1) Social media will turn from hype into necessity: pretty easy one right as very is talking, blogging and tweeting about it, it’s kind of a self fulfilling prophecy. Personally I don’t think that many recruiters will actively source for candidates on twitter (use the x-ray site:twitter *bio) but it certainly believe it will become much more interesting as a communication channel. Especially with the ease of integrating twitter into Linkedin, Facebook, FB pages, myspace etc it becomes very easy to reach a lot of people with one tweet. So perhaps the focus of corporate twitter won’t be in attracting tons of followers but much more in how many people can you reach through the other networks and how many times are you retweeted. With twitter lists the whole “I’m awesome because I have a gazillion followers” is becoming irrelevant as people can follow you through a list without follow you directly.

2) Linkedin will get even bigger. Pretty safe to say. I think that they will push some smaller networks out of the market (I still expect them to drive Xing out of the market). Now that Linkedin has opened itself to external apps more and more possibilities come up and we’ll see a rise in users but as well in usage. Just think about having the ability for candidates to apply on your job site through Linkedin.

3) Job boards are here to stay! On most of the lists you will see that this year the big job boards will really disappear. That prediction has been on the list since the early 2000′s. Wrong, I predict that the monsters of this world will still be around in 2015 and keep charging us ridiculous prices. I still am amazed that were in the US and Asia you pay 30-50 USD (if you have a bit of a contract) for a job posting we in Europe still get charged 500 – 1000 USD por a crappy piece of HTML. In the long run? Perhaps Linkedin will get bigger than Monster as people are more inclined to keep their LI profile up to date than to keep their Monster CV up to date. Now it depends on Linkedin as they need to lower prices and do a big quality upgrade to ensure that we get quality responses.

4) We are gonna be busy this year as we’ll see an increase in open positions. Perhaps it will be at the end of the year but smart companies will try and recruit those golden nuggets that are available in the market.

5) Mobile recruitment is a lot of smoke but little fire. The only real application is the ability to send out SMS’s (in Europe text messaging is bigger than in the US) at the same time as posting it to the job boards. Or while doing a search on my ATS I can select a bunch of interesting candidates and send them a text message instead of an email. The big advantage is that it is unintrusive and where most people don’t like being called in the office or don’t read that email they will more likely respond to a message if it is interesting.

6) Employer branding is dead, long live employer branding. The traditional way of branding your company is so 1990′s. Of course we will try and communicate our company values through posters, flyers and whatever when we go to job fairs and such (until we finally realize the low ROI of those job fairs) but as we move into social media recruitment we simply can’t control how people are talking about us. Where in past days a bad recruitment experience (or product experience) would stay within the circle of family and friends it now shows up on Linkedin, Facebook, chats, YouTube and MySpace. Companies need to realize that they have lost control and the sooner they know the better it is. A very important question is whether companies want to really interact with candidates and invest in doing so. Candidates don’t want to hear polish stories about your values, they want the truth and evidence of those values. They want to directly communicate with employees and hear their stories. Are you ready for this?

7) ATS providers finally “get” social media and CRM. I really expect the big guys to come up with a better social media integration. True my ATS I want to have the ability to post a job on the usual job boards but as well update the status on my social networks, twitter the job and post it on my corporate Facebook page. As well I want to automatically send out an email to my employees to alert them about this great job and get the employer referral program going. On the external side I would expect candidates to be able to apply directly with their Linkedin profile and get that connection with their twitter account. Oh yes they should stop charging the hell out of us for these features.

SEO for Recruitment: even more smoke and a tiny spark. I’ve seen so many blogs about how recruitment was going to change because 80% of the people are looking for jobs through Google these days. We should jump on the bandwagon and invest heavily here. Now, working at Vistaprint I know all about SEO (just type in free business cards) and how hard it is to get your page above the fold. You can certainly try and work with your SEO people and try and piggyback on their efforts. The interesting thing however is that in most of those blogs nobody talks about the ROI and most of them haven’t even got the tools to track it. Most recruiters look at the source of the hires and perhaps the candidates in general but is anybody looking at where the candidates are actually coming from. Is anybody tracking the conversion rate that sources have on your site? It’s great to tweet all day long but are you really getting more people to your site? So you may see that a) nobody gives a damn and you have no visitors or b) you get 1000′s of visits but no applications. Food for thought.

