The Future of Online Recruitment

Yesterday Katharine Robinson and Phillip Clement attended Enhance Media’s Online Recruitment conference “The Year Ahead”. Katharine gives her thoughts below.

I was particularly interested to hear what Facebook, YouTube, PWC, Workcircle and the rest had to say. The conference was aimed mainly at the job board market and corporate recruiters, but when your job is to manage a recruitment company’s digital footprint, it’s somewhere you just have to be.

I was a little surprised that the day seemed to have no clearly defined objectives – I don’t know whether it’s because I used to be in teaching, but I like to have a clear Idea of what I am supposed to be learning so that I know whether or not I have been successful. There was not even an Agenda provided before the event.

We kicked off the day by hearing from YouTube. There was a whole plethora of incredible stats. Most notable from an energy perspective was the fact that YouTube might only be three years old, but it accounts for 10% of the bandwidth being used on the internet at any one time. As there are 1.2 billion minutes of video uploaded every month, this must be being stored somewhere. These data centres must account for massive energy usage and have quite a carbon footprint. Probably most interesting from a recruitment perspective was that video can help in the selling process – pictures add credibility when you buy something so moving pictures add even more. I was inspired by the notion of creating some short snippets of video, demonstrating the opportunities we are working on, having an EcoSearch YouTube channel and putting some of these clips on our site.

I was looking forward to hearing from Facebook. If you are interested in such things, you will know that EcoSearch already has a Facebook Page where you can become a fan. I wanted to see what more I could do with it. I was a little disappointed to find myself on the receiving end of a sales pitch for their targeted advertising. We were told about pages, and shown a couple of the best ones (that I had already investigated when creating ours). I was also disappointed to find that the speaker couldn’t answer my question about our page’s analytics.

Blogs were also a big topic of the day. In my opinion the most important thing about blogging is communication and interaction with your audience. As a recruitment company I am often concerned that people will not wish to comment as they don’t want anyone to assume they are on the market for a job (either rightly or wrongly). I have nothing against this and at EcoSearch we are committed to privacy and ensuring that our clients and candidates are ensured the highest discretion. The only suggestion from the speakers at the event was to give people the ability to comment anonymously.

Here on dot.green anonymous comments have always been allowed – so don’t worry about commenting on the blog – we encourage you to have your say.