En-Sync 8020 are our latest live partner to launch their own job board powered by JobsiteWhite. They are a professional consulting and business service provider. They use their expertise in order to enhance their clients’ businesses and facilitate their success through the clear and concise strategies they provide.

Their 5 key values for a successful business are:

•  Professional Recruitment
•  Contract Recruitment
•  Business Consulting
•  Training and Development
•  Knowledge and Networks

They offer consistent support to their clients to ensure that their strategies, structure, systems and processes within the business are healthy and that they are supported with capable role holders in robust roles to enable their employees to realise their potential. They also offer a full suite of management training and development programmes to assist the business in accelerating their employees’ full potential in every level of the business.

En-Sync 8020 wanted a job board because their business had expanded beyond consultancy into recruitment and their clients increasingly wanted assistance in finding suitable candidates, to coincide with the business structure that En-Sync 8020 developed for them. It seemed like a natural progression for them to move into recruitment, especially as they already offered such comprehensive advice about business strategies and offered training once a suitable candidate was found. Adding a job board would make their offering more robust and their site more stand-alone in its field and would take full advantage of growing organic and social traffic to their site.

They had already started advertising jobs on their site and social media pages and developing a basic job board, but wanted to improve their offering to include a search engine function to assist job seeking users in finding suitable roles within their chosen business field.

They therefore chose to partner with us firstly to improve their offering to their clients, and to expand their current online services. Secondly, partnership with us allows En-Sync 8020 to have a live feed of current vacancies on their site from Jobsite.co.uk, and also cross-posts vacancies advertised on En-Sync 8020 to Jobsite. This allows En-Sync 8020 to offer a far greater exposure to hiring client vacancies to potential job-seeking candidates.They also want to harness benefits that Jobsite’s reputation can bring to their own job board. Jobsite has such an established name and presence in recruitment and advanced job board technology which we can supply En-Sync 8020 with to run their own job board.

Check out their brand new job board here.

Kevin Burt, Director of En-Sync 8020 says of his motivations to partner JobsiteWhite and the partnership process:

“The benefits were apparent, but with all strategic partnerships you have to ensure there is a reasonable benefit for all the stakeholders. After further discussions with the JSW team and focusing on the benefits the partnership would give candidates and clients, it seemed to be quite fortuitous and very complimentary. In reality the effort required was fairly minimal as the process has been clearly articulated and simple to implement.”

Apprentice Supermarket is our latest live partner.

They are a not-for-profit organisation based in Northampton which aims to help unemployed young people, part of the “Jobless Generation”, to develop their skills, self-confidence and employability in order to gain work experience and get them back into work or full time education.

They offer a range of training programmes, or “boot camps” for both the apprenticeship-seeking candidate and hiring employers. Since October 2011, 40 apprentices have completed training programmes and 27 of which have already found work. One of their prominent company mottos is “come in wearing a hoodie, go out wearing a tie.”

Eligible candidates must be between the ages of 16 and 24, either school leavers or those looking to retrain and gain new skills. Apprentice Supermarket can offer them a full induction and essential training into the industry they are entering as well as personal monitoring, training on the job and a list of connection to hiring companies in the UK once they have completed their apprenticeship or training.

For clients they offer a training service to help them recruit the right candidate. Apprentice Supermarket acts as a filter in order to help hand pick candidates with skills that will best match and benefit the hiring company. They also offer a monetary incentive to companies if they recruit an Apprentice Supermarket trained apprentice.

They chose to partner JobsiteWhite to add a job board onto their site because, as a not for profit organisation, they need as much national brand awareness as they can.  The main focus of their business is to get currently unemployed and unemployable young people off the streets and the dole and back into work. Therefore, brand awareness is their biggest driver as the young people they are trying to recruit are initially, before Apprentice Supermarket’s extensive training programmes, unemployable, and would not know where to look to job-seek online or which resources to use. Apprentice Supermarket is aiming to make itself as well-known as possible, in the most-cost effective way it can.

Hence they chose to partner with JobsiteWhite to add a job board on their site as it is the cheapest solution on the market. By doing so, Apprentice Supermarket can also harness the well-known name and marketplace that links to Jobsite can provide. A professional looking job board, utilising Jobsite’s cutting edge job board technology, with a feed of current vacancies from jobsite.co.uk, will give them valid and relevant site content. It also allows them to boast the name of Jobsite on their own site, which is a very good endorsement of their brand. It is this factor that they hope will encourage other companies and major employers to also endorse their brand and become a resource for them to use in order to help employ and retrain their apprentices.

