100 posts and more to come - thank you!

I just want to wish the readers of the blog a belated Happy Christmas and a colourful, peaceful and successful New Year.

When I started off this blog it felt like I was talking to myself a lot. Now that the blog readership has been growing steadily I find I do less of this here and normally do more of it while walking in Phoneix Park or in Tramore!  I wantted to give a special thanks to those regulars who have taken the time to subscribe to the RSS feed. Your email comments have made the blog worth while and I hope to write more engaging content for you in 2009.

I've been writing the blog for 4 years now and I just recently posted my 100th entry. While I would have liked to have posted more in 2008 my new job, which I love, took up a lot of time -especially, considering I am soaking up more information than ever from China, India and MEA. However, "cleachtas a dheanamh maistreacht" so now that I am getting the hang of it I hope to produce some more next year. I'm off to Paraty and Itacare on vacation until the end of January but "slan go foill" and see you in 2009!


Happy Hunting!

PS - I will be organising the first ever "Irish Tuesday's Club" in Feb 09 so hope to see you there.

Saongroup continue their impressive growth - opportunity knocking on recessionary times!

It's not something you hear a lot of people in the Irish press talking about to often but Denis O'Brien and Leslie Buckley have been consistent and tenacious in their vision of creating one of the biggest job board portfolios in the world. Since there acquisition in Irish Jobs from John Feeley in 1995 they have been growing and diversifying ever since. The list of acquisitions they have made and the number of current opportunities they have in their own company are interesting and caused me to dig a little deeper.

On their own web site they state: "saongroup.com is now one of the fastest growing Irish owned online companies in the world, with offices in 10 countries across 4 continents. saongroup.com has its head office is Dublin, Ireland and employs more the 1,700 people across the globe".

Being one of the fastest growing Irish owned companies in the world may sound a bit "quixotic" but it's very much true! Looking from afar and having studies closely what Career Builder and Monster have done and tried to do over the last number of years what Saaongroup has done has been very impressive in comparison.

The portfolio consists of, and this is only some of it:

Candidate Manager
CaribbeanJobs.com
IrishJobs.ie
Job001.cn
Job1998.com
Jobs.ie
Jobs.lu
JumptoJobs.co.uk

MyJobGroup Ltd
myJobsinPune.com
NIjobs.com
MaybeFriends.com
PNet
RecruitGulf.com
SHjob.cn

The company is currently expanding aggressively in India with the recent launches of http://www.myjobsinpune.com/  in Sept 07 and then a recent second expansion in http://www.myhyderabadjobs.com/. I've checked and http://www.mybangalorejobs.com/ and http://www.mydelhijobs.com/ are functioning job boards as well so maybe they've gone ahead and registered the domain and got these set up already. Maybe these are simply target looking companies that the group may go after. Get ready for Goa, Jauiper, Cochin and the other big hubs to follow. Basically, anywhere there is a concentration of 5 million or more people on the planet where internet penetration is growing Denis and Leslie will want a job board. Get ready next for Nanjing, Dalin and Shenzhen in China.  Actually, it seems like that is exactly what the company is planning by the looks of some of its  vacancies on its career site. Interestingly, they have a regional CEO/COO job in China where they are looking for an individual with 10+ years experience, willing to travel and who can speak Madrin and English. The role will report into the regional CEO and will have control of P&L, expansion and employee motivation. Having been to China myself 3 times now and about to go again in February to train Microsoft's recruiters some deep sourcing techniques I've had a chance to immerse myself in the China recruitment industry and study it from afar. It certainly fits into the emerging market category that Saaogroup have targeted for expansion.

