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?

New Sourcers Network

It's been a very relaxing Christmas with lots of swimming, food, films and fun!

I'm now looking already to 2008 and one thing I have decided to do for the year is slowly work at bringing the community of Irish recruiters out there with a passion for sourcing closer together. Hopefuuly, let's see. These type of things are notoriusly hard to do when you ahve 15 reqs open! :) In a humble attempt I've set up Ireland's first sourcing society [which one of my close colleagues has joint yet. She knows who she is :)! ]. To join the society you will have to go to http://irishrecruiters.ning.com/ and answer some of the simple questions at the start to register. If joining please put a photo at least an avator if you are to shy to put your own picture. The network hopefully will be a great place to learn more about sourcing and will facilitate and questions and answers forum for people to ask their questions which hopefully the community will comment on. On this social network I will also write the occassional blog entry... so if you liked some of the articles switch over if you want to keep reading.

Search Engine Wiki

I've been waiting for this one to come along and finally it is here. The international search engine list is very cool!

Also, worth checking out is a site called www.joinmicrosofteurope.com I have been working on and a new blog that is perfoirming really well for me and is loads of fun brining me all over the world with my trusty camera called. The Microsoft Internationl Core Tech blog!

The world of social network referrals

I talked about H3.com anumber of months ago as a system to refer your friends for a job and win a bonus from a company from doing so. Well now there is another site something similar this time from the UK called, Zubka doing the same. It's worth investigating a little more to see if your company could use it.

49 per cent of IT recruiters find social networking sites more useful than internet banner ads in finding staff!

The day job is keeping me extremely busy at the moment so apologies for the lack of blogging!

Here is an interesting artcile with some opinions from IT recruiters on the value of placing banner ads on sites versus mining in social networks.

Join Microsoft Europe www.joinmicrosofteurope.com

If you want to find out more about Microsoft's new Windows Live Europe recruitment micro-site you should check it out here.

4 social networks to think about mining

OpenBC (Germany)

LabCircle (Germany)

Viaduc (France)

Neurona (Spain)

Recruitment from Bulgaria not that easy!

Any we thought we had it bad in Ireland. Read here.

Google to double workforce in Ireland to 3000

Wow! Will be interesting to see how many of this new heads will be senior core-tech engineers working on core service delivery!

Check out the article here.

ERE Exchange Recruitment conference

Just in case any of you want to learn a little more about international recruitment from some of the best and biggest in the business this conference in Amsterdam may interest you: read more here. See you there!

Yahoo Invites Us Into it's new social network Mash!

So here we go again...this time it's Yahoo’s new social network: Mash.

Mash includes features common to Facebook, MySpace, and My Yahoo. You can load a set of modules onto your profile page and move them around drag-and-drop style. The modules include Flickr RSS, Ego Boost, Common Friends, MyMoshLog2, Blog Module (RSS 2.0), Asteroids, Astrology, PimpMyPet, Hover, Kaleidescope, Guestbook, and My Stuff. Mash also has something called Pulse, which is very similar to Facebook’s news feed. The Pulse page shows “updates from your friends” that are basically Twitter-like messages reporting all of your friends’ activity on Mash. The modules gallery also states that “in the coming months we’re going to open up our module development platform to 3rd party developers.” The site is an invitation only application at the moment... so expect some requests to join from your friends in the future...

Google updates its search functionality on Advanced Search Page

The advanced search page has been upgraded and now you can search pages in the last 24 hours and 2 months... in additional to the usual 1,3,6 and 12 month options. Pretty cool functionailty if you want to search for CVs that are only 24 hours old!

And here is for the hack for the URL which I learned about from the excellent Tara Calishan. The syntax for the date seach is:&as_qdr=. The variables are d (day), w (week), m (month) and y (year). So the way this works is if you try a search and added &as_qdr=d to the end, you'd get only results from those pages added to the Google index in the last 24 hours.

So the examples would be:2 days is &as_qdr=d2. Searching 3 weeks is &as_qdr=w3, and so on. Now when you start goofing around with the result URLs, odd things can happen.

