Look, we know we’re great and you, very kindly, tell us we’re great, as well…But now those lovely people over at Monster have given us another, unexpected shot in the arm for our online recruitment skills.

Their Iphone App uses one of our jobs to showcase how a well rendered and well written job appears. All with our lovely logo and one of our old jobs on right in your face – POW…Out of the 5000+ live jobs they only went and chose good old Net Natives.

We have been getting all busy with our Facebook Recruitment Service for recruitment companies and job boards and received some nice PR today.

This is just the first round of it, but thought you may find it interesting…

http://www.onrec.com/news/net_natives_powers_recruitment_inside_fa

http://www.recruiter.co.uk/1006254.article?cmpid=REC04&cmptype=newsletter

What’s even more lovely are the interested recruitment companies calling us up straight after reading and wanting to work with us.

Thanks for that…

This question is being asked a lot at the moment as the BSI looks to work Online Recruitment world looks to create a set of standards to measure and track the best practices for the online recruitment industry.

There have been a lot of discussion about it over at our Recruitment Futurology Group.

I  was invited to attend the first BSI meeting about 18 months ago. It was a good turn out, the CEOs or directors from every major UK job board and senior representatives from REC.

The issue was (and is) over responsibility. If a job board adheres to a standard set of principles, but the person who posts the jobs (the recruiters) do not, then where is the value of that kite mark? At that time, there was unilateral agreement that it couldn’t work.

But why not? Why not have a common set of principles across all of the job boards. Why not say that as a job board, you should only publish jobs that are for REAL vacancies, where EVERY candidate will be notified of acceptance or failure, where there is a common complaints procedure and which are bound by a set of metrics that measure success?

As a recruitment owner, I would love to be able to say to my clients that we only work with job boards that have the BSI standard. As a business, we adhere to those metrics, why shouldn’t our suppliers?

Why shouldn’t the job board industry want to try to do what’s best for the clients, candidates and industry as a whole?

As the MD of one of the Job Boards said to me in another forum, “Steve – if only all recruiters adhered to a set of principles around candidate management – sadly, as we all know, they do not. For Job Boards I suspect its a bit like ‘biting the hand that feeds them’. They grew up on staffing industry billings and came to rely on them – turning on them in this approach would risk 50% of their revenues I suspect.”

I think that pretty much sums it up…!

We loved our old office, but we started getting a bit bored with sitting on each other’s laps, so we’ve all moved to a lovely shiny office just down the road.

The phone number stays the same 01273 734 640.  But most of us now have swishy direct dials. Oooo get us special ones…

Steve Evans 01273 783846

Ben Billing 01273 783847

Michaela Timmins 01273 783848

Alex Hughes 01273 783851

Stacey Brand 01273 783845

Don Skinner 01273 783849

Jez Green 01273 783850

Darrell Cox 01273 783852

The new address:

3rd Floor, 33 Bond Street
Brighton
East Sussex
BN1 1RD

I recently wrote an article about how recruitment has changed and thought I should share some thoughts about what has changed and why it will never be the same again.

The Net Natives online recruitment business model thrives because the nature of recruitment has changed in 4 incredibly important (but rarely mentioned) ways.

1. Clients do not hire against potential, they hire against budget. It is no longer the case that a good CV will get an interview on spec. Clients recruit when they have budget sign off. This means that the recruitment process has gone from being predominantly proactive to largely reactive. Recruiters are not able to groom and nurture quality candidates and then “sell” them to their network, they have to wait to be assigned a role to work on. Candidates have understood this and now do more work themselves to get themselves a job. Which leads me onto…
2. The advances in job board technology, with effective email alerts and intuitive artificial intelligence, serving recommended jobs has dramatically increased application rates through the boards. In the same way that better user experience has increased online shopping, so has better job board technology increased candidate placements. Coupled with dramatic increases in online searches for jobs through searches, 101 million searches for jobs last month on Google, this changes the initial engagement behaviour of the candidate. However…
3. There is no loyalty to job board brands. No job board can claim 100% exclusivity to their candidate database, because of the candidates’ job search habits. Clients know that to make sure their role is seen, they need to get the greatest coverage. We are transparent about the job boards we use to fill the roles and we constantly review and monitor to ensure we are using best in breed.
4. We are able to do this with incredible advances in technology. At the click of a button we can post a job advert to 750 job boards and then the job specification is “parsed” across the databases, automatically returning best results based on semantic searches (and with another click they can review all relevant biogs on LinkedIn). Is this simple process really worth 20% of the annual salary? We don’t think so.

