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Now in their ninth year, the National Online Recruitment Awards finally has it's own website! The site showcases current contenders as well as previous finalists and winners.
You can also view information about the categories and rules, the judges and how to nominate a site.
The awards will be presented on 5th November at our networking event. If you'd like to come along you can register here.
We are currently running a poll with Voyager about membership of professional bodies.
I got a sneak preview at the current results and was particularly interested in the results from one of the questions:
"If you have ever joined one of the recruitment associations, what are the main reason(s) for being a member?"
The results so far are:
It helps uphold standards in the industry: 62%
Their advice, experience and tools available offer me value for money/reassurance: 59%
My customers expect it: 27%
The events offer a good opportunity to network within the industry: 20%
The badge in the window is cheap PR: 19%
In an industry where many are seen to be disinterested in standards and where our governing bodies come under a fair bit of criticism for being ineffective it's great to see that nearly two thirds of respondents think that standards are relevant and that someone (and more details of who that may be when the full results are revealed) can help to ensure they are upheld.
It's also nice to see that only a fifth join an industry body for the PR; of course it would have been nicer it no one joined just for the badge!
Full results will follow. If you've not completed it yet the survey should take around 45 seconds and you could win an iPod courtesy of Voyager Software Ltd. (The closing date is 4th September!)
After my recent blog post about freebies sent from Red Advertising I got a lovely note from the guys at The Recruiter's Book offering to send me a sample copy. Of course, it would have been rude of me to refuse!
So, on Monday a very bright green A4 hard back note book turns up. This is a lovely simple idea. Rather than spend the last 10 minutes of your Friday drawing up columns in a lined notebook you use the pre worked up pages in The Recruiter's Book.
It's very un-paperless office and the recruitment software companies will despair (as may your Office Manager). However, there is no point pretending that recruiters don't like to write stuff down and this funky book is as good a place as any to keep notes of all your activity.
Its relevance to you will depend on how close a match their headings are to the ones you currently use (or can get used to using). The top two thirds of each double spread page are for listing candidates you are working with (candidate name, current employer, role applied for, interview details, start date or reason for rejection) and the bottom section is an assignment tracker (client, role, start date, end date, salary/hourly rate and fee agreed).
It costs £12.95 which is probably only twice the price of a nice black and red A4 pad. If you use one double page spread a week then each book should last you about a year. If you use more than that (and are placing at an appropriate rate) then you shouldn't mind having to buy two a year!
Finally, despite their love of low tech, the guys from The Recruiter's Book are on Twitter - so you can follow them there if you like: http://twitter.com/recruitersbook
Top-Consultant.com is running its third Virtual Careers Fair on the 25th September with over 600 (pre-screened) candidates expected to attend. At the first event they ran, which was in June last year, each stand had an average of 427 unique visits and in February 2009 event it was 424.
Virtual careers fairs work for a number of reasons - candidates being more likely to attend as they needn't take a day off work or worry about being spotted there; recruiters not having to prepare costly stand material and being able to "man" the stand from their desks. There are other reasons for a recruiter to consider taking part in a virtual careers fair and ...... for more information contact Sarah Nutton at sarah@top-consultant.com or call on 0207 667 6880. She can do a much better job of providing the details than I can.
However, we will do a follow up after the event on the blog.
This was posted on our discussion board earlier in the week:
I received a call today from another agency posing as the "Jobcentre", "Hi, I am calling from the jobcentre, I wanted to ask you a few questions about your vacancies. Can you please tell me which client these vacancies are for, do you have contact details for them"
My colleague who initially took the call pointed out he thought it was another agency, as normally they would say "I am ..........calling from West End Job centre, I am calling about your vacancies, reference etc", they never ask you to let them know of client names or details, as the name is already entered with postcode on employer direct.
I asked this person, which jobcentre and which reference, he was unable to provide this, I also informed them as the "jobcentre" they should already have the name of the client.
I confronted him and said I know your calling from another agency, by this time my colleague had done 1471 and we now know of their name etc. He called me a tw*t and hung up.....
I called the agency and spoke to the director, he informed me that he is not going to stop his staff from getting jobs in, which I don't have a problem with that but posing as the jobcentre and contacting other agencies is unprofessional, let alone desperate and why not call clients direct like the rest of us. I told him I would inform the REC, he replied with I don't give a $h*t as he's not a member.
It's got a fair bit of response both on the forum and via Twitter.
When I first read the post my thoughts were that it was just another example of why recruitment has the bad reputation it does. This sort of activity doesn't particularly surprise me, although, like the person who posted the thread I've never heard of this exact type of call to trawl for leads. When I first worked in recruitment in the early 90's the consultants would scour The Sunday Times and Grocer magazine and phone up all the agencies advertising "blind" vacancies (ie, not naming the client), pretending to be a candidate interested in the role. I always thought it was pretty standard practice.
I doubt, even back then, that many agencies fell for this and that it was a pretty futile practice but I understand why for many it became a standard Monday morning activity. To be still doing this type of thing, and so ineptly, makes me wonder why we haven't moved on. Perhaps recruitment is always going to have the "bottom feeders" who don't have the intelligence and skills to source their own vacancies and hope to survive off the scraps of others. If they aren't able to construct a simple lie and forget to conceal their phone number then they aren't likely to be a major threat to any half decent agency.
However, they do continue to give our industry a bad name. As someone else pointed out it's not surprising that a consultant with tough targets is prepared to try anything to get a vacancy - what's more disappointing is that a manager of an agency would consider this to be fair business practice.
Come on - create a decent service offering, get together some USPs, train your staff (why not take a peek at our UK Recruiter Plus offering!) and have them hitting the phones calling corporates rather than other agencies.