Sales Executive Cayman Islands Caribbeanjobs.com	Cayman Islands
Business Development Executive - Dubai UAE	Dubai
Sales Account Manager Luxembourg	Luxembourg
Sales Executive Trinidad Caribbeanjobs.com	Trinidad
General Manager RecruitGulf.com	Dubai
Group Finance Director Saongroup China	Beijing
Business Development Manager Abu Dhabi, UAE	Abu Dhabi
Regional Finance Manager - Saongroup (China)	Shanghai
Sales Executive Jamaica Caribbeanjobs.com	Jamacia
Management (Online Recruitment) - Worldwide	Worldwide
Financial Accountant – CaribbeanJobs.com	Trinidad
Regional CEO - China	Beijing (travel involved)
Sales Account Manager Dublin (OTE €70,000+)	Dublin 2

The downturn in the global econonomy presents fantastic opportunities for those companies that have a strong balance sheet. Anne Hegarty in CPL, Brian Murphy in Premier Group and all at Saaongroup must be looking forward to 2009 and the acquisition trail ahead!

G-Speak and the User Interface of the Future

One and a half years ago I was fortunate to be present at a meeting with Steve Ballmer where he fielded some questions from a group of recruiters within Microsoft. At the meeting Steve was asked what would he like to change about technology in the future? What would he like his technological legacy to be? Amongst many things right at the top of the list was redesigning operating systems and how people are allowed become more intuitive with their bodies and minds in operating computer systems instead of relying on the present mouse-and-hand paradigm which we have an ubiquitous preponderance of today. As he spoke I tried to form some images from his words to bring myself into his future. In the abstract I found a formidable opponent.  But now with the help of the amazing work of the extremely talented Oblong industries  I can realise the picture that he painted in its totality.


As the inventors put it themselves:

"The g-speak platform is a complete application development and execution environment that redresses the dire constriction of human intent imposed by traditional GUIs. Its idiom of spatial immediacy and information responsive to real-world geometry enables a necessary new kind of work: data-intensive, embodied, real-time, predicated on universal human expertise.

Some of the SOE's core ideas are already familiar from the film Minority Report, whose characters performed forensic analysis using massive, gesturally driven displays. The similarity is no coincidence: one of Oblong's founders served as science advisor to Minority Report and based the design of those scenes directly on his earlier work at MIT. Other foundational components are less directly visible but as crucially transformative. The g-speak platform braids development arcs begun in the early 1990s at MIT's Media Laboratory, where Oblong's principals produced radical user interface advances, distributed and networked language designs, and media manipulation technologies."

Cloud recruitment in the future may involving geo-spatial gloves that are a combination of gestural i/o, recombinant networking which will bring us a major stride forward in computer interfaces since 1984. We may all be able to gesture with our hands to a mobile device and execute a number of commands simultaneously using voice recognition. Enjoy!

CPL hit hard

Over the last few days there's been some interesting commentary in the national press about CPL's revenue performance. Check out the Indepants article, here today and yesterday's RTE update here. Shares in the company are down at 1.05 euros at the moment and the group expects the outlook for 2009 to be "very uncertain".

Permanent placements are suffering, we know this, it will be interesting to see how hard the contract side of the business become in 2009. However Anne Hegarty and co have a very strong balance sheet. I'd be expecting them to acquire a number of small operations across Europe in the year ahead allowing them expand more aggressively into the RPO market in Europe and play catch up on companies like Kenexa and Adecco to name but a few.

The Future of Recruitment is in the Cloud! (Utility Recruitment)

I love technology!

Ever since I got a Commodore 64 I've been hooked. One of the very cool things about working for Microsoft is I get a chance to collaborate with smart people in a very innovative environment that allows me glimpse over the edge of tomorrow's technological future and constantly reignite the curious little boy in me who loved to tap away at his computer in his bedroom for hours on end. In this environment I'm often trying to keep my personal knowledge base high by listening to a variety of tech podcasts such as Leo Leporte's Twit and blogs like TechCrunch and the prestigious Robert Cringley's blog as well as a huge internal database of sharepoints on a variety of technological gendres and flavours. And that's not even mentioning our very own Channel 9 or MSDN Blog Network.

I love recruitment!

