Welcome to issue 286 of the ukrecruiter newsletter. 

CONTENTS

Visit http://www.careersinrecruitment.com for the latest recruitment industry jobs.

My Favourites

http://www.campfirenow.com - We’re a geographically dispersed company, this is our virtual watercooler – permanent chat rooms to discuss, share visuals and so on. This and Skype make our business possible.

http://www.centraldesktop.com - an ‘intranet in a box’ – great for discussions, reviewing files, and collaboration

http://www.vyew.com - team-based web-conferencing – discuss and annotate screens together in real time.

These favourites were suggested by Simon Appleton of Workcircle (www.workcircle.com


Why not submit your 3 favourite web sites. See the guidelines at http://www.ukrecruiter.co.uk/articles.htm

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Article One: How to harness the power of email for recruitment by Anthony Braide

Email is an all-pervasive communication tool. However its potential use as an extremely effective means of building customer relationships and selling recruitment services remains hugely under utilised. In this article I’m going to explain a few simple ideas that are very easy to implement and will improve your bottom line. 

Opt-in email marketing (your recipients have given their permission for you to contact them) is exploding because it works. Companies are lured to it by incredibly low costs and high response rates. It’s easy to get started and it puts any organisation, large or small, on a level playing field. Unlike conventional direct marketing pieces, email marketing is both cheap and easy to test, so excellent response rates should be achievable for any recruiter.

Unfortunately so many of the recruitment emails that I receive get just about everything wrong. And why don’t the senders ever seem to learn from their mistakes?

The advantage that email marketing has over pretty much any other type of marketing is its trackability. Instant, live results from your marketing campaign were a marketers dream just a few, short years ago. Now they’re a reality but only the enlightened few are taking advantage.

Emailing your database from Outlook or using bulk email sending software gets you little or no feedback. Imagine if you could tell, at a glance, who isn’t interested in your services and really doesn’t want to hear from you again (so you don’t waste any more of your valuable time on them). Imagine if you could tell who opened your job description and read it repeatedly (wow, those people must really be interested!). Better still, if they click directly through to your website and you know what link they clicked on (you now know exactly which job interests them). If you had that kind of information you could really start to harness the power of email.

Fortunately all that information is really easy to obtain if you use a good email marketing tool rather than Outlook. There might be a learning curve of a few days but it’s worth a little effort to make your emails 100% more effective? With in-depth information you can begin to mould your campaigns and target your messages. Improve your response rates and follow up on click-throughs. In essence, learn from your mistakes and find out what works for you.

To start you on the right track. Here are 5 tried and tested ways of improving the effectiveness of your emails.

  • Keep your subject lines short and to the point. Longer than 40 characters and they’ll be cut off by many email clients. 

  • Keep it simple stupid. Don’t make your emails too long or try to cram in too much. You’ve got a second or so to grab your reader’s attention so keep it concise. If you’re targeting your readers well, this should be easy.

  • Let your readers know what to do next. Put a clear call to action on your email. A link to your website or your telephone number, big and bold.

  • Make it time limited. Putting a deadline on your email has been proven to increase response rates. Make it clear to your recipients that if they snooze they loose and the job opportunity will be gone!

  • Time it right. Don’t send your email at 10’o’clock on a Monday morning when everyone is manic. It’s going to get deleted. Timing is everything so choose a time of day when your recipient will be more receptive.

Pay close attention to just these five rules and I guarantee you will improve your response rates. Good luck and remember the power of email marketing - customer knowledge!


Anthony Braide is Managing Director of Gencia Media Ltd who are developers of leading UK email marketing application LiveWireCampaign.co.uk. You can send a campaign to up to 50 recipients per month absolutely free (if you need to send more you can purchase a pay-as-you-go voucher). Visit the website at www.LiveWireCampaign.co.uk or call 01565 641481 to find out how LiveWireCampaign.co.uk can help your business.

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Advertisement

Recruiters – How much income do you lose by turning away vacancies?

Launching in November, www.SplitFeeJobs.com is a new and unique website that offers recruiters the opportunity to advertise their jobs to other recruiters and work together on a “Split Fee” basis.

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So don’t turn away that vacancy – work with another agency and split the fee! 

Article Two: Review of “Successful Headhunting” Training course by John Hazlewood

After 10 years in contingency recruitment I am now, along with a lot of other recruiters, in a very much candidate driven market where the more ‘traditional’ ways of doing contingency recruitment (ie database search, advertising on job boards and networking) are not giving us sufficiently high quality candidates. I have done a little bit of headhunting before and do generally feel that this approach usually offers clients a better standard of candidate. I felt a headhunting course like this would enable me to offer a better service to my clients.

The course, presented by Recruitment Matters’ lead trainer, Warren Kemp, was held at the, very upmarket, Malmaison Hotel in Leeds. I arrived at the Hotel by 8:30 am reading for a 9am start and there were the usual refreshments available, coffee, tea and muffins. There were 16 participants including myself with various levels of recruiting experience; from attendees with almost no recruiting experience to recruitment consultants like me with at least six years experience. A lot of the attendees were local to the Leeds area; however, there were several attendees like myself from further afield like Nottingham and Aberdeen.

The training room at the hotel was of a very high standard and easily accommodated the sixteen attendees in a boardroom style layout. Warren made sure we were all very welcome and got us to fill out our own names on a blank cardboard nameplate.

