They specifically want to work in sales/biz dev in a public company in LA County. I can’t figure out if this is a good thing or not. Is this bribing your way into a company or a stroke of genius?

Today, we received an unsolicited email from a large recruitment agency that “specialise in working with start up companies.”

Strangely the email goes on to say that “our standard terms and conditions are automatically attached to every email we send.” It sounds like an apology for some kind of IT problem they’re having. But thankfully the T&Cs are being reviewed “in light of the current market conditions”, whatever that means.

The first line of the T&Cs tells me to read them carefully as they are binding on me. Remember this is an unsolicited email. It is the company’s policy to “strictly enforce its terms of agreement in the event of any dispute.” And we haven’t even spoken yet.

The fee structure of the agency is really interesting. If we hire somebody through them that earns €20,000 we pay them €7,500 . That goes up to €17,500 for somebody on €50,000. Remember these guys specialise in start ups!

I can’t think of any other industry that operates with these kind of economics. I also can’t think of another sector where you’d send somebody an unsolicited email with aggressive terms and conditions containing an outline of penalties and threats of legal action. It makes the Nigerian email scams seem polite.

Maybe it’s time employers gave new employees that don’t come through an agency a sign on bonus for approaching them directly.

Most small companies don’t have a formal employee referral program. Everybody knows everybody so what’s the point, right?

We’re one of those small companies. We just ran a referral campaign to find a new intern for a media production role. Here’s how it panned out:

I added the job into our social referral software on Saturday evening.
Each of our 5 person team got an auto generated email informing them about the position.
I offered an Apple TV as a reward for a successful hire.
Each employee logged in and was able to easily post the position through Zartis to their social graph.
On Monday morning we had 9 candidates for the position.
We can track each referral back to each employee. We also capture the social network each job seeker came from.

The sources of traffic to the job ad were:

961 Twitter
93 Facebook
70 LinkedIn

Couple of points to consider. The number of Twitter views is inflated because the number of “bots” that find the link and land on the page. Even if half of all views were created by bots it’s still a lot of real people coming through. There were about 34 retweets of the job ad. They were definately real people.

LinkedIn was relatively low but the position is for an intern. LinkedIn would probably yield a better crop if it was a more senior position. Facebook did ok in terms of driving traffic but it did drive a lot of “engagement” with people commenting on the position and the post.

Did it work? Absolutely. We got 9 great candidates in two days. And, this is for a 5 person company. It was also great for employer branding. I’m looking forward to seeing the results for a 300 person company in a couple of weeks.

So we’re trying to help by offering you a free and confidential review of your online and social media recruiting. If you’re interested we’ll do the following:

• Review your web site for usability issues and let you know how it scores
• Review the candidate experience and give you pointers on how you could improve it
• Review your social recruiting and give you feedback

This is a service for CEOs, COOs, HR departments and internal recruiters. There are no catches and no strings attached. We’ll also release benchmarking information on how you score against other companies in your category.

To get started simply signup here. We love forward to hearing from you.

“You’re in LinkedIn and probably thinking about your career so it’s a good time and place to get someone’s attention.”

“I’ve never clicked on one of those ads.”

“The jobs displayed in LinkedIn definitely get your attention.”

As the saying goes: “I know half of my advertising budget is wasted, but I’m not sure which half”. Pay per click helps answer that, so we ran a simple test.

We created a Facebook ad for a freelance writer. After segmenting the audience by geography and demographics there were about 20,000 people in our target audience.

Because I’m writing this you can probably guess that we didn’t find our writer.

We created two variants of the same ad as a simple A/B test. The ad was seen by about 4,000 people, on average 5 times in one week. Four people in total clicked through. None applied for the job. Maybe I write lousy ad copy. It was pretty disappointing. We know Facebook can work extremely well for job referrals. You can read a quirky case study here.

Total cost of experiment $1.60. Teacher’s comment: “Needs more practice.”

We ran a test on LinkedIn yesterday. This time for a mobile app developer in a friend’s company. The job had already been tweeted by some high-Klout individuals. There were about 200 page views generated from the twitter traffic. But no applicants. Hen’s teeth and mobile app developers…

Based on the very granular segmentation offered by LinkedIn, we set our ad to a target of 26,853 people. Two variants were created for A/B testing. In one day there were 17,189 impressions and 4 click throughs resulting in one applicant.

Total cost of experiment so far $11.03.

What does this tell us? Not a huge amount sadly because our R&D budget is so low. The laws of small numbers are dangerous.

If we stretched the numbers and spent $1103, buying 400 LinkedIn click throughs, would we have got 100 applicants? That could potentially be very powerful.

If you’re reading this with £10k burning a hole in your pocket let me know and we can find which half is not wasted.

PS: if you’re a mobile app developer check out the mobile developer role here.

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.

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.

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.