I love trying to figure out how new improvements in technology can be used to make recruitment more efficent and effective. A lot of recruiters I know like to read other recruitment magazines or blogs or like to pick up the CIPD magazine, the Friday Irish Times or Sunday Business Post to keep up to date with the latest recruitment trends and techniques. I do this myself a lot and have benefited greatly from others. However, I much prefer following the technology geeks and then applying what I've learnt from them to recruitment rather than reading about it from other recruiters. That's where the fun is for me and that's when and where I enjoy my job the most.

Some of the greatest satisfaction I have had in my career is coining a technique and then passing it onto one of our recruiters in Dublin, Dubai or Hyderabad and learning in the future that they made a hire through it.

For quite some time Microsoft has been working at the concept of Software as a Service (SaaS) and has been one of the architectural leading netizens which such companies as Google, Salaeforce and Amazon when it comes to coining the phrase "Cloud Computing"! It's been very interesting to watch this from the inside and I believe that now more than ever a recruiter can be empowered by using technology correctly and creatively to be better at their job and more successful than their peers.

A lot of people may not know what cloud computing is? Sometimes you here people mention things such as: "on demand computing" or ""cluster computing" or "server virtualisation". For me it's simply the ability to access information over the internet from any device. It is a step towards less of a device centric, app centric world and more to an information centric model. Recruiters will need to know how to use social media to brand and contact technological savy individuals and the new generations. They'll need to sync better to increase speeds to facilitate the sharing and processing of information. It will be driven by mobility.

Some of my recent blog entries have been about vice technology, image teleportation and mobile syncing. Stay tuned for more in the future.

For those that are new to Cloud Computing check out  Christopher Barnett's great video!

Voice Search - Square is the new round - The Future of Recruitment is in the Cloud!

Wow! I can't believe it's that long ago but I think it's 2001 when I wrote an article for Monster called "How will XML change the face of recruitment".  7 years and XML has had a huge part to play in driving ATS systems together allowing multiple posting and driving us all towards a more common cloud computing experience. It is truely amazing the technology that recruiters now posses. The future is here but in a lot of cases it's just not distrbuted amongst us evenly.  One example of this is voice search technology which maybe in the next 7 years will have a big part to play in how we break away from our addiction to laptops and desktops and start to use mobile devices more in how we recruit. Who knows we'll probably be even talking into our car mirrors to make a search one of these days for a senior credit analyst or a purchasing manager (for new readers who haven't checked out my little screenplay on searching on your car mirror check it out here)!

Here's a video to tell what I mean:



And this is only the start!Windows Mobile, iPhones and Android are all working on improving their technologies in this space. Already Google's launch of Google Mobile Apps in iTunes a couple of weeks ago is setting high standards for voice search on your mobile device. So why not do some searching for candidates on the web or on LinkedIn are Facebook while you're queuing up in Marks and Spencers for those addictive choclete cookies or why not use that valueable time when waiting for your next Ryan Air flight to Faro!

The future of recruitment is in the cloud!

Is this the future of remote interviewing?

Maybe the hologramatic interview is not too far away!!!

List of European Search Engines

When sourcing passive candidates on the Internet most recruiters only use Google, which in my opinion is a big mistake. You should always have a healthy variety of search engines at your disposal to source with... at a very least you should also use Live and AltaVista as well. Engines index differently and in my years of searching I have found on numerous occassions CVs in one search engine that did not feature in another.

Here is a list of European search engines to be aware of.

Using JobCompass to find a job on your iPhone

Interestingly CareerBuilder a few months ago came out with an iTunes job searching agent that works with your iPhone but it looks like JobCompass has outdone them with a far more slicker and more location specifc spider that runs off popular job boards like Monster, Dic, HotJobs and Cybercoders to pull their jobs from...

Check out the demo...

The new Monster is on its way!

I've got my official invitation to the Irish launch and looking forward to seeing their new career profiling system and jazzed up engine. Also looking to the odd canape and drop of vino tinto as well!

Hats off to the marketing team in Monster.

