Online Recuitment 2009 – The year ahead
Thursday last saw me down in London for the day at a conference hosted by Enhance Media. Online Recruitment, The Year Ahead.I was accompanying a couple of my clients and it was an interesting day with some great presentations, in the pleasant surroundings of the Royal Geographical Society in Kensington.
A few highlights of the day:
Lisa Mauro from Youtube gave a good presentation on using the site for recruitment, with some nice examples of a more guerilla approach to shooting videos with line managers talking about the role directly to the candidate. Not so polished, but the shaky camerawork actually lends to the trust factor, also nice to see some of them filmed in the office where you’d be working too. How many job interviews have we all been in where all we saw of the company was an anonymous grey conference room! But ultimately, there was nothing amazingly new to me, just that more people should do more video!
Workcircle gave what was, for me, quite an interesting presentation about setting up an aggregator from scratch and scaling up an adwords campaign, it was nice to see a concrete case study of the long tail in action. I think some of the audience however found it a bit detail heavy in places. It was great though to hear a really down to earth presentation where they made it plain that their business model is essentially about buying candidates at one price and selling them on at another. Many companies would dress that up in a lot more fluff.
Jeremy Mason from Revenue Science gave a good overview of behavourial targeting, which I knew about, but it was good to see some of the more advanced stuff they’re now doing and to learn that the big minimum spends that used to act as a barrier to entry for a lot of clients have now been relaxed a little.
Facebook, never fail to be interesting and gave a stats packed presentation with one or two useful nuggets which give the lie to some of the more commonly held assumptions about their audience. One that stuck in my head was that 25% of their users are over 35. Great to see some examples of their new video and event engagement ads and avanced targeting too. Also interesting to see that the low cost PPC model of Facebook Flyers has led to an increasing number of candidates running their own ad campaigns targeted at employers they want to work for!
There were some interesting nuggets in some of the other presentations, but alas by that part of the day my memory is becoming hazy, you can catch up on some of the action too by reviewing the people who were tweeting the event live with the hashtag #c9
Overall it was a good day, I bumped into a few people I knew too and it was great to catch up. But, if anyone from Enhance reads this I was left with a bit of a feeling that the event couldn’t quite decide who it was aimed at. Some presentations clearly had clients in their sites, others were more agency focussed, some were very heavily techie, others a much lighter overview.
..and over lunch I even managed to slip out for 10 mins of fresh air to make some calls and snap some pictures in nearby Hyde Park.
Did they tell you how to find good ActionScripters, 18 months later and I’ve still not found one.