As one door closes… Another opens
It’s been an interesting week in my world. Just a couple of days ago we heard the result of a competitive trial against one of our major competitors. We face these frequently at hunt4staff.com and are reasonably relaxed when a client goes this route, knowing the work we have put in to make our service amongst the best in the industry.
When we heard our service was better than our competitor, we were pleased, although not that surprised. Nor were we surprised to hear our applicant tracking system was more sophisticated than our competitors product. So all in all something to be pleased with you’d think.
But no. We have handled a number of successful projects for this client and they have always been delighted with our service. Yet this week they chose to select our competitor based on their perceived brand. A brand which is largely built on the celebratory status of the dragon investor in that flat fee recruitment business.
Now I found this decision quite odd and rather disappointing. But you have to respect the decisions a client makes and move on. My challenge was how to sell the positive to my team who might be devastated to lose an account in such a way.
So this is how I explained it. If a business such as hunt4staff.com can achieve a service and product which is better than that delivered by a business with all the investment and resources a “dragon” can add then we have something to be rather pleased about. And if this one client rejected us on the basis of their brand alone, then there would be many more who would choose us simply based on the quality of service we have clearly established ourselves as excellent.
Now as a director you can seek to persuade your staff of the merits of such an argument, and they may even smile and try to agree with you. But you need a little more to make such a loss less painful.
Today, just two days later we did that. A major multinational organisation in exactly the same field has decided to place their recruitment business with us. An account which is probably ten times the size of the one we lost on Wednesday.
So as one door closes, another opens… It’s a funny old world.
Being an Exhibitionist
It’s many years since I have manned an exhibition stand at the CIPD annual exhibition. I am really looking forward to this year as I return to three exciting days of smiling at people as they walk past our stand. Perhaps I am in a minority, but love the whole exhibition thing!
The only problem I have is making sure I go to the right place… I still think of the CIPD as having their conference and exhibition in Harrogate. Must remember to set the Sat Nav for Manchester!
The work involved in pulling an exhibition like this together seems vast. But for us it is a really good opportunity to tell the world about our Hunt4Staff.com business. As well as catching up with a few contacts I have not seen for far too long. So if you are in Harrogate… Sorry – Manchester this year, then do pop along and visit us on stand C12.
But seriously, going back to being an exhibitionist. It always amazes me how many of the stands have people sitting on the stand, the other side of a table, waiting for someone to approach them. I am sure this is not the way to make you exhibition & marketing strategy work for you. But at its core, this is about getting the right people for the right job. You’d expect us to get that bit right wouldn’t you!
Hope to see you in Manchester,
All the best,
Jason
Does Money Matter?
A few days ago, I wrote my blog about online job boards and the issue of location. I thought I’d continue on this theme and look at the way in which employers use salary when advertising jobs.
Let me start with a question.
Q – Would you still do your job if your employer did not pay you?
A – errr.. not sure I have to wait for your answer on that one do I!
I think we can fairly say that most of us would not keep doing our normal job without pay. Except for a few exceptionally wealthy, or perhaps rather strange individuals! But seriously, how many of you would apply for a job that did not pay the salary you want, or perhaps need, to earn? I think we can safely conclude it will be very few. So what has all this got to do with Job Boards.
Let me tell you. When most job seekers look online for their next role, they have a number of criteria in mind. Now one of those is location, as I explained in my last blog – The Trouble with Job Boards…
Another, and arguably the big one… is Money. It’s all about the money.
Now lets just take a step back and think about how Job Boards and internet searching works. If you read your local paper, it is quite simple to simply flick through the pages, glancing over the adverts which are in your area. There are probably a couple of pages of them. It’s quite easy to mentally sift the interesting from the er…. rubbish. Even if you pick up a specialist trade publication, you only have to turn through a small number of pages to review the roles available to you.
The internet isn’t like that. In order to write this blog, I had a quick look at Jobsite a couple of minutes ago. Now I can’t tell you how many live jobs Jobsite have, because Jobsite only tell you they have in excess of 5000 live jobs. However, to give you an idea, I did a quick search to find 975 adverts were placed in the last 4 hours alone. That should give you a clue as to how many are on-line. Another search shows me that over 5000 adverts have been placed today alone. Now I don’t know about you, but I couldn’t simply glance over 5000 adverts to sift through to the few that interest me. That’s where the job searching technology gets rather clever.
