2012 Salary Survey Released by Morgan McKinley

Morgan Mckinley have released the results of their 2012 Salary Survey.

The Salary Survey covers hiring and salary trends in the following sectors:

• accountancy and finance Salaries
• financial services Salaries
• HR Salaries
• IT Salaries
• Legal Salaries
• Sales & Marketing Salaries
• Technical Salaries
• Customer service Salaries
• Secretarial & office support Salaries

The report confirms that the outlook is set to be very conservative for 2012 with the odd exception, such as the IT sector where growth looks relatively promising.

Download the full Salary Survey

The Salary report is based on the input of 584 senior managers across the sectors in the list above.

Congratulations to the team at Prosperity for winning an Eircom Spider Award.

Prosperity’s win was for “best listings site”. Prosperity were the only recruitment agency to be short listed this year. With attention on the NRF awards, it is in some ways surprising that more recruitment agencies did not go for the Spiders too.

Well done again for a job well done prosperity. Clearly happiness does work!

Medical Jobs recruitment Agency Jackie Brown Medical have completely relaunched their website in time for the Recruitment Industry Awards, 3Q have been making progress with their SEO efforts this week.  It seems that awards time is a really good thing for the recruitment industry as everybody pulls out all the stops to get them one of the coveted awards.

Has anybody noticed any other major changes? Leave a comment and I will add to this article if you have any news or have made any changes to your recruitment website.

The deadline for submissions to this years NRF Recruitment Industry Awards is 5pm tomorrow.  Any agency wishing to participate would need to think about using a courier if they want to enter.

The National Recruitment Federation awards are THE highlight of the recruitment year.  While recruitment agencies watch each other continually, the awards offer a real mark of how well agencies are doing in relation to their competition.

This years Recruitment Industry Awards will be held on 25th November at the Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin.  The awards are sponsored by The Irish Independent.

Good luck to all participants.

I have been very quiet for a long time on the subject of recruitment.  A lot has happened in my absence.  There have been recruitment agency deaths, takeovers and consolidations.  I don’t want to focus on the negatives too much.  There is far too much of that going around.

I am writing this post just to announce what I will be up to for the next while.

Return to free job posting imminent

I had started a free job board, but stopped the process part way through.  I will be re-visiting mynextjob.ie and some other job sites.  I will also be re-vamping this site (I think I’ll start with these disgustingly coloured headings – bright green in-case you are reading after I’ve already done it).  If anybody has any suggestions of what they would like to see happen on this site, please drop me a line by commenting on this post or emailing me (see contact page).

Tell us your recruitment news

As always, any news you have on recruitment, good or bad is always appreciated.  I am not beyond a plug or two in this news section.  If you have been innovative or are bucking trends let me know and I’ll help you shout about it.

I have read a lot of posts about how recruitment is changing.  My opinion is that it is only changing in response to the current economic climate.  The job of a recruiter remains the same, it’s just a little tougher than it was 5 years ago.

Recruitment Methods

Certainly there is a change in recruitment methods.  Social media has been widely adopted at this stage, particularly Linkedin.  The hype about social media has died down though.  It is now just another day to day tool for recruiters.  There also seems to have been a bit of a backlash against social media with people preferring to get more personal with their clients/candidates.  While I see social media as integral to recruitment today, I applaud this more personal approach.  I believe it brings about a more professional recruitment service, one that will stand to the industry as a whole going forward.

During the celtic tiger years recruiting was easy and standards across the industry as a whole got a bit sloppy.  Some recruiters were treating recruitment as a numbers game.  The demand for staff allowed for this “fling as many CV’s as you can” approach to succeed to some extent.  This is no longer the case.  Client companies are now able to demand and get the job done that they are paying for.  They can get a smaller list of targeted CV’s that cuts down their own workload.  They can expect recruiters to be able to talk them through each of the CV’s they have sent in.  This is how it should be.

Job Seekers

The quality of job seekers for positions has been becoming increasingly better.  This is due to the larger numbers of highly qualified candidates out there through job loss / insecurity.

The market is tough out there for job seekers.  For recruitment agencies that facilitate emigration business is booming.  There is a general backlash amongst businesses to buck recession trends though.  I have heard a lot of business owners mention the 80’s.  Companies survived through hard times before.  We have had and will have some more tough financial medicine, but there has already been a small return to growth in the exports market.  We may not return to the heady days of the celtic tiger, but business will continue to be done in this country.  It has to be done.  People have to survive, and that means more innovation and more creation.

Announcing the New Online Marketing Forum. We are shouting about our latest resource for you.

Online Marketing is the life blood of recruitment agencies.  There is a massive thirst for knowledge out there.  To try and meet that demand Webshed have created a Online Marketing Forum.

The forum has boards for SEO, Online and offline marketing, Social Media, and PR.  The idea is that it will provide a place to ask questions in an anonymous manner.

SEO is a huge area in itself, and since SEO, Marketing, PR and Social Media all tie together, we at Webshed prefer to use the term holistic SEO.  The forum is broken into sections, but for a really good online presence all of the sections should be married together.

The Online Marketing Forum is very new.  As a result there little activity on it.  This will change.  I have just begun actively marketing the forum, and over the next few weeks it will see a spike in activity.  If you have a question or a comment do not be afraid to be the first to post.  After all, every forum has to start somewhere!

