If you are looking for a job, or simply want to get a taste of the job market, there are a plethora of Irish and international websites that allow you to search current vacancies, submit your CV and generally make the most of the “online experience”.
However, if you are actually trying to recruit staff, you will be sorely disappointed.
Earlier this week we started advertising a job vacancy. Naturally we want the widest choice of candidates so that we may make the best possible choice. I would have thought that advertising job vacancies online would not be complicated.
Boy was I wrong!
The majority of the Irish jobsites do not allow you to advertise vacancies online. Yes, they will list your job vacancies BUT you have to call them or wait for them to call you back! I’m sorry, but isn’t this 2006? I’m more than happy to spend money online. I’m comfortable with ecommerce. Why the hell can’t I actually make use of it?
RecruitIreland.com, which is an offshoot of Thomas Crosbie Media (aka The Irish Examiner) requires you to either email them or call them.
Jobs.ie / Nixers.ie – Fill out a contact form and wait for them to respond. They’ll ignore any explicit instructions you put in the contact form and insist on calling you.
IrishJobs.ie – seems to be a carbon copy of the other two.
The only site that actually allowed me to pay them – yes, part with my money, wasn’t even Irish. It was a multinational. Monster.ie.
Monster.ie embraces ecommerce. You could ring them if you really wanted to, but you aren’t obliged to.
Pricing of standard listings is plainly visible, as are current discounts and special offers.
You can signup online, pay your money and start making use of their vast resources in minutes.
Much as I would like to be able to support Irish online recruitment websites I have to admit they really suck.
Monster, on the other hand, rocks!
Now why on earth can’t the Irish ones make life that simple?
EDIT: Our current vacancy is here
Michele Neylon :: Pensieri
Technology, Marketing, Domains, Thoughts
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So when are you going to start a job site that kicks their ass?
Indeed – in fact…..hmmm stealing idea 🙂
Damien – I’m not that interested in competing with them. I just can’t fathom why they make giving them money so damn awkward
Peter – And if you saw some of the domains I already own 🙂
I know, it’s mad isn’t it.
I worked for Monster when that product was introduced, it’s called PAJ – Post-A-Job and it’s a remarkable piece of work, no human interaction needed at all.
They do have account people who will call you with suggestions to imrove your job listing, or maybe suggesting moving it to another category.
This internet might catch on after all.
It’s odd that the biggest job site (irishjobs) doesn’t embrace this idea.
Bernard’s post goes some way to explain the “logic” that they’re using and did lead me to nicemove.ie which would allow me to post a job online without dealing with sales people.
I agree with you 100% Michele. I found it very frustrating the last time we were recruiting.
Building a simple easy to use recruitment site is on my list of things to do just as soon as we have http://www.scrudu.ie/ up and running (which should be in the next 10 working days or so). It should only take a about a week to build a recruitment site (sounds like a challenge)…and my plan would be to make it free, for at least 3 years. Do you think that would get any support?
Roger
It might well do, which is why I am seriously considering using a couple of the domains that I have sitting on a shelf gathering dust 🙂
I meant a challenge to us not you! I was talking to myself again, but sure hey isn’t competition a good thing?
I’ve a couple of domain names for that too – would it really have to have “irish jobs” somewhere in the domain name to be picked up by Google – would irishjobs.ie get snooty about it, and would they have a right given that it is extremely generic?
I say 10 days to finish “The best Irish Search Engine ever”, 🙂 , but my predictions are never realistic – the last 20% always seems take 80% of the time particularly since we want to add an “as Gaeilge” search, a Blog Search facility and the usual feature-creep stuff that goes with getting a site good for launch date.
Do they have a trademark?
Is it enforcable?
I’m not an expert, but I would have thought that a descriptive name would be hard to trademark.
Don’t worry about me competing against you 🙂
The domains I have are quite niche
Jobs.ie is acutally very good, and great value for money in my opinion. I know you might think its a pain in the arse to sign up, but they call you back to help you sign up and in the process help you perfect your recruitment ads. They have excellent customer service too.