Andrew Kunman, MD of Apprentice Supermarket says of the joining up process:

“The customer service and system process was seamless a pleasant experience all-round”.

We’ve had a very busy year here at JSW HQ.  Since launching in May, we have been making a name for ourselves. We have exhibited at events, conferences and trade fairs, given master classes and web demos, become members of such renowned associations as the Association of Online Publishers (AOP) and the Professional Publishers Association (PPA), attended award ceremonies and been shortlisted for Best Innovation in Online Recruitment at the National Online Recruitment Awards (NORAs) after only six months!

All of this was of course, to get partners up and running with their own brand new job boards. We continue to enjoy good working relations with our current partners and to welcome new partners on board, and we look forward to making additional developments to improve and update JobsiteWhite in 2013.

From all of us at JobsiteWhite, we wish you a very Merry Christmas and a prosperous 2013.

Yesterday was Team JobsiteWhite’s Christmas outing.

Devised by our Sales Director, Gemma Cooney, we hired out the pedi-bus to travel in style around London. This was a surprise to all of us, as Gemma kept it all a secret and we didn’t know what she had planned until we turned up at the meeting point.

The pedi-bus is essentially a multi-cycle platform where you bring your own drinks and cycle around the sites of London as a team.

Before we set off we looked like this:

We quickly realised it is deceptively hard work however, especially as our first  mission was to cross Tower Bridge powered only by our own pedalling! This was no mean feat as the incline of the bridge is really steep.

Very soon, we looked like this:

However, with the Christmas tunes blaring we gave it our all, holding up traffic and being photographed and filmed by tourists.

(Us holding up the traffic, much to the chagrin of taxi drivers and van men)

Legs burning we made it over the bridge and to our first much-needed pit-stop where we caught our breath and the guys did a few stretches to prepare themselves for the next leg:

Next we pedalled into the City where people seemed very surprised to see us and clearly thought we were crazy as we cycled by. Undeterred, with Christmas hats on, drinks flowing, singing along to Christmas songs and waving at everyone we saw (including a very supportive policeman), we successfully completed our lap of the City, winding up back at London Bridge.

It was great fun, a real challenge and not for the faint-hearted.

With massive appetites we tucked into our Christmas dinner at Floridita’s which, after all that cycling,  felt thoroughly deserved!

It’s official, job boards are the top resource for both recruiters and jobseekers. Consequently our partners, running state of the art job boards with technology to match that of Jobsite itself, are benefiting from this trend. We are seeing more and more companies turn to online job boards to increase revenue, site traffic and most importantly, to promote their own vacancies and to hire good quality candidates.

Research from HPI shows that online job boards are consistently the preferred method of job searching for candidates.

Following the same trend, online job boards are also the favourite method for businesses looking to recruit new staff. Therefore, our partners’ job boards, with the ability to sell job vacancies, put them in a very lucrative position.

Recruitment is an additional remit that many organisations are now turning their attention to in order to improve their online presence, brand awareness and general site offering to their users.

Consequently, many different industries are now displaying job boards very visibly on their landing pages to drive more and more interested traffic to their job boards.

For example the Trade Association Forum, in 2004, had no obvious links to their employment pages on their home page. Links were present on the page, but got lost in the rest of the content and were not a major focus of the page, nor were they drawing users towards the jobs page.

But in 2012, the “jobs” link is highly visible and one of the 3 main featured headings on their updated site:

This is a move I’m sure partners of JobsiteWhite can empathise with, having chosen to update their sites in such a way.

The demand for staff is also on the rise as well as the numbers of active job seekers, meaning that this is a great time to run an online job board, as it is the preferred method of job searching. Markit Economics Ltd published figures showing that staff demand is on a 13 month high and growing, for both permanent and temporary roles across all sectors. Therefore our partners’ job boards have launched at the perfect time and are pitching to the biggest client base they could hope to have at the current time.

Job boards show no signs of losing their position as the top resource so don’t let such a unique position go to waste. Below are some tips for our partners to make sure their job boards continue to thrive and remain successful:

• Attract the right candidates to your niche. Do that and the right employers will come too, wanting to spend money and advertise on your site, with the view to hiring the perfect candidates.

• Make candidates’ lives easy – then they will return. Make registrations and applications simple and easy to follow, make your site as accessible as possible. Candidates are the biggest source of revenue, through their positive activity on site, you will attract more and more employers (see above).

• Be proactive; make sure you know exactly what’s going on in your job board. Track everything, all metrics -candidates, registrations, applications, and CV uploads and employer requests.

