Google Base gets better

While only available in English and German interfaces Google's recruitment offering Google Base is getting much more sophisticated. It's a matter of time before it becomes a real player in the job market. Maybe when push and pull RSS technologies meet, which maybe only 2 or 3 years away, Google will be at that point to make this product into a Monster slayer.

Do you know what this means:Zyciorys

Big browny points if you know what it is?

It's the word for 'Resume'in Polish. There are 6,912 living languages in the world. Here are the ones I've been able to figure out what the word resume is translated into:

German: Lebenslauf
French: Résumé
Spanish (EU): Currículo
Spanish: Resumen
Holland: samenvatting
Portuguese: Resumo
Swedish: återuppta
Polish: Zyciorys
Russian (Borat’s): Ðåçþìå
Russian Резюме
Greek: επαναλάβετε
Japanease: 概要
Chinese: 回复
Korean: 이력서
Arabic: سيرة ذاتية, خِصة

If you know any more or disagree with the above translations. Please let me know.

YouTube -Video CVs and ZunePhones

I read an interesting article on the ever informative and entertaining ERE web site that got me thinking. Make sure you read it and have a look at Aleksy Vayner’s video resume!!! Interesting young man!!! While not in vogue at the moment it will be interesting to see how this new application channel picks up. In 5 years time it may well be the norm to listen to candidates' podcast CVs and inspect their video resumes. At that stage we should able to port our ZunePhone or iPhones to our application tracking system to pull in our daily candidate RSS feeds which will allow us watch pre screened video resumes that match our search criteria on our train ride home.

The Nework expands to the Middle East

For those of you interested in recruiting from the Middle East, TotalJobs.com and Stepstone’s creation and Monster rival - The Network – keeps growing and has just expanded their recruitment capacity with their recent partnership with Bayt.com. To learn more read here. It’s interesting to see that Google are advertising some of their Irish client service jobs there already.

The Network is now the largest formal alliance of market leading recruitment websites globally offering coverage in 53 countries.

Apply for a job through your mobile phone

Mobiljob is a revolutionary new job board that gives every person who owns a mobile phone access to you current job openings.It is unique in that potential candidates can search, view and apply to your current vacancies all through their mobile phones, therefore taking the need for PC access out of the equation. Mobiljob is the only job board that sits on all the networks in Ireland and is the only recruitment solution of its kind in Europe. I'm not too sure if recruiters or job seekers will go for this... I personally wouldn't. I think RSS is still the new technology to beat. Mobile phones may act as an agregator for your feed in the future but forking out on a hefty priced text when you have free or low cost access to the Internet I don't think is the way the m-recruitment industry will take flight.

How to dent Monster and Irish Jobs Revenue streams

Recently, we saw IrishDev introduce RSS feeds into their growing site. Kudos to the boys. But let's be honest, we still are light years away from the new technologies and pricing models being used by some of the most pioneering sites in the US. I for one am a big fan of Indeed.com. For quite some time I was curious about how they made their money. Now I know. Check out the following article on their blog. And also listen to their CEO Paul Foster talking about the subject on MarteingMonger's Podcast #22

Key words and Recruitment 2.0

So what can we say about key words…??? Don’t underestimate their power and don’t underestimate how they are changing the recruitment industry. Owning, advertising, optimising and linking to keywords will be from 2015 onwards as important as creating a careers web site and posting your openings on a job boards was in 1995. Understanding how key words work in search engines, how the right choice of key words is instrumental at driving candidates to your job descriptions and how RSS is changing the way in which job seekers search for opportunities are essential lessons that need to be understood if you want to have a thorough understanding of how new technology is making the hunt for technical talent more sophisticated. Just as the Internet has moved into its Web 2.0 phase, likewise, Internet recruitment has moved into its 2.0 phase and is rapidly moving towards 3.0. Key word selection and advertising and how they interact with search technologies and social/ service engineering are leading the evolution. Let me draw some lines in the sand for illustrative purposes. I could go back to critical moments like the invention of paper and the phone but I won't :)

Pre 1996: (Pre Web):
Advertising on newspapers. Use of recruitment agencies.

