New Zealand’s Bravest Recruitment Firm

It’s been a great week, dominated by us here at Rice Consulting hosting Ross Clennett for his Recruitment Masterclass series of events in Auckland.  Thanks for your efforts and expertise Ross, and a huge thanks to everyone involved in the events, we hope you found them valuable, informative and enjoyable.

So now here we are on Friday morning, you want your weekly dose of Whiteboard blog-alicious commentary, and I am staring at a mountain of work to catch up on.

So hurray for Job X Soutions, who sent around an e-mail flyer last week that does a lot of this week’s work for me.  What they spoke about pertained to one specific recruitment business, but what it does is open up a much wider debate around the future of job boards.  One MD of a global recruitment brand recently told me that they were on the verge of cutting job board use entirely.  I don’t entirely believe him and suspect there was a fair amount of bravado fueling the statement, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see their usage continue to lessen.

We ourselves are reducing the number of ads we post on job boards from May onwards.  Whilst we won’t be reducing the amount we spend, we will be spending it on different parts of the site.  The reason?  The actual job listings part of the job boards are just not performing the way they used to and the quality of response is dire.

The job boards recognise this, of course, but so far their response has been earnest but ineffectual.  SEEK’s jobseeker profiles product looks good, is easy to use, and on the face of it is really quite clever – but hands up who would pay for it?  Sorry SEEK but I don’t want to be told by you what CVs I might be interested in for my jobs, I want to see all of the CVs and make that judgement myself.  And what happened to Trade Me Jobs’ Bounty Hunter product?

Top marks for effort.  No marks for usefulness.

So now we have recruitment businesses like Marsden Inch below who have adopted a policy to simply refuse to post any vacancies on job boards at all.  After all, our clients can easily do that themselves nowadays, so what value are we offering by simply duplicating their own efforts?

Can the job boards come up with innovations that work? Game changers that we will pay for? Or are their spluttering engines never going to fire back to life, and soon the terminal descent to oblivion will commence? I want them to succeed.  I want them to develop new products, services and solutions to benefit my recruitment business long into the future.  But if they don’t, well I think many of us will be falling in step behind the brave Marsden Inch.

Your Brand Online Could you charge for it?Take a step back and look at your brand on the web. Is it robust, mature, properly invested and speaking to your prospective clients and candidates?In part, your online brand has a lot to do with user experience. When candidates and clients see you online what do they think? Are you speaking to them in your own voice or that of LinkedIn or Seek, do you stand out from the pack or are you a ‘me too’?What we know from the behavior of the candidates that use our clients solutions, is that they first search on the recruiters business name associated with their job search rather than go straight to Seek. A well-constructed online recruitment website delivering an excellent user experience will out-perform a job advert listed on commercial job boards. We see this every day in our client site statistics.It’s not to say that commercial job boards are dead in the face of a great recruitment site, but it’s worth thinking about the money you invest in commercial job boards vs. that you invest in your own brand online.One of our key clients, Marsden Inch, a leading recruiter for the advertising and media environment, doesn’t spend a dollar with Seek or Trade Me or any other job site for that matter as their business is totally focused on their own ‘recruitment brand’. Their site visitor numbers and those hitting the job search button and applying for roles exceed that of many larger generalist recruiters….life without commercial job boards. Do you take fees from your clients to advertise on your own website or is it a ‘free service’ alongside the paid Seek ad? Many recruiters recoup the cost of above the line advertising as part of the deal with the client. Imagine a world where every cent of that went back into creating your own leading recruitment brand rather than fund the coffers of a multinational job board that throws the odd annual bash. All of this means having a website that is well optimised and search engine friendly, has all the tools a candidate expects from a commercial job board, captures the attention of the audience, leverage social media effectively and a whole lot more. As a recruiter this may not be your core competency – but what you do know are the strengths of your business, your brand and what is important to your clients and candidates. That’s why many leading recruiters partner with us to deliver solutions that can outperform the commercial job boards. With a clear focus on your brands strengths and a solution that candidates love to use, your online solution will be a real asset to winning more business. How much is that worth? Seth O’Meara | 03-377-4097 JOBX Solutions JOBX Solutions Phone: 03-377-4097 info@jobx.co.nz / jobxsolutions.co.nz Copyright © 2012. JOBX Solutions.