A new year, but old lessons still need to be learned

Andy — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 13:01:49 +0000

One of the ongoing discussions in recruitment advertising is on the merits of job boards; the core question centering around the quality of lead that they tend to provide. I’m not going to get into the argument today, but the point here is that we tend to look at job boards on a (fairly) regular basis and see a continuous repetition of the same basic mistakes, which can be irritating if (a) you are trying to promote the use of the job board in question and (b) your client is increasingly better educated in the commercial etiquette of emarketing and therefore are more likely to spot such mistakes.

Take email marketing. Look at the two images below. The one on the right is the mail as it was meant to be seen, with all imagery and content in its visual glory; the one on the left is the mail as I received it in my inbox. The job posting itself (a ‘Dynamics AX Project Manager’ for those of you who are interested) is obscured within a barrage of unnecessary imagery. Even more frustrating is that, other than the job post, all the other copy within the mail is unnecessarily obscured from view by being buried within images. So if, like me, you receive gazillions of mail and consequently tend to have images switched off, the mail simply doesn’t work.

This is basic stuff and does nothing to alleviate my, or my clients concerns that sites like these are managing either candidates or client postings with due care and attention. Which is frustrating because these sites CAN be very effective.

I’ll not even mention the fact that I switched off the email alert after the last Monster security lapse, so have no idea why it has been switched on again…

QR codes in recruitment advertising: an agile approach to mobile development

Andy — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 15:16:49 +0000

We’re currently testing QR (Quick Response) codes for a recruitment advertising campaign for one of our clients. And it seems to be working pretty well.
For those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about, a QR code is like a bar code that has a URL embedded in it. Take a photo of the code with an internet-enabled device (such as the HTC Hero phone below) and you are taken directly through to a specific website. In thise case, we are using QR codes to support an external event. It seems too simple to be true, really. Unfortunately common issues have clouded its adoption – lack of interoperable standards, lack of education, I could drone on.

Anyhow, if you are interested in playing around with this technology, we have come across a simple site that allows you to generate QR codes for free. You’ll need to download the correct software on your mobile device to get it working, but we’ve even sorted that for you. i-nigma (do you see what they’ve done there???) or Mobile Barcodes should work.

If you want to test it out, I’ve created a code that will link to the Holodeck home page.

If you do have a play, I’d be interested to know your thoughts.

Holodeck » Recruitment Advertising

A new year, but old lessons still need to be learned

QR codes in recruitment advertising: an agile approach to mobile development