The Online Marketing Forum should be a good resource for recruiters who want to learn how to build both their own brand and the company brand online.  It is not just recruiters who will benefit.  Anybody with an online business can use the forum and benefit from free advice.

It is your forum, and will be very much user led.  Enjoy it.  Visit the Online Marketing Forum at http://www.webshed.ie/forum.

Returning to Recruitment can be stressful

Returning to recruitment an easy task? Obviously… evidently not!

After nearly 5 years working in the Recruitment business and a further 17 month stint at “Motherhood”, returning back to the role I love so much would, at first glance, seem the most natural progression to getting yourself  ”back into the workforce”. The excitement of coming back to work and getting right back into the nitty gritty of meeting new people on both sides of the process was endlessly thrilling to me! Afterall… recruitment is recruitment right? Returning to recruitment is now, in 2010, NOT as simple as all that!

The first thing that hits me are words like Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter and… BLOG? I’m suddenly facing a fullforce training schedule on how to use these things on a day to day basis in my fabulous new recruitment role? You want me to write a what?? So here I am, day 2 and after what seems like a year of fear, here I am writing my first blog and all the time thinking how do I incorporate this into recruitment.. but I am told that everyone does it, so I’ll try my best!

What I face now, which for some reason I am quite looking forward to, is this strange new paper free environment with blogs and Tweets and Status Updates as opposed to “File, Print”! My connections, upon returning to recruitment, will no longer be squeezed into the address book at the back of my diary but rather in the form of Connections in Linkedin! I’ve had a look… admittedly, it looks good so who am I to object!

All in all, returning to recruitment looks good so far. I’m told that my fear of blogs will eventually go away.. eventually!

IrishJobs.ie have announced that the number of job vacancies advertised on their site has stabilised.

The current number of jobs on the IrishJobs site is about 16,000.  This is down from 45,000 in the midst of the Celtic Tiger years.

Sectors that are showing signs of recovery are:

• Accountancy
• Banking
• IT
• Finance
• Marketing
• Medical
• Sales

None of these sectors are at anything like the strength they were once at, but the fact that the free fall in job vacancy numbers has halted is good news.  Reports from agencies also indicates a return towards some economic growth in 2010.

Text a Job (txtAjob.ie) Jobs to your mobile phone.

I previously wrote a post about Ireland’s only free-to-advertise text alert job board txtAjob.ie (Text a Job).  They offer jobs to your mobile phone via text alerts.

In the piece I wrote before I remarked that a job seeker would be likely to receive lots of jobs that were not suitable for them.  This was because the categories were very broad.  I am delighted to report that this has been addressed in a significant manner.  They have added a further 22 categories, meaning that subscribers to a specific category will have less flotsam to contend with.  This is a very welcome development.

Of course, how relevant jobs are to the user will be highly significant when it comes to people retaining the service on their phones, so it makes good business sense.

TxtAjob have also stated that stale and repeated jobs will also be automatically removed.  This has been a problem for all the job boards.  As we entered the recession it got particularly bad, with fake job postings and multiple versions of the same job advertised.  This was often in an effort to make an agency look like they had more jobs than were actually available.  TxtAjob are actively removing any instances.  The other job board to tackle this was RecruitIreland.com, who moved to a credits system like Monster last year.

It would seem that txtAjob have gained quite a few agencies as advertisers, but also have companies advertising too.  I know that they have integrated with eRecruit to make job posting easier for agencies that use that service.

TxtAjob have also been advertising fairly heavily.  They are running campaigns on Newstalk and on FM104, where they are also sponsoring FM104’s job finder spot.

Competing in the job board market is not easy, and txtAjob seem to be doing a good job of it.  Since advertising jobs is free it makes sense to post jobs with them, particularly with the media coverage they are currently receiving.

Email addresses you should not use for job hunting

It is astounding how many people send in CV’s from email addresses that do them no favours what so ever.  I have no problem with anybody calling themselves hotgirl69@gmail.com, stud09@hotmail.com or mushroom.trev@ucd.ie, but I do not want to see it on a job application.  Yes It amuses me, it makes me laugh and it may even make me remember you.  The trouble is you really don’t want to be remembered for your decidedly dodgy email address.

How is a recruiter supposed to put you forward as a professional in your field when they know that you are willing to use an email address like the above to promote yourself.  Ireland is not quite the repressive Catholic Ireland it used to be, but alluding to sexual prowess, recreational drug taking or criminality is not clever.

It could perhaps be excused if it were not so simple to get a new email address that is more professional. trevor.sorbie@gmail.com is a lot better than mushroom.trev.

Now that that is off my chest, do I really have to go into making your profile private on facebook and cleaning up your Linkedin profile?  Good.  Oh, just one thing on facebook.  If, like me you are linked to Saddam Hussain, Salman Rushdie, Osama Bin Laden and George Bush, just because you though it was funny… be aware that you cannot make your friends private.  If you are looking for a job then ditch your less admirable, politically incorrect, or controversial friends.  You do not want somebody else getting your job just because you inadvertently offended your would be boss by linking to somebody they despise.