1996-2004: (Web 1.0)
Monster was born. Career sites began to flourish and evolve. Search engines began to make their mark. Email, newsletters and online forums of varying hues and diversity flourish. AdSense created.

Pre 2004 > 2007 (Web 2.0).
Indeed.com created ( the first company offering an RSS job aggregator thus signalling the birth of Web 2.0). Google first major company to use its own search engine to advertise its careers pages off a large spectrum of prominent key words in multiple geographies and in multiple languages. Podcasts being used as JobCasts to advertise roles. The dot jobs domain (.jobs) begins to gather momentum. Blogs beginning to advertise jobs and top talent constantly referring to their sites in addition to their CVs.

2007 > 2015 (Web 2.0 evolves)
Maturing of present technologies: more niche job forums, niche job boards with RSS feeders, jobcasts and a further iteration of XML job schemas. Communities liked LinkedIn become more prominent to connect job seekers together. ZoomInfo providing sourcing channels and MSN and Google providing more intelligent search facilities for recruiters to contact passive candidates.

2015 > (Web 3.0)
Cohesion technologies mature. The job description key word profile is standardised by XML.org to integrate with hardware devices like Microsoft’s Zune devices and Apple’s iPod dual phone/mpeg players. Google or MSN launch a profile matching key word repository service that signals a new revolution and kills Monster. Skype Jobs set up to allow recruiters bid for access to candidates who are on-line, pre–qualified and are prepared to join your job opening WebFair

How do key words work?
The best person to ask this question is George Boole. He is the founder of the Boolean language which is the alphabet for using key words. I would suggest reading some of the following artciles to understand more:

1. Simple Tutorial
2. For more detail browse the Wiki on George:

Candidates are beginning to connect themselves on the Internet more and more. People are beginning to receive a plethora of newsbytes in their life. The bites will come in a huge variety of formats. Our next generation will be the news bite generation. Understanding how to use keywords to swim in this new newsbyte society is crucial to ensuring that Microsoft stay at the bleeding edge of pioneering recruitment strategies. Presently you can fill out a profile form in Monster, a recruiter can purchase access to the database and candidates who match a job description can be contacted. This will change. Companies like Microsoft and Google will allow you fill out a profile in MSN jobs or Google jobs. Employers will pay to advertise their job profiles and using RSS and XML job posting and matching formats employers and job hunters will be consummated together in sacred cyber matrimony! Ahh…isn’t that lovely!!!

Well done IrishDev.com for embracing RSS feeds!!!

So at last we are seeing some RSS functionality coming into the Irish Job Boards market!!! Irish Dev.com is a cool site that I have long admired for its well designed GUI, very relevant quick search categories, solid blog content and its pioneering embracing of RSS feeds! Well done. In a sea of recruitment stagnation finally a job board in Ireland has embraced a new technology that will create an exciting wave for job seekers to ride to easier job hunting.

So what is RSS?
RSS (Rich Site Summary) is a format for delivering regularly changing web content. Many news-related sites, weblogs and other online publishers syndicate their content as an RSS Feed to whoever wants it. RSS solves a problem for people who regularly use the web. It allows you to easily stay informed by retrieving summaries of the latest content from the sites you are interested in. You save time by not needing to visit each site individually. You ensure your privacy, by not needing to join each site's email newsletter. The number of sites offering RSS feeds is growing rapidly and includes big names like Yahoo News and Amazon.com.

How can it be used for recruitment?
In multiple ways. You just have to be creative. The two obvious ways are string searchs and advertising jobs... For example, check out Indeed.com and you'll see the power of RSS feeds. Also check out about the 5 million dollars the company raised to start growing. Also, check out two of the recent blog posts on Tom Raferty's excellent IT blog which addresses the subject back in March and follows the topic up again in May. Tom, quite rightly talks about the loss of fist mover advantage for Irihjob.ie and RecruitIreland the two job board behemoths in Ireland and how they will need to start thinking quickly about how to bring this functionality into their products if they are not to loose market share to Irishdev.com.

