“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."

There has been some dispute whether this phrase was actually uttered by Henry Ford, the founder of The Ford Motor Company, however it is very often attributed to the industrialist who revolutionised the American motor industry.

The American population had a need; they wanted to get from one place to another in the most efficient way possible. Now unless you were one of the lucky few that could afford an automobile, the only real option was by horse. Ford had a vision of producing the first mass market automobile at a low cost, a vision which can be seen realized today.

The above quote got me thinking about the recruitment industry as it currently stands and the options that are currently available to Inhouse Recruitment Teams. Some argue that Ford is suggesting that people are stupid and don’t know what they want and that only he knows what they want; they want faster horses but he knows that what they really want is a car. I prefer to look at it in a different way; people knew that they wanted to get from Point A to Point B and with only a few options available, the horse was the only real choice for the masses.

Inhouse Recruitment teams know that they want to:

• Cut the cost per hire
• Cut the time per hire
• Achieve both of the above whilst still attracting the best talent

The options that are currently available to Inhouse Recruiters are to:

• Advertise on a job board
• Use a 3rd party Recruitment Agency
• Search CV Databases
• Search Social Media sites such as Linkedin, Twitter etc.

The first two options can be very costly, often costing thousands of pounds. The second two options can be extremely time consuming. So looking at it in this way, none of the currently available options meet the needs of the Inhouse Recruiter.

When you post an advert on a job board you are relying on that perfect candidate visiting that particular website and completing an application. What if that perfect candidate doesn’t visit that website, the perfect candidate doesn’t generally visit job boards.The perfect candidate is what is known in the industry as “The Passive Candidate” and passive candidates do not visit job boards. Not only are job boards expensive, it is very much a hit and miss approach to advertising your positions and promoting your employer brand.

Recruitment Agencies are a very expensive way to source talent. If you find a good recruiter, they can certainly cut the time per hire if they already have access to a pool of passive talent just waiting for the right opportunity to come along. It is only the very good recruiters that will have this type of passive candidate available; it is well known that the vast majority of agency recruiters do no more than advertise on job boards and search CV databases anyway. We all know the cost per hire when sourced via a recruitment agency – usually anywhere between 15-20% of the candidate’s salary. Companies have spent millions of pounds in recruitment fees over the course of a year due to their reliance on 3rd party recruiters.

Spending your day searching CV Databases is a laborious and time consuming way to spend your day as an Inhouse Recruiter – I know because in a previous life I’ve spent many many hours glaring at CV after CV. When I talk about CV Databases, I’m referring to those offered by the job boards mentioned earlier. Besides being a time consuming process, sourcing candidates from a CV database means that you are competing with every other person who has access to the same database, mainly recruitment agencies and other Inhouse Recruitment teams. Going back to the classic ‘Passive Candidate’ idea, how many of these candidates do you think have uploaded their CV to a job board database recently?

The last of the main options available is Social Recruiting, which to most (not all) Inhouse Recruitment teams means searching through LinkedIn for candidates and tweeting a few jobs on Twitter. Scouring Linkedin is as equally time consuming as searching through a CV database, plus you are still competing for candidates with agency recruiters. On the plus side, searching Linkedin will allow you to search through a ‘living database’ which will include a large number of passive candidates. In addition to the time spent searching Linkedin, you also have to consider either the time it takes you to build your network or the cost involved to effectively search if you only have a small Linkedin network.

So that pretty much covers the four main options that are available to Inhouse Recruiters, none of which are ideal.

We wanted to develop a way to combine these four options into a single solution that allows Internal Recruitment teams to achieve their goals of attracting talent in a cost effective and speedy way. What we came up with is JobsTheWord.

On the face of it JobsTheWord may look no different than a job board, but if you look a little more closely you’ll see that there are no job advertisements posted by recruitment agencies. Straight away you are cutting out the competition for talent from thousands of agency recruiters who post on job boards every day.

The technology that lies behind JobsTheWord is what makes the solution a little bit special. People (candidates) leave an infinite amount of information online on Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook, blogs and in forums. Imagine a solution which can take all of this information, organise and then interrogate it intelligently to match potential candidates with your vacancies, and then make sure that these candidates see your adverts.

