Which countries work when it comes to Internet recruiting and Sourcing candidates?

Well many of them of course, and often different sourcing areas are better depending on which skill sets you're looking for.

Never the less we were doing some analysis last week on this topic and the results were quite interesting and worth sharing I thought.

Below are two images, firstly is a specific campaign run by a client based in Dubai, and where there candidates came from.

Then below there is a pie chart on which countries are the best performing markets (outside of the region itself) for generating online candidates. :

How to make Email add value to Recruitment?!

For many recruiters still using email addresses to receive CV's, email is your worst nightmare I'm quite sure. But it needn't be useless. There are many really cool ways email can be very helpful; and here's just two ways that are easily set up if you have a candidate management system in place:

1. Systemised Emails to Deliver Candidate Vouchers
Initaitives are always worth talking about, and this isn't revolutionary but still very underutilised in the realm of employer branding. Basically every time you complete an interview, you set the system up to send a thank you letter/email to the candidate. With it you include a voucher for them to redeem against your products. It could be 20% off a cup of coffee or CD (depending on what you sell). The options are limitless and costs next to nothing to put into place. What's the point of this? Well you can imagine the impression you'd have if after your last interview you received a free cinema ticket, or a bottle of wine for you and your partner when you next go to dinner. It would be positive right? Regardless of if you get the job offer next week, or they tell you that you've missed out on the job - you're going to think they're a great company. You may not even spend the voucher, but you'll tell people to think about applying to them. We've done this for retail and hotel clients, but there is no reason most employers couldn't do this. The mareketing department would love recruitment for it (there's a first!) and you'd be creating customers for the company whilst making candidate attraction easier for yourselves.

2. Recruiter EMail Footers to Carry Hotjobs
This can be done whether or not you have a hiring platform in place or not, it can just be automated and more usuful if you're lucky enough to have one. Get all recruiters or even HR staff to update there email auto signatures to include the 3 'hot jobs' of the moment. This free marketing tool will generate awareness and free candidates. It may even cause employees to be aware of those hard-to-fill jobs and refer you fresh candidates.

RSS for Recruitment Staff Knowledge

We're implementing a massive retail talent management platform for a client currently, and the project champion told us this week how his recruiters across many countries are relying on RSS feeds to keep them up to date with news from around the recruitment/jobs/jobseeker world that is the Internet. I'm not sure how many others are doing this but I thought I'd scribe about it here briefly.

What is RSS, well it stands for Really Simple Syndication; and is an easy automated way of having content sourced from across the Internet for you without having to go and find it yourself. Imagine you like to check the weather each morning in Glasgow (it's raining I can tell you!), and like me you check the sports news or your share values. Well through RSS you can set up a page, think of it as your own private homepage on the Internet, and all those items of interest will be brought into your page for you. It only brings you news when their is latest news to show you, so it saves you going to a site if there's no need.

Back to the recruitment scenario. So as a recruiter you can set up RSS feeds for your business concerns, senior appointments, new jobsites opening up, legislation & staff tribunal cases, salary data, exchange rates, housing prices; and of course the sport!

Quite a nice way of keeping up to speed as a recruiter. Speak to your IT dept/Portal Managers and see if they can help you set something up, it's extremely simple and many RSS readers are free.

'War for Talent' Banking Conference - my thoughts

Well I went to the 'War for Talent' in Banking Conference a fortnight back, and I wasn't really given the impression that the audience were in battle mode. It was quite disappointing from that perspective. I had hoped HR staffers would be there talking about how they were finding advantages over each other, and who was leading the field; but nobody seemed to be using any tools or techniques worth a mention. I spoke individually to a number of senior recruiters and HR generalists to ask privately what challenges they were facing and how they were reacting....nothing, nobody home.

Shocking really, and I only hope that the Executives of those banks represented are aware at the lack of action being taken, or that there are actually steps being taken to be competitive but that nobody wanted to share their ideas. There were no stand-out employers except HSBC maybe who at least seemed to be going to good efforts to implement locally some of the international retention strategies in the local set up. Even these efforts though seemed to be limited to Opinion Surveys, Exit Interviews and Employee of the Month Awards for staff recognition.

It struck me that the HR Banking community doesn't fully understand yet how difficult it has got to hire great talent in the Middle East markets. Part of the problem I think is that Bankers, not unlike Hoteliers, see banking as something that runs through your blood. Therefore so long as you're a good bank, then you'll attract good bankers (as they won't want to work anywhere other than a bank). The finance markets are changing very quickly across the MENA region as they have in Asia; and corporate recruiters need to see it. There is a diversifying pool of jobs for bankers now more than ever; stock markets being born, Islamic Banking on a meteoric rise, corporate and infrastructure financing and IPO's abound. Banks need to start implementing tools and techniques that the rest of industry has been doing for a couple of years. General employer branding (wider than just targeting bankers) and targeted selection to develop talent pools in key skill areas. Using the Internet to develop relationships ahead of time with that talent.

Banking is so regulated and every risk has to be mitigated; hence training & development is always a mandatory measure.To compound this issue further for banks, is the very fact that have invested in Training so heavily (also as a retention tool) they are a good target for highly developed staff - which others will continue to feed off.

As banks in the region outsource and offshore more of the back-office functions, I foresee a huge crunch in talent shortages in the retained core banking areas; and very few employers in this sector are prepared for this.