The technology has also got me thinking. It begs a big, big, big question to all recruitment managers. Why don't you build RSS feeds into your career sites.It seems like an obvious evolution in e-recruitment. It will allow interested applicants tag the category of jobs they are interested in and every time a new job is posted they get an alert. Cool! It will save the recruiter hours of mining for candidates and place the onus of contact on the job seeker. Which should translate into dollars saved on the ground.

It's going to be interesting to see how RSS feeds change the recruitment landscape... with the ever increasing seamless integration of technologies across multiple platforms the day is not to far away where you will get a quick text to your mobile if a new job in Microsoft comes up that you have expressed and interest in!!!!

The flat CV revisited

I've just read a good article on ERE Exchange which related to a previous blog I posted about the future of recruitment and how we may have a flat CV recruitment process that will bring the recruiter and the applicant together in far more sophisticated fashion than we have today... obviously, other people have been pondering the same thought across the pond and investigating the concept in their own way...check out this article

So give me a boolean string I can use in Germany

Here's two to keep you thinking:

intitle:cv OR inurl:cv "software ingenieur" -job -bewerben

intitle:lebenslauf C++ "software ingenieur" -job -stellenausschreibung -bewerben

Happy Hunting (Glückliche Jagd)!!!

Alas poor Teoma i knew him well

Teoma is gone or should i say integrated with Ask.com! It used to be that i used 4 search engines when searching for candidates now we are down to three: see article
:(

Microsoft gets better at search

Today I came across Microsoft's new Window's Live beta search site. It's a vast improvement on the old MSN UI and the new toolbar albeit it Beta version has some new tools worth checking out like the Onfolio tab, phishing filter and the ability to subscribe to RSS feeds directly from search results. While the raw horse power is not in the backend to compete with the present incumbent search champions it is a significant step in the right direction to win back some market ground. In particular, for recruitment purposes the new macro functionality and feeder functionality may help with complex string searches. I've tried it and like it. The UI is impressive and the integration work with the other bundled Live services provide for interesting debate in the Google Pack versus Windows Live Bundle debate. Try it.

Using Google News to recruit more effectively

Any self respecting cyber recruiter keeps an eye on all the main search engine labs and subscribes to their newsletters to hear what new products are coming out, or in the case of Google, what new beta release they have up their sleeve. Last week after many years in Beta Google News finally grew up (despite the disdain of the newspaper publishers) and became a fully grown product. About time I hear you say! Here! Here! What's cool about this is it's one more evolutionary step down the road to personalised information on the Cloud! A very powerful tool if thought about carefully and used right.

To date when using Google News you select from a drop down box of countries and a set number of categories. That's changed. Now you can impressively choose what categories you want, from a large list of countries, and, you can create your own categories and apply your own keywords to them. This is great if you want to keep up with cutting edge news on the recruitment market. And if that's not enough, they also have a RSS feeder on it which pulls the information to you. Excellent. I've been waiting for this for along time and now it's here. The future is quickly becoming the present.

Think of the possibilities here. If you want to study a specific competitor just stick in their name and store the feed. On a daily basis you'll be able to see from thousands of news feeds around the world any information that has come out about them in the public domain or discussions that are being held about them. Something I've set up is 'redundancies +Ireland'. I check Google News daily. Usually in the morning when I come to work. When a redundancy announcement happens in the market that may result in new skilled staff coming into the readily available labour pool -the quicker I know about this the quicker I can pounce on them if they have the relevant skills for any of my open reqs. The possibilities are limitless. Track your favourite recruitment agencies, job boards and newspapers. Scour for white papers, blogs, or appointments. Hunt for legal, system and economic updates.

Google has come out with another interesting tool, that if applied right will make you a better recruiter. You should invest your time in learning how to use it.

And if that's not enough, they've also come out with their new toolbar update. I wonder how I can use that to hunt for candidates. Any ideas?