Changes at the top for Zubka

After only having had David Sheildhouse talking so passionately about his service (Zubka) a couple of weeks ago it appears he is now "looking at other opportunities".

In their words;

Zubka's management team has evolved. Armando Ruffini, Zubka's Co-founder and
previously COO, has moved into the role of CEO as David Shieldhouse, Zubka's
Co-founder and incumbent CEO, refocuses his energies on new entrepreneurial
ventures. David tells us: "From developing the original idea, through to
launching the business, securing VC backing from Balderton (previously
Benchmark) and building a solid foundation of users, we have been on an
incredible journey. We are all justly proud of what Zubka has achieved so far
and I look forward to seeing the business realise its full potential as a global
player in the recruitment industry."

The article then goes on to describe the backgrounds of the rest of the management team. So I did what everyone can do these days and looked them up on LinkedIn. A quick search under people for the company Zubka and I have my suspicions confirmed. What a great research tool.

My concern here is that there have been many technology based products that aim to dis-intermediate recruiters from the recruitment process. The aim to bring passive candidates (someone who is not actively looking) to the attention of hiring authorities. The issue is and from painful experience getting the name is only a small part of the battle. If I am a talented individual in my vertical, am I going to be motivated to enter into discussions about a future career move on the basis of a job posting, and probably a poorly written one at that.

The management team at Zubka have great, solid experience in some great companies, I dread to think what their payroll is each month! The gap, I feel, is that their does not appear to be any recruitment experience, David had been involved in executive search, I saw that as a huge positive. He says he will still be involved, I hope that is the case.

Third party recruiters have been alienated before by web based plays in the recruitment market, you ignore them at your peril. They simply cannot make this work for them unless they outsource or unbundle part of the process and say get a team of researchers in India trying to make residual income from their recruitment databases. The model is not clear but I will start to take a closer look.

For the general day to day individual, you may find a role that suits you, get a friend to refer you and then hopefully split the fee (a pseudo signing bonus). But, I would hardly call that attracting a passive candidate!

Recruitment hits Second Life

An article that really starts the head spinning from VNUnet.com, I am not unaware of Second Life, and I am more than aware of the growth and hype surrounding it's online community. But the blending of your real life (first life) and the escapism of your virtual life (second life) feels like a stretch, if not defeatist. With a globally aging demographic it is getting harder and harder to attract, hire and retain the talented people that will help companies achieve their goals. On that basis I have to applaud the creativity of taking the career fair concept to the virtual world.

The Career fair is being run by TMP and those interested in attending need to pre-register at the following site http://www.i-jobsforreal.co.uk/. By this point I was turned off already, but I am going to persist and see if I can report on the event and give you my feedback.

Year in and year out, I have read about the mythical passive candidate that job boards are supposedly bringing to the attention of recruiters! I am sorry, but I have yet to see someone passively, accidentally, as if by magic, end up on a job board and apply for a job! A career fair in a virtual world is going to be attracting the same kind of people that would be looking for work in a real world career fair in their real life. The hype and PR that goes with this is one thing, what I want to hear about is the time to hire, quality of hire and cost per hire from such activity before we give it too much credence.

For the majority of us the fact remains whether we are interacting in the real world or in a virtual world, we leave a trail of activity that creates a perception of who we are. Educate yourself on the best way to promote and represent your personal brand online and ensure your information is consistent. No matter where you decide to work or play online, your business partners, colleagues and potential future employer or clients are online too.

Zubka Blog - Celebrates Success

Whilst attending a franchise exhibition at the Birmingham NEC, I had the fortune to bump into David Shieldhouse of Zubka. Not only did I discover they were just down the road from my current office, but they were also solidly founded in executive recruitment in their former lives.

Zubka is relatively new, but our discussions took me back to the "dot com boom" days when over far too many drinks one evening, a group of friends came up with the idea of shunt-a-mate.com. The idea being that there are times when you reach a point in your career path where you cannot move forward without your boss moving on! By referring your boss for a job (commonly known as shunting) you could free up some room at the top for career progression. The idea took on a life of it's own we started thinking of the many people that could benefit from shunting someone else from a role!

OK, so a liquid fueled idea created a fun evening, and then sure enough as with many great ideas it seems a team of people got off their bottoms and did something about it! That appears to be what David and team has done. In their words;

"Since we launched Zubka, we've evolved our platform, built a
business that is active in around 100 countries, won awards and accolades from
our peers, brought vacancies onto the Zubka job
board from some of the leading brands and
businesses in the world today and generated (to date) over £2.5 million GBP of
rewards for our thousands of referrers to benefit from."

