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!

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.

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.

Your online profile is being used by professional recruiters!

This article was published by NPR (www.npr.org) it clearly demonstrates how your online information is being used today.

In the past many recruiters had to rely on adverts in offline media to entice and attract candidates into the recruitment process. Then that promotion, naturally, went online. Both approaches were reactive.

Proactive recruiters have always purchased, begged, borrowed and stolen information sources with lists of names and approach candidates directly. Industry journals, membership lists, corporate directories, and professional association member lists are all hot property.

The downside of these traditional sources is that they actually had little information other than a name and company. They also quickly became out of date. The web and particularly the relative ease with which an individual can now create an online presence for themselves has blown sourcing of names wide open.

Recruiters have been quick to catch on, as have corporate HR departments and recent studies by Execunet and Careerbuilder have indicated as many as 70% of corporate recruiters are using the web to investigate a potential future hire. As many as 30% of these searches have led to the individual under consideration being removed from the process due to information found.

If you have ever doubted the need to ensure your CV / Resume and your online profile (both professional and personal) are synchronised now is the time. Your information is being used and you can control the opportunities it can open up to you. Follow our hints and tips to ensure you are managing your online reputation.

Why use business social networking sites?

Many use business social networking do so to achieve what they used to do in traditional networking, reach someone for some form of mutual benefit. That could be to sell them something, create a partnership, gain a further referral, make a career move, research a company or industry, or gain competitive intelligence.

LinkedIn quote that 1 million people are joining LinkedIn every 25 days. The people that are joining start to spread the word by connecting with people they know, are getting to know, or as some "open" networkers are doing connect with people they do not know!

As a tool it has evolved and gained popularity, the power of the tool increases as you increase the number of people that you are connected to. The end result is that a huge database of professionals has been created that is used by many of the people that can helpful in your current career and future career.

You need to take control, your online profile may be the first impression you make on someone, it may also be the only impression you make on someone. I am not going to get into the process of creating a profile that will help promote our personal brand online, you can see that in our e-book downloadable from this site. What I want to do here is outline how the site is being used to help you see value, and to get you to think about the impact of using tools like Xing and LinkedIn.

The first thing you should use a business social network for is to Make connections. This increases the chance that people find you above the millions of other profiles. People like to connect with people that are connected. I am not an economist but there is great value in the quality of the network that you develop during your career. When people do find you they will look at your connections and look for similarity with themselves and look for mutual friends / colleagues. People are more likely to work with someone that they trust, or have mutual contacts that they trust.

Your online profile is your online CV / Resume, Make your profile consistent with your traditional CV / Resume, and make sure you do not lie! That may sound silly but it is a known fact that people are extravagant with the truth on their CV / Resumes. With thousands of people able to view your profile you need to ensure that you are consistent and truthful. Do not limit your profile to just your current role, as this limits the ability for you to be found and therefore connect. Make sure you include education and professional qualifications, memberships, affiliations, and interests / hobbies.

Do not be shy about your profile, Promote your profile. As an accepted business networking tool, these sites open up an interesting opportunity. If you were to include your traditional CV / Resume in your e-mail as an attachment every time it would be seen as a little odd, if not down right irritating to your current employer! However, it is common practice to include a link to your business networking profile in your signature. This can subliminally be used to allow people to get to know you and understand the value you have to offer.

Googling yourself is not something to be shy about, I actually encourage it, trust me you will not go blind. Go on Google yourself. The net result of social networking sites trying to gain more traffic and register more users is that they have developed their databases so they can be searched, your profile can appear in the natural search results delivered by Google.
Once your profile is complete you can further promote your profile through Guerilla marketing. The advent of Web 2.0 and the ease with which anyone can contribute to web sites, forums, blogs, Wikis e.t.c. Has led to your ability to further promote yourself. The search engines like Google like web pages that have other pages referring to them. By using the web link (URL) that shows your profile page in comments or other entries you make on the web then you further enhance the visibility of your profile.

To further increase the effectiveness of you profile encourage people that you trust to build recommendations for you. The best way of doing this is to recommend your contacts; I’ll rub your back if you’ll rub mine. This has been the basis of traditional networking for years. Do not stop now just because it is an online medium.

One thing that recruiters are doing continually is using these tools for research. If you are going to try and win business, aim to find people that have worked there previously and gather intelligence. Be certain that if you are going to make a career move, your new employer is going to want to check out your credentials and background. The prevalence of flase claims on CV / Resumes has led many recruiters and corporate hiring authorities to believe the acronym (TAL) “They All Lie”. Well how about turning the tables and making sure you know about the back ground of the hirer as well.

Find out where people with similar skills as you work, and do some market research on who might be a future employer. As a recruiter we have always used tools to get a target list of companies that might be interested in a talented individual that I was managing the career of, you can do the same. If you get connect and start entering the recruitment process, use the tool to research the company, and the hiring manager to ensure there is a fit professionally and personally. Do not be scared of speaking directly with ex-employees, they are normally more than willing to comment on their previous employer. If you do not get what you need first time try again, it is a little bit of a numbers game. Recruiters have done it for years, keep trying and you will be amazed at what people will tell you.

A new product launched by LinkedIn is their answers tool. It allows you to ask business questions to your contacts and also to the wider audience. The interesting spin on this is not only to ask your own questions, but actively participate in answering questions in an area where you have specialist knowledge. This not only attracts the attention of other potential contacts but also builds a record of your interaction and demonstrates your expertise in the area.

The net result here is that there are many reasons to use business network tools, above and beyond promoting your own personal brand online. With our hints and tips, we hope that you can differentiate yourself and ensure you are able to maximise the opportunities open to you.