Jobsite's Twitter App

Praise to the marketing team at Jobsite (with some technical support!) for their entry onto the Twitter platform http://twitter.com/Jobsitejobs - Why do i think its good?

• Its clever
• Its logical
• It is not pretending to be something - its not. Its just fast neat realtime way of delivering jobs - like a souped up jobs by email
• Its innovative
• they appear to have got it done pretty quickly and will no doubt learn how to improve and enhance it in future

Clearly the job matching technology to the your Twitter profile is flawed and is not going to deliver perfect (indeed anywhere near perfect) jobs but its a start - and i think its a pretty darn good start!

International Media Planning and Buying

This part of our business has grown every year since launch and its one of those rare things that is actually much easier than clients think (we even tell them this!) - Why is this the case? (Warning - i am about to make some wild generalisations but basic principle does apply)
1. UK digital marketplace is about 10 times more complex than virtually any other territory we book in. More sites more sectors - no other country has about 15 sites claiming to be the nation's leading IT Job board for instance
2. In other territories the general boards (Monster/Stepstone/Seek/Careerbuilder etc) are much more dominant over the vertical players than the UK
3. With all tracking and tagging done correctly - you have confidence that the campaign is set up and is running as it should be consistently across all territories (in olden times - there was always a fear of whether adverts ever appeared)
4. Time differences are no longer much of a problem - as people work more flexibly and can email acknowledge react at times above and beyond 930-530 local time.

Anyway an example of one of those things in life that is getting easier not harder

Things I am not going to do this week

1. Set up a paid for event as a social networking recruitment expert - i think its fair to say NOBODY is a social networking recruitment expert
2. Launch a product for charging candidates to access jobs that are freely available elsewhere
3. Get depressed that everyone on Twitter seems to lead a more interesting life than me full of holidays, 30 mile bike rides and blissful family days out while i fall asleep in front of Britain's Got Talent having realised i need to purchase some new "naughty steps"
4. support a bunch of foreigners when i should be supporting OUR bunch of foreigners tomorrow night - i will be a once a year Man U supporter
5. finish the copy for OME website redesign (again...)
6. Pay too much for 2 contract renewals we have - the times are hard and prices for our clients will need to reflect that. May go down to the wire....

OME Digital Seminars

Recently completed the latest in our event series sponsored by the Telegraph - this time the theme was 7 Pillars of Successful Digital Recruiting - but with a particular focus on business networks. Guest speaker was Simon Kelly UK Sales Director of LinkedIn. Masses of interesting comments pre, during and post event but just going to highlight a few here
1. It was a mixed room of recruitment companies and direct recruiters (prob 60-40 in favour of direct) - and LinkedIn are pitching their commercial effort squarely at direct market which led to interesting Qs from the floor from the recruiters. It was almost like recruiters were a "necessary evil" (my phrase) for LinkedIn - but the direct model was the Holy Grail - probably a reflection on the US ownership.
2. Simon expressed some concern about how this message was going to go down but my view was surely we can all see that if LinkedIn allowed unfettered access to profiles to all rec cons it would be the surest way to kill their growth stone dead as the back lash to receiving loads of unwanted contact via LinkedIn would cause quality candidates to remove their profiles. To be fair most of the rec con attendees understood that fully.
3. Nobody was prepared to state it too loudly but there was an unmistakable air of slight optimism in the air - certainly compared to unremitting gloom of some January events i attended.
4. Yet more confirmation that these days it is all about a direct sourcing model for companies - reducing cost per hire etc. When OME launched 3 years ago - it was all about migration from print to online - it feels a bit quaint saying that sort of stuff in 2009
5. Telegraph is a great place to host the event - the delegates are all massively impressed with how modern a set up they have here and the paper, online, TV, Mobile products all work together.
6. Definite pick up in the amount of delegates doing some Search Engine Marketing activity - it has become part of the established tool set now for companies - however as we always say it is not just about doing it - its about doing it brilliantly!

How Twitter has affected me

1. Proved to me once again that i can occasionally be 100% wrong about the adoption of new products in this marketplace, i slagged it off before succumbing in June 2008. I now love it.

2. Has provided me with yet another distraction from doing "proper" work. And with Twitter i can pretend its work - sort of.

3. Has made me blog less - despite how it seems on my blog sometimes - writing a decent interesting blog post takes time and effort. A tweet requires neither. I would like to think the quality of blog posts has improved.

4. Has shown me again the difference between business and social networks - i like having lots of connections on Linkedin - i restrict it hugely on Twitter - i use the following rules
Nobody
who tweets too much
who exclusively uses it to promote business in a dull way
who uses it constantly to say how busy they are
Very few
celebrities (occasional temporary exception)
people i don't know in some connected way

It may not be how others use it but it works for me

5. Has made me question again the role of job boards ( i think central to the candidate attraction piece but others disagree) - i am not sure about job aggregation via Twitter but have a strong view but i want to know a lot lot more over coming months.

6. Has driven me to create an approach where clients can get benefit from Twitter while investing little more than time and effort or our time and effort for fee. I like saying to people that we think this is the right way to use it now but this is likely to move so fast and in odd directions that in 3 months time this may all change!

Public Sector Time Bomb

doing some market analysis at moment - and following Barack Obama being more positive about stuff thought i should drag everybody down (particularly the battered print industry).
As we know Public Sector vacancies have been relatively robust at present and this has consequently meant that their share of the total market has grown from 20%(2007) to 40% (2009).
Now whatever government is in power - vacancies have to collapse as spending is cut in next few years to restore some semblance of sanity to government finances.
Sadly this will impact most hard on local papers as it is one area that has not taken a huge dive for them in last 2 years and online migration has not happened as quickly in other areas.

Lets all hope that the private sector's green shoots turn into full blooming economic recovery to mask the public sector recruitment dive.

Search Engine Marketing Bull

More often than you think we are engaged to go in and sort someone else's mess involving a digital recruitment initiative/pilot/launch etc and one has to be very careful not to get stuck in a mindset of other companies are rubbish and we are great. There is some outstanding work done both internally and by other suppliers in this market and occasionally we have to say to clients we would love to work with "actually your current supplier is doing the right stuff in the right way at the right rates - so stick with them".
However - we got called in for some remedial SEM work by a big corporate that had been done by one of the leading players (they would say THE leading player in the industry) and it was an absolute piece of Mickey Mouse work that really stunned me with how it could have been set up that way - tracked in that fashion etc.
The problems this causes are a complete lack of confidence in SEM (and consequently business/social network pilots) and lack of faith in all companies in this sector.
I felt myself coming over all PeterGold and ranting about those who claim to be "experts" when they are no such thing.
Now i know that this SEM company are extremely competent (if expensive) so what happened? probably boring old factors like a bad account manager, too busy, being oversold to customer, too big a spend in first couple of months and then always playing catch up while dealing with an unhappy client relationship. I am sure there may have been some customer issues too but i guess we will find out more over next few months but the key thing is to keep the spend down while those lessons are learned - well that's our approach and we are sticking to it.