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Dave Mendoza (Master CyberSleuth Consultant) asked me if I'd do him a favor and post this panel discussion clip on my blog. Seeing as he gave me the brilliant idea for my LinkedIn Group how could I refuse.
I was chatting with a recruiter (who I'm calling Stuart) the other day who said he'd recently had a couple of instances of recruiters, from another agency, phoning up pretending to be a candidate in order to get names of companies who have live vacancies. Stuart asked the recruiter (who at that stage he thought was a jobseeker) to send over his CV so they could talk about suitable opportunities. The chap must have just picked up a CV from his inbox and sent it over after changing the name and current job. Sadly for him, Jason recognised that the rest of the CV was from one of their current candidates!
Surely the rouge recruiter would have been better using his resources to call potential clients rather than try to pinch them off the competition. I like to think I'm pretty aware of many of the tactics recruiters use - but surely no one still teaches them this stuff?!
This year's Onrec conference takes place on Tuesday 3rd June at The Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre, Westminster, London.
The agenda includes presentations from the Head of HR at O2, Felix Wetzel of The Jobsite Group and a "Senior Inventor" from IBM talking about Virtual Worlds and Online Recruitment. Laura Stoker of AIRS will be presenting on "Finding passive candidates" (this will be a nice overview to their two day course I'm attending on the 4th and 5th June). I also notice that Matt Alder is chairing the panel discussion at the end (that should stop me sloping off early).
Last year's conference was worth attending (I did a review here) and there was a good range of exhibitors on the exhibition floor. However, as with previous years' I had been disappointed to not see more recruiters attending the exhibition just to ensure they are up to date with what's available on the market.
The exhibition is free to attend and included in the price of the conference ticket is a free copy of the Online Recruitment Yearbook 2008 (worth £30). To book call Wendy Finch and quote ref AOB40 on 0870 766 8530 or email Wendy@onrec.com.
I'd noticed that Colin Minto had gone a bit quiet on his Borto blog. For me this is a good thing as it means he is (probably) spending time focussing on my Jobboard (we use his company's technology). However, I do miss his writings.
However, it's great to see that Gareth Osborne has taken up the mantle and so far posted seven times this month. Gareth, as ex-Chair of the REC has some pretty strong opinions on the recruitment market so it'll be interesting to see what he talks about. His two most recent ones are Worst nightmare possible for Recruiters (news that the PM has been in 'secret' discussions with the EC to find a solution to the 'Agency Workers Directive') and Developing a Second String (why you should encourage your staff to develop a second area of expertise).
Gareth assures me there is more to follow and Colin promises that he'll be back to blogging soon.
David Somerville is a secret blogger. He writes for the internal blog at the parent company of Simply Online Services. When we were last chatting he was telling me about a blog post he was putting together and kindly offered to share it to the world at large, via my blog.
Sales people. Don’t you just love them? Well being a marketing manager generally not, as I spend much of my working hours listening to exactly why I should spend my budgets with them.
The subject of ‘what makes a good sales person’ is a big one; but allows me to introduce to you the phenomenon of the ‘ism’. These ‘ism’, a colourful collection of uniquely composed phrases, have overtime been refined by the account manager of one of our jobs boards, CareersInRecruitment
At first we listened with disbelief, and a great amount of humour. Surely he didn’t just say that?! But, despite the unusual vocabulary targets are hit consistently, business flourishes and you have to wonder, is there more to selling then straight talking?
We started to record these, mainly for our own amusement, so below is a list of our 10 favourites (in no particular order), so you can decide for yourselves whether they would work on you…
1. You know what Accounts departments are like. They don’t see facts and figures, they only see numbers
2. Proof in the pudding that it’s money in the wind
3. High quality candidates are like a game of Poker…they don’t show you their hand
4. You don’t leave your CV so your boss can trip over it
5. There isn’t a big red button on the desk that says “make vacancies come in for this job”
6. You’re sifting through the rubbish to find the gems
7. We’re the pinnacle force at the forefront of recruitment
8. It’s like putting a carrot in front of a donkey
9. Gonna give you another bite of the biscuit
10. I haven’t pulled it out of the book of wonderful telesales lines
I had a note from Bill Vick (via Twitter) the other day saying that he has relaunched XtremeRecruiting as a Videocasting Web site and that he is looking for super star recruiters or technologists to interview via Skype video.
He would love to chat with some of the people who for the "UK Recruiter Community" so I said I'd pass the word around.
If you are interested get in touch with Bill direct, leave a comment here or drop me an email. Let's help Bill give the recruiting leaders in the UK more exposure.
Each week in the ukrecruiter newsletter we publish the Hitwise's top 10 most visited UK recruitment sites.
Once a month we now get the equivalent stats from ComScore. The plan is for us to publish them regularly on this blog (with a link from the newsletter). Below are March's figures.
comScore: Top 10 Career Services & Development Sites by UK Unique Visitors (000) – March 2008*
Total U.K. Internet Audience: 33,761
Career Services and Development: 11,099
Jobcentreplus.gov.uk: 2,704
Fish4jobs: 1,795
Totaljobs: 1,631
Monster: 1,418
Reed.co.uk: 1,108
NHS Careers: 996
CareerBuilder: 915
Jobsite: 822
Guardian Jobs: 626
CV-Library: 570
*Unique users aged 15+, excludes traffic from public computers such as internet cafes or access from mobile phones or PDAs
As we don't have a newsletter issue this week (we only do four a month and April is a five week month) the latest Hitwise stats are here.
