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Guest blog, from Keith Robinson.

Many thanks to Stephen for letting me write this article and doing such a great job with NORAuk.  I am a huge fan of recognizing and rewarding excellence in any sector. Having been shortlisted last year with my new launch Careersiteadvisor, I know the thrill and anticipation when you are at the event… you cannot beat it and Stephen “Thanks for setting these, up and continuing to run the NORAUK”.   Stephen asked me to write something on/about On-Line Recruitment so a short ramble;

This may seem a no-brainer to anyone in the online recruitment industry, and perhaps even a preposterous question for me to ask, given my role in the sector over the past decade.

Commerce aside, it is perfectly possible to provide a service, where every single available vacancy is locatable via one solitary website.  How simple and convenient would that be for candidates?  If such a site existed, there would be no real need to trawl a multitude of job boards, searching, registering, applying again and again.  Surely then jobseekers would only have to register once in a great big CV Database.  Here too, employers could easily identify them, sure in the knowledge that these are the best available candidates to consider for each role?  “Crazy talk” you say? “It’ll never happen”.  

Throw open the shutters, open the windows, and take the sandbags from the doors. The storm of recession has past, and we can all get back to normal. Perhaps not quite.According to the Office of National Statistics, the UK economy experienced growth of 0.1% in the last quarter, and unemployment unexpectedly fell by 7,000 in December. Now that the snow has cleared away, there’s nothing to stop us. These figures may be great for confidence, but there is much to overcome still in the recruitment market.

Are you loving E4’s new hit American import, Glee?

However you feel about the show (and I quite like it – in a totally manly way, of course), business-wise, they’ve got it sussed. All songs are available straightaway on iTunes and the E4 website for sale. I can see them charting, even though they’re saccharin covers (I love them though).

Very soon, much of TV will go this way. Immediate purchase of items advertised will be commonplace. Sky TV/Broadband and Virginmedia customers will soon have shopping accounts, where you simply click your remote to add items advertised to your shopping list. I think Sky already have to capability to set a reminder for a TV show while it’s being advertised on screen – “Click the red button to set record for this program”.  This is the future of TV advertising revenue.

Every week, since August 2000, the volume of vacancies advertised on Britain’s most popular job boards has been monitored by AlljobsUK.com. We now have data for these websites for the past 480 weeks. Because we monitor a range of of websites, we are able to more accurately reflect the state of the UK online recruitment sector. Whilst the Monster recruitment index will tell you the experience of only one job board, we are able to track the ebb and flow of the market as a whole. The effects of the current recession are all the more dramatic, when seen in visual form.

As Robbie Cowling will testify, Jobserve were the first established online recruitment job board in 1994. Initially a “jobs-by-email” service, the existence of the World Wide Web was known and used by very few, and largely consisted of IT experts and enthusiasts. Early websites were referred to as bulletin boards, leading to the term Job-Boards.

Skip forward to 1999, and the recruitment world, if not jobseekers, had embraced email and those pioneer’s websites, which were able to advertise vacancies for a fraction of the cost of traditional newspapers. That said, newspaper advertising was still the first place most recruiters and employers advertised their vacancies.

Does this sound weird? After all, why would some one want a couple of bits of paper about where you used to work.?  I’ll get straight to the point.  The way criminals operate has changed….

Vast amounts of crime now take place online.  It’s because the Internet is the equivalent of an open bank, with no guards, no cameras and no safe.  And here’s the bit that really gets my goat – its not the banks money that gets stolen – ITS YOURS.

So what has this got to do with my CV.  Simple.  Online thieves want your identity, so that they can take your money, use your credit cards, even get jobs using your identity, that their criminal record would prevent them from obtaining.  There are 15 bits of personal information that the online Identity Thief wants, in order to steal your identity. Just three of these is enough to start targeting you.  Recent research …

Now that the line between business and personal use of Social Media is becoming almost completely blurred, how do you know when you may be crossing it?  The Social Media revolution is upon us, and very few will have failed to notice that it has been colonised by business, large and small, across national borders, and often beyond legislation.  Individuals and companies now have a multitude of accounts on Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Bebo, Youtube etc etc.  So do I “Follow” my company account on …

The volume of vacancies advertised on UK job boards has fallen by 69% in the past 2 years. And this is in a market that is abandoning print advertising for digital – The Sunday Times contained only 8 actual job adverts this week.  So do we know just how the job boards that we all use, on a daily basis, are faring in the current economic climate?  We do know, for example, that the official number of unemployed now stands at 2.4 million, and has increased by 220,000 in the past three months.  When people are losing jobs and not finding new ones, we also know that demand is far outstripping supply. There are of course many firms still recruiting,