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Welcome to issue 364 of the ukrecruiter newsletter. Looking for recruitment consultants, managers or directors, HR recruitment professionals or online recruitment professionals? Look no further; UKRecruiterJobs | 
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CONTENTS
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How To Deal With Client Rejection & Increase Your Sales Results - Part Ten by Gavin Ingham Break your pattern Do something different. Stand up, take a walk, have a coffee, set yourself some new targets, make some phone calls, go to the gym. Do anything to break your state. Do some star jumps, shout at the top of your voice, read a motivational quote… Breaking your emotional pattern is one of the keys to choosing a new more resourceful state. So that's our 10: 10 ways for dealing with client rejection and increasing your sales. What can you do to improve your ability to deal with failure and rejection? How can you reframe rejection as learning? How can you better equip yourself to be the sales superstar that you owe it to yourself to be? It's up to you. This was written by author and motivational speaker Gavin Ingham. Sign up for his free Sales Success newsletter and read his blog now at www.gaviningham.com We are interspersing this series with the regular "My Favourites" piece. So why not submit your 3 favourite web sites. See the guidelines at http://www.ukrecruiter.co.uk/articles.htm |
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Opinion Piece - Agency Workers Directive – Are we to be consulted? By Adrian Marlowe The Agency Workers Directive (AWD) has long been simmering in the background, with many believing it would never become law, especially since the Government was originally against the proposals. However, following policy U-turn, the Government announced on the 20th May that a deal had been made with the TUC and the CBI that would give agency workers the right to equal treatment. The details of how the deal was reached were, to say the least, a little sketchy. On the 9th June the EU Council discussed the AWD proposal, with the UK now supporting the Directive. Notably on the same day the UK secured the retention of the opt-out from the 48 hour working week under the Working Time Directive, which had been under threat. This appears to be another deal behind closed doors. The BERR (Department for Business, Enterprise & Regulatory Reform) website states “The Government hopes that EU agreement will be obtained in time for the necessary UK legislation to be introduced in the next parliamentary session.” This suggests that legislation could be in force in the UK a lot sooner than most people, including the REC, believe. In fact it could be in force as early as April 2009. One question unanswered is who agency workers are going to have equal rights to. The Directive currently states that temporary agency workers shall have basic working and employment conditions as if they had been “recruited directly by that undertaking to occupy the same job.” This appears to cover temporary direct placements, as well as permanent employees, but the REC believes the comparator will only be to employees of the end-user. There are other misconceptions flying around, including the belief that the Directive would not apply to pay. However, the Directive makes it clear that “basic working and employment conditions” include pay. IT contractors also believe that the Directive will not apply to them, but the Directive does not exclude any industry. One area where the Directive could have a major impact on the whole recruitment industry, is if agency workers become entitled to maternity rights, which under the current draft of the Directive is entirely possible. Not only could this mean agency workers being entitled to statutory maternity pay (with a question over who is liable to pay) but if agency workers become entitled to maternity leave it follows that they may have the right to return to the same job they were in before they went on maternity leave. This goes against a key idea of the recruitment industry; being able to supply a flexible and disposable workforce. There is also a question at what point the agency workers would get these rights. Under the proposed Directive agency workers would be entitled to equal treatment from day 1, but Member States can derogate from this and have a qualifying period. The UK currently proposes 12 weeks, but this would have to be approved in Europe. It is arguably unfair that the Government has failed to warn the recruitment industry of the potentially devastating impact this legislation could have on their businesses. So far the Government has shown no intention of carrying out a new Consultation or Regulatory Impact Assessment (RIA). Following one carried out in 2002 it was concluded that: “The present UK regulatory framework offers a balance between flexibility and protection and agency workers.” So the question is why the Government now feels that there is a need for change. Taking figures from the RIA in 2002, it is possible to estimate what impact the new legislation could have on the recruitment industry. Then it was estimated that 210,000-290,000 agency workers would benefit from the proposals, but the figure today is now around 1 million. Adjusting the figures in the RIA to reflect this increase, and also taking into account increases in the Retail Price Index, the benefit to agency workers would be about £950 million a year in equal pay. On Government figures this would mean an increased cost to end users, as a result of higher fees from agencies, of around £1.625 billion per year. This is a staggering amount of money, and possibly more than end users would be prepared to pay. This legislation therefore has the potential to blow the whole recruitment industry apart. The impact and immediacy of AWD have been underplayed by the Government and others. It could be that the Government does not realise the full impact the legislation would have, in which case it is imperative that a fresh RIA is carried out. Also if the detail of the comparator has not been thought through, what would be the position if the Government suddenly realised that it cannot work, yet it has facilitated the AWD in Europe? On the other hand, several factors point to the possibility that the Government is fully aware of the potential consequences for the recruitment industry. For example, VAT concessions are being abolished by April 2009, and on the 26th June the Equalities Bill was introduced. This encourages employers to disclose levels of pay, in order to help eradicate unequal pay between men and woman. The combination of these measures could significantly damage the recruitment industry. Is this too much of a coincidence? It could be suggested that the Government is deliberately instigating a move towards the model of recruitment industry adopted in other European Countries. The message that needs to be conveyed is that if the recruitment industry wants to stop these potentially catastrophic pieces of legislation coming into force, then action needs to be taken now. If enough recruitment companies come together it may be possible to convince the Government to delay any domestic legislation, and crucially persuade them to carry out a fresh consultation and RIA. Adrian Marlowe is MD of Lawspeed