The ladders $100k+ social experiment

Interesting commercial from TheLadders, the premier job board in the US for jobs over $100k+. I wonder how TheLadders job board would perform in Ireland? One thing for sure is IrishJobs realised along time ago that there is a niche market there and in action to it they created the Executive Room but I'm not convinced it worked. I just did a search selecting the "employer" drop down menu and then I selected "Dublin" as location and it only returned 10 results. Seems like they have quite a ladder to climb if they want to get to where they want to be. A commercial as clever as this would help! Come on IrishJobs marketing team - give us something innovative as a commercial. It's been a while and we're waiting! Capture our imagination the market for executive recruitment is there for you to win or lose.

Monster gets the wallet out and snaps up ChinaHR

Monster snaps up ChinaHR

(China Daily)

US-based online recruitment service provider Monster yesterday secured complete control of ChinaHR.com, paying $174 million for the remaining 55 percent stake in the Chinese recruitment site.
Monster had said in its financial report for the second quarter of 2008 that it would pay $200 million to $225 million in cash to ChinaHR.com shareholders. Monster said in 2005 that it would take the remainder if ChinaHR.com was unable to get listed within three years.

Analysts said the failure of the IPO was due to problems with ChinaHR.com's profitability. The company suffered a loss of 150 million yuan in 2007, according to Monster's financial statements for the year.
"The acquisition will give Monster a stronger presence in the Chinese online recruitment market," said Edward Lo, executive vice-president of Monster China, who takes over as the interim CEO of ChinaHR.com while maintaining his current Monster post.

China's online recruitment market is led by NASDAQ-listed 51Job with a 29 percent share, followed by ChinaHR.com with 24 percent, according to Beijing-based consulting firm Analysys International.
Although Monster's acquisition comes amid a slump in US online labor demand due to the global financial crisis, Lo said it is an opportune time for Monster to invest in the Chinese market.

"The economic situation which has ups and downs is a cycle," he said. "The merger is not a short-term investment but a long-term strategic partnership to create the best global recruitment platform."
Liu Tong, an online industry analyst from Analysys International, said it is a good deal for Monster from a long-term perspective as China's online recruitment market is growing rapidly. It grew 36 percent year-on-year in the first quarter of 2008.In addition, ChinaHR.com's loss does not mean it has operational problems, he said. In 2007, it achieved a revenue of 281 million yuan.

The merger with Monster means there will be enough cash flow to enhance its brands, he added.
More than 90 percent of ChinaHR.com's revenue comes from the online recruitment compared to 33 percent of its rival 51job's, Liu said, adding it means there is plenty of space for Monster to diversify ChinaHR.com's future revenue structure.

Facebook and Xing see expansion during financial crisis

Interesting but not suprisingly the world of social networking reacts very positively in times of economic turmoil. Have a read of the following article from the Economist. BTW: I'm in China at the moment for a Microsoft HR and Recruitment Immersion tour. Looking forward to learn this week about some of the recruitment challenges that the Chinese market has to offer and how I can bring some of those learning back to the European market... I wonder will any of the Irish job boards stakes in Chinese job boards be mentioned in the McKinsey study we're going to get on the talent market tomorrow. PS- Stay away from duck's tongue but when given the chance to eat duck liver encased in brown caster jelly. Go for it!

M16 using Facebook to recruit!

Looks like her Majesty's British Service is recruiting their next James Bond on Facebook! Check it out here!

This week in recruitment

1. Firms' recruitment falls to 15-year low in London > 2. Indeed expand to India > 3.India's Fastest Growing Online Recruitment Site, Naukri.com, Chooses Akamai to Optimize Performance and Scalability > 4. Is everyone social networking - read what the Synovate survey has to say > 5. LoadzaJobs.ie have 3 week online recruitment fair

Facebook and Careerbuilder join forces

Previously I posted about clever LinkedIn building an API to Facebook's platform and it looks like CareerBuilder are following suit and jumping on the Facebook train. Just in case any of you there out there haven't heard of facebook well shame on you and here is a few stats to peak your interest.