At the beginning of the course Warren told us there would be really only two points in the seminar when we should or might want to take notes: the ‘name gathering’ and ‘candidate objection/concern handling’ sections.

Warren gently led us through each of the topics for the rest of the day with attendees getting plenty of chance to put into practice what we had learned by being split up into groups of two or three with ‘brainstorming’ exercises at appropriate moments. There was also plenty of opportunity to ask questions. The topics we covered in the course were head-hunting methodology, name gathering, getting past the gate-keeper, identifying candidate motivators, the head-hunt call & subsequent conversations, selling the benefits to the candidate & client, the client pitch & fee structures, candidate objection/concern handling and managing the process including the resignation.

Included with the course at the hotel was a very nice formal sit down lunch with a varied choice on the menu, which gave all of the participants on the course a chance to network with each other.

Warren came across as someone with a lot of practical experience and in-depth knowledge of headhunting (Warren actually practices what he preaches as he has his own ‘headhunting’ company). He also genuinely wanted each participant to understand that headhunting can be done ethically and professionally. All the participants’ questions were answered fully by Warren and he made sure everyone was happy with the content of each topic before moving on to the next topic.

At the end of the course we were given a very comprehensive course notes manual together with six audio CDs, recorded by Warren in a very professional package, covering all the topics in the course. 

The course gave me exactly what was looking for - a comprehensive understanding of all the processes to do with headhunting. I thought the course was excellent value and quite frankly I am struggling to find any weak points about the course. Warren’s training is of a very high standard indeed. If you want to learn how to headhunt professionally and ethically or need a brush up on your headhunting technique then I suggest you attend one of Warren’s seminars. 


John Hazlewood is Account Manager for Northern Europe at Scout Recruitment and can be contacted on 01224 645708 or john.hazlewood@scoutrecruitment.com.


For information about this course contact Emma Thorpe at Recruitment Matters on 0800 0749289. Or visit www.recruitmentmatters.com  

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Don't Miss This

Press Release: Marcia Appointed to Euro-CIETT Board
"Marcia Roberts, the newly appointed Chief Executive Officer of the Recruitment and Employment Confederation (REC), has now been elected to be a member of the Euro-CIETT board. In this role, Marcia will represent the interests of the UK’s £24.5 billion recruitment industry on the eight strong board of Euro-CIETT, the European Confederation of Private Employment Agencies.  Euro-CIETT is the representative body for the European recruitment industry, which is made up of national federations from other European countries and the largest multi-national agencies."

Run Psychometric tests for less money
I've recently started using a new provider for the majority of the psychometric questionnaires we run.  As a result I have about a dozen on account with a previous supplier.  These are perfectly acceptable for online assessment of graduates, managers and directors.   If you want to run any questionnaires in the near future drop me a note and I'll do a discounted price for these.  Email contact2@ukrecruiter.co.uk

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Discussion Board Summary

Don't forget to visit The Discussion Board. Current topics on the site include:

Any postings you or anyone else makes will be included in the weekly digest. Sign up for the free digest here or hit reply to ask me to include your email address

It is free to use the discussion board and you don't have to register to view messages. Visit the site; ask questions and share your knowledge

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Online Recruitment Update (sponsored by http://www.broadbean.co.uk for "the UK's favourite job posting system")

Using Linkedin within the UK Recruiter community
We've set up a UK Recruiter group on LinkedIn. To sign up you just need to click this link: https://www.linkedin.com/e/gis/2189/4596053253C3.  If you use LinkedIn with the same email address you use to get the newsletter you can automatically become a member of the LinkedIn group.  If you use an alternative email address we'll have to "authorise" your membership.  If you don't use LinkedIn already you can read a little about the site on one of my previous blog postings here

Louise's UK Recruiter blog
In the past week I've talked about the workingmums.co.uk website (is it sexist?), the results of the NORA awards and ZoomInfo for recruiters.  You can read "Louise's UK Recruiter blog" at http://ukrecruiter.typepad.com 

Recruitment Blog Watch (last 7 days):
Tim Elkington's blog: Online Recruitment - the bigger picture: What is the value of everything? and Law 2.0 + Detective YouTube. 
Stephen Fowler's blog: Recruitment Views: The Results of the National Online Recruitment Awards; A job board just for your voice!! and I am over the moon 
Jim Stoud's Blog Charm: The Week In Recruiting (roundup of the best blogs of the week); HR in INDIA: What does a recruiting team do?  and NSA is using TV for Recruiting

Hitwise top 10 Recruitment Sites, week ending 28th October 2006
The most visited UK recruitment sites last week, starting with the most popular, were www.jobcentreplus.gov.uk, www.totaljobs.com, www.monster.co.uk, www.jobsite.co.uk, www.jobs.nhs.uk, www.reed.co.uk, jobs.tes.co.uk, www.jobs.ac.uk, www.jobsgopublic.com and jobs.guardian.co.uk. Hitwise don't aggregate data from sites who form part of a network such as fish4.co.uk For more information about Hitwise, visit http://www.hitwise.co.uk

This section is sponsored by http://www.broadbean.co.uk; "the UK's favourite job posting system".

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Regards
Louise Triance
UK Recruiter http://www.ukrecruiter.co.uk

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