Careers

Job aggregators 2015

I published an original article back in 2010 about the Job Aggregators that were available online, explaining what they were and including links to the main players at the time. You can read that article here, if you want… but time has moved on and many/some of those aggregators have now closed their doors, shut down for business or merged with other operators, so the job aggregating landscape has changed somewhat. So it’s time for me to revisit the topic and lay out the best aggregators as I see them now in 2015. (Please note that these links will be UK oriented)

I was going to write that these are in no particular order, although over the previous years I’ve had more experience with Indeed, SimplyHired, Trovit and Adzuna and although there’s a huge amount of cross-over between all of these, I would argue that these are probably the major players in this field. In all likelihood they’re probably looking at mostly the same sources. The key difference comes from any working partnerships with direct employers and recruitment agencies, as they’ll typically be providing a feed of their jobs directly to one or more of the aggregators below.

Indeed

One of the main job aggregators in the UK, they also have an international arm too. They have a simple interface that’s easy to use, uncluttered and pulls in jobs from across a wide variety of online media – including not just regular job boards, but publishing houses and newspapers too. Indeed also offer helpful mobile and tablet apps, so you can save vacancies while you’re on the move to review at a later time and date.

The others…

List of online courses, free training and MOOCs

I’ve been impressed with the pace of development of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) and have even signed up for and studied some subjects through various platforms. But what I wasn’t aware of until recently, was that there’s a handy MOOC aggregator that’s been developed which looks across all the available courses online and presents a single interface for searching across them.

This resource is called Class Central and includes courses from the following providers:

Through Class Central, I’ve been able to discover a wider range of courses and have signed up to future classes as a means of continuing my professional development.  Most are free, although Udacity seem to charge for a lot of their content. The other suppliers typically offer an unverified programme which doesn’t cost you anything, but you don’t get the certificate at the end to demonstrate you’ve studied. The certificate is less important than the learning for me, so I wasn’t too bothered by this.

Many of the world’s leading universities and centres of higher education have made a selection of their course materials available online. Live courses offer an interactive element with assessed coursework and tests, whereas archived courses are still accessible with self-study being achieved through the blended learning approach of text and video material. 

At least two of the MOOC providers listed above – Coursera and edX – offer iOS apps which I’ve found particularly good, not least because they allow you to download course material to the app so that you can watch videos and read documents offline when you don’t have an internet connection. 

So, if you haven’t explored the world of MOOC’s yet, I implore you to give them a go. Challenge yourself and learn something new!

Personality tests

the brainPersonality tests are frequently used in business and university life to help gain a greater understanding of one’s self and of others around you. I’ve had the good fortune to go through a number of the tests myself and it’s often surprising just how accurate they can be. Myers Briggs, Belbin, Jung, Freud, etc. – they all provide different insights into the human psyche. But the reason for this post, is that I was emailed a link to a really handy site that provides a whole host of free, online tests – and it’s definitely worth a visit: http://similarminds.com/

There are also companies that offer psychological or psychometric testing – and it’s often used in the recruitment process – which is why there’s some listed on the Recruiter Network, here: http://www.recruiternetwork.co.uk/category/recruitment-suppliers/testing/

Salary calculators

There’s some handy resources available online to help with salary calculations – such as these:

Election Salary Comparison tool, available here: http://www.thesalarycalculator.co.uk/election.php

or, a general take-home salary calculator, available here: http://www.thesalarycalculator.co.uk/salary.php

The UK Recruitment Industry – info sources & magazines

Working within the UK Recruitment Industry it’s important to stay abreast of developments that are going to affect you. It goes without saying that recruiters need to remain informed of the news that affects them within the sectors that they trade in, so there will be countless sector-specific news sources that will provide information such as this. However, it is also important to remain informed of developments that specifically affect the UK recruitment industry – whether it is government legislation, recruitment trends, market sentiment, new HMRC guidelines, or even just monitoring the competition. The following set of links are all useful sources of information for the UK recruitment industry; there are more, but these are the primary ones that I use.

Read more

Job Aggregators

There is an updated version of this article available here.

What are job aggregators?

They’re online services that trawl through the Internet, locating and indexing jobs from job boards and employers according to the niches or geographies in which they operate. They’ve been around for a while – and almost all of them make the claim of having the most jobs, being the largest job board, or the most visited. The simple truth is that they’re quite similar to each other.

Despite this, they should still play a role in both a candidate’s job seeking arsenal and in a recruiters or employers advertising portfolio.

For advertisers (recruiters and employers):

The best thing is that most of these job aggregators are free. Most of them operate without requiring any direct intervention and they’ll silently come and trawl your site, finding your jobs and advertising them on your behalf. Because they’re mostly doing this in real-time, you also don’t have to worry about ensuring positions are removed when they’re filled, or expired. Just remove them from your own listings and the aggregators will reflect this when they next re-index or aggregate your job feeds.

Some of the aggregators will come to your site automatically and start aggregating your jobs, especially if you readily make available RSS or Atom based feeds of your jobs. Others, you have to specifically register with them and provide the direct links to where they can pick up the feeds. It’s still limited input, for what can often be access to quite a large potential market of jobseekers.

For jobseekers:

The job aggregators represent a quick, easy and accessible route to the latest jobs. They can save time by reducing the number of sites that you have to visit to find the jobs that are relevant to you and as they’re typically presenting job search results in real-time, you can be assured you’re accessing the latest vacancies. The bad news is that there can be serious problems with duplication; and some sites will try and bundle additional (sometimes chargeable) services with the job searching process.

For web developers:

Some of the aggregators have started offering APIs now too, so that you can directly integrate a fully functioning job search element in to your web site. The benefit to this is that can be another added facet for the services you provide to your users. The main downsides are that you’re effectively directing traffic away from your web site and you never hold the jobs yourself on your site, therefore there are no SEO benefits here. You also have little control over what’s displayed or how it appears. But they’re low effort, zero cost options that certainly can be a part of some sites.

Alternatively, you could consider developing your own aggregator using off the shelf php scripts, or considering plugins for blogs or CMS systems that can mostly do the job for you.

List of job aggregators:

This list is going to be forever changing, so right now, these are the main job aggregators (primarily UK based) that seem to have the highest profiles

Simply Hired – http://www.simplyhired.co.uk/

Indeed – http://www.indeed.co.uk/

Workhound – http://www.workhound.co.uk/

Work Circle – http://www.workcircle.co.uk/

Job Applications –http://www.jobapplications.co.uk/

Career Jet – http://www.careerjet.com/

Job Safari – http://www.jobsafari.co.uk/

Marketing, business and web skills

So this web site is now a handy place for me to keep everything that I do online ordered and accessible, as well as test various online technologies and functionality.

My skills and experience includes:

  • Marketing – strategic & tactical marketing plans, advertising, etc.
  • Business & organisational health checks
  • Web design – HTML, PHP, Joomla, WordPress, others…
  • Graphic design – predominantly Photoshop – covering print and advertising design, business graphics, logos, invitiations, anything really…
  • Research – predominantly secondary, desk-based research – but also including advice and consultancy on alternative options and sources of information
  • Recruitment – how to recruit, services available, routes to market, CV writing advice, careers management and consultancy work, recruitment web sites, etc.
  • Social media marketing – just starting here (late, I know), but, watch this space…