One final note. I have never thought much of the contingent recruitment model. Why should I work hard to find the best candidate only for the client to turn out not to have budget or the role changes (or not be a good employer).

Companies like us do everything a recruiter NOW does; we create the campaigns, post, search, filter, screen and shortlist but our model is paid our ability to do this, not our client’s ability to hire. We are transparent in our successes and believe in passing on our specialist online recruitment knowledge to everyone.

But of course we provide regular recruitment training for our clients throughout our blogs. Something you would never get from a traditional recruiter.

And on a final FINAL note. I have been exposed to some pretty horrific recruitment practices in my 15 years all because the consultants wanted to close the deal. Not for the benefit of the candidate, nor the client but for their pocket. This does not happen when the client makes the objective choice to recruit without undue and irrelevant influence.

Hope this all makes sense, but if anyone wants to speak to me about this in more detail, feel free to get in touch – steve@netnatives.co.uk

I recently wrote an article about how recruitment has changed and thought I should share some thoughts about what has changed and why it will never be the same again.

The Net Natives online recruitment business model thrives because the nature of recruitment has changed in 4 incredibly important (but rarely mentioned) ways.

1. Clients do not hire against potential, they hire against budget. It is no longer the case that a good CV will get an interview on spec. Clients recruit when they have budget sign off. This means that the recruitment process has gone from being predominantly proactive to largely reactive. Recruiters are not able to groom and nurture quality candidates and then “sell” them to their network, they have to wait to be assigned a role to work on. Candidates have understood this and now do more work themselves to get themselves a job. Which leads me onto…
2. The advances in job board technology, with effective email alerts and intuitive artificial intelligence, serving recommended jobs has dramatically increased application rates through the boards. In the same way that better user experience has increased online shopping, so has better job board technology increased candidate placements. Coupled with dramatic increases in online searches for jobs through searches, 101 million searches for jobs last month on Google, this changes the initial engagement behaviour of the candidate. However…
3. There is no loyalty to job board brands. No job board can claim 100% exclusivity to their candidate database, because of the candidates’ job search habits. Clients know that to make sure their role is seen, they need to get the greatest coverage. We are transparent about the job boards we use to fill the roles and we constantly review and monitor to ensure we are using best in breed.
4. We are able to do this with incredible advances in technology. At the click of a button we can post a job advert to 750 job boards and then the job specification is “parsed” across the databases, automatically returning best results based on semantic searches (and with another click they can review all relevant biogs on LinkedIn). Is this simple process really worth 20% of the annual salary? We don’t think so.

One final note. I have never thought much of the contingent recruitment model. Why should I work hard to find the best candidate only for the client to turn out not to have budget or the role changes (or not be a good employer).

Companies like us do everything a recruiter NOW does; we create the campaigns, post, search, filter, screen and shortlist but our model is paid our ability to do this, not our client’s ability to hire. We are transparent in our successes and believe in passing on our specialist online recruitment knowledge to everyone.

But of course we provide regular recruitment training for our clients throughout our blogs. Something you would never get from a traditional recruiter.

And on a final FINAL note. I have been exposed to some pretty horrific recruitment practices in my 15 years all because the consultants wanted to close the deal. Not for the benefit of the candidate, nor the client but for their pocket. This does not happen when the client makes the objective choice to recruit without undue and irrelevant influence.

Hope this all makes sense, but if anyone wants to speak to me about this in more detail, feel free to get in touch –steve@netnatives.co.uk

I’ve been involved in recruitment for 16 years and set up my recruitment business nearly 2 years ago, yet I still struggle to know what to say when people (alright, my Mum) asks, “So, what sort of business are you?”.

