A Big Hello (& RecruitRank Awards)
November 24, 2006 9:38 AM
As one of the original founders and CEO of the Jobsite Group, it's no surprise that I'm passionate about recruitment. A job's not just a job, it's a big part of your life - so it's very important that you enjoy what you do. The right job gives you a great sense of fulfilment and achievement. I have first hand experience of this when I moved from my software developer job to turn a business idea into reality! Ten years later I'm still here and love the fact that my job is constantly changing and presenting me with new challenges.
If you're working in an environment where you feel that you fit in and that the work you are doing is meaningful, I think the possibilities for what you can do are almost endless. There's more to people than meets the eye and that's the most important thing to remember. Scratch the surface and you'll be surprised at what you can find.
Knowing who you are and what you want out of life isn't always clear cut and that's why Jobsite's mission is to help you plan your work life so your whole life works better. To do this we're continuously developing new services, which I'll try and keep you up to date with. We hope you'll find them useful and that they'll lead to you being happier with your work.
Here at Jobsite we're particularly proud that we're starting to become an integral part of the recruitment process, so my blog will also give you an insight into my own views on how the recruitment industry is shaping up and new developments we're working on to make your life easier.
I couldn't start blogging without shouting about one of our recent achievements! We've just held the inaugural RecruitRank Awards in London, the only industry accolades determined by feedback from hundreds of thousands of job seekers. Through RecruitRank we've given candidates a stronger voice and a chance to let them recognise recruiter best practice and customer service. It's a total "win - win" situation; job hunters get to feed back their satisfaction or frustration with the service they've received and recruiters love to hear what people think of their service so they can take steps to improve it.
With many new projects on the horizon I'm certain that there'll be a lot of exciting things for me to talk about in the coming months, so watch this space.
Comments
Hi Keith,
Be interesting to hear some of your thoughts.
My question is why has the site not been redesigned? Monster and TotalJobs seem to have embraced an easy on the eye design whilst Jobsite's main site has stayed the same for a long while now.
I see you have all these niche sites being built, which is a good idea - but they look more fresh than the original site which always brought Michael Page the bulk of its applications. Surely a redesign would benefit us recruiters more and I know the jobhunters would love to see a new site.
Also with so much competition in the marketplace, how do you keep up? I see so much targeted marketing all over the place from competitors but not Jobsite, I work on law placements and see more Legal Prospects adverts than Jobsite's "arty" orange adverts.
Be interesting to hear your views on this.
Gary
Gary - November 24, 2006 8:49 PM
Ah... a passionate introduction indeed from the 'capo di tutti capi'...
Charlie - November 26, 2006 11:58 PM
To Gary and Charlie....
Dont worry too much about winning prizes for websites. What we "workers" out here are looking for are job sites that have real jobs and agents who take the time to answer your submissions. I have recently had a response from an agent - the first after many submissions - and what a pleasure it is to have someone out there treats you with respect.
John - November 29, 2006 4:22 PM
Hello Gary,
Many thanks for your feedback.
You are referring to the Jobsite.co.uk website when you mention our 'main' site and have some valid points.
We have always been very careful when making cosmetic changes to any of our sites because we have found, through constant candidate feedback, how to optimise them to the max. It's much easier when launching new products such as www.Emedcareers.co.uk or www.legalprospects.co.uk to go for a completely new design though as you rightly point out.
We have over 4 Million visits to our network each month now and even minor tweaks are always received with an enormous wave of feedback so believe me..we are listening hard. The Jobsite product does actually change quite regularly and believe it or not...has undergone a radical change, even quite recently.
I think you might be referring to a wholesale new look and feel and we have lot's of concepts around this that we are looking at right now....but in typical Jobsite fashion....we will 'ask the audience' before we make anything go live....watch this space.
Keith
Keith - November 30, 2006 9:06 AM
Congratulations, John.
The agent's name wasn't Tony by any chance, was it ?
Charlie - November 30, 2006 9:35 AM
Gary,
On the subject of marketing, we do different things for different sites depending on the market position of each of the sites. Jobsite is by far our biggest brand and as such gets a different brand awareness treatment to our newer niches such as LegalProspects, EmedCareers, SeniorSales, Engineerboard and OnlineInsuranceJobs. It's a balancing act between offline brand building and online direct response. At the moment, Jobsite has a sustained campaign in many of the search engines such as Google and Yahoo. Jobsite also gets a massive support from our partner newspapers such as Daily Mail, Mail on Sunday, Metro, the Northcliffe local newspapers (which cover 12% of the UK's population) and the Evening Standard. To give you an idea of what all this means in terms of Internet traffic, we receive around 4 million visits to our network of recruitment sites each month which is around 2 million unique visitors.
Regards,
Keith
Keith - December 4, 2006 2:07 PM
Hi Keith,
I agree with your philosophy of not making changes without user "approval".
I remember some changes that jobserve made a few years ago which (in my opnion) changed the complete look and feel of the site with negative impact.
I am a firm believer in the "if it aint broke don't fix it" school of thought.
Regards,
Richard
Richard - December 6, 2006 2:25 PM
Keith
Whilst I applaud your efforts I'm not sure your RecruitRank is a valid tool.
Viewing our feedback it seems a total of 6 candidates responded in 90 days - on the basis of the number of candidates we speak with daily this suggests all the others were satisfied.
Statistically these 6 represent <1% of candidates we have dealt with i.e. RecruitRank should be showing Acuro as having a 99% satisfied candidate relationship.
[Note: Ours is a specialist boutique recruitment company and is known for its excellence in candidate management, best illustrated by the fact that we receive 88% of our new business from candidate referrals!!]
Matthew - December 6, 2006 5:59 PM
Matthew,
I would agree that small sample sizes are not useful for stats so I'm not sure I can answer this with the data you gave me here.
How many ads was that data from?
What is the proportion of people you spoke to who are from Jobsite group sites compared to other sources.
Thanks
Keith
Keith - December 15, 2006 10:58 PM
Keith what a dashing photo!!, how are you keeping?
best regards Paul Stiles
paul stiles - January 19, 2007 7:17 PM
Hey Keith,
I think you guys you have a wicked website, very user friendly....I personally give it 10/10 LOVE IT.
Mercy - February 13, 2007 9:41 PM