By now the vast majority of the recruiting industry has taken notice of Craigslist. Craigslist originally was a small website set-up for the San Francisco area as a way for the local community to sell items (before eBay became a household name), find local services‚ and advertise available apartments and houses for rent. Job seekers and Recruiters were not frequenting the site. Now, Craigslist dominates what we call the “classifieds” space with a few other online companies nipping at it’s heals. I will talk about others in future posts.
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Craigslist is a very good alternative to the major job boards such as Monster and Careerbuilder in that there are options for posting positions here, and searching across resumes posted‚ to the site‚ as well. Posting is free in most of the‚ cities, with small fees in some of the major cities including NY, Los Angeles and Washington, DC. More than 1.5 million jobs are posted to the site every month. In terms of traffic, the site gets 8 billion page views per month - so you are guaranteed to have alot of people see your postings. I did a quick search in their resumes section and found 75 “Software Developers” in the San Francisco area. Here is a screen shot of the resume searcing capabilities:
Craigslist has expanded well beyond it’s northern California roots to encompass every major city in the U.S. as well as Canada and many other countries overseas. The site covers 450 cities worldwide.‚ I have heard many success stories from using Craigslist as a strong alternative to other career sites that have forced employers’ hands with huge fees.‚
Here is the resume of Robin Strayhorn,‚ a candidate currently looking for virtual sourcing or recruiting opportunities with over 7 years of recruiting and 10 years of sales experience.
Now that StaffBytes is live‚ I want to bring up an important feature of the site, the Recruit Chute.‚
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Recruit Chute is located at the top right hand corner of the site and is the big orange logo sticking out up there. It is an area where anyone can “get involved” with this site and discuss and share all things recruiting. Recruit Chute was added to the site so that Recruiters, Internet Sourcers, Researchers and others can add:
Tips
Techniques
Tutorials
Videos
Audio Messages‚
White Papers
Resumes
eBooks
Pictures/Illustrations
Site Reviews
Comments
And More
By using Recruit Chute you can learn from others, share expertise and get your name out there in the industry. All users of Recruit Chute can either remain annonymous or have their name proudly displayed by their posting. I look forward to your contributions.
Jobfox is a career site geared towards passive job seekers.‚ Jobfox is a company started by the original founders of Careerbuilder, and is set-up to work specifically with passive candidates by matching open job opportunities to their skill sets and predefined criteria. Job seekers come to the site and set-up a profile with very specific details, put up their resume and get presented with matched career opportunities. Job matches in the Jobfox system are ranked on a 1-10 scale, so users can see what matches up best with their criteria. Job seekers can determine who gets to see their resume with‚ confidentiality features, and determine how to move forward with job opportunities from employers.
The site is beneficial for recruiters in that the majority of users who are on Jobfox are not actively seeking employment, but are willing to look at the “right” opportunity if it matches their criteria. A large percentage of Jobfox users are not on any of the other major job boards such as Monster or Careerbuilder. In addition, if you get a candidate from Jobfox who is a 9/10 match for instance for your open position, you can be sure that the candidate is well qualified especially by skills sets, as Jobfox uses a fairly robust system.
WebbAlert is a video blog that gives it’s audience a “daily tech round up”. Much like TechCrunch, which I featured in a previous post, WebbAlert can give recruiters and sourcers new avenues to pursue such as new products and services in the market. Each episode is usually around 5-6 minutes and provides good quick “newscast style” overviews on everything from Skype to Google along with links to the articles and companies mentioned. Great resource to be tuned into the latest developments not only in technology but with current and emerging companies. I personally have found out about many new blogs, products, services and companies by watching every week. Check it out and let me know if you agree.
Indeed is a search engine exclusively dedicated to jobs. Per their website, Indeed‚ ”gives job seekers free access to millions of employment opportunities from thousands of websites, including all the job listings from major job boards, newspapers, associations and company career pages”.
Indeed represents another option for recruiters‚ to‚ advertise their open positions instead of ponying-up for a package of job slots with say Monster. In fact, if done right, it could be pretty cost-effective too. Indeed offers a performance-based model like “Google” where you only pay when targeted job-seekers click on the ads that are relevant to what they’ve searched for.‚ They claim to get over 4 million unique visitors to the site each month.
