Change in legislation for recruitment agencies in Ireland

In an attempt to get rid of some of the rogue recruitment agencies in the country it looks like the government has got some of their negotiations wrong with the unions, read here.

First the e-voting scandal, now the agency negotiation issue, will be interesting to see how Minister Cullen performs in his new office in the cming years!

Germany powering ahead. The French still wary to hire!

Here's an interesting article on the European Envy Effect. If you want to know more about Germany's continuing amazing comeback and a little on some of the issues facing the French economy, read here.

Hands up who likes Oasis's classic Wonder Wall song

Well here's another type of wonder wall, from Blinkx, but this time a meta-wall that allows your multi-visualize the videos that are presently out there in the meta-universe.

JobTonic and Facebook

My apologies for being away so long I was travelling the world with Microsoft where I went to Shanghai, Beijing and Hyderabad in India to learn about our recruitment challenges. Well, I'm back again so let the blogging begin.

This week I wanted to draw your attention to JobTonic which is an interested new referral site for the public. It's a little like H3 in the US. What I like about Job Tonic is it has already reacted to creating an API to fastly growing Facebook.

Irish Jobs, Monster and Recruit Ireland have a new friend on the block

Just when you thought there wasn't enough space on the Irish job baord scene for another player we see the entry of three niche platforms under the one umbrella: SaleJob.ie, ComputerJobs.ie and AdminJobs.ie. As I predicted along time ago the increase of niche job boards with detailed business RSS feeds and topical discussion may arise and begin to erode into the bigger job baords revenue. There is still a huge opportunity in the market to create niche portal sites with job opportunity for very specific niches. I wonder when we are going to see HRjobs.ie, C++jobs.ie and NursesJobs.ie, the list is almost endless!

FaceBook get's its own operating system

It's impressive to see how FaceBook is evolving into an advertrising platform that allows companies operating its own advertising campaigns from within their own platform... here's the article, it's interesting to see not only the job boards being highly competitive but also the social networks rowing in and keeping the online networking and connection market very interesting. They are squashing MySpace and are on the way to an interesting IPO proposition in the not so distant future.

Google interviews - the long slow spit

When I was a kid I used always let a spit hang slowly from my mouth and then at the very last moment when it was going to drop off my tongue into oblivion I'd slurp it back up in a big heaving lung pulling upwarding flowing vortex. It took quite a bit of skill and a huge amount of patience to perfect the technique!!!

It sounds like listening to Jeff Barr an evangelist at Amazon on their Web Services team explain about his interview day in Google and the barage of emails he's been getting from Google recrutiers that are canvassing him despite the fact that he did not want to join them signifies again that having PATIENCE is a big RED BULLET POINT you need on the top of your CV if you are to successfully get through an interview in Google and get an offer. Read the article hear.

Microsoft takes its testing serious!!!

I got a good laugh from this one!

Microsoft buys minority stake in Career Builder

Watch this space... will Microsoft enter the job baord market? Read the update here.

Irish Jobs takes on the Gulf

The latest launch from Irishjobs.ie and the Saongroup.com network: www.RecruitGulf.com came to the market today. This is a brand new advertising medium for employers and recruitment agencies operating in the dynamic and rapidly growing economy of the Gulf. This adds to the UK, Caribeen and China launches and gives the brand further global reach than it had before. I wonder are they eyeing something up in Australia and Latin Amercia as we speak.

Google expanding quickly

Google confirms it will open operations center in Poland: Google plans to open an operations center in the Polish city of Wroclaw in 2007, creating 200 new jobs. The center's main task will be to support the advertising department. Google said in a statement it chose Wroclaw because of the “availability of highly qualified graduates, the country's economic stability and strong infrastructure.” Google also operates a research and development center in Krakow. Colm Long, a Google director, said, Google will begin hiring immediately. Said Long, “In the first phase, we plan to take on 50-100 people.”

Google expects to double its Brazilian team: CEO Eric Schmidt said Google expects to double the size of its Brazilian team to 200 employees in 2007. Google will focus its recruitment on Brazil's largest city, São Paulo.