Our unique way of looking at recruitment is so pioneering it’s hard to put us into any “recruitment” category…

• We’re not a traditional recruitment company, but we will find your next hire, doing all that a traditional recruitment business would do with our Flat Fee Recruitment Model
• We are not job board resellers, but we are transparent about our Job Board Advertising network and CV database services and use these tools to find your next hire, keeping costs to a minimum
• We don’t have the pretensions (or fees!) of a recruitment advertising agency, but we do provide Media Buying/Planning, Campaign Managment, Recruitment Outsource & Employee/Employer Branding and Communication services
• We would never join the bandwagon of ever growing “social media experts”, but we deliver effective Facebook Advertising Campaigns and provide simple Social Media Strategy & Consultancy for businesses

Bascially, we are a recruitment company to some, an ad agency to others and a marketing consultancy to the rest, but splendid to all!

So that’s as clear as mud still, then! Look, why not just get in touch and we’ll try and explain everything…

(Oh and we are also partners with the UK’s Recruitment SEO guru who runs our sister company Search Natives that will help get your site found, ethically…)

Interviewing can be traumatic for applicant and interviewer, which makes preparation important if the results are to be meaningful and well prepared…

Net Natives bring clients closer to the applicants through our online flat fee recruitment services, we think that recruitment should be an open process and want you to learn how to be better recruiters. We have already provided an extensive list of sales questions, but you should also use competency based questions in any interview scenario.

Competency based questioning as a technique

Competency based interviewing seeks to determine how a candidate is likely to behave in the future, based on how they have behaved in the past.

Competency based questions seek evidence of how a particular problem, circumstance etc. has been handled in the past.

Below is a list of competency based questions to cover most scenarios you would require when interviewing…

• Ability to Plan

Example: Tell me about a time when you had to plan an event?

Question: What steps did you take? What were the results?

• Ability to Set Priorities

Example: Could you tell me a time when you were really busy with study, work or other commitments?

Question: How did you handle it? What did you do?

• Ability to Delegate

Example: Have you ever been in position when you had others helping you?

Question: How did you distribute tasks?

• Customer Relations

Example: Describe a situation that challenged your interpersonal skills?

Question: How did you manage the situation?

• Team orientation

Example: Can you think of a time when you have been involved with a group of people / team that was unhappy about something or who were faced with a specific challenge?

Question: What was the problem / issue? What you do? What was the outcome?

• Ability to deal with people at all levels

Example: Describe a situation where your work was criticized?

Question: Describe the situation. What happened?

• Problem Solving

Example: Tell me about a particularly difficult problem you have been faced with?

Question: How did you address this? What was the outcome?

• Learning

Example: Can you think of a time when you didn’t know what to do to solve a problem?

Question: What was the situation? What was the outcome?

• Coaching

Example: Give me an example when something was being done poorly?

Question: What did you do? What was the outcome?

• Attention to Detail

Example: Can you tell me a time when you missed an important detail in the workplace?

Question: What happened? What was the outcome?

• Communication Skills / Communicating with appropriate impact – oral and written / Communication & Influencing

Tell me about a time that you had to convey a complex message.  How did you choose to do this?  Who was the audience?  What were the results?

Give me an example when you had to persuade someone around to your way of thinking.

• Teamwork / Working Together / Sharing and Collaborating

Is there an example where you had to resolve conflict within your team?

Talk about an example where you have had to work with a colleague who had a very different style to you?  How did you do this?

• Customer or Client Service / Demonstrating a passion for Client Service / Delighting your customers

Where have you “gone the extra mile” for a client.  What was the outcome?

Talk about a client relationship that you had to turn around?

• Stakeholder Management / Building and Sustaining Successful Business Relationships

Let’s talk about a project you have been involved with where you had to manage stakeholder groups.  How did you go about this?  How did you measure your success?

• Demonstrating Integrity

Have you an example where you have had to challenge the actions of a colleague?

