Update
This is an update on an article I wrote last year around this same time of year. Although I have started a program in my office not to automatically rule out the large boards for recruiting purposes, as I had for a number of years, I still think these larger services are more useful for job order research and sometimes leads as well. In the boom years when I used to check Monster regularly there would be over 1000 jobs advertised in my area on any given day. In the summer of 2002, the count was way down to about 250. It stayed at that level most of last year creeping up a bit here and there. As of today, the count was up further to 308. Of value to us, as recruiters, is in the analysis of these figures.
Like last year, I logged onto Monster, HotJobs and CareerBuilder and checked on the counts for St. Louis IT/MIS job orders and was pleased to see an increase of almost 100 jobs. Out of the 603 ads 345 of them were placed by what I consider to be third party firms, be they permanent or staffing companies (us). This represents 57% of the ads running on that day, way down from over 70% a year ago. Conversely, employers (clients) ran a whopping 188 of these ads, up to 31% from 21%. There was also a big increase in the N/A column due to the fact there were a lot of "confidential employer" ads...many more than last year. I suspect most of these were placed by client type companies wanting to avoid an onslaught of calls. Here are the figures I came up with. The figures in parenthesis are from last year but the percentages are from this year.
Ads for St. Louis IT/MIS job openings - 1/04
Service
Total Ads Recruiter Ads
Client Ads N/A
Monster 308 (285)
173 (205)
80 (56)
55 (24)
HotJobs 157 (149)
97 (114)
57 (32)
3 (3)
CareerBuilder 138 (72)
75 (41)
51 (21) 12 (10)
Totals
603
345 (57%)
188 (31%) 70 (12%)
(506)
(360)
(109)
(37)
Less recruiter ads...more client ads. You might initially look at that and think it is bad news. Not to me. It certainly means the money for new hires is starting to loosen up. It also means the recruiters may be doing more traditional, non-Internet recruiting (which I don't believe) or, are moving their recruiting dollars to other resources that are not conflicting with their client's own recruiting efforts (which I do believe). This would be a smart move. With so many more clients and potential clients running ads now you would think I would rethink my new policy of considering the larger job boards for my own recruiting purposes...not really. I would say before any one of you would think about using one of the three services noted above, or any large, nationwide career hub, I would absolutely run a search for job orders in your specialty / geographic region and make sure you are not going to be competing against your own clients for the same candidate pool.
Bigger and better things ahead for all of us...plan for it and be ready. Many of those 603 jobs will trickle down to recruiters in my area. Also, if the numbers on the big boards are up, the number are going to be up everywhere else as well. Not everyone runs Internets ads and not everyone should.
Rosetta
In last December's column I included a press release from BroadLook Technologies announcing its new product, Rosetta, a utility developed to rapidly and accurately capture single and large sets of contact information from web pages, your email in-box, Word docs, Excel, or any Windows application. Rosetta has now been released to the public.
According to BroadLook Technologies CEO, Donato Diorio, "We constantly look for ways to help our clients spend more time selling and less time performing the necessary, but often time-consuming tasks of research and data entry. Rosetta is an application designed to simplify and streamline the process of inputting and updating contact records into your contact management system."
The great news is that the basic version of Rosetta is free. The free version allows users to capture, save and export one record at a time to your ATS, CRM or contact manager. You probably don't realize how many times over the course of a week or month that you type contact information into your organizer, ATS, or whatever. If you spend just ten minutes per day typing that equates to one full week of typing per year. Using these numbers if you use this product you could make an extra placement per year. It is something that every recruiter should grab as part of his or her toolbox. The paid version of Rosetta allows you to capture and export an unlimited number of contacts.
BroadLook testing has shown this product to be much faster and more accurate than competing products. Unlike some utilities that require data to be in a preset format, this product can work with data in any format.
The bad (and good) part about writing a review about Rosetta is that there is not a lot to write about. It only takes about five minutes to learn how to use this product. The program has a very simple interface. You capture your data, build a list, and then export to over 50 different contact managers, CRM's and Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS's) including Excel, Word, text, Outlook, Eudora, Act, Goldmine, Bullhorn, ResuMate, MaxHire, Prohire, cBizOne, PCRecruiter, and many, many others.
Also, BroadLook has a unique, industry-friendly policy whereby if you are using a system that Rosetta does not support, simply contact your ATS vendor and let them know that you would like their product to work with Rosetta. If an integration with Rosetta results, your copy of Rosetta (full version) is free. BroadLook says they will honor the first 10 requests to each vendor with free copies to the requestor. So, if your ATS is not yet supported by Rosetta, call your vendor quick. They are aggressively seeking additional partnering resources.
You should definitely take a look at this product as soon as you can. The full version retails for $219.00 but can be found for as low as $199.00, $50.00 less expensive that some competing products. Rosetta uses the same technology used by its sister product, BroadLook, which was reviewed in this column last year. For more information you can visit the Rosetta home page at
http://rosetta.broadlook.com/ or download the free basic version at
http://rosetta.broadlook.com/download.html
. Anyone with any questions or comments can also reach Donato Diorio at (262) 691-3900 or via email at
ddiorio@broadlook.com.
A Few Niche Sites
Here are a few niche sites culled from emails received recently. Hope you can use.
SalesHeads
http://www.salesheads.com
They claim to be the #1 and most looked at Sales & Marketing job board on the Internet. They claim to have over 77,000 self-registered sales professionals. According to www.alexa.com, an Internet traffic reporting service, they are the highest ranked niche sales job board on the Internet.
Absolutely Healthcare
http://www.healthjobsusa.com
They provide a searchable resume database, nationwide employer links, and job postings in 100 categories of health care recruitment. Free healthcare salary guide available on the website. Named by Haldane's employment website guide as the best website for health care jobs.
VetJobs.com
http://www.vetjobs.com
Sponsored by the Veterans of Foreign Wars, this site has become one of the largest military related job boards on the Internet. They offer access to technical employees who have strong management backgrounds, training, technical expertise. They offer a database of over 58,000 candidates, many with a security clearance. Many with bilingual skills as well.
CallCenterCareers
http://www.callcentercareers.com
They were selected as one of the Best of the Best in 2003 in the latest edition of CareerXRoads Internet employment site guide. They claim over 20,000 call center candidate resumes in their database. Their Candidate Management System tracks all applicants and they have a Job Posting Manager that provides statistics on all job postings.
ExecuNet
http://www.execunet.com
They are a leading provider of executive-level talent and offer RecruitSmart, an all-inclusive service that provides the tools that will make it easy for you source top executive talent. They offer an executive resume database plus access to a sourcing network. Also a confidential job posting area. A Forbes "Best of the Web" site for four years and a CareerXRoads
"TopSite".
Tip
This month's tip doesn't have much to do with Internet recruiting but this might be of interest to anyone who submits MS/Word documents to employers, or anywhere else for that matter. Unknown to many people each word document has a Properties setting. You get to this by opening any word document then clicking on File / Properties. You will see a dialog box with a several tabs. If you open a number of documents and check this setting you will be surprised at what is in here sometimes, which is often overlooked. Of interest to most recruiters would be the Summary tab. I always put the candidates name in the Title box and then always fill out the Author and Company information fields as well. The last thing you want is to submit a resume via email to an employer on your letterhead but have a competitor's name and company in Properties. You never know if your candidate is passing a resume along to you that was prepared by another recruiting firm. Since I check this setting on each resume I send to a client site I can tell you many are prepared by parties other than the candidate. Happens all the time.