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.
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
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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