Yahoo getting into the LinkedIn game

It's a bit late and they'll certianly be chasing their tail but Yahoo have decided to try get deeper into the social networking job connection game providing a LinkedIn like service to connect colleage students with employeesa at companies whom are recruting. It's called Yahoo KickStart. It's still in concept phase but we'll probably see it soon. Learn more here.

Monster hacked for the 2nd time

As if one time isn't enough now Monster has been hit twice and millions of people's personal data has been compromised. Read more here.

Vlog your Job and Facebook indexing in Google

For those who don't know I am working from Barcelona these days and am settling into life in the very nice Microsoft sales sub based down in the very trendy Daigonal Del Mar on the sea front.I've been 10 days here and have settled in sufficiently enough to start catching up on my neglected stream of recruitment blog updates and newsbytes... here's two of the things out there are the moment that caught my eye:

1. Video Blogs: Somthing that caught my attention straight off the bath that I wanted to share was a new UK company that has come on the scene called Vlog Your Job. It's a WordPress blog masked as a professional site. While I like it's something we have been doing in Microsoft for some time now. It's not rocket science simply record a video of a hiring manager discussing their opportunity talking about their culture, benfits, etc. When I went on the site I tried to open a video and got tired of waiting so I left, I also tried to leave an encouraging comment on the site but I was brought to the WordPress username and password section which meant having to login in which I wasn't prepare to hang around for. Check it out and see what you think. It might encourage to finally get out the camcorder and start advertising some of your own jobs. And as I said it's not a new idea. Check out Jobs2view for another slant on the offering.

2. Facebook thinking of embedding in Google.It seems like Facebook is going from strength to strength and it is quickly gathering loyal followers away from MySpace, Orkut, LinkedIn and the rest. Last month 3 high profile Google engineers who had realised their magic 4 years stock options and made a fortune left and joined FaceBook which is a sign of real potential and a sign of a potential flotation in my mind. Anyhow last week facebook conducted a poll asking 'Would you care if someone could search Google and find a Facebook page with your name and a small profile photo?' This ads some more interesting spice to whether a recruiter would use social networks to fing d qualify a candidates suitability to a role based on their social network profile and what they have been saying in some of their scraps. I wonder has anyone in Ireland been disqualified for a role based on what their social footprint looks like on the Internet? But let's have a reality check here about FaceBook before you all start racing off into the sun set and start hunting candidates on it. LinkedIn is still my number one choice. It has by far for me much more relevant European profiles. If you are looking to hire from the US i'd probably go for Facebook but on the internation scene LinkedIn is still number 1.

Depending on which survey you read, 40 to 60 percent of the workforce is just waiting for you to call them with a great job

I read Kathy Barton's article on dissaction within the workforce in the US today and it sited some very interesting facts from CareerBuilder's 2007 'Dream Job' survey and also from the Department of Labour Statistics: You can read the article here on Alder concepts.

80-90% of the US labour force is not in their dream job and overall annual U.S. voluntary turnover increased to 23.4% in the year ending in August, 2006, up from 22.7% the previous year! I wonder what the stats are for Ireland?

51Job soaring in China

For any of you out there use to recruiting in China using online techniques you're probably very familiar with 51Job which has had it's revenues increase 34% this year and has now a market share of 30% of the online job market.

iHipo

One of my colleagues recently passed on this new International free job board to me. Not sure if any of you are interested in it out there. It's got built in RSS feeds against sub categories which is a good start.

Check it out here.

intitle: tag in Hebrew

So i'm down in Israel at the moment doing some internet sourcing training and I learnt some very interesting things. This is for advanced cybersleuth aficonads...for those of you who want to know more let me know and we can set up a training session on the net or at your premisese :)

Hebrew is written right to left. You can use the intitle tag translated into Hebrew to do a traditional intitle:~cv search in Google however you confuse the engine when you try to write a string that has intitle in English and the word for CV in Hebrew which is a double word going right to left. You have to keep it one language or the other... this is not the case if you use the intitle with other languages which go left to right! So you can use a comnination of English and Russian or German but you can't do it with English and Hebrew. I wonder what it the situation in Arabic?

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!