But as many candidates now have options of job boards as well as jobs to apply for, without any more time, it is ideal to determine what time is best for recruiters to post jobs online.

Conventional thinking has it that jobs should be published on Fridays so that candidates can view the jobs over the weekend and apply.

However, recent reports from online recruitment sites shows that the time when more applications are done online are Mondays and Tuesdays, especially when candidates come back home and remember how crap their current jobs are.

According to Dan at Broadbean,

the best time for applications builds up through Monday to a peak at Tuesday lunch time.

However, for some jobsites, if you post jobs on a Monday, the chances are higher that your jobs will be at the top as the most recent and thus get more clicks and attract more applications.

Many recruitment agencies and recruiters are set in their ways, but it will be worth making changes in order to get the best out of your online recruitment advertising.

How do they take advantage of these positions and which is best used by recruiters?

A look at the sites itself shows a huge difference in their respective appeals.

Recruitmentcareers.co.uk has a rather plain feel, more of like something a desperate designer created overnight. Using archive.org, I was able to see how the site looked like in the past and in my opinion that was far better than its present design.

Its alexa ranking is pegged at 1,478,325 - meaning that a lot of activities is not happening on the site. Again, alexa rankings should be taking with a pinch of salt.

Careersinrecruitment.com - which comes 2nd in the search results has a nicer layout and better colours (my favourites, blue and orange) and the navigation is superb.

It has the Top 10 Live jobs which gives candidates the ease to click and find recruitment jobs.

Careersinrecruitment.com is also a member of the broadbean network and has alexa ranking of 889,895, which is decent enough for a niche jobsite.

Common sense states that the later gets a better share of recruitment advertising for recruitment jobs. Which do recruiters use more?

I am pleased with this and even if it will rank better in more keywords in the future based on some ongoing SEO work on the site, it goes to further show why recruitment companies must invest in recruitment SEO to be at the top of their games.

On the funny side, you could see: Did you mean: recruitment billing on the google results page.

No, google, I meant recruitment blogging. I am sure your algorithms will get used to ‘recruitment blogging‘ soon.

One thing this blog will try and focus on in the foreseable future will be recruitment seo and how online recruitment can assist recuiters find the right candidates, fill their roles and yes, be big recruitment billers.

In its fourth and largest round of funding since it was founded five years ago, the website secured $53m and plans to use the money to bolster its presence in Europe.

According to the Telegraph, LinkedIn, which established a London base in January, has around 1.5m members in the UK - its largest market in Europe.

The website currently has a team of 8 at its UK headquarters in Marylebone, with plans to attract more than 20 staff by the end of the year. LinkedIn’s European managing director Kevin Eyres said: “Europe is an integral part of LinkedIn’s growth strategy.

The company’s current revenue streams include advertising, subscriptions, job listings and corporate hiring services, and LinkedIn said it is in the process of launching “several new lines of business.”

Linkedin has proved to be of great resource to recruiters who find qualified candidates on the site and network online with colleagues and business contacts.

A good example of a recruitment blog is the PWCPeopleBlog http://pwc.blogs.com/pwcpeople

I have italized the expression: A good example of a recruitment blog is the PWCPeopleBlog.

I have seen quite a few very interesting recruitment blogs which offer excellent posts on recruitment and how the companies or their clients go about with hiring.

A few vital statistics for the supposedly ‘PwC recruitment blog’:

1. 5 posts in 2008 by just one staff, Paula, who happens to be a Senior Manager

2. non-recruitment related blog posts; Paula ranting about her personal life etc

Hello Onrec, PwC blogs is nothing near a recruitment blog. Thanks but try again!

Broadbean Technology is Europe’s leading provider of advert distribution and response tracking solutions.

MD Broadbean, Dan McGuire was a recruiter for 3 and a half years before moving into online recruitment almost 5 years ago.

Broadbean now has over 800 customers; a network in excess of 700 job boards. Their web applications are used by 60% of the UK’s top 250 staffing businesses and a large number of major employers in banking, telecoms, IT services, financial services and new media as well as SME’s, sole traders and anything in between.

According to Dan’s blog, Broadbean is growing at over 100% per year with an expected turnover in excess of £2.5m by 2008.

Broadbean is definetely an online recruitment technology company to watch out for!

The decision was made to increase the number of vacancies on the site and attract more jobseekers. It will help recruiters to find appropriate staff without going to any expense.

They also stated that Jobtonic is giving employers an opportunity to reach a large audience of 100,000 active UK jobseekers and advertise jobs to over 1.5 million passive users who are able to refer jobs to appropriate jobseekers outside the Jobtonic database …

The cool part was:

All these services are totally free and won`t cost a penny for recruiters!

This must be a huge shift from their original strategy to generate revenue from referral fees paid by recruiters when candidates are placed. This brings to mind the question: Are Online Recruitment Referral Sites still trying to figure out a sustainable business model?

Take the case of Zubka (alexa ranking 250,197) - launched by recruitment veterans in 2006 to so much fanfair, publicity and even funding from Benchmark.

