This will be James’s 5th Marathon in total and he will be aiming for a sub 4.30hr time.

Please sponsor him by visiting: www.justgiving.com/jamesswiftmanchester

Firstly, over the last few weeks our Weight Watchers Leaders Recruitment website has gone live, and the launch was supported by successful PPC Facebook and Google campaigns. You can read the full case study here. This was the culmination of a lot work across different channels (although it’s not the end of the work by any means!) so was an exciting time for us.

We’re also pleased to welcome McKinsey to our client base. This relationship is in its infancy, with us having assisted them with advertising a couple of niche roles, and there are some bigger, more strategic things in the pipeline at the moment which we hope will be the start of a strong relationship.

A campaign we worked on with JTI to recruit Tactical Trade Marketeers resulted in 6 hires. This campaign was run purely on job boards, and the hires came from Reed, Grocer and Totaljobs (proof if it were needed that job boards still work!).

An exciting opportunity was presented to us this month as our MD James Swift’s been asked to lead a track at Tru Leeds, so he’ll be talking about integrated recruitment campaigns, including the Weight Watchers work and another client of ours, JTI. Bill Boorman’s published our Weight Watchers case study as a guest post on his site ahead of the Unconference, and I’ll write more about the track and the Tru event in general in the next Newsletter!

Very importantly from my (self-involved!) point of view, I joined the company, and had something of a baptism of fire learning about all our clients, contacts etc and generally how things work here. An interesting training session with Enhanced Media on Effective e-Recruitment has strengthened my interest in areas such as PPC and social media as additional resource channels, and I hope to spend more time on this and gain more expertise. I’ll also be blogging and keeping up this newsletter, and generally tweeting, connecting with people on Linkedin etc so connect with me, talk to me and ask us for help with anything you might need. Any requests for blog articles/guest posts are also welcome.

Look out for next month’s update! Katherine Morris.

As the articles tell us, companies need to have a talent attraction branding policy. Most big companies have responded to this with nice user friendly websites and a consideration for how they express and publicise what they offer their staff.

And yet I’m shocked that many companies don’t extend this consideration to their use of job boards. Considering that it’s the first port of call for many job seekers (despite many people trying to proclaim job boards are dead, people do still use them. They really do) some companies take very little care over what their ad/presence on the sites looks like.

There’s a certain airline I can name that has a good quality careers site, well branded in their well-known colour scheme, with attractive photos, interesting icons and a good level of enticing and useful information. Recognisably theirs, easy to use and helpful. And yet today I found one of the ads for their live vacancies on a job board. One paragraph with an uninformative summary of the role, no nice pictures, just one little company logo. Uninformative and not particularly recognisable or on-brand. It gives the impression that the company in question don’t really care about how applicants view them, and yet a look at their website shows this isn’t true.

Most good job boards have responded to the change in recruitment and focus on branding by allowing companies to make their adverts personalised. Go on a job board such as Totaljobs (disclaimer: other good job boards are available) and look for an advert by Yo Sushi!. Click into one of their listings and admire the scrolling pictures of sushi at the top, the well placed logo and the clearly written and informative copy that indicates they’re a modern, professional company who’ve thought about the job hunter.

Look for KFC jobs and you’ll see that they’ve used what’s known as a Display Listing, so that the entire background is KFC branded and you feel like you’re actually on the KFC website. There’s an attractive familiarity about it.

Even less well known brands can do this. Search for The Compass Group, a catering/food services company. They’ve used a flash banner at the top of each listing to produce an attractive ad for the company. This is not only informative for those who might not be familiar with them, but again shows professionalism and vision. Applicants want to work for companies who are professional and have vision.

Touches like this increase applicant confidence in the company as a potential employer and place to build a career, and they make you look clever.

FACT: That’s a 400% increase since 2007

FACT: A person spends an average 6 hours-a-week social networking

Conversations about your employer brand are going on right now. How involved are you?

Social recruitment marketing gives you huge reach and unrivalled access to candidates’ behaviours and demographics. Beyond Interactive can help you turn this information to your advantage.

• Create highly targeted marketing campaigns relevant to a candidate’s social media profile
• Integrate social media into your existing websites
• Build & engage with networks interested in your employer brand
• Create instant word-of-mouth buzz about specific job opportunities
• Capture candidates with the right cultural fit for your organisation’s data
• Better management of your employer brand and PR via daily conversations

Contact James Swift on 0844 3350390 for a free mini-audit and we’ll tell you where you can add value by socialising your employer brand.

www.beyondinteractive.co.uk

We’ve recently had a few situations where we’ve been approached with briefs to write job copy with potential age discrimination issues. Never an easy conversation to have with a client to say “you can’t say you require someone with 3 to 4 years experience” but none the less, it’s something that cannot be avoided and needed addressing.

