Online Recruitment - the bigger picture (Tim's blog)

Viva El Fulham!

Forgive me this non-recruitment post, but yesterday was an emotional day. I've got Sky Sports, but don't have Setanta, so chose to listen to Fulham away at Portsmouth on Radio Five Live Sports Extra in a garden decorated with black and white balloons and streamers. I'm sure anyone who's been through a similar experience will agree that there's nothing quite as tense as listening to such an important game on the radio. A magnificent result. I put it down mostly to the fact that I was wearing my lucky Barry Hayles T-shirt from Cult Zeros, oh and well done to Danny Murphy, Roy Hodgson and everyone at Fulham. Now, back to work.

Google wars

As outlined on the Enhance Media blog a couple of weeks ago and as Yoda once said 'Begun they have, the Google wars'. Since the start of this week restrictions have been lifted in the UK on sponsoring other people's brands and trademarks on Google adwords - for example Virgin Atlantic can now sponsor British Airways etc. It's been this way in the US for a couple of years, but is new to the UK market.

Some people have been upset about this, threatened to boycott Google adwords and are even talking about legal action. Despite this the adoption rates seem to be quite slow so far, we've recommended to our search advertising clients that they sponsor some key competitor brands and that we review and measure the activity after a month or so. We're also sponsoring some competitor brands in the research area with some interesting results. There's also someone (that I'd never heard of until now) sponsoring Enhance Media. But apart from that it looks fairly limited, there are a couple of recruitment consultancies sponsoring some of the leading job board brands, but interestingly in other sectors none of the mobile operators are targeting each other (have they come to an agreement?) and only flight booking sites (rather than rival airlines) are sponsoring British Airways.

I think this will work particularly well for smaller players that sponsor the brand name of the market leader in their sector, so many searches are still brand related and this offers the chance for smaller brands to deliver an exact message against leaders in their sector - for example (and this is made up, so anyone who actually knows anything about this, please forgive me) a user might search for a BMW 3 series and then get a message about a similar model from KIA that has the comparable features, is cheaper, but less well known, all of a sudden I'm presented with a choice and for the price of a click thru, KIA might have pinched a potential customer from their competitor.

BBC iPorn

I was looking at the BBC iPlayer earlier this week and was amused to see the top two most popular shows played on the iPlayer. Top of the list was 'Page Three Teens'  (an everyday tale of teenage girls that want to be page 3 models), closely followed in second place by 'Glamour Girls' (an everyday tale of teenage girls that want to be glamour models). It's funny that the internet has the capacity to reduce even the most respected of organisations to purveyors of smut.

It reminds me of the definition of 'earth' in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - 'harmless', which was revised by Ford Prefect to read 'mostly harmless'. If the internet had been listed in the Hitchhiker's Guide its definition would probably have been 'porn' and with the advent of web 2.0, social networking sites etc would probably have been revised to 'mostly porn'.

Footnote 1 - if you check the BBC iPlayer most popular list now then some integrity has been restored.

Footnote 2 - I imagine that some people searching for 'porn' online today will find this post instead and be most disappointed; I might have to turn the comments off!

How much is too much? I draw the line at Twitter

There's a lot of people round here getting very excited about Twitter. I'm not one of them, not yet anyway. For starters I'm too busy, this might sound silly given that posting to Twitter probably takes less than 30 seconds each time, but for me it's a channel too far. I write this blog, contribute to the Enhance Media blog as often as possible, use LinkedIn and occasionally Facebook and I struggle to keep up with all this already. I once foolishly agreed to write for a third blog, but gave up because I just didn't have the time. There are 100's of things I'd like to do on LinkedIn, but again don't have the time.

How many social networking / user generated content sites can any one person handle before updating them / writing becomes an obligation that takes over? There's a danger that all of a sudden it's the web driving the person and not the other way round. I keep getting loads of emails about Naymz and the other day an invitation from someone to link to them on Dopplr - a social networking tool for the frequent business traveler. I've signed up to Peter Gold's Talent Management network, but again, haven't found the time to do anything meaningful there. I can handle blogging, LinkedIn and Facebook, but draw the line at Twitter, Naymz, Dopplr etc.

I'm also not sure that Twitter is that exciting, I like and respect my fellow recruitment bloggers and enjoy reading their stuff about recruitment, but I've got no interest in which film they watch before they go to bed, what they think of their new trainers or whether it's raining or not when they go to the gym, it's just too much information. I read a couple of tweets the other day that said 'I'm getting on the plane' and then a couple of hours later 'I'm getting off the plane' - great! I also realise that this is slightly hypocritical as I often blog on here about Fulham, the weather etc, but for some reason I guess I think that is okay, whereas a constant update on what people are doing is too much.

