page or lose his/her results.
• The addition of the Jobs taxonomy gives us an edge by adding enhanced job title and skills data to both candidate and job profiles.
• Our matching engine enables us do deliver the unique ‘compare jobs’ page.
• When our extraction engine is used on CVs to prepare candidate profiles, the candidates will have an even better matching result.We will be looking to expand our reach with links to many sites, and with the use of Technorati tools as well.Kangarooster - It does the job.

Technorati Profile

Technorati Tags: Candidate attraction, e-recruitment, kangarooster, online matching

An interesting blog/article by Bill Vick ” Let your dream job find you” could almost have been written by the Kangarooster team. At least the theme reaches out to the idea of candidates having to make sure that their presence is made easliy searchable and easily findable.

Interestingly enough for us, Bill quoted from an article on CNN’s digitalbiz section that was written out of their Hong Kong Bureau and featured some quotes from me - Thanks Bill.

Although the focus is on individual control of individual marketing, if the candidate begins to think this way, then what really occurs, as Marc Drees emphasises almost daily, is Relevance!

Al

Technorati Tags: Candidate attraction, e-recruitment, kangarooster, online matching

Door alle werkzaamheden rondom de lancering van Kangarooster heb ik al geruime tijd geen blog kunnen schrijven, wat gelukkig niet tot een ‘cold turkey’ heeft geleid.

En hoewel ik niet kan zeggen dat de rust is weergekeerd, is het wel iets rustiger geworden. We zijn nu vooral bezig om het aantal vacatures te laten groeien, en het is dus nu ons salesteam dat overuren aan het maken is. Daarnaast blijkt dat met het live zetten van een site er altijd zaken naar boven komen waar je tijdens het testtraject nog niet tegenaan bent gelopen.

En in deze tijd kan het woord BETA natuurlijk wonderen doen. Dus Kangarooster is live in Beta.

De komende maanden gebruiken we om het aantal vacatures op Kangarooster snel te laten groeien. Daarvoor bieden we bedrijven de kans om gedurende drie maanden vacatures gratis te plaatsen. Tegelijkertijd gaan we natuurlijk hard aan de slag om kandidaten naar Kangarooster te laten komen.

En als laatste zijn we natuurlijk heel benieuwd naar jouw reactie op Kangarooster. Wat is jouw ervaring, wat is sterk, wat kan worden verbeterd? Laat het ons weten. Via een reactie op deze blog, of via info@Kangarooster.nl

 Ik hoop van jullie te horen!

Hi everyone.

First of all, massive congratulations to Luis and Arturo and the rest of the technical team for the Beta launch today of Kangarooster. Our baby has been in gestation for a while - but this is really the first step in delivering a truly innovative experience for the candidate. As we move forward, I am sure that our technology will power many many career sites, enhancing companies’ capability to engage directly with the IQA (interested, qualified and available) candidates.

This has led me to think about Talent Pools again. Well, actually, I recently helped out some US colleagues who are preparing a paper on the topic. What came to me was how little academic research or industry literature exists on the topic. The CIPD (Chartered Institute of Personnel Development) in the UK refers to Talent Pools only for existing employees. Most companies that think of the Talent Pool as a place for external candidate info only really have a static database.

If you want to make it a real Talent Community, then you have to engage with candidates, communicate regularly and treat them with respect. If you look at Keith’s posting over the weekend, you will see yet more evidence how little companies do understand about this aspect.

Over the next few articles, I will return to the themes of Talent Community.

Let the fun begin with Kangarooster as a starting point.

Alan

Technorati Tags: Candidate attraction, e-recruitment, kangarooster

A great survey was released this week in the UK and it backed up the results of a survey I did at Totaljobs 4 years ago. Bad recruitment practices hit a companies balance sheet.

Treat jobseekers badly and guess what; they won’t refer the job to others, they will talk badly about you as an organisation and worst of all they will be less inclined to buy your company’s products or services.

The Survey by Capital Consulting high lights that One in four jobseekers have been badly treated by a prospective employer.

• 53% of job seekers will not purchase products and services if they have been badly treated
• 55% tell at least three people about their bad experience

So you spend all that money  marketing and  building a brand, HR invest in building an employer brand and at the point of ‘purchase’ they get a poor experience.

The study by Capital Consulting indicates that companies are not handling the recruitment process as well as they could, with one in four job seekers saying they have been badly treated when applying for a job.

So what are the key results;

• 31% of people tell between three and five people about their bad experience, and 24% of people tell more than six people. A very vocal 10% tell more than ten others, and 1% will go as far as venting their spleen on the Internet by blogging about their bad experience.
• 53% of job seekers actively avoid buying products and services from a company that treats them poorly, with almost a quarter of those (23%) declaring that they will never purchase any product or service from the company again, even if it means going without.

So at a time when more businesses need to attract more talented workers than ever, companies are alienating exactly thise people they so desparately need. 

So what are the issues that upset the jobseeker:

• One in two (53%) people were aggrieved that no reason was given for not being offered the job. 
• 51%of people said the lack of feedback following an interview was their main irritation.  
• Almost half (49%) of all job seekers find the lack of acknowledgment of their application the most annoying part of the recruitment process
• 34% say they are asked irrelevant or stupid questions at interview
• 30% are asked to do irrelevant tests
• 26% of job seekers don’t like dealing with third parties and recruitment agencies – men (30%) dislike this more than women (20%)
• 32% of people say they are sent details for jobs that do not meet their skills or salary expectations.