This is where Big Data comes into the equation. Whilst still a relatively new concept, particularly in the recruitment industry, we have adopted this technology very early on to identify and contact potential candidates about positions that may be of interest to them, including that sought after ‘Passive Candidate’. Much in the same way that Tesco uses their Club Card data to promote and market new products to specific sections of their customer base, we are able to match and market your positions to your target candidate base.

This solution takes away the need for costly hit and miss job board advertising, expensive recruitment agencies and time consuming CV Database and Social searching. JobsTheWord allows Inhouse Recruitment teams to:

• Cut the cost per hire
• Cut the time per hire
• Achieve both of the above whilst still attracting the best talent

So, do you still want that faster horse or are you going to jump in the car?

Having worked as a web designer and developer for the past few years I have a strong dislike for long forms that collect what I deem to be unnecessary information. As far as I am concerned, and I’m sure a lot of my fellow web professionals would agree with me here, any online form should be as short as possible and the only required fields should be those that are needed to reach the end goal.

Nowadays more and more companies have their own inhouse recruitment teams (which I think is brilliant) and depend less and less on recruitment agencies. To help manage their recruitment process a lot of these employers use an Applicant Tracking System (ATS). Quite often when a jobseeker wants to apply for a particular job they have seen they usually have to register using the ATS and fill out lengthy application forms, sometimes up to five pages long.

I don’t think I would ever fill out a five page web form for anything, let alone a job application form – unless it was for a company that I really really wanted to work for or if I was really desperate. Of course there is the argument that employers only want to attract people that really want to work there and it filters out those less passionate about the company. So I decided to ask a few more people and posted the following question on LinkedIn:

Do long job application forms put you off applying?
A lot of employers now use Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) to handle job applications from potential candidates. This quite often results in the candidate having to register and then complete a form that’s anywhere from 1-5 pages long as well as uploading their CV.

As a jobseeker does this put you off applying for the position, do you put it on your ‘to do’ list and forget to come back to it?

Before writing this post I wanted to ensure that I wasn’t the only person with the view that such lengthy forms are unnecessary, the question was only posted less than 24 hours ago but has already had a great response, here are just a few opinions from LinkedIn:

“Different people are going to react in different ways depending on what where they’re at in their career, what mood they’re in, etc..

But there is one thing that is guaranteed and that is that a long online application process will always lose the candidate who doesn’t need another job – but is potentially looking for a better job.

And let’s be honest, those are normally the types of candidates most companies want to speak to.”

“I am mostly puzzled by the level of detail in these forms. They ask for information that goes very far back or details about you that make you wonder: WHY do they want to know this about me? But if you want to apply you have to fill out the entire form, so if the questions are too intrusive or strange, you might decide to look elsewhere. Those forms also give an impression of the organisation and its culture in subtle ways”

“Definitely! It’s a case of companies over-thinking the hiring process. They’re so afraid of making a costly mistake that they turn off qualified applicants by being so intrusive. It’s the in-person interview and the actual interaction with another person that should be the deciding factor, not a long laborious online form. Where has the old ‘gut instinct’ gone when hiring an employee?”

“Keeping your metrics is important and thus employment online application and tracking is necessary. A good ATS will allow the uploaded resume to populate most of the application thus making it easier for the applicant to proceed with some minimal data entry. Simple, clear and concise principles to satisfy your most necessary metric needs.”

“Yes. I think that the Applicant Tracking Systems are generally used by companies to gather resumes (of applicants) for potential jobs they may have down the line.

It’s much more beneficial to contact a potential employer through a networking connection, and vice versa.”

“Yes, they are very irritating – and all of them do it differently. If they don’t have a CV parser then I definitely don’t bother.”

“Most definitely. I tend to find the longer the form to fill out the more bureaucratic and nit-picky the organisation. This is an instant turn-off.”

“It really does. I can see why companies would want to ensure they capture certain information but sometimes it’s such a trial. Such information could be requested to be included in the cover letter. Companies like forms as they standardise the whole process. I think that a CV will tell you more about the candidate than a form will.

It’s put me off before, especially if I’m not really in need of a new job, just want something better, or if I have several options, the long form will be the one I leave until last and my not even get around to.”