Have you ever been asked to do something you were uncomfortable with?  How did you deal with this?

• The Development of Others / Leading or Coaching – formal and informal

Give me an example where you had to give some difficult feedback.

Give me an example where you have worked to improve an individual’s performance.  What was the outcome?

• Your Own Self Development

Give me an example where you received some difficult feedback.  Talk about how you set personal objectives.

What are your objectives for your next role?

• Being Results Driven / Delivering Results

How do you define success?  How do you achieve it?

• Organisational Skills / Planning & Organising

Give me an example where you had to manage a specific project to deadlines.

Give me an example where you had to deal with two conflicting priorities.

An example where you were faced with unreasonable deadline?

We had a wonderfully busy 2009, working with over 100 new clients in the last 3 months alone, who now keep coming back for more. Here are some of ours and the UK’s job boards’ vital statistics for October to December 2009.

Our goal for 2010 is to help make recruitment open, transparent and helpful; we hope these stats will help you understand how the system works.

The Top 10 most applied for Job Titles

From the hundreds of individual campaigns Net Natives has run in the last 3 months, these are the most popular job titles based on candidate response.

Average No. of Applications per Role

By breaking down candidate responses into sectors, we can begin to see which sectors generate the most interest from online recruitment

*This figure is deceivingly good, due to an incredibly successful multi-platform client campaign.

How has does the UK’s Job Board network perform?

Here is a quick performance overview of our job board network over the last 3 months, to give you an idea of how each job board performed in relation to the number of applications for the last 3 months’ campaigns as wel as those applications that were shortlisted as extremely relevant. As you can see below, we don’t only use the major and niche UK job boards, but also search across many candidate databases as part of our flat fee service.

We love our stats here at Net Natives, but what do they all mean?  Have a look at our candidates job search post to get the inside track on candidate behaviour and how this relates to the stats we have.

But the ultimate statistic is which job board provide the best hires. It’s not that simple, with each providing strength in different areas, but we’ll provide more detailed statists in our next round up. In the meantime, we hope these are good enough for the time being

If you have any questions about our stats or want some more detailed information on our job board network please get in touch.

Because of the developments in online recruitment and the massive increase in services such as flat fee recruitment, more and more clients are seeing CVs that have not been “improved” by recruitment companies.

This means the candidate is back in control of their presentation, which is a wonderful thing, but means as an applicant you are responsible for how you are presented.

The CV is a marketing tool for you. It is your introduction to your future employer and dream job and it needs to have NO SPELLING MISTAKES and be relevant to the job/sector you are applying for. Here are a few do’s and don’t's that are essential when creating your CV and applying for a job.

First the dos…

1. Do make sure you highlight your CV with relevant keywords. With improvements in technology, more and more CVs are read with intuitive “parsing” technology. If you wish to be considered a sales executive, call yourself one!
2. Do make it clear in a 3 sentence synopsis who you are and what your skills are. Make this flexible but relate it to each job you apply for.
3. Do list your experience with most recent experience first.
4. Do clearly mark job titles and time of employment for each employer.
5. Do add facts and examples of work.
6. Do list duties AND achievements.
7. Do check EVERYTHING.
8. Do add the URL of your LinkedIn profile to your CV. Not sure how to use LinkedIn effectively for job searching? Have a look at our “Using LinkedIn for Job Searching” post.

Now the don’ts…

1. Don’t make any spelling mistakes. EVER.
2. Don’t waste time with video technologies. It’s just a gimmicky fad that succeeds in telling the employer what you look like and how you come across on camera, but not much else. Even worse, the format you use might not be viewable on a recruiter’s PC; or they might not find your CV from their database because they use a keyword search to find candidates. Even worse, some recruiters exclude any video applications – because they show the recruiter your age, skin colour and gender – all of which a recruiter cannot take into account on the grounds of discrimination.
3. Don’t include photos, unless you’re applying to be a model.
4. Don’t include tables or fancy formatting as your CV may not be read effectively by recruitment tools.
5. Don’t save in any format apart from word, as before, your CV may not be read effectively by recruitment tools.