Louise's UK Recruiter Blog

Sincerest form of flattery?

I recently found (through my daily automatic Google search) that some of my blog posts were appearing on another website.  In fact lots of my blog posts (some very old and some very recent) and plenty from other people.  The person who stole then has kept the titles the same but translated the body of the posts into another language and then back into English.  I am assuming this is in an attempt to disguise the work.  Whilst I'm really cross that my blogs have been used by someone else I'm also vaguely amused by some of the translations; "kill dual birds with the single stone" and my description of Madgex as "job house as well as CV poke as well as compare software".

Of course what I'm most interested in is whether this lazy individual will take this post and how it will turn out!

TalentPuzzle Update

I've been interested in the recruitment matching service that TalentPuzzle offer and so got hold of a few update stats. One of the things that I think would make it difficult for a site like this to get momentum is that you need do see a good a variety of jobs on there to entice the recruiters to sign up.  The idea is a good one - recruiters can visit the site and see live vacancies where a corporate actually wants to use an agency.  However, with everything that recruiters have going on even something as simple as this can be difficult to get buy in for. 

They only launched at the end of 2009 and already have more than 60 clients (and their recruitment needs!) singed up - including one FTSE 250 company and one Fortune 500 company.  Whilst the companies useing this come in a variety of sizes the most common roles are Engineering, IT, Sales and Finance.  The average advertised placement fee is 15%. 

The other good news is that for any CV submitted in February that leads to a placement (no matter when) they will not charge the standard fee of 25% of the placement fee. So the recruitment consultant gets 100% of the advertised fee.   Check it out and feel free to leave any feedback here!

Recruitment Unconference un-reviewed

Bill Boorman and Geoff Webb hosted the second UK recruitment unconference last week. If you live outside of Twitter it may have passed you by (although I do understand Bill also promoted the event on LinkedIn)!

Following one day of "sourcing" experts sharing their knowledge were two days of recruitment focussed knowledge sharing.

I was only able to attend for one day and even then missed the last session. The two sessions I sat in on from start to finish were "The Social Media Circus" and "Recruiter Big Brother" (which was actually about the use of video in recruitment).  My plan had been to produce a write up of learning points to share. 

However, the joy of attending an event where lots of other bloggers are present is that one (or many!) of them are bound to have written up their notes better than you.

So what I want to share are the best roundups out there.

I have to kick off with Matt Alder's "TRULondon – the very good, the slightly bad and the tiny bit ugly".  Totally agree with all his points.  Superb networking*, very un-superb organisation (on the day I attended).  Overall very worthwhile attending.

Mervyn Dinnen shared his thoughts on "Networking, Learning but I still got Those Talking Gen Y Blues"

Alan Whitford's summary of "TruLondon II Day One"

The Red Recruiter's Day one roundup

I'm sure there are more summaries to come and I shall add them here when I spot them!

In the meantime here are a few related blogs which I thought I'd mention:

Andy Headworth took the opportunity to interview the lovely Jim Stroud on "Where will social media be in recruitment in two years time?" 

Mike  Taylor also interviewed Jim about "Using Online Video In Recruitment"

Jessica (who is Blogging 4 Jobs) wrote a "Man, I love your accent" type blog.

Raj Anand conducted a few Videos interviews with recruitment experts at the event

And Wendy Jacob took a load of photos (although I'd like to find that one of me eating fish and chips so elegantly with my fingers!)

If you need MORE than this then tune into the event twitter steam at #trulondon

* I also want to say what an absolute pleasure it was to catch up with so many fabulous people at the event.  People I've known for years but never met, people I've heard about but never previously been introduced to and a load of old friends!  Thanks for facilitating that Bill.

Elite Leaders - Showcase Events

You may not have come across Elite Leaders before. They run a "programme" for recruitment directors designed to increase the turnover and profit levels through peer to peer learning. Members get together monthly and meet with highest quality business and recruitment experts who share many of the secrets of their success.   The Elite groups are chaired by high-profile business people such as John O'Sullivan, Sir Eric Peacock and Ben Brett.
 
Each Elite group consists of up to fifteen owners and managing directors of recruitment companies.  Elite are now looking to expand their network and are running two showcase meetings where potential members can find out about Elite as well as benefiting from a free speaker session (with Jeff Group - ex-MD of Robert Half) and open forum session.
 
These take place on the 3rd and 11th March as breakfast meetings from 8am to 10am in London.  There is an agenda here.
 
These would be a great opportunity for anyone who is looking to further develop their business and feels they could benefit from being part of a support network with some clout! 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Finding Recruitment Tweeps

Twitter continues to be an important tool to help us connect with the UK Recruiter community.  I'd like to think we use it to help the community (re-tweeting enquiries, requests for help with assignments and answering questions) as much as using it to promote ourselves (networking events, advertising space on the site, questions around research for articles/blogs).  Our Twitter network has grown (2287 followers for our UK Recruiter account and 884 for Louise's) but it's a constant challenge to ensure we are following the right people.  To help this we've created a list of recruitment related Twitter users (Tweeps) who are happy to be followed by anyone: http://tweepml.org/UK-Recruiters-on-Twitter/

If you log onto Twitter you can follow them all in one go.  If you are on Twitter and want to be added to the list you just need to fill in the form: http://tweepml.org/TweepGen/suggest.aspx?g=19eadc4125f24b94b67538acad6a3f1c

Of course this isn't the only way to find recruiters on Twitter.  You can do a search on twellow (yellow pages for Twitter) or check out the "lists" created (within Twitter) of some high profile Twitter users.  For example the UK Recruiters list from UK Sourcers.