You can view the rest of the responses here

Some interesting points raised in the answers above, particularly the first one. In recruitment there is a saying that “the best candidates are those who aren’t actively looking for work”. As somebody who isn’t actively looking for a new job but happen to spot one that could convince you to leave your current employer, would you be willing to complete a long form to apply?

The vast majority of web users are used to instant gratification, if something looks like it may take longer than a couple of minutes to accomplish online then there’s a pretty good chance that they won’t start the process, let alone complete it.

To give you a few statistics, not too long ago we launched our job boardwww.jobstheword.co.uk . Some employers receive applications by email whereby an applicant enters their Name, Email Address, uploads their CV and their application is sent – all done in under a minute. Other employers choose to direct jobseekers to their ATS portal to apply for a position. What we’ve noticed is that the number of jobseekers that we direct to the external sites and the number of jobseekers who actually go on to complete the external application form is very different.

Our main job is to advertise, promote and market an employer’s vacancies, once a jobseeker views a position and decides to click the apply button our job is essentially done, we lose all control after the jobseeker leaves to apply for the job on the ATS portal. We’ve noticed that as few as 1 in 8 (12.5%) of jobseekers go on to complete the online application form after being redirected from our site, others can be as high as 60%. However that still leaves a massive 40% of jobseekers who were interested in applying for the position deciding that the form was either too long to complete or simply lost interest once seeing the form.

The suitability of that 40% for a particular position is open to debate but going back to that old recruitment saying – “the best candidates are those who aren’t actively looking for work”. Is it possible that a large proportion of those people who were initially interested in applying but didn’t after viewing the form fall into the ‘best candidates’ category?

Another of the major gripes with jobseekers is that a lot of the fields in these online forms request information that can easily be gathered by reading their CV or covering letter, information such as Name, Address, Contact Details etc. If you’re applying for a job with a few different employers and have to complete similar forms time and time again, this can get really frustrating. Remember searching for car insurance online before the days of price comparison websites, entering the same information time and time again got really time consuming.

I suppose this is why a lot of jobseekers don’t mind using recruitment agencies, they send their CV to a recruiter and the consultant does most of the work to get you to interview stage, no application forms to fill out.

For a lot of people, job hunting can be a long laborious process, during which time they have to complete what appears to be an endless line of application forms. I’m sure that most, if not all, employers would like the very best candidates to apply for their positions without relying on recruiters or headhunters.

All companies want to streamline their recruitment process and find the very best talent before their competitors, surely the streamlining should begin with their application process.

When looking for a new job one of the first things that you would do is visit a job board, usually that means Jobsite, Jobserve, TotalJobs, CWJobs, Monster, Reed and a few others. Each of these sites share a few common features – CV Databases & Recruiter Job Postings.  I’m not saying for a second that either of these are bad things, but there are a few things that you should bear in mind when using these types of job board.

Duplicate Jobs
When a company uses a recruitment agency to find potential candidate, they generally use a few different agencies. This then means that the advert for the vacancy will be posted several times on the same job board by different recruiters.

The problem with this for you as a jobseeker is that it will be almost impossible to tell if two, three or even four job adverts are for the same position, as recruiters tend to write very generic advertisements so that other recruiters don’t know who their client it. Let me give you a quick example:

Advert 1

Front End Web Developer, London £30k – £50k, HTML, CSS, JavaScript
My Client, a leading London based Digital agency, are looking for a Front End Web Developer with experience in HTML, CSS, JavaScript as well as design experience in Adobe Photoshop.You will be responsible for designing and building the Front End to the Websites including the look and feel of the new features as well as some design. This is an excellent opportunity to work on projects with some global brands. To apply please send a copy of your CV and any portfolio links.

Advert 2

HTML, CSS, JavaScript Web Developer, Soho, London, £25k – £45k
Excellent opportunity to join global Digital agency at their London HQ. Due to an increase in projects my client is looking for a number of Web Developers to join their expanding team. The ideal candidate will have experience in HTML and CSS. Any experience in JavaScript or Photoshop would be useful but not essential. The successful candidate will have the opportunity to work exciting projects and improve their current skillset. Please send a copy of your CV and salary requirements to be considered.