There is one global truth, companies are always looking to reduce their cost per hire, recruiters are a necessary evil in many hiring authorities minds. Corporate hiring authorities are struggling to find talented individuals to hire. That is because talented individuals, who are happy where they are, being looked after, and doing a great job are not actively looking for them!

The incentive of a referral fee may be enough to provide and incentive to an individual to refer a friend. This functionality has been on the job boards for a long time. But, with an incentive it may make you think a little harder! With the referral fee being a fraction of what a corporate hiring authority pays to a recruiter the motivation will be there to make best use of such a site. There is still a large amount of work to do in the process though.

My issue in this respect, having worked as a recruiter, is that the fraction of the fee is being paid because providing the name is only a fraction of the task in attracting, hiring, and retaining top talent. Any recruiter "worth their salt" is aware that in this tight market, covering counter offers, and steering candidates with multiple offers on the table is what makes the difference.

Finding clients that are also prepared to sell the opportunity is also a key part of the battle. When I consider the amount of work in finding the name, and then having to hope that they get through the process to be hired, when I have no control over that part of the process, it worries me. I can only see the odd placement being made unless you have large database of candidates and throw names at it. In a candidate tight market, that can only be described as full employment in many markets, I'd rather make a 20 - 30% fee from a candidate than settle for a small referral fee.

On the other side of the equation. Recruiters usually work specific assignments and struggle to work with talented individuals that do not quite fit the spec they are working on. This talent often "withers on the vine" if they are not introduced to new opportunities quickly. It could be here that a recruiter could earn incremental revenue, over and above their normal business. Particularly if they find someone outside of their area of speciality, in which case they would usually get no further business.

Zubka seems to have a role to play, but it needs to permeate into the everyday life of a normal web user, rather than something that an active job seeker will go and do. If an individual wanted to go and look for a job there are many job boards that would meet that need.

Management of expectations is key. I have heard so many times that one of the biggest criticisms of the recruitment industry is that individuals are given very little information about the role that they are asked to interview for and it ends up being a complete waste of time and energy. Simply putting a name to an opportunity and hoping that the individual and hiring manager fall in love still seems like a long shot. I am sure David and team will prove me wrong and I support the passion, drive and innovation they are putting into their business. I applaud it, and with £2.5m in referral fees to be collected something must be going right!

Another reputation checking company!

The article above highlights another company that is providing a business service based around using information found on the public web to establish or protect an individuals background. If you think that Facebook, MySpace and other such sites are only for Gen X and Gen Y then think again.

The company in this article, Reputica (http://www.reputica.com/) launched in June '07, has launched a CEO version that allows recruitment companies to gather information from many web sources to establish the credibility of candidates they are working with. Text from their site;

"ReputicaCEO Search a service to executive search agencies which offers a full
download of all online articles, chats and blogs written about
candidates, providing a far more detailed and balanced background
view."

Reputica also has a product that allows you to view your own data and highlight areas that may need work as you manage your online reputation. We will take a closer look at their product and report back to you shortly.

Jobtonic First to Exploit Facebook for Recruitment

In this article Job Tonic has taken advantage of two common themes that form the basis of this blog. Firstly, business and personal social networking. Secondly, one of the benefits of social networking, the opportunity for individuals to manage their career development in an age when there is no such thing as a job for life.

In their words;

"Jobtonic’s Facebook add-on allows users to view jobs
and make referrals with the chance of being rewarded with up to £2,200. The
refer-o-matic application is free to use and available to all users, Jobtonic
passes on a finder’s fee reward to successful referrers.
Jobtonic’s
refer-o-matic intelligently reads the user’s Facebook profile in order to
display jobs most relevant to their location. It gives the growing number of
Jobtonic referrers quick and easy access to the latest job vacancies via an
application button always present on the left hand side of their profile. The
application can easily be added to a Facebook profile with just a few clicks in
less than two minutes.

Facebook boasts over 24 million active users
worldwide and has been receiving 100,000 new registrations daily since January
2007. With well over 1,000 jobs now available across the UK on Jobtonic with
rewards of up to £2,200 up for grabs, there has never been a better time for
social networking fans to monetise their networks.

Nick Goldstein, GM, Jobtonic enthused “Facebook is
the social networking site of choice for those looking to keep in touch with
friends and past colleagues. By embedding our job vacancies on the site with
this application, we ensure that our users have easy access to them giving them
more opportunities to refer jobs to friends and make some money if their friends
take the job.”

Individuals in your own private network may now spot an opportunity that they know could be just right for you and refer it to you. The more people you have in your network that really know you and that you trust the tighter the opportunities are likely to be.

