23.12.09

Introducing the FY10 Irish Recruiters Think Tank

To help me plan and cater for the variety of viewpoints now in the Irish Recruiters membership I have created the Irish Recruiters “Think Tank”. These are very passionate recruitment professionals that I have met for the first time in the Irish Recruiters events during FY09. They are from different segments of the industry and share my passion for technology and recruitment. I look forward to working with them and thank them for agreeing to give their time to help me prepare for more community, education and debate for the year ahead.

Roderick Smyth – Founder and CEO of Arithon


With a background in software development, Roderick founded web design company NSP in 1997 which was subsequently sold in June 2000. Following this, he co-founded Arithon, becoming CEO in 2005. The online Recruitment Software system is now used by almost 200 agencies across Europe, Middle East and Americas. Roderick is an avid technologist who has been immersed in recruitment technology for almost 10 years and has a keen interest in how technology affects recruitment. Roderick is also Managing Director to manufacturing group CSC (family owned) since 2007.

“I’m very excited to have an opportunity to participate in the direction of Irish Recruiters as I’ve been very impressed with Declan and the ethos on which he founded the group. It’s no surprise that membership has grown to over 1,000 members and I look forward to adding to the community to learning from the other members.”

Michael Wallace: - Commercial Director, Loadszajobs 

Educated at WIT, Michael’s publishing career started in London where he worked for one of Europe’s most successful b2b and b2c publishers, EMAP. During his four years at EMAP he was part of the team that launched the UK’s first Internet Magazine appropriately named, Internet Magazine and the UK’s first Weekly computing title ‘Network Week’. Network week tapped into the growing community of Technical professionals in the UK and was an obvious vehicle for recruitment advertising, here began his interest in the recruitment market which led him to online recruitment soon afterwards.

In 1997 he started and set up the first international office of the UK Recruitment Website TopJobs which he managed successfully until 2001 when the Irish Business was purchased by Denis O Brien. Ireland was an ideal test market for their expanding business and was quickly one of Europe’s most advanced internet recruitment markets with all the global recruitment websites competing in Europe’s fastest growing economy. As part of a management team that rolled out a business model across 14 countries Topjobs became the first internet recruitment site to float on Nasdaq. Michael has experiencing the Dotcom boom and bust era which was an invaluable learning experience and he witnessed the changing face of recruitment as it moved online at such lightning pace.

With over 15 years in publishing and more than 7 years in online recruitment he believes the best has yet to come in the online Recruitment Sector. "Innovation is being driven by the emerging challenge of social media and the increasing expectations of advertisers and job seekers. Online recruitment advertising is still evolving and most of the job boards are bracing themselves for huge change which is overdue and inevitable.The Irish Recruiters group is a perfect example of how users and industry innovators can drive change in a sector or marketplace and I look forward to being part of the Think Tank that will strive to improve the quality of services provided within the Irish recruitment Market in the coming years.”

Jonathan Campbell – Co- Founder and Director of Select People

A career recruiter, Jonathan holds a Bachelor of Commerce from UCD and remembers the days when CVs came in the post and you faxed them to your clients! In 2006, having spent 8 years recruiting accountants in Dublin, Jonathan relocated to the Cayman Islands with his wife and two dogs. There he managed the island’s largest Recruitment & Immigration Company, using his first hand experience of life off-shore to help hundreds of other like minded professionals to realise their career ambitions overseas. He returned to Ireland in early 2008 and established Select People, a specialist reinsurance and banking sourcing firm that finds talented people globally for international clients. Jonathan is passionate about technology, a gadget freak and a serial Facebooker and tweeter.

His clients are primarily overseas and his company competes against recruiters in some of the most advanced markets in the world. Select People have positioned themselves as internet recruiters and Jonathan and his partner Vincent were quick to embrace the power of cloud computing, social networking and Boolean searching. He is a firm supporter of the Irish Recruiters Club and was honored to be invited to participate as a member of the Think Tank:

"The Irish recruitment industry is currently lagging behind our international peers and the only way that we are going to be able to compete in the next phase of global growth is by being ahead of our international competition. As a small island, we need to band together and share our collective ideas and experience to ensure that Ireland becomes a global leader and innovator in recruitment techniques. By participating as a member of the Think Tank I hope to be able to share the experience of Select People with my peers in Ireland and also to learn from the many talented individuals out there in the Irish market."

18.12.09

Premier November Irish Employment Monitor

Read the full report here - these are the main highlights:
  • During November 09, the number of professional job vacancies in Ireland increased by 2%, compared to October 09
  • The year-on-year monthly comparison registered 27% fewer new professional job vacancies, comparing November 09 to November 08
  • The number of professionals beginning their search for a new role during November 09 held steady compared to October 09, showing a slight 1.5% decrease
  • Year-on-year 6% fewer professionals entered the new jobs market in November 09 compared to November 08
 Also, O2 launches Twitter SMS, here

10.12.09

Ever heard of "in memory" analytics?