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Article Two: The Myth of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) by Stephen O’Donnell It is well known that 5% -15% of traffic on most recruitment websites comes from people typing in the web address directly, 10% to 20% linking from referring sites, and around 70% - 80% from search engines (mainly Google). You can slightly vary these figures by advertising like crazy, encouraging other sites to link to yours, and by “optimising” your site for the search engines. Traditional advertising costs a lot of money, for little return in traffic. Online advertising can work, but again you only get what you pay for, if that. Negotiated (i.e. not natural) link exchanges rarely work, as sites with a higher PageRank than yours will want to be paid for this service. Finally, optimising your site these days is no longer a black art. Google works very hard to ensure that your site receives the search priority it deserves; so trying to hoodwink it into believing your site has more relevant and greater content than it really does, is unlikely to work. What you certainly can do, is ensure that all of your content and pages are easily visible, well sign-posted, content rich, and regularly updated. This way, you can certainly have an advantage over the sites that do not yet do this. Of course what we all want is for our websites to be naturally high in search results, with an excellent PageRank. The best path to this, is to genuinely have a website packed with regularly updating content that is relevant to your target audience. Actively encouraging online-talk about, and links to, your site from other well trafficked sites will help your PageRank too (Off-site SEO). We know that Google's algorithm is working with more than 100 different variables, so whilst trying to outfox them is futile, welcoming them in is essential. Imagine this though. What if all sites were well optimised within their own pages, and had as many external links to them as their sites merited? In that case, wouldn’t all websites then get the search ranking that they deserve? This is very true, and you can bet that the biggest and busiest job-boards are just as well optimised as each other. Given the amount of continually changing content, in the form of job adverts, they should also rank more highly (for general terms) than the sites of recruitment firms competing to attract the same candidates. By gifting content to job boards in the form of vacancy adverts, advertisers are also making the job boards more attractive to search engines and by extension to candidates. This is seen most clearly in the success of Reed.co.uk. Whilst still benefiting greatly from the deal, Reed has shown a unique route to finding candidates. Recent research conducted by Google discovered that 50% of internet users start their pursuit for a job at a search engine before they go to a job board, recruitment agency website, or online trade publication with vacancy adverts. This of course negates the individual brand awareness efforts of many sites, as candidates follow the links to the most relevant vacancy, regardless of where it is hosted. Brand loyalty can be scarce amongst job boards, but is more common with agencies, where the candidate can identify with a recruiter, or the firm’s reputation. You could of course buy traffic to your site. Long established for getting a leg up on Google, paying for a campaign with Adwords means that you only pay for the traffic that you receive, on a pay per click basis. This can however be expensive, as you’ll be competing with large job boards with very deep marketing pockets, and teams of professionals to ensure their own volume of candidate traffic. Bidding for individual words, and the many combinations of phrases that candidates may search for, can be like playing cards with only a small number of chips – you are quickly priced out of the game. However, there now is an array of Vertical Search Engines, specialising in the recruitment sector, who are able to generate vast amounts of traffic in their own right, and route it directly to your vacancies on your site. This traffic is the result of continual aggressive SEO work, a high PageRank, and of course an enormous database of ever changing, relevant, recruitment content. This self-targeting traffic can then be channelled directly to vacancy adverts on any site, whether it be large or small, long established or new, and most importantly, optimised or not. Traditional SEO remains essential for every commercial website, and is certainly the most cost effective way of generating long term traffic. However, when you have vacancies that are only present on your site for a short time, and need applications today, sourcing targeted candidates via vertical search engines, is an easy decision to make. It is by far and away the simplest, quickest and most effective way of optimising your site to attract jobseekers. This is the kind of Search Engine Optimisation, or more specifically Search Engine Marketing (SEM), that brings immediate results. Stephen O’Donnell FREC, has been in the recruitment industry for 21 years. Having run 2 fast growing recruitment agencies, in 2000 he founded AlljobsUK.com as a comprehensive portal to every recruitment resource for candidates in the UK. In 2001 AlljobsUK.com devised, and continue to host, the National Online Recruitment Awards (NORAs). AlljobsUK.com is now a stable mate of 1Job.co.uk, the UK’s leading vertical job search engine. |
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Online Recruitment Update (This section is sponsored by http://www.1Job.co.uk; "the leading UK job search engine") UKRecruiterJobs:
Traditional, On-line and Corporate HR Recruitment Job Board Hitwise top 10 Recruitment
Sites, week ending 5th July 2008 Louise's UK Recruiter blog Discussion Board Summary Press Release: Latest audit underlines Workcircle's market lead This section is sponsored by http://www.1Job.co.uk; "the leading UK job search engine" |
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Regards
Louise Triance
UK Recruiter http://www.ukrecruiter.co.uk
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