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

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 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

Joel Cheesman heeft een aardig stukje over het opportunisme van bepaalde vacaturesites in Amerika.

Omdat social networks nogal een hype zijn gaan ook vacaturesites mee in de vaart der volkeren en maken een MySpace account aan. Maar wat gebeurt er dan vervolgens met zo’n account? Wordt het onderhouden, wordt actief gebruik gemaakt van de ‘mogelijkheden’ van de social network site? Niet altijd, zoals het stukje van Joel duidelijk aantoont.

Overigens wel aardig om Jobster nu als een vacaturesite te betitelen. Twee jaar geleden waren ze een referral program service, daarna een referrel program service met een vertical search (Workzoo), toen een social networking site for werkzoekers en nu een vacaturesite met een sociaal networking sausje. Je vraagt je toch oprecht af hoe een bedrijf haar strategie zo vaak kan wijzigen zonder haar geloofwaardigheid te verliezen.

Toen ik een half jaar geleden begon te bloggen voor Expand had ik geen idee wat de impact van dit fenomeen zou kunnen zijn. Ik ben, zacht gezegd, zeer positief verrast.

Toen we met Kangarooster begonnen, wisten we al dat een blog een integraal onderdeel van de site zou moeten worden. Door de brede kennis en diepe ervaring van de partners zou een blog een bijdrage kunnen leveren aan de kennis van online recruitment in al haar facetten.

En nu is er een bevestiging van deze gedachte bij monde van John Sumser. In een uitstekende post over het belang van blogging in de recruitment arena beschrijft John op zijn onnavolgbare wijze de waarde, de beperkingen, de risico’s en de toekomst van blogging in onze industrie.

John blogt niet, nooit. Al zo lang als ik me kan herinneren publiceert hij zijn e-mail nieuwsbrief. Toen ik hem in november 2006, tijdens de ERE dagen in Amsterdam, vroeg naar het waarom had hij geen duidelijk antwoord. Maar hij houdt ervan zijn boodschap te controleren. Dat, en de onwil om op allerlei commentaar te moeten gaan reageren, zijn waarschijnlijk de belangrijkste redenen waarom we John in (nabije) de toekomst geen eigen blog op zullen zien zetten.

In the last few weeks some interesting stuff is being written in the US about relevancy. These seem to eminate from the recent Jobster change in direction. To me this is a debate that has gone on for all my 27 years in recruitment, it’s recruitmeny 101, “I want to find a good candidate, with the minimum amount of fuss”

Relevancy V transactional?
First off, some home truths on passive versus active candidates:

1. You can have a relevant active candidate as likely as an irrelevant passive candidate
2. You can find a relevant candidate as likely on a generalist jobboard as on a niche jobboard

The real question is how many irrelevant candidates you have to wade through to find a relevant candidate? I guess this is probably driven for the largest part by the economic cycle. During an economic low the amount of irrelevancy will be staggering, at an economic high you will be lucky to find any candidate at all.

The question is regardless what I want to see when searching for a candidate, regardless of whether I am posting or searching the CV database: Is the right candidate available at the right time and at the right price.

I would like choice but time is becoming a very critical factor. Not just the time to hire, but the physical time of finding, attracting, and then sorting through my responses or the CV database I’m accessing. “Time, time, time or I don’t have enough of it” is a common theme I hear today.

More and more of those who are doing the recruiting are being asked to do more with less resoruces, both financial and physical.

So in the world of recruitment where so much of what we do is based on a transactional relationship relevancy is often not a key motivational issue. I deliver to you #A circulation, or #B unique users per month, we deliver #C of this audience or #D of visits to your posting, we have #E CV’s in our database, you got #F on-line applications. BUT how many are relevant and, as important, how quickly can I find the relevant ones at the right price.

The move from the transactional relationship to a relevancy based one is possible but it requires an investment. That investment does not have to come from the recruiter but those who supply you with candidates. Demand relevancy and you might be suprised at what you find.

The Rooster