- 4th most trafficked website in the World!
- 80 million active registered users
-Projected to have 200 million users by end of 08
- 45 billion page views per month
-Over 250,000 new active users a day

Here is the link to CareerBuilder's Facebook page and here is another to a clever company page created by Caeerbuilder. Where you can expect Careerbuiler to make it's money will be leveraging the newsfeed functionality in people's profiles for targeting advertisment. Prices are out in the UK and range from a plantnium package for £9k for 1.5 million impressions and a client facebook page to a silver package which is £3k for 500,000 impressions and a client page. For that kind of money maybe worth a try!

What's cool about these options is there is also the ability to purchase some ad space per a number of media options so you can look at what demographic and location you want to target amongst others which allows you control the hit rate a bit better.

To learn more about the partnership and learn about some of Career Builder's aggressive expansion plans read Careerbuilder's CEO, Eric Preseley's interview on CNET.

And not to be out done Monster in the UK also have their own page. Albeit, I haven't heard of any close knit relationship like Careerbuilder's forming yet. Maybe only a matter of time.

Saon Group do it again - but this time in south America

check out the news article here here.

Saongroup.com has expanded its operations to central America with the acquisition of Tecoloco.com. The company operates in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Panama and plans to open in Costa Rica before Christmas. The company also boasts an impressive client base that is expanding quickly.

The Irish recruiter, which is jointly owned by telecoms entrepreneur Denis O'Brien and Cork businessman Leslie Buckley, is believed to have paid more than $3 million (€2.05 million) to acquire the business although no price was disclosed.

If this spikes the entrepreneur in you what should you do to capitalise on the Latin American jobs board gold rush! Well, if you got some time on your hands and some money to spend and want to follow in the jet stream of Denis and co I'd susggest starting with the language! Learn that Spanish fluency you all dreamed about having. Get over to Central America and start yourself a job board and pay someone to get some clients to use it. Plan your exit to one of the never ending expanding job boards of the world. Career Builder was quite happy to buy 2nd choice and 3rd choice generic job boards all across Europe to expand its global brand. They could be a contender. Likewise Monster has proven that it is prepared to do the same. I reckon if you pick an excellent URL that can rank in organic searches quickly, provide a simple and clean architecture that works and get someone on the ground drumming up some clients with some careful CPC purchases and some consistent blogging you'll have a small business before you know it.

Creo que empersaria en Costa Rica, al menos, las playas son grandes si la empresa fracasa- Hasta pronto!

Irish Saon Group is (IrishJobs.ie) expanding internationally again!

The Irish Saongroup has been flashing the cash again... This time, they've bought MyJob a Mauritian job board. This is hot the heels of last years expansion into In Southern Africa after last year’s acquisition of P-Net.

The island in the Indian Ocean has 1.2 million inhabitants and their economy will be the first country “to become the first nation to have coast-to-coast wireless internet access”...interesting move!

"Scary New Competition for Monster" - Business Week

So there is a debate raging in the US at the moment about whether or not employers are getting screwed over by the good old "pay-to-post" job board model. Is it good enough to pay for a posting and to HOPE that someone will respond to you that fits the bill. Should not the model be pay-for-performance? Enter RealMatch with a brand new model and way of doing things.

Is it time that Monster, IrishJobs, RecruitIreland, JObs,ie and the other take note and beging to give us something new that provides with better matching technology that currently exists. I wonder which one of them will stand up to the test. If RecruitIreland or Jobs.ie can do it and do it well we may have a new big dog in town to usurp IrishJobs off its top mantle here in the Emerald Isle!

Flexible Executives - could this cool idea work in Ireland?

Flexible Executive is an interesting niche agency in Atlanta US that caught my attention this w/end. At its core what it does is connect executives that have family responsibilities e.g. parents who manage from home autistic children, with firms that have specific projects that let them work from home while at the same time allowing them maintain flexibility around work-force balance. I'm not sure if Ireland has a big enough market to support this model but hats off and great idea.

This Week in Recruitment

1. Monster's founder sets sight on Obits, here. 2. Online Recruitment is the best way the credit crunch for employer, here. 3.New recruitment TV show, here! 4. UK meltdown sends Indian students home, here. 5. Recent Google rankings show an annual average of almost 400,000 searches for keywords 'Caribbean jobs", here.

