The Blog

Employees and social referrals

We’re build­ing an employee refer­ral fea­ture into Zartis. We’re strug­gling with the mar­ket­ing mes­sage. “Unlock­ing the poten­tial of your employ­ees’ social graph” might be a true state­ment but it doesn’t sound great, does it? “Lever­ag­ing your net­work to har­ness the poten­tial.…” I can’t go on.….

So, some­body in here came up with “instant refer­rals, just add jobs”. We like it. We hope you’ll like the prod­uct. We’re already work­ing with a cou­ple of our early customers.

If you’d like to increase the num­ber of refer­ral hires at your com­pany let us know.

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Posted in Social recruiting

Mobile recruiting made easy

We’ve just made all of our client job sites mobile friendly. Why bother you might ask?

5% of all traf­fic to our clients’ job pages is already from mobile devices. That num­ber would have been under 1% two years ago. That’s fast growth. Expect it to con­tinue. Some­thing like 750,000 smart phones are being acti­vated every day!

Twit­ter is also hav­ing a huge impact on mobile recruit­ing. Over 50% of all Twit­ter traf­fic is now from mobile. We see a huge suc­cess rate from our clients post­ing jobs on Twit­ter. Noth­ing worse than click­ing on a job tweet with a mobile device and you can’t even see the con­tent of the page properly.

With most careers sites when a can­di­date lands on a page, they find that way the mobile browser ren­ders the con­tent really sucks. Turn­ing your iPhone on its side doesn’t help. You still can’t upload a CV/Resume. Few would argue that the process works. It’s bad employer brand­ing. Period.

On our mobile-friendly pages we’ve trimmed down the con­tent dis­played to just the job descrip­tion and require­ments. If a can­di­date applies from their mobile they send their name, email, cur­rent job title and com­pany. Tada! Their details are now in your sys­tem. If it’s the CTO of Google you can call him back. Great.

The can­di­date also gets an email sent to them with a link to com­plete their appli­ca­tion once they are back at a desktop/laptop. This is obvi­ously what you’d hope they do but at least you’ve cap­tured their con­tact details and iden­tify from the mobile interaction.

Of course they can always use their LinkedIn pro­file from a mobile if they’re on a Zartis devel­oped careers site.

Happy mobile recruiting.

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Posted in Social recruiting

New year, new job

Despite the wheels of com­merce grind­ing to a halt over Christ­mas, vis­its to our clients’ job pages still aver­aged 50% of their usual daily traf­fic on 24th, 25th, 31st Dec, and 1st Jan. Each of these days was on a Sat­ur­day or a Sun­day. On a nor­mal week­end vis­its to job ads are often down by up to 50%. So sta­tis­ti­cally, Christ­mas and New Year’s didn’t really have any impact on job search.

What did have an impact is the new year. New Year’s res­o­lu­tions must have included ditch­ing the boss. Yes­ter­day was our busiest day for job views by a long shot. Sure, we’re grow­ing fast which cre­ates some dis­tor­tion, but yes­ter­day was over twice as busy as an aver­age day in December.

To those of you think­ing of hir­ing, now’s a good time to set out your stall.

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Posted in Social recruiting

Mobile recruiting

We’ve been toy­ing with mobile recruit­ing strat­egy for the past cou­ple of months. We started by review­ing how many vis­i­tors to Zartis are using mobile browsers. The fig­ure is about 5% with about twice as many iOS as Android hits.

A cus­tomer asked if this includes hits from iPads when our users are inter­view­ing can­di­dates. Turns out this is where a lot of the mobile vis­its seem to be com­ing from. I do it myself any­time I’m inter­view­ing now. Why bother print­ing a CV/resume when you can open it on an iPad and take notes directly into Zartis.

So, the clos­est we’ve got yet to mobile recruit­ing in truth is really mobile based inter­view­ing. We have to up the game in terms of get­ting can­di­dates into Zartis from mobile browsing.