Google opens Latin American headquarters in Argentina: Google opened an office in Buenos Aires which will be the headquarters of its Latin American operations. Gonzalo Alonso, Google's director general for Latin America's Spanish-speaking countries, said, “Argentina will be the third-largest headquarters for Google business development in the world, after those in California and Ireland.” The Buenos Aires office also will manage some clients of its operations in Spain. Alonso, who will head the Buenos Aires office, said Google chose Argentina as its regional headquarters for the Argentine people's entrepreneurial spirit, the high number of Internet users, and the good quality of Argentine software developers. He denied that the decision was based on Argentina's low costs resulting from the weak peso. CEO Eric Schmidt said the Argentine government has been “very supportive” of the company's entry in the country. Said Schmidt, “We are going to create many, many jobs.”

Google recruits at Wayne State University for Michigan offices: About 100 Wayne State University students and alumni attended a recent Google recruiting session on campus. Grady Burnett, head of Google's online sales operations in Ann Arbor, told applicants that Google wants an active role in Next Generation Mobile, the network for mobile electronic devices. Burnett said the new network will allow people to use their cell phones to do things like open garage doors, change the channels on televisions and more expansively browse the Internet. Burnett said he doesn't believe desktop and laptop computers will be pushed off the market by handheld devices, but said they could expand the electronics market even further. Google’s Ann Arbor headquarters caters mostly to customer service and AdWords. There also is a group of Google employees in Southfield who work with Michigan auto companies.

Italian job boards

For those of you who are trying to find technical talent in Italy I have been doing some research into the job market and the following 3 boards are my incumbents (in order of prefernce):

1. InfoJobs
2. Monster and
3. Corriere

New Microsoft Graduate Video

Innovative CV from French graduate

Here's a CV we received in Microsoft from a recent French graduate. Enjoy.

This week in recruitment - The fab 5

Experts say the Internet recruiting market in Russia is worth about $20 million per year maybe that's why Monster has just opened up there!. A new job board has just opened in Scotland called http://www.scottishjobsonthe.net/ And you thought that Microsoft didn't have its own job offering. My old colleague Rob McIntosh gives us an excellent defintion of the word sourcing in Wikipedia. An army recruiter goes to jail.

You can listen to it in Podcast form here,or you can listen to it in the podcast plug-in on the right hand side! Enjoy.

Want to fight poverty! Work for the richest man in the world as a Recruitment Manager!

On ERE this week the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation posted a spec looking for a Recruitment Operations Manager... if you think you have the skills needed it may be your chance to really help the world be a better place!

Hotjobs is not just your regular job board

Two interesting facts have unearthed themselves about Yahoo's hotjobs this week:

1. They are catching up ground on CareerBuilder and Monster, quickly, and
2. They have integrated their 'Answers' funtionality from their search engine into their job board thus giving them the gensis of some social networking functinality and allowing them push towards a vertical search engine niche.

It will be interesting to see if and when CareerBuilder and Monster make the move toward search engine like functionality. In my own backyard the present incumbent job board IrishJobs seems a million miles away from trying something in this space and is relying on it's push newsletter approach.

Could this job ad be the most innovative ever???

This ad is very cool and will give Mr Shackelton's ad on the right hand side of the screen a run for it's money. Check it out here.

Indeed and Zoominfo get it on!

This is a very interesting union. Maybe FY07 is going to be the year of strategic alliances!

I know that most people in Ireland in the recuitment world rarely refer to either of these companies but they are worth keeping an eye on. Interestingly ZoomInfo has agreed to use Indeed's job search engine this week.

Read the press release on Business Wire.

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?!?

Will every popular blog have a job board built in and has widget mania arrived!

It's interesting to pick up on some of the recent movement in recruitment product development that is being pushed by the blogosphere of late.

Indeed and Jobster recently came out with widgets which allow bloggers to host job advertisments on their blog. Also Monster widgets are appearing like this one in India. SimplyHired have come to the game with their impressive Jobs-O-Matic offering which allows bloggers to add a job board to their site and as such make some money for their hard spent hours of blogging!

The Irish Cyber Sleuth may have to try this on his own site one of these days!!!

Which all leads me to the question. When will the Irish market embrace some of these advances!?!?! So I wonder how long it will be before Irish Jobs bring out a widget for the job seeking community. If it takes as long as it did for them to embrace RSS capabilities on their site I won't be holding my breath. Maybe Stepstone or JobPilot may introduce something and start innovating in the heavily reactive European job board market.