This time Stepstone buy into France

The French job board market seems to be seeing a lot of activity of late. Recently I talked about CareerBuilders entry into the market by purchasing LesJeudis but this time StepStone is taking over the French LVE Group, check out more here.

So now I make it Monster, CareerBuilder, StepStone, Adenclassifieds and Régionsjob in France. Is there room for any more.. definitnely, expect more aquisitions and more consolidation to come.

Zubed - GeoSpatial Jobs are here: This rocks!

This is super cool!
And, super clever!

I was waiting for Google to bring out this system as a marriage between Google Base Jobs and Google Maps but it looks like they didn't think about it, didn't see it as being a big enough priority or were simply bet to the post by Zubed.

Zubed is an online mapping system that matches employers with job seekers for permanent and contract jobs for free, for both parties. However, recruitment agencies can not use the system and are politely asked to stay away!It has a simple messaging system in place, allows advanced search and has some networking functionality set up.

Career Builder enters the French Market with a Bang!

Also worth taking note of is Career Builder's recent announcement that it is entering into the French market with the purchase of the LesJeudis group which includes a prestigious IT job board and also ingenieur-emplois.com, Erecrut, Phonemploi, RecruLex and CAOemplois. The group also has their fingers further in the employment pie in France with such portfolio prducts as: proposes candidate management solutions via Profilsoft employment faris and job search engines. It looks like CareerBuilders expansion outside the US is picking up some series velocity to challenge Monster's hegemony and the strong growth of Total Jobs on a global context.

Here's what Yasin Farhan, President of the International Careerbuilder Group said o the employees of the newly acquired company via email.

I am excited to announce that CareerBuilder is continuing its international expansion with the acquisition of Lesjeudis.com, the leading independent online job site in France. Lesjeudis operates six different recruitment Web sites in France focused on various employment segments and is one of the most widely recognized IT job sites in France. The company is also a leader in job fairs in France. The Lesjeudis brand, coupled with MSN’s enormous internet penetration in France (more than 20 million visitors in May to MSN sites in France), positions CareerBuilder for long term success in the French marketplace.

As a leading economy in Europe, France will play a key role in CareerBuilder’s international expansion. This acquisition adds hundreds of thousands of new job seekers and many of France’s leading employers to CareerBuilder’s international network.

I would like to welcome Cedric Barbier, the founder of Lesjeudis and his team to CareerBuilder. Cedric has built a great organization, consistent with CareerBuilder’s culture and values, and we are thrilled he chose CareerBuilder as the home for his organization. Lesjeudis will retain the well-recognized brand that Cedric and his team have built over the last 10 years and Cedric will continue to lead the company.

This acquisition, combined with our recent launches in Italy, Belgium, Norway and Romania, are significant steps towards achieving our mission of being the global leader in online recruitment.

Read more here: 1, 2, .

LinkedIn to go IP0 in 2009.

Who said there wasn't money to be made in Social Networks, read here, and here. With the company projected to make 100m US dollars in revenue this year they've come a long way. Despite having many exit opportunities from a large number of suiters...of which I would imagine Monster was one... it will be interesting to see if LinkedIn opens its platform to developers and how if it does so it will change their offerings to the now 23 million people with profiles on the site.

The new public profile url builder in LinkedIn and cool new French Recruitment Software

I just changed my public profile URL in LinkedIn to: http://www.linkedin.com/in/irishjobs - you can see that i now have the words Irish and Jobs in the profile. This is pretty neat as you can take high real estate words on the web and apply them to a web address on your profile which will increase the chances of organic search queries by the public driving eye balls to your LinkedIn profile where you can be advertising your current open reqs!

Also, the French jobs search engine Moovement has recently launched the software Job Board which allows a company create its own HR and recruitment site for a small monthly fee.

Announcement: New Job!