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Posted in Social recruiting

Zartis bulks up its Board

We’re delighted to announce that Bill Liao, pre­vi­ously co-founder of social net­work Xing, has joined the Board of Zartis. Also join­ing the Board is Jonathan Grey, owner of Ova­tion Incen­tives, a Sun­day Times Tech Track 100 company.

The appoint­ment coin­cides with an invest­ment from SOS Ven­tures, a $140m tech­nol­ogy fund; and AIB SCF, a €53m ven­ture fund. The fund­ing will be used to fur­ther develop Zartis’ mobile strat­egy, a social refer­ral func­tion and grow the busi­ness glob­ally. Awesome.

Bill Liao

Bill, entre­pre­neur, busi­ness men­tor, speaker, phil­an­thropist, diplo­mat and author, is a co-founder of the social net­work ser­vice XING and CEO of Finaxis AG, a pri­vately held com­pany in the finan­cial ser­vices indus­try. In 2011 Liao joined SOS Ven­tures as their Euro­pean Ven­ture Part­ner spe­cial­is­ing in Inter­net and social media. Bill is a spe­cial diplo­matic envoy for St Kitts and Nevis, with a spe­cial inter­est in sus­tain­able devel­op­ment and the environment.

Bill is also founder of WeForest.org, an inter­na­tional not-for-profit orga­ni­za­tion com­bat­ing global warm­ing in the most nat­ural way pos­si­ble by refor­est­ing pre­vi­ously degraded land. Bill is ded­i­cated to the vision that busi­ness and enter­prise, con­ducted fairly and with respect for the envi­ron­ment, can and will cre­ate a bet­ter envi­ron­ment for work, life and the world that we all share. This vision is cap­tured in his book: Stone Soup; a Secret Recipe for Mak­ing Some­thing from Nothing.

Jonathan Grey

Jonathan Grey is the founder and Man­ag­ing Direc­tor of Ova­tion Incen­tives, a lead­ing incen­tive, reward and moti­va­tion solu­tions provider based in Lon­don. Founded in 2001, Ova­tion Incen­tives was recently included in The Sun­day Times (UK) Tech Track 100 List and is recog­nised as a thought leader in the incen­tive and moti­va­tion indus­try. Ova­tion Incen­tives’ clients include Philips, Voda­fone, Nike, Ver­i­zon and Regus. Jonathan is orig­i­nally from Cork, Ireland.

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Posted in Social recruiting

Toddlers and social recruiting

If I was five years old I’d want to attend Wood­land Edu­ca­tion, a child­care and kinder­garten ser­vice in Mel­bourne, Aus­tralia. Here’s why: they give the kids iPads (super­vised obvi­ously). They help tod­dlers learn Chi­nese. They pro­vide par­ents with an iPhone app. They use Vimeo for their promo video. And they use Zartis for recruitment.

One of the first fea­tures we included in Zartis is the abil­ity to add your jobs and appli­ca­tion process to any face­book page. We weren’t sure what the uptake would be. In truth, most peo­ple haven’t yet added it. Wood­lands is one of the first to use it and it looks great. I asked Mark Wood­land, the gen­eral man­ager, why they do their recruit­ment via face­book. Here’s his response:

“Why should I use social media?”

I have been often hear­ing peo­ple ask­ing this ques­tion, and it reminded me of the time, 5 years after the Inter­net boom, where every­one was ask­ing “Why must I own a web site?” This also brought me back to an old ques­tion “Why should I email you when I could just affix a stamp and mail it out? When email was first intro­duced, most peo­ple were appalled with the idea of using email instead of tra­di­tional mail­ing and saw it as trou­ble­some and insecure.

Most of us who engage in social media under­stand that its pri­mary pur­pose is about con­stant inter­ac­tions and par­tic­i­pa­tion with users actively online so as to develop trust­wor­thy rela­tion­ships and closer bondings.

If busi­ness’ are not will­ing to inter­act with their cus­tomers in mod­ern ways, cus­tomers may turn to com­pa­nies that have a pres­ence online where they are able to com­mu­ni­cate (Face­book, MySpace, Twit­ter). They will look for com­pa­nies that are more will­ing to lis­ten, respond, engage, inter­act and respect them.