So for an example, you could place an ad for a Systems Administrator position based in San Francisco, California with Linux, SNMP and other key skills. You would place the‚ ad on Indeed with a link back to‚ your companies career site or perhaps another location on the web where it is placed, and each time a user finds your job, you are charged per click. See the example screen shot:
There are great benefits to both recruiters and job seekers. Recruiters get a targeted audience for their open‚ positions (based on defined key words, locations and more).‚ Job Seekers find jobs that match their exact search criteria (including key words, locations and more). In addition, Job Seekers can save‚ their searches on the site and have jobs delivered to‚ them by email alerts,‚ RSS feed readers and other means. The RSS feed directly to candidates is great because they simply set-up their search criteria and when a job matches it is sent directly to them without having to revisit the Indeed website.
Have you checked out BountyJobs yet? BountyJobs is a website where “employers can find talent cost effectively, faster, and more efficiently while recruiters can make more placements, earn more money, and become more respected.” BountyJobs is set-up to act as the middleman between employers and recruiters on candidate placements, acting as the third party.
There is value from both sides (employer and recruiter side) to using the site. Employers can post their hard-to-fill positions there and not have to go through the burden of working with 3rd party consulting firms or vendors, while getting the benefit of having several recruiters working on a requirement at a time. Recruiters can simply decide where they would like to be active and submit their candidates, with no obligations. There are alot of independent recruiters on the site, but I can see where recruiters already working for another firm would want to use the site. Say for instance they have several sharp Java Developers in their active pipeline in Washington, DC, but their current employer does not have any open positions for Java skill sets, or anything for Java in the DC area. The perfect scenario would be to see if there are any relevant openings for these Java folks out on BountyJobs, and “get engaged” on that particular requirement as BountyJobs puts it. There are very recognizeable companies already using the site including Freddie Mac, Toys R Us, State Farm Insurance, M&T Bank and Deloitte to name a few I saw today. Recruiters are set-up on 1099 terms if they place a candidate with an employer. There are nice submission features for candidates and communicating with the employers, as well as searching for open positions based on job categories, key words, industries and regions. All positions are full time and recruiters receive a set percentage of each placement. Let me know your thoughts and if you have had any successes there. Below is a screen shot:
In a follow up to a previous post on Jigsaw, here is a video tutorial on how to use their directory effectively and discover over 6 million plus people. The 18 minute video walks through the search functionality of Jigsaw and gives many sourcing and recruiting suggestions.
*If you want “full screen” hit the square button in the bottom right corner of the video toolbar.
While Internet Explorer is the most widely used web browser on the planet and has the lions share of the market at this point at some 60-70%, Firefox (at close to 15% by some accounts) is in my opinion the best browser. For Recruiters and especially Internet Sourcers and Researchers, Firefox can be used to grab as many resumes as you can take. Think millions if you are ambitious enough!
Firefox has what they call “add-ons” that you can attach to the browser to make searching, bookmarking and other tasks very easy. One add-on in particular I want to show you is called DownThemAll. Let’s say for instance you were doing some boolean searching for resumes using Firefox. Let’s also say that your search string pulls up thousands of resumes. DownThemAll makes it possible to download all items from your search with a few quick clicks. Here is a video example:
*If you want “full screen” hit the square button in the bottom right corner of the video toolbar.
I recently got an XBOX 360 and got signed up for the XBOX LIVE which allows you to play video games online with or against other gamers from around the globe. I never thought in a million years that this would be a place to recruit someone. But sure enough, while I was into a game last night, I found myself thinking just that. Hey now, quit laughing over there. No seriously - let me fill you in.
Last night there were over 500,000 people online in the XBOX LIVE community, with a vast majority of those numbers from the U.S. When you sign up, you set yourself up with a screen name, much like the way you would when signing up for any other networking community, like MySpace for instance. While playing, you wear a headset, and over the course of your gaming, you talk to the other people you are playing against (some good and bad talk mind you), but there is ALOT of dialogue there. You find yourself asking questions such as “Where you from BATMAN 320?” or “What do you do X-MAN?” XBOX LIVE actually makes recruiting easy believe it or not. You have the ability to add friends to your personal list and re-connect with them each time online (so you can build some rapport). You can also have one-on-one chats in the online lobbys outside of the games. In addition, you have the ability to look into your “friends” lists as well, and see who they know (easy way to introduce yourself to new people then).
What do you think the demographics are on the people who are playing in XBOX LIVE? My thoughts are these are people who like technology and perhaps a large percentage of them would make excellent candidates for open technical positions, if you know how to talk to them. What are your thoughts?
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