I'm glad to report that I have got a little promotion in Microsoft and now I am a global sourcing manager working on some interesting new challenges we have in supporting the business to make the move to a more distributive development strategy. In doing so I will be spreading the net to learn more about our strategic development centres and hot r-e-g-o-s which is where we think we should be sourcing talent from. This will be more travel, which I sincerely hope won't be too much, as I don't like missing my runs in Phoenix Park in the heart of Dublin or my weekly game of football with the lads, but, it will give me a change to learn more about global sourcing which I am delighted about. Top on my list of things I'm going to try learn are:

-How to write search strings on Google, Live and Baidu in Cantonese and Mandrin
-What are the top technical recruitment agencies to use in Israel and perfect writing Hebrew strings from right to left
-How to run sourcing blitzes in Mumbai, Bangalore and Hyderabad in India
-How to run competitive research programs in Scandanavian

Amazing the journey's one can go on from a little room in Ireland. Should be fun!

This week in recruitment

1. Scary, US Armey get more creative on their recruitment brand. 2. Top Japanese job boards. 3. Are you looking for a job in oil? 4. A third of Irish workers wouldn't apply for their current job. 5. Executive recruitment in France now arriving in 2nd Life.

Is this the best job in Europe?

CV Videos revisited

OK - We're all well versed about Video CVs at this stage... and God knows I've seen a few in my day. But for those of you who haven't caught up with the marketplace to get up to speed check out sites like: www.lookfirst.net, www.talkingcv.com, www.visualcv.com and tecopeople.com. And also check out some of my previous posts on the subject in the categories section to the right.

To add to the sites already out there an Irish company called www.CVizz.com and has got in the game. Started last year as an Enterprise Ireland high-potential start up it links graduates and employers in a innovative medium that is only going to get stronger in the years ahead. Hats off to Marie Carroll, CEO of CVizz and I wish her and the company every success in the future.

Matching technology has arrived but still has along way to go

When will the job boards be competed against with a disruptive technology. Will Google or Microsoft get into the job market some day? Probably not for some time! They have bigger fish to fry for the moment. But there are a lot of other recruitment minds thinking about how they can leap frog the job boards. one company that has caught my eye of late is Real Match.com. This is the first technology that replaces keywrod searching with a profile-matching model that has a cool proprietary algorithms to match candidates with recruiters behind it.

What I like about this technology is it is the first proper "matching" technology that I have seen and the first step towards my predictions around how XML may help change the way we recruit in the future in the screenplay I wrote called the "Flat CV" back in 2005. The technology also offers real time search results that grade and ilter candidates according to how well a profile matches an employers JD profile.

Seems like we have a company who is truely embrassing the concept of quality not quantity which is refreshing!

Xing spreads its wings

Interesting to see Neurona being taken over. Expect more consolidation to come from Open BC.Read here.

Tip: Use the new LinkedIn app to place your jobs on Facebook

LinkedIn as well as changing its UI recently, also very interestingly did a Facebook on Google move :) by creating a Facebook application of its own that allows LinkedIn users place there jobs on Facebook. Clever.

In my opinion this is a clear first mover play to protect the potential threat of Facebook launching similar functionality to it's own site that take people away from LinkedIn.

Simply called "My Company's Hiring", the app is very basic and though it is branded with the LinkedIn logo, it has absolutely no connection with LinkedIn or your profile on LinkedIn. Quite simply it is a way to post what jobs are open at your company, into your Facebook profile.

To put it into use you simply turn on the application, fill out your company's name, location and position details and where people can get more info.
Simply activate the application, and fill out the company's name, location, the positions you are hiring people for, a description, and if needed, a link for where people can get more information from.

YouTube meets IrishJobs.ie

Corporate adoption of social media to both recruit and retain is becoming very popular in the US at the moment and this phenomenon is beginning to seep into Irish waters as well. This week i had the chance to look at two sites which are leading the charge around video recruiting: VideoJobShop and CareerTV.

