With more and more companies bringing recruitment in-house, the importance of having a well-designed and functionally rich recruitment website has never been so important. Here are some tips to help make your recruitment area shine:

1.In order to attract the best candidates, make sure your website is not hidden away within the main corporate website. To become an employer of choice you must strengthen your image in the marketplace. Invest as much time and money into developing your recruitment website as possible. It is just as hard to attract traffic to your recruitment pages as with your commercial pages, so you need to dedicate the same amount of effort.

2.It is important to develop an exciting website that shows candidates what it is like to work for you and promotes the benefits and culture. Candidate testimonials, blogs, galleries and video are some of the great ways to do this. However, there has been a tendency over the last few years for websites to have great content but offer little in the way of candidate services. Sites need to be balanced, with actual recruitment features that you would often associate with job boards or agency sites.

3.To aid that balance, build your website on a strong applicant tracking system (ATS) or recruitment platform. The website will operate a lot better than self-built portals and will provider a higher level of recruitment functionality to improve the overall candidate experience.

4.A good website should be designed to maximise accessibility, usability and be optimised for the major search engines. You might also want to consider combining a content management system into the website so that authorised employees can upload and edit content themselves. These pages can often also be maintained through your ATS.

5.Ensure your corporate brand is protected. Make sure any ATS powered career pages perfectly match your brand guidelines and existing website. Every detail should be looked at including the URL used for the career portal. You do not want to put candidates off registering and shake their confidence by making it obvious they are registering on an external system or site.

6.Managing the overall candidate experience is key to ensuring candidates return to your site. Even candidates that may not be suitable should come away with a positive experience. Intuitive navigation (the ‘3 clicks’ rule) and easy-to-use tools will ensure an enjoyable recruitment experience for both applicants and hiring managers. Your chosen ATS should enable you to deliver powerful and intuitive self-service portals to candidates, hiring managers and agencies (on your PSL) alike.

7.The registration process should be simple and allow for speculative applications as well as direct applications. Incorporating CV parsing into your portal makes life easier for candidates and dramatically reduces drop-off rate while increasing your talent pool organically. When a suitable position then comes available, you can use the searching technology in your ATS to identify suitable candidates and send them a personalised message via email or SMS. Plus by having a searchable talent pool, you can reduce recruitment costs such as advertising and agency spend – this will also shorten time to hire and ensure business continuity.

8.You should introduce automated processes such as allowing job seekers to sign up for intelligent job alerts matched to their profile, or SMS alerts of upcoming interviews / events. Online scheduling for interviews and assessment centres should be available through the career portal as well as useful information and downloads.

9.If you choose to develop a mobile (touch) version of your website, make sure it will work across all smartphone platforms. When developing mobile sites or apps, many companies choose to offer a smaller version of their main website, but this does not offer the mobile user the full experience. Being truly web-based and browser-independent, an Eploy® powered recruitment website for example can offer the candidates and hiring manager’s full access and often negate the need to develop a cut-down app version at all.

10.Feed your Facebook, Linked-In, Twitter and blog pages into your website via live RSS feeds. RSS feeds from your ATS can also be used in reverse, to add content to your social channels. Encourage candidates to promote your jobs through their own social channels, all tracked through your ATS. Make sure that any social networks utilised are monitored for negative feedback so that you can respond quickly and rectify any issues.

Finally, remember your website is not just a shop window – it is a communication tool for candidates and staff. If it is designed well, it will work hard for you. The site will help to reduce administration procedures and allow recruiters and hiring managers to conduct most of the legwork involved in recruitment online in an efficient and coherent way.

To discuss how Eploy can help streamline your recruitment website, please call 0800 073 4243 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting 0800 073 4243 end_of_the_skype_highlighting or visit www.eploy.co.uk

Christopher Bogh,
Technical Director,

HR recruitment remained steady throughout the summer. There were fewer new roles coming on to the market in July and August as many people enjoyed a well-earned rest with the family. We have found the first couple of weeks back slightly quiet and suspect that many City folk have taken their summer holidays a little later this year.

We anticipate an active autumn with many of our clients looking to fill roles on a permanent and interim basis. However, we foresee the interim market becoming a little more active than the permanent market for the end of 2011. Our thinking is formulated by the following:

• The seasonal nature of the corporate event cycle ensures there is a steady demand in Q4 2011 and Q1 in 2012 for HR interim help
• HR Interims continue to play a vital role as temporary replacements in cases of maternity or unpaid leave situations
• HR Interims have a vital role, as subject matter experts, in leading specific corporate agenda projects such as major change programmes and establishing businesses in new countries for our international clients
• The lack of overall confidence in the recruitment marketplace means that companies are more inclined to employ someone on an interim basis rather than permanently, at this time
• This has in turn led to a proliferation of fixed term contract roles, for various reasons, which can be unhelpful from a fiscal and legal point of view, to those already formally established as career interims

On the permanent side, we anticipate more senior level HR searches on the market, seeking both Heads of HR and appointments one level below. It is still a candidate-driven market at this level, with many talented HR professionals staying put and, in particular, waiting for anticipated bonuses as we approach the end of 2011.

Article provided by:

Alison Hughes,
,
Higher Talent

It’s a valid question and one which, as an outplacement and career management practioner, I get asked frequently.

