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;

I saw my first job board in the U.S in 1996 on a visit to my advertising agency partner in Chicago, Shaker. I was blown away with what I saw and the opportunities I foresaw with such a platform – “the internet”, and with the quick and easy ability to search a large volume of jobs from across wide geographical regions.

Only 15 years ago recruitment media was “print”; strong national, regional and trade newspapers dominated, and often had no or little competition. In reality they had local monopolies and charged accordingly.

To place a recruitment advertisement in two local newspapers Nott’s Evening Post and the Derby Evening Telegraph could cost £60 for a single column centimeter (hugely expensive), and yet your potential candidate lived in that broad geographical area.

The “job board” had the ability to go across newspaper boundaries, and to me the opportunities to “break monopolies”, deliver new and exciting channels to “passive” candidates were limitless.

My next enlightenment came a year latter when again in the U.S I saw a company careers site, wow awesome, and given at this time I worked for a Recruitment Advertising Agency again for me what opportunities, branding, jobs, interactivity, etc etc….. but as usual I got carried away with the “limitless technology capabilities” and forgot that less that 15% of UK home had internet, and those that did were on dial-up and a heavy page took hours to download.

BUT interest had been stimulated and now it was a matter of time…. Waiting for the consumer to catch up with the technology, and the infrastructure build out to lead the consumer.

By 1998/1999 we had our first print causality, Freelance Informer, a Reed Business owned trade magazine for IT Contractors which folded due to the migration of that audience to Robbie Cowling’s Jobserve.

In 2000 I joined Totaljobs.Com and my love of on-line recruitment just grew, understanding what “job seekers’ wanted (Real Jobs with Real Companies), how a poor “candidate experience” impacted on a company’s P&L. So much so, that in 2001 we decided to take the advice of an awesome strategist at Totaljobs, Andrew Findlater and share our findings.

We created the Totaljobs Seminar Program and over 3 years ran 70 plus roadshows across the UK and helped “educate” over 700 industry professional on the benefits of On-Line Recruitment, many of today’s “In-House Recruiters” attended and we shared our passion for a move towards more in-house recruiting.

Alan Whitford our regular Chairman shared is passion for the “time and cost” to hire matrices, and we even talked about “cybersleuthing” i.e. on-line sourcing. Yes, in 2001 we had Roy Everett (spiderman) talking on the subject.. we saw a bright future for recruitment, and it was on-line.

Today we are there, but it has been much slower than I ever expected. On-line has, or is just about to overtake print media, and a recession or two doesn’t help.

We now have social media, on-line referrals, ATS… a whole multi – billion pound/dollar industry has been built to support “On-Line” recruitment.

But finally I have some regrets, and I will share them.

- We have commoditized a key part of our industry – the job advertisement, and boy what a poor candidate experience most job postings give.

- We have seen great creativity, great copy writing, and great typography disappear.

- We have made it more difficult for a job seeker to find a job – search does not work, the future has to be matching.

- We have made it too easy for job seekers to apply for a job, and for a recruiter to delete a CV. My term is “the promiscuous digit”.

BUT job boards are not dead, more will launch and other versions of boards will evolve.

The future is bright, the future is On-line Recruitment… whatever that might look like.

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”.  That may be so, but it’s precisely what the major players in our industry are aiming for, and each has every intention of eventually becoming that universal job board.  In a market that’s so fragmented, every website has ambitions.  Firstly to succeed as a business, and then to grow by gaining market share and popularity, and of course revenue.  Totaljobs announced today that it has 12.7% of the UK online recruitment sector.  Does it want more?  Do Monster and Jobsite have other plans?  You can bet they do. Even down to the smallest of niche employment sectors, there are sites battling for market share; be it revenue, number of vacancies, clients, visitor numbers, or a host of other KPI’s.  These are businesses after all, and their commercial success is not always in the best interest of candidates.

Employment agencies succeeded hugely in the 80’s and 90’s because they could identify and recruit more efficiently and cost effectively than employers could themselves.  This, in addition to the traditional advert, then created another layer between the candidate and the job.  In the early days of online recruitment there were great fears that job boards would spell the end for agencies, and it was expected that employers would be the biggest advertisers by far.  Several job boards even refused to run any ads from agencies at all.  But that wasn’t to be.  This was a young and extremely competitive market, and agencies represented the greatest repositories of the very jobs that jobsites needed to satisfy candidates.  Moreover they represented the very best opportunity for consistent revenue, even if they paid much less per job ad than employers.  Thus, the great opportunity for disintermediation was lost.  Not on purpose, of course, but there are now thousands of job boards, niche job boards, publications with job boards, agencies’ own job boards, and employers’ job boards.  Is this easier for candidates?  Has the solution become the problem?

