Microsoft launches new career web site

Microsoft last Monday united over 150 career web sites, dozens of applicant tracking systems, and a lot of microsites that organically formed by businesses that felt the career site in the past wasn't telling their story as well as they wanted to. You can check it out here.

This is the culmination of two years work where we decided back then to re-invest in our talent management systems and update our Applicant Tracking System to a new SAP platform. The logical step after deciding to invest in a new ATS was to also invest in a new career site platform which is what we did. Over 10 full-time people worked on this project in addition to a validation team that was set up for project management and quality control. Margie Medd, Microsoft’s director of employment branding, spearheaded the project aided by one of our finest Recruitment Marketing Managers, Liz Frideman, and both have done a terrific job.  At Microsoft, in my opinion we have under invested across our businesses' portfolios including recruitment at telling our story. This is a great step forward in the right direction creating a one message platform that allows for more built in social media inclusion and tailorisation at the country level.

When we started our focus groups two years ago it became obvious that three things were critical for success: search and apply for jobs was number one. Knowing what to apply for in a company with 100,000 employees was next on the list and third was specific information on the company and the job.

That’s why the job search is ubiquitous on the site and that’s why the navigation bar is super simple with only three main channels: Apply Now, Find Your Fit, and Meet Microsoft. The content for the latter two channels will grow over the next several months, although the core pieces are in place. Microsoft’s most popular recruiting features - Hey Genius, View, and Microspotting — will stay and retain their own separate identification, though one or two might be folded into the career site over time. The irreverent “Day of Microsoft Perks” video was preserved and is a part of the channel that talks about the company’s benefits package.

We are already planning for more social media integration and more story telling in the coming months which should be exciting when launched. On the topic of media, also check out our Office 2010 trailer. There is a lot of cool things happening in Microsoft at the moment and its great to work with so many creative people now more than ever who are getting an opportunity to express themselves much more in the ideas they have and in the way they work. The future of recruitment is in the cloud!

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.

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.

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!

Should you allow comments on your career site

Have you ever heard of Tim O'Reilly before? He's the guy who founded top publishing house O'Reilly Media and has written a number of forward looking articles on open source and the Web 2.0 phenomenon. He's also the same guy who brought his experience to bear in a number of savvy investments e.g. Bloggger which sold out to Google.

He now has turned his hand to the VC world where he has a $51 million fund called AlphaTech Ventures. It is not a big heavy wait fund but rather a small and nimble fund that looks at investing at a very early stage. Impressively, some of his investors include Jeff Bezos, who is the founder of Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN), and Pierre Omidyar , who is the founder of eBay (NASDAQ EBAY).

Of no suprise is the fund has gone to work already, the investments include: Instructables, Chumby, and Wesabe.

In particular I like the first company Instructables which is a search engine that gives you “step-by-step instructions for making things you never knew you wanted”. Like this lightbulb vase above. It's pretty cool! After a little more investigation I unearted on the jobs page of this company that they are allowing applicants comment their way around the open job descriptions, and the public are allowed to see what they say!It also openly advertises AdWords on the site! Do you think this is a novel idea that may catch on in career sites across the world!?! Or just a cash strapped start-up trying to make some quick advertisement revenue?!?

Career Web Sites 2.0

This week Cisco announced that it was acquiring Five Across, a social networking “in-a-box” company designed for the corporate environment. Interesting. The news press states that:

"The Five Across platform, Connect Community Builder, empowers companies to easily augment their websites with full-featured communities and user-generated content such as audio/video/photo sharing, blogs, podcasts, and profiles. These user-interaction functions help companies improve the interaction with their customers and overall customer experience on their websites. Social networking functions are of unique interest to media companies, sports leagues, affinity groups and any organization wishing to increase its interaction with its online constituency."

Ok, so Cisco may be using this as a sales channel rather than a applicant contact conduit and repository however considering Cisco's reputation as a leader in recruitment practices I can't but help think they are going to use this for the latter.