In view of this, I recently picked on a certain job board (which will remain nameless) to read through some of the jobs on their site and I was shocked by how many potential litigation issues that could arise from corporate organisations on there. A lot of these were from copy and paste job descriptions.

If anyone reading this blog writes their own job copy then you should read this article on Monster (link below). It’s not too long-winded and if you stick to these guidelines then you’ll be OK. Or, better still, use a professional copywriter that will not only ensure it’s written in full compliance with any litigation issues, it will be engaging to the candidate!

http://hiring.monster.co.uk/hr/hr-best-practices/recruiting-hiring-advice/acquiring-job-candidates/how-can-i-avoid-discrimination-in-job-adverts.aspx

The other day I asked a regional job board for a proposal which was responded with immediate negativity and accusations of us not giving them feedback on previous proposals. What’s more, apparently sending us proposals is “becoming mundane.” After pointing out that I’d be happy to lift the burden and take our business elsewhere, I got a further accusation of being “rude.” As someone that sold Job Boards to Ad Agencies for around 7 years or so, I totally understand people’s frustrations. However, there are ways of doing business and frankly, this is totally unacceptable! Emailing us with “any news on that proposal?” isn’t asking for feedback. It’s lazy and gets answered with “no” if there isn’t any news. The same media owner sees fit to then get other people in their business phone me, have a right go, point out that they know someone that works for our client and basically piss me off to high heaven. All this for just asking for a proposal!

All this has been going on for years but in these tough times, it’s the really smart and professional operators that will succeed. You don’t need to be an ass-kisser, just behave in a professional way and you’ll be treated this way in return. Becoming aggressive just makes you look desperate and extremely unprofessional!

Will I do business with this site again? Yes, probably, but will I think of them as one of our partners? Definitely not!

Feedback on the above more than welcome!

I really liked the idea of having track-topics running simultaneously with the flexibility to dip in and out of each one. I felt a bit rude doing this at first but if something was clearly not to my interest/benefit, it gave me the flexibility to just move on to the next one. A slight criticism is the tracks were positioned a little bit close to each other so if you were sat in the wrong place, it was quite easy to become a bit distracted and I found myself listening to two tracks at once (well that probably says more about my attention span than a criticism)! Everyone tweeting in real-time made it really easy to see which tracks were of most interest and by simply following the #TruManchester hashtag, I could make a decision on which was seemed right for me.

The tracks could’ve been defined a bit clearer. For example, Social Media Circus could’ve been anything from the theory of Social Media, from a client’s perspective or candidate experiences. I personally wanted to know more about ROI from other like-minded people but it tended to lean towards whether or not Facebook is suitable for recruitment at all and one or two seemed to dominate this particular track.

The really big plus point for me was that you actually got to meet and engage with people all the way through the day. There was none of the usual just sitting there being sold to by a job board, a social media provider or whoever else is flavour of the month. It got me thinking about how everything can benefit my business and most importantly, how it can help with our client’s people strategies. What’s more, it was clear from the start that both the track-leaders and attendees were genuinely passionate about improving our market.

I left the day feeling really positive about the whole experience and although most of us probably stayed out a little later than we should’ve done in the evening/early hours, I finally got the opportunity to meet people I’ve been communicating with on Twitter. I found it fascinating that people travelled from all over the world to attend too! I will definitely be attending future events and if you want to learn new experiences about all aspects of recruitment communications from genuine experts, then they are not to be missed!

Big thanks to Bill Boorman for organising and Jobsite for bringing me along. Top effort!

http://trumanchester.wordpress.com/about/

Really looking forward to the event, see some old and new faces and hopefully gain some insight into what’s going on in the social media / rec comms market.

http://trumanchester.wordpress.com/

Come along and play in this quick changeover tournament. Your small entry fee will help educate the pupils at this school and give them some much needed funding. Adults and Children over 13 welcome and there will be cheerleaders and a raffle.

About the charity

It raises money for pupils at Levana Primary School which is in a deprived area of Cape Town, South Africa. So far it has funded things such as a library, school uniforms, school trips and an extra teacher. It aims to provide opportunities for the pupils that they may not otherwise receive.

For more information, please contact Nell Banfield on 07944 663026 or email: nell.banfield@ntlworld.com

You can also visit the just giving page if you would like to make a donation: http://www.justgiving.com/levanaschool/ or to see some photos of the School, visit: http://www.nellbanfield.com/levana.html