Back issues of the newsletter - Issues 1 to 50
Welcome to the first edition of the Recruit Net Newsletter. The Newsletter has been designed to be short enough to be read on opening. However there should be enough detail to let you know if the site is going to be beneficial to you. Unless otherwise specified, sites mentioned have a UK focus; this is not to say that we won't be covering International resources.
http://www.cvserve.com - CVServe
This site has
recently been launched (December 1998), selling itself as both a CV Database and
a Vacancy Board. It focuses on the European market for IT, telecoms and
electronics. They obtain their CVs both from candidates registering direct and
from agencies registering part or all of their databases (similar to the CANDEX
service offered by PeopleBank). There are apparently over 45,000 CVs registered
on the database. Agencies and Corporate companies pay an annual fee of £1500,
which gives them access to the CV database and allows them unlimited advertising
on the vacancy part of the site. Vacancies advertised on CVServe are also placed
in appropriate newsgroups. If you place one of your candidates with an
organisation as a result of using this service a fee of £500 is payable to
CVServe.
CVServe are currently offering a free six-month trail, which allows you to advertise as many vacancies as you like; being free, it might be worth trying.
http://www.shell.co.uk/chopper/cho_route_inv.htm
- RoutePlanner
This is a very simple and plain site, however, the service
provided is extremely useful to those organisations and individuals who do not
already own route planning software. The site is provided by Shell. You enter
the starting point and destination for your journey, also entering any places
you wish to go via. The results are given in table format showing the exact
route, times of each stage and journey distance. The only grievance with the
site is that the distances are given in Kilometres not miles (although the
conversion formula is also given). This would also be a useful site to let
candidates know about, so they can sort out the route to their interview!
TIP OF THE WEEK
This may sound quite
straightforward, but if you're not doing it you could be wasting quite a lot of
on-line time. When looking at results from a search engine or directory query
open each web page you want to view in a different window (right mouse click and
choose "open in new window" option). This allows you to continue
looking through your search results as other web pages are loading. You'll have
to regulate how many windows you have open, depending on how slow the Internet
is, but I quite often have between 5 and 10 browser windows open at once.
UPDATES FROM THE WEB WORLD
We've recently added
an update to our Recruitment Directory - http://www.nmib.com/course/recdir.htm
Under the Vacancy Boards section there is a new link to additional UK vacancy
boards.. Let us know if you think we have missed any. In the very near future
we'll be adding links to International job vacancy boards.
I hope you find this information useful. The next Newsletter will be in a fortnight's time. Please don't forget to let me know about any good sites you're using.
http://www.beaucoup.com - Beaucoup directory of
Search Engines.
Quite a few of you have been asking for a list of search engines
and Beaucoup is the best I have come across. It lists more than 1,200 search
engines and directories across the world. I've found that the most useful way to
use the site is from the "BIG" Page (there's a link to it near the
start of the home page). This page links to a majority of the engines on the
site. The search engines and directories are classified geographically and by
major category. In the next issue I will tell you about a site which reviews the
usability of the top search engines. I am also trying to locate a good "UK
only" list of search engines and directories and will keep you updated.
http://people.yahoo.com - Yahoo! People Search -
Advanced Email Search.
Web sites that allow you to find email addresses for
individuals in the UK have been fairly poor to date. Yahoo's People Search
allows you to search for either the telephone number or email address of
individuals. But hidden within it is a feature you might well find useful.
Under Email search click on the link that says advanced. This takes you to the "Advanced Email Search" page that finds individuals within a specified organisation. For example enter the search term "Boots" or "Ericsson" into the "Organization Name" and click on "company" under the heading "Organization Type". Then click on search. This will bring up a list of matches, each showing the email address and Location (eg, Surrey, UK or IL, US). When you click on the name of the individual another screen shows further information such as secondary email addresses, employment details and University attended. You can also search for email addresses by domain. However if, for example, you type "boots.co.uk" some of the matches are surprising - "@boots.demon.co.uk" and "bootshop.com" as well as "@boots.co.uk". However if you do not know the full domain name - it works just as well typing "boots". You can also find people by past organisations or schools or find people by professional services or domain name.
TIP OF THE WEEK
When printing off pages from the
Internet ensure your browsers print options are set to print the URL of the web
page on all printed pages. This is useful if you circulate pages printed from
the Internet. It can also be used as a backup if you forget to add useful sites
to your Favourites/Bookmarks. I also find it useful to always print the date on
web pages, so I know how old the information is (although this doesn't tell me
when the page was last updated!). Full instructions for adding this feature in
Internet Explorer can be found under the heading "printing a web page"
in the help menu. In Netscape Navigator you can click an option box in the
"page set-up" dialog box (found from the File menu).
NEW UK RECRUITERS WEB SITE
I've recently spent
quite a bit of time working on a "Recruiters UK Home Page" - http://www.nmib.com/recruiter.
This is intended to be the ideal starting point on the Internet for all
recruiters. It is not yet "publicly" released, however, much of the
information is already on the site and I am offering you a chance to preview it.
As the name suggests, it's meant as a resource centre for UK recruiters -
containing links to web sites which are of use to recruiters, not only for
sourcing candidates and clients, but also for all other activities which take
place within either a recruitment consultancy or corporate recruitment
department. Categories include recruitment software organisations, associations
and institutes and recruitment advertising agencies. Hope you find it useful.
In issue #2, I promised to let you know about a site which reviews the usability of the top search engines. I'm actually going to feature three sites, all giving different types of information about search engines.
http://searchenginewatch.com/facts/major.html
If
you want to learn more about the major search engines and what they are good at
try this page from the Search Engine Watch web site. It gives a simple but
useful one-paragraph review of each of the "major players"
www.unn.ac.uk/features.htm If you use several of the major search engines and
want a quick checklist of the features that each supports try this site from the
University of Northumbria. The site lists the "top" seven search
engines and indicates whether they support such features as truncation and
proximity searches.
http://www.nueva.pvt.k12.ca.us/~debbie/library/research/adviceengine.html
Try this site to find which search engine is best for different search
scenarios. The site suggests potential reasons you would want to use a search
engine and recommends which tool would be most appropriate. For example if you
want to find Web pages from a geographic region it suggests using MetaCrawler as
it can search by continent.
http://www.hemscott.co.uk
Hemmington Scott are
publishers of financial information on UK registered companies. Their web site
contains a "company" section that has free information on over 2,300
UK registered companies. The depth of information varies, although very
comprehensive information is available on many of the companies, including 5
year summary P&L with balance sheet, daily share price, names of Directors
and major shareholders and a summary from the annual report. From the main menu
click on "UK Equities Direct" then "Companies" and then
either click on the A-Z section or enter a company name in the search box. This
site is certainly one of the best free sites for financial information.
Internet Tip
Are there a few sites you use on a
very regular basis, perhaps your favourite search engine or newspaper site?
Whilst the bookmarks/favorites option is useful, you can get even quicker access
by using the Personal Toolbar option (called Links in Internet Explorer). First
make sure the toolbar is visible (use the View menu). You can add sites to this
toolbar either by "dragging and dropping" the icon beside the URL or
from the bookmarks/favorites drop down menu. This means you are only one click
away from your most favourite sites!
http://www.usenet.org.uk/newsgroups.html - List
of all UK newsgroups
Within the UK Usenet Homepages site there is a complete
list of all Newsgroups within the uk.* hierarchy (there are approximately 300 UK
newsgroups). Each newsgroup has a short description of its purpose and whether
it is moderated. This site also contains the charters for each newsgroup and
other useful information. If you haven't used Usenet you are missing out on an
important part of the Internet. Newsgroups can be used to locate professionals
from specific industries, conduct research, post vacancies or even for
recreational activities! If you haven't already got access to newsgroups ask
your Internet Service Provider.
http://www.newstrawler.com - NewsTrawler
NewsTrawler is a search engine for newspapers and magazines. It covers hundreds
of news, magazine and journal sources from a broad range of countries. UK
specific sources include The Guardian, The FT, Electronic Telegraph, The
Scotsman and BBC News. Whilst you can perform a search on all the media it is
probably more productive to register and then customise your profile to only
search those sources that may be of interest to you. This service is free,
however, some of the news resources charge for retrieval of the article. The
main limitation is that NewsTrawler does not support date searches, so you can't
search for a story in a particular time period.
INTERNET TIP
A nice simple tip this week. If you
are finding a page is taking a long time to load press the Stop button on your
toolbar and then re-click on the link or, if the page has already started
loading, hit the Reload/Refresh button on your toolbar. Sometimes this can just
act to kick-start the process.
http://www.whitepages.com.au/time.shtml - White
Pages Directory
White Pages is the Australian equivalent of our Yellow Pages or
Freepages web site. However, the interesting bit is the World Time &
Dialling Codes feature. You enter the country you're calling from in one field
and the country you're calling to in the field(s) below (you can also enter a
specific city at this stage). The results show the current local time in both
locations with the dialling code you need to use. If you did not specify a City
on the previous screen you are given a drop down menu of Cities with appropriate
dialling codes. For those of us who get confused even when we know the time
difference they also give a handy table showing a comparison of times for the
next 24 hours!
http://www.hoovers.com/industry/resources.html -
Hoovers Industry Zone
If you have never come across the Hoovers site before then
you are already missing out on a great resource. However, we're looking at a
particular part of the site - the Industry Zone. Whilst some of the information
Hoovers provides is charged for, most of the industry zone is free. They do
"Snapshots" on many industries and the information is not just US
focussed. The list of Snapshots is found on the right hand side of the page
towards the bottom in a grey box (not to be mistaken with a similar box at the
top called Industry Sectors). Some of the industries they cover include
Automotive, Beverages, Computer Hardware, Household & Personal products and
Toys & Games - over 40 snapshots at present. As an example, if you are
trying to research the Biotechnology industry the snapshot contains a detailed
industry overview, an industry jargon glossary, links to pertinent web sites and
other news features as well as relevant statistics. Certainly a useful site -
they even have a "print ready" version of the Snapshots!
Camilla Woodhouse of Highfield International recommended this site, and as a result has won herself an Internet "goodie bag". To win yourself a goodie bag send me an email suggesting a site for recruiters and if I use it the goodie bag will be in the post!
INTERNET TIP
Sometimes when you look back
through your bookmarks/favorites you can have trouble working out from the name
what the site was. This is because the name is taken from the Web page title. If
the Webmaster hasn't chosen a descriptive name (eg, New Media in Business -
Internet Training) you could be left with something generic like "Home
Page". Once you've bookmarked the page you can edit the name in Netscape
Navigator by going into Bookmarks, Edit Bookmarks and then Bookmark properties
or in Internet Explorer by going into Favorites, Organise favorites and then
Rename.
http://www.ask.com
Ask Jeeves is a "natural
language" search service. This means you can ask your question in plain
English without having to use keywords or Boolean search terms. Ask Jeeves also
has a multi-search option that brings results from five other search engines.
The site is best used for searches where you want to find the answer to a
specific question, such as "where will I find a list of conferences in the
UK?" It does not perform so well when you are looking for results from a
number of sites, such as if you were looking for executive biographies of people
in the soft drinks industry. This is a nice tool, which has a good following
among the on-line community.
http://www.carol.co.uk
CAROL stands for Company
Annual Reports on Line, and the purpose of this site is to provide, free of
charge, the information from annual reports. In total there are about 2000
annual reports on the site. These are made up of the Top 500 UK companies, about
1000 European companies and another 500 Asian companies. The quantity of
information on each company varies as CAROL does not amend the reports in any
way, but instead just provides links to certain sections from the actual annual
report, including Chairman's Statement, Profit and Loss and Balance Sheet. This
is a useful site if you want to see the annual report as the organisation
intended, rather than a summary, as for example you get with the FT.Com site.
INTERNET TIP
If you get fed up waiting for all
the images to load every time you use a search engine why not try using the text
only versions. As they don't use fancy images they load much faster and they are
less distracting. AltaVista is at http://www.altavista.com/cgi-bin/query?text
and HotBot is at http://www.hotbot.com/text/
Just a quick note to let you know that I've started to add vacancy board profiles to the UK Recruiter's Home Page (http://www.nmib.com/recruiter) - these are intended to give a simple comparison of the UK vacancy boards available. I'll add more as the vacancy boards send their forms back to me!
As usual, any feedback and suggestions are most welcome, don't forget that if I use a site you suggest you'll get an Internet goodie bag.
This issue is focussing on sites which provide up to date business news in the UK.
http://www.news-review.co.uk
The main service
provided by the News Review site is the Weekend City Press Review. This is a
publication (either sent by email or post) which provides a summary of business
and economic news from the weekend newspapers. Whilst this service is fee based
(about £200 per annum) they have a full archive of all articles from back
issues of the Weekend City Press. This archive is searchable and nearly all the
articles are free to read. The newspapers from which they collate the articles
include the weekend editions of The Times, The Telegraph, The Independent and
Guardian, The Mail and The Express. A problem with just using the free archive
to research a particular organisation is that they don't include that week's
Weekend City Press, which might prove embarrassing if you were unaware of an
important issue that had just arisen that weekend!
http://www.ukbusinesspark.co.uk
UK Business Park
is made up of two main areas. One is the UK Activity Reports on different market
sectors. These give information, in the format of short articles, on
acquisitions, investment plans, new products and other major developments within
the sector you choose. These are normally distributed by email and whilst they
are charged for, they do offer a free 3-week trail. The other area of the site
is the archive from the UK Activity Reports - covering news articles on
approximately 1800 UK Companies. You can search on a company name or use the
alphabetical listing of organisations.
INTERNET TIP
A somewhat different tip this week.
A month or so ago my mouse started to play up and after a couple of weeks I got
a replacement. However, this isn't your standard run-of-the-mill mouse, this one
is a "Wheel Mouse". Whilst designed for use in all applications it is
especially useful for Internet use. It has a wheel in between the two buttons
which allows you to scroll up and down a page and zoom in on specific areas of
the page. Although perhaps it doesn't sound particularly impressive, it really
does speed up the use of the Internet - and now I've got the hang of it (after
only about 20 minutes) I would certainly not go back to a standard mouse again.
At around £10 + VAT you can get these from most computer supply shops.
http://www.thebiz.co.uk/gennoiass.htm The Biz -
National Official Information Sources
It can be quite difficult to locate
specific Associations and Institutes on the Internet. The Biz provides a list of
over 200 UK associations with either a link to the web site where it exists or a
page of contact details for those associations without a web site. The list is
in alphabetical order and is unfortunately not categorised by industry, so
whilst it is useful for browsing through it can be a little time consuming if,
as an example, you are trying to find the association connected with the Mail
Order industry. Despite the lack of a search facility and the fact that there
are obviously many other associations not listed, this site is well worth
remembering when trying to find a particular association.
http://www.jobadverts.com Job Adverts
There are
many vacancy boards available on the Internet (you can find information about
them on the UK Recruiter's Home Page - http://www.nmib.com/recruiter). However,
the distinctive thing about the Job Adverts site is that it is free to advertise
vacancies and access their CV database along with a number of other services. In
order to use the site you do have to register your details with them. The site
was only launched last month and already they are getting 50-60 new vacancies
added each day and have approximately 350 candidate CVs registered. The site is
still in its infancy, however it is probably going to be one worth watching!