Now in a fully mature market, talk frequently focuses rightly upon the “candidate experience”.  It’s fair to expect fierce competition to continue between the big players, and for a new accountancy job board to launch every month, but let’s not kid ourselves that a mirror broken into a thousand pieces can possibly produce a complete picture.  No one player will become universal, but it is still possible that somehow the pieces can be seamlessly integrated, so that, at least from the jobseeker’s perspective, they can view a complete and comprehensive picture of what jobs are available to them.  Job Search Engine’s, or aggregators, like 1Job.co.uk and Workcircle are the closest to this we have so far.  That is also technology’s next challenge in this market.

In fact I understand that at this very moment, the Department for Work and Pensions have plans to do precisely this, via the revamped Job Centre Plus website.  However, whilst worth paying close attention to, you’ll forgive me for not holding my breath.

Stephen O’Donnell

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. Unemployment may have dropped slightly, but so too has the employment rate (down to 72.4% from a peak of 75% in early 2008). A study, produced in January by the CIPD, reveals that 1.31 million people were made redundant during the recession, and that two-thirds of those, who subsequently found work were paid an average of 28% less in their new job.

There are no prizes for guessing how this will affect the confidence of jobseekers, employers and the professional recruitment sector.This has been reflected in the volume of vacancies advertised online.The AlljobsUK.com Online Recruitment Index has monitored the number of job adverts on the UK’s major job boards for the last 10 years.If we take January 2008 to be the beginning of the employment crisis, then our Index was standing at 1,703.31. 2 years later, it’s 59% lower, at 821.51. In that time, the much predicted demise of print advertising as a primary advertising channel came to pass as. Whilst trade magazines and some newspapers still carry job adverts, it’s only with an accompanying job board.

In bald terms, the Alljobs Online Recruitment Index shows that the number of job adverts across the ten monitored sites has plummeted from 805,695 to a low of 258,992.Currently recovering slightly to 368,722, the details of each site are very illuminating. Firstly, we should know that many sites count their volume of vacancies differently, as they hold a job advert online for anything from a week to over a month. We collect weekly figures on how many vacancy adverts there are on each site at that time. The two charts, shown here, separate out Reed.co.uk and Totaljobs.com, as their volumes far exceed those of the other websites. Reed.co.uk is often taken to be an accurate indicator of job availability, as it is largely unimpeded by cost considerations. Free advertising means that, within limits, all agencies can advertise every single vacancy they have. Despite their huge volumes, Reed is currently displaying only 31% of its maximum number of job adverts over the last 2 years. Similarly, and at the other end of the scale, JustEngineers.net have lost over 90% of their volume during the same period. Engineering and manufacturing sectors have clearly taken a big hit. Furthermore, whilst Monster have mostly outperformed their immediate rivals, Jobsite, Totaljobs and CVLibrary, they are now dipping and have lost 65% of their peak volume. Not only are there fewer vacancies, but a lesser proportion are being advertised in bulk on the biggest job boards.

As recruiters have been forced to re-evaluate all expenditure, online advertising with the major job boards has suffered enormously. The old model of “advertise and wait” simply doesn’t work on its own anymore, and recruiters are having to be far more active and creative, in order to identify and attract candidates. Social media websites, in the form of Linkedin, Facebook, and Twitter are being exploited, and all networks are being leveraged by recruiters determined to satisfy clients.

We have now seen an encouraging bounce-back from the extended winter dip. The Alljobs Index is up 244.48 since New Year, and many other market indicators are positive. If the statistics are anything to go by, where we have now had steady figures for the past 12 months, the threat of a “double-dip” appears to be increasingly unlikely.

Stephen O’Donnell

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. Profile mapping will also ensure that customised adverts are delivered to you, according to your watching preferences, in the same way Google already does, and Amazon recommends products based on your shopping and browsing history. Amazon, for example, keep track of your browsing, and know how many times you’ve looked at that crappy Adam Sandler DVD, but haven’t purchased it. They’ll keep suggesting, until you buy.

It’s not everywhere yet, but increasingly we’re seeing that a very large proportion of products sold online can be paid for by Paypal.  A rival to that service is Google Checkout.  The time will come soon, when any product viewed online, will have a hovering “Purchase this item via Paypal/Google Checkout” floating above every image.

So how will this affect the recruitment sector?  When I was young, my dad used to tell me “Son, if you are the best at what you do, then you won’t ever have to look for work; work will coming looking for you”.  Imagine every mention of an employer online, when hovered over, offered the option to “View all vacancies available with this employer”?  It won’t be easy, but we have already seen that most things are technically possible online.  All it takes is the will to implement, and the public appetite for such developments.