Also, don't forget, there is a Guide to Twitter available via our UK Recruiter Plus site.

Comparing your use of IT within the Recruitment Industry

Recruitment IT Services have a funky little tool on their website.  It allows you to compare how you approach IT with other's in the same industry and similar size of business.
 
Firstly you select your company size from the drop down list and then you can choose questions from four categories (general company information, IT Systems & Services, Collaboration & Communication and Recruitment IT Systems).
 
For example you can see that 100% of companies with 11 to 25 staff outsource their IT support and that 92% have a disaster recovery plan in place.  However, only 42% of companies sized 1 to 10 employees have a disaster recover plan (and only 83% of them outsource IT support).
 
The questions also cover recruitment database usage.
 
There is some interesting information here although I have to be honest and say I certainly wouldn't want to "benchmark" myself against some of the results; amazing to see companies with no IT support in-house, No outsourcing, no backups, no disaster recovery.....!

Recruiter Network Event - 11th March

Our next Recruiters Networking event is taking place on the evening of 11th March in central London.  It'll be a similar format to other events with drinks on arrival, lots of opportunities to chat with other recruitment professionals plus a recruiter Q&A session with Alan Whitford (RCEuro), Felix Wetzel (Jobsite) and Raymond Pennie (Kamanchi). 

 

The event takes place on the evening of the Recruitment Consultant conference.  So it could be a good opportunity to "kill two birds with one stone".  Gary at Recruitment Consultant magazine is offering a discount to UK Recruiter subscribers.  If you book one ticket you get a  10% discount and if you can get a 50% discount when booking a second place.  For more information on this you can Gary King on or visit the site (enter UK Recruiter in the comments book to get your discount).

 

Back to our networking event.... last year we had over 150 people at each event and for 2010 we are taking the brave step of downsizing; in order to give people the opportunity to network with a large percentage of the attendees we are going to be hosting smaller events.  We'll limit the number of industry suppliers at the event so there is a larger proportion of recruiters and we are limiting overall number to 60 to 80 attendees.

 

If you want to come along simply register now

Enhance Media Conference - Roundup

Last week I was at the Enhance Media Conference.  There were over 400 delegates which was a superb turnout. If you missed it you can view the speakers here.

Some key stats from the speakers:

Jobg8 (online marketplace for jobs): there are over 5,000 job boards in the UK and over 50,000 in the US.

Madgex (job board and CV search and match software): over 75% of job seekers expect to find their next job from job boards (Weddle’s 2009 Source of Employment Survey) and 79% of employers use social media sites - IAEWS 2009)

LinkedIn: Surveyed 262 HR professionals and found that 25% hire from job boards.  50% plan to spend less time and money on using third party agencies and 40% plan to spend less on job boards. When asked what the plan to spend more time and money on 37% said internal referral programmes and 30% said professional and social networks.   68% said they thought professional and social networks was the most essential and long last trend in recruiting.

Enhance Media: Giles's presentation was very interesting and jam packed with stats - but this wasn't on the memory disk we were given and despite requests hasn't been made available to me!

Lawspeed (recruitment law specialists):  53% of employers use social networking sites to "screen" candidates and 12% plan to do so.  The TUC said Facebook was "3.5million HR accidents waiting to happen”.  The bottom line of this presentation was that if you are using social networking sites to screen candidates you must follow data protection laws.  It's not illegal but there are guidelines and if you use information on the sites you are potentially open to a discrimination case.  If you want to monitor employees social networking usage that's fine as long as you put the details in their contract of employment. 

Capita (outsourcing company): These were Steve Newson's predictions for 2010: 
•Challenging year ahead with some acute difficulties in the public sector
•Candidate sourcing strategies will continue to broaden
•Social Recruiting will grow
•Mobile Phone Applications will have an important place
•Job Boards will innovate or see declining share
•In the broadest sense of the word,  "Search" will be a key factor
•Finding the model that enables interaction with emerging technologies will be important to the health of core recruitment platforms
•Newspaper advertising model likely to fundamentally change

The final session was a panel debate with Google, Bing, Trinity Mirror and Monster.  I personally didn't enjoy this as much as I had hoped I might and didn't get as much benefit from it.  However, I'm not sure it's very easy to get a panel session right (which worries me as I'm on two this year!)

There was also a twitter hashtag for the event of #emconf2010 - you can view this to see talk from the day.  It's very clear that people are a lot more polite about conferences and speakers when they do it in public forum!

What did I take from the event?   There is talk that job boards are dying (although there was very little evidence of this), some candidates are more savvy (localised searches, using less job boards, expecting more from agencies) but many are still at an entry level with regards to using the internet, corporates want to move away from using agencies (as they always have!).  The most positive stuff didn't really come from the speakers but from the attitude of the delegates.  There was a real buzz and lots of very up beat talk.