From their website, you can learn that Zubka is a unique job referral site which can benefit you in two simple ways;

First, you can earn good money by recommending friends for jobs. (Yes, it’s that easy). And second, if you need to fill a job vacancy, Zubka helps you find the perfect person - in a simpler, cheaper, more hassle free way than the usual recruitment routes.

However for the last few months, things seems to be on the quiet side from Zubka. Are recruiters actually using this site? Are people really making money from these sites? Is the online referral recruitment business model viable?

Although Alexa rankings are not the very best in tracking web traffic, but they can be used in this case for comparing the reach of both sites jobtonic and zubka. Please see below.

Are you using these sites? Please kindly share your experiences …

In the UK, the recruitment industry is very competitive and many recruitment agencies have succeeded in having an online presence.

However, in order to take full advantage of what the web can offer to a recruitment consultant businesses, your website must follow some fundamental principles and also have some key features.

Below is a list of five key features that I suggest your recruitment site must have:

1. Recruitment websites must be Simple and Usable

This cannot be overstated. The more clutter you have on the recruitment site, the more its harder for candidates to find what they are looking for. Job candidates are very impatient. They want to see jobs - make a decision of whether they should apply to it or not - and move on. Your recruitment online project should also be very easy to navigate. The latest jobs should be properly displayed and information about your recruitment agency should be presented in a honest and relatable manner.

2. Recruitment websites must have a CV Upload Field

Candidates want to make sure that their CV is submitted on your recruitment site. Most candidates find it very complicated to fill online application forms (I do) or even send job applications via email. To benefit from your ability to attract more candidates, I will suggest the following fields below as very relevant:

• Full Name
• Email Address
• Phone Number
• Job Position
• Upload CV

These 5 data feeds are all you need to get the candidate’s CV to your recruitment portal. Their name, of course. But also their email address and phone numbers as this can be stored in your recruitment database. And definetely their CV. The Job position field will make it easier to relate their CV to some kinds of jobs. You will see the relevance in the subsequent features.

3. Recruitment Agencies must Invest on Recruitment SEO

This is a subject that will recur in your drive to be competitive online. It is not just enough to own a nicely-designed website that allows candidates to send in their CV. Your recruitment online campaign must also include a budget to actively promote your website on the Internet.

The site itself should be highly optimised with keywords and phrases that relates to recruitment in the general sense and to your recruitment sectors (construction, finance, engineering, health etc).

The keywords could also be geographical, depending on if you servce a particular region or location eg (Leeds, Cardiff, London etc).

Your recruitment site should be submitted to many search engines and relevant directories and if possible, hire someone to manage an ongoing blogs/forums link building and the use of social bookmarks.

4. Recruitment Companies must use Jobs-by-email Service

Jobs-by-email is a very smart way to inform candidates that have registered on your website about current jobs that could be of interest to them. Yes, you can call them on the phone, but you must have realized that many job seekers do not pick up calls during office hours and atimes the email is a very convenient and non-intrusive way of reaching them.

The candidates on your recruitment database will have filled their email address in the CV upload field. Hence, if they had added their CV with the job position: Internal Auditor, then the next time you want to find candidates for a related position, you can search your database with that job title and send the jobs-by-email to the candidates. You will be surprised how many responses you will get.

5. Recruitment Agencies website can do with Newsletters/Blogs

Recruitment newsletters play a role in reminding candidates of your interests in them and also letting them know any changes in your business. It could be that you are expanding and/or moving to new offices. It could also be information about how best they can do at Interviews or write a CV.

Recruitment Blogs are essential for the recruitment agencies that are keen to maintain an open communication system for candidates, clients and even stakeholders. The blogs must be updated often to keep readers interested in your business.

I hope this features are of use in your next plan to create a value-added recruitment website.

Please feel free to make comments or add more features that I could have missed!

The need for recruitment SEO strategies is more demanding the last few years as more web users rely on google for most of their Internet searches - and yes, there are now more and more web users looking for careers online.

A look at the search results trends for the keyword ‘recruitment‘ shows something of interest. The major job boards like monster.co.uk and jobsite.co.uk did not take the first place (as at June 16th 2008).

How long that has been, I do not know. Although google does change their algorithm once in a while.

The top recruitment site on the number 1 spot is reed.co.uk. Also of note is that hays.com and michaelpage.co.uk, which are more of recruitment consultancies than recruitment job boards also took the 2nd and 3rd spot respectively. jobsite.co.uk is in the 4th position.

This ranking may not be connected with the investment on recruitment SEO by these companies. I will retract the statement in case they all decide to make public their actual budget on recruitment SEO.

However, it might be the big G’s way of allocating spots based on its own discretion - afterall, many things in business is based on who knows who where, when and how.

Having used this leading online recruitment jobsite myself, I value the array of candidates that can be found in their database.

The only issue is the recruitment technology they depoly which delivers poor candidates search results for specific keywords - offering you a large number of ‘unrelated’ CVs which you have to sift through. Hmm, very painstaking!

I think that very large online recruitment job boards should start focusing on making candidates searching easier than getting overly excited on the number of job candidates on their jobsite.