The first thing that you’ll notice about both of these job adverts is that they are both extremely vague, they give no indication of who the end client is. All that is clear from the adverts is that a digital agency based in London is looking for a front end web developer. There are a lot of digital agencies in London hiring front end developers at any one time!

This advert could quite easily be for the same company advertised by two different recruitment agencies or it could be for two different companies altogether. As a candidate, how do you know the difference? The fact is that you don’t, unless you apply for both jobs you won’t know.

So let’s say you apply for both jobs and take calls from two different recruiters and it turns out that both adverts are for the same position. You’re now in a situation where you will either have to let the first recruiter you spoke to represent you for this job or make a decision as to which recruiter you wish to process your application – recruiters will often claim ‘candidate ownership’ if they spoke to you first about the position.

This post isn’t about recruitment agencies so I’ll move on, my point here is that you may have wasted your time applying twice for the same position with two different recruiters. Imagine if this position was advertised by 5 – 10 different recruiters and you applied for all the positions only to find out they were all for the same job. Think how much time you have wasted sending out up to 10 different applications and taking up to 10 different phone calls – all for the same job. Even worse imagine if this position was for a company that you had no interest in joining.

Wouldn’t it be much easier and much less time consuming to be able to apply to employers directly?

So Many Recruiter Adverts – over 85%
All job boards carry recruiter adverts, on average in the UK 85% of all job adverts posted across the major job boards are those posted by recruiters. That means that less than 15% of job postings are from employers directly. As a candidate this means that if you wish to avoid recruiters completely and apply directly to employers then you have to do a lot of filtering and searching to find their adverts.

Recruiters are trained by the job boards to ensure that their adverts appear high in search results. Looking back at the two example adverts above you’ll notice that the main skills of the job are in the job title, this ensures that their adverts place highly in results – most web developers would use the search terms HTML CSS when looking for a new job as the term ‘Web Developer’ could bring back anything from C# jobs, Java jobs or PHP jobs.

A lot of hiring managers don’t have this knowledge which is why they would probably use a job title like ‘Front End Web Developer’ or ‘User Interface Developer’, meaning that their vacancies would appear way below the recruiter adverts, often on page three or four, pages that are not often reached by job seekers. So unless you’re really determined to find them it’s unlikely you’ll find many jobs from employers advertised on the major job boards.

Salaries
The vast majority of direct employers do not post salary details on their job adverts. This is for a number of reasons, the main reason being that employee’s salaries are very often confidential. Imagine your current employer posted a job advert for a similar position to your own but the salary listed was much much higher than your salary, you wouldn’t be best pleased would you? Another reason that direct employers do not list salary information is because they are often very flexible and the package on offer can vary greatly depending on the skills and experience of applicants.

Adverts posted by recruiters very often list salary details, but you’ll notice that salary band stated on most of these adverts are very broad, e.g. £30,000 – £50,000. I don’t know about you but I find it highly unlikely that a candidate at £30K would have the same level of experience as a candidate at £50K. The reason the salary band is so wide is to attract the highest level of applicants possible from the advert – if candidates aren’t suitable for this role, they may be suitable for another or at the very least they will sit on their CV database until another position comes along.

Non Existent Jobs
Sometimes the adverts posted by recruiters are not for existing jobs. This doesn’t happen very often at all, but very occasionally a recruiter will post an advert for a job that doesn’t exist in order to collect CVs and build their CV database. Like I said, this doesn’t happen very often but it’s something to look out for.

CV Database
To apply for a job advertised on a job board, you usually have to register with that job board and upload your CV. Now unless you’re careful your CV is now stored on that job board’s CV Database, meaning that anybody with a licence now has access to your CV and personal information. Do you know if your current employer has a licence to any of the major job boards? Imagine your own employer stumbling across your CV online when they have no idea that you’re thinking about a move.

If you do register with any of the job boards, keep an eye out for a small check box on the registration form that should prevent your CV from being added to their searchable database.

JobsTheWord has no searchable CV database and never will have, so there is zero chance that anybody will ever see your CV apart from those companies with whom you’re making an application. In fact we don’t even ask you to register before applying for a job!