INTERNET TIP
This week's tip is for Netscape
Navigator users. If sometimes when you are printing off web pages you find the
text doesn't show up clearly (or in fact at all) this is probably because the
page has been produced and therefore printed in a light colour. To print all
text on a page as black, go to "page setup" on the File menu and
select the black text option.
http://www.hoovers.co.uk
By now you are probably
well aware of how highly I rate the information available from the
www.hoovers.com site. Recently they have brought a UK version of the site on
line. They provide free company report profiles to the same level of detail as
on their US site. There are profiles on European and UK companies (over 500 UK
companies), giving an overview, financial history and links to competitor web
sites. They also have links to UK specific resources in subject areas such as
Travel, Business and Finance. I'm sure as time passes they will add more and
more information and that this site will become as useful in the UK as their US
site is in America.
http://www.forumone.com
Forum One is a search
facility for locating web forums (also called discussion forums, bulletin boards
or message boards). Web forums are similar to newsgroups and mailing lists - but
are available on the web directly from your browser (unlike newsgroups) and are
public discussion areas (unlike mailing lists). Forum One categorises many
forums by subject area and offers a search option to help you locate the
relevant forum. The search results show which category the forum falls into,
when a message was last posted and gives a short description of the purpose of
the forum. As there are so many forums the only problem with the site is that it
could take you quite a while to locate the ones you are interested in. However
as web forums can prove to be a useful research resource it could well be worth
the effort.
INTERNET TIP
To quickly add a web page to your
bookmarks/favorites file hold down Ctrl and press d, however, don't forget to
organise your bookmarks regularly!
http://www.rac.co.uk/html/services/froute.htm
The RAC Routefinder is a similar service to that provided by Shell (which I
reviewed in a previous recruit net newsletter). Using the RAC site seems to be
quicker than using the Shell offering and it also has some additional services.
To use the site you enter your starting point and destination and any Towns or
Cities you wish to go via. The results are given as a series of directions, with
traffic information next to each section of the journey. A large-scale map is
also produced showing the entire route, with the option to zoom in for more
detail. You also have the option of getting an updated route and latest traffic
news emailed to you at a date and time you specify, so you could sort your route
out a few days before travelling and arrange for the email to arrive 30 minutes
before you are due to leave the office. The only real niggle with the site is
even if you don't wish to have the route and traffic news emailed to you, you
still have to enter your email address.
www.websitez.com/
WebSitez is a free service
that can help you to locate web site addresses. It is often difficult to guess
the URL of a site you are looking as addresses can be complicated with
abbreviations and hyphens. To use the service all you need enter is the name of
the company, a keyword or part of the web site address and WebSitez searches its
database of over 1 million web addresses. It claims this database represents all
com net and edu web addresses in existence, the obvious downside of this is that
it is not going to help you if the company has registered a .co.uk address.
However, as long as you bear this in mind, it is still a great service. For
example I wanted to know all the web addresses for Unilever (my thinking being
that a large company like Unilever might register URL's for its products as well
as a corporate home page). I typed Unilever into the search field and ended up
finding over 100 sites managed by the Unilever company (UK and US), including
such sites as chicken-tonight.com and persil.com.
INTERNET TIP
If you are completing a form
on-line don't forget you can often move from field to field by using the tab
key, rather than re-positioning the cursor in each new box by using the mouse.
http://www.bt.com/phonenetuk/
BT white pages
allows you to search for an individual's home telephone number by their surname
and location (either Town, City or County). By entering part of a surname and
location (initials or street name are optional) you can search the BT 192
database to retrieve matches. If more than one match is found then all the
results are listed and to view an individual you click on their name. The final
result is shown as a name with initials, address and phone number.
Unfortunately, you cannot do a reverse search by entering a telephone number to
retrieve a name and address. As you might imagine, ex-directory phone numbers
are excluded. The site can also be used to search for business telephone
numbers, however it is not as comprehensive a service as others available on the
Internet (eg, scoot).
http://www.mirago.co.uk
Mirago is a new Search
Engine aimed specifically at UK users. Mirago does not only index UK and Ireland
sites - but also encompass International sites that are of interest to the UK
market. When entering your search term you can choose from a number of options,
eg, whether you search on "all of the words", "any of the
words", "the words as a phrase", etc. If you prefer you can
instead use the Boolean terms; AND, NOT, NEAR, etc. A useful feature is the
"Sort By" option, allowing you to determine the order in which the
results are displayed (this will not affect the total number of links returned).
For example you can sort by word density (how many times the search terms are
found in each page) or by how many other sites link to the site found.
INTERNET TIP
Did you know you could send the web
page you are looking at to someone else in an email? In Netscape Navigator right
mouse click on the web page and select "send to". In Internet Explorer
choose the File menu and then "send to" - you can either choose to
send the whole web page or just the hyperlink. Don't forget that the some web
pages can be quite large and that the person receiving the email might not be
best pleased if it takes a long time to download!
http://ww2.tscentral.com/EventCenter/index.jhtml
Finding information about trade shows can be difficult if you don't subscribe to
the correct industry magazines. This site called Trade Shows & Exhibitions,
aims to provide listing of all events in all industries. It is not UK specific,
but does have a fairly large amount of information on UK events. The search
facility allows you to locate an event by keyword, industry sector, geographical
location and/or date range. Sadly it doesn't cover all events taking place,
although it should be a good starting point. If any of you are using a site
which you feel provides better coverage, please let me know and I'll cover it
here in the next newsletter.
http://www.ft.com - Financial Times
I often
recommend the FT.com website to people when they want to locate annual report
type information. However if you only used FT.com for this you would be missing
out on lots more great information. It's not the easiest site to navigate and
you do have to register first, but don't let this put you off. When first going
into the site you will probably find it best to click on the site map button and
start off from there. As an example they have a section called "World's
Most Respected Companies", where they list the Top 40 companies worldwide,
reports on a number of specific companies, such as Nestle, Cargill and Toyota
and also the Top 10 Business Leaders worldwide. This particular information
might not be of use to everyone, however I think it shows the depth of
information available.
INTERNET TIP
Quite a few sites, like FT.com,
require you to register before you can use them, some use cookies so you don't
have to type your user name and password every time, but others do require you
to remember them. If you always use the same user name and password you'll
obviously find it a lot easier to remember. To be able to do this ensure you
pick an unusual user name so that someone else won't have already used it (eg,
your surname backward). You should of course use a different password on any
site where you are doing financial transactions - like an on line bank account.
http://www.thebiz.co.uk
Since I last reviewed
the "The Biz" site it has undergone a complete transformation. They
have re-designed the site both in terms of looks and content, making navigation
simpler and adding extra sections. The Biz is a business-to-business resource,
listing organisations and giving editorial where possible. The site has two
major parts, the "Main Directory" and the new "Office
Portal". The directory is split into 14 categories (such as Financial,
Marketing and Telecoms), each of which is sub-categorised (eg, for Financial the
sub-categories include auditors and factoring). Within each sub-category
organisations are listed, some with editorial, with a link to their web site or
if no web site exists, details of address and/or telephone numbers. The Office
Portal contains listings of companies who provide on-line products and services,
such as Corporate Insurance (business to business - not consumer goods). The
site has an improved search facility - allowing you to not only search the
entries, but also the category headings - often leading you in the right
direction. Finally The Biz also has an Event Zone - listing "a few hundred
UK events" - you can search by name, date, sector, venue, etc.
This brings me on to the next site, which was recommended by Sara McGingle of CMP Media (who as a result has won herself an Internet goodie bag).
http://www.itbulletin.co.uk
IT Events
Bulletin" is an "e-mail newsflash designed to keep you up to date with
forthcoming seminars, conferences and exhibitions within the UK technology
sector". It is a free service where you specify your areas of interest when
subscribing and then receive relevant emails twice a week. Some of the events
are free to subscribers of the bulletin. The site is run by IT Events http://www.itevents.co.uk/
and on their corporate home page you can also find information on exhibitions
and conferences that they organise within the IT industry.
INTERNET TIP
Once you get used to searching on
the Internet you tend to find your favourite search engine and stick to them.
This is great if you spend time getting to grips with the advanced features.
However, even the major search engines apparently only index up to a third of
the Web - you could easily be missing the information you are looking for. If
you don't get the results you want - either try different search engines
(perhaps a multi-search engine like Dogpile - http://www.dogpile.com) or use
subject specific directories (I'll try to cover some of these in future
newsletters).
http://www.freetranslation.com
FreeTranslation.Com is a site which allows you to enter text in one language and
then converts to another (the languages it can work with include Spanish,
French, German and Italian). The technology used "doesn't simply translate
text word by word but actually analyzes sentences based on the rules of the
language and translates the words and phrases in the context of the original
document." It is safe to say that this is not a perfect art; the results
occasionally appear incomprehensible, however, normally at the very least you
can get the gist of the document. This service can be used for gaining a general
understanding of a piece of text from an email or website. For material you
would wish to put in front of a client it seems the only answer is still human
translation.
The other site I have reviewed seems to be having technical problems today. Sorry about that - but I'll add it to the next newsletter (assuming it's fixed by then!)
INTERNET TIP
This is an Altavista specific tip.
If you are having problems with large numbers of hits to a search query but
little relevance - you can try to make the results more specific to you by using
the Title Search option. For example, by using the search term "title:
petrochemical" you will bring back only pages with the word petrochemical
in the title of the page. Of course you still need to choose your key word(s)
carefully - to be relevant and if possible fairly uncommon.
http://www.multimap.com
Multimap is one of a
number of similar map sites available on the Internet. What differentiates it
from the others is that it is the only service with street level maps of the
whole of the UK. You enter a postcode, place name, London street or grid
reference and press the Search button. A map of that area is returned with a
scale indicator at the bottom. You can zoom into any area by clicking on that
part of the map. They have also been beta testing maps for other countries
(mostly European) although these are not generally available to street level.
Additionally they have plans to introduce a route-planner service.
**This site was recommended by Elliot Davies of Executives on Assignment Limited**
http://www.askalex.co.uk
ASKALEX is a searchable
database of over 1.8 million UK organisations - they have the largest database
of this nature, accessible via the Internet, in the UK. To use the service you
enter a "Name, Product or Service" and, if relevant to your search,
the area (Town, County or Postcode) for which you are searching. The results are
shown in a table with the company name and phone number, then address details
and finally details of their product or service. A maximum of 50 companies are
returned in the results so you may have to refine your search to get the
companies you want. Those who have paid for a "priority listing" are
displayed first - with the rest of the results in no particular order (meaning
that doing the same search just 10 minutes later might bring back different
companies if there are more than 50 meeting the criteria). The downside I find
to the service is that only those companies with a priority listing are given a
link to the web site address that would be frustrating if you wanted to view web
sites rather than make phone contact.
**This site was recommended by Clair Banks of Mercuri Urval**
INTERNET TIP
Sometimes when you enter a web page
via a search engine you will be taken to somewhere within the site rather than
the home page. This is great if you find the information you are looking for on
that page and then wish to leave the site, however, it is more likely you will
wish to look around the site for more information. Some sites only put
navigation links on a frames page (often running down the left side of your
browser) and quite often if you don't enter at the home page you don't get to
see the frame. If you are having problems working out what is on the site and
suspect this is the case cut the URL back to the basics (eg, www.nmib.com -
rather than www.nmib.com/recruiter/vbprof.htm) and start again from there.
http://www.acronymfinder.com
Acronym Finder has
a searchable database of over 100,800 entries (growing rapidly). Unlike some
similar services they do not limit themselves to Internet related acronyms. The
site is very simple to use. You can either enter the acronym and search for its
meaning or do a "reverse lookup". When you enter the acronym there is
an option for a "begins with" search - if you are not sure what the
acronym is you can enter the first few letters, however, this seems to
invariably bring back a great number of hits. An alternative would be to use the
"reverse lookup" option. This allows you to find the correct acronym
for a "meaning". You enter a keyword and find all those acronyms that
include the word. As an example if you wanted to find the potential key words
when recruiting for qualified accountants you would type in
"accountant" - the results would include such acronyms as CIMA, ACCA
and CICA. With this information you could search CV Databases, use the correct
terminology in an advert, etc. The results also show if the term is specific to
a certain country, so against CII (Chartered Insurance Institute) is says UK.
Finally the database has some rather strange (and/or amusing) acronyms such as
ITBOTFTBD - It's The Business Of The Future To Be Dangerous.
http://www.warwick.ac.uk/cgi-bin-Phones/nng
The
University of Warwick provides a searchable database of UK Telephone Codes. This
information is made available from Oftel's listings (which from their web site
is not searchable!). You can search either for a full UK phone number, an area
code, an exchange name or a town, city or village. For example to find out where
the person with a telephone number starting 01635 is based you would enter
"01635" in the search field and click submit. The results show this is
the area code for Newbury and then lists the exchanges in that area, allowing
you to narrow down the location even further. If you get a message, for example
"to call Norwich 48892" you can enter Norwich in the search box and it
will tell you what the area code is. The site also provides information on BT
phone charges and an area map showing where in the UK the exchange is situated.
There is another similar site to this (recommended to me by Elliot Davies) at
http://www.brainstorm.co.uk/utils/std-codes.html. The site also has a search
facility and lists all the UK codes (which might be useful for printing off) but
it doesn't seem to be as up to date as the University of Warwick's' site.
INTERNET TIP
The Financial Times, FT.Com
(http://www.ft.com), is giving free access to their Global Archive of news from
over 3,000 worldwide publications until August 23. You need to be registered
with FT.Com to be eligible - but you can register free of charge. From the home
page click on the "Free Research" link on the left hand side of home
page.
http://www.alltheweb.com
FAST is a relatively
new search engine (launched in May 1999), but one which has superb coverage of
the Internet. It has already indexed 25% of the Internet (200 million pages),
more than any other search engine - AltaVista has indexed 19%. [These figures
are taken from www.searchenginewatch.com and are based on an estimate of 800
million total pages on the Web] Whilst FAST has a very simple look and feel you
can still use advanced search techniques. The main options are to search for
"all the words", "any of the words" or "the exact
phrase". However by choosing "any of the words" you can use the +
(word must exist in the document) - (word must not exist in the document) and
"" (the exact phrase must exist in the document) symbols. This
certainly puts FAST in a similar league to AltaVista and Northern Light and is
certainly a search engine I'll be using on a regular basis.
http://www.royalmail.co.uk/paf/pcodefin.htm
The
Royal Mail has a Postcodes On-line service where you can search for any Postcode
within the UK. You enter the address details (Number, Building name or business
name with Street and Town details) and then click on Search. The results are
returned as a list of "delivery points" - showing the full address
(including company name if relevant) and postcode. Alternatively if you have the
postcode but not the address the "Address Finder" runs a reverse
search where you enter the postcode with Number, building name, or business name
if you know it. The site certainly seems to be accurate and quick to use. The
only downside is that you are limited "to 50 correct look-ups in any 24
hour period". If you need to do more than this either use a different
machine (if you can) or try www.afd.co.uk who run a similar site based on the
Royal Mail database and who allow up to 20 searches a day.
INTERNET TIP
A combination of a tip and site
recommendation this issue. We've recently made some major updates to the
Internet HyperGlossary we maintain at http://www.hyperglossary.co.uk. The site
is for business users who want to know how to get the most out of the Internet.