So, with the very best job boards, they have rather clever search capabilities. In a few minutes, I can build a search string which will sift through every single job on Jobsite. This search will tell me the roles which meet my target requirements. Just a few moments later, I know Jobsite have 388 roles within a 30 mile radius of my home. And that is only looking at those adverts placed within the past 7 days. Just to clarify, that is just looking at those roles within my specialist skill sector, Human Resources.
Now here is my question. Do you think I will narrow down the 388 to the ones that match my salary requirements before glancing through them all? You bet I will!
So, if this is the case, why oh why would any employer advertise a role without stating a salary range. The only answer I can come up with is they don’t fully understand the new world of internet based recruitment.
There are a few key criteria which will have a direct effect on the number of applicants you will see. Salary and location are right there at the top. So please, if you are thinking about advertising your next vacancy on the internet, make your recruitment budget work for you and do include the salary.
All the best
Jason
The Trouble with Job Boards…
As we start to get busier in our flat fee recruitment business, we begin finding the challenges we will face on a regular basis. The most interesting this week was realising just how little the business world appears to know about on-line advertising. Before we can persuade them to go on-line, we need them to understand how to make it work for them.
This week, I cam across a number of scenarios where potential clients simply didn’t understand enough about the on-line job advertising market to make the jump to internet based recruitment. Some of them made misinformed judgements about how to advertise, other no doubt missed out all together on the massive savings to recruitment budgets that can be made through on-line based recruitment.
So let me try to take some of the mystery away.
It’s all about location.
One of our prospective clients in the north of England has been struggling with the decision as to whether to use a flat fee recruiter like WebRecruit or our very own Hunt4Staff.com. Each time they face the decision, they back away from the considerable saving they could make deciding to pay large recruitment fees or significant costs of advertising in the regional newspapers. This week I understood why.
Our client, had previously rejected using the major internet job boards for advertising as they did not want to attract applicants from all over the country. He simply wanted relevant local advertising coverage for his job. He concluded, albeit wrongly, that picking a national based job board was like using a national newspaper. Something most employers would rarely do.
Wrong.
When you place an advert in a newspaper, the reader simply turns through the pages, glancing at the adverts on display. They pause when they see one that catches their eye and hopefully read more thoroughly. If it seems right for them, they apply. This is the old model of advertising. Before moving to internet based advertising you need to learn the new rules of recruitment. The rules of on-line recruitment.
Your Postcode Matters
I did a quick search on TotalJobs this morning to find they have 86,389 live vacancies! How on earth would a job seeker glance over each and every one of those adverts? Answer – They don’t. If my client had simply become the 86,290th advert to glance through, he would get very very few applicants. But it doesn’t work like that.
A job seeker builds a search to show the jobs which might be of interest to them. This means they narrow the 86,389 to ones which might suit them. Now I live in a rather rural part of the East Sussex Countryside, but when I asked TotalJobs how many of their 86,389 jobs where within 10 miles of me, I could only view 223. Even I can manage that.
Before you advertise, you need to work out how to target your ideal employee from their likely search criteria. Their preferred location needs to be right at the top of this list. So please, for the sake of your recruitment budget, please don’t ever advertise a role on the internet without including a postcode location. You’d be surprised just how many employers do.
Now…. I wonder if my local paper has 223 jobs this week?
All the best,
Jason
About Jason Perry
I started my career within HR & Training, and became a qualified member of the CIPD and am now a Chartered Fellow of the Institute of Personnel & Development. In 1994 I started Assessment Systems – a business providing specialist consultancy in the area of Assessment Testing and Psychometrics. In 1999 we launched our second company, ASL Recruitment. We took the experience of providing assessment expertise and started trying to transform the high street recruitment market. In addition, we handled a number of senior and specialist roles. In 2009, we launched our new venture, Hunt4Staff.com delivering an online flat fee recruitment service for just £595. An active member of TEAM, The Employment Agents Movement, I sit on the National Executive of this organisation and am a Regional Director in the South East of England. I enjoy living in rural East Sussex with my wife and two daughters and take a far too enthusiastic, and perhaps even an interfering interest in politics.
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