9) We finally discover Google adwords as a recruitment medium: not a new prediction but I think that if we look at the cost of placing a job ad where you have no control over who actually ends up applying, where you are targetting active candidates and compare that with what paid search can offer you. A budget controlled ad that shows up when your target audience does a related search (non job or job related) and where you can track the results in a free application that gives you insight in how to tweak your postings. Hello anyone?

10) My blog will become very successful and will land me that new exciting job!

I’ve scheduled Dec 15th in my agenda to look at my glory or defeat

If you haven’t read the previous post please do so first.

One advise I got from several people is to actually delete site:linkedin.com in the string but put site:COUNTRYCODE.linkedin.com. That seems a pretty good thought and I set out to do some testing on it. Here are my results:

What does this mean? I don’t know? One conclusion might be that in the original search there are a lot of duplicates or it might mean that the new search eliminates valid hits. I think you need to try for yourself and see if you get enough valid hits. I would of course be very interested in hearing about your finding!

Sacha Otten did some very good work on the string if you work on several countries in the same string. My original string had; (inurl:be.linkedin.com OR inurl:nl.linkedin.com etc). Sacha came up with (inurl:be OR inurl.nl)linkedin.com

I did another test drive and here is what I’ve found

That actually seems to work very nicely and it saves us real estate in the search string. Make sure that you don’t have a space between ) and linkedin.com

Thanks Sacha!

If you have more suggestions or experiences with this search string just let me know!

1) you call the them to try and visit them and they never seem to have time, claim to have a preferred supplier list or simply very few open positions. Looking at their job site you actually do see that they have 35 open jobs with an average open days of 65?

2) They claim that all agencies always shout the same thing; that we’re the best, leading agency, very specialized but yet able to fill all your positions. They claim we never come up with creative solutions but ….have you ever seen an innovative corporate recruiter?

3) So in the end they do let you come over because they have a job open. You spend 2 hours of your time talking about the job, process and fees and go home thinking you got in the bag. Then when you try to follow up you simply can’t reach them and they are not returning your emails/calls. Three weeks later you hear they are working with another agency and apparently didn’t bother to inform you. Relationship building anyone?

4) Great, they finally give you the assignment but of course only on a contingency basis. The seem to forget that we as well have our cost to cover, recruiters to pay for etc. They feel insulted if you then try and work quickly and send them resumes on the fly. What do you want, that I invest loads of time and money while you give the same job to 3 other agencies? You get what you pay for right? If you want pure dedication and high quality services you pay for it.

5) Before you can start you do of course first need to be set up as a vendor which requires you to fill out 4 different forms, take calls their Indian call center trying to make sense of what this person is talking about. The contract itself is of course a corporate contract and is so complicated and utterly one-sided that you need to get external help to try and understand it and to make sure your not being tricked into something. But you need the work so you sign with the exception of the payment terms that you set at 14 days.

6) You try and get a complete picture of the positions (beyond the badly written shopping list they call a job description) but the recruiter is not very interested in helping you and doesn’t seem to be very knowledgeable about the position. Your request to talk to the hiring manager is denied because “they don’t want to bother the hiring manager too much”. So we are left (again) with an incomplete picture and later they complain that the candidate isn’t that perfect or tell you that you’ve oversold the job?

7) You are able to present 3 candidates (that you feel are really good) and never hear from you again? The recruiter apparently went to Disneyland for 2 weeks because it is impossible to reach him/her. Due to the terrific backup plan other recruiters have no clue what so ever about that position and tell you to wait until the recruiter is back. After getting close to being sued for harassment you get a short email that they have an internal candidate, a hiring freeze or simply have closed the position.

It takes approx 3 weeks before they are able to arrange an interview with your presented candidates and then they complain that your candidate has taken another offer? Oh and yeah, can you send 3 more candidates because they feel they can’t take a decision without having seen at least 5 candidates?

9) After a gazillion emails and calls you then finally get some feedback on your candidates. They really needed 3 weeks to get all the managers together and get feedback. It turns out that the manager doesn’t actually know whether he has the budget for the hire and it first needs to be approved by the VP. The VP however is again busy with a reorganization and it might very well be that the job no longer exists.