Hitwise top 10 Recruitment Sites, week ending 19th April 2008
www.jobcentreplus.gov.uk
www.jobs.nhs.uk
www.totaljobs.com
www.monster.co.uk
jobs.tes.co.uk
www.reed.co.uk
www.jobsite.co.uk
www.linkedin.com
www.cv-library.co.uk
www.s1jobs.com
If you are looking to compare these stats the main differences are that ComScore include sites like Fish4 (Hitwise don't aggregate data from sites who form part of a network) and that comScore don't include LinkedIn (they class LinkedIn as a social networking site and rank it under their "conversational media" category as opposed to the "Careers Services and development" category we are seeing above).
Last week Emma from Sky mentioned on Twitter (you can read about why you should be using Twitter here) that she’d had 32 sales calls in one day (mostly from recruitment agencies).
I think that makes her something of an expert in the field of cold calling. So I asked her what makes her actually sit up and listen to a sales call.
Understand my Business – Even a company like Sky gets people calling up who don’t understand what the company actually does. If you are tasked with calling corporates from a list make sure who know for each one what the industry is and what products/services the company offers. Make sure you know the basics (Emma once had a cold call when she was at Unilever in which she the recruiter to send her some details by email. The guy lost his credibility when he asked her how to spell Unilever!). Research, Research, Research (but don’t be put off asking “intelligent” questions)!
Differentiation – Ensure you can verbalise what makes you stand out from all the other calls your potential client is taking. You may be able to differentiate yourself through the positioning of the call and your understanding of the business. However, if your service is exactly the same as everyone else’s (and in most cases it’ll be pretty similar) use yourself as the differentiator. I know it’s cheesy but “people buy from people”. Show that you actually understand the role you are trying to pitch for a chance to fill, talk with authority about the industry, share details of the success you’ve had with similar roles in similar organisations. Build rapport!
The deliverer making the call – For Emma getting a call from a business development person isn’t ever as successful. She wants to speak to the person delivering on the account. You either do it this way in your organisation or you don’t (if you don’t I’d avoid calling Emma at Sky if I were you!).
Use a recommendation - This isn’t about going around HR. It’s about asking someone you know within an organisation to suggest to HR (in advance of you calling) that it’s worth speaking with you.
Follow the rules – This probably goes against much “sales” advice about not giving up and finding a route in. However, for some companies if you are told you must deal with HR and that you need to be on the PSL, trying to work around this will end up with you being blacklisted. In some companies if HR knock you back you CAN get in with line. I’m not sure how you know when to try this approach and when not. However, Emma suggests you don’t try this with Sky.
So, how many of the 32 calls that Emma took that Friday hit these criteria….. none.
Now, I'm not one for a lot of self publicity (well, I don't think I am). However, I do want to mention what we've been up to with UKRecruiterJobs.co.uk since our launch a couple of months back.
We've had a great response from people within the UK Recruiter community. The launch of a job board is something quite a few of you have been telling me is a "no brainer" for ages! So we partnered with Brainhunter (Colin Minto, ex REC and thoroughly decent chap, is their MD) to launch the site.
We've now integrated the site with AdCourier (the award winning advert distribution solution from Broadbean Technology) and have a partnership with 1Job.co.uk (according to Hitwise the most visited Job Vacancy Search Engine in the UK) so that our jobs are shown via their website.
Broadbean are our co-hosts for the networking events and I've known Dan McGuire for 7 years. I asked him if he'd do a quote for the press release we sent about our integration with AdCourier. This is what I got Dan McGuire, Managing Director of Broadbean and general all round top fella said; “We have a long standing relationship with UKRecruiter and I think this really enhances their offering. They are our co-hosts of The Recruiters Network so, naturally, we are delighted to add UKRecruiterJobs to our list of job board partners. I would like to add that Lou is a babe and Colin has THE best beard in the world.” It might not have made it into the press release but I have found it hard to resist the temptation to immortalise his words (and not just because he called me a babe!). Sorry about that Dan.
Oh yes, ought to mention (as I'm going for the self publicity bit here) - We have also just launched our unlimited job postings for one year for £1,000 package. We're are limiting the number of successful applicants for this offer to just the first 100 organisations that apply though.
We have been referenced in the Creative Pool "Guide to online recruitment" so I felt it only polite to reciprocate.
Creativepool is a specialist UK online creative job board and have put together an overview guide to online recruitment. The objective of the guide is "to help candidates and employers, who are yet to try this method of recruitment, decide whether it might be right for them".
To be honest I can't think there are many clients or candidates who haven't experienced some form of online recruitment. However, I am all for information about how to use the internet better so ...
You can download the free PDF from their website.
Contents include: how the market has grown and continues to grow in 2008; some key statistics on online recruitment usage; how it works; the pros and cons for both candidates and employers; tips for making the most of online recruitment and a few handy related links. At the end of the document, there are even recommended creative recruitment consultants for those who do not wish to pursue recruiting online and therefore need an offline alternative.
Worth recommending to candidates and colleagues who are still resisting the lure of online recruitment.