Being dif­fer­ent can be scary at times, and social media is extremely unique from what major­ity tra­di­tional mar­keters are doing, presently the con­sumer is empow­ered through social media and I firmly believe ‘social employ­ment’ is the next step.

Thanks,
Mark Wood­land | Wood­land Edu­ca­tion
Gen­eral Manager

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Posted in Social recruiting

UK tech companies fall behind US counterparts in social recruiting

We’re putting this out as a “press release” today but it’s worth includ­ing the details here in our blog. We reviewed 100 top UK and US tech com­pa­nies to see how they use the Web and social media for recruit­ment. The results weren’t what we expected. You can see it all the fancy graphs here but the sum­mary find­ings are:

LinkedIn is by far the most pop­u­lar social media net­work for recruit­ment. It’s impos­si­ble to accu­rately say how many com­pa­nies use it to search for can­di­dates but only 14% of UK com­pa­nies and 25% of US com­pa­nies are directly adver­tis­ing posi­tions on it.

Only 9% of UK com­pa­nies are using Twit­ter to pro­mote vacan­cies. 23% of US com­pa­nies are doing so. This may tie in with the fact that more US com­pa­nies use Appli­cant Track­ing Sys­tems which often auto post to Twit­ter. Most employee refer­ral pro­grams also result in an uplift in the use of Twit­ter for hiring.

Face­book, despite its 750 mil­lion users, is the least used net­work. Only 1 UK com­pany even lists jobs on Face­book. The US num­ber is still low at 4.

In the UK 61% of com­pa­nies are adver­tis­ing jobs on their own web site. How­ever, only 11% are using an appli­cant track­ing sys­tem, or any­thing other than plain old vanilla flavoured email to receive job appli­ca­tions. Lit­tle won­der that can­di­dates com­plain about the appli­cant experience!

In the US a sim­i­lar amount of com­pa­nies (68%) adver­tise roles on their web site but their use of appli­cant track­ing sys­tems is more than dou­ble at 23%.

Only 3% of UK com­pa­nies and 4% of US com­pa­nies use video to show­case their employer brand­ing. This is a big missed oppor­tu­nity to dif­fer­en­ti­ate com­pany cul­ture in a sec­tor where good can­di­dates highly sought after.

Social recruit­ing is tipped as a huge growth sec­tor. From the sur­vey results its clear that its still in its infancy.

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Posted in Social recruiting

Case studies in online and social recruiting

We’ve just released a short case study show­ing five great exam­ples of online or social recruiting.

We picked names you’d imag­ine, like Google, and also a few less well knowns (GetH­ip­ster ring any bells?).

We wrote the ebook because we felt each cam­paign was some­how unique and inspir­ing. We hope you find it use­ful and would love to hear your feedback.

If you’d like to share any expe­ri­ences for future edi­tions please con­tact us and let us know.

You can find the case stud­ies here: http://www.zartis.com/resources/

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Posted in Social recruiting

WordPress jobs plugin released

We’re delighted to announce a free plu­gin that allows any com­pany to add their jobs list­ings, appli­ca­tion process and can­di­date man­age­ment to any Word­Press site.

When a job is cre­ated in Zartis it will auto­mat­i­cally appear in Word­Press, as well as the user’s Twit­ter time­lines and Face­book pages. Can­di­dates can apply for the role using their CV/Resume or LinkedIn pro­file. All can­di­date details are stored in the secure Zartis host­ing platform.

Word­Press users expect a lot for free so we don’t charge for the plu­gin. It allows a user to down­load the plu­gin and sub­scribe to the Free monthly plan on Zartis.com. If more than one job is being adver­tis­ing they’ll have to flip to the low cost plan.

We use Word­Press to run zartis.com. We’re in good com­pany. There are almost 60 mil­lion other Word­Press sites. We’re look­ing for­ward to hear­ing from you.