10) After a process of 4 months, 3 phone screens, 8 interviews spread out over 3 days, an assessment center they need you to check references because they are still not quite sure about this candidate. As if references are going to give the best insight?

11) OMG, by now you are taking medication against your anxiety attacks but they are ready to make an offer. The thing is that they only have a budget of 80K instead of the 100K they talked about before. But you know, there is a crisis going on so the candidate will just have to accept it. RSU’s and a sign on bonus are out of the order of course so you really need to pull all the plugs and again sell the job and company to convince the candidate.

12) And yes, you did it! The candidate accepts their horrible offer and you are ready to send your eagerly awaited invoice. The candidate later tells you about the absolutely horrendous onboarding where it took 5 days to get an email address, 8 days to get a laptop and most likely 2 months to get that company car he order (while driving around in some battered Ford from the guy they fired last week). Training seems to be non-existent and his manager doesn’t seem to have time to get you settled in.

13) While your contract clearly states that you have a payment term of 14 days their Indian service center now tells you that they always have 45 days in any contract and that the recruiter doesn’t have the authority to change that. And they didn’t get a PO number so it’s going to take a bit longer as it’s against company policy to open a PO after the service has already been delivered. So it’s just gonna take a bit longer than those 45 days because they closed the books already for this month.

14) While you are busy trying to find new clients they all of a sudden remember you because they decided to let go of the candidate and although the contract says you don’t refund the money they would highly appreciate it as they will not replace. When you try to find out why they let go of the candidate they somehow are not able to articulate the reason. The candidate you placed tells you that he still doesn’t really know either but does know that he is the 5th in a row in the last year that has been let go off.

So, corporate recruiters; let’s not always bash so hard on external recruiters! We are not always making things very easy and don’t always create conditions for success. Perhaps next time I’ll try to come up with some ground rules to work together. In the end we both have the same objective?

oh and yes, this piece is for a bit of fun…………….

I can of course try and search through the search engine of Linkedin directly and see what it gives me but the results have not been optimal. If I add say (Netherlands OR Belgium) to my keyword search I get a lot of false positives simply because of people having those words in their profile. One of my favourite ways of searching Linkedin is not using linkedin at all, it’s the all-mighty X-ray. Be prepared because I’m taking you on a bit of a journey.

X-ray explained
Now, hopefully most recruiters are comfortable with x-ray but for the less boolean-gifted recruiters a quick explanation: x-ray is a Google search string that allows you to focus on one particular site. If I put site:linkedin.com in my Google search it will give me only results from………….right, LinkedIn! There are big advantages to x-ray over a LinkedIn search and that is that you really can see all of the public profiles on linked and you can actually contact them. Reason for this is that a) your search results is limited by the size of your network and b) LinkedIn allows you to see the LinkedIn profile if you come in through this back door where if you did a normal search it wouldn’t allow you if that person was outside of your network.

Whenever you do an x-ray on Google don’t forget to add inurl:pub OR inurl:in -intitle:directory in order to eliminate pages where such a groups and events. To further narrow it down add -inurl:updates. To give you an idea of the power of this string: it gives 30.200.000 hits. I would say much of the population of Linkedin

The international X-ray
For the more advanced recruiter that wants to search internationally there are some ways to limit the search to a specific country or some specific countries. Glen Cathey wrote an article about how to do this after I had contacted him about some international search he had done. To recap his research:

You can do a search on postal codes on Linkedin:

If you take a large city as say Amsterdam, The Netherlands you see that in the city there are several postal codes

Now if we do a search on Linkedin with the postal code 1000 in the Netherlands you will see that all of them have in their profile “Amsterdam Area, Netherlands”.  And with that “area, country” we can play.

My own research completes Glen’s list and below a list of all the structures that are being used

“Area, France”
“Area, Germany”
“*, United Kingdom”
“Area, Switzerland”
Area, Belgium
Area, Netherlands
Area, Sweden
Area, Spain
*, Finland
Area, Norway
*, Russian Federation
*, Portugal
Area, Italy
*, Ireland
Area, Denmark
*, Austria

As you can see most countries in Europe follow the “area, country” setup except for the UK but what can you expect from a country where people drive on the wrong side of the road?

