Well, that’s good news for international companies who recruit talent from abroad.

Another survey, the E-Recruitment research made by Personnel Today, states that current recruitment budgets - even though in decrease - were rather spent on web-based methods than on traditional media such as press or headhunters for example. The survey had been carried out among more than 400 HR and board level directors.

Apart from that, “online methods proved far more popular. Two-thirds (66%) of HR professionals surveyed said the jobs section of their own company websites were used as a recruitment tool for most jobs, while 22% used this to promote some jobs, with just 12% never using this method. Online jobs boards such as totaljobs.com were also popular, used by a third of respondents (32%) for most jobs, and by 42% for some.”

However, Web 2.0 services such as social networking sites, blogs, Twitter & Co. are not yet in strong use to find candidates but their usage is likely to increase over the next two years.

Conclusion: the internet recruitment industry will continue to grow and benefits from the economic crisis. I wonder whether this trend is going to be confirmed once everything is back to normal.

So it will be light posting today and I would like to draw your attention to a current position to fill: I have posted the job ad for an Internet Marketing Specialist to my job board.

Feel free to send it to your contacts and to tweet it aloud.

Have a great week!

• 31 per cent actually clicked on the display ad (which is in itself a very strong figure)
• 27 per cent made a search on search engines in order to find out more about the advertising company
• 21 per cent typed the URL indicated in the banner into the address bar of their browsers
• 9 per cent made some profound research by investigating social networks, forum discussion, etc.
• 13 per cent did not react at all or had not perceived the commercial.

So, these are good news for savvy employer branding and HR communication campaigns! Even if the data has been collected in the USA exclusively and has been financed by an SEO and SEM specialst, the results speak for themselves and are relevant - to a more or less big extent - for other countries.

A more detailed report and some discussion can be fiound here.

So I very much enjoyed yesterday’s telephone conversation with him where we caught up about last year’s events on both sides. For example, Arbita have launched a free version of their multiple posting software OnePost, thanks to which, customers and not(-yet) customers can publish their roles on selected job boards.

Apart from that, ATS is explored more thoroughly, SEO and SEM consultants recommend online HR strategies, there is a recruiter education workshop service and so on.

Another very interesting aspect is that Arbita also relies on consultants outside the company thanks to the so-called Advisory Board providing their customers with professional advice to a max.

I am always amazed to see how online recruitment evolves in the United States because I think they are really setting the standards (and the pace!) in the field. After the call I felt that European job sites and online HR in general still have a lot to learn. I think that the most important thing is to have a vision and to pursue a strategy that is customer- and performance focused.

This young job board (the site has been actively launched in May 2008) displays a very industrious attitude and keeps on developing. Only a few weeks ago, the social network platform for engineers, réseau-ingénieurs, has gone online.

Apart from that, David said that most of the visitors landed directly on job offers on the site thanks to their good Google indexation and Google AdWords. Pricing varies from 300,00 Euros for one job posting to a pay-per-application model.

I think the site is worth a try, and I will be very happy to provide you with more information and interesting initial offers. Please don’t hesitate to contact me.

So tomorrow I will be leaving for Paris to meet a few clients. In two weeks time, we will be on a big tour through Germany in order to meet up with clients in Aachen, Frankfurt, Mainz, Stuttgart and Munich. If you wish to meet us on the way, please let me know by email or telephone

Anyway, I’m afraid that I will not be able to blog a lot during the next days. But I will share some of the information and news I will be gathering on my way.

Have a nice week!

Currently, the German version is not very strong yet, hosting only 81,000 jobs (just to compare: the job search engine kimeta.de displays more than 900,000 roles).
If you enter, for example, “mercedes” in the company search field, you will find a job ad that has originally been published on Gigajob.de (another German aggregator)…, very interesting. Apart from that the word Ingenieur (engineer) has been mis-spelled and there is no indication of the company that is actually hiring. Great result!
The second job is for teachers. At least here, the name “mercedes” appears in the name of the contact person.
So, still some optimisation to do here

Last but not least: the German site translation and orthography are not very good. The word “click” is written as “clic*”. If this word is supposed to be in English, it would be good to add the “k”. But that’s only a small thing. Most of the German on their site is - grammatically speaking - correct. However, the expressions sound somewhat odd.
I guess that here will be done some more polishing in the future.

Anyway: happy clicking!