As well as an A-Z of Internet terms there are detailed explanations of the major
Internet concepts and a "how to" section on such topics as creating a
web site and using the Internet.
http://www.countyweb.co.uk
COUNTYWeb is an
on-line directory of UK businesses. When you first enter the site click on
"Top 1000" to bring up a list of the top 1000 companies in the UK (50
at a time). This list is organised by sales turnover, but you can also choose to
re-order by number of employees or alphabetically. When you click on a company
name a small window is shown with the nature of the business, address and phone
number. To see the top companies in a certain county click on the map of the UK
and choose a county. Some of the counties (eg, Oxford) have a list of 1000
companies, however some of the smaller counties (eg, Cornwall) only have a few
hundred. Once you are "within" a county you can conduct a
"business search" - this allows you to search for companies in that
geographical location by industry sector. Another service offered by COUNTYWeb
is their "Job Locator" service. It is free to post vacancies and view
CVs. It currently has "177 Job Vacancies submitted by 51 Employment
Agencies across the UK and also contains the CV's of 424 Job Applicants".
http://www.nmib.com/recruiter/cvdbase.htm
I've
recently been working on an article for Recruitment International that should be
published this week. It looks at CV Databases available in the UK and gives a
comparison of the key features (including number of CVs and the cost of use).
I'll be adding a link to it from The UK Recruiter's Home Page later in the week
- but for now it's only available to subscribers of recruit net. I am always
interested in the success, or otherwise, that you have with CV Databases (and of
course Vacancy Boards) so if you are inspired to have a free trail of one of the
sites please let me know how you get on.
HELP WANTED!
I'm putting together an updated
list of sites that provide FREE financial information via the Internet on UK
companies. These would include sites like FT.Com and Hoovers UK. I'm interested
in knowing which sites you use to find background information out about
organisations and key financial statistics. Also, do you use sites that provide
on-line annual reports? I'd like to include a comparison of the best sites so if
you prefer a particular service please let me know the URL, which key features
you use and why you like it.
All information I receive will be fed back via the newsletter.
http://www.companieshouse.co.uk
Whilst the
Companies House web site is in part a "shop window" for it's paid for
information services it also offers some useful free information. On the home
page click on the Free Information link - this takes you to a screen with links
to "Disqualified Directors" and "Companies Name & Address
Index". These two links offer access to the appropriate companies house
databases (These databases are only active between 8am and 8pm Monday to
Friday). To search the database of companies enter the company/branch name or
company/branch number into the search fields and click on search (other options
are given if you want to select dissolved names, proposed names, etc). If more
than one match is found you can select from a list. The results show name and
registered office, company number, date of incorporation, company type, SIC
code, accounts information, previous names, etc. The database of disqualified
directors works in a similar way. You enter the surname of the person you are
looking for and click search. Again if more than one person with that surname is
found you can select from a list. The name of the person is given along with
address and disqualification dates. The reason for disqualification is also
given as a code - click on the code to view a pop up information screen. This
service is easy to use even if it hasn't embraced the web philosophy of
"open all hours"!
http://www.ft.com/ftsurveys/country/ Country
Profiles from FT.Com.
Those of you who are registered with FT.Com may already be
aware of this service that FT.Com are promoting this month. The Country Briefs
part of the FT site contains in depth profiles on many countries worldwide.
There is News commentary, review of political structure, maps key economic
indicators, demographics and statistics and much more. There is also a column
with links to sites outside of FT.Com that are relevant to that country, such as
media organisations and trade councils. On the countries I looked at there
seemed to be a great deal of information. However from what I could tell the
profiles are not updated very often, for example Sweden's was dating from May
1999. Regardless of this it is certainly up to the usual standard of FT.Com
Recruitment99 Just wanted to let you know that I'll be at the Interviewer event on September 30th and October 1st. If you are intending to go, please come and see me on the Learning Curve stand (we partner with them to offer the "Candidate Resourcing Using the Internet" course and I'm going to be helping them out for a couple of days). I'd love to meet you and find out how you are using the Internet and perhaps share some ideas. (You can get free tickets for the event by calling Interviewer on 01203 230333). Hope to meet you there.
A couple of weeks ago someone from this newsletter mailing list asked me about the best way to obtain information on Polish owned companies which operate in the UK. The following two sites, although very different, both provide this information. They also both have much more to offer.
http://www.tagish.co.uk The Tagish site contains thousands of links to useful web sites - these are found under the heading "Essential List". The main categories of information are UK Government, World Government, Telematics and the Information Society, Embassy Contact Details Worldwide, Worldwide Government Web Sites, UK Universities and UK Healthcare Providers. As an example of how to use the site I'll use the search I did for Polish Companies. Enter the links area by clicking on "Essential List" (to the left of the opening screen) and then from the links at the top of the page choose "Embassy Contact Details Worldwide". On this page you can either look for embassies by country of origin or by host country. In order to find the information I was looking for, I choose "..by host country" and then U (for UK). Under each country's heading you get a list of embassies in alphabetical order with links to the embassy's web site (where it exists). By following the link to the Polish Embassy web site and then clicking on Economy I came across the "Teleadresun Directory of Polish Companies (which is a bit like Kompass). They had a button to switch to an English version of the site where I was able to search their database. Using the Tagish site you can get access to embassies for any country and within any country in the world. Not all have web sites - but all have contact details.
http://www.mrweb.com The MR Web site is aimed at Market Researchers. The free information is available under the heading of Desk Research, with the sub categories - Sector Grid, Countries and Search Engines. Clicking on "sector grid" takes you to a list of about 30 industry sectors with links to press, top companies, trade associations, etc. There is a UK bias but there are sites from all over the world. Under the heading of "countries" there is a comprehensive directory of International Yellow Pages. For each country there are (subject to availability) links to a White Pages, Yellow Pages and Web site directory. This area of the site is organised by continent and then alphabetically by country. The "search engine" part of the site is quite limited only 5 linked to.
For the Polish query I went into the "countries" part of the site to look for a Yellow Pages directory of Poland. Choosing Europe and then Poland took me to a link to the "Polish Business Directory" where I could search for Polish companies based in the UK.
UPDATE Some of you may have been using the Dun & Bradstreet web site to obtain information on organisations by industry. The site has now been re-designed and this free information has been removed. They allow you to do a search to obtain a "count" of companies matching your criteria. However the actual information is only available to those who pay!
http://www.surfwax.com SurfWax is a meta-search engine that whilst still in "beta" is a useful addition to the other search tools currently around. SurfWax retrieves results from seven search engines; AllTheWeb (which I reviewed in issue 17), AltaVista, Excite, Google, InfoSeek, Lycos and Yahoo. To get the best results you would use the standard + - and "" symbols, and you should bear in mind that SurfWax is not case sensitive. The search results are returned as a list of titles (in alphabetical order) for the sites that have been found to the left of the screen with a key on the right. Next to each result is a symbol showing which search engine it has been returned from. When you click on the title of a web page it is opened in a separate browser window. This is a great feature that allows you to work through the search results while pages are loading, although you can easily end up with too many browser windows open at once. Other features of SurfWax are the SiteSnaps and Focus options. If a SiteSnap is available a green button appears before the web page title. The SiteSnap is a site summary that should allow you to determine if the site is relevant to your search quicker than it would take to load the actual page. The Focus option allows you to put more or less emphasis on certain words that SurfWax has decided are relevant to your search.
http://www.uk.sage.com/business/hm_business.asp This site was recommended by Colin Pearson of Eutech Engineering Solutions Ltd (who wins himself an Internet goodie bag). The Sage Business Channel is a mini-portal of business relevant sites that has been put together by Sage UK. Examples of sites linked to include a translation tool, events listings, postcode lookup, the BT Phone Number site and a map tool. In addition there are a number of "features", these are short articles on subjects such as PR, non-executive directors and the minimum wage. The features are fairly recent, so the page may still be in development - with more links to be added. The Sage site also has a useful News page with links to the main newspapers, weather and sports information. It also has summaries on major news stories. Another link is to a Travel page that again contains quite a lot of information. This site does provide a useful starting point for some areas of research although as with most sites of this nature it is not yet comprehensive enough to rely on for all information needs.
http://www.bird-online.co.uk bird-online is essentially a one-stop shop for UK and Irish business information and resources. It is especially good for locating new information sources. The site works as a directory; you can select the category you are interested in and a list of sites for that heading is returned. Each site listed has a short review and a link to the actual web site. The categories on the site include Business Intelligence, Company Research, Europe and IT and Communications. There are thousands of sites listed within bird-online. It is completely free to use the site, although some of the web sites that are listed may charge for services. Other sectors on the site include business events, business suppliers, and business diagnostics. The sites are all hand chosen to provide information relevant to the category they are listed in (apparently they reject about 75% of all sites suggested to them). All of the sites contain actual information - rather than another list of links and bird-online are committed to continually add new websites to the categories.
http://www.altavista.com In the last week AltaVista have relaunched their website. The site looks different and contains new functionality. They now claim to include 90% of websites within their index and to have improved the relevancy of results. A new feature is the addition "Company Factsheets" (containing information taken from the Hoovers database) for "an array of companies". It is not apparent how many companies have factsheets but for those that do this is a useful addition. They also seem to have improved the directory part of the site with "hand-picked sites" across many categories. This part of the site is structured in a very similar way to Yahoo and is easy to navigate. If you are not currently using AltaVista as one of your main search engines now is a good time to give it a try.
NET NEWS There are a couple of new sites that might be of interest to those of you involved in recruitment for your own company - Recruiters Online (http://www.recruitersonline.co.uk/recon.htm) and Boris Web (http://www.borisweb.co.uk). Recruiters Online (owned by Jackson Deville) is a vacancy board for recruitment jobs (eg, recruitment consultant, researcher, etc) - they do not allow 3rd parties to advertise (ie, no recruitment to recruitment firms). Boris Web is a CV Database of recruitment consultants/researchers, etc. The service works in a similar way to many other of the CV Databases by charging a fee if you take on a candidate. It is interesting that they also take up references for each candidate before placing the CV on the database.
http://www.searchability.com SearchAbility is a website with detailed reviews of "gateway" sites to specialised search engines. When looking for information on the Internet often the first step can be trying to establish which is the correct search engine, from literally thousands, to use. As well as the major search engines (AltaVista, HotBot, etc) there are those that specialise in certain areas - in fact there is probably a search engine for any subject you could think of. SearchAbility helps you to select the most appropriate search engine by listing guides (also called gateway sites) with a description of each one. Information such as subject coverage and what areas it is especially useful for are given. SearchAbility will give you links to search engines you may never otherwise hear of or come across which may have the specialised information you are looking for. However, one word of caution, it is always better to conduct your initial search with one of the main search engines (or a multi-search site like www.surfwax.com) before trying a specialised search engine. The specialised sites will not have indexed as wide a scope as the general sites and you may miss an important lead or piece of information.
http://www.corporateinformation.com CorporateInformation is a superb resource for researching a company. The site contains research reports on over 15,000 publicly traded companies from around the world, with 20,000 "company profiles" and direct links to over 300,000 company profiles on other web sites. From the home page you can either select the link to "UK" or conduct a company search (searching the worldwide database). If you click on UK you are taken to a page where you can either search for a UK Company (at the bottom of the screen) or go to other sites offering information on UK companies (these include the excellent Hoovers, FT and Hemmington Scott sites I've previously reviewed). When you do a company search the system returns the company information and profile links within their own site as well as four or more of the most useful other sites listing that company. The information you get from CorporateInformation is very detailed and depending on the company includes: Company Description, Competitor Analysis, Sales Analysis, Stock Performance, Dividend Analysis and Financial Position. All this information is free as are the services provided by most of the other sites linked to.
http://www.publist.com PubList.Com is a reference tool and directory of over 150,000 print and electronic publications. It is a worldwide resource which lists information on over 16,000 UK based publications. To search the database you can either do a "Quick title search" or an advanced search. The advanced search option allows you to search by title, publisher, subject, country, ISSN or a combination of these. Once the results are returned you can select individual publications and view detailed information. Typically this information covers publication type, frequency, editor, publisher, address and email. Whilst I was not able to locate all the publications I was looking for, this is the best free service I have come across and the site appears to be adding new publications on a fairly regular basis.
http://www.odci.gov/cia/publications/factbook/ The Central Intelligence Agency World Factbook is an annual publication that is made available, free of charge, via the Internet. The site contains a list of over 250 countries worldwide on which there is detailed information. The information covers geography, people, government, economy, communications, transportation, military and transnational issues. The depth of information does vary depending on the country; however, on the countries I looked at there was a very comprehensive analysis available. This would be a good site for starting country research.
INTERNET TIP Don't forget that at the recruit net newsletter's web site - The UK Recruiter's Home Page (http://www.nmib.com/recruiter) - we have a section of "suppliers of products and services to the recruitment industry". This is a listing of UK companies offering services to the industry such as training, skills & psychological testing, recruitment software, recruitment to recruitment, etc. If you know of a company who should be added please let me know.
http://www.martex.co.uk/taf/lookupfr.htm The Trade Association Forum provides this Associations Directory. It contains a listing of over 600 UK associations. The associations are listed either alphabetically or by industry, unfortunately you can't search the site. If you know the name of the association you are looking for you would click the "A-Z" graphic. This takes you to a screen where the alphabet is in a small area at the top left of the screen. Click on the first letter of the association's name in this window. A list of associations starting with that letter will be shown in the frame below. To view details on an association click on the name. Information includes a brief overview, postal address, phone and key contact information. Those associations listed with an image of www in little red box also have a link to their web site. If you don't know the name of the association you are looking for you can click on the link to industries and then choose an industry to view all the associations within that industry. This site was recommended by Sara Harrison of TMP.MSL.
http://195.58.66.13/reed/salary_calculator/main.htm This is the "Regional Salary Calculator" from the Reed Online recruitment agency. The service is offered to candidates to help them determine how much they would be earning based on their current salary if they moved to another part of the UK. On the first screen you enter the area in which the person is currently working (the areas you choose from are Greater London, South West, West Midlands, etc) and then the area that the person is moving to. You press the red button containing the white arrow to move to the next screen. On this screen you are asked to be a bit more specific about the localities, then you enter the present salary in £'s and press the calculate button. The result shows what you could expect to earn in the new region. This site uses figures from the Office for National Statistics New Earnings Survey 1997. However, despite the fact this survey was done two years ago the same ratios should still apply.
I actually found this site when searching for one that will give suggested salaries for certain job roles in different areas of the UK (eg a Marketing Director in the West Midlands). I haven't so far come across a site of this nature - if you know of one please let me know and earn yourself a goodie bag!
ONE FOR THE HOLIDAYS http://www.whatsonwhere.com With the holidays coming up I have added a "leisure" site this week. This UK site is for those of you who have turned up in a town on holiday, only to discover that you've missed the spectacular annual festival by only a few days. In the words of the site "While there are great specific-interest sites out there on the big, bad web, they are often hard-to-find in the needle-in-the haystack cyber world. So we wanted to create a site which would make sure that you don't miss the great events going on around the world". Categories include music, sport, family, film, performing arts, food & drink, gay & lesbian, home & garden and travel. The site was recommended by Christina Darell-Browne.