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 you can see in the chart below, the index was still around our datum point of 1,000 in January 2001. It actually dropped in 2002, and again in 2003, as a result of the “DotCom Bubble” bursting, and then rose steadily, as business confidence grew. Confidence in online recruiting also grew rapidly, until late 2007, when the Northern Rock crisis shook the commercial world. They say that a rising tide lifts all boats, but the dramatically falling tide of 2008 exposed traditional newspaper recruitment advertising, and all its inefficiencies. So whilst the overall volume of advertised vacancies has plummeted, the newspaper share of the market has been decimated. We can see here the seasonal shifts which occur each year, and how vacancy volumes compare year-on-year. The most remarkable year is clearly 2008, when the index seems to fall off a cliff. 2009, whilst steadily bumping along the bottom, has at least halted the decline. Modest falls and rises throughout the year have been seized upon as signs of either recovery or further gloom. It is true that since August we have seen slight growth, but far less than is usual for this time of year, and now the Christmas dip has started a little early. We always see the New Year as the very lowest point of the year, when the fewest vacancies are advertised, and this year should be no exception.

In the year ahead, we are expecting public sector recruitment to take the brunt of the current crisis. Whilst it is the private sector that makes most use of online recruitment, we expect the AlljobsUK.com Online Recruitment Index to remain flat for at least the first half of 2010.
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Websites monitored in the AlljobsUK.com Online Recruitment Index: CV-Library, Fish4jobs, Jobserve, The IT Job Board, Jobsite, Jobsearch, Monster, Reed, Totaljobs, Just Engineers.

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.

This was the point where online recruitment got serious. Various forces were at play; the number of pc’s in the homes of the public, pc’s in the workplace, broadband versus dial-up internet access, and of course the active involvement of recruiters.

However, from a candidate’s perspective, what has changed in the last ten years? Are jobsites really all that different? How far have they progressed?

You could say that the biggest hurdle was overcome by simply being able to replicate traditional job advertising, and adding the ability to register with a site, upload a CV, and apply directly to vacancies. Aside from slicker graphics, a few more bells and whistles, and various ways of accessing your account via handheld devices, the biggest development by far is the ubiquity of online recruitment. In 1999 we predicted that traditional advertising in newspapers and trade magazines would die by 2002. We were perhaps 7 years ahead of schedule, and it hasn’t quite died yet. What has happened is that virtually every vacancy advertised at all, is first advertised online. Of course, due to the current climate, there are now fewer jobs advertised online than there were in 2000. The Alljobs Online Recruitment Index monitors the volume of vacancies on the most popular UK jobsites. It commenced with a datum of 1,000 in August 2000, and currently stands at 799.16.

Picture this. The ideal situation for any jobseeker, is to have knowledge of every single available vacancy that might suit their skills. An accountant in Manchester would love to have a definitive list of every available job. That way, they can be sure of not missing out on the ideal position. It used to be the case that you could rely upon a certain newspaper or trade magazine for this. A close relationship with a specialist recruiter could also keep candidates well informed. Now, in 2009, we can be pretty positive that almost every available vacancy will find its way online, albeit across a multitude of websites.

One job, one candidate, and one employer; these are the only required ingredients in the recruitment process. Everything else, recruiters, jobsites, etc etc are simply methods of efficiently bringing together the thousands of candidates, jobs and employers. The ideals that the online recruitment industry is working toward, are simple intuitive systems that address each participant as an audience of one. As a candidate, this should mean complete visibility of all available vacancies, and with which specific employers.

In the past ten years, many of the old ways of working have been replicated online. In the past decade, the biggest leap forward has been the usage by candidates and advertisers, to the point where it is the primary route for all recruitment. It may be surprising to say out loud, but the job boards haven’t really progressed in their basic format in all this time. I think that this will remain true for the next few years, and that instead, there will be a culture change in the ways all participants use recruitment websites. I believe that the time and circumstances are now right for the huge body of jobseekers to demand more from jobsites than they have been getting so far.

I believe the time has now come for every vacancy advertised, where possible, to state clearly who the employer is. Agencies, especially those in decline, will resist this. They need to remember that candidates, jobs and employers are the only essential components of the recruitment process. Honesty and openness are now expected, and indeed overdue. There are good reasons why some vacancies, by necessity, have to remain anonymous. Conversely there is an overwhelming case for the benefits brought by bringing about the end of anonymous job advertising. Greater clarity, in the information provided to candidates, will instantly propel those that take the lead, to success in the next chapter in this continually evolving business.

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 …has revealed that around 93% of CV’s contain at least three – some CV’s many more.   Do you know how many copies of your CV exist?  Can you remember who has them?  What information is on it?  I’m betting that you can’t be absolutely sure, and thus you are at risk.  If you are thinking that this won’t happen to you, and anyway I’d get it all back in the end you’re in for a shock.

