Ask Balance

Do you have any questions you'd like answered in relation to recruitment, interviews or a career in accountancy?

We've launched an 'Ask Balance' feature over on the Balance Recruitment website this week, and my colleague Tony Vickers is first up in the chair. Tony has been recruiting for finance and accountancy staff in London for over 10 years, working with some of the worlds best known brands across a variety of sectors. 

He has been shortlisted for the 'Agency Recruiter of the Year' Award at this years Recruiter Awards for Excellence, and is eager to take your questions. 

Get involved here: #AskBalance

Job Boards and the battle for quantity over quality...

With the threat of social media networks moving in on their territory, job boards have had to work a little harder recently to convince their clients (e.g. recruiters and direct employers) that their services are still as valuable as ever and that their well established business models can withstand the threat posed by LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.

This is most notably evident through the significant increase on advertising spend to increase the number of job seekers registering on their sites. The campaigns seem to be working, with a number of job boards boasting record traffic statistics.

So what does this mean for the clients who advertise vacancies on their sites? Does it improve their chances of finding the best candidates? Possibly. Does it mean they will receive more applications? Certainly. Does it mean they’ll spend more time filtering out irrelevant applicants? Definitely. Quantity is assured, quality isn’t.

One job board even seems to actively promote the ‘spray and pray’ method of searching for work in their TV campaign, implying that a wholesale change in career profession is achieved as simply as sending your CV off for something that catches your interest!

Ask any recruiter what they dislike about using job boards and they’ll all tell you the same thing; too many irrelevant applications. Job board users can send their CV’s to countless vacancies in no time, regardless if they do not have the experience requested in the vacancy advert.  Very few recruiters will tell you they just want even more applications.

There is also a logical argument to say that this focus on volume has a negative impact on the job seekers who use the job boards in the manner intended. Relevant applicants will inevitably get overlooked from time to time when their CV’s are buried in amongst hundreds of irrelevant applications.

So what do I think job boards could do to improve their services? Here are a few suggestions:

·         If a job seeker is applying for a very wide range of different role types, at salary levels that indicate a reasonable level of previous experience might required, send a ‘yellow card’ email, asking them to be more realistic with their applications, or face restrictions on the number of applications they can make.

·         Limit the number of applications job seekers can make daily. This might be a bit extreme, but it would encourage job seekers to spend more time reading through adverts to see if they have a realistic chance of being considered.

·         Universal use of filtering questions. Some job boards have this feature, but couldn’t they all allow the advertisers to pose some yes/no experience questions that filter out unsuccessful applicants?

·         Require more information to be entered manually by the job seeker for each application (to reduce spamming). Adding a layer of process in to the application process will take more effort on the job seekers part. Perhaps allow the vacancy advertiser the option to add a specific question field, relating to the advert (e.g. ‘please describe your involvement in a systems upgrade project’).

So when I receive a promotional email from a job board telling me that their new TV advertising campaign is about to start, I now find my finger pressing the delete button before I’ve reached the end of the first sentence.

What do you think of the above suggestions? Would they improve service for you as a recruiter/hiring manager? Or would they be too restrictive as a job seeker? Or have you got any better suggestions? Please comment below…

LinkedIn's Endorsements feature - users will decide its fate...

I’ve read a number of articles/blogs recently discussing the pros and cons of the Endorsements feature on Linkedin, so I thought I’d throw my opinion in to the ring.

The theory behind its introduction makes sense to me. It’s a quick and easy way to publicly verify the skills and expertise of a contact you’ve worked with or done business with. Not as personal and informative as a written recommendation, but still a testimonial of sorts and one we’re all grateful to receive when it’s from someone we know.

One of the major problems is how the feature is promoted on the site. Linkedin have made it too quick and easy to endorse multiple contacts with one mouse click when prompted.  This significantly dilutes the credibility of the function and actively encourages users to endorse their connections for skills and expertise they may not possess.

Another big argument from the doubters is that they’re receiving endorsements from people they’ve never even met or had business dealings with. In the article:  Why I Think LinkedIn Endorsements Will Be Dead By The End Of The Year the author states that he’s had five endorsements that very day from complete strangers, and as a result feels the feature is doomed to fail.

This is where there seems to be some misguided criticism of the feature in my opinion. Only first tier connections can endorse you, so if you don’t want to give strangers the ability to endorse you, don’t connect with them in the first place. Linkedin can’t be held accountable for being unable to distinguish between your real life connections and the open networkers you connect with on the site to build a bigger network. *I’ve literally just had a notification of an endorsement come through as I typed this (I promise!), and guess what – it’s from a stranger with ‘LION’ in their surname. I assume they’re just hoping for a reciprocal endorsement back, but it’s not going to happen.

So how can it be improved? It’s quite simple – by improving it ourselves. If everyone takes the initiative and some time out to endorse their real life contacts for the specific skills you know they possess, a much more accurate picture of an individuals expertise will eventually be reflected in the data.

The same goes for any site you use with user generated reviews and endorsements. Do you read the reviews on Amazon, ebay and TripAdvisor before making purchases/reservations for example? If you use it, get involved too. Contribute your reviews and experiences also and make it even better for everyone. The same applies to Linkedin Recommendations and Endorsements.