The answer, of course is yes – good outplacement can deliver many lasting and tangible benefits to both the employing organisation and the departing employee. In short, it’s still a key element of good HR practice. While the overall level of support that most organisations are able to commit to has been reduced in many cases we have seen an annual increase in the number of clients offering outplacement services to their employees, as the UK’s leading outplacement provider. Investing in people’s future careers is undoubtedly seen to be as important now as it was 10 years ago.

But why do we wait until an employee is facing redundancy to offer them career assistance? Outplacement interventions are, by their very nature, focused upon a very specific set of circumstances – redundancy (arising from either corporate downsizing or mergers and acquisitions) or simply as a result of the changing nature of employment within a given organisation. In the rapidly changing world of work, we are seeing organisations change the way they interact with employees and vice versa. There is growing recognition, particularly amongst Gen Y (and the soon to be upon us Gen Z) that the rate of change within the workplace is accelerating rapidly and “their” experiences at work will be manifestly different from those that we see today (and think how different these are to when we started work in the 80s and 90s).

Tired retention strategies are no longer viable and progressive organisations are investing time and money in employee’s careers now. How can they be supported to ensure ongoing motivation and commitment? How can they be developed to ensure that there is adequate succession throughout the organisation? How can we attract the best talent and so on?

Supporting people to assess their strengths, their skills and their principal motivators, providing clear and focused insight into how career aspirations can become reality and ensuring that career-development conversations at appraisal time involve more than a cursory nod to “future development” is already a key differentiator amongst certain organisations. Amongst those who are likely to have three, four or even five distinct careers across their working lives, an organisation that displays empathy with, and access to, appropriate career management techniques will be perceived as an organisation that individuals will look to work with.

So whilst outplacement will always provide that burst of condensed energy and activity to help people with sudden job loss, investing in careers prior to redundancy situations will ease the pressure of those difficult situations. Career resilient individuals will be more motivated, more productive, more likely to commit to your organisation… and less likely to need to start from scratch when faced with change.

Article provided by:

Owen Morgan,
Commercial Director,
Penna plc

The general economy remains uncertain however, there is a general expectation that the pace and recovery of economic growth will fall. Whether you are an optimist or agree with the general consensus, it is fair to say that there are still tough times ahead. As we assess the market and work closely with clients to ensure that they have the talent and resources to meet the challenges ahead, we are increasingly asking: “What do you understand about the ability and potential of your own talent?”

More organisations are looking to their internal resource pool for ways to increase their competitive edge. Whilst most organisations realise the importance of measuring current performance levels of employees, we have increasingly found that many organisations do not fully understand, or recognise, potential areas for development in their managers and leaders. When we consider that by developing the talent of managerial teams, businesses could transform themselves and, as an additional benefit, address longer-term performance issues.

Objectively assessing the current and future capability of managers and leaders is an effective way of identifying the gaps between current performance levels and the future needs of the business. Ramsey Hall is increasingly asked to work with organisations to assess, through objective development centres, the capabilities of managers in order to identify ways to address performance issues and take organisational performance to the next level.

Placing a greater importance on the development of internal capability will, undoubtedly, increase the potential of your business and enable improvements to be made to the ‘bottom line’, increase customer expectations and help your organisation to compete in ‘ austere’ times. Additionally, such measures could also serve as a tool to boost morale, increase employee engagement and enhance the career experiences and potential of your organisation’s most valuable asset, your people.

Article provided by:

Jenny Ludford ,
CPsychol,

The recent Labour Market report released by the Office for National Statistics represents a bleak outlook on the current employment market. Set against a stock market in crisis and an inert economy, Personal Career Solutions analyses what this means for the 2.49 million who are unemployed and looking for work.

Back in January, there was a sense of optimism in the job market. Recruiters were reporting an increase in vacancies with a hopeful outlook that this positive trend would continue throughout the year. Disappointingly, reports from the ONS for the second quarter show a decrease in vacancies. With only 449,000 jobs publicly advertised the competition is rife.

It has not all been doom and gloom. Although Public Sector redundancies have had a massive impact on the negative figures, Private Sector employment has increased and total pay has increased by 2.3%. These positive figures illustrate that the private sector is stabilising and companies are investing in talent to solidify their position in our turbulent economic market.

Despite the dip in advertised vacancies, organisations are still hiring but budgets are being cut. The use of recruitment services are being used less, appointments sections of newspapers are thinner, so HR departments are under pressure to find candidates themselves. Knowing this, jobseekers must now change the way they approach their search. When times were good a candidate could go to a recruiter and let them do the work, in this market the candidate has to put in the leg work if they want to find results.

Despite the downturn, Personal Career Solutions’ clients are continuing to find work successfully. No clients in August found work through newspaper advertising, which has traditionally been a key source in finding executive level job roles and only 20% of clients found roles through traditional recruitment services. The other 80% of clients found work through the unadvertised job market, in other words networking and self-marketing.

In the current job market, networking is key when searching for an executive level position. Personal Career Solutions provide help and assistance on researching and building networks so candidates can overcome the shortfall in advertised positions. With over 15 years of experience in providing executive career management services they understand how to make the most of existing networks and how to approach key industry contacts.

For more information on how Personal Career Solutions can assist you at this time please visit: www.personalcareersolutions.co.uk or call 0844 880 6690