Likewise, RecruitIreland are getting creative. When Dell was hit with its large set of redundancies in Limerick the company soon after offered free job postings to all Limerick employers. It has now gone one step further and offered free job postings to all employers in Ireland.
On their blog today they wrote:
"This week we launched a new campaign offering free advertising to employers in Ireland - the aim of this campaign is to provide support to businesses at a time when they most need it and also to be a "one stop shop" as such for jobseekers. We want to offer you a complete service whereby when you log onto the website you will find all vacancies in Ireland in the one place - we hope by offering free advertising to employers we will facilitate this."
This is a clever but controversial move by the company and one that should see the a lot of jobs that are live and offered by internet savy employers in the country being aggregated onto their board. It will makes sense for a signifigant amout of employers that they post their jobs on the site now that it is free and job seekers will be happier as they can view more jobs in one place. However I question if RecruitIreland will be denting future revenue streams in the future from the important recruitment agency companies that make up a signifigant chunk of their client base. I wonder is the offer open to all recruitment agencies as well? It wasn't obvious from reading the announcement on their site if it was or not. If not, I wonder will agencies view this as an attenuation of their brands in the market?
Recently it has been more evident that a new set of outplacement and CV clinic services and products are entering the market with IrishJobs for example setting up Horizon Outplacement As the recession moves on we will no doubt see more innovation in the market. I wonder when Tesco's will decide to enter the market. TescoJobs.ie could be an interesting move into the industry or I wonder will Michael O'Leary at some stage look at the similar technology behind his RyanAir web site model and also enter into the market with RyanAirJobs.ie. Probably long odds on both. You'd be best served putting your money on Ireland winning the next Eurovision. However, I'd be far more willing to bet on a lot more change and response in the coming months. Recruitment providers will work harder to build new and foster deeper relationships with job seekers and clients. RecruitIreland again, have seemed to grasp this concept well by introducing new functionality on their home site where they specifically call out a section called Web 2.0 and RecruitIreland.com which allows job seekers interact with their web site by offering them the option to follow them on Twitter, Bebo or by RSS. They also provide an option to download a simple App or join their group to use FaceBook to facilitate their search. I'm suprised that other job boards haven't followed suit already and I have no doubt more will in the future. It will be interesting to see which will be the first to offer a full mobile recruiting advertising campaign targetted to mobile smart phones. I'll be talking more about this topic and web 2.0 recruitment tactics at "The Future of Recruitment Conference" on the 3rd of June. I'm also looking forward to debating RecruitIreland's free