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Posted in Social recruiting

What is Zartis?

Some­body asked me today: What is Zartis? I had to email the response. Here’s what it said:

The recruit­ment indus­try is worth in excess of $130 bil­lion per year. The indus­try is going through sig­nif­i­cant dis­rup­tion because of greater Inter­net use by both employ­ers and job seek­ers. In the past two years, social media has added fur­ther disruption.

Most small to medium sized com­pa­nies are not ade­quately pre­pared to cope with this change. Zartis is a low-cost soft­ware as a ser­vice tool to help them.

Zartis allows users to sign up for a free ver­sion of the ser­vice in less than 60 sec­onds. A user then adds a job which is dis­played on a pub­lic web site allow­ing can­di­dates apply for the role using their CV/Resume or Linkedin details.

Once an appli­ca­tion is sub­mit­ted the can­di­date receives an auto­mated acknowl­edge­ment email and the com­pany receives a noti­fi­ca­tion email. Can­di­date details are stored in an online data­base where the com­pany can view, edit and inter­nally share the can­di­date details.

To reach more poten­tial can­di­dates Zartis allows a com­pany to broad­cast the job advert to a num­ber of web and social media chan­nels. These include the company’s own web site, twit­ter account, face­book page and free global job aggre­ga­tors includ­ing Indeed.com, Sim­ply­Hired and Trovit.

The ser­vice can also be used in con­junc­tion with job boards fun­nel­ing all appli­cants from the job board into their Zartis account where they can be man­aged better.

The ser­vice is low touch, mean­ing it can be eas­ily setup and return value quickly to a user. The ser­vice also addresses a global need in the SME sec­tor. Both of these are impor­tant fac­tors for a low cost SaaS model to work.

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Posted in Social recruiting

“Onbrand” careers site

We’ve had some great feed­back from some great com­pa­nies that really care about their online brand­ing. One thing that kept com­ing up was “can we con­trol the look and feel of Zartis jobs and the appli­ca­tion process on our site?”

The answer now is yes. Jobs, and the appli­ca­tion process, can be embed­ded into your com­pany web site. The look and feel can be com­pletely con­trolled so that the colours and fonts reflect your cor­po­rate branding.

To cre­ate your cus­tom careers site you only need to add a small snip­pet of code. Your web devel­oper should be able to do this in a cou­ple of min­utes. Every­thing else is con­trolled from an easy to use styling page within Zartis.

Let us know if you’ve any feed­back on this.

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Posted in Social recruiting

New help desk

We like to think that Zartis is so easy that it doesn’t require a help desk. We’re also real­is­tic enough to know we’re wrong.

With any Web appli­ca­tion, no mat­ter how well it’s designed, there’s always a need for great cus­tomer sup­port. We’ve just built out our online help desk and we’d love to get your feed­back or hear your questions.

You can now con­tact our helpdesk at, you’ve guessed it, http://help.zartis.com.

We look for­ward to hear­ing from you.

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Posted in Social recruiting

Friday: dolphins and facebook

This isn’t quite the view our office win­dow but it was the view we enjoyed on a break from the office today. We’ve been busy work­ing on face­book inte­gra­tion which is nearly com­plete. To cel­e­brate a few recent mile­stones we went on a trip around the beau­ti­ful Cork har­bour and bumped into a some bot­tlenose dolphins.

There’s noth­ing like watch­ing a pod of dol­phins jump­ing around like this.

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Posted in Social recruiting

What is social recruiting?

My back­ground isn’t in social recruit­ing and I strug­gled with the term for a while. I’m not going to explain what it is because Andy Head­worth at Sirona Con­sult­ing does a much bet­ter job than I can. Check out his book — Smart Social Media Strate­gies in Recruit­ment.

It’s a must read if you’re in or look­ing to get into social recruit­ing. It’s a real no-nonsense, straight talk­ing approach to a sub­ject that’s being over com­pli­cated and hyped by some.

He’s also well worth fol­low­ing on twit­ter @andyheadworth.

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Posted in Social recruiting