Beyond.com, Inc., the world’s largest network of niche career communities, released a survey showing graduating college students rely heavily on their university career centers and prefer to use niche job sites over general job boards and social networking sites. I found their results almost perplexing because nearly every student I speak with has never been to their career center nor heard of niche job boards in their industries.
http://www.beyond.com/i/md459/media/in-the-news/survey-college-graduates-going-niche-not-social-in-their-job-search.htm
This is quite an old report, but I came across it and thought it was worth sharing
New research published today (October09) by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), shows that racial discrimination in recruitment still exists towards ethnic minority people.
The study showed discrimination occurred for those applying for jobs with a name suggesting they were from an ethnic minority, rather than white British. For every nine applications sent by a white applicant, an equally good applicant with an ethnic minority name had to send sixteen to obtain a positive response.
Three applications were sent to 987 advertised job vacancies giving a total of 2,961 applications. Applications were made to private, public and voluntary sector employers of varying sizes.
The public sector vacancies included in this study – which usually required standard application forms, did not discriminate at this initial stage of recruitment. This suggests that discrimination might be reduced by the use of standard application forms.
http://www.dwp.gov.uk/newsroom/press-releases/2009/october-2009/dwp047-09-191009.shtml
There seems to be an increasing amount of talk about diversity recruiting, and not just in pharma. By diversity recruiting I mean ensuring that you recruit a diverse range of candidates within your company. In reality this might mean that you broaden your recruitment net to include sites that, for example are used by minority groups based on race, colour, age, disability, religion. It may even amount to positive discrimination, as the BBC have stated:
“Under such a plan, if two job candidates met the required standards, the candidate whose ethnicity is under-represented in the force would be selected.” (BBC, 19th April 2007)
A few useful diversity recruitment resources:
Some pharma companies are making progress in diversity recruiting by promoting themselves well
What is immediately noticeable however, is the fact that all these diversity job boards are USA based – what is the UK, or indeed the European pharma industry doing about diversity recruitment? - and what strategies are in place?
Google are stepping up their “social media” integration with gMail by a new featured called Buzz. This allows interaction with your contacts and social media websites though the gMail account. In some respects it seems to be competing with Wave, but I guess its just another string to their social-bow.
Gatszu.com is claiming to be a fast and transparent recruitment solution and the start of a new revolution…
The online recruitment marketplace that connects employers seeking talent to approved recruiters across the UK
Launched in February 2010, gatszu.com, in association with The Sunday Times HR Business Network, is an online recruitment marketplace that connects employers seeking high quality candidates to specialist recruiters in the UK. Giving employers the opportunity to set their own fixed fee, centralise their recruitment process and gain access to a far wider pool of talent than ever before.
Not sure myself yet, but its probably worth knowing about.. http://www.gatszu.com/
I came across this today http://twitiq.com/ its a twitter “client”, that allows you to manage your Twitter account though an interface that is like Twitter only better. You can have multiple twitter accounts, and manage them quite well. You may prefer tweetdeck, but I think this is quite neat.
I’m back from Christmas and from snowboarding in the Alps – getting used to all this snow at home now! Even managed to have a snow kiting (snowboard and kitewing) session a couple of miles from my house at the weekend. Brilliant.
My plan was to go to the office in Bracknell this morning, but I was getting horror stories from office colleagues who were abandoning their cars and taking hours to get home. Looking at the BBC website – nothing – no news. What we need is something more immediate, to tell us where the snow has got to, so we can map it. Well its already done.. http://uksnow.benmarsh.co.uk/
Using tweets with #UKsnow and followed by the first 4 digits of your postcode, twitterers can indicate where it’s snowing – in real time, and indicate the severity. Clever Ben Marsh then plots it on a nice google mash up – brilliant.
It would be nice to get some sort of time line to “play-back” what’s happened, so you could guess if its coming your way, and the default “snow” icons are hard to see, but there is a high-vis icon option.
Otherwise, a great idea. I’ve heard similar mashups being used for tracking earthquake effects. At last, someone has found something useful for Twitter 
Oh its snowing in Bristol now.
This may seem obvious, and also more of an SEO point, but as I’ve just spent some time doing it myself, I thought I’d remind you!.
Google et al, rely heavily on sitemap.xml to know what’s on your site. Sure they can crawl and do crawl it, but why make their lives hard. By keeping a valid sitemap.xml file in the root of your site, you provide a link to all the pages on your site that the search engines should know about. A few points:
- you should update your sitemaps every time you change content. (ie add a new job) so it should be done dynamically without you having to get involved
- you can have multiple sitemaps. Useful if like on www.PharmiWeb.com, you have thousands of pages.
- you can add your sitemap(s) url to your robots.txt file (another essential) to help the engines keep track
- submit your sitemaps to google webmaster tools and bing
- Yahoo treat things differently, I’ll do that separately!