This is the last recruit net newsletter before Christmas. Have a fantastic break - see you back on the 5th of January 2000. As usual, any feedback and suggestions are most welcome. Don't forget that if you suggest a site that I then review you'll get an Internet goodie bag!!
http://www.statistics.gov.uk/ This is the web site for the Government Statistical Service (GSS). The role of the GSS is "To provide Parliament, government and the wider community with the statistical information, analysis and advice needed to improve decision making, stimulate research and inform debate." The main areas of the site are "StatBase", "UK in figures" and "Publications on Line". StatBase provides access to key statistics drawn up from the full range of official statistics. You can either click on STATSTORE to view all datasets available (790 at present) or click on STATSEARCH. You search the StatBase catalogue by first selecting a theme (eg, Banking and Finance), then a subject (eg Finance Leasing) and then a topic (eg, income and expenditure) - any matching documents are displayed. Some of the statistical analysis is charged for - although much of the information on the GSS site is free of charge. The UK in Figures part of the site contains statistics on such topics as Economic and Financial Trends, Health, Housing, Employment, etc. Publications on Line is a listing of other surveys available such as Scottish Office Publications. Finally, under the heading "Latest News Releases" there are the last 30 days of statistical press releases (however, you will need the adobe acrobat reader to view these). These currently cover many topics such as business investment, retail sales and motor vehicle production. This site was recommended by Christina Darell-Brown.
http://www.egroups.com eGroups.com is a web site providing a mailing list type service. You can either create your own group or join one you feel relevant. They currently manage over 300,000 groups. All sorts of groups exist including many non-business groups (eg, cooking, sports, etc). You can use eGroups.com to set up a group whose members can send and receive emails, schedule meetings, share files or have private group chats. Companies may look at using this site to allow them to communicate with specific clients or groups of candidates - perhaps using the bulletin board facilities and the group calendar to schedule meetings or conferences. You can also keep a bookmark or favorites list of web sites of most interest to the group. Use of the eGroups.com service is free, as it is supported by "discreet" advertising. For a small monthly fee there is a "no-ads" option available. This site was recommended by Nick Terry of FSS Group.
THE HUNGER SITE - http://www.hungersite.com This site was recommended by Chris Murphy of Ravensbourne Research Limited. Some of you may have already come across it - but being such a worthwhile site it is worth mentioning as much as possible. The Hunger Site is a non-profit site giving all monies raised to The United Nations World Food Programme. From the home page you click on the "Donate Free Food" button, this registers your donation and takes you to the "thank you" page that shows the sponsor or sponsors who will pay for your donation. This site does not cost you anything - and only takes a minute or so for you to visit. As Chris points out though most of the sponsors are US firms so you are less likely to actually buy anything from them. Well worth taking two minutes to visit.
http://maps.altavista.co.uk/altavistauk/startmap.hm Using Alta Vista's map service you can either get an overview map of a town or city in the UK or request driving directions. The overview map service is similar to the ones provided by streetmap (www.streetmap.co.uk) and multimap (www.multimap.co.uk). However, the maps on Alta Vista do only give an overview rather than the amount of detail that you get with the streetmap service. To use the driving directions you enter the address you are starting from and the address you are driving to. The results page gives you an overview map with the route highlighted, the distance of the journey and the estimated travel time the journey will take. Below this are detailed directions. One of the great things about this site is that it is quick to use and if you print the results off you get uncomplicated instructions to take with you. Additionally if you need more detailed instructions you can click on the "show manoeuvre maps" link to see the driving directions with images of exactly what to do each step of the way. When using this site you will need to know the postcode in order to get the best results, and also remember, as the site states, "you should always do a reality check and make sure the roads still exist"!
http://www.newswatch.co.uk This site offers a daily roundup of the news stories reported by the British press. Essentially they take the major stories of the day and summarise them. The site states they offer an "objective and non political analysis of news events". The home page of the site has an index down the left hand side with all the topics covered on the site. These include book reviews, stories from the music press, video and cinema news, celebrity gossip and weather forecasts. In the centre of the home page is a small section of bullet-point "Breaking News" stories and a link to "What the Papers Say". The breaking news section is updated as news stories come in and the daily roundup is delivered to the site by 9am every day. The news stories are split into Headlines, Business and Sport. This is a great site if you want to see the main stories each day, without wading through a stack of daily newspapers. Whilst you can look through the archives on the site, if you are looking for a search engine for archives of UK news stories you could try http://www.newstrawler.com
http://www.ukbusinessnet.com
UK Business Net states that they aim "to be the most comprehensive business-to-business information resource and marketing forum on the Internet". The site holds over 5,000 pages of free information, including material covering the financial markets, trade news, seminars and conferences, industry publications, etc.
One of the larger areas of the site is the "UK Companies Database". This database, which is searchable alphabetically, by sector or geographic region, contains contact details for over 2,000 UK business-to-business firms with an Internet presence. The database lists head office address, phone and fax numbers, URL and email address. Some of the companies have a more detailed listing with details of services/products offered.
The "Financial Index" contains content from stock and currency markets. Some of the available information includes business exchange rates, UK market indices, world market indices and tourist exchange rates. The site states that these pages are updated every weekday morning.
The "Trade News" section offers current trade news with editorial submissions from business-to-business companies across 190 different sectors. The "PR Centre" can be used to find archives from the Trade News service.
The "UK Trade Events Diary" is a database of UK exhibitions and conferences. The events listings are not searchable but can be viewed by name, date, venue, alphabetically or by sector.
The "Trade Media Index" is a listing of over 1,200 UK trade & technical publications, UK Newspapers and Broadcast Media. The listings give traditional contact information and links to e-mail and websites where appropriate.
Finally the "UK Business Net Datafile" has Internet links to external resources covering such topics as finance, politics, government, trade associations and training.
This site is a wealth of information and is continuing to grow. Some of the resources are more useful than others - but it's a good back up resource.
Contents: Financial Times restructure - Internet Resources newsletter - recruit net subscription form.
www.ft.com The Financial Times web site has long been a fantastic resource for much company information. They have, in the last few days, revamped the site. As well as sporting a new design and features they have added a different navigation system. It is this navigation system that will probably make the most difference when using the site. The new approach provides a navigation frame to the left of the page. This is used to select the areas of site you want to visit and can then be "hidden" if you wish to get a better view of the page more easily.
For those of you who have not used the FT.Com site before, the main features include a very comprehensive "News & Analysis" section, the "Markets and Portfolio" section (this section contains stock prices, company reports and financials) and the "Search & Archive" sections. As well as these core areas that have been on the site for some time they have added some new features. The new features include: office tools (personal email, file storage, and an online diary), discussion forums for key business topics and dossiers about key people in business. This site contains a wealth of information and is worth having a good look around.
http://www.hw.ac.uk/libwww/irn/irn.html The Internet Resources Newsletter is published on the web every month by Heriot-Watt University Internet Resource Centre. The newsletter highlights new Internet resources that are relevant to researchers and business users (with an emphasis on the research interests at Heriot-Watt University - these include engineering, science, and social science). Each month there is an A-Z of new sites with a short description of the site's content. There are also sections on Internet related publications, a book review and updates on new mailing lists and news forums. You do not need to subscribe to be able to view the newsletter. The major fault you could find with this site is that whilst it does provide archives of past issues, these are not searchable. However, this site is definitely worth the time it takes to visit once a month and look through the new listings of Internet resources
Contents: Executive Grapevine + Britannica.Com + recruit net subscription form.
http://www.executive-grapevine.co.uk Executive Grapevine publish a number of recruitment orientated directories, including one listing UK Executive Recruitment Consultants, one of International recruiters and a directory of Non Executive Director's/Interim Management providers. They also publish a magazine for search firms, called "The Head-hunter".
The Executive Grapevine web site is used to give information on the publications they sell (which can be bought on line) but is also potentially a useful resource for recruiters. Topical recruitment news is highlighted on the site with some content from back issues of Head-hunter magazine.
They have a number of "notice boards" on the site, including one for executive recruitment and one for career development and outplacement discussions. These allow recruiters to post messages onto the web site and could be used to ask for advice on a recruitment related project or to provoke discussion on issues from within the industry. Visitors can also subscribe to the recruitment database. This is a paid for service which allows the user to search the Executive Grapevine publications.
This site is worth keeping an eye on - as no doubt some of the content will prove of interest to recruiters at all levels.
http://www.britannica.com The Britannica.com web site was created by the people who publish and sell the world famous Encyclopaedia Britannica. All the information on the web site is free. You can either browse the site or simultaneously search the encyclopaedia, reviewed web sites, magazine articles, and certain books. Britannica.com have reviewed more than 125,000 web sites and the articles may be from more than 70 magazines (including Newsweek and The Economist)
Also included on the site is news from washingtonpost.com (this is world news - but does have a strong US focus). There are also market data and weather forecasts - again with a US focus. However, the site promises that upcoming releases of Britannica.com will include more local content for the UK.
This is a very comprehensive site with a good search facility. Searches I have conducted to test the site rewarded me with worthwhile results.
Contents: mad.co.uk - timeanddate.com - other sites of interest - recruit net subscription form.
http://www.mad.co.uk mad.co.uk is a website that is aimed towards the marketing, media, advertising and design industries. It is maintained by Centaur Communications and features their 13 publications (these include Marketing Week, Design Week, New Media Age and Sports Marketing). You can obtain an overview of information without paying, although the detailed content is only available to subscribers at £282 per annum. However, they are currently offering a free trial subscription that lasts a month.
On the home page there is the day's top news story (from their publications) with highlights of other stories. To the right of the page are links to online editions of 10 of the 13 magazines produced by Centaur. Also on the site are marketing related vacancies and a searchable archive across all of the publications.
Also from the home page are links to their "Channels". These consist of news and features from the 13 magazines categorised by sector (the main channels include consumer products, retail, services, media and advertising). These allow you to find relevant up to date content without having to go to each publication's web site. Each channel has a "home page" where a brief synopsis of the latest news appears. As a subscriber you have access to the full archive of news and features from all 13 publications.
This site was suggested by Cam Woodhouse of Highfield Executive Search & Selection, gaining herself a goodie bag in the process.
http://www.timeanddate.com The Time and Date web site has been developed by a young Norwegian called Steffen Thorsen as a free service. The site has a number of features relating to time and the calendar along with some information on the subject of time. The site also contains various counters, for example you can find out how many days, hours and minutes have passed since the start of 2000.
One of the really useful features of the site is the World Clock. The main feature of this is a listing of cities around the world with the current time. You can also set up a personal world clock. This allows you to choose up to 16 cities around the world and display the current local time for them as one web page. This would be especially useful if you have a clients or colleagues based in offices around the world.
If you want to organise a meeting or telephone call between people on different continents you can use the Meeting Planner. Select the cities involved and the day you want the meeting or call to take place on - the World Clock Meeting Planner displays corresponding times for all those cities for that day.
Using the calendar features you can view monthly calendars, the calendar for any year and work out the duration between two dates.
OTHER SITES OF INTEREST A site which has appeared in the news quite a bit recently is the UK version of Ask Jeeves - http://www.ask.co.uk The site was also recommended to me a little while ago by Mike Richards of Robert Walters. The US version of Ask Jeeves (reviewed in issue 6) has long been a popular site, so it is not surprising the UK issue is providing so much interest.
http://www.ukrecruiter.co.uk - I've recently updated the CV Database listings on The UK Recruiter's Home Page.
CONTENTS: Wright's Company Information Database - Choosing the right vacancy board (article).
http://profiles.wisi.com Company Profiles is just one part of the CorporateInformation.com web site. However, it contains a vast amount of information. There is detailed analysis of over 20,000 companies. From the home page you can choose to either search by company name or ticker symbol, or to browse an alphabetical list of companies, a list of companies by country or a list of companies by industry. Once you have selected the company you are interested in there are six key information areas. The first area gives a basic overview of the company with contact details, names of key officers, previous year's sales figures, industry sector, number of employees, etc. The next area is the "Research Report" which contains more in-depth information including company description, competitor analysis, stock performance and financial position. This area is quite detailed (for example there are nearly four pages of information for Dairy Crest Plc). The final four areas are more financial information - headed up as Analysis Summary, Sales Analysis, Price Analysis and Earnings Analysis. There is a fantastic amount of information on this web site - definitely a complement to other resources such as my favourites www.hoovers.co.uk and www.ft.com.
This site was recommended by Kevin Chamberlain of Priam Solutions. Kevin receives a goodie bag for this recommendation.
CHOOSING THE RIGHT VACANCY BOARD I've included at the end of this newsletter an article I recently wrote for Online Recruitment. Whilst some of you may have already read it in the publication I thought it might be useful to include it in the newsletter. Thanks to all of you who gave input and feedback to me for the article.
Choosing the right vacancy board
There are well over 100 vacancy boards available to the UK recruiter. How do you decide which one is the best for you?
Most traditional press have an easily identifiable readership, making the choice of where to place each advert much simpler. For traditional recruitment advertising (newspapers and trade magazines) you can rely on publications such as BRAD to guide you to the correct place for your vacancy. Advertising on the Internet is a completely different story. Whilst a number of vacancy boards have been operating in the UK since 1995 the marketplace has by no means stabilised.
Compared to the traditional press most Internet vacancy boards currently provide very poor "readership" statistics. Most will be able to tell you how many people have been to the site over the period of a month. However, you need to ensure that the statistics refer to unique visitors rather than number of page hits (counting the number of times each page on the site is visited rather than the number of people). TopJobs (http://www.topjobs.co.uk) are one of the only UK sites to be audited by ABC, so whilst they can provide information on age, ABC profile, etc, you have no one else on line to compare this data against.
RMS MediaTech are compiling Media Kits for each of the UK vacancy boards in the "Internet Recruitment Index" that can be found in the middle pages of Online Recruitment magazine. Matthew Wheeler at RMS MediaTech said "The lack of verifiable data has created an air of mystique about recruitment websites which not only inhibits recruiters' confidence in selecting one site above another, but also serves to dissuade them from advertising online in the first place. We would aim to change this mentality with 'The Internet Recruitment Index"". This data provides information on number of visits, target market, top 10 searches, etc. In each issue on Online Recruitment they will profile four more UK vacancy boards.
Armed with comparison data, the next thing to do to determine if a vacancy board is right for your particular assignment is to deduce the sites "actual audience". You should do this by looking at the vacancy board in depth, see what type of vacancies are being advertised, and if your vacancy fits in with these. See what agencies and search firms are advertising on the site, if they are your "competition" the site is more likely to be the right one.
When you speak to a vacancy board you should also consider asking how the site attracts visitors, for statistics on number of vacancies and for references from satisfied customers.
It is always worth asking individual vacancy boards if they will offer you a free trail. Ruth Sawyer of Priam Solutions says "with new vacancy boards coming on line all the time we always insist on a free trail to test the suitability of the site for the sort of vacancies we advertise". Priam place an average 200 jobs on vacancy boards each month. Having spent some time comparing the vacancy board market they now tend to advertise each vacancy on 3 main sites (as well as at their own web site). In general Priam advertise on the Internet instead of in traditional press - so for them getting it right is very important.
If you are currently advertising vacancies in newspapers and magazines why not look for an Internet option to try in parallel. This way you will not be under pressure to achieve immediate success from the web.
If you put a vacancy on the Internet and get a poor response don't give up. Look for a more suitable vacancy board and try again.