I agree that following someone on Twitter can be compelling and addictive, but is this really interesting or is it just voyeuristic? I don't understand the compulsion to share everything you do with anyone who'll listen.

I also have no interest in who's writing the 10 Downing Street Twitter. I didn't care who wrote their press releases etc, I just assumed it was some bloke in PR and now they've moved to a more modern channel I still don't care.

I'm happy to be proved wrong on this, maybe no one's explained it properly to me yet or outlined the recruitment / business benefits. Maybe when they do I'll have that light bulb / eureka moment, but for now I'm still in the dark! Does that make me a twit?

Animal magic

I knew things were getting strange when we had an earthquake, a storm, snow (documented here) and then London started to smell. But at the weekend I met a six foot badger (which was the only good thing that happened that day) and on Monday I saw some orangutans climbing all over a building in Blackfriars, still it was in a good cause. Hopefully things will return to normal later this week.

 

Online 60% of all recruitment spend - Borrell Associates

Hot on the heals of the IAB UK spend data out the other day, Borrell Associates in the US have released their Online Recruitment Advertising Report. The report highlights that in the US 'nearly half the job seekers who have internet access are not yet using it to look for jobs' - showing the potential for more growth.

It goes on to detail the share of recruitment ad spend by medium, showing 60% is spent online, Metro Dailies (I assume titles like the Washington Post etc) take 23%, Other print 13%, and Suburban NP's (I assume regional newspapers?) 4% with Broadcast and Outdoor taking less than 1% - heady stuff. I'm giddy with excitement.

The full report costs $995, or like me, you can download the executive summary for free.

ABCe recruitment metrics

I went to a meeting this morning with people from ABCe, job boards, a web metrics provider and a recruitment ad agency (officially titled the Offline ITG Working Group (Recruitment) meeting!) looking at the current rules that ABCe use in relation to what can and can't be included on an ABCe audit certificate. Much of this relates to job boards that are part of wider sites (like newspapers) or job boards that are part of networks or whose technology powers other sites and can be tracked back to this debate on Digital Recruiting. We got talking about a funnel of useful online recruitment metrics that could look something like this

1 - users that see all content on the network (ie all pages)
2 - users that see all content that includes job listings (such as editorial pages with embedded jobs)
3 - users that actually visit the jobs channel (either directly or by clicking on an embedded job)
4 - job searches
5 - job views
6 - job applications

We agreed that the value to the recruiter of each metric increases the further down the funnel you go - ie applications are worth more than users that see embedded job listings but don't click on them (fairly obvious).

ABCe have metrics that cover 1 - 3 already (Unique Users) and 6 (Online Job Applications, Online Job Referrals and Email Job Referrals) but don't have metrics for points 4 and 5. The other interesting thing to note is that some people submit their user numbers defined by point 3 to NORAS and some people submit users as defined by point 1 to NORAS - obviously tightening up these rules would be good for all as it would be more like comparing apples with apples etc.

The next stage is for ABCe to draft a proposal which would then go to the ITG and JICWEBS for approval and then hopefully could be used by ABCe for recruitment sites in the future - the long and the short of it is that we could get some useful new metrics and clear up some issues relating to the current auditing rules. I'll keep you posted.

UK online recruitment classifieds worth £286.8 million in 2007

The detailed breakdown of the IAB spend figures is now available - these show that online recruitment classifieds (ie ads on job boards) were worth £286.8 million in 2007 (£142 million for H1 and £144.8 million in H2). We'll do more detail on this on the Enhance Media blog tomorrow, in the meantime Louise wins the t-shirt, she was closest with her prediction of £302 million (that is, of course, if you don't count our original prediction of £300 million!).

Google ads on Yahoo

Story here. Whatever next, Monster vacancies on Total Jobs? Stay tuned for IAB online classified figures - publicly available from 4pm (ish)

Great British e-test - results out today

The results of the Great British e-test (that we've been working on for ages) are out today. Amongst other things, the results show that the most internet savvy people in the UK are from London and Canterbury and that some of the least internet savvy people in the UK come from Torquay and Derby. This seems to have caused a bit of a stir in Derby, where I've just done a radio interview for Smooth Radio East! Sky News and Webuser have also picked up the results.

You can buy the full results as a pdf from the Enhance Media site and see how your target audience uses the internet compared to people in Derby (probably more and better!).