So poor communications, poor interviewing techniques, 3rd parties and lack of relevency all seem to be key issues. Those who read our blog at Kangarooster know these issues are our passions.

So great research…but will boardrooms listen…the jury is still out.

The Rooster

So another series of Blogs that adopt a “musical” analogy. In the last month I have been training the staff in a UK recruitment advertising agency. One of the areas covered is to look back at at where we have been to look forward to the future

At 47 years of age there is a lot to look back on!! But it also highlighted to me that at one level we have come so far and yet at another little has changed.

So in this series I will give a Rooster’s potted history of the last 27 years and some observations on this period. Usually for me I will inject some humor into this. At least, my sense of humor.

So where to begin; one upon a time a wide-eyed fool walks into to the office of the Thomson Corporate for a job in Classified Sales, having sent much of the previous 4 years as a punk, in squats and running a fanzine called Alternative Music. So suit on and spiky hair straight, safety pins out, in I walk. Interesting questioning technique!!! asked to sell an ash tray, yes Geraldine O’ Conner I’ll never forget. So the ash tray and got the job. Corporate Life here I come.

2 weeks training and AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action), sound like a punk song, I am assigned to sell Recruitment Advertising on Construction News or as my father who was a builder would call it “Jackers Journal”. At this point I felt a level of fear never felt before. I walk from the traing room to my desk, through a sea of smiling faces, I sit at the desk, my client base in a box, on index cards allocated alphabetically. I’m meant to pick the phone up and sell, oh my god, the silence is deafening, they are all listening, they are waiting for me to pick the phone up, they will listen, they will laugh… I’ll wait for the coffee break, no one around. I made the call and started a 27 year love affair with this industry.

Lesson 1: Don’t worry about what others might think since most of us are in the same boat. Today I speak at recruitment conferences around the globe and every single time I’m still petrified, but like that first sales call once you take the step there is no going back.

Much like what has happened in recruitment, we are electronic, there is technology, there is no going back.

Next time, the client, the ad, the printer and where’s the money made then.

I met with a couple of great guys last week in Holland to talk about developing some training programs for recruiters and it got me thinking. I know that is a worrying sign but it just happened. And I thought: who or what is a recruiter?

I think it is easy to understand that those working frontline in a staffing firm, recruitment consultancy or a search firm are, or can be, defined as “recruiters”. But today in the client world who or what is a recruiter?

Lets look at the internal process to identify those who recruits:

• Line Management/Department Head/Supervisor. These are the individuals who do the real recruiting in many organisations. They often have the budget to handle there own hiring needs, will contact a staffing firm and brief on their requirements/needs. They can contact a recruitment advertising agency and get the ad produced and placed. They can even handle that first phase communication with a candidate.
• HR professional. In many organisations it is an HR professional who is the first line of contact, whether it be taking a paper based CV or an electronic one, looking at candidates who have registered on-line or taking a call they interact with a potential future employee. But do they always interview the candidates? And does that make them any less a recruiter?

So these would be the traditional definitions of those who recruit. In my next series I will look at the challenges these groups have today when hiring. And I will be asking myself: are they really equipped to handle the recruiting needs of the 21st century?

I have still one bigger question when defining who or what is a recruiter. In any organisation should not everyone be a recruiter? The actions and comments of the CEO can have a greater impact on an organisation than one “rouge” hiring manager interviewing badly. A board director saying something inappropriate at a industry conference and then being quoted, can do more damage to hiring into that company than we often expect.

We live in a world of constant communication, a world where with so many channels for news or opinion the need for content is unrelenting and everything we say or do can potentially create news. With blogging we even become the creator and sometimes the news itself.

So in this environment from the top down we are all recruiters.  What we say and do impacts on the jobseekers perception of us and our organisation. Brand reputation is a word often used in Public Relations. Just put the word Recruitment in front of Brand and that is the reality we face today.

But what has all this ‘thinking’ got to do with training?

Because it is important to develop courses for those in the HR/Recruiting. But let us not forget the line managers for it is there that all the great work that happens at the attraction stage goes to waste. And lets educate senior management on the impact they can have on recruitment.

The Rooster

So in the final part of this series, where do I believe recruitment should sit in and organisation? 

For me the answer should be simple, where the organisation has significant hiring needs to justify a stand alone team, then this should report into Marketing with a strong dotted line into HR.

For a medium sized company with one recruiting professional in-house it should sit in HR with a very strong dotted line into Marketing.

With organisations without in-house recruiting professionals this function should be handled by an HR generalist and therefore left within the HR function. But ensure that this individual gets some recruitment-related training.

So why Marketing? Well, to me recruitment today is Marketing, when you look at the core attributes:

• Research consumer/jobseeker opinions of the organisation
• Identify the values, attritutes, positives, and message that reflect both reality and resonate with the audience
• Build the brand
• Identify the channel to the candidates
• Create the message and attract- reflecting both the audience and the channel/medium
• Manage the response- treat the jobseeker as if they are consumer
• Build a two way relationship with those candidates you may wish to hire in the future
• Sell- yes the interview is as much a sell as it is an interview. It is a 2-way sales process, they sell to you and you sell to them
• Close- yes again you need to close, get them to commit
• For those that don’t make it look after them, they may be a customer or future customer. Or simply remember they are people and therefore deserve your respect

So to me recruitment is about a skill and competency set that already exists in the marketing function; therefore why re-invent the wheel?

But ultimatly in an organisation there should be alignment between the Corporate goals of finding great talent and the internal key functions; HR, Marketing and Corporate Affairs.

Getting these functions working together and you can have a great recruiting team!

The Rooster