Placing adverts on vacancy boards tends to involve a much simpler process than advertising in the Sunday Times for example. In general you don't need to worry about advert sizes, layout, graphics, etc. However, don't let this mean that you spend less time thinking about the content of the advert. Candidates can be bombarded with lots of very similar looking vacancies on the Internet. Ensure that yours is the one they look at and reply to. Specify important criteria clearly. When candidates are looking down a long list of vacancies they will favour those that show job title, location, salary and industry at a glance. Also if you have a policy on advertising style ensure this is carried through to the Internet.
If you have a corporate web site why not place all advertisements on there as well. Here you should not be limited on space, give as much information as possible to candidates, to encourage the right ones to apply and the wrong ones to de-select themselves.
Finally, the best test is to try out a number of sites. Compared with traditional media advertising on the Internet is still very cheap!
Published in Online Recruitment 13th March 2000
CONTENTS: Nua Internet Surveys - London Underground route planner
http://www.nua.ie/surveys/ Nua Internet Surveys is a division of Nua (providers of Internet consultancy and development), they are known by many as an authoritative source for Internet statistics.
The web site is a database of the last 3 years worth of information produced and collated by Nua. When you go to the home page of the site you find headlines on the most recent trends, surveys and demographics they have reported. You can browse the database by category under the following headings: Sectors, Society, Tools and Demographics. Within each category there are sub sections (for example under the heading Sectors there is a section called Recruitment). Within these sections all relevant Internet Surveys are listed with a title and one paragraph overview. If you click on the title you are taken to the full text of the survey. Related stories are listed at the end of the survey. To the right of the screen is an option to conduct a keyword search across the entire database.
Nua offer an Internet Surveys Email that is a free weekly newsletter (the database is an archive of these newsletters). The newsletter reports on the major Internet trends and surveys of the week with editorial comment. Subscribers also receive a bi-monthly Nua Internet review, as well as the Nua Internet Year In Review.
This site was recommended by Tina Bolton of QCareers.Com. Tina receives a goodie bag for this recommendation.
http://www.subwaynavigator.com/ Subway Navigator offers a route finder program for public transport in over 60 cities around the world. Cities include Caracas, Athens, Calcutta, San Francisco and London.
The area of the site I have looked at in detail relates to the London Underground (http://www.subwaynavigator.com/bin/select/english/united-kingdom/london) a link to this page can also be found from the Subway Navigator home page. To use the London Underground route planner you enter your starting point and destination. If you are not sure of the station name there is a full list. Once you have entered this information click on the "compute route" button. The results give you the estimated journey time, the name of the line to take and the direction in which to travel, along with a list of the all the stations you pass on the journey. Some of the stations have hyperlinks to page with a list of attractions near that tube station. Where available a link to the web site for the attraction is also given. You can also view the route on a map of the whole underground. It is shown with small green squares on the stations you pass through and large green squares for the starting and destination stations - this proves irritating when printed as the squares can obscure the text!
On the home page for the London Underground it suggests it was last updated in 1998, and whilst the Jubilee line extension isn't shown you don't find new stations being added to the Underground on a regular basis! For the searches I did the information it returned was in line with what I would expect, but you have to remember to add time for waiting on the platforms and possible delays. Considering this is a free service maintained alongside another 59 route planners for public transport worldwide I think it is an excellent site.
CONTENTS: Telephone Directories on the Web - The Pay Information Centre
http://www.teldir.com/eng Telephone Directories on the Web is a site that claims to have the most complete index of online phone books. The site is a directory of over 350 links to sites in over 150 counties around the world. They provide listings of yellow pages, white pages, business directories, email addresses and fax number directories. The phone books are reviewed and only those that "make some attempt to be complete" are linked to from this site. The site is pleasant to use, being uncomplicated and well laid out with the help pages written in a fairly informal style. There is other information on the site such as some telecoms links and information on country and area codes. It is a nice starting point for looking up business or home phone numbers in many counties.
http://www.payinfo.co.uk The Pay Information Centre site is maintained by Tricorn Human Resources. There are a number of areas on the site - but probably the most interesting are the Job Descriptions and Pay Data. These are split into two key categories of companies (http://www.payinfo.co.uk/Job_group_pay_data.htm) and public sector (http://www.payinfo.co.uk/public_sector_jobs.htm) information. Within each category is a listing of the main job functions. For example under company pay data there are 19 categories including bakers, clerical and secretarial, engineering, human resources, marketing, sales and recruitment consulting. To view the pay information you need to click on the relevant group. The pay data is presented in a table with the job titles down one side with columns for the minimum and maximum pay. In some tables there are additional intermediate columns and some also provide information about how pay is affected by geographical region. The job descriptions are also provided. This sort of information presented in a easy to understand manner can be hard to find in the UK without having to pay - so it is a real bonus that all the information on the site is free.
Before I get on with the newsletter I wanted to let you know that I have created a web page for subscribers with links to sites covered in all previous newsletters. It can be found at: http://www.nmib.com/recruiter/recnet.htm. Don't forget to bookmark it, as I'll be keeping it up to date.
CONTENTS: News Item (Jobsite Vacancy Manager) - Reviewed Sites (FreePint and Google) - Other sites of interest (The Marcus Network and ChuffChart) - subscription form
NEWS ITEM Jobsite (one of the leading UK vacancy boards) are launching a new software product called the "Vacancy Manager" and are offering you, as subscriber to this newsletter, a special deal. This vacancy submission software allows recruiters to post an advertisement simultaneously to a number of recruitment sites. Jobsite are offering a special one-off promotional price of £132.99 (5% discount) to newsletter members. They would normally only allow recruiters with a Jobsite contract to purchase the software but will waive this stipulation as part of the offer. The offer is only available for two weeks (until the 24th May) and you can contact promotion@jobsite.co.uk for more information.
REVIEWED SITES http://www.freepint.co.uk FreePint is primarily a free email newsletter. The newsletter, published twice a month, has articles on web resources with tips on searching the Internet and website reviews. The articles in the newsletter are written by information professionals with expertise in the relevant field. You can subscribe to the newsletter from the website and find an archive of previous editions. However, the website contains much more. The FreePint site also has articles, relevant book reviews, and "the Bar". The Bar is where Internet researchers and business users can post questions and comments for other users to respond to. Really useful site for all kinds of business information.
This site was recommended by Chris Murphy who wins a goodie bag for his suggestion.
http://www.google.com Google is a search engine that ranks its results based on the link structure of the Internet. This basically means that sites with many links to them from other web pages are ranked higher in the results. The home page of the site is uncluttered with a field to enter your search terms and a drop down menu from which to choose the language you want the sites to be in. By default Google searches for all the words you enter into the search field. It does not use Boolean technology so you cannot use NOT OR AND or NEAR, however, you can do phrase searches by using the quotation marks. For the best results you should look at the search tips that are linked to from the home page. As well as the sophisticated search engine Google also has a directory with 15 main categories (similar to Yahoo). You can view the list of web pages for each category either in alphabetical order or by the Google ranking. One of the more amusing features is the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button which takes you directly to the first web site it brings back after a search.
OTHER SITES OF INTEREST Two subscribers to recruit net have recently been in touch to let me know about web sites they maintain.
Marcus Stafford runs a site called "the marcus network" in his spare time. The site (http://www.marcusstafford.com) lists all of the networking groups in and around London along with a listing of "business incubators". The site also includes some resources aimed at, or recommended by, entrepreneurs. A useful site for those interested in business start-ups or networking.
Chris Berry has recently developed the ChuffChart website (http://www.chuffchart.co.uk). It is aimed at people due to leave their current job, particularly those in the UK Armed Forces. (NB, for those of us not familiar with army terminology a ChuffChart is the traditional countdown to the end of ones army career.) The site has links to careers resources, training information and recruitment agencies. Recruiters can advertise appropriate vacancies for free on the website.
CONTENTS: Reviewed Sites (What the Papers Say and UK Company Researcher) - Other sites of interest (Freelance HQ) - subscription form
REVIEWED SITES
http://www.wtps.co.uk What the Papers Say is a free daily news service that can be accessed by email or via the web site. On the home page of the web site are the top news story headlines (split into four sections of Who's in the news?, UK News, World News and Sport). You can click on the headline to be taken to a more detailed synopsis. The synopsis is delivered under the headings of who, what, where and when and also has a "snippet" of the story. When you are reading the news stories there is a "carry on reading" section to the right of the screen where you can click on a link to be taken to various newspapers' web sites.
Also on the site is an amusing newsbot (although it probably wears thin once you've done it a few times!). Basically you enter a few details into the relevant fields and the newsbot makes up a newspaper headline and story.
The site is updated every weekday morning and will soon be available at weekends as well. This is a great site or email service for those people who really wish they had the time to read the papers every day.
http://www.ukcompanyresearcher.com The UK Company Researcher site is a categorised set of links to information of use to someone conducting research into UK companies. The site is laid out in a straightforward manner and whilst the resource is still growing is certainly worth using. The first category of links is for "UK Company Search"; this provides links to telephone and web directories, UK company snapshots (providing a small amount of information on UK companies), financial accounts and annual reports and to company news sites. There are three categories of company search sites for English, Scottish and Welsh companies; these are to sites providing information on companies within these geographical areas. The next category is "Industry Search". This area has a list of industries with links to web sites providing information relevant to that industry. On the site is also a listing of links to the web sites of over 300 UK companies (they plan to increase this to over 1000 by the end of June). Other links include those to printed resources, CD-Rom resources and web news. They will also be adding a section on "Jobs" where they will advertise vacancies in business information roles. This site may well help you to find a few key resources that will prove very useful in UK company research.
OTHER SITES OF INTEREST
Mark Newman of Rain IT Services has emailed me about Freelance H.Q. (www.freelancehq.com). This is a web site for IT contractors and agencies to communicate about industry issues - with the focus definitely on contractors' experiences with agencies. The site gets feedback from contractors on the jobs they've done, skills used and the pay rates involved. This information is combined into a number of graphs, aiming to give an overview of the market. Whilst some of the information given on the site might be showing agencies in a bad light, Mark feels that a site like this can give agencies a forum to affect a change.
CONTENTS: Reviewed Sites (Raging Search - Image CV - CVServices.net) - Other sites of interest (Purchasing Consultants) - New Feature (vacancy board reviews) - subscription form
REVIEWED SITES
http://www.raging.com Raging Search is a search engine developed by AltaVista. The search engine has a huge index (they state it is the biggest) of over 350 million unique web pages. When you are choosing a search engine as well as wanting one which has a large number of web pages indexed it is equally important that the site is capable of ranking the results so that only the most relevant are returned. Raging Search ranks web pages by text relevance and link analysis. Text relevance means that it searches each page for your search terms and then considers a number of factors including how often and where those words appear on the page. Link analysis means that Raging Search rates pages that have many links into them higher than those with none. The search engine also has a customise option that allows you to set personal options including how many results are returned per page, how much information is shown about each site and which languages you wish to search in. With its huge index, simple interface and quick response it is worth taking a look at. I've certainly found it seems to return good results.
http://imagecv.co.uk & http://www.cvservices.net These two similar sites have recently been recommended to me. Both sites offer paid for CV preparation and production services. However, they both have large amounts of free information that job seekers would no doubt find useful both in preparing a CV and more broadly when looking to move jobs. The Image CV site has sections on CV compilation, Useful Sites and a free "monthly topic" (this month they cover pre interview preparation). The CVServices site also has information on preparing a CV as well as the "A better career" section that looks at boosting a job seeker's career management strategy. The site also has a career scenario appraisal under the Resources section that helps job seekers find out how confident they are with their "current career positioning". These sites might prove useful if you want to point candidates in the direction of resources for CV development and career forwarding.
The Image CV site was recommended by Adele Anyon of Hotjobsonline, who has as a result won herself a goodie bag.
OTHER SITES OF INTEREST Derek Roylance of Horizon Associates has emailed me about a site he is involved in at http://www.purchasing-consultants.co.uk. The purpose of the site is to give information about buying for both professional buyers and consumers in general (for example they have a section on how to buy a car direct from Europe and potentially save thousands of pounds). Derek has suggested that the section on Ethics (listed in the Professional part of the site) might be of interest to recruiters when interviewing people for buying jobs.
NEW FEATURE I've recently been talking to a recruit net newsletter reader about a particular assignment they have been working on with regard to advertising on the Internet. Her experiences of the different vacancy boards have been really interesting. I would like to start up a regular feature in the newsletter and on the UK Recruiters Home Page where I report the findings of recruiters who have advertised on UK Vacancy Boards. If you are interested in talking about your experiences please email me. I'd probably only need a paragraph or so, detailing information such as the type of vacancy you were advertising, where you placed the advert, how helpful the sales people were, how much you paid and what you got for your money and what the response was like. An overall comment on how pleased you were would be great. If you don't want me to publish your name and company just let me know. Look forward to hearing from you.
CONTENTS: Reviewed Sites (Shell GeoStar & JobHuntersBible.com) - Other sites of interest (Why What Where) - subscription form
REVIEWED SITES
http://www.shellgeostar.com This is actually an adaptation of the very first site I reviewed (the Shell Route Planner site http://www.shell.co.uk/chopper/cho_route_inv.htm). However, the site contains much more information than just a route-planning tool. Most of the core information on the site is found within the Journey Planning section. Within this section the route planner allows you to plan your route with detailed driving instructions and street-level maps for most of Western Europe. You can use the "Search for a single location" option if you are looking for information regarding a specific location. The "Search for your special interests" link allows you to search within categories such as Food & Drink, Local Attractions, Leisure and Sports. From this section you can also book accommodation. If you are interested in a specific region you can search for it and find information including its history, local customs and travel facts. There is a travel advisor section where you can answer questions relating to your preferred country, ideal holiday and region type and the database will suggest ideal destinations. Also on the site is a travel talk section that is a bulletin board where you can post questions about various subjects including culture, food & drink and sport. Finally the site also has an online shopping section. Shell has teamed up with a number of other companies, including BOL, to offer travel books, maps, toys & games and music via the site. This is a comprehensive site for those interested in car travel or booking hotels or restaurants within Europe.
http://www.jobhuntersbible.com The JobHuntersBible.com is a site that was developed as a supplement to the career guidance book "What Color is Your Parachute?" Whilst the content is geared towards US jobseekers there is useful information for the UK recruiter, career guidance advisor or anyone working within the recruitment arena. The site is split into a number of categories including Tests & Advice, research, key contacts and resumes. The relevance of the information will be dependant on your business area, but for example the category "research" contains some useful general tips on using the Internet for research, including using search engines, researching companies and other business resources. There is also a section for employers and recruiters that contains a series of articles written by Peter D Weddle (a US on-line recruitment expert). Another nice area of the site is the list of links to "unusual job" sites (including a list of jobs for people who "Long for Unpredictable Days"!) some with detailed information about certain roles. This site is full of information, hopefully some of which you might find useful yourself whilst other aspects you might like to refer candidates or jobseekers to.
The JobHuntersBible.com site was recommended by John Lees of John Lees Associates who has as a result won a goodie bag.
OTHER SITES OF INTEREST Tim Gibbon of The Midas Marketing Internet Group recently emailed me about the Why What Where search engine position checker (www.whywhatwhere.com). The site offers both free and paid for services to allow you to check your web site's ranking with search engines.