Thanks to CAN, recruiting companies have the possibility to attract potential candidates that do not necessarily visit the Monster site itself. Job postings are promoted via text banners throughout the ad network. In Monster.de’s case, the Top20 web sites listed by the AGOF (Association for Online Research in Germany) will be used for promoting jobs via the CAN. Thus, the available sites may vary according to the moment when banner campaigns are made.

I contacted Monster in order to receive some more details on the subject and here are some of the bits and pieces they came up with:

• Job listings are displayed as banners (Skyscraper, Leaderboard and Rectangle) in a Google AdWords-like fashion, meaning they consist basically of text and, possibly, the company logo.
• The banners are exclusively published on those sites of the AGOF’s Top20 (or 30) that are relevant to the target group (relevance is Monster’s priority). This is assured by Geo- and Behavioral Targeting
• Apart from that, the ads are also to be found on Monster (10 to 15 per cent of the booked PI’s).
• Hiring firms can order so-called “CAN-Units”. A banner can take up to 4 units with 1 CAN-Unit corresponding to one of the place holders (again, as in Google AdWords).
• I wonder whether each banner element (unit; the job teaser) has to be from the same company or whether a mixture of different employers is possible. Anyone a hint on that?
• Prices vary according to the number of bought CAN units, starting from 395,00 euros a piece.

So let’s have a look at the current AGOF Top 20 (from 25th February):

Number 1: T-Online (JobScout24 is part of the German T-Online Group)
Number 2-5: free email hosting providers. Those sites are very good in general given that they have gigantic traffic and allow perfect targeting.
Number 8: StudiVZ (a kind of Facebook, very popular among German students) - they have been acquired by the Georg Holtzbrinck Group in 2007. And Georg Holtzbrinck is one of the major stake holders of the Top5 German job board stellenanzeigen.de.
Number 9: Spiegel Online - they have a close job posting co-operation with stellenanzeigen.de…
Number 17: MeineStadt.de - good network for local and regional candidate search. They used to re-publish listings from StepStone.de and Monster.de (the two sites had actually bought traffic from meinestadt.de) and had announced in January, that they wouldn’t sell traffic to them anymore. But, what the heck, the Monster banners can be published in other parts of meinestadt.de since they also offer a dating service and other classifieds such as cars and apartments.
Number 18: the social community wer-kennt-wen.de (”who knows whom”) - well, I consider that this site should be handled with care concerning banner job postings. It rather seems to be used by its members to find flirts and more than find a serious job.

Conclusion: I think that CAN is a very interesting product and am going to propose it to my clients to optimise their passive candidate search. My guess is that other job boards will soon start setting up similar services for their customers. The battle is on

At the beginning of February, Jobware communicated their new multiple posting partner for SAP roles, DV-Treff. The combination of both amounts to a package price of 1,295 euros, which corresponds to a discount of more than 23 percent compared to the added public list prices. Thanks to this, recruiters access more relevant candidates for their SAP positions. DV-Treff is a very good job board in this sector (nevertheless, I recommend an overall layout and site relaunch; that hasn’t been done for at least 5 years).

However, the thing with Dv-Treff is, that they have started, 2 or 3 years ago, to re-sell job postings on sites other than their own. So they have positioned themselves as yet another “multiple posting agency” like, for example Aktor. Well, I think it’s weird that a job board sells postings of their competitors, but apparently they need some more income.

Anyway, having had a look at their multiple package job board portfolio, I understood that some of the sites belong to the category that I call “no-name” sites. Apart from that, there are boards that can be booked for free since they are part of a co-operation. You just have to know which site to post to in the first place

Conclusion: Jobware have made a very good and strategic choice for their customers and I’m sure that DV-Treff will increase revenue with this as well.

Anyway, it seems that some HR managers have some time resources at their disposal these days and I suggest they use it to get some online training in the international job board markets. So here is my link list:

• Aktor Interactive’s Newsletter on Online-Recruiting: indicate your email address, tick the box “robopost.de” for the German version or “aktor.fr” for the French version. You will receive an automatic confirmation link by email, click on it, done.
• Jo’s (German) Career- und JobBlog link lists. A must-have.
• XING Group on E-Personnel Marketing: Discuss with us.
• For Consultants and sales people who work a lot by telephone: motivation and tips from the “Queen of Cold Calling”, Wendy Weiss. Either as a daily Twitter dosis or visit her (leider etwas unübersichtlichen) Homepage.
• While talking about Twitter: The Top 50 of the American recruiters, found by Jim Stroud.
• For francophiles: FocusRH, information from the French Online Recruitment Sphere.
• English and American job board press releases: Onrec.com

Have a great and successful week!