Louise's UK Recruiter Blog

New UK Recruiter Discussion Forum

You may have noticed that, with a significant amount of help from Stephen O’Donnell, we've got a new discussion forum on the site.  The reasons for this are twofold; after working with us for nearly 10 years Willco, who ran the old forum, have decided to stop supporting forums as part of their business offering.
Luckily, we were prepared as we've been looking for a way to add registration and more social networking functionality to the forum (as per user requests) for a while.

The result is that we've moved to new provider with the following new features
- Forum posts can be read by anyone but you need to register to post
- Posts can be shared on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and a couple of other sites using the links on the far left
- There is no pre-post moderation.  Whatever time of day (or night) you post the comment will go immediately live

What's not changed:
- Rules for posting stay the same
- We'll still be regularly monitoring the forum
- The top 3 posts will be referenced in the newsletter each week

With the addition of a "reporting" feature I'm hoping for a self-policing clientele as well as lots of different opinions and lively debate. 

On the old forum we had over 4000 posts in two years (some of them were spam or libellous mind!).  I'm pretty sure that pre registration will mean slightly less posts - but hopefully more valuable, interesting, worthwhile ones. Give it a go!

The 2011 UK Recruiter Newsletter subscribers’ survey

Recently we felt it was time to run another survey to produce some up to date demographics of our readership.

Questions covered readership patterns, business focus, preferences and status to visits and use of the main UK recruiter site.

As a summary, there is an over whelming majority of you that come from an agency recruitment background (82%) with a position within your business at manager level or above (77%). We can see a significant increase in subscribers working as consultant and in a direct hire or in an RPO environment.   The majority (41%) work as employees but there is an increase from previous years of owner managers/sole traders (18%); perhaps reflective of the industry as a whole.

Delving into the type of recruitment solutions you offer, there is high percentage of permanent recruitment being undertaken (41% of readers focus primarily on permanent recruitment) and with 47% focussing on a combination of temporary, contract and permanent we are seeing nearly 90% of our readership having some involvement with permanent solutions. 

In terms of readership style we see a lot of you browse the newsletter on a weekly basis and focus on the areas that are more interesting to you personally (70%).  Whilst the majority of you are still based in the UK, there is a significant increase on our overseas subscribers this year.

We also asked some questions around the other services that UK Recruiter offers.  The good news is that most readers are aware of what we do such as the Recruiters Network events (91%), UK Recruiter Plus (62%) and the various pages on the main site that are available but some of you don't use them as much as perhaps you could, should or would!

Taking a lead from this, we’ll be ensuring we keep the content on the site up to date and probably doing a little more PR in the newsletter around the benefits of the other services on offer. The events are becoming very popular and we intend to increase their regularity, vary their theme and will be strongly encouraging you to come along and try for yourselves. Don't forget as a member of UK Recruiter Plus you can come free!  (see, got some PR in already!!).

Thank you to all of you who responded; we value your input and suggestions all of the time and hope you continue to utilise all of what UK Recruiter offers.

Launch of UK Recruiter Plus

After four months of hard work we have today launched our new UK Recruiter Plus service.  The site is a huge databank of valuable recruitment related information and guides specifically designed to offer help and advice to all recruiters. 

Over the years we've have had many calls from recruiters asking for advice on all aspects of recruitment and the forum is constantly used to request help on a variety of recruitment topics too.  Whilst we've done our best to help with every enquiry the idea is that UK Recruiter Plus will be an ongoing tool to assist everyone within the industry at a low cost (only £99 per annum for access to all the information).

The content has been provided by industry experts.  Many are well recognised names in the recruitment industry (such as Alex Strang, Bill Boorman, Bill Radin, Denise Walker, Fiona Lander, Gavin Ingham, Giles Guest, Heather Travis, Mark Whitby, Mike Taylor, Mike Walmsley, Roy Ripper, Stephen O'Donnell, Steve Finkel, Tom Atkinson and Tracey Dunn) who are sharing their expertise in the form of white papers, articles, top tips and guides.

We've been really lucky to have such a great web design company working with us and thankfully for me most of the hard (and often tedious!) work has been undertaken by our new Technical Director, Pieter van Beesten.

We've already had some nice PR about the site (thanks Suzanne and Stephen) and lots of coverage on Twitter.

We're offering £25 cash back to the first 100 people who sign up and an ongoing referral programme (£10 cash back per referred subscriber).  If you want to know more about the service visit the site or give us a call on 07724 197830.

I Feel Validated

Just spotted an interesting stat in the poll we did with Voyager.  To the question "Do you read content in recruitment magazines/newsletters at least once a month" 95% said yes. 
 
So, that's a bit of good news for me and the publishers of other recruitment media.

Ps, if you've not seen this week's newsletter it's here (and you can sign up here!)
 

 

UK Recruiter Readership Survey

We are conducting a survey into the demographics of the UK Recruiter community.

It should only take you about 3 minutes to complete and we'll be sharing the results with you in the near future.

Please can you complete the survey here.

Online Recruitment - Expert Interviews

The latest in Mike Taylor's series of "Expert Interviews" features me!

In an attempt to not sound quite as squeaky as I think I normally do, I spend the first 5 minutes of the interview talking in a monotone voice!  If you can get past that I do perk up a little.

Mike asks me about the background behind UK Recruiter, about creating the weekly newsletter, our new job board, blogging, our networking events and social networks.

You can check it out here.

The growth of UK Recruiter

Warning - what follows is one of those very irritating "teasers"!  I loathe it when people write teaser posts. You know, “I’ve got great news, but I can’t tell you.” However, I'm going to forgive myself in this instance because I think I deserve to give what we are doing at UK Recruiter a bit of PR.  I hope you will forgive me too!

Over the years we have made many changes to UK Recruiter in an attempt to fulfil our goal of creating a community site for UK based recruitment professionals.  In recent years we have added to the directory of suppliers and newsletter with our discussion board, networking events and this blog.  For the past couple of months we have been working on a new and major addition to the services we can offer to recruiters.

But, that's all I can really say for now. 

Ok, a clue.... what we are doing fits in nicely with the post I made about the jobsite research earlier in the week.  Our plan is to launch in time to hit the 31st January deadline (in fact we hope to be able to reveal within a week).

UK Recruiter Community Survey 2007

Please can I ask for your help with the UK Recruiter Community Survey 2007 we are conducting. 

We'd really like to find out more about you so that we can better meet your needs. We've set up a simple questionnaire with just 9 questions.  It should only take a few minutes to complete and we'd really appreciate your input. 

Thanks in advance!

Getting graphic(s) in the ukrecruiter newsletter

Yesterday we sent out the 309th issue of the ukrecruiter newsletter.  For the first time, since we started in 1999, it contained images (about time some might say!). This means that from now on the UK Recruiter logo will proudly sit at the top of the newsletter and advertisers can put their logo next to their advert.  Our very first newsletter in January 1999 was text only and I sent it by bcc'ing the distribution list via Outlook Express.  Mind you that wasn't too much work considering we only sent it to around 50 people.  Now it's delivered to over 14,000 subscribers using the fabulous Willco system. 

If you read my blog but don't receive the newsletter please feel free to sign up - and spread the word (thanks!)