CONTENTS: Reviewed Sites (@skme.com & UK Company Web Site Addresses) - Other sites of interest (The AA) - subscription form
REVIEWED SITES
http://www.askme.com/ The @skme.com site is one of many "ask an expert" type sites available on the Internet. It is certainly a great site and seems very popular - with 2.5 million people using the site every month. To ask a question you first need to find the right category for that particular subject area. From the home page you can type in a search query to bring back a list of matching categories and experts. Alternatively you can browse the category list moving through the sub categories until you find the most relevant subject area. There are 14 main categories from Business & Careers to Technology & the web. Once you have found the most suitable category you can browse for an expert from the listings. For example in the Marketing category there are 245 experts with the top 10 ranked (the rankings are determined by adding up points given to the experts from both the person asking the original question and other web sites users). Throughout the site you can read the experts' previous answers to questions. Once you have posted a question you can ask to be notified by email once the expert has answered. You can also view the answers to any of your previous questions by using the "Members Only" button at the top of the screen.
http://www.ukdotco.co.uk The title of this site - "UK Company Web Site Addresses" totally sums up its intended content. The site has listed a good selection of UK companies with the web site addresses of many. To use the site you can browse for a company either by category or alphabetical listing. There are 38 categories on the site from Aerospace and Defence through to Water. There is also a final category called Unlisted Companies, where it seems they might be listing companies yet to be categorised. One of the slightly off-putting things about this site is that they have chosen to list companies who don't have a web site, making the site seem incomplete. However, as finding the web site address for a company can sometimes be a frustrating and time-consuming process, this site is worth remembering to try.
Camilla Woodhouse of Highfield Executive Search & Selection recommended this site.
OTHER SITES OF INTEREST I've previously covered quite a few route planner web sites. However, The AA site (http://www.theaa.co.uk) is certainly worth knowing about. Two of the really useful features of the site are the "Routes & Traffic Information" section, giving AA Roadwatch traffic reports and route plans, and the Hotel Guide & Booking Service with a database of over 8,000 hotels and B&Bs in the UK and Ireland.
In this edition of the newsletter I'm only covering one site as it has a number of useful features and uses.
CONTENTS: Reviewed Sites (Biz/ed) - Other sites of interest (Gator) - subscription form
REVIEWED SITES
http://bized.ac.uk The Biz/ed site has been developed for UK students, teachers and lecturers by staff from the Institute of Learning and Research Technology at Bristol University. However, despite its educational bias, it is a very interesting site for anyone with a need for business or economic resources. The site is split into 5 main sections with a site map as well as a "what's new" page.
The first section is the "Internet Catalogue". This is a categorised directory of over 1800 Internet resources. You can either search the directory by keyword or browse the categories. Categories include Business, Economics, Marketing, etc. There is also a listing of the latest additions to the catalogue that is useful if you are a regular user. Each resource listed is linked to and has a short description of its key features.
The next section on the site is "Learning Materials". These are materials to support the business studies and economics curricula.
The "Data" section on the site contains a number of resources for locating information on companies and their financial data. The sub-sections include information from the Office of National Statistics, Extel Data and a Chronologies section. The Extel data (part of FT Information) is basic financial information on 500 leading UK companies. The chronologies section has a listing of national and international events "of significance to the economy".
The next section is "Company Facts", which is definitely aimed at students, but does provide interesting reading. It is a listing of 12 companies (including Boots, Tesco and Unilver) with answers to typical student questions. There is quite a lot of data for some of these companies. From this section you can also get to a very useful listing of links to the web sites of the FTSE100 companies (the direct URL for this page is http://bized.ac.uk/listserv/companies/comlist.htm). This page seems to be kept well up to date.
Finally there is a section on "Virtual Worlds", which is a very student orientated part of the site. This is a learning resource to help students apply business and economic study theory to real world situations through two virtual programmes.
Despite being a resource aimed at students and teachers this is a really useful web site - very nicely presented and kept up to date.
OTHER SITES OF INTEREST Rebecca Cartmell of CyberCV recently emailed me to let me know about a web service she finds very helpful. Gator (www.gator.com) is a software application that you download from the Internet to assist in filling out forms and remembering your Internet passwords.
CONTENTS: Reviewed Sites (whatis & Price's List of lists) - request for help - subscription form
REVIEWED SITES
http://www.whatis.com whatis is a "knowledge exploration tool". The main content of the site is an encyclopaedia with over 2,000 definitions of IT terms, mostly Internet and computer related. The definitions contain useful cross-referencing to other topics.
Along the top of the home page are A-Z links that you can click on to see the word list relating to that letter. To view the definition of a word you just click on that link. Alternatively to search for a specific word or term you can conduct a "Quick Search" using the search box found in the left hand column. This will search for the word(s) in the list of definitions. You could also use the "full-text search" option to find every definition containing the words you are searching for.
There are also a number of other resources on the site including the "word of the day" feature and the "learning paths" and "fast references" sections where you can obtain detailed information on IT. There are also sections on buying computer hardware/software and book reviews.
whatis is a useful site for those looking for understanding of technical terms and concepts - full of information for the technical and non-technical individual alike.
http://gwis2.circ.gwu.edu/~gprice/listof.htm Gary Price's List of lists site is a vast information resource. As the title suggests it is a categorised directory of lists that other organisations and people have created. The main body of the site contains one very long page split into bestseller lists, business, education, entertainment related lists, living, politics and science. The business lists are further split down into industry and some geographical sectors. The sort of resources the site links to include "Most Admired Companies (Fortune)" and "Europe's Top 100 (Largest Spenders in IT)".
Near the top of the home page there are 5 other "resource compilations"; direct search, speech/transcript center, newscenter, audio/video news on the www and congressional research service reports. These are also very useful resources. For example the "direct search" section contains links to the search interfaces of resources that contain information that is not easily accessible from the standard search engines.
Finally, for the frequent visitor, there is a section on the home page where recent additions to the site are listed by date added.
This site is a fantastic resource as many of these lists are probably impossible to find using a search engine alone.
REQUEST FOR HELP I've recently had an email from one of the recruit net newsletter subscribers which some of you may be able to help with. Nick, from a major UK search and selection company, is looking for a listing of US companies, by state, ranked by either sales revenue/turnover or number of employees. He is specifically interested in California and San Francisco. Obviously Price's List of lists might give him quite a few leads (including a Ranking of Californian companies at http://www.latimes.com/business/times100/tables.htm), however, if any other subscribers know of sites they could recommend to Nick can they please drop me an email.
CONTENTS: Reviewed Sites (Lycos SMS service - AlljobsUK.com) - Site of Interest - New Feature - subscription form
REVIEWED SITES
http://www.lycos.co.uk/service/sms There are a number of sites on the Internet where you can send free SMS (Short Message Services) messages from your computer to a mobile phone. However, many of them require registration and a number of the sites are slow to use. The Lycos site is certainly one of the simplest I've come across. To use the service you click on the button, at the bottom of the page, marked "send a message". You have to then click another button to agree to their terms of use. In the next screen you enter the mobile phone number of the person you want to send the message to and then enter the text (up to a maximum of 130 characters) and then click on "submit". You can send as many messages as you like from the site. It is certainly a quicker and easier way to send SMS messages than having to type in the entire message on your mobile phone keypad!
http://www.alljobsuk.com The AlljobsUK.com site is a great resource that I think sits well alongside The UK Recruiters Home Page. The site is a dedicated portal for jobseekers. The site was established by the director of a UK recruitment company, based in Glasgow, with many years recruitment experience. The purpose of the site is to "deliver" candidates directly to recruitment companies and employers. However, the amount of information on the site makes it a useful resource that you may wish to use yourself as well as recommend to jobseekers. For example the publications section contains information on newspapers, magazines and journals that carry vacancy advertising. Another useful feature is the listing of UK recruitment companies (you might like to check that your company is listed!). The site does not directly compete with recruitment companies as it doesn't carry any vacancy advertising or offer a CV database. It is a site well worth being aware of.
SITE OF INTEREST After the last newsletter when I mentioned the whatis site I have had an email from Rebecca Cartmell of Cyber-CV who has informed me of another site she uses for similar information. The Tech Encyclopedia (http://www.techweb.com/encyclopedia) has over 14000 definitions of computer terms and concepts.
NEW FEATURE The next edition of the newsletter will see the addition of a new feature. Chris Pengelly from Riley Advertising will start a new series; reviewing UK vacancy boards. He will be giving information and key facts to help you determine which jobs site to use when. Please let me know if there are any sites in particular that you would like reviewed, and why.
As usual, any feedback and suggestions are most welcome. Don't forget that if you suggest a site that I then review you'll get an Internet goodie bag!!
CONTENTS: Reviewed Sites (FTMarketWatch.com & xrefer) - Vacancy board reviews (Jobpilot & Jobsite) - Subscription form
REVIEWED SITES
http://www.ftmarketwatch.com Financial Times MarketWatch is a joint venture between the Financial Times and CBS.MarketWatch.com. The site offers free financial and market news and information. It is aimed at the European private investor. The site is split into 3 main sections; news/commentary, markets/data and portfolios. The News/Commentary section has up to the minute news stories as well as a news tracking system available under the title "news alters" that allows you to view stories by date and time as they break. The sub-category "FT MarketWatch News" gives the stories as one-liners and "Market Pulse" shows news stories as short paragraphs. As well as stating the facts the reporters give informed commentary on various news stories. The markets/data section contains statistical information on the markets; with sections on Europe, Americas, and the Asia/Pacific. If you register in the portfolio section you can track an unlimited portfolio of shares and sign up to free financial news by email.
This is a great site for the private investor and anyone wanting to keep aware of either the financial markets in general or the financial activities of specific clients.
http://www.xrefer.com Xrefer describes itself as the web's first reference engine. Basically it allows you to simultaneously search a number of reference publications. These publications (currently they have around 30) include encyclopaedias, dictionaries, business glossaries and quotation books. To conduct a search you enter the word or topic you are interested in into the search box near the top of the screen and then press "go". The results are returned as list giving the first sentence of the resulting text as well as the reference source. Once you click on the result you are given the full text from the publication. Within the text other words are cross-referenced - allowing you click on any underlined (hyper linked) word to be taken to that topic. Once you have chosen a key word this makes it a lot simpler to learn lots about the topic/area. To use this site fully it is worth looking at the search tips section as there are a number of advanced ways to search, including using wildcards, searching for numbers and using ? to signify you are not sure of the letter you want (apparently very useful for crossword fanatics!).
This is a great source for looking up information about a person, fact, quote or word. It is made even better by the lack of clutter on the site and speed of response.
VACANCY BOARD REVIEWS This is the first edition of our new feature where Chris Pengelly of Riley Advertising reviews UK vacancy boards in the recruit net newsletter. Chris also gives each vacancy board a score out of 50 derived from an internal Riley survey.
Jobpilot - http://www.jobpilot.co.uk Owned by the largest player in online recruitment on Germany (and one of the largest in Europe), Jobpilot.co.uk has the backing to be successful in the UK market. There is a trend towards globalisation in the recruitment market, and if Jobpilot is to be competitive in the global marketplace that is happening then the UK will be key to its success. Expect major investment in marketing and a steep rise in both traffic and jobs on the site in the near future. One of the rare opportunities to back a winner early.
The site itself is quick to download and easy to navigate. There are enough jobs (3200) for the traffic at the current levels (118,000 visitors in June) to make sure that jobs are seen and offer as good potential for response as any other site.
Clients on the site include British Airways, Cisco, Nokia, JP Morgan and Lucent.
The site scored an overall 38 out of 50 in the recent Riley survey into the top recruiting sites in the UK, which makes it a top five player for response potential.
Jobsite - http://www.jobsite.co.uk One of the oldest, or should we say the most mature, UK recruiting sites on the web. Jobsite is privately owned (although Manpower have a 25% stake) and run. Where other major sites spend fantastically large amounts of money on advertising to push traffic to their sites, visitors are drawn to Jobsite by virtue of its name, and the good policy of capitalising (by excellent search engine optimisation) on the work other sites are doing to promote the internet as the first stop in a job hunt.
The site is clean and uncluttered and quick to download. Navigation is simple and the feel of the site is one of speed and efficiency. Jobsite is a top scorer for the number of jobs online (40,932) and for traffic (594,440 visitors in the last month).
Clients on the site include Alliance and Leicester, Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, Nortel, and Sony, plus dozens of recruitment consultancies. A plus point for the site is that direct clients' jobs are starred to differentiate them from the recruitment consultancy jobs.
The site scored 43 out of 50 in the recent Riley survey into the top recruiting sites in the UK, which makes it the top scorer for response potential.
Vacancy Board reviews are researched and written by Chris Pengelly of Riley Advertising (Riley Advertising can be contacted on 0207 353 3223).
As usual, any feedback and suggestions are most welcome. Don't forget that if you suggest a site that I then review you'll get an Internet goodie bag!!
CONTENTS: Reviewed Sites (Amnesi & 192) - Vacancy board reviews (* & *) - Comments on JobSite - Subscription form
REVIEWED SITES
http://www.amnesi.com Amnesi is a web site that allows you to locate information about Domain Names (most of us have faced the dilema whether it is Scoot.co.uk or Scoot.com or even Scoot.net for example). The Domain Name Search Engine allows you to enter parts of a web site address and it will suggest a list of potential matches. This can be used if you cannot remember an exact web site address or are not sure of the spelling. You type your best guess into the search field along with any other criteria you know (eg, how the domain name ends, fragments of the address or the min/max length.) The results are brought back as a table (with up to 75 options) with the most likely sites at the top.
Another service on the site is "Domain Info". By entering a domain name you can find information regarding the registrant, administrative and technical contacts as well as when the domain was first registered. This search feature does not work with every domain although it does work for com/net/org as well as well as most of the two letter country domain names (like .uk). You can also do a what they call a "Reverse IP Lookup". You type in the IP address (something of the form 195.12.2.9) and find the domain name at that address.
This is a nice site that is generally quick to use. However when I couldn't get search results because the server was busy I got the following message: "Please click on the banner above. Sponsors will give us $0.12 and we will buy a faster server"!
http://www.192.com The 192 site has a database of the UK Electoral Roll 2000. You need to register with the site (although this is free) to get up to 20 searches of the database each month. To conduct a search you enter the name and location of the person you are looking for. The results show the full name and addresses of everyone matching your query. You can choose to sort your results by name, town or postcode and can also change the number of results returned per page.
The 192 site also has a number of other features such as a street map generator, travel directions and Directory Enquiries. Another feature on the site is a Business Directory of over 3 million records. However, if you want to search the directory you will need to upgrade your registration and pay a subscription fee.
Once you have registered for the site, using the Electroll Roll search is very straighforward.
COMMENTS ON JOBSITE After the review of Jobsite by Chris in the last edition of the newsletter I had a call and subsequent email from a UK recruiter, working for an IT & Telecoms recruitment company. He has asked to remain anonymous but has written a review of his experiences of Jobsite that I hope will prove of interest.
**Jobsite - My experience of using it - By an experienced recruitment consultant **
I, like many, believed that there was no effective recruitment website other than Jobserve then I signed a deal with Jobsite. It has proved to be extremely successful. I didn't agree with everything that was said by Chris in his review but I can say one thing, Jobsite is a highly cost effective way of resourcing people. Which is all I am concerned with at the end of the day.