I heard a statistic recently that the average Gen X / Y individual will have an average of 10 different jobs by the time they retire. There is no negative connection with a career move every 3 to 4 years, in fact it can be seen as a negative if you do not move as you can get bogged down in political issues and historical baggage.

Use the tools available to you, but remember network sensibly and ensure that you would be happy with anything you post online to appear in your local newspaper. With career opportunities getting ever more closely linked to social networking it is important that any profile tells the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

Reputica Launches

A new company Reputica has launched a brand new online system that it says will revolutionise reputation management. In their words;

"A new 360 degree reputation management company launches today with the promise to be the answer to managing corporate and individual reputation within the world of citizen journalism. The brainchild of Paul Alexander and Andrew Jordan, Reputica trawls the full spectrum of traditional and new media, including blogs and chat rooms, to produce a unique dashboard of reputation scores known as ReputicaRating™, in real time. In addition, the service can predict where and when news stories are likely to go across the internet, enabling clients
to proactively manage breaking news.

The Reputica service, available on a yearly subscription, is aimed at ‘anyone who values their reputation and who wants to proactively improve their profile’. In particular, CEOs, high net worth individuals and PR companies are first in line for attention. “With more and more corporate and personal scandals filling the news every day, companies, CEOs and public figures need to safeguard their reputations now more than ever,” says Andrew Jordan. “Long before you see it in the traditional print media, bad news about you, your company or your products can be winging its way through the ether, transferred by anyone with a computer and modem. Blogs, chat rooms, word of mouth are fast becoming just as influential – and faster moving – as traditional print and TV media. Within days, the impact of this could potentially cost companies millions in lost revenue, and studies have shown that on average it takes over 3.5 years
for companies or individuals to recover from such reputational damage.”

“The ReputicaRating™ is just the beginning,” says Jordan. “The key to our service is in using our unique software to predict how information will disseminate across various media platforms. In other words, if a negative blog comes out one day, we can predict – based on complex analytical algorithms – where that story is likely to go next, and when. We can then advise our clients on the most effective pre-emptive steps to take. Reputica turns Reputation Management from being reactive to being proactive, a far more effective strategy.” The management are hoping that ReputicaRating™ will fast become the currency for reputation scoring. "

It is early days to see if they can become the de-facto standard with such a broad range of intangible online media coverage, but we will be watching them closely.

For those in the lime light every day, polititions, celebrities, and CEOs of large multinational companies there seems to be a sense of ego that could fuel interest in the service. For the rest of us I am not so sure? It certainly highlights the need to protect and research your online profile, and take corrective action where necessary. As for subscribing to a service to get a reputation score? That may be a step to far.

Make sure you follow our advice, hints and tips and do not post anything that you would not want published in your local paper. You are then one step further to protecting your personal online brand.

Practice our hints and tips for using Google to search for references to you in it's database and you will be able to take action if something is posted that would impact your repuation negatively.

Business Week Article: Social networking challenging the job boards

The link above takes you to an article about the big 3; Monster, Careerbuilder and Hotjobs being challenged by a number of new players in the Web 2.0 world.

Niche job boards were always going to invade the generalists territory, if they were backed and promoted to capture a sufficient passive and active audience of specialists that were comfortable using the sites. If I am an engineering manager, I want a career site that is specific to me. Not one that tries to cover all industries.

In my own experience the biggest issue with the generalists is the privacy issue, with more and more human resource departments within companies using the same tools and monitoring web activity at work, it is a challenge for users to have an excuse to explore and submit their details.

Niche sites that have more than just jobs as content have a better chance of attracting the quality candidate. Positioning a great career opportunity alongside some research they are doing in their normal day to day work has a better chance of you coming back after work and following up on the opportunity.

Take that to a natural conclusion and social networks of like minded business people with quality profiles on their background, needs and wants. Is an obvious place for the promotion of career moves, as any good recruiter also knows it is good to fish where the fish are! Sites like Xing and Linked In have know created huge databases of talent with an open premise of networking for mutual business and opportunities.

It is going to take time to see the impact on the traditional job boards but you know it is serious when they are already trying to build social networking concepts into their own products. Why someone would build a social network linked to a job board, essentially pointing out you are not happy where you are, is yet to convince me. But my gut says they should stick to their knitting and ensure they have innovate ways of attracting candidates instead of trying to be something they are not.

The net result for us all, is that the use of social networks and the management of our personal and professional brands online are essential business skills. These skills should be taken seriously, take a look at our hints and tips to ensure you are making the most of the tools available.