• Sell your site and your job board, advertise it, make people aware of it and drive traffic towards it.

• Make sure you have clear links to social media, your candidates are probably using it, make sure you do too to ensure you are joining the conversation and increasing your brand awareness as much as possible with the people that matter.

For more information check out Evenbase’s Strategy Director Felix Wetzel’s blog post via job board doctor: http://www.jobboarddoctor.com/2010/10/12/people-balance-technology-the-future-of-job-boards/
It was written in 2010 but is still relevant today.

Good Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is fundamental to the success of a website and you don’t have to be a technical genius to make a few changes to greatly improve your online presence and SEO rankings.
The below tips are free, easy and effective. Follow them and your basic SEO improvements are underway and your site will be well on its way to a higher position on those all-important search engine results:

1. Keywords

Choose your keywords carefully and always be ready to change and update them as things evolve. Follow your keywords on Google Analytics so you always know how users are reaching you and what your most successful keywords are. Know your audience. Understand exactly who you’re trying to target and why, -promote your product, via keywords, not just the business itself. Additionally, when updating your keywords, think outside the box, your audience may use different words to find you than the words you might use yourself.

2. Originality

Make sure every page is original – original content keeps users, which means they will return. Give them something to come back for, such as a regularly updated blog, or twitter feed or onsite news and updates. Great copy and content makes a site, not only in terms of its readability and its relevance to your audience, but also in terms of Google’s trackers. They can tell the difference between original pieces and spam, so make sure your keywords are present but don’t over repeat them, use synonyms to create variety and increase your authority in your field, it won’t harm your keyword tracking, but possibly enhance it as too much repetition tends to persuade Google that you’re writing spam and your ranking will be affected. Remember: (good) content is king.

3. Page Links

Interlink your site. Strong page links allow the user to move about easily without constantly searching for the page they’re after or returning to the home page to start again. This strategic movement of the user will provide the most accessible and positive user experience and will make your site stronger and easier for the search engines to track. The more of your site that the trackers can find through strong visible links, the better for your SEO and search results ranking. Embed hyperlinks into your copy too, not just on the site around the copy, Google values this.

4. Outbound Links

Create outbound links via the content on your site, to good quality external sites that support your copy. Google likes this and it makes your site look stronger and more authoritative and will increase your traffic. Do not use competitors to link to, but try to use websites that will, ideally, link back to you on their site. Eventually, you will gain enough presence in your chosen field that you will gain inbound links from other sites without having to link back. This is a big boost to any site if they have been genuinely endorsed by another site without prompt or reciprocation. Such links are difficult to come by but push your site high up the rankings if they can be achieved. However they can also be bought by such tools as Link Ads.

5. Social

Increase your social media presence – the more Facebook or Twitter followers you have, the more potential users of your site – or at least a bigger listening audience to pitch it to.

And finally…If you feel like splashing out, you can always run Pay-per-click ad campaigns to deliberately drive traffic towards your site and boost your numbers, or there are plenty of client-facing SEO agencies out there to outsource your SEO responsibilities to, and they will implement their specialist knowledge into getting your site as high up the rankings as they can get it.

We’ve had a very successful 2012 but 2013 is going to be even bigger and better.

With many more partners in the pipeline to go live in the first quarter of the year, our partner list is set to double in the first 3 months alone.

This expansion will make our partnership network bigger and stronger than ever. All partners are invited on launching their job board to join the JobsiteWhite LinkedIn group where they can see all the latest news from JSW HQ . We also encourage them to use it as a forum to discuss with us and fellow partners any successes or issues raised by their job boards. For more regular updates on JobsiteWhite and for relevant industry news, follow us on Twitter @JobsiteWhite.

Not only will we be expanding our current members but we’ll be attending plenty more events and trade fairs. Catch us as at the PPA New Talent Awards on February 12th.

We have Associate Membership to the Professional Publishers Association, (PPA) and the Association of Online Publishers (AOP) so will be attending more conferences and events with both organisations throughout the year.

Similarly, we have plans to exhibit at the Publishing and Media Expo in February and the Trade Association Forum event in June of next year, come and say hello if you’re attending, we’d be happy to see you.

Additionally, our parent company Jobsite will be re-launching their television campaign in January. This is hugely influential as their campaign in October resulted in the highest number of visits ever to Jobsite.co.uk, with over 5.8million, (see this handy infographic for more stats and information) and the January campaign is set to capitalise on this.The January campaign is running from 4th January-10th February, in which time it is predicted that the TV ads will reach 21.6 million ABC1 adults, with at least 78% of the target audience seeing the advert at least once, the average being six views.