Now, let’s say I need a user experience expert in the Netherlands? A what? Yeah, sorry but I had this search recently so might as well take that one. A search on “user experience” in the whole of the Netherlands gives me 1239 hits. I’m not going into how I can increase it by perhaps looking at other job titles, that is not the meaning of this article.

An x-ray on google site:linkedin.com (inurl:pub OR inurl:in) -intitle:directory -inurl:updates (”Area, Netherlands”) “user experience” gives me 2.510 hits. A lot better of course, way too many results and I would need to narrow it down but I’ve just doubled the number of candidates. Now this seams to work but if I’m searching for more countries I may run into the Google limit of 32 words in the boolean search. As well I’ve found that somehow not everybody has a region mentioned in their profile which would render the “area, country” string useless. In a niche market like UX I can’t afford to lose out on a single candidate.

The Holy Grail of international x-rays
So here is what I’ve found and if I’m not mistaken nobody else has blogged about it. So here is my ticket to fame LinkedIn has recently changed all the personal links on peoples profiles. Now, US-based profiles haven’t changed and still are http://www.linkedin.com/in/NAME but as I’m based in Spain my personal link has changed to http://es.linkedin.com/in/tedmeulenkamp. A check on other profiles gives that profiles in the UK now have uk.linkedin.com, in Germany de.linkedin.com and the Netherlands nl.linkedin.com. I have not (yet) compiled a list of all the country codes but they seem to be following the standard country codes used globally.  So wow, Linkedin has actually placed a country code in the personal links of all their members! Have I found the holy grail for international linkedin x-rays?

So before we bring out the champagne (or cava in Spain) let’s test this.

site:linkedin.com (inurl:pub OR inurl:in) -intitle:directory -inurl:updates inurl:nl.linkedin.com user experience” gives me 2.990 hits. Not bad as it increases the amount of hits over the previous one because of the before mentioned fact that not everybody has a region in the profile but they surely have had to give their country when signing up. But we are still not there, what if, just imagine, what if the country code is only used in personal profiles and not on any other pages. That would mean we could get rid of inurl:pub OR inurl:in as thus save space.

site:linkedin.com -intitle:directory -inurl:updates inurl:nl.linkedin.com user experience” gives me exactly the same amount of hits as my previous search and that is just awesome! It really means that we can leave out inurl:pub OR inurl:in. But wait, wait, wait. What if we leave out -intitle:directory and -inurl:updates?

site:linkedin.com inurl:nl.linkedin.com user experience” again gives me the same amount of hits. AMAZING!!! We went from a pretty lengthy search string to this compact, easy to remember, easy to use search string! Just to be complete if you want to use this string for a multi country search you just put in inurl:nl.linkedin.com OR inurl:be.linkedin.com OR etc).

So folks, run the following and bookmark it for your international searches:

site:linkedin.com inurl:nl.linkedin.com KEYWORDS”. Change the country code and keywords and rock on!

Conclusion

There is so much more to get out of Linkedin by using an X-ray and now with this new search string you can actually very accurately search per country and profit of the larger network and accessibility of the x-ray search! And dear friends in the US, sorry but because you still have the original profile links you still need to use the full search string.

UPDATE:

I got a lot of reactions to my post and some have had some interesting suggestions:

One is to actually delete site:linkedin.com in the string but put site:COUNTRYCODE.linkedin.com. That seems a pretty good thought and I set out to do some testing on it. Here are my results:

What does this mean? I don’t know? One conclusion might be that in the original search there are a lot of duplicates or it might mean that the new search eliminates valid hits. I think you need to try for yourself and see if you get enough valid hits. I would of course be very interested in hearing about your finding!

Sacha Otten did some very good work on the string if you work on several countries in the same string. My original string had; (inurl:be.linkedin.com OR inurl:nl.linkedin.com etc). Sacha came up with (inurl:be OR inurl.nl)linkedin.com.

I did another test drive and here is what I’ve found

That actually seems to work very nicely and it saves us real estate in the search string. Thanks Sacha!