The Jobsite website has three different functions that can be used in different ways to produce a steady flow of available and highly placeable candidates. The CV Watchdog function is great for getting available candidates with core skill sets (e.g. Java Developers) but be careful when you set them up as you may find yourself with 500 emails in your inbox. The CV Online is good for those more unusual requirements that you get from time to time. There are however a lot of graduates on Jobsite so try using the salary and graduation year functions to discount these people.
As a recruitment company we have not found much success from job postings on Jobsite as we don't have much brand awareness within the UK compared with some of the other companies who advertise on the site. Lets be honest, if you wanted to work in Telecommunications would you rather click on, Nortel or a recruitment company you have never heard of? However these big clients mean that the quality of CV's on the website is very high. So make sure you sign a package that includes the CV Online, its well worth it.
If you are still not convinced trial it for two weeks. I did and placed three people. Jobsite really does work but it still doesn't replace Jobserve.
*********** end of reveiw ************
As usual, any feedback and suggestions are most welcome. Don't forget that if you suggest a site that I then review you'll get an Internet goodie bag!!
CONTENTS: Reviewed Sites (Free On-line Dictionary of Computing & Euroseek) - Vacancy board reviews (StepStone & Top Jobs) - Subscription form
REVIEWED SITES
http://www.foldoc.org The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (FOLDOC) was first started in 1985 and now contains in excess of 13,000 definitions. It is basically a searchable and browsable dictionary of terms, acronyms and jargon relating to computing. To search the dictionary you just enter the word(s) you are looking for in the search box and press the Search button. Definitions tend to be quite basic; normally between one line and two paragraphs in length. Other technical terms that are used within a definition are cross-referenced and there are also links to external resources on the web where appropriate. On the home page of the site there is a link to "Recent Updates" which is quite interesting if you are browsing the site rather than searching it.
This is a useful and fairly comprehensive site that is quick to use. It is certainly worth adding to your list of computer dictionaries.
http://www.euroseek.com Euroseek is a European portal and Search Engine site. You can use the search engine part of the site to conduct simple searches of the web pages indexed by the site. In addition you can choose to be specific about the language in which you are searching and the geographical location. You can select from 39 languages and/or from over 40 countries or 7 regions (eg, Europe, North America, Asia, etc). The search facility also allows you to use some of the Boolean operators (AND, OR, minus sign, etc) to conduct a more sophisticated search. The results to searches are displayed in a fairly standard manner; giving page title, a small amount of the page text and the URL(s). The language and date the page was last updated are also shown.
The site also contains a Web directory that is organised into categories similar to those Yahoo uses (eg, Arts, Business, Computers, etc). There were 1,797,824 sites and 261,103 categories in the directory when I last looked.
This is a nice search engine tool if you are looking to conduct a Europe specific search.
VACANCY BOARD REVIEWS Chris Pengelly of Riley Advertising reviews UK vacancy boards specifically for the recruit net newsletter. Chris also gives each vacancy board a score out of 50 derived from an internal Riley survey.
StepStone - http://www.stepstone.co.uk StepStone is arguably the biggest player on the European scene. Certainly (according to Gallup) the best recognised brand in online recruitment in the UK. Figures on market share vary from StepStone being the out and out leader with 51% market share of the online job seeking audience (MMXi - April 2000) to the site not making the top three (MMXi - September 2000). Whichever way you look at it though, the mammoth marketing budget and search engine optimisation will produce significant traffic to the site and as long as it continues they will be at the very least a top three site (at least by traffic).
The site, as you would expect, is quick to download and uncluttered. There are a large number of jobs (18,000) in the UK and traffic is excellent at around 509,000 unique users in the last month. With the biggest sales team they should have an excellent selection of clients and they do.
If there is one thing to knock the site with it is lack of content, apart from jobs.
StepStone scored 40 out of 50 in the recent Riley survey into the top recruiting sites in the UK, which makes it number two in the internal response potential ranking.
Top Jobs - http://www.topjobs.co.uk This is a really nice site. The great client base is a real incentive for candidates to visit the site. It is a 'mature' site that has had time to evolve and develop to make it fast to download and easy to navigate - and it is easy to navigate but not so quick on my computer.
Traffic is good. According to their ABC audit there were 628,811 visits to the site in March. The number of jobs on the site may seem a little low compared to other sites at about a couple of thousand but they are quality, well presented jobs.
A nice site from the candidate's perspective. From a clients perspective there is the opportunity to be seen with some nice company. With hyperlinks not allowed from the site to your own, if you have made any investment in your own site you have a strong reason not to use Top Jobs - that is a shame.
Top Jobs scored 38 out of 50 in the recent Riley survey into the top recruiting sites in the UK, which makes it joint third in the internal response potential ranking.
Vacancy Board reviews are researched and written by Chris Pengelly of Riley Advertising (Riley Advertising can be contacted on 0207 353 3223).
As usual, any feedback and suggestions are most welcome. Don't forget that if you suggest a site that I then review you'll get an Internet goodie bag!!
CONTENTS: Reviewed Sites (Trade UK & FT.Com People Channel) - Vacancy board reviews (Monster & Total Jobs) - Subscription form
*****REVIEWED SITES*****
**http://www.tradeuk.com** Trade UK is the "Official British Government Suppliers Database". The site contains information on over 55,000 UK based companies that export to other countries. The site is intended for use by companies wishing to trade with a British exporter although it is great for looking up companies by industry, product or service. To use the database, from the home page, you first need to select "UK" from the country drop down menu and then click on the red button next to International Buyers. This takes you to the International Buyers screen where you need to click on the button next to "Search for British Suppliers". You are then taken to a simple search page where you can either search by product or service or by business name. Once you have entered your search criteria you click on "search now". The results are returned as a list in alphabetical or random order (you can select which you would prefer). On the results screen you are shown the company name, phone number and address with a one-line description of the business area in which they operate. You can view details on individual companies by clicking the icon that looks like a page. The depth of detail available on companies in the database is varied. Typical information includes two contact names (often the MD and Sales or Marketing Director), turnover, number of employees, SIC codes, export markets and detailed description of the company's activities. You can also print a report of a number of companies.
This database is straightforward and quick to use. It is worth considering when trying to find UK companies operating in certain industry sectors or want to search on a particular product or service.
**http://people.ft.com/people** The "People Channel" is another really useful offering from FT.Com. Whilst the site is still under development (having been launched in February) it is already a great resource for information on influential business and political figures. The site is split into three main sections; people in focus, dossier index and people on the move. The People in Focus section is "news-driven" and updated every day. These stories are reported on the home page of the site with an average of 4 or 5 individuals covered each day. These articles look at the relevant news stories surrounding these people in quite a lot of depth. There is also a "people in focus index" where articles from the last 30 days are found. Where available these are linked to the people profiles in the dossier index. The Dossier Index is probably the largest part of the site with over 700 people profiles. Most of the profiles are on CEO and Board level business people within UK companies, however, the site recently added profiles on a number of famous sports personalities. As the site develops more individuals at managerial level will be added. The People on the Move section summarises news stories containing information on promotions, new appointments and senior level dismissals. This section is updated every weekday.
As you would expect from FT.Com this site is easily navigated with quality content. It will no doubt become an even more useful resource as it grows.
*****VACANCY BOARD REVIEWS ***** Chris Pengelly of Riley Advertising reviews UK vacancy boards specifically for the recruit net newsletter. Chris also gives each vacancy board a score out of 50 derived from an internal Riley survey.
**Monster - http://www.monster.co.uk** Monster is a mammoth site in the USA and one of the most successful online businesses ever. This clearly demonstrates that an online recruitment business model can not only work but also be incredibly effective. They are suffering a few problems (or about to) in the USA due to a huge increase in the number of candidates registering their CV's as confidential, thus making them more difficult to contact and that part of the site less effective.
In the UK the site is not as successful. There are around 13,000 jobs online at the time of writing. On the surface this is a very good figure, but they are online for up to 60 days which is twice as long as most of the leading sites or a lifetime compared to Jobsite or Fish4Jobs. Leaving jobs on for this long is not going to encourage candidates to return very often to check the site (if at all). If you were looking for a new job, would you register with a site that had tens of thousands of jobs every other month, or had tens of thousands of jobs every week?
Looking at the accountancy/auditing jobs as a starting point, at a guess, something like 75% of them are from TMP themselves (the owners of Monster). In the next category (Administrative and support services) one admin job dominates. I would have given up by now!
What is really disappointing about this is the fact that Monster, with a little more attention to detail, could be absolutely essential to the recruiter in the UK, as it is in the USA. The site has a huge marketing budget and is going to develop enormous traffic, for everybody else if they are not careful. The site, in July, had 425,588 visits, generating 4,741, 372 page views. It could be huge, with that sort of backing, it could be Monster!!
All the same it is worth a closer look simply because of the site not being too cluttered by jobs and, in theory, incredibly well trafficked ie there doesn't appear to be much danger of a potential candidate being overwhelmed by vacancies from your competition!
Monster scored 37 out of 50 in the recent Riley survey into the top recruiting sites in the UK, which puts it just outside the top 5 in our internal response potential ranking.
**TotalJobs - http://www.totaljobs.com** A really interesting site this one. Owned by Reed Business Information, TotalJobs began life as an online effort by RBI to consolidate its massive recruitment advertising content into the one place. Now it is its own entity, and although still taking content from the RBI stable of titles (and thus supporting their own recruitment sales efforts) it is taking off quickly.
Traffic is being built rapidly (current figures are for 420,000 unique users generating 6 million page impressions in a month) as a result of their latest advertising campaign, and they have a large number of jobs, as you would expect. Content is interesting and draws you into the site (How to become a secret agent!). So, a site definitely worth looking at. A common complaint is that it can be a little slow to open.
TotalJobs scored 38 out of 50 in the recent Riley survey into the top recruiting sites in the UK, which makes it third equal in our internal response potential ranking.
Vacancy Board reviews are researched and written by Chris Pengelly of Riley Advertising (Riley Advertising can be contacted on 0207 353 3223).
As usual, any feedback and suggestions are most welcome. Don't forget that if you suggest a site that I then review you'll get an Internet goodie bag!!
CONTENTS: Reviewed Sites (Official Site Register & Total Search) - Article (The importance of Establishing Brand Awareness) - Site of Interest (The Skills Market) - Subscription form
*****REVIEWED SITES*****
*Official Site Register* **http://www.osr.co.uk/** The Official Site Register claims to be the Internet's largest search engine of "official only" websites with over 1.5 million entries. The site was first started in 1995 and now OSR Ltd employ 30 people to trawl the web looking for official sites and handling the many submissions they get each day. The criteria for entry is that the site must either be a corporate body or the official web site on a topic that is likely to be copied (eg, the Spice Girls official web site). They have indexed sites from around 148 countries. Companies include all those in the FTSE100, FTSE500 and the Dow Jones index. The search feature is very simple: you enter the name of the company or subject you are looking for in the search box at the top of the home page and click on Find. The results give the URL of the official site, if it has been indexed, along with a one-line description. To go to the site you simply click on the URL.
As finding official web sites and those for companies who haven't been able to get a straightforward web site address can be quite time consuming this is a really useful site.
*Total Search* **http://search2.ft.com/ft/gx.cgi/ftc?pagename=View&c=Collection&cid=FTD6PKJRPDC** Total Search is yet another great free service from FT.Com. This part of the FT.Com web site provides access to millions of articles and a directory of business sites. It has three main sections offering free services: FT Only, the Global Archive and the Web Guide. The FT Only search option allows you to search for and retrieve articles from the Financial Times and FT.Com website. The Global Archive is a search facility where you can search from over 10 million articles from in excess of 2,000 newspapers and magazines. To conduct a search you enter your search term into the search field at the top of page. You can either search across the whole of the archive or you can refine your search. The refine options include choosing specific dates within which to search, choosing from 15 industries and/or 8 regions, specifying publications or country of publication, etc. With over 1,250 articles being added every hour this is a comprehensive news archive. The Web Guide is a business directory that has indexed the websites from over 20,000 businesses. You can either search the directory or browse the categories (under the main headings of reference, work and current affairs). Unfortunately some of the categories are quite US focussed (for example the main part of the careers section seems to contain mainly US based websites).
With so much information in this part of the FT.Com site is it quite difficult to know how best to use it. However, if you are looking for business related news stories it is certainly worth making sure this site is on your list.
*****VACANCY BOARD REVIEWS ***** Chris Pengelly of Riley Advertising is currently on holiday for a fortnight. Vacancy board reviews will re-commence on his return.
*****ARTICLE***** THE IMPORTANCE OF ESTABLISHING BRAND AWARENESS
There are many benefits to be gained from branding, but what are they, and how will branding aid your recruitment drive online? Branding is more than simply convincing clients and candidates to recognise a logo or product name. Successful branding means creating emotional associations and allows potential candidates and clients to know the culture, beliefs and goals of your company.
The shift towards advertising job vacancies online is gathering momentum and is now established as an integral ingredient of the recruitment industry. In the struggle to become noticed amongst the increasing number of recruitment sites on the internet, recruitment companies venturing into this arena must create a strong presence, this is effectively obtained through branding.
Branding online is crucial in today's climate, and will play a key role in deciding who succeeds in the future. Those that fail to be branded will not create the required impact on the market place and will be ignored.
A brand that has candidate loyalty is able to generate constant revenue flow, reduces marketing expenditure and keeps the competition locked out. It is reported that most internet users visit approximately ten sites on a regular basis - with over 50% of UK internet users having looked for work online one of the bookmarked sites will be a jobsite. Branding will increase the likelihood of being bookmarked; once bookmarked the brand will keep reinforcing; developing the relationship without the competition.
Brands are built and reinforced at every single step of the recruitment process. The opportunity to gain candidate and client loyalty, trust and confidence in your abilities to serve them effectively and develop a relationship exists from the first contact. Customer relationships need to be nurtured. Once a strong relationship exists between you and the customer, they are far more likely to remain with you - the familiar and trusted supplier. It is 5 times more expensive to find new customers than maintain current ones. This being the case, it is arguable that investing in the brand makes sense and will save you money.
Oaten Farrar are a Recruitment Communications Agency based in Bristol, specialising in Branding, Web Strategy, Marketing and Advertising. For more information on these services please visit: www.oatenfarrar.co.uk or telephone Nick on: 0117 9532343 email:info@oatenfarrar.co.uk
*****SITE OF INTEREST***** The Skills Market (http://www.theskillsmarket.co.uk) is a web site that provides recruiters with real time access to the details of IT professionals who match their requirements. It is a CV database, with over 10,000 mostly UK based candidates. The services it offers to jobseekers are more comprehensive than most. Candidates, once they have entered a profile, can use the site to find out relevant market information, such as the average salary for their skills and how "in demand" those skills are. As with most CV databases the candidate doesn't pay anything to register their details or use the site - it is the recruiter that pays a monthly licence fee.
As usual, any feedback and suggestions are most welcome. Don't forget that if you suggest a site that I then review you'll get an Internet goodie bag!!