The adverts will also be shown 2.9 million times across video-on-demand channels such as 4oD and ITV.com, and print adverts will appear in national newspapers, such as the Daily Mail, Mail on Sunday and Metro which have a combined circulation of over 5 million. This campaign is highly relevant to our live partners as their client vacancies will appear on Jobsite, so any additional exposure Jobsite will gain as a result of this new advertising campaign can only be a bonus and will increase exposure to JobsiteWhite partners’ vacancies and potentially their job boards and applications too.

All in all JobsiteWhite, Jobsite and our partnership network is going from strength to strength as we move into 2013.

Keep an eye on our Twitter page @JobsiteWhite for all the latest news and updates throughout the year ahead, along with our Whiteboard blog page: http://www.jobsite.co.uk/whiteboard/

Evenbase’s Quarterly Recruitment Review is a statistical feast of recruitment and job seeking.

Each quarter they compile a full report into attitudes and behaviours of job seekers and employers. It is a highly useful resource to all in the Evenbase family and its results will similarly be useful to our partners running their own job boards, to know the changes in activity and usage for online recruitment and job boards.

We have summarised the results that are most relevant to our partners below:

General Statistics

In Autumn 2012 unemployment fell by 50,000 to 2.5 million, the lowest rate since August 2011. Coinciding with this is the statistic that the number of people in work in this quarter is at the highest ever rate. This is all very positive stuff for both the economy and the recruitment industry.
The average number of vacancies has fallen from 7.7 to 6.5, however this is not a major concern as figures always decrease over the summer and take a little while to recover. Similarly, 46% of all businesses asked, reported some available vacancies within their companies, the highest percentage since 2010, and only 11% reported no vacancies at all. Temporary or contract roles have seen a greater interest than permanent roles in the last quarter.

Status of job boards

Good news for JobsiteWhite and our partners: job boards are still the most considered recruitment resource for both jobseekers and employers. For 75% of candidates it is the most favoured resource, and two-thirds of employers said the same.
Businesses are using more job boards in 2012 to recruit candidates than they did in 2011. In terms of preference or loyalty, 55% of businesses only use one job board, but candidates are more flighty and like to vary their options as 63% of them use more than one job board.

Mobile Browsing

Mobile technology in the latter half of the year is becoming more influential with both employers and jobseekers alike. 60% of jobseekers now use mobile devices to browse for jobs online with 34% actually applying for jobs from a mobile device, a percentage that has grown a massive 12% from the last quarterly report, possibly assisted by the rise in tablet device sales over the last six months, and the variety of options available. One in five jobseekers would like to see mobile versions of the job boards they use, with a coinciding increase in mobile apps or optimisation being created for job boards.
To read the full Evenbase report, click here.

E-commerce is a growing industry, advancing year on year and a very credible threat to high street retail. Even that massive online giant Facebook is moving into retail to boost their formidable revenue, with their new Facebook Gifts. As a purveyor of jobs and vacancies via your job board, e-commerce is where you’re gaining your revenue, and where you have to stand out.

E-commerce is evolving, and as it’s nearly the end of the year, critics and experts are looking ahead to the future and changing trends for 2013.

The biggest change to occur is to make sites less clinical, less catalogue-like and more personal, to mimic actual retail. One size fits all is no longer good enough, e-commerce is evolving to suit its individual user’s needs. Therefore sites are updating their tracking to track orders and preferences in order to make informed recommendations via email or when the consumer next visits the site.

Remembering your user’s preferences gives a personal touch to your site and makes it easy to predict what your user will buy next. It also enables you to send out behavioural targeted emails reminding them of items they previously viewed or left abandoned in a shopping cart without completing the transaction there and then, persuading them to revisit and continue to buy online without the hassle of searching again.

As well as on-site tracking, the Cloud is the newest and most useful resource for this. It can store highly targeted data based on past searches in order for you to easily email your users or behaviourally retarget them via cleverly placed reminders on any other sites they may be looking at.

Probably the most important change in e-commerce is the steadily increasing amount of mobile or tablet browsing. Mobile traffic, especially from tablet devices is the biggest upward curve and most certain prediction for the future.

Mobile traffic has doubled within the last six months to ecommerce sites, led by the iPad which has a 50% share of the whole of mobile ecommerce. These are figures that are only set to grow as there are more and more tablet devices available and sales are growing at a far faster pace than PCs or laptops. The device market is changing and online sites should evolve accordingly.