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.

Tag. You're Hired. Will this be the line that slays Monster!

Last September I went to my first ERE Exchange conference. It was the 2nd ERE Exchange International Conference and was in beautiful Amsterdam. At the conference I had the opportunity to as Jason Goldberg the CEO of Jobster a simple question at the end of his presentation.

"Hi Jason, Declan from Ireland, could you give me your opinion on when push and pull RSS technologies will meet?"
"2 years," he answered with the steadfast indubitable stare of a sniper locking in on a distant target.

I wondered quietly to myself, can he do it in 2 years!

If there is anyone that is going to teach Monster, the almost $7billion dollars, 1 billion profit generating job board, some manners, it's Jason and Jobster.

Seattle-based Jobster, which has put together $50 million in venture capital, used to have a similar business model to Monster - a pay and post advertising proposition. But late last year they made a decision to try something different. They handed out a lot of pink slips, announced redundancies and shifted their business model dramatically. As of yesterday they have made their jobs listings free and offered a wide range of new features including and most importantly profile tagging technology.

Jobster is like LinkedIn or Xing: a social network. It contains well thought out profiles which allow users host their CV. The super cool thing about the site is the user can also "super tag" their profile and Jobster using Jobby's tagging technology (a company they bought last year) will match up profiles and job specs. Goldberg has also decided to syndicate these listings out via RSS and other methods, so job search engines like Indeed will be able to add these to other listings from around the web.

This without doubt in my mind Monster's biggest competitor. Goldberg famously belittled Monster in a series of interviews recently saying that Monster was a "crap product". He is now impressively backing up his words with a dramatic shift in his business model. This can also hurt other social networks, especially the quickly growing LinkedIn. If people start putting their profiles up in Jobster instead of LinkedIn their popularity will erode. Isn't competition great?

Jobsters job posting is free. I know I will be first in queue from Ireland and getting my jobs posted their today.

So here I am thinking 2 years like Goldberg said was unrealistically optimistic. He mislead me and did it in 5 months. Great news for employer and job seeker alike. The sword has come out, the battlefield laid down; how long will it be before Google, Yahoo or Microsoft come to the battle or Monster starts to slowly turn the ship! LinkedIn while probably nervous are probably secretly rubbing their hands together going "ching ching" if one of the big boys want to get into the market they'll probably have to add an extra zero to the check book if they want to acquire rather than build the technology.

Google Base and XML

5 years ago to the day I wrote an article for Monster talking about how XML would change the way we post job descriptions. At the time I worked for a Web Services Security company that encrypted XML messages. Most of the people I talked to didn't know what XML was and even today 5 years on I don't really believe much has changed in the recruitment fraternity. Google know a lot about XML and how it can change the way we bulk post our jobs. At present they accept bulk uploads in five formats, including tab-delimited and four XML formats: RSS 2.0, RSS 1.0, Atom 1.0, and Atom 0.3. They even provide sample files to illustrate how your bulk upload file should be formatted. To learn more visit their Google Base where the following page goes into a little more detail.

What is even more interesting about this is you can include specific advertising attributes in your bulk upload file and then you can create a Google AdWords ad to help increase traffic to your Google Base items. This allows you create a very targeted advertising program that allows you to run highly targeted cost-per-click (CPC) regardless of your budget. Clever.

Are you looking for Russian sites to advertise on

Here are a few of the more obscure ones to look at:

http://job.biz.ua/cgi-bin/view.pl?page=2&razdel=48&tip=1®ion=-1&perpage=30

http://www.naim.ru/rcatalog-5.html

http://www.be1.ru/job/resumes/

http://job.ukr.net/searchres/view_IDres.php?id=273380

http://job.bigmir.net/search/?type=1&country=10000&subm=1&sub_cat=2221&cat=2200

http://www.alljob.com.ua/vacancies-ukraine-web-programmers/page13.htm

http://www.naim.ru/rcatalog1-7.html

http://www.bigmax.ru/Detailed/114059.html

http://www.ufarabota.ru/bank_resume/?filter_date=62&id_job=1407

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.