In Microsoft Ireland we've been playing with the concept of social recruitment for quite some time and it works. I'm not privy to share any juicy stats on how it works but trust me when I say that the time investment has been worth while. What has worked quite well from a branding point has been a blog I've been running for over a year called Microsoft International Tech Jobs. What has pleasantly surprised me with the site is the number of people who subscribe to the rss feeds and the percentage of visitors that come to the site from organic search listings purely because of the carefully chosen keywords I use in the title or article main page that the search engines indexed. What also is worth noting is the videos themselves also can have a hit count which allows you understand what videos were visited the most or the least and as such can give you some ideas of what to do better to fine tune your content, subject matter and directorial approach.

What we are begining to see is the creation of a new type of recruiter in the HR/Recruitment team of large corporations. Let's call it the social recruitment marketeer. This persons's job is to design and build content for your recruitment brand. To research and locate high-traffic locations where your target audience exists and design sounds bites, video bites or text bites to try lure your target markets attention. This individual also needs to be technically astute and must be prepared to learn new technologies, tinker and play with them and then draw some conclusions about how these can be used to improve your company's sourcing strategies. Whether it be forming a group on Facebook, learning how to write search in iTunes podcast directory, how to optimise your web site for higher visibility or how to automate searches on the web. There is a lot happening out their that needs attention. Those who want to professional cybersleuths and reap the benefits of social computing need to understand that there is a need for an up front investment in resources to get this right. And there is a need to let people test and play with these technologies in order for them to find out what will and will not work for you.

LinkedIn, Sushi and iPhones

Cool! So today I found myelf in a sushi restaurent with a wi-fi connection. Nice combination. Tempura and broadband. Life could be worse I thought to myself as I picked up some sashimi with my brittle chopsticks. To make the evening even more interesting I found my first c++ engineer on my iPhone using LinkedIn... oh how these times are changing :)

Build your own recruitment web site.

The best of a new bunch appearing for me is Stand Our Jobs - it's easily customisable and i incorporates a lot of what is good about web 2.O.

Blue Card will hurt the US

It's very interesting, and testemant to the pain US employers are experiencing that the Chairman of Intel penned this piece about the ultra competive Blue Card system being proposed by the EU member countries to attract quality employees into the region. Read here.

Microsoft using Facebook to Recruit

As you know we here in Microsoft do our humble best to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to trying to recruit quality staff. The latest concept we have been toying with in the US has been how we use Facebook to try recruit. As most of you know by now recruitment isn't all about clever tools, tricks, and marketing experiments it's more about a good old fashion dolp of well written, informative and catchy job descriptions, an efficient and focused sourcing campaign and roll up your sleeve tenacity. But that aside, it is important to try new techniques to market in. LinkedIn being a very good example of why. Every so often you can find a tool that hits your bottom line with some direct hires as we've experienced here and you can learn invaluable market information about your targeted hires.

But what about ubiquitous Facebook as a recruitment tool? For me the jury is still very much out! So far it hasn't won me over and I haven't heard too many companies making hires from it yet. But that said there is a lot of experimenting going on. Check out some of the work Ernest & Young has been doing on the graduate front. Also CareerBuilder.uk and GulfTalent.com are now offering a jobs matching service on Facebook. GulfTalent going as far to build, as far as I know, the first recruitment application geared to recruit from the social platform. We haven't invested heavily in marketing on it yet but we are paying it attention. To not pay attention would be haphazard. The numbers are simply too hard to ignore. With its magnanimous rise to power Facebook is clearly becoming the front running global social platform. What we've decided to do it create out own group to do some of our own testing. You can check it out here. The real interesting part for me is the advanced search facilities in facebook and the new apps that are beginning to appear. Not so much the group sections. If they begin to develop and the meteor rise of users keeps growing then the people you are searching for may have a profile and you may be able to find them. To do this as it stand will be hard because of the prevailing attitude on it that it is more a social tool to interact with friends and family and look up old class mates you went on the J1 to Montauk but have since dropped off the radar. The simple truth of the natter is not many people are putting up their professional profiles and until that happens its effectiveness will be circumscibed from a recrutitnt point of view. Time will tell. I'll keep an eye on it and report back to you all.

Will 2008 mark a slow down in jobs

Irish job gloom ahead?