Most Job Boards are designed with recruiters in mind
The simple fact is that most job boards are designed with recruitment agencies in mind, which is why over 85% of the jobs posted are from recruiters. Everything that job boards do, from the training they provide to recruiters and their pricing structures, is for the benefit of recruiters, since they’re their biggest customers. Job boards offer huge discounts for adverts when buying in bulk, how many direct employers do you know that would purchase upwards of 50 job credits per month? This level of credits would be the absolute bare minimum that any recruitment agency would buy in a month, very few employers would purchase at this level and therefore don’t benefit from lower advertising costs like recruiters do – hence all the agency jobs!

This article may look like that I am having a pop at recruiters since there is a lot of focus on the types and number of adverts that they post. The problem isn’t with recruiters themselves it is more with how other job boards operate, recruitment agencies are their biggest customers so everything that they do is centred around pleasing them. The reason you are forced to register and upload your CV to these job boards before applying for a job is so that they can then sell on their CV Database to the hundreds of recruitment companies that use their services.

JobsTheWord only advertises vacancies from direct employers, as a job seeker this benefits you in multiple ways:

• You will always know which companies are hiring and can save yourself time by ensuring that you only apply for positions with employers that interest you and won’t waste any time applying for the same job multiple times or with employers that you aren’t too keen on
• Your CV will never be stored on a searchable database meaning that it will never been seen online by your current employer or any other third party
• Searching for jobs from direct employers becomes much easier as you don’t have to filter through hundreds of agency adverts.

To view all the latest jobs from direct employers visit www.jobstheword.co.uk.

For the latest updates from the blog and other news you can follow us on Twitter, join ourLinkedIn Group or become a fan on Facebook.

The life of a football manager is a demanding and high pressured one. Your every move is questioned and your decisions scrutinised. Not only do you have to ensure that your team produces winning performances but you also have a team to keep happy and meet the expectations of demanding fans.

After reading the above you may think that there are no similarities between designing websites and managing a football team. However, bear with me and hopefully by the end of this post I’ll have convinced you.

Read the rest of this post »

Last week I was asked to start the initial user interface design of a fairly large web application. I took out my sketch pad to start plotting and planning, I wasn’t drawing buttons or thinking of colour schemes – I was wireframing. It got me thinking about how when I very first got started in design, I was so keen and eager to start designing the graphical elements of the site that I completely overlooked the process and underestimated the importance wireframing. As a result I often found that my designs weren’t as good as they could have been and that I wasted a lot of time “moving things around” further into the project.

Read the rest of this post »

Chris Pirillo (one of the highest earners) explains Empire Avenue, how it helps you track your social media activity and building online communities!

If you do decide to register on Empire Avenue, please use this link so we both earn some Eaves! - http://empireavenue.com/?t=ss3uvbrt

I've been a big fan of social media for quite a while now, using it in some shape or form for the past 5 years or so, although much more heavily in the last 2 or 3 years. One of my main uses of social media has been to pick up freelance work, which I have discussed briefly in a previous post.

There is a lot of talk across the web on how employers or recruiters can use Social Media to find new talent, but there is very little advising jobseekers how to best use Social Media to help them land their next move. So I am going to offer a few tips on how to best use Social Media to help you in your job hunt.

Read the rest of this post »

When most people think of social media, they think of Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin. To a lesser extent they may also think of Digg and StumbleUpon. One of the 'newer' social networking sites that I have been playing around with for the last few weeks is Empire Avenue. 

Empire Avenue at it's very simplest is (to quote Wikipedia) a 'stock market simulation social network game'. In other words, you buy and sell shares in other users to increase your own share price, wealth and overall influence. However after a couple of hours searching the site, joining communities and interacting with other users, you begin to realise that Empire Avenue is so much more than a game, in fact I wouldn't describe it as a game at all.

Read the rest of this post »

One of the most difficult aspects of being a freelance web designer is finding and maintaining a steady stream of work. This is especially true for newbie freelancers, one of the biggest mistakes you can make is to sit back and wait for projects to find you – this will almost never happen, at least not when you are starting out.

There are a number of different ways you can go about finding work.

Read the rest of this post »