The possibilities of "real time recruiting" is becoming ever more transparent. It'a topic I am planning to discuss in more detail in FY10 Irish Recruiter conferences and a newsletter I will be launching for members next year. The world of real time computing is hugely exciting and the cloud is only getting smarter.

New Facebook Stats

Company Figures:
More than 350 million active users
50% of our active users log on to Facebook in any given day
More than 35 million users update their status each day
More than 55 million status updates posted each day
More than 2.5 billion photos uploaded to the site each month
More than 3.5 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) shared each week
More than 3.5 million events created each month
More than 1.6 million active Pages on Facebook
More than 700,000 local businesses have active Pages on Facebook
Pages have created more than 5.3 billion fans

Average User Figures
Average user has 130 friends on the site
Average user sends 8 friend requests per month
Average user spends more than 55 minutes per day on Facebook
Average user clicks the Like button on 9 pieces of content each month
Average user writes 25 comments on Facebook content each month
Average user becomes a fan of 2 Pages each month
Average user is invited to 3 events per month
Average user is a member of 12 groups

International Growth
More than 70 translations available on the site
About 70% of Facebook users are outside the United States
Over 300,000 users helped translate the site through the translations application

Platform
More than one million developers and entrepreneurs from more than 180 countries
Every month, more than 70% of Facebook users engage with Platform applications
More than 350,000 active applications currently on Facebook Platform
More than 250 applications have more than one million monthly active users
More than 80,000 websites, devices and other services have implemented Facebook Connect since its general availability in December 2008
More than 60 million Facebook users engage with Facebook Connect on external services every month
Two-thirds of comScore’s U.S. Top 100 websites and half of comScore’s Global Top 100 websites have implemented Facebook Connect

Mobile
There are more than 65 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices.
People that use Facebook on their mobile devices are almost 50% more active on Facebook than non-mobile users.
There are more than 180 mobile operators in 60 countries working to deploy and promote Facebook mobile products

You can get the stats straight from Facebook, here. Some amazing stats!!! Some of the stand out ones for me are: "half of comScore’s Global Top 100 websites have implemented Facebook Connect" and "There are more than 180 mobile operators in 60 countries working to deploy and promote Facebook mobile products"! Will be interesting to see if they break through the 1/2 billion members mark in the next 24 months. I wouldn't bet against it. Expect a lot more Orkut users in Brazil and India to catch onto the Facebook craze in the near future.

3.12.09

The Irish Recruiters "Hat Tip" Awards are here!

This year has seen some really great innovation and creativity on the recruitment front especially with the evolution of cloud recruitment, social media, deeper internet sourcing techniques and tools.

To recognise some of the great work in the industry I want to ask you all to consider sending me a mail at declanfi@microsoft.com with the nominations for the following categories with an explanation of why you think the nominee should win! I’ll have a look at these and write a blog post saying who the winners are referencing their work so that the entire Irish Recruiters membership can see it. I’ll be the soul judge, won't be included in the nominations and I’ll be as objective as possible. There is no trophies for winners or even bottles of wine simply a cyber “hat tip” and some industry recognition.

The nominees can be companies or individuals. All should be for companies or recruiters based in Ireland or Irish recruiters living abroad. Examples of work for campaigns in or outside of Ireland may be included. Clear examples should be listed of the work that is being nominated and the reasons why you think they should win. There are two categories for the awards: (1) companies and (2) individuals

Please provide a maximum of one nomination per category and provide links or images where possible. All nominations should be received by 5pm the 18th of December.

If you have any questions drop me a mail.

Company Awards:
Most creative use of technology award - Employers, Job Boards, Agencies, Recruiters, Others

Individual Awards:
Best LinkedIn Group?
Best LinkedIn Profile?
Best Twitter?
Best Tweet?
Most creative use of Twitter?
Best Facebook Page?
Best Irish Recruiters Blog?
Best Irish Recruiters Blog Post?
Best Irish Recruiters Blog Newcomer?
Most interesting Irish Recruiters discussion post?
Quickest response to technology?
Best use of mobile or cloud recruitment techniques?
Most creative online ad campaign?

2.12.09

A letter from Mark Zuckerberg

Interesting article, here, on privacy in Facebook. Great to see some admission around not providing proper privacy which was a big problem for a lot of people, for a long time. Great to hear Facebook taking feedback and worked hard to improve their platform. In this new world of social profiles, real time aggregation and location based GPS advances expect the public to demand far more secure networks with huge levels of tailorisation in their privacy settings. Also, expect governments and the EU to follow suit.

"Somehow we missed this point with News Feed and Mini-Feed and we didn't build in the proper privacy controls right away. This was a big mistake on our part, and I'm sorry for it. But apologizing isn't enough. I wanted to make sure we did something about it, and quickly. So we have been coding nonstop for two days to get you better privacy controls. This new privacy page will allow you to choose which types of stories go into your Mini-Feed and your friends' News Feeds, and it also lists the type of actions Facebook will never let any other person know about. If you have more comments, please send them over."