Hugh
Maybe so, but all I wanted to do is post a job vacancy quickly. I have no interest in dealing with sales staff etc., for something which should be simple and straightforward.
I’ll stick to using Monster.ie 🙂
Michele
Michele,
Thats all good, but one shouldn’t really choose a recruitment site because of the ease of use for the employer – they should use it for ease of use for jobseeker.
If you visit http://it.monster.ie/ and do a search for jobs in Carlow (the ‘where’ dropdown), and select ‘Internet/E-commerce’ in the ‘what sector dropdown’, you get no results. Now, hosting COULD fall into that category for many, but the results page does not make it easy to unfilter the results, i.e. provide simple dropdowns at the top of the page – take http://www.jobs.ie/Jobs.aspx?Categories=4&Regions=7&Keywords=&Submit=Search as an example.
If I visit http://www.jobs.ie and do a search fruitless search, its easy for me (via the dropdowns at the top of the site) to filter or unfilter the search.
For me, this is the most important element – the ability for the jobseeker to find positions available to them.
H
Hugh
You pay for the number of sections your job is listed in and as we weren’t hiring for “e-commerce” we weren’t going to advertise in that section.
I would have to disagree with you anyway. While it’s good that a site is easy to use for jobseekers it should also be easy to use the service as an employer. Who pays for the sites anyway? Jobseekers or employers? I think you know the answer
Michele
Well a recruitment website is nothing if it doesn’t have jobseekers, and many of them.
Monster (despite huge marketing spend) is nowhere near the likes of Jobs.ie in terms of both jobseeker traffic and ease of use. A recruitment site should be picked based on traffic and ability for jbseekers to find your recruitment ad easily.
Sure let me put it like this, if I was mad into ease of use for the purchaser i’d have gone to hosting365’s site (http://www.hosting365.com/servers-value-p4.php) when looking for a dedicated server, clicked the ‘buy now’ button, signed up, and gone with them.
But instead, customer service and quality is what I was after, so I emailed you guys (Blacknight) for a quote and i’m very happy with the service. You don’t have ‘buy now’ buttons (http://www.blacknight.ie/p4-servers0.0.html), but you have great service, and that for me is what is most important. 😉
Despite the ease of use of mosnter.ie you have to remember they don’t allow job seekers to filter out recruitment agencies.
Recruitment agencies bombard all job websites with dummy vacancies in order to bring in CV’s which is a serious pain if you think you have found your ideal job.
Which is why Irishjobs.ie was the only real recruitment website I would recommend as they allow you to choose between companies and recruiter or both if you want.
However I do feel your pain in not being able to do everything on-line in an efficient manner.
What killed me with IrishJobs.ie (and I think jobs.ie operate the same way but could be wrong on this) was that you had to pay an annual fee of something like Euro 3000 even if only wanted to place one or two ads over a 6 month period. The technology of a recruitment site is not very difficult to do and the product/user flow is very similar to something like daft.ie – who charge much less for a similar service. I think there should be a service similar to that for jobs and will set about doing jsut that in about 2 weeks, just as soon as we’re finished with Scrudu.
Well we ended up advertising with jobs.ie as well:
http://www.jobs.ie/ApplyForJob.aspx?Id=270697
I share your frustrations! Most of the jobsite’s in Ireland favour recruitment agencies. It’s as if there’s some sort of cartel operating to stop employers being able to advertise jobs for a realistic price. It allows them to keep their comissions so bloody high. I’m an independent recruiter and I’d be happy to post your job on Irishjobs under my subscription if you’d like. I’ve got a subscription for 25 jobs at any one time and I’m not using them all at the moment…. Don’t ask why, I guess I’m just feeling generous at the moment.
A year or two later and they still do not have it… Perhaps they do not want it? Perhaps they need contact to try to upsell?
Ivan | http://www.JobsBlog.ie