Month: January 2006

links for 2006-01-30

Now Hiring for free

Launched in November NowHiring is making a play for the job board space in Australia. How are they doing this? Offering FREE job postings, yes free, for their basic employer package. Now if you are an employer in Australia and recruit you should check them out.

If you just can’t help yourself and just have to pay for a job posting (because that is “how it has always been”) they will allow you to sign up for a month package at $198/mth for unlimited jobs and some very nice features. The package provides you with:-

  • Unlimited Job Postings
  • Online Applicant Management
  • Applicant Screening and automatic ranking
  • Your logo on your Job Ads
  • Advertiser Directory listing
  • Job Listings on your company web site
  • Bulk job upload (csv, xls, web service)
  • Unlimited resume access from the resume database

Not a bad package when you look at it.

No I don’t work for them, so why the glowing advertisement? Two simple words. Blog and RSS. The second is not really a word but it still counts.

Now Hiring have a blog which can be found at http://blog.nowhiring.com.au/, go check it out and subscribe. The first few posts provide some good background about how they ended up where they are today.

The second thing is they have RSS feeds on search results. This means you can set up a feed for your favourite jobs and have them appear in your RSS reader. Here is one I prepared earlier for HR & IT jobs in Melbourne.

2006 is shaping up for a great year in the online recruitment space DownUnder.

Spam attack

Over the last hour I have been under a comment spam attack from 195.225.177.80. Based on a whois search they seem to be coming from an ISP in the Netherlands, specifically RIPE Network Coordination Centre. Doing some background checking on RIPE I would suggest that it is a user on their network somewhere.
Maybe they could shut them down, I doubt it.

The comments linking to subdomains on atspace.biz, which just redirect to Google, which to me seems very strange and non productive or am I missing something? atspace.biz is a free hosting service from Zetta Hosting Solutions.

Oh, well I guess I will just keep deleting the comments that are being caught by WordPress.

Jobs In RSS

Over the last few months I have been exchanging emails with Kevin Howard from Jobs In HR, a niche job board here in Australia for HR jobs, I first wrote about them a while back. Jobs in HR is a email service sent out to over 5000 subscribers on a weekly basis. Jobs are also posted on their web site. The rates for advertising are not bad either, $120 per jobs for a casual rate, of course volume packs are available.

I take my hat off to Kevin and his team as today they added RSS feeds to their site. Kevin dropped me a note overnight to let me know it had gone live and they already have 8 subscribers, 9 now as I subscribed, with no advertising! They have implemented the feeds by state when you browse the web site. They have used the Firefox, RSS feed icon as well which seems to be the standard people are moving towards.

Interesting Firefox does not seem to recognise that there is a feed on the page when you are browsing the jobs, hopefully this can be fixed easily.

Hot and Hoter

The last few days have been very hot here in Melbourne, around 40-43C (or 104-109F), just a bit hot. We went to the shopping centre to try and escape, like everyone else, and I would guess it was in the mid 30’s inside the centre. The shops kept turning the lights down to try and cool things down! There was 1.5 hour query to see a movie, even a 30 min queue to pick up tickets bought online. Our kitchen has about 35C, while the rest of the house stayed around 29-30C which is not too bad considering. At one point during the day I was laying on the bed, lights off iPod on just trying to chill out. Needless to say the house we are in does not have air conditioning.

Looking at the forecast we have a few days around 30 and then back up to 40 for Australia Day on Thursday.

Early access for Victorians

From 1 Jan 2006 employees in Victoria will be able to get access to their long service leave early.

You can read about the details at Deacons Legal Update. Some of the changes are:-

  • Most Victorian employees will now get 2 months long service leave after 10 years service, rather than 3 months long service leave after 15 years service.
  • Employees get pro rata long service leave after 7 years service regardless of whether the employer dismisses the employee or the employee resigns. This applies even if dismissed for serious misconduct.
  • Employers will not be able to unreasonably refuse an employee taking double leave at half pay.
  • Paid maternity or paternity leave counts as service for long service leave purposes.

    • For those of you not in Australia and have no idea about long service leave it is one of those colonial throw backs. Back when most Australians were from England, after 10-15 years of services employees were given 3 months off. Just about the time it took for a boat trip back to “the motherland”, spend a month there and boat trip back to the colonial outpost.

    Now it is just a good deal for employees.

Vertical Search and India

Gautam posts on an interesting development in India around vertical search, could it be illegal in India?

It seems Naukri has successfully defended got an interim injunction againstBixee for (updated 14 Jan 2006) scraping of their jobs by another site. I have been wondering when this would happen and it is probably one of the aspects limiting the development of vertical search in countries outside of the US.

I can kind of understand where a traditional job board would see a threat from vertical search and why their lawyers and management would want to stop this before it takes hold. Let’s look here in Australia where we have 3 major job boards (Seek, mycareer.com.au and CareerOne) all who charge an amount to list your job with them. These organisations have spent huge sums of money building a brand so that when job seekers and employers think about recruitment they think of their sites.

Now if vertical search takes off and all of the jobs from corporate sites are aggregated within minutes of them being posted for free, why would you need a traditional fee based job board? The business model just died. From this point I see Naukri’s move as defensive and I would expect to see the same from the top job boards in Australia.

Job boards need to add value to the recruitment process not just be a classified engine. If a job board can begin the move up into the recruitment firm space, by adding useful features, then they add value and employers will continue pay for the service. From my perspective this is a far better result, except for the lawyers.