CONTENTS: Reviewed Sites (Work.com & Map Sites) - Internet Training - Article (Branding by Hugh Ramsey) - Site of Interest (Ask Alex) - Subscription form
*****REVIEWED SITES*****
*Work.com* **http://dowjones.work.com** Work.com is a business portal from Dow Jones. Despite being a US based resource it is a very comprehensive international tool. The main sections of the site are "Industries", "News", "Markets" and "Tools". Within the Industries section there is a list of 28 industry sectors. Once you click into an industry you get the top news, trends, a calendar of key events, stock information and information on key people in that industry. The News section is sub-categorised into top International business stories, technical business news and news from Asia or Europe. To find UK news stories you use the drop down listing of countries under the Europe heading. The Markets section has subcategories for "top market news", bonds, world stocks, currencies, commodities and the economy. The next section "Tools" is a listing of other web sites and internet based tools, categorised for business users. Headings include "Buy and Sell", "Organise your Office" and "Research".
As I mentioned at the start this is a very comprehensive site, with some great resources. If you are looking for information with a UK focus you might need to spend some time tracking down the most useful sections.
*Map Sites* **http://www.streetmap.co.uk & http://www.multimap.co.uk** The two main UK web sites that have mapping information are Streetmap and Multimap. Whilst they are both really useful sites for locating a colour map for anywhere in the UK, it has become apparent that it is no longer enough just to be able to produce a map by postcode. New features are being added all the time. Streetmap allows you to search by various criteria including postcode, OS grid reference, phone code and Latitude/Longitude. Multimap has added an "interactive tube map" (http://uk2.multimap.com/map/tube.cgi?client=tube&tmap=Tubeoverview) where you can zoom in or pan across the London underground. In addition, both sites give the option of viewing an aerial photograph of certain locations - especially within London. This is a great feature (although I admit it does have limited business use) and the clarity (especially on the Streetmap site) is amazing. If you want to try it out have a look at OS grid 507560,175865 on Streetmap.
*****INTERNET TRAINING***** I hope no-one minds one small paragraph of self-publicity! We run a one-day course showing recruiters and researchers how to use the Internet as a recruitment tool. This course can either be run as an onsite or public course depending on the number of people you are looking to train. For those who'd rather learn at their own pace we have also developed "The Recruiters Guide to the Internet"; this is published in association with Learning Curve and REC. Drop me a note at louise@nmib.com or call me on 01635 254881 if you want any more details on either the course or the guide.
*****ARTICLE***** Hugh Ramsey has produced the following information as a follow up to his article, in the last issue, on Online Branding.
All about a brand A brand is a representation of your company, and the promise that it offers people who come into contact with it. It is more than simply a logo; it manifests itself through all channels of the marketing mix and beyond. It is feasible, and beneficial, for a company to create a brand that encapsulates what it is to clients and potential clients alike. The brand expresses the ethos of the company, as contained in the mission statement, but it is actually more than this alone as it goes directly to the customer and interacts with them. It is present in meetings, in the shape of the director's car, and further more, it sends messages in all manner of ways through behaviour, emotions and visual statements. A brand is a complex phenomenon, and one that companies need to consider if they are to remain competitive.
1. Brands are important vehicles for creating growth, in terms of market share, revenues, and profits. 2. Brands are timeless. Products and services will come and go, but brands can live forever. 3. Brands are about meaningful and valued relationships with candidates and clients alike. They convey strong images and expectations. 4. Brands are experienced through many different encounters. Each represents an opportunity to influence and shape the overall brand image. 5. Brands are everybody's business. They can be the glue that ties the organisation together toward a common identity and purpose. 6. Brands are more than a name, a logo, or an advertising campaign. 7. Brands are very difficult to duplicate. Products can be copied and improved - they provide little sustainable competitive advantage. 8. Brands have a personality and a style, and are expressed through emotional attributes. 9. The strongest brands find the appropriate balance between functional and emotional attributes. 10. Brands rarely succeed when they try to be everything to everyone.
Oaten Farrar are a Recruitment Communications Agency based in Bristol, specialising in Branding, Web Strategy, Marketing and Advertising. For more information on these services please visit: www.oatenfarrar.co.uk or telephone Nick on: 0117 9532343 email:info@oatenfarrar.co.uk
*****SITE OF INTEREST***** I'm actually going to mention a site I reviewed back in Issue 15 as two people have recently recommended it to me. ASKALEX (http://www.askalex.co.uk) is a searchable database of over 1.8 million UK organisations (with the information originally obtained from the Dun & Bradstreet directories). To use the directory you either enter the company name you are looking for or a product and service. You can also enter a town, county or postcode if you want to narrow your search results. When you have entered your search criteria you click on the "search". The results give the company name and phone number, town, and one line description of the company's "speciality" and a link to a location map. There is also a link for "more details" - where you can get postal address, contact name, email address and web site address,
If you are interested in writing an article for the recruit net newsletter please drop me with your suggestion. Also, as usual, any feedback and suggestions are most welcome. Don't forget that if you suggest a site that I then review you'll get an Internet goodie bag!!
CONTENTS: Reviewed Sites (thetube.com & Search Engine Guide) - Recruitment 2000 - Top Tips (Writing online vacancies) - Statistics (from ICM CareerCare) - Opinion (Vacancy Board limitations) - Subscription form
*****REVIEWED SITES*****
*thetube.com* **http://www.thetube.com** As the title suggests this is a web site dedicated to the London Underground. The most useful part of the site is probably the "Tube Planner" (found under the heading Plan a Journey). To use the service you select your starting point from a drop down list of tube stations (alternatively you can manually enter a place of interest, a postcode or an address) and where you are travelling. The results show the route you need to take, how long each part of the journey will take and "actions" at each stage (eg, Board train to Stratford or West Ham). You are given an overall journey time along with price for an adult and child ticket. Another useful feature on the site is the Underground Maps. There are two maps (a standard tube map and an "all zones" map) in pdf and jpg format. The site also contains other information related to the London Underground including service information and links to other travel information (London Buses, River Services, etc). This is a great site and the Tube Planner is especially quick and easy to use.
This site was recommended by Tom Szczepanik who has won himself an Internet goodie bag.
**Search Engine Guide** **http://www.searchengineguide.com** The Search Engine Guide is a directory of search tools. If you are looking for information on a particular subject or topic you can waste time by using the wrong search engine or directory. It is often much quicker and effective to use a search site that specialises in your particular area. Search Engine Guide has more than 3500 "search engines" linked to from it's directory. You can either search the site using the search box found on the home page or browse the directory. The directory is split into 16 categories (eg, News and Media, Business, Society, etc) with each category containing a number of sub categories. Whether you search or browse the site the results are shown in the same way. Each site that is linked to is listed with its title and a one-line description of its purpose. You then click on the web site title to be taken to its home page. The site also contains articles and tutorials relevant to searching the Internet, both from the perspective of a Webmaster and someone looking for information.
This is a useful site to bear in mind if you need to find the most comprehensive amount of information on a specific topic.
*****RECRUITMENT 2000***** Just wanted to let you know that I'm going to be at the Recruitment 2000 event (29th and 30th November at London Olympia). I'll be spending some time on the Learning Curve stand to help out with enquiries for "The Recruiters Guide to the Internet" we sell in conjunction with them and REC. Please drop by and say hello if you are at the conference.
*****TOP TIPS*****
Writing Online Vacancies Robert Dunning, Operations Director of Rexonline Plc has recently written an article to help recruiters make the most of online advertising. Here he lists the top 10 (plus one!) tips for writing advertising copy for the Internet.
1. Location - candidates want to know more than whether the job is in the South East or North West ... they want towns and counties ...they want to picture themselves going to work and measure how accessible the Employer is. 2. How much? - Serious job seekers are looking for serious jobs. The truth is "Negotiable" or "£excellent!" doesn't cut the grade against a job giving an approximate figure 3. Start Date - Notice periods (and other variables) make people think that a job saying "ASAP start" is too late to be applied to. A good tip is to state the present and following months. 4. Job Categories - Almost all job sites categorise vertical and horizontal sectors of the job market together. So where does an IT Sales Executive search? If you're not sure place the job in both sectors. 5. Job Description - Job seekers want to decide for themselves whether they are suitable to apply for a position. They want details of what they are responsible for, what the job entails rather than just a few skills mentioned that match. 2,500 characters is usually more than enough space to write a detailed job description. 6. Key Words - After writing your vacancy add a list of key words and their variations. So easily a candidate can miss your vacancy if the key words do not match. E.g. Vacancy contains "AS400" candidate may only search on "AS/400" 7. Job Title - Consider Job Titles to be part of your key word list and include variations. Eg. Vacancy contains "Sales Executive" candidate may only search on "Telesales" 8. Spam - As soon as a candidate views a vacancy containing the same keywords over and over again to gain higher rankings the job seeker loses faith in that particular vacancy and the company advertising it. 9. Editing - Should vacancy response be too low consider going back to your advertisement and edit the description or key words. 10. Vacancy Removal - When all of the above is in place and response is too much it's time to check whether your vacancy can be removed from the site. 11. Branding - Check that your vacancy links to your Corporate Profile so that candidates can buy into your organisation and recruitment methodology.
Rexonline own the JobTrack (www.jobtrack.co.uk) vacancy board site.
*****STATISTICS*****
ICM CareerCare, a career management company, recently conducted a survey of 40 directors, managers and executives to find out what use they are making of vacancy boards when looking for a new position. Peter Douch from ICM has supplied an overview of the surveys findings that may prove of interest. - 65% of respondents had used vacancy boards whilst looking for a new job. - 52% of users found the registration process on vacancy boards to be laborious. - 76% of respondents said that job hunters should be allowed to browse vacancies first before deciding whether they needed to register for further details. - Websites directly related to the job hunter's specific industry sector or profession were the most popular amongst users. - Top of the list of best ways to find a new job are networking with former contacts and regular monitoring of professional and trade journals, which were still felt to be just as valuable as using vacancy boards. - Vacancy boards are currently felt to be only marginally more useful than national newspaper advertisements.
*****OPINION*****
Vacancy Boards: the downside for employers For this edition Chris Pengelly of Riley Advertising gives his opinion on the limitations of vacancy boards for corporate recruiters.
The UK recruitment market has changed over the last couple of years, skills shortages are increasing and the war for talent is becoming more competitive than it ever has been. The question is now how do I portray my company as an employer of choice, and sell what we have to offer, so that when I have vacancies to fill I either have CV's that I can use or my advertising efforts cut through the noise?
The rationale of using Internet recruitment sites for answering the above question is not one that holds water. In establishing an 'employer brand' that will result in 'employer of choice' status a company has to deliver a message to employees and potential recruits that are not necessarily looking for a new job. Using a jobs board only focuses that message at people that are actively looking for a new job.
Let's start at the beginning with your potential recruits. What are the things that are important to a person when they make the difficult decision to change jobs? What do they look for in a new job? I know for sure that I have never looked for a new job in my life and when I ask my friends they give me the same answer. The truth is that people usually do not look for a new job, especially when they are generally happy in the one that they have.
The winners in the war for the best talent - the companies who will be best able to drive their businesses forward by recruiting and retaining the best - will be those companies that people aspire to work for. They will be the companies who potential recruits look at first, and keep track of openings using their corporate website. These companies will be the companies that CV's are sent to on spec. These will be the companies whose employees actively go out and recruit their friends and families and industry peers. These will be the companies that rely less heavily on recruitment consultancies and advertising specific vacancies to actually fill jobs. These are the companies that spend their budgets on employer brand development, on being at the right events, on keeping in touch with potential recruits, on listening to the labour market. These will not be companies that buy and rely on the jobs board model as it is today. What is the point in spending a fortune on advertising all of your jobs somewhere where only people looking for a job are looking? Why waste money building your brand to the 5% of the working population who you are too late to influence (they are searching through a jobsite to get a new job, they are in the market to send their CV to as many companies as possible)? Why waste time chasing candidates who send their CV's through to you via a jobs board and another 10, 20, or 50 companies?
Something has been lost in this online revolution - uniqueness (or near uniqueness) of response. The jobs boards are great for recruitment consultancies to use. They can cancel out the lack of uniqueness in response by advertising a large volume of jobs. They are geared up to chase candidates and sell their jobs to them. They can respond quicker and to a larger number of people than most employers can.
Jobs boards work for recruitment consultancies. They offer consultancies access to a large number of people that are actively looking for a new job, the consultant can sell the benefits of the job, and the employer that has retained them, to the candidate.
So how does an employer use the World Wide Web to deliver a message to a targeted audience of potential new candidates without using jobs boards? The same way that they traditionally have, by using a mix of media that targets people either by where they live, what they do, or what they are interested in. The only difference now is that they have a new media to use in that mix. The way forward is for employers to use the corporate website as the centre of the whole campaign and as the focal point for all employer branding efforts. When everything you do is aimed at getting people to look at and respond to your corporate site then jobs boards show their true value, which is less than 5% of your recruitment marketing efforts.
Until jobs boards reinvent themselves this small share of recruitment budget is all that I believe they are likely to get. If recruiting online worked consistently for employers then that share would increase. It is up to the jobs boards to prove me, and other people that see their limitations, wrong. Up to that point employers should take them for what they are - of limited value.
If you are interested in writing an article for the recruit net newsletter please drop me with your suggestion. Also, as usual, any feedback and suggestions are most welcome. Don't forget that if you suggest a site that I then review you'll get an Internet goodie bag!!
CONTENTS: Reviewed Sites (open.gov.uk & MSN Search) - Subscription form
*****REVIEWED SITES*****
open.gov.uk ***http://open.gov.uk*** open.gov.uk is a portal to UK government sites. The two main areas of the site are the organisation and topic indexes. The organisation index is an alphabetical listing of government bodies that have web sites. These include individual local councils, the Royal Air Force, the audit commission, etc. The topic index is an alphabetical listing of the major topics for which government bodies produce information for the Internet. These topics include public records, foreign affairs and business.
The site also contains a section called Pathfinders; this has a listing of the government Internet portals. These include UKOnline (the government "Internet for all" initative) and the Government Consumer Gateway. Another interesting part of the site is the "Top 10 sites". This shows the most visited government sites over the last 7 days - for those who are interested, the Inland Revenue was at number 3 when I looked!
This site is very well structured, easy to navigate, uncluttered and a fantastic resource for government information.
MSN Search ***http://search.msn.co.uk*** This is the search engine from Microsoft. It's certainly not new to the search engine scene - but I thought I'd mention it as I've been using for a while now as my first port of call.
As well as a search engine the web page has a basic directory with headings such as work and money, careers and library. As MSN is global there are links to worldwide search sites for the US, Japan, Australia, etc. The search engine is very simple to use - you just enter the search terms into the box at the top of the screen and click the "search" button. The results are returned with the URL, title and description of page content.
There is an advanced search option where you can use Boolean searching, change the way results are shown, limit the search to a geographical region, search for pages by date changed and you can also search for audio, video or graphic files.
When I search using MSN I tend to type my search query directly into the address bar on the Internet Explorer browser. If you do not type a URL into this field the browser assumes you are entering search keywords and uses the MSN search engine to find results. The results are brought up in the same way as if you'd searched via http://search.msn.co.uk. One of the advantages of this is that you don't have to have a search engine as your home page but you can still search the web with minimum effort.
If you are interested in writing an article for the recruit net newsletter please drop me with your suggestion. Also, as usual, any feedback and suggestions are most welcome. Don't forget that if you suggest a site that I then review you'll get an Internet goodie bag!!