This year alone, over 4 million peoples ID’s were stolen from one leading job site.  In the US, a recent study has shown that the current economic climate has increased this type of criminal activity by over 40%.  Oh, and by the way, ID theft already costs every individual in the UK £231 per year (through the ‘hidden cost’ – which is the increase in prices and banks charges to cover the loss that businesses make).

The crazy thing is that protecting yourself is fairly simple.  This 20 page  free guide, packed with tips, resources and information, which was put together with a leading cyber crime expert shows you how.

Here is an example of a typical CV, and what you can do to protect yourself.

Take action now before you become the next victim.

Andy Gooday MD

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 …Twitter, or become a “Fan” of my company on Facebook? Maybe I should give my company a recommendation on Linkedin, and start a group for current and former employees, and/ or clients.  Whenever I broadcast my views on Twitter, should I add that “these views do not necessarily represent the views of the company”?  I probably shouldn’t use the company logo for my Twitter avatar in that case.

Not so very long ago, I had to write a “Fair Use Policy” for my company, where it had to be spelled out in black and white the precise use for which company computers and internet access could be put to, and what constituted private use of company email accounts.  My own view was that whatever you do with the company’s computers, is done in the company’s name.  Of course it’s now commonplace for individuals to search for job whilst at work, and whilst most would do so discreetly, I don’t believe a company could sanction an employee for doing so; whilst on a break, for example.

Now that the Social Media revolution has become so much a part of business life, are we working when we Tweet?  Are we representing our firm’s interests at all times?  Not so long ago, the only people to speak on behalf of a large employer were senior management, or the MD in person.  Now that we find so many people “representing” the views of a company, it becomes ever more difficult to be speaking from the same hymn sheet.  Where the structure of communication is becoming ever more fluid, are new conventions being established? I know at least one very progressive internet technology company which has barred the use of Twitter altogether.  Equally, there are many companies where much of the day is taken up with idle unproductive chatter on MyFacedinTube.

I have no definitive answers, and perhaps each company will develop its own way of doing things.  For now, its maybe best to work and personal social networking separate, and search for jobs on your iPhone at break-time.

Stephen O’Donnell

PS.  : 20% Increase in Companies Blocking Social Media Sites

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, but not in enough numbers, and not for the skills possessed by many of the newly unemployed.  In a healthy job market, brisk circulation is vital; people have the confidence in their ability to move from one job to another, and therefore create a vacancy when they resign.  Lack of confidence, fewer new vacancies and low circulation are all part of the same spiral.  So, fewer advertised jobs, and many more candidates, leads to a sequence of events that is very difficult to reverse.

It’s difficult to find independent indicators of how the recession is directly affecting the job market.  For nine years now though, the AlljobsUK.com Online Recruitment Index has been monitoring the volumes of vacancies advertised on the UK’s most popular job boards.  In 2000, most vacancies were still being advertised in print media, newspapers, trade magazines etc.  However 9 years later, the online recruitment sector is now the automatic place where vacancies are advertised, and print advertising for recruitment is pretty scarce.  That being the case, we would surely expect there to be many more jobs advertised online than ever before, wouldn’t we?

Here we can see a snapshot of the current Online Recruitment Index, from 17^th August.  Across the ten sites, we have a total of 329,076 live job adverts.  This is only slightly higher than the lowest figure ever recorded in 9 years, which was only 2 weeks ago.  To give an idea of the depth of the effects of this recession, the Index is now only 31% of its highest recorded figure, which was as recently as August 2007.

Equally, we can see the relative effects on the specific job volumes with each site.  None are above 50% of their peak figure, and six are below 30%.  Of course we know that each of these job boards have different business models, and use different criteria to count vacancies.  That is why it is especially useful to compare their current and previous figures.  Of all the sites monitored, it is probably Reed.co.uk, which is most significant.  The great bulk of their vacancies are posted there for free, and are therefore not constrained by the cost to advertise.  They also come exclusively from UK recruitment agencies, who are competing fiercely themselves to generate revenue.

So what does mean to the online recruitment industry, and how does it affect the hard-pressed job seekers throughout the UK?  We have heard in the last week that France, Germany, and now Japan have technically come out of recession.  Have their stimulus plans worked, and will ours follow suit?  Analysts project a slow recovery, but this is almost entirely reliant upon a return of confidence internationally.  Dependent upon their parentage, the nature of job boards should mean that they are structured to weather the storm, and adjust to the market place. However, if these figures reflect the rest of the sector, they do suggest that many must be very near the bone indeed.  The inevitable grab for market share, as the state of national employment recovers, will determine the victors.  Brand loyalty has been taken to a low ebb by this recession. If the best jobs are only a click away